A Tale in the Desert definitely falls into the category of one of those fringe games. I played it for a few months back around the second Telling, and really enjoyed it. Unfortunately that particular telling progressed too slowly, and since then the population has dropped down too much for the game to have the same impact it once did.
What made WoW special was having such a huge population early on--the population itself, not what drew it in to begin with. I personally enjoyed doing 40-man raids and other activities in large groups, and it definitely gave the game a more epic feel. Unfortunately, between the move away from 40-man content and server transfers decimating my server's population, it was enough to make give up years of invested time and effort in the game.
I even did Warhammer for a while, hoping to re-live that first epic year or two of WoW, but between poor implementation of various aspects of the game plus server transfers destroying entire server populations, Mythic lost yet another customer.
Right now, I still play EVE. It seems to give me most of what I'm looking for. Deep down I still want to see the next WoW, the next truly epic high-population fantasy MMO, but I have no idea what (or when) that might be.
I'm bound to get modded a troll or flamebait or off-topic or something for this, but how is this different from pirating music?/.
This is different because we're talking actual piracy here--theft in order to make a profit, in this case running a business on illegitimate software.
Music 'piracy' is not 'piracy' unless you're making a profit off of it--burning and selling CDs or charging people for the MP3s. This is where every court case loses out in the end.
If you bust a counterfeit CD ring, great, the law is against them--they are profiting off copying music.
When you bust 12-year-old girl for downloading the Jonas Brothers CD, you're skating on the thin legal ice of crap like the DMCA and other RIAA-backed forays into law. That case just isn't piracy, no matter what RIAA wants to call it. She isn't making a profit off of it, and you can't prove any monetary loss by the music producers, as you can't prove she ever would have paid for the CD.
So they did a study of gamers...and had twice as many female participants as male? While I agree most studies lowball the percentage of female gamers out there, there is no way there are twice as many as male gamers. It's also safe to say that the two sexes would potentially have very different responses to a survey like this, as well.
I'll venture a quick guess... Ms. Galindo, Harlandale High School, San Antonio, TX? (I'm surprised she's still teaching if so, she has to be pushing 70 by now. I graduated in 1996..didn't have her for classes, but knew of her antics far too well.)
If it isn't her, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that someone else would do the same.
Besides being anal about exactly how students take notes, she was notorious for making all students turn in their notebooks at the end of the year. She would make sure they were complete (you'd fail the entire class if not) and then make you shove it through an industrial shredder she had brought in just for this task.
Fun fact: She was teaching there as far back as the 70's...a family friend had her back then. The friend ended up out of school due to medical issues. An hour after waking up from a major surgery that had her gutted like a fish, that teacher was on the phone making sure she was doing her homework.
I went and picked up his Mistborn series. First book was quite good, but the 2nd fell apart. The characters lack real depth. It worries me that the last book is in his hands, but it could turn out alright. However, there is probably no chance that any movie could do this series justice. Oh well.
I also felt the second Mistborn seemed to show his inexperience as a writer a bit, but the third book was good and wrapped up the story nicely (although in a bit of an unexpected manner).
I have good hopes for him finishing up Wheel of Time.
Please, please, please...don't let this turn into another abomination like "Legend of the Seeker." The Sword of Truth series is among my favorite, but the "TV adaptation" has butchered them so badly.
Every single plot device used for the climax of the first book has been thrown out the window in the first two episodes. They have basically stripped the entire story and every character down to just their names and written something from scratch for TV.
I also agree that the old "2 x RAM" standard is outdated.
If you are a typical desktop user--browsing, email, games, etc, you will likely never swap. If you happen to edit photos a lot then you'll use a bit more. In these cases doing 4GB swap for 4GB RAM should be more than sufficient, and even then overkill.
If you are a serous 'power' desktop user, heavy graphics / video editing or similar heavy-duty tasks, you will likely have significantly more RAM. If you ever did swap things would become so slow your productivity would be severely hampered.
Were you talking about a server I'd say the same thing. Your swap space on an active server (thinking database or application server) is really just there to keep you operational should some process go haywire, long enough for you to fix it. If you are regularly swapping on a server then you need to upgrade your RAM or adjust your software on it.
If you're just talking about recovering a bunch of social security numbers or your husbands porn stash, fine, this is a perfectly good challenge.
If you're talking about protecting the latest nuclear warhead plans or the names of every spy your country has in operation "nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure." Data recovery companies are not your threat. Your threat is a government agency that can dismantle the drive and use customized read heads to read the magnetic variations across the area of a single bit.
And, of course, a government agency is sure as hell NOT going to volunteer for this experiment, thus alerting the world to the fact that "dd is not enough."
And, of course again, if your data really is that sensitive, you're almost certainly already under the "nuke it from orbit" set of directives, because you know better.
One of the local news anchors in LA had that done. I give it credit for being uncommon (by no means unique), but not something I'd ever do. It sure as hell shows as a sign of permanence though!
I hope others here also used to play the old Duris MUD. I did through multiple wipes, the brief excursion to Basternae, back to Duris, etc.
Duris had a few elements done right.
- Full pkill and ploot. - Fast and easy leveling. - Useful gear easily obtainable (necessary for full ploot). - Two distinct sides in combat with each other.
And the truly unique thing that made Duris what it was:
- One side is slightly more powerful than the other, but is far more difficult to level, live, etc, naturally keeping the population in check to balance the differences.
One side gains the numbers, one side gains the elite. It really did work out very well.
Later on, they even added a third side (Illithids) that were far far more powerful, but they had a hard limit, only so many could exist above a specific level, and they had age limits. Once you aged so much, you'd die permanently or lose levels (I forget which now), allowing someone else a chance to join the ranks.
Given all that, what Star Trek Online needs is the ability to play the Federation, Romulans, Borg, Species 8472, whatever. For once let people truly play the 'bad guys' and go full PVP.
That's all good (and well deserved), but when are they going to get around to the RIAA and MPAA lawyers? They're just as bad at predatory practices and push the limits constantly. Disbar all of them as well!
Even with voice chat you aren't going to produce a very social game (which is what MMOGs really are about) without a keyboard. A joystick and four buttons won't cut it...which is why I still consider a standard PC of any flavor to be far superior to any console they can come up with.
I'm just waiting to see the body count that results from this.
Gangbanger: "Give me your money, holmes..." Peacenik: "How much do you need? I'd be happy to help buy you a burger." Gangbanger: *blows peacenik's brains out, takes his wallet*
The Burning Crusade expansion was already the beginning of the end for the 'serious' raiders. When they decided to not introduce more 40-man instances they killed a lot of raiding guilds, including mine. The day they announced that fact people I knew started leaving in droves. I stuck around for a couple months after TBC came out, but I just couldn't do it.
By forcing smaller groups, they caused both an increase in smaller, tighter cliques of players, alienating many on the outside, as well as limiting the likelyhood of non-cookie-cutter classes and builds from getting into raids. This further alienated even more players.
If they ever release a lot more 40-man content I *might* consider re-subscribing, though a high price for buying the expansion will likely stop that. There's also the whole issue of "I already have a job, I don't want to play like I have two," which was a large factor in me quitting.
Also, in reference to "keep my customer away from my precious tables," these are not your tables--the customer is the one writing you a check, not your tables. That is something far too often forgotten in the non-mass-market software industry.
My company provides SQL-backed software, and we have gone through similar problems. Normally we support Crystal Reports and have someone give them basic training in it. If they cause a problem, we'll cut the access, and they know it.
Now the truly scary part is when they want WRITE access to their database. They are already restricted so they only have access to their own data, so confidentiality of other customers' data isn't an issue. However, they can massively destroy their database under bad circumstances. In one case a customer did a wide-open update to a very large table--they were fortunate that it filled the transaction log and it was rolled back, otherwise their only recovery would have been a database restore. Even then the rollback took hours...
While I've always been a big 'do it yourself' (coming from a geek who has a 42U rack cabinet full of servers in his living room), for 1U or 2U systems I'd say to go Dell. Their systems are reliable and dirt cheap. Try to find a vendor that offers one of their 'special buys,' which also have support contracts for 1/5th the usual cost.
Is this our first step towards the Infinite Probability Drive? I hear the dynamics of the fluid movement of tea is rather important towards its functionality... Gah! Infinite Improbability Drive...
Jeez, try to make a joke and screw it up with a typo =(
Is this our first step towards the Infinite Probability Drive? I hear the dynamics of the fluid movement of tea is rather important towards its functionality...
The "high efficiency stove" is just a chimney starter using pots the right size to fully close the top.
Yeah, I applaud them for trying to find ways to help, but these really aren't "inventions," just re-applications of existing items and concepts.
Having gone through public schools starting early/mid 80s, I can say this is nothing new.
I had three teachers in elementary try to skip me ahead, but administration stopped them. I grew bored, didn't do all the 'busywork' crap (copy the blackboard 20 times type work), didn't do my homework, and was even sent to the principal and paddled for it once.
As of 4th grade the teacher was testing me on 12th grade reading and comprehension books just to keep me doing something closer to my level.
Finally around 5th grade they started up the GT (Gifted & Talented) program. It didn't help much. They had a 'specialist' pull another student and me from class a couple hours a week to do slightly more challenging work. It kept me going as I went into middle and high schools in further GT and advanced / dual credit courses later on.
When my brother and sister went through elementary, they received a little better treatment. Instead of a traveling counselor, they brought in qualifying kids from multiple schools to a central classroom a couple times a week for about half a day. This proved to work far better, and I wish it had been in place when I was there.
Instead, I went through school with crappy grades (zeroes on homework / busywork, hundreds plus extra credit on every test). Hell, I nearly flunked a grade because I just couldn't make myself waste time on busywork I already knew.
In the meantime, every drooling retard in the district had tons of special treatment--though I have to admit they outnumbered the gifted students by an order of magnitude.
(IANAL, but my response below is based on how I've had this debate explained to me on more than one occasion by people far better informed than I was before.)
Movie pirating cost the industry $18.2 billion worldwide in 2005
That sounds really high. I wonder how they even came up with those numbers. It's like counting how many Linux desktops there are. You can't count what people "might" have seen.
That's why, until the DMCA, people copying or downloading movies weren't charged with anything. The $18.2 billion number is only valid if it is based on real numbers of illegal copies of the movie being sold--AKA piracy. Copying your movie for a friend or downloading it off the internet is NOT piracy. In order to be piracy you have to prove monetary loss. It is not possible to prove, in any way, shape or form, that a person would have paid to see a movie if they had not been able to copy or download it.
Before the DMCA gave the MPAA and RIAA essentially police powers they wouldn't touch a case in court that would reference the Sony Decision (also referred to elsewhere in this thread as the Betamax Decision). That decision is just a court opinion right now. If a case went to court based on non-piracy copying it would have solidified the court decision and given far more power to people file sharing.
Now we have the DMCA, and if you take a Polaroid of your little brother with a movie poster in the background the MPAA can have you charged with piracy, claiming someone might have seen the poster and decided not to watch the movie causing them to lose $8 in movie ticket royalties, $12 for a future DVD sale, $20 in future T-shirt sales, and $2000 in collateral damages for people he tells that he didn't like the poster and causes them not to watch the movie or buy bobble-head dolls and logo-covered hot pants.
I get the impression that the core of it wasn't written by MS way back when, though. And it sure wasn't built by the Windows team.
It was written by Sybase, bought by MS and forked somewhere around Release 10. MS then ripped out the good parts (i.e. the ability to run on real operating systems) and rebranded it.
Can you tell I come from a Sybase shop?
A steaming pile of shit by any other name would still smell like shit.
Tactics like this make me sick. Every college student working on Marketing degrees should be rounded up and put to work on a farm. At least shoveling shit there would be of benefit to humanity.
Slashdot Mirror
A Tale in the Desert definitely falls into the category of one of those fringe games. I played it for a few months back around the second Telling, and really enjoyed it. Unfortunately that particular telling progressed too slowly, and since then the population has dropped down too much for the game to have the same impact it once did.
What made WoW special was having such a huge population early on--the population itself, not what drew it in to begin with. I personally enjoyed doing 40-man raids and other activities in large groups, and it definitely gave the game a more epic feel. Unfortunately, between the move away from 40-man content and server transfers decimating my server's population, it was enough to make give up years of invested time and effort in the game.
I even did Warhammer for a while, hoping to re-live that first epic year or two of WoW, but between poor implementation of various aspects of the game plus server transfers destroying entire server populations, Mythic lost yet another customer.
Right now, I still play EVE. It seems to give me most of what I'm looking for. Deep down I still want to see the next WoW, the next truly epic high-population fantasy MMO, but I have no idea what (or when) that might be.
Now that really was a useless study. Internal politics and poor leadership in IT are the cause of almost every single problem in IT.
I'm bound to get modded a troll or flamebait or off-topic or something for this, but how is this different from pirating music? /.
This is different because we're talking actual piracy here--theft in order to make a profit, in this case running a business on illegitimate software.
Music 'piracy' is not 'piracy' unless you're making a profit off of it--burning and selling CDs or charging people for the MP3s. This is where every court case loses out in the end.
If you bust a counterfeit CD ring, great, the law is against them--they are profiting off copying music.
When you bust 12-year-old girl for downloading the Jonas Brothers CD, you're skating on the thin legal ice of crap like the DMCA and other RIAA-backed forays into law. That case just isn't piracy, no matter what RIAA wants to call it. She isn't making a profit off of it, and you can't prove any monetary loss by the music producers, as you can't prove she ever would have paid for the CD.
So they did a study of gamers...and had twice as many female participants as male? While I agree most studies lowball the percentage of female gamers out there, there is no way there are twice as many as male gamers. It's also safe to say that the two sexes would potentially have very different responses to a survey like this, as well.
I'll venture a quick guess... Ms. Galindo, Harlandale High School, San Antonio, TX? (I'm surprised she's still teaching if so, she has to be pushing 70 by now. I graduated in 1996..didn't have her for classes, but knew of her antics far too well.)
If it isn't her, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that someone else would do the same.
Besides being anal about exactly how students take notes, she was notorious for making all students turn in their notebooks at the end of the year. She would make sure they were complete (you'd fail the entire class if not) and then make you shove it through an industrial shredder she had brought in just for this task.
Fun fact: She was teaching there as far back as the 70's...a family friend had her back then. The friend ended up out of school due to medical issues. An hour after waking up from a major surgery that had her gutted like a fish, that teacher was on the phone making sure she was doing her homework.
I went and picked up his Mistborn series. First book was quite good, but the 2nd fell apart. The characters lack real depth. It worries me that the last book is in his hands, but it could turn out alright. However, there is probably no chance that any movie could do this series justice. Oh well.
I also felt the second Mistborn seemed to show his inexperience as a writer a bit, but the third book was good and wrapped up the story nicely (although in a bit of an unexpected manner).
I have good hopes for him finishing up Wheel of Time.
Please, please, please...don't let this turn into another abomination like "Legend of the Seeker." The Sword of Truth series is among my favorite, but the "TV adaptation" has butchered them so badly.
Every single plot device used for the climax of the first book has been thrown out the window in the first two episodes. They have basically stripped the entire story and every character down to just their names and written something from scratch for TV.
I also agree that the old "2 x RAM" standard is outdated.
If you are a typical desktop user--browsing, email, games, etc, you will likely never swap. If you happen to edit photos a lot then you'll use a bit more. In these cases doing 4GB swap for 4GB RAM should be more than sufficient, and even then overkill.
If you are a serous 'power' desktop user, heavy graphics / video editing or similar heavy-duty tasks, you will likely have significantly more RAM. If you ever did swap things would become so slow your productivity would be severely hampered.
Were you talking about a server I'd say the same thing. Your swap space on an active server (thinking database or application server) is really just there to keep you operational should some process go haywire, long enough for you to fix it. If you are regularly swapping on a server then you need to upgrade your RAM or adjust your software on it.
If you're just talking about recovering a bunch of social security numbers or your husbands porn stash, fine, this is a perfectly good challenge.
If you're talking about protecting the latest nuclear warhead plans or the names of every spy your country has in operation "nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure." Data recovery companies are not your threat. Your threat is a government agency that can dismantle the drive and use customized read heads to read the magnetic variations across the area of a single bit.
And, of course, a government agency is sure as hell NOT going to volunteer for this experiment, thus alerting the world to the fact that "dd is not enough."
And, of course again, if your data really is that sensitive, you're almost certainly already under the "nuke it from orbit" set of directives, because you know better.
Get a tattoo of a band.
One of the local news anchors in LA had that done. I give it credit for being uncommon (by no means unique), but not something I'd ever do. It sure as hell shows as a sign of permanence though!
I hope others here also used to play the old Duris MUD. I did through multiple wipes, the brief excursion to Basternae, back to Duris, etc.
Duris had a few elements done right.
- Full pkill and ploot.
- Fast and easy leveling.
- Useful gear easily obtainable (necessary for full ploot).
- Two distinct sides in combat with each other.
And the truly unique thing that made Duris what it was:
- One side is slightly more powerful than the other, but is far more difficult to level, live, etc, naturally keeping the population in check to balance the differences.
One side gains the numbers, one side gains the elite. It really did work out very well.
Later on, they even added a third side (Illithids) that were far far more powerful, but they had a hard limit, only so many could exist above a specific level, and they had age limits. Once you aged so much, you'd die permanently or lose levels (I forget which now), allowing someone else a chance to join the ranks.
Given all that, what Star Trek Online needs is the ability to play the Federation, Romulans, Borg, Species 8472, whatever. For once let people truly play the 'bad guys' and go full PVP.
That's all good (and well deserved), but when are they going to get around to the RIAA and MPAA lawyers? They're just as bad at predatory practices and push the limits constantly. Disbar all of them as well!
Even with voice chat you aren't going to produce a very social game (which is what MMOGs really are about) without a keyboard. A joystick and four buttons won't cut it...which is why I still consider a standard PC of any flavor to be far superior to any console they can come up with.
I'm just waiting to see the body count that results from this.
Gangbanger: "Give me your money, holmes..."
Peacenik: "How much do you need? I'd be happy to help buy you a burger."
Gangbanger: *blows peacenik's brains out, takes his wallet*
The Burning Crusade expansion was already the beginning of the end for the 'serious' raiders. When they decided to not introduce more 40-man instances they killed a lot of raiding guilds, including mine. The day they announced that fact people I knew started leaving in droves. I stuck around for a couple months after TBC came out, but I just couldn't do it.
By forcing smaller groups, they caused both an increase in smaller, tighter cliques of players, alienating many on the outside, as well as limiting the likelyhood of non-cookie-cutter classes and builds from getting into raids. This further alienated even more players.
If they ever release a lot more 40-man content I *might* consider re-subscribing, though a high price for buying the expansion will likely stop that. There's also the whole issue of "I already have a job, I don't want to play like I have two," which was a large factor in me quitting.
Also, in reference to "keep my customer away from my precious tables," these are not your tables--the customer is the one writing you a check, not your tables. That is something far too often forgotten in the non-mass-market software industry.
My company provides SQL-backed software, and we have gone through similar problems. Normally we support Crystal Reports and have someone give them basic training in it. If they cause a problem, we'll cut the access, and they know it.
Now the truly scary part is when they want WRITE access to their database. They are already restricted so they only have access to their own data, so confidentiality of other customers' data isn't an issue. However, they can massively destroy their database under bad circumstances. In one case a customer did a wide-open update to a very large table--they were fortunate that it filled the transaction log and it was rolled back, otherwise their only recovery would have been a database restore. Even then the rollback took hours...
While I've always been a big 'do it yourself' (coming from a geek who has a 42U rack cabinet full of servers in his living room), for 1U or 2U systems I'd say to go Dell. Their systems are reliable and dirt cheap. Try to find a vendor that offers one of their 'special buys,' which also have support contracts for 1/5th the usual cost.
Jeez, try to make a joke and screw it up with a typo =(
Is this our first step towards the Infinite Probability Drive? I hear the dynamics of the fluid movement of tea is rather important towards its functionality...
The "high efficiency stove" is just a chimney starter using pots the right size to fully close the top. Yeah, I applaud them for trying to find ways to help, but these really aren't "inventions," just re-applications of existing items and concepts.
Having gone through public schools starting early/mid 80s, I can say this is nothing new.
I had three teachers in elementary try to skip me ahead, but administration stopped them. I grew bored, didn't do all the 'busywork' crap (copy the blackboard 20 times type work), didn't do my homework, and was even sent to the principal and paddled for it once.
As of 4th grade the teacher was testing me on 12th grade reading and comprehension books just to keep me doing something closer to my level.
Finally around 5th grade they started up the GT (Gifted & Talented) program. It didn't help much. They had a 'specialist' pull another student and me from class a couple hours a week to do slightly more challenging work. It kept me going as I went into middle and high schools in further GT and advanced / dual credit courses later on.
When my brother and sister went through elementary, they received a little better treatment. Instead of a traveling counselor, they brought in qualifying kids from multiple schools to a central classroom a couple times a week for about half a day. This proved to work far better, and I wish it had been in place when I was there.
Instead, I went through school with crappy grades (zeroes on homework / busywork, hundreds plus extra credit on every test). Hell, I nearly flunked a grade because I just couldn't make myself waste time on busywork I already knew.
In the meantime, every drooling retard in the district had tons of special treatment--though I have to admit they outnumbered the gifted students by an order of magnitude.
(IANAL, but my response below is based on how I've had this debate explained to me on more than one occasion by people far better informed than I was before.)
Movie pirating cost the industry $18.2 billion worldwide in 2005
That sounds really high. I wonder how they even came up with those numbers. It's like counting how many Linux desktops there are. You can't count what people "might" have seen.
That's why, until the DMCA, people copying or downloading movies weren't charged with anything. The $18.2 billion number is only valid if it is based on real numbers of illegal copies of the movie being sold--AKA piracy. Copying your movie for a friend or downloading it off the internet is NOT piracy. In order to be piracy you have to prove monetary loss. It is not possible to prove, in any way, shape or form, that a person would have paid to see a movie if they had not been able to copy or download it.
Before the DMCA gave the MPAA and RIAA essentially police powers they wouldn't touch a case in court that would reference the Sony Decision (also referred to elsewhere in this thread as the Betamax Decision). That decision is just a court opinion right now. If a case went to court based on non-piracy copying it would have solidified the court decision and given far more power to people file sharing.
Now we have the DMCA, and if you take a Polaroid of your little brother with a movie poster in the background the MPAA can have you charged with piracy, claiming someone might have seen the poster and decided not to watch the movie causing them to lose $8 in movie ticket royalties, $12 for a future DVD sale, $20 in future T-shirt sales, and $2000 in collateral damages for people he tells that he didn't like the poster and causes them not to watch the movie or buy bobble-head dolls and logo-covered hot pants.
I get the impression that the core of it wasn't written by MS way back when, though. And it sure wasn't built by the Windows team.
It was written by Sybase, bought by MS and forked somewhere around Release 10. MS then ripped out the good parts (i.e. the ability to run on real operating systems) and rebranded it. Can you tell I come from a Sybase shop?
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet...
A steaming pile of shit by any other name would still smell like shit.
Tactics like this make me sick. Every college student working on Marketing degrees should be rounded up and put to work on a farm. At least shoveling shit there would be of benefit to humanity.