That's 16hrs a day, 7 days a week. He's serious, but he's also exaggerating.
Serious, yes. Exaggerating, no. I'd consider it a lowball estimate, given that I'd play for 30-50hrs straight sometimes. Of course it wasn't all EQ playing, my multimonitor setup allowed communication, research, writing, and other things during downtime. I made my money by doing some MySQL/PHP work but to survive I had to live off of savings and sell some stock and computer parts. O_o
It was a strange time in my life, for sure, but 3 years later I'd like to think it gave a different perspective on life. It's funny, in the interview for a job I had just after my EQ binge years the interviewer was actually a UO/EQ player. The MMOG connection actually helped us find common ground, go figure!
As a 4-year EQ player that was a story and quest nut, I found most of the "talk, kill, loot, give" quests to be downright boring. O_o
There's one quest though that stands out. It's an epic-length quest to return a legendary dragon's spirit to rest named The Spirit of Garzicor. Even with my feverish playing (over 110hr/wk) it took me over six months to complete and required large amounts of assistance, including a raid at the end. Of course this quest at the time wasn't well charted, which made it more fun for the questing players but quite a bit more challenging.
In the end though, looking back on four years of EQ and the timesink questing process made me pretty depressed. I realized that I had sunk more of my time into EQ quests than pretty much any other hobby in my life in a mere matter of 4 years. That's part of the MMO experience though - time == reward! Quests just make that time less mundane.:)
I think one valid point is that if you are the geek a celebrity calls for help, and you play your cards right, it could lead to much more interesting and higher paying work.
That's true, and nobody else gets the kind of nationwide volume that those guys get. Random service trips to the homes of John Q Public would be interesting, all of the consulting/support I ever did was through contacts and with business. Different world entirely out there!
Working the help desk at a call center or IT in a corporate job doesn't get you the contacts that field work with the public can get. Of course, it doesn't need half the thick-skinned attitude either...
...and some spyware is simply a rediculous pain to remove.
This method works for 95% of infections thoguh:
1) Reboot into safe mode (WITHOUT Networking) 2) Run Sysinternals Process Explorer from a USB drive or a CD-ROM. 3) Terminate any memory resident processes that are not signed Microsoft entries. 3b) If any of these will not terminate, read below. This requires creativity. 4) Run Sysinternals Autoruns and disable startup entries for anything that's not nessicary. In partiuclar look at the Winlogon DLL entries, several very malicious spyware applications wedge themselves in there. Refresh at least twice after removing, as memory-resident malware can cause things to hang around. 5) Run HijackThis and remove any unnessicary BHO items, HOSTS file redirects, security zone exploits, or other malware hooks. Refresh at least twice after removing, memory-resident malware can stick around after removal. 6) Reboot into normal mode and run the "Add/Remove" wizards for all installed spyware. "You're crazy!" you say? Well, yeah. But SSK3 and several others actually will dutifully remove themselves on their own, without the need for a painful file hunt. Some, of course, may install new malware but steps 1-5 don't take long. Just get it off the list at least! 7) Run AdAware, SpyBot, and the trial version of SpySweeper to verify completion. The new version of SpySweeper has rootkit detection, which is normally disabled for scans! Enable it before scanning.
There ya go! Clean system. Works in 95% of the machines I clean, which can reach well into the 100's a week sometimes.
NOTE: If malware is still resident in safe mode... Research it online. Most auto-reinstallers like SpyAxe, CoolWebSearch, Aurora (nail.exe), and many others have simplified removal tools made by the community at large that are easy and quick to run. The latest version of SpySweeper (4.5) has many of these kinds of fixes incorporated though, but some malware attacks removal products directly as well.
Good luck with your fixes! Having a CD burnt with all relevant tools can be a huge lifesaver. A USB drive with Portable FireFox can be an even bigger life saver when you have to research something like an autoreinstaller, too.
Wow, I never really expected to see this reported on seriously within the next decade or two...
After reading Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Trilogy" (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars), I was awed by the reality with which he approached so many "hyper-advanced" ideas. Everything from solar sails to solar lenses were put into use in the series, and he made it all sound doable - if not viable. If you're interested in the space elevator concept, do yourself a huge favor and pick up at least Red Mars.. It really offers quite rational insight on why an elevator would be useful (espically for Mars) and how it could be done.
For those that can't grasp the concept (which took me months to really get a hold of), it's something that really requires a thick amount of understanding... It's not an "elevator" as much as it is a string to pull things along. It makes it possible to carry any amount of matter into orbit without the use of propellant or fast acceleration - like the freight train of space travel. It's not glamorous, and "tourists" may not find a use for it due to the long time it would take for human (low acceleration required) travel, but it would advance industry in space faster than any other advance I could think of.
Basically, it takes sending some self-controlled robotic factories along with a small army of robotic workhorses out to a carbon-based asteroid (of which there are many). You'd plant them there and build more robots out of the materials on the asteroid. Then, you build a mass driver to basically spew out chunks of carbonous mass at high velocity - to change the direction and orbit(s) of the asteroid. As this is happening, ya just start some robots working on a "tether" factory to extrude some buckey-ball goodness and you're set until ya hit earth orbit.
The toughest part is actually getting the massive asteroid into a stable orbit and finding out how to stabilize the tether with all that tension on it. It'd also produce huge ammounts of electricity due to it's travel through the earth's atmosphere... Hmm... Free power, anyone?;) A base station sounds like a great idea, but you don't want to take a risk of pulling the tether down with tension - the Mars trilogy points out exactly how dangerous a "wrap-around breakage" event could be... Not pretty.
Oh well, I tried. Just pick up the books and let Mr. Robinson explain things in his extremely-descriptive way... After reading through that and putting some massive thought into it, it certainly seems possible for Mars for so many reasons, and it'd be useful on Earth only after it's in use someplace else as a proof of concept..
Anyway, too much coffee for me... Some food for thought.
Working in a retail software store, I see (and am charged with the duty of shelving) tons of software boxes.
Generally, they're in that good ole' 8x11ish box size that makes it oh-so-easy to shelve.. But others can be a pain in the ass for smaller-footprint stores like ours (hint: in malls.. not much space) because customers smack their heads on, trip on, or otherwise destroy those pretty wide-ass boxes.
A good example: The Quake II Quad Damage pack. 4 cds - Quake II, the two mission packs, and the netpack. A fscking double-wide box. w0o. It's 2 freaking boxes wide! Of course, it fills our Activision shelf quite nicely, but the customers think it's f00king nuts.
A better example: Video cards. Although they're not software, they certainly could be packaged as such. Their boxes are about 10 times the volume of the contents! I mean, god... wtf? I understand the need for marketing is high in that market, but with the blatent BS and crap that they throw on those boxes (read the Voodoo 5 box for some 'interesting' information..) they'd be better off letting the marketing department take the day off.
Anti-example: Sid Meyer's Antedam. Whoa. I was freaking impressed by this one. It's packaged in a DVD case! w0o! Of course, it misleads the customer - they think the game's on DVD or it's a misplaced movie - but definately more economical and practical.
Lesson: marketing > usability
Well, what a rant. Something for ya'll to chew on, I guess...
Speaking of porting and 0ldsk0olness, WWiV would be nice to see on *nix. The source was distributed to registered sysops, and could be modified at will... I can't remember what it was written in, but my guess is Borland Turbo C++ - maybe this is what all of us WWIV junkies have been waiting for?:)
"As can be said for virtually any product ever manufactured. You don't really believe that VCR's and televisions and CD-ROMs were designed as objets d'art, do you?"
Well, that is true - but remember that Sony (and even retailers) lose cash on every system sold. VCRs and CD-Roms are close to commodity levels in availablity, number of manufacturers, and price. The PlayStation 2 is proprietary Sony hardware that can only play proprietary Sony games - just like any other console. Sony makes their cash in the buisness from selling the games, which have an extremely high markup and the liscences to produce games on their proprietary hardware.
"I work for an ISP, and I answer hundreds of phone calls a week from customers who need a box just like this one. They are desperately perplexed by any technology more complicated than a toaster, and it would save us and them literally thousands of hours of frustration and stress if they had purchased a box more suitable for their limited needs. I see the PS2 and future incarnations of similar hardware as the salvation of the consumer, not the enemy."
Well, congratulations. I work for a major video game (PC, console, and handheld) retailer, and I answer hundreds of people's questions a week who need something that'll do everything for them too. Not "a box just like [the PS2]", but something that'll provide them with everything they need. They too are perplexed by anything more complex than a fly swatter, but they buy PC's. I see the PS2 and future consoles (with the exception of the Dreamcast if Sega ever releases the spec on the GD-Rom format) as the primary component in the corporate scheme to use us for as much cash as possible - with little regard for the freedom of information or thought.
The unsophisticated consumer-level users can still buy their PlayStations and Nintindo 64s and bow down to their corporate masters and laugh at the geeks with their complex PC's.... and they will.
It's the dark side, alright - but it's actually a little more attactive than the real "dark side".
Maybe we can start a distributed cracking effort? It is a tough encrpytion - it would probably take a PIII 600EB a few millenia in CPU time to brute-force it according to my back-of-the-envelope(tm) calculations...
I think the cracking effort should be called Hemos@Home in honor of the encription system's creator. Or maybe Local-H?
Methinks that peeps across the country simply cannot appreciate the destructive power and force of a hurricane like Floyd. I've lived in Tampa, Florida for 18 years, and I've hurricane after hurricane devistate the east coast. I'm not one to question the wisdom of/., but sometimes it hits a little too close to home (no pun intended).
Maybe some people need to climb out of their bunkers once in awhile and see what mother nature can really do. You all just don't understand that a hurricane can be more dangerous than that friend of yours that's got root on a.mil. They do real tangible dammage
Slashdot Mirror
Don't copy that floppy!
Google Video Linky
That's 16hrs a day, 7 days a week. He's serious, but he's also exaggerating.
Serious, yes. Exaggerating, no. I'd consider it a lowball estimate, given that I'd play for 30-50hrs straight sometimes. Of course it wasn't all EQ playing, my multimonitor setup allowed communication, research, writing, and other things during downtime. I made my money by doing some MySQL/PHP work but to survive I had to live off of savings and sell some stock and computer parts. O_o
It was a strange time in my life, for sure, but 3 years later I'd like to think it gave a different perspective on life. It's funny, in the interview for a job I had just after my EQ binge years the interviewer was actually a UO/EQ player. The MMOG connection actually helped us find common ground, go figure!
As a 4-year EQ player that was a story and quest nut, I found most of the "talk, kill, loot, give" quests to be downright boring. O_o
:)
There's one quest though that stands out. It's an epic-length quest to return a legendary dragon's spirit to rest named The Spirit of Garzicor. Even with my feverish playing (over 110hr/wk) it took me over six months to complete and required large amounts of assistance, including a raid at the end. Of course this quest at the time wasn't well charted, which made it more fun for the questing players but quite a bit more challenging.
In the end though, looking back on four years of EQ and the timesink questing process made me pretty depressed. I realized that I had sunk more of my time into EQ quests than pretty much any other hobby in my life in a mere matter of 4 years. That's part of the MMO experience though - time == reward! Quests just make that time less mundane.
I think one valid point is that if you are the geek a celebrity calls for help, and you play your cards right, it could lead to much more interesting and higher paying work.
That's true, and nobody else gets the kind of nationwide volume that those guys get. Random service trips to the homes of John Q Public would be interesting, all of the consulting/support I ever did was through contacts and with business. Different world entirely out there!
Working the help desk at a call center or IT in a corporate job doesn't get you the contacts that field work with the public can get. Of course, it doesn't need half the thick-skinned attitude either...
...and some spyware is simply a rediculous pain to remove.
This method works for 95% of infections thoguh:
1) Reboot into safe mode (WITHOUT Networking)
2) Run Sysinternals Process Explorer from a USB drive or a CD-ROM.
3) Terminate any memory resident processes that are not signed Microsoft entries.
3b) If any of these will not terminate, read below. This requires creativity.
4) Run Sysinternals Autoruns and disable startup entries for anything that's not nessicary. In partiuclar look at the Winlogon DLL entries, several very malicious spyware applications wedge themselves in there. Refresh at least twice after removing, as memory-resident malware can cause things to hang around.
5) Run HijackThis and remove any unnessicary BHO items, HOSTS file redirects, security zone exploits, or other malware hooks. Refresh at least twice after removing, memory-resident malware can stick around after removal.
6) Reboot into normal mode and run the "Add/Remove" wizards for all installed spyware. "You're crazy!" you say? Well, yeah. But SSK3 and several others actually will dutifully remove themselves on their own, without the need for a painful file hunt. Some, of course, may install new malware but steps 1-5 don't take long. Just get it off the list at least!
7) Run AdAware, SpyBot, and the trial version of SpySweeper to verify completion. The new version of SpySweeper has rootkit detection, which is normally disabled for scans! Enable it before scanning.
There ya go! Clean system. Works in 95% of the machines I clean, which can reach well into the 100's a week sometimes.
NOTE: If malware is still resident in safe mode... Research it online. Most auto-reinstallers like SpyAxe, CoolWebSearch, Aurora (nail.exe), and many others have simplified removal tools made by the community at large that are easy and quick to run. The latest version of SpySweeper (4.5) has many of these kinds of fixes incorporated though, but some malware attacks removal products directly as well.
Good luck with your fixes! Having a CD burnt with all relevant tools can be a huge lifesaver. A USB drive with Portable FireFox can be an even bigger life saver when you have to research something like an autoreinstaller, too.
Kalie Ma
Wow, I never really expected to see this reported on seriously within the next decade or two...
;) A base station sounds like a great idea, but you don't want to take a risk of pulling the tether down with tension - the Mars trilogy points out exactly how dangerous a "wrap-around breakage" event could be... Not pretty.
After reading Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Trilogy" (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars), I was awed by the reality with which he approached so many "hyper-advanced" ideas. Everything from solar sails to solar lenses were put into use in the series, and he made it all sound doable - if not viable. If you're interested in the space elevator concept, do yourself a huge favor and pick up at least Red Mars.. It really offers quite rational insight on why an elevator would be useful (espically for Mars) and how it could be done.
For those that can't grasp the concept (which took me months to really get a hold of), it's something that really requires a thick amount of understanding... It's not an "elevator" as much as it is a string to pull things along. It makes it possible to carry any amount of matter into orbit without the use of propellant or fast acceleration - like the freight train of space travel. It's not glamorous, and "tourists" may not find a use for it due to the long time it would take for human (low acceleration required) travel, but it would advance industry in space faster than any other advance I could think of.
Basically, it takes sending some self-controlled robotic factories along with a small army of robotic workhorses out to a carbon-based asteroid (of which there are many). You'd plant them there and build more robots out of the materials on the asteroid. Then, you build a mass driver to basically spew out chunks of carbonous mass at high velocity - to change the direction and orbit(s) of the asteroid. As this is happening, ya just start some robots working on a "tether" factory to extrude some buckey-ball goodness and you're set until ya hit earth orbit.
The toughest part is actually getting the massive asteroid into a stable orbit and finding out how to stabilize the tether with all that tension on it. It'd also produce huge ammounts of electricity due to it's travel through the earth's atmosphere... Hmm... Free power, anyone?
Oh well, I tried. Just pick up the books and let Mr. Robinson explain things in his extremely-descriptive way... After reading through that and putting some massive thought into it, it certainly seems possible for Mars for so many reasons, and it'd be useful on Earth only after it's in use someplace else as a proof of concept..
Anyway, too much coffee for me... Some food for thought.
Working in a retail software store, I see (and am charged with the duty of shelving) tons of software boxes.
Generally, they're in that good ole' 8x11ish box size that makes it oh-so-easy to shelve.. But others can be a pain in the ass for smaller-footprint stores like ours (hint: in malls.. not much space) because customers smack their heads on, trip on, or otherwise destroy those pretty wide-ass boxes.
A good example: The Quake II Quad Damage pack. 4 cds - Quake II, the two mission packs, and the netpack. A fscking double-wide box. w0o. It's 2 freaking boxes wide! Of course, it fills our Activision shelf quite nicely, but the customers think it's f00king nuts.
A better example: Video cards. Although they're not software, they certainly could be packaged as such. Their boxes are about 10 times the volume of the contents! I mean, god... wtf? I understand the need for marketing is high in that market, but with the blatent BS and crap that they throw on those boxes (read the Voodoo 5 box for some 'interesting' information..) they'd be better off letting the marketing department take the day off.
Anti-example: Sid Meyer's Antedam. Whoa. I was freaking impressed by this one. It's packaged in a DVD case! w0o! Of course, it misleads the customer - they think the game's on DVD or it's a misplaced movie - but definately more economical and practical.
Lesson: marketing > usability
Well, what a rant. Something for ya'll to chew on, I guess...
Speaking of porting and 0ldsk0olness, WWiV would be nice to see on *nix. The source was distributed to registered sysops, and could be modified at will... I can't remember what it was written in, but my guess is Borland Turbo C++ - maybe this is what all of us WWIV junkies have been waiting for? :)
The BBS is dead, long live the BBS.
Well, that is true - but remember that Sony (and even retailers) lose cash on every system sold. VCRs and CD-Roms are close to commodity levels in availablity, number of manufacturers, and price. The PlayStation 2 is proprietary Sony hardware that can only play proprietary Sony games - just like any other console. Sony makes their cash in the buisness from selling the games, which have an extremely high markup and the liscences to produce games on their proprietary hardware.
Well, congratulations. I work for a major video game (PC, console, and handheld) retailer, and I answer hundreds of people's questions a week who need something that'll do everything for them too. Not "a box just like [the PS2]", but something that'll provide them with everything they need. They too are perplexed by anything more complex than a fly swatter, but they buy PC's. I see the PS2 and future consoles (with the exception of the Dreamcast if Sega ever releases the spec on the GD-Rom format) as the primary component in the corporate scheme to use us for as much cash as possible - with little regard for the freedom of information or thought.
The unsophisticated consumer-level users can still buy their PlayStations and Nintindo 64s and bow down to their corporate masters and laugh at the geeks with their complex PC's.... and they will.
It's the dark side, alright - but it's actually a little more attactive than the real "dark side".
Maybe we can start a distributed cracking effort? It is a tough encrpytion - it would probably take a PIII 600EB a few millenia in CPU time to brute-force it according to my back-of-the-envelope(tm) calculations...
I think the cracking effort should be called Hemos@Home in honor of the encription system's creator. Or maybe Local-H?
Methinks that peeps across the country simply cannot appreciate the destructive power and force of a hurricane like Floyd. I've lived in Tampa, Florida for 18 years, and I've hurricane after hurricane devistate the east coast. I'm not one to question the wisdom of /., but sometimes it hits a little too close to home (no pun intended).
.mil. They do real tangible dammage
Maybe some people need to climb out of their bunkers once in awhile and see what mother nature can really do. You all just don't understand that a hurricane can be more dangerous than that friend of yours that's got root on a