Re:Moderating my posts down is prohibited.
on
Raising the Kursk
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· Score: 1
Plus, I would think that moderation is merely an opinion of what the moderators think of the intellectual property in question. It's the same as a bookstore moving a book from the main stacks to the "Bargain" bin. I can't understand how moderating a post changes the contents of the intellectual property. Plus, I've never read the TOS for slashdot (big surprise, I'm sure) but I should think it would cover such matters.
No doubt! Think about how much of what we do financially is etherial.... I get a paycheck, which is basically a piece of paper telling me how much has been direct-deposited. I logon to the website and notice that the numbers in my account have gone up. I go to ebay and find something that I like, be it a DII item or whatever, and check the bid... then go to another website and pull up my account information.. yup, enough balance on the credit card to pay for it. So I bid, I win, and then login to paypal and make a payment. Check the credit card website, yeah, the balance is up, but that's okay, back to the bank website, a few more clicks and types, and there, I just made a payment from my checking account to the credit card. Both values go down. Then it's on to USEast to get my new item. Later that evening, I find some change in my nightstand to go to Taco Bell, and realize it's the first time in five or six days I've touched 'real money', which also has no value but that's another discussion alltogether. But it does raise the question... why is it so hard to plunk down $50-$100 in cash at a store, but I'll bid on Ebay and order from pricewatch sites all day long? Anyway.
C;mon... we've _all_ bought stranger stuff than an item on a game server... right? (right?)
(OT: When I was working at MindSpring, we had USR Netservers, over a hundred and fifty scattered throughout the network, routing traffic from modems to the backbone... each one had a 200MHz Pentium chip, and I used to fantasize about the d.net client being ported to the Netserver...:)
Cool. I downloaded QNX a few months ago when I had an older system I'd bought from a friend that had no operating system (the computer, not the friend). Slap QNX on it and the wifey is online. It wasn't very pretty, but it worked. Thought it was pretty slick that it all fit on one floppy, and was a pretty decent li'l system for what one needed. I wouldn't use it all the time or as a regular OS by any means (besides, there's no distributed.net client for it:), but as a quick'n'dirty solution it worked. The small footprint is still what impresses me though.
And they had the "Towers of Hanoi" game on there, and any OS that comes with that can't be all bad. *grin*
Back in The Day, when 2400 baud modems were just starting to make their push into the market, an email came 'round from a fellow that claimed to have discovered 'the worst computer virus ever'. He said he had just finished downloading a program with his 2400 bps modem, when the hard drive started seeking and writing all over the place. As he put it, "Thank God for strong coffee and a recent backup." Everything was normal again. Then he tried to run the program again. Same result. Then he tried a different program. Same result. Luckily for all his readers, he worked for some telecom firm and had an in-house lab at his disposal, and therefore discovered this horrid virus. Apparently, it was transmitted by the 'sub-carrier channel' present on all 2400 bps modems, then proceeded to wreak havoc. Since there was no way to monitor thatn sub-carrier for traffic, and certainly no way to block it, there was no way to stop the propgation of the virus. This email ended with something like "The best course of action is probably to stick to 1200 baud modems until we can figure this thing out."... and he signed it "Mike Rochenelle".
We eventually decide that "Mike Rochenelle" == "MicroChannel" or something similar, a company with a glut of 1200 bps modems facing a huge depreciation in their inventory. This post just brought back the memories of those days...:) AFAIK, this was circulated pretty regularly along with the 'modem tax' panic message du jour.
You may have hit one of the nails on the head... what I miss was the continuity... the day-to-day building up of stuff (planetary resources, fighters, ships, etc etc etc). I mean I can hop on battle.net and play Starcraft until my eyes bleed, but all I have to show for it is a few wins (or losses, as the case may be) and some more experience. I absolutely love games where there is noticable progress made daily, and that progress is preserved.
Maybe that's why I'm having so much fun doing rc5 with distributed.net... I get to check stats every day.:) I have this need for numbers and rankings and just... just... STATS!!!! that must be fulfilled.
In this context, I say we oversentimentalize the BBS.
I disagree to a certain extent (big suprise there, I'm sure)... I loved the days of that kind of community... we had a group that I just haven't found on the 'net. Since this was a local BBS (none of that LD stuff for me back in The Day), we would all get together for a 'Bash' every 3-4 months... Pig out at Ryan's Steakhouse buffet, hit miniature golf, go-cart racing, and whatever else we could manage. We would also get together for some marathon sessions of Civilization and Diplomacy.
So maybe I've proved your point. They were just another point of contact to bring people closer together.. and in my case, it worked spendidly. So maybe the nostaligia isn't for BBSes per se, but rather the community that we had built around them. We don't want BBSes back, we want OUR BBS back.
(crap, I posted a huge reply and then lost it, them's the breaks)
Okay... Was Esterian Conquest the game where you started with one planet and you sent scouts and destroyers and cruisers out to conquer other planets, and build up planetary defenses and set 'orders' for your fleets every day? I'm thinking that it was. I originally thought it was that game where you could move in three dimensions, was pseudo-real-time, and you could buy fighters and cruisers, and your goal was to conquer these three 'power planets' and control the game. But no... that was something else... and I can't remember what.
I remember playing in the days of TW200 and TW500... back when buying 50 fighters was a big deal... when you could only end each day with 25,000 credits maximum... LOSING 25,000 credits on the flip of a coin (not knowing that the integer would max out at 32,767)... being able to destroy a planet by landing on it (unopposed, of course, what were planetary defenses???) and typing 'd'... oh, it's the nostalgia monster working overtime (like me!).
I actually did play a TW game in... oh... 1996 or so... via telnet. Kinda choppy, but it worked okay... so advanced though, it was a "Build up for a few weeks, get really moving, get killed, start over" game.... I'm one of the firm believers that TW should be reset every 3-4 months... and the Cabal or whomever should be used as a very prejudicial equalization force.
My first TW game was on PCBoard... a solid BBS that I have somewhere on 5 5 1/4" floppies. I played lots on a Wildcat system too. I also used to play Barons quite a bit, which seemed pretty unpopular on the board I was playing it, so I rose thru the ranks pretty quickly.:)
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Plus, I would think that moderation is merely an opinion of what the moderators think of the intellectual property in question. It's the same as a bookstore moving a book from the main stacks to the "Bargain" bin. I can't understand how moderating a post changes the contents of the intellectual property. Plus, I've never read the TOS for slashdot (big surprise, I'm sure) but I should think it would cover such matters.
No doubt! Think about how much of what we do financially is etherial.... I get a paycheck, which is basically a piece of paper telling me how much has been direct-deposited. I logon to the website and notice that the numbers in my account have gone up. I go to ebay and find something that I like, be it a DII item or whatever, and check the bid... then go to another website and pull up my account information.. yup, enough balance on the credit card to pay for it. So I bid, I win, and then login to paypal and make a payment. Check the credit card website, yeah, the balance is up, but that's okay, back to the bank website, a few more clicks and types, and there, I just made a payment from my checking account to the credit card. Both values go down. Then it's on to USEast to get my new item. Later that evening, I find some change in my nightstand to go to Taco Bell, and realize it's the first time in five or six days I've touched 'real money', which also has no value but that's another discussion alltogether. But it does raise the question... why is it so hard to plunk down $50-$100 in cash at a store, but I'll bid on Ebay and order from pricewatch sites all day long? Anyway.
C;mon... we've _all_ bought stranger stuff than an item on a game server... right? (right?)
Wow, I first read that about... umm.... 10-11 years ago on a BBS.. good to know this story is still alive.
(OT: When I was working at MindSpring, we had USR Netservers, over a hundred and fifty scattered throughout the network, routing traffic from modems to the backbone... each one had a 200MHz Pentium chip, and I used to fantasize about the d.net client being ported to the Netserver...
Cheers -- Brian
And they had the "Towers of Hanoi" game on there, and any OS that comes with that can't be all bad. *grin*
-B/W/
I seem to recall....
:) AFAIK, this was circulated pretty regularly along with the 'modem tax' panic message du jour.
Back in The Day, when 2400 baud modems were just starting to make their push into the market, an email came 'round from a fellow that claimed to have discovered 'the worst computer virus ever'. He said he had just finished downloading a program with his 2400 bps modem, when the hard drive started seeking and writing all over the place. As he put it, "Thank God for strong coffee and a recent backup." Everything was normal again. Then he tried to run the program again. Same result. Then he tried a different program. Same result. Luckily for all his readers, he worked for some telecom firm and had an in-house lab at his disposal, and therefore discovered this horrid virus. Apparently, it was transmitted by the 'sub-carrier channel' present on all 2400 bps modems, then proceeded to wreak havoc. Since there was no way to monitor thatn sub-carrier for traffic, and certainly no way to block it, there was no way to stop the propgation of the virus. This email ended with something like "The best course of action is probably to stick to 1200 baud modems until we can figure this thing out."... and he signed it "Mike Rochenelle".
We eventually decide that "Mike Rochenelle" == "MicroChannel" or something similar, a company with a glut of 1200 bps modems facing a huge depreciation in their inventory. This post just brought back the memories of those days...
-Bucky
Maybe that's why I'm having so much fun doing rc5 with distributed.net
-Brian
I disagree to a certain extent (big suprise there, I'm sure)... I loved the days of that kind of community... we had a group that I just haven't found on the 'net. Since this was a local BBS (none of that LD stuff for me back in The Day), we would all get together for a 'Bash' every 3-4 months... Pig out at Ryan's Steakhouse buffet, hit miniature golf, go-cart racing, and whatever else we could manage. We would also get together for some marathon sessions of Civilization and Diplomacy.
So maybe I've proved your point. They were just another point of contact to bring people closer together.. and in my case, it worked spendidly. So maybe the nostaligia isn't for BBSes per se, but rather the community that we had built around them. We don't want BBSes back, we want OUR BBS back.
-Brian
(crap, I posted a huge reply and then lost it, them's the breaks)
Okay... Was Esterian Conquest the game where you started with one planet and you sent scouts and destroyers and cruisers out to conquer other planets, and build up planetary defenses and set 'orders' for your fleets every day? I'm thinking that it was. I originally thought it was that game where you could move in three dimensions, was pseudo-real-time, and you could buy fighters and cruisers, and your goal was to conquer these three 'power planets' and control the game. But no... that was something else... and I can't remember what.
I remember playing in the days of TW200 and TW500... back when buying 50 fighters was a big deal... when you could only end each day with 25,000 credits maximum... LOSING 25,000 credits on the flip of a coin (not knowing that the integer would max out at 32,767)... being able to destroy a planet by landing on it (unopposed, of course, what were planetary defenses???) and typing 'd'... oh, it's the nostalgia monster working overtime (like me!).
I actually did play a TW game in... oh... 1996 or so... via telnet. Kinda choppy, but it worked okay... so advanced though, it was a "Build up for a few weeks, get really moving, get killed, start over" game.... I'm one of the firm believers that TW should be reset every 3-4 months... and the Cabal or whomever should be used as a very prejudicial equalization force.
My first TW game was on PCBoard... a solid BBS that I have somewhere on 5 5 1/4" floppies. I played lots on a Wildcat system too. I also used to play Barons quite a bit, which seemed pretty unpopular on the board I was playing it, so I rose thru the ranks pretty quickly. :)
-Brian