>What's your goal in writing the aimbot? If it's
>to beat other players, you're cheating. If it's
>not, then why not just write a script that
>prints: "You win."
#include <obvious.h>
Some people actually enjoy the challenge of writing a nice, tight piece of code that accomplishes something interesting.
Writing printf("%s", "You win.") is less satisfying than writing a good bot.
- limit your development/project team to a maximum of 6 or 7 people and knock down them cubicle walls! COMMUNICATE PEOPLE! BE A TEAM!
Umm... no.
If and when I ever get around to writing my first SE book, it will be called "Bullpen Environments Considered Harmful." Go to your local bookstore and get yourself a copy of the book Peopleware for a more in-depth explanation, but in my experience, bullpen environments encourage incidental interruptions and prevent your from getting into that "flow" state in which real work gets done.
I've worked in bullpens, bad cubicles, private offices, and good cubicles, and I think I can safely say that offices and "good" (high-walled, quiet) cubicles are the most effective. Just make sure you have sufficient group rooms available, and that the offices/cubes are large enough for two- or three-person impromptu design sessions.
- PROTOTYPE your brains out and show the results to your users/customers. Requirements will change, understanding will increase. You'll all feel better. ITERATE this until everyone is happy!
That I'll buy, but that's actually a tenet of XP.
- Do the initial design as a group - all of you.
Again, I have to disagree. Group design, in my experience, is an exercise in wordsmithing and wastes multiple peoples' time very efficiently. I've found that a more efficient and effective method is to have one or two people create a design straw man, distribute it a few days ahead of time (to allow for digestion), and then meet in your team-sized groups to beat it into a working design.
Ultimately, it's all about humans working together.....
I think we agree on the destination, but not which highway...
I am advocating a choice, whereby someone can pay to have adverts turned off.
Aha--OK, now I understand you. I didn't get that from your original post
Actually, many shareware programs that include ads use the model you're talking about, including Opera, which is the browser I'm using to compose this. Others include PKWARE (PKZip), VisioSonic (PC DJ), and GoZilla!
(Disclaimer: the company I currently work for makes SDKs that enable just this kind of thing...)
With respect, can you quote an example of any company that has ever, successfully or non successfully, adopted the business model I asked for?
Respect--what a great concept on Slashdot! [grin]
If you're talking only about the specific POP3 service case you mentioned, then I don't know of any (most ISPs offer this, but only packaged along with other services you probably don't want).
And why bring up a bunch of companies which decided to go for subscription-only content and then move wholesale to advert-funded-only content? What possible relevence do they have?
More broadly, each of the companies I mentioned offered a service-for-a-fee model, found out that not enough people would pay for it, and switched to an advertising-based model. I think that is relevant, because it shows that they've found that an ad model is (or at least was at the time) more lucrative than a service-for-a-fee model.
Naturally, that doesn't mean that the same is true now, that it will be true in five years, or that there isn't a better model out there waiting for someone to think of it. I'm really hoping that the last case is true.
Katz et al may think that it's dreadfully "old economy" for people to pay for content, but some of us are quite happy to do just that.
Aha-that word, "some". Are there enough of your to support a business? It's been tried, and I don't think it's ever worked to a great extent.
ClariNet, Slate, and MSN have each learned this lesson. Slate was a pretty interesting case--they have more about it on their site. If you don't read it, notice this one line: "Ten to 15 people visit our free areas every month for each one paying subscriber."
The Wall Street Journal still sells subscriptions, but they have a different target audience, plus their content already has a strong offline brand and therefore has ingrained value. You might argue that AOL has a content subscription model, but I think more people use AOL for the Internet access than for the AOL-only content.
The fact remains that not enough people are willing to subscribe--they'll just surf to a "free" site with the same content, even if they do grumble about interstitials. Companies, therefore are taking the 80/20 approach--why waste resources on a small minority of people who object to the ads?
On a bigger-picture note, has anyone seen or heard of a revenue model, other than ads, that would work for a slashdot-style web site? I don't think so, unfortunately.
man every time someone thinks the computers of the world are going to melt in a year... two years...50 years... there's either a fix in half the time or when the time comes it's less of a disaster than they expected.
You don't understand. The reason that "there's a fix in half the time" is because someone writes an article or otherwise brings up the fact that there's a problem in the first place. It's the problem that no one finds or mentions that will kill you.
What we have here is validation that "many eyes make bugs shallow," but it still takes hands and minds to FIX those bugs.
"Mat Soell indicated in a forum post several days ago that some Microsoft employees they have spoken with were unhappy that the Myth servers ran on Linux..."
Hmm... I'll bet some Microsoft employees don't like kung pao chicken. Does that warrant a headline like "Microsoft Unhappy With Chinese Government"?
The assumption that Microsoft speaks for every employee and that every employee speaks for the company is utterly ridiculous. Does every Slashdotter agree with every other Slashdotter? Would you be willing to adopt the views of "some Slashdot viewers" when talking about the views of "the open-source community"?
BTW it's easy and fast to get H2 from water so look for that to become the perfered way of getting H2. just my 0.02
Easy, yes. Fast, yes. Economical, no. It takes more juice to do hydrolysis than you'd get out of the fuel cell!
You're correct in seeing the fossil fuel source as a first step. Biogas (hydrocarbon gas generated by composting) is a likely replacement in the future, if we can get it more economical. But seeding the general public with these things in preparation is an awesome first step.
No intelligent business writes off an entire market. I work in the insurance biz and I know we jump through stupid and absurd hoops to become regulated in the different states.
...
Writing off an entire state because you don't like a law is something you do only if the law is going to make you go bankrupt.
Funny, given that's exactly the stunt the auto insurance indistry tried to pull some years back when PA tried to put a cap on exorbitant auto insurance rates. Eventually, the state had to back down for fear of having every insurer stop insuring Pennsylvanians.
As much as I dislike "big gummint", I dislike "big insurance" more (and one of my parents used to be an agent...)
Which of these would support a modern PC-based game distributed as Free Software?
This isn't baiting at all--it's a question I've wrestled with for years now. Each of the three models discussed are forms of "software subsidization": you're paying for something else, which pays for the software development. But I can't figure out what would be likely to subsidize game development.
The closest I've come is something similar to the OEM game packs you get when you purchase hardware like sound cards and video accelerators; however, this leads to bad things like games and applications being made unuseable on competitors' hardware when the user upgrades a system (do you hear this, Creative?).
They do a good job of covering both ends of the spectrum - the publishers who want to hold on to their old code, and folks who see it as being wasted.
I disagree.
1. The only publisher they listed was Microsoft, who isn't terribly well-represented when you look at what's really available in the abandonware community.
2. The representative to whom they spoke hadn't heard of abandonware before! Her only comment was that Microsoft does go after piracy. They could have at least dug around until they found someone from the publishing community with some knowledge of the situation.
C|Net, you should be ashamed of such shoddy journalism.
CDE has one major strike against it in the Linux world: it's not Open Source. You have to license it from OSF. So, just like Motif, it can not become a Linux standard.
Tim
Re:What about IP verification??? Won't work
on
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
·
· Score: 1
It's a feature of Gnutella that it doesn't rely on an IP address to communicate with a client. For example, at home I have machines behind a firewall. Their IP addresses are in the range 192.168.0.XXX, which is a "private" or non-routable IP address--it doesn't exist except within the confines of my LAN. I have only one IP address for my entire LAN, and that's my firewall box (my ISP charges another $25/month for additional IPs...).
If Gnutella didn't work this way, I wouldn't be able to use it.
What if the code was released under the GPL by someone who had no right to do it?
I'm not a lawyer, but from what I understand, this is called "agency by estoppel". If an employee improperly released code under the GPL, and I use it in a product believing in good faith that the employee was authorized to act on behalf of his employer, then the employer has no recourse against me, and the situation is "as if" the employee really were an agent of the company.
Any lawyers out there want to check my work?
Yet another reason that companies are loathe to embrace the concepts of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
I'm getting quite tired of this "Sun had optical mice back in the early fourteenth century" thread.
The Sun optical mouse (which I've used since 1990) is NOTHING like the new "optical" (actually CCD camera) mice.
The Sun optical mouse contains an LED which shines onto a reflective, gridded mouse pad, and is detected by a simple light detector. This means that you have to use the (slippery, glass-like) mouse pad, and you have to move the mouse in the same coordinates as the mouse pad (since the mouse pad itself is gridded). I tend to move my mouse in a slightly diagonal (top left to bottom right) motion, and it's annoying that I can't just slightly change the orientation of the mouse--I have to move the whole pad.
The new Microsoft (and presumably Apple) mice use CCD cameras, which means that they don't require some easily-cracked-or-dented, hard-to-replace mouse pad.
The bigger problem is probably that we use the term "optical mouse" for both mouse systems, when they really don't have that much in common.
> However I don't know about the solution of > just copying COM/ActiveX/OLE, especially > when Microsoft is now dumping COM in > favour its.NET architecture.
This statement is like saying that RedHat dumped XWindows in favor of Gnome.
I used this for the Palm, but I found graffiti to be faster and more accurate (particularly combined with TealScript to customize the glyphs).
However, I was just thinking, this layout might make an excellent one-handed conventional keyboard for a PC. Just air-typing, it seems very natural; you'd probably need some kind of shift to do punctuation, though.
Having a nine-month-old, sometimes a one-handed keyboard would come in VERY handy...
The answer is yes. You're looking at this the wrong way. Let's say another bank buys your bank. Are they going to close all the accounts, send your $37.98 back to you, and say, "Hello. Your bank doesn't exist anymore, and we don't own the records to your account. Would you like to open an account with us?" If that were the case, there would be no reason to buy a bank in the first place!
A company "folding" in each of these cases just means they sell to someone else at a discount to their actual value. As I see it, the problem isn't with them selling the accounts/histories/data. It's whether or not the new company is willing to abide by the same ground rules. This could very easily be negotiated into the agreement between the old {.com|doctor|ISP|telco|bank} and the new one.
This has actually happened to me with a doctor's office. The old doc retired and sold out to a new doctor, and included all my records. A good thing, because when I went to the new doctor, there was no break in service. The new doctor was bound by the same legal restrictions on sharing information as the old one, however!
I can see a bigger problem when a business goes under, liquidates, and as part of the liquidation sells customer information to inappropriate parties, with no strings attached. But let's make sure that's what we rail against, not just selling the information to the party who buys the business.
I heartily disagree--from personal experience! I was surprised to see on this list a great program I use, and have used, on a day-to-day basis. I had no idea it had gone unmaintained. After seeing this, I'm motivated to pitch in and make sure it doesn't die.
This seems like a pretty good result, don't you think?
Section. 8. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, [...]
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
Letters of Marque and Reprisal are essentially carte blanche to attack enemies of the state. I don't think that any have been granted in the last hundred years or so, but I seem to remember reading that some were granted around the time of the U.S. Civil War.
Slashdot Mirror
>What's your goal in writing the aimbot? If it's
>to beat other players, you're cheating. If it's
>not, then why not just write a script that
>prints: "You win."
#include <obvious.h>
Some people actually enjoy the challenge of writing a nice, tight piece of code that accomplishes something interesting.
Writing printf("%s", "You win.") is less satisfying than writing a good bot.
Not necessarily. Often (as was the case with my current employer), the more restrictive agreement is the default, and is just boilerplate.
Remember that in the Real World, everything is negotiable.
If you do, take a sieve. You're going to need to to recover any pieces of an object that hits the water at hypersonic speed.
Umm... no.
If and when I ever get around to writing my first SE book, it will be called "Bullpen Environments Considered Harmful." Go to your local bookstore and get yourself a copy of the book Peopleware for a more in-depth explanation, but in my experience, bullpen environments encourage incidental interruptions and prevent your from getting into that "flow" state in which real work gets done.
I've worked in bullpens, bad cubicles, private offices, and good cubicles, and I think I can safely say that offices and "good" (high-walled, quiet) cubicles are the most effective. Just make sure you have sufficient group rooms available, and that the offices/cubes are large enough for two- or three-person impromptu design sessions.
- PROTOTYPE your brains out and show the results to your users/customers. Requirements will change, understanding will increase. You'll all feel better. ITERATE this until everyone is happy!
That I'll buy, but that's actually a tenet of XP.
- Do the initial design as a group - all of you.
Again, I have to disagree. Group design, in my experience, is an exercise in wordsmithing and wastes multiple peoples' time very efficiently. I've found that a more efficient and effective method is to have one or two people create a design straw man, distribute it a few days ahead of time (to allow for digestion), and then meet in your team-sized groups to beat it into a working design.
Ultimately, it's all about humans working together.....
I think we agree on the destination, but not which highway...
I am advocating a choice, whereby someone can pay to have adverts turned off.
Aha--OK, now I understand you. I didn't get that from your original post
Actually, many shareware programs that include ads use the model you're talking about, including Opera, which is the browser I'm using to compose this. Others include PKWARE (PKZip), VisioSonic (PC DJ), and GoZilla!
(Disclaimer: the company I currently work for makes SDKs that enable just this kind of thing...)
With respect, can you quote an example of any company that has ever, successfully or non successfully, adopted the business model I asked for?
Respect--what a great concept on Slashdot! [grin]
If you're talking only about the specific POP3 service case you mentioned, then I don't know of any (most ISPs offer this, but only packaged along with other services you probably don't want).
And why bring up a bunch of companies which decided to go for subscription-only content and then move wholesale to advert-funded-only content? What possible relevence do they have?
More broadly, each of the companies I mentioned offered a service-for-a-fee model, found out that not enough people would pay for it, and switched to an advertising-based model. I think that is relevant, because it shows that they've found that an ad model is (or at least was at the time) more lucrative than a service-for-a-fee model.
Naturally, that doesn't mean that the same is true now, that it will be true in five years, or that there isn't a better model out there waiting for someone to think of it. I'm really hoping that the last case is true.
Katz et al may think that it's dreadfully "old economy" for people to pay for content, but some of us are quite happy to do just that.
Aha-that word, "some". Are there enough of your to support a business? It's been tried, and I don't think it's ever worked to a great extent.
ClariNet, Slate, and MSN have each learned this lesson. Slate was a pretty interesting case--they have more about it on their site. If you don't read it, notice this one line: "Ten to 15 people visit our free areas every month for each one paying subscriber."
The Wall Street Journal still sells subscriptions, but they have a different target audience, plus their content already has a strong offline brand and therefore has ingrained value. You might argue that AOL has a content subscription model, but I think more people use AOL for the Internet access than for the AOL-only content.
The fact remains that not enough people are willing to subscribe--they'll just surf to a "free" site with the same content, even if they do grumble about interstitials. Companies, therefore are taking the 80/20 approach--why waste resources on a small minority of people who object to the ads?
On a bigger-picture note, has anyone seen or heard of a revenue model, other than ads, that would work for a slashdot-style web site? I don't think so, unfortunately.
Umm.... as a medium, plain text IS 1-d. It flows from beginning to end.
Don't confuse the dimensionality of text with the dimensionality of the graphic representation of characters which _are_ 2D.
man every time someone thinks the computers of the world are going to melt in a year... two years...50 years... there's either a fix in half the time or when the time comes it's less of a disaster than they expected.
You don't understand. The reason that "there's a fix in half the time" is because someone writes an article or otherwise brings up the fact that there's a problem in the first place. It's the problem that no one finds or mentions that will kill you.
What we have here is validation that "many eyes make bugs shallow," but it still takes hands and minds to FIX those bugs.
"Mat Soell indicated in a forum post several days ago that some Microsoft employees they have spoken with were unhappy that the Myth servers ran on Linux..."
Hmm... I'll bet some Microsoft employees don't like kung pao chicken. Does that warrant a headline like "Microsoft Unhappy With Chinese Government"?
The assumption that Microsoft speaks for every employee and that every employee speaks for the company is utterly ridiculous. Does every Slashdotter agree with every other Slashdotter? Would you be willing to adopt the views of "some Slashdot viewers" when talking about the views of "the open-source community"?
BTW it's easy and fast to get H2 from water so look for that to become the perfered way of getting H2. just my 0.02
Easy, yes. Fast, yes. Economical, no. It takes more juice to do hydrolysis than you'd get out of the fuel cell!
You're correct in seeing the fossil fuel source as a first step. Biogas (hydrocarbon gas generated by composting) is a likely replacement in the future, if we can get it more economical. But seeding the general public with these things in preparation is an awesome first step.
No intelligent business writes off an entire market. I work in the insurance biz and I know we jump through stupid and absurd hoops to become regulated in the different states.
...
Writing off an entire state because you don't like a law is something you do only if the law is going to make you go bankrupt.
Funny, given that's exactly the stunt the auto insurance indistry tried to pull some years back when PA tried to put a cap on exorbitant auto insurance rates. Eventually, the state had to back down for fear of having every insurer stop insuring Pennsylvanians.
As much as I dislike "big gummint", I dislike "big insurance" more (and one of my parents used to be an agent...)
Tim
Which of these would support a modern PC-based game distributed as Free Software?
This isn't baiting at all--it's a question I've wrestled with for years now. Each of the three models discussed are forms of "software subsidization": you're paying for something else, which pays for the software development. But I can't figure out what would be likely to subsidize game development.
The closest I've come is something similar to the OEM game packs you get when you purchase hardware like sound cards and video accelerators; however, this leads to bad things like games and applications being made unuseable on competitors' hardware when the user upgrades a system (do you hear this, Creative?).
Tim
Nope. Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison:
"I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing..."
More Jefferson quotes are here.
Hemos writes:
They do a good job of covering both ends of the spectrum - the publishers who want to hold on to their old code, and folks who see it as being wasted.
I disagree.
1. The only publisher they listed was Microsoft, who isn't terribly well-represented when you look at what's really available in the abandonware community.
2. The representative to whom they spoke hadn't heard of abandonware before! Her only comment was that Microsoft does go after piracy. They could have at least dug around until they found someone from the publishing community with some knowledge of the situation.
C|Net, you should be ashamed of such shoddy journalism.
CDE has one major strike against it in the Linux world: it's not Open Source. You have to license it from OSF. So, just like Motif, it can not become a Linux standard.
Tim
It's a feature of Gnutella that it doesn't rely on an IP address to communicate with a client. For example, at home I have machines behind a firewall. Their IP addresses are in the range 192.168.0.XXX, which is a "private" or non-routable IP address--it doesn't exist except within the confines of my LAN. I have only one IP address for my entire LAN, and that's my firewall box (my ISP charges another $25/month for additional IPs...).
If Gnutella didn't work this way, I wouldn't be able to use it.
What if the code was released under the GPL by someone who had no right to do it?
I'm not a lawyer, but from what I understand, this is called "agency by estoppel". If an employee improperly released code under the GPL, and I use it in a product believing in good faith that the employee was authorized to act on behalf of his employer, then the employer has no recourse against me, and the situation is "as if" the employee really were an agent of the company.
Any lawyers out there want to check my work?
Yet another reason that companies are loathe to embrace the concepts of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
Some good links:
I'm getting quite tired of this "Sun had optical mice back in the early fourteenth century" thread.
The Sun optical mouse (which I've used since 1990) is NOTHING like the new "optical" (actually CCD camera) mice.
The Sun optical mouse contains an LED which shines onto a reflective, gridded mouse pad, and is detected by a simple light detector. This means that you have to use the (slippery, glass-like) mouse pad, and you have to move the mouse in the same coordinates as the mouse pad (since the mouse pad itself is gridded). I tend to move my mouse in a slightly diagonal (top left to bottom right) motion, and it's annoying that I can't just slightly change the orientation of the mouse--I have to move the whole pad.
The new Microsoft (and presumably Apple) mice use CCD cameras, which means that they don't require some easily-cracked-or-dented, hard-to-replace mouse pad.
The bigger problem is probably that we use the term "optical mouse" for both mouse systems, when they really don't have that much in common.
> However I don't know about the solution of .NET architecture.
> just copying COM/ActiveX/OLE, especially
> when Microsoft is now dumping COM in
> favour its
This statement is like saying that RedHat dumped XWindows in favor of Gnome.
.Net is BUILT with COM. Read the C# spec.
I used this for the Palm, but I found graffiti to be faster and more accurate (particularly combined with TealScript to customize the glyphs).
However, I was just thinking, this layout might make an excellent one-handed conventional keyboard for a PC. Just air-typing, it seems very natural; you'd probably need some kind of shift to do punctuation, though.
Having a nine-month-old, sometimes a one-handed keyboard would come in VERY handy...
The answer is yes. You're looking at this the wrong way. Let's say another bank buys your bank. Are they going to close all the accounts, send your $37.98 back to you, and say, "Hello. Your bank doesn't exist anymore, and we don't own the records to your account. Would you like to open an account with us?" If that were the case, there would be no reason to buy a bank in the first place!
A company "folding" in each of these cases just means they sell to someone else at a discount to their actual value. As I see it, the problem isn't with them selling the accounts/histories/data. It's whether or not the new company is willing to abide by the same ground rules. This could very easily be negotiated into the agreement between the old {.com|doctor|ISP|telco|bank} and the new one.
This has actually happened to me with a doctor's office. The old doc retired and sold out to a new doctor, and included all my records. A good thing, because when I went to the new doctor, there was no break in service. The new doctor was bound by the same legal restrictions on sharing information as the old one, however!
I can see a bigger problem when a business goes under, liquidates, and as part of the liquidation sells customer information to inappropriate parties, with no strings attached. But let's make sure that's what we rail against, not just selling the information to the party who buys the business.
I heartily disagree--from personal experience! I was surprised to see on this list a great program I use, and have used, on a day-to-day basis. I had no idea it had gone unmaintained. After seeing this, I'm motivated to pitch in and make sure it doesn't die.
This seems like a pretty good result, don't you think?
Section. 8. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, [...]
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
Letters of Marque and Reprisal are essentially carte blanche to attack enemies of the state. I don't think that any have been granted in the last hundred years or so, but I seem to remember reading that some were granted around the time of the U.S. Civil War.