Easily. They could stand in one spot, and kill you. The game client actually knows a little more about where people are than it's displaying, which why wallhacks can work. Add in the fact the computer will be 99.9% accurate to your forehead, and you're done. It's easier to make a completely accurate bot than it is to make one that misses.
There's a section in Preferences -> General which controls which categories you have on the panel on the left. One of those available to display now is "Applications" which will happily take you to that section of the iTunes Store.
They absorbed Blizzard North into their Irvine offices a couple years ago. It doesn't exist as a separate entity anymore.
They have enough people to manage all of their projects. Previous to this announcement they had hinted at this with statements about their "Team 3." So right now they have one team on WoW xpacks, one on SC2 (and the xpack which we know will come) and one on D3.
These next 12 months should be interesting, with WotLK and SC2 likely to both land in that window.
As a side note, I found the scale to be wildly inaccurate. Apparently I could loose or gain over a pound by stepping off and back on again. Some of that's posture. If you're not pefectly centered on the pressure sensor, it probably won't quite read you right. The digital in my bathroom does the same thing. I'll usually do best of three to figure it out.
It's much less fun when the bots are on your team.
Gold farming and grinding are much less needed these days in WoW with the daily quests giving out 8-12g a pop, and being able to do 25 of those a day. Most taking 10mins to complete.
It wouldn't surprise me if this is a Vivendi decision. If the publisher doesn't want to release a version, the developer would be hard pressed to be able to justify the expense to make it. Especially when the publisher in this case is also the owner of the company.
We know Blizzard has the talent to do a Linux port, and probably in short order. There's the Linux servers to start. There's a IsLinuxClient() API call in the code. The primary Blizzard poster in the Macros and UI forum is one slouken: better known as Sam Lantinga of SDL and formerly Loki Software.
Honestly, I'd not be surprised if there's a mostly working client in-house for Linux due to some of the above bits. Odds of it ever seeing the light of day however are slim, and if people cry bloody murder about Linux being scapegoated here, it's not liable to pain the Linux community in a nice light. The next time someone brings up a Linux port, the suit will only remember "Oh, Linux. That's those people who were threatening to firebomb our offices. We don't need them."
And when the guy contacted Blizzard informing them of his situation, they reinstated the account and credited him 4 days. There's nothing to see here, outside of an account being flagged due to location and registration IP address, all brought up, quite possibly by a guild split causing some people to be asshats and reporting him. No anti-military bias, just the usual issues which crop up when you have a massive customer base, and piles upon piles of complaints against people who threaten someone's e-peen, whether they're real or imagined.
I've read some of the higher level journals from the beta, and there are some quests similar to this idea. You're sent off by an NPC to kill another NPC of the other faction. That NPC in turn, sends PCs of his faction, to kill your NPC. The respawn on both of them is in the form of hours, so it's a good thing to keep your guy alive, and drop the other one.
As long as Unnamed ISP has no legal ties to the VoIP carrier which is being theoretically impacted in this case, I don't see how Restraint of Trade comes into it, unless you bring market coverage %age into it. If they don't wish to transit traffic across their network, they really aren't legally obligated to. The end-user ToS already has stipulations resrtaining what their ISP will allow on their connection, so it would be easy enough to leverage that to snip out VoIP traffic as being 'detrimental to general network health'
Now, Comcast could fall afoul of this due to their size, if they are also offering a competing service. The whole monopoly/antitrust routine we went through with Microsoft. Similar basis: company with large market presense establishes barriers to competing products by leveraging their scale to favor their services. Smaller ISPs in a competitive market would likely be able to drop traffic at their whim.
Personally, I wouldn't appreciate such an ISP's methods, but I would agree with the ISP putting in place a "Don't call us for VoIP issues" policy. Many of the smaller providers do just fine with non-realtime traffic, but they'd show their flaws with VoIP.
...and not use IE. JavaScript, while often abused, is still useful for proper end-user UI feedback. Using a good browser (Moz/Firefox/Opera/!MSIE) will clean up most of the annoyances with JS problems.
5th paragraph of the article: "Marked "U.S. Government Property," the device turned out to be a wireless transmitter"
The DoD did put their name on it. Maybe I'm just weird, but opening odd boxes labelled as gov't property outside of a known military base just doesn't strike me as a very wise thing to do.
The thing everyone seems to forget in this whole discussion is the switch of publishers in the middle of the project. Once BioWare and Interplay split, I'm sure that had a marked effect on their production choices. They might have had to run to familiar, easy to implement, but possibly not x-platform APIs and tools in order to make the release date Infogrames wanted to hit. The fact that Inforgrames has let them continue the x-platform push, and will acquire a heavier support load due to it is something people should be thankful for. Yes, the delays have sucked, but they're still doing it. It's the first project of theirs they've tried to do on all the major platforms at about the same time. I'm sure they'll streamline everything and get to a level near iD, Epic and Blizzard (yes, I know, no Linux from that one, but look at how long War2 for Mac took vs. War3 for Mac) in a project or two.
Ok, for those defending Clean Flicks 'right' to market an edited version of a movie, how would you like this situation:
Let us postulate a company: Clean Books. They buy a copy of a book, epoxy it sealed, and attach an 'edited' copy of the book with the offending content taken out. Would you be supporting the publishing house going after the company, or would you support the company editing the book?
Or somone going through the Linux kernel source and removing all the 'colorful' comments. Does not the creator of content have the sole right to determine how their content is presented? Is this precept not intrinsic to the idea of software licenses, the subject of which tends to be of most discussion here? (Discounting First post and the trolls, of course)
Only 30 million hits a week? I was running a site, on MySQL that was pulling 15million a day. Now, if you mean 30mil _pageviews_ that's different. We did about 400k of those per day. Granted, we did have a slightly weird setup, but it did the job, and very well. Each front-end webserver had a MySQL slave instance with the necessary read tables. This helped keep the concurrency way down. The master was only written to upon user information adjustments, or hourly when banner data was replicated back to it from the slaves (no sense pushing all that data to the master on each hit when the front-side can be used as a temporary aggregation point).
Now as to the backup, mysqlhotcopy at about 3am. Drops a write lock on the tables. Maybe a couple minutes of write lock on a really gigantic table. As we didn't have a higly active forum, or other DB update intensive section of the site that required immediate public update, it didn't cause any real problems. In a year of this operation with 15 slaves, I think I had to hold the replication's have on one of them once, and that was my fault anyway. It helps to create the db before you start replicating to it.
The company I worked at previously had a daemon which was receiving 1500 requests every 30 seconds, each of which resulted in a dbm open/create, update, and close. After 6 months of incessant drive chatter, it killed the disk it was running on. We then threw 1/2GB of RAM at it and tossed the files into/tmp (on Solaris, so it was effectively RAM). System was much quieter, a little faster and we didn't torch anymore drives. RAMdisks come in very handy at cutting back on hardware stresses in cases like this.
Slashdot Mirror
http://opensource.apple.com/ ?
All the FOSS code and their diffs for each public build are there.
Also a fair amount of Darwin code finds its way back into the mainline BSDs.
AmigaOS for the Dalai Lama. There's something oddly appropriate there with the Guru Meditations and all...
Easily. They could stand in one spot, and kill you. The game client actually knows a little more about where people are than it's displaying, which why wallhacks can work. Add in the fact the computer will be 99.9% accurate to your forehead, and you're done. It's easier to make a completely accurate bot than it is to make one that misses.
From http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/09/25/bc-vancouver-olympics-trademark-o-canada.html which is the source linked to from the BoingBoing article:
"The phrases were recently trademarked by the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee in anticipation of the announcement, it was revealed Wednesday."
There's a section in Preferences -> General which controls which categories you have on the panel on the left. One of those available to display now is "Applications" which will happily take you to that section of the iTunes Store.
They absorbed Blizzard North into their Irvine offices a couple years ago. It doesn't exist as a separate entity anymore.
They have enough people to manage all of their projects. Previous to this announcement they had hinted at this with statements about their "Team 3." So right now they have one team on WoW xpacks, one on SC2 (and the xpack which we know will come) and one on D3.
These next 12 months should be interesting, with WotLK and SC2 likely to both land in that window.
It's much less fun when the bots are on your team.
Gold farming and grinding are much less needed these days in WoW with the daily quests giving out 8-12g a pop, and being able to do 25 of those a day. Most taking 10mins to complete.
If they keep this up, I can see their next OS: Microsoft Windows BoW (Block of Wood) Ultimate Edition!
But a block of wood isn't complete safe. Someone could get hurt by it. So they'd have to release SP1 which adds padding.
True, but since when have facts ever stopped a government entity looking for an additional source of income?
He may be a Republican, but he's an oddity in the past 20 years or so in which California has tended to the blue side.
He's also married to a Kennedy, after all, which helps water him down.
It wouldn't surprise me if this is a Vivendi decision. If the publisher doesn't want to release a version, the developer would be hard pressed to be able to justify the expense to make it. Especially when the publisher in this case is also the owner of the company.
We know Blizzard has the talent to do a Linux port, and probably in short order. There's the Linux servers to start. There's a IsLinuxClient() API call in the code. The primary Blizzard poster in the Macros and UI forum is one slouken: better known as Sam Lantinga of SDL and formerly Loki Software.
Honestly, I'd not be surprised if there's a mostly working client in-house for Linux due to some of the above bits. Odds of it ever seeing the light of day however are slim, and if people cry bloody murder about Linux being scapegoated here, it's not liable to pain the Linux community in a nice light. The next time someone brings up a Linux port, the suit will only remember "Oh, Linux. That's those people who were threatening to firebomb our offices. We don't need them."
Don't forget Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1904468136 "Gambling Online" complete with a sample excerpt of the book!
And when the guy contacted Blizzard informing them of his situation, they reinstated the account and credited him 4 days. There's nothing to see here, outside of an account being flagged due to location and registration IP address, all brought up, quite possibly by a guild split causing some people to be asshats and reporting him. No anti-military bias, just the usual issues which crop up when you have a massive customer base, and piles upon piles of complaints against people who threaten someone's e-peen, whether they're real or imagined.
> there certainly isn't a promenint "changes since previous agreement" at the top or a version number.
There's a nice little thing called a timestamp at the very top of the file.
I've read some of the higher level journals from the beta, and there are some quests similar to this idea. You're sent off by an NPC to kill another NPC of the other faction. That NPC in turn, sends PCs of his faction, to kill your NPC. The respawn on both of them is in the form of hours, so it's a good thing to keep your guy alive, and drop the other one.
As long as Unnamed ISP has no legal ties to the VoIP carrier which is being theoretically impacted in this case, I don't see how Restraint of Trade comes into it, unless you bring market coverage %age into it. If they don't wish to transit traffic across their network, they really aren't legally obligated to. The end-user ToS already has stipulations resrtaining what their ISP will allow on their connection, so it would be easy enough to leverage that to snip out VoIP traffic as being 'detrimental to general network health'
Now, Comcast could fall afoul of this due to their size, if they are also offering a competing service. The whole monopoly/antitrust routine we went through with Microsoft. Similar basis: company with large market presense establishes barriers to competing products by leveraging their scale to favor their services. Smaller ISPs in a competitive market would likely be able to drop traffic at their whim.
Personally, I wouldn't appreciate such an ISP's methods, but I would agree with the ISP putting in place a "Don't call us for VoIP issues" policy. Many of the smaller providers do just fine with non-realtime traffic, but they'd show their flaws with VoIP.
...and not use IE. JavaScript, while often abused, is still useful for proper end-user UI feedback. Using a good browser (Moz/Firefox/Opera/!MSIE) will clean up most of the annoyances with JS problems.
5th paragraph of the article:
"Marked "U.S. Government Property," the device turned out to be a wireless transmitter"
The DoD did put their name on it. Maybe I'm just weird, but opening odd boxes labelled as gov't property outside of a known military base just doesn't strike me as a very wise thing to do.
The thing everyone seems to forget in this whole discussion is the switch of publishers in the middle of the project. Once BioWare and Interplay split, I'm sure that had a marked effect on their production choices. They might have had to run to familiar, easy to implement, but possibly not x-platform APIs and tools in order to make the release date Infogrames wanted to hit. The fact that Inforgrames has let them continue the x-platform push, and will acquire a heavier support load due to it is something people should be thankful for. Yes, the delays have sucked, but they're still doing it. It's the first project of theirs they've tried to do on all the major platforms at about the same time. I'm sure they'll streamline everything and get to a level near iD, Epic and Blizzard (yes, I know, no Linux from that one, but look at how long War2 for Mac took vs. War3 for Mac) in a project or two.
Ok, for those defending Clean Flicks 'right' to market an edited version of a movie, how would you like this situation:
Let us postulate a company: Clean Books. They buy a copy of a book, epoxy it sealed, and attach an 'edited' copy of the book with the offending content taken out. Would you be supporting the publishing house going after the company, or would you support the company editing the book?
Or somone going through the Linux kernel source and removing all the 'colorful' comments. Does not the creator of content have the sole right to determine how their content is presented? Is this precept not intrinsic to the idea of software licenses, the subject of which tends to be of most discussion here? (Discounting First post and the trolls, of course)
Only 30 million hits a week? I was running a site, on MySQL that was pulling 15million a day. Now, if you mean 30mil _pageviews_ that's different. We did about 400k of those per day. Granted, we did have a slightly weird setup, but it did the job, and very well. Each front-end webserver had a MySQL slave instance with the necessary read tables. This helped keep the concurrency way down. The master was only written to upon user information adjustments, or hourly when banner data was replicated back to it from the slaves (no sense pushing all that data to the master on each hit when the front-side can be used as a temporary aggregation point).
Now as to the backup, mysqlhotcopy at about 3am. Drops a write lock on the tables. Maybe a couple minutes of write lock on a really gigantic table. As we didn't have a higly active forum, or other DB update intensive section of the site that required immediate public update, it didn't cause any real problems. In a year of this operation with 15 slaves, I think I had to hold the replication's have on one of them once, and that was my fault anyway. It helps to create the db before you start replicating to it.
Actually, 10 years. A president can serve up to half of his predecessor's term, and be elected for two four year terms after that. 22nd Amendment.
The company I worked at previously had a daemon which was receiving 1500 requests every 30 seconds, each of which resulted in a dbm open/create, update, and close. After 6 months of incessant drive chatter, it killed the disk it was running on. We then threw 1/2GB of RAM at it and tossed the files into /tmp (on Solaris, so it was effectively RAM). System was much quieter, a little faster and we didn't torch anymore drives. RAMdisks come in very handy at cutting back on hardware stresses in cases like this.