I have a text log of that first MUD session by the two guys who set it up:
# Welcome to MUD1 at Essex University! # # Time: 18:57:32 # There are 1 users on currently, including you. # # You are in a room with one door on the north wall. # > n # You go north. > look # You see one door to the south. > s # You go south. > look # You are in a room with one door on the north wall. > search # What? > examine # I don't know how to do that, Dave. > find # What? > # TimTheEnchanger logged in. # # Time: 19:02:12 # There are 2 users on currently, including you. # > *** TimTheEnchanter attacks YOU *** *** You are hit for 26721 damage! *** *** You DIE! *** > n # You can't do that, you are dead. > nnnn # What? > nn # I don't know how to do that, Dave. > nnnnnnnnnnnn # What? > TimTheEnchanter shouts, "hahaha dumbass!" > q # I don't know how to do that, Dave. > quit # What? > exit # Goodbye, and thanks for playing! Come back soon! # Elapsed time: 0 hours 6 minutes 33 seconds. ^(*@#CONNECTION LOST
Global warming means seas slowly rise and cities move inland over the course of a century or more.
But accidently triggering another ice age will kill billions. And if it happens in just a few years, as scientists think ice ages may actually start, most of humanity will die.
It's like I'm an adult in a room filled with kindergarteners. "Hey, let's build a big stack of chairs to reach the cookies!" "Yeah! Good idea!"
Programmer 1: Our new format is incompatible with the old format.
Programmer 2: Can we convert them?
Programmer 1: Not easily. Let's just force everybody to re-do their profiles. This new format is very neat, after all, and warms my heart as a programmer. What's the worst that can happen? A few million people get mad at my employer? Bah! That's nothing when weighed against the satisfaction of introducing a neat program that warms my programmer heart.
And sadly that's exactly the way it is at many places. Most programmers are clueless about making user interfaces intuitive (much less testing same, witness the famous Bill Gates letter about MS's tortuous online store ordering system) to say nothing about making sure their "neat new thing" handles upgrades flawlessly.
Is it really that hard to look at it from the user's point? What would you, as a customer, expect? You'd expect to log in to see some new features, but all your data is still there.
Oh, by the way. For millions of users, it's worth it for the company to have a few extra programmers integrate all the old crap and the new crap so it can all work at the same time. Just a small loss in stock price for this fiasco would justify dozens of programmers.
The real problem: poor planning on the part of management for letting the developers dictate the path. Somewhere, somebody above the buffoon programmer who said "well, wipe it all then" was a manager who should have thought, "Well, that'll piss off our customers." But didn't.
Ok, Joe. Here's the next candidate. Type in some stuff and try to see if they're a human or a robot.
Joe (typing): "What do you think of the $700 billion bailout?"
Turing Candidate (onscreen results): "Like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this. We're saying, 'Hey, why bail out Fanny and Freddie and not me?' But ultimately what the bailout does is, help those that are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy to help...uh...it's gotta be all about job creation, too. Also, too, shoring up our economy and putting Fannie and Freddy back on the right track and so healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reigning in spending...'cause Barack Obama, y'know...has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans, also, having a dollar value meal at restaurants. That's gonna help. But one in five jobs being created today under the umbrella of job creation. That, you know...Also..."
It's just one more VS thing to get in the way when I push F1 on the "class" keyword in VC++ to look up some obscure syntax.
You'd think MSDN would be capable, in an intuitive manner, of putting the C++ stuff first, since I pushed F1 editing a.cpp file in a.cpp project.
But no, I have intermingled all obscure uses of the word in Java, SQL, VBA, this or that server scripting language, Foxpro, Access,.NET framework, and the secret language only identical twins understand.
Well, at least they're letting some chess experts select four moves for the public to choose from.
The BBC had a "public vs. a grandmaster" game 18 years ago on live TV. "Would the public add up to an awesome chess player with so many minds, or would it be disturbingly poor?"
I think people can guess the answer. Keep that in mind the next time you vote.
Or PvE, it seemed to have more to do with number of ships than whether they were player or NPC.
Losing my new and first battle cruiser when a bunch of frigates and junk jumped me in an L2 mission because I was getting 1 frame every 4-5s was what drove me away.
Keep in mind the mouse movement is tied to the frame rate so to move the mouse to the little click circle takes several frames to line up correctly.
And even if you hotkey "run away! run away!" (as I had by that point) you still end up dying.
10s to warp up to speed and get away takes > 30s because of the horrendous fps.
I rather found it humerous that a number of times I blew up after going into warp, only to have my junk de-warp somewhere in BFE between warp points.
Which is another cool thing. Even though you warp from planet to moon to asteroid to space station within a solar system, you could fly there the hard way under impulse engine (or whatever Eve calls it, I forget) if you wanted to take anywhere from hours to months.
Woo hoo! 8 kps! How long to 1/10 the way to the Oort Cloud?
Yes, if you can get into some player corporation and run with their fleet. Load up a missile destroyer or cruiser and just pour it on once the "tackle" happens. Or slugs or lasers or whatever.
The missions are somewhat tedious. Of course you can go into sub-0.5 space (i.e. no guards to save you from being pk'd) but that has its own problems.
I lasted a month before quitting when I lost my first battlecruiser thanks to PvE graphics lag when a bunch of things jumped me and I suddenly was getting 1 frame per 4-5 seconds. It's tough to even click your warp escape button in that scenario.
I suppose if you can get in groups, things would be better (and more realistic as fleet vs. fleet) but that still wouldn't solve the graphics lag issue.
You ain't kidding. Some slow, lame comment like this is Teh Winnah according to people around here?
For god's sake, frist psot was a play on 2 girls 1 cup. Hell, we've already been through lesbian incest and necrophilia before this l00ser posted this lameosity.
Some people (this poster, and those who +modded him) have got a long way to go to catch up with the average Slashdotter's knowledge of the Wonders of the World.
Let's not. That would be The Matrix Online, which I need not point out was simultaneously the most "perfect" choice ever for an online avatar game while ending up a total flop.
Building encounters with a bunch of street thugs, level after level after level.
And not enough outfits, either. At least City of Heroes has a ton of sexy stuff you could wear on your girls, and it was all available at level 0.
It's interesting that Matrix Online had a way to "hack" things to gain extra powers. So did Star Wars: Galaxies, for that matter. But not real hacking of the game. No way, no how!
Well, for this case, let's say an "encounter" is one sexual encounter between two people, where one is infected, and there is a non-zero chance of transmission to the non-infected person.
In fact, I ran some interesting numbers myself just now in Excel.
If we use these as our variables (easy to switch around in a spreadsheet):
Infections per encounter: 1/10 Average years before realizing they're infected and stop copulating: 2
Then if everybody averaged 5 distinct sexual encounters with different people, every single day, then after 2 years, this person will have infected 365 people. And if they keep up the same rate, this will balloon to the whole world's population somewhere around the 7th year.
Of course, there are overlaps, and the "heavy hitter" population is a far cry from the whole world's population.
But for other values things get interesting.
For 1 encounter per week (again, 1 new partner per week, and 1 encounter with them) you're looking at about 15 years.
1 new person per week is pretty damned fast.
1 a month gives us somewhere around 21 years to get to the world's population.
Let's say a sex in the city girl has 5 new encounters per year. (Granted, 5 new people would be multiplied by x times per person, but the numbers come out similarly.)
Here it gets fascinating. Presuming the person "hits it" for 2 years before realizing they're infected and then stops (big assumptions), the rate of spread will equal the rate of "die-off", which would represent cessation of sexual activity after 2 years.
I.e. it stops spreading.
And for even less lucky^H^H^H^H^H slutty people, which is probably most of humanity, the rate of "die-off" actually exceeds the rate of spread, and thus the virus would become extinct.
Of course, sub-populations with high rates of copulation could keep it going, or spreading, in their own worlds, as could longer periods of time before cessation of infectious behavior after learning one was infected.
This model is very simple, and ignores those and other parameters, such as different rates of infection depending on the type of encounter, different rates of infection depending on whether it's a male or female "receiving", the average number of copulations per unique partner is considerably greater than 1, relationships are not always serially monogamous, and this is violated more with higher rates of encounters, and so on.
But those are just tweaks to the general exponential situation.
So, yes, AIDS could have petered along, so to speak, not making much headway until hockey-sticking in the 1960's to early 1970's with the sexual revolution, and specifically, the gay sexual revolution. Then increased detection, awareness, treatments, prevention, changes in risky behavior, and a lower rate of transmission female -> male than male -> male or male -> female all combined to put the clamps on the explosion.
For the same reason as the "gas shortages" in the 1970's -- panick causing peoople to top out their tanks. (This, by the way, is also the reason "even/odd" days actually increase the gas station lines, rather than resolve the problem.)
Drive outside Atlanta, and the stations are full, like everywhere else in the country.
> "If Melville had so much as allowed for any possibility at all where Captain Ahab 'wins,' > no matter how remote, the work's message and its interpretation of the world completely > changes. Instead of destiny and fate, we would now speak of probability and chance."
On the other hand, even mathematical certainty in the invulnerability of a story or person isn't proof against the cleverness of humanity.
> The council says it is "deeply concerned" by the news, but is confident that > "multiple layers of security have prevented access to systems and data."
The article continues.
"Indeed, a fax sent by the council to local news outlets later that day confirmed that '[the council's] servers were never breached and we've **CAMILLA P-B IS A HORSEFACE!!!!!!**"
Furthermore, it's a modern conceit to think poetic speech is somehow required to say "3.14" instead of "3".
3 is plenty good when just talking and rounding. It is the proper integer to round pi to, after all.
Moreover, although strained, when you consider "3" is acceptable for rounding from values from 3.499 to 2.500, the description of 3x the diameter most certainly falls within this range.
I.e. the math works out, and it's a fraud to claim this somehow "disproves" the accuracy of the Bible.
Because God knows there's plenty of other junk in there more than capable of it.
Worse, doesn't some law about the Internet and Congress trump any state action?
Can some other domain seize control of KY.gov because Kentucky is behaving illegally according to some other jurisdiction that allows those gambling domains?
Slashdot Mirror
No, two there always is. Master...and apprentice.
I have a text log of that first MUD session by the two guys who set it up:
# Welcome to MUD1 at Essex University!
#
# Time: 18:57:32
# There are 1 users on currently, including you.
#
# You are in a room with one door on the north wall.
#
> n
# You go north.
> look
# You see one door to the south.
> s
# You go south.
> look
# You are in a room with one door on the north wall.
> search
# What?
> examine
# I don't know how to do that, Dave.
> find
# What?
>
# TimTheEnchanger logged in.
#
# Time: 19:02:12
# There are 2 users on currently, including you.
#
>
*** TimTheEnchanter attacks YOU ***
*** You are hit for 26721 damage! ***
*** You DIE! ***
> n
# You can't do that, you are dead.
> nnnn
# What?
> nn
# I don't know how to do that, Dave.
> nnnnnnnnnnnn
# What?
>
TimTheEnchanter shouts, "hahaha dumbass!"
> q
# I don't know how to do that, Dave.
> quit
# What?
> exit
# Goodbye, and thanks for playing! Come back soon!
# Elapsed time: 0 hours 6 minutes 33 seconds.
^(*@#CONNECTION LOST
And we've never looked back!
Please do not attempt to cool the Earth.
Global warming means seas slowly rise and cities move inland over the course of a century or more.
But accidently triggering another ice age will kill billions. And if it happens in just a few years, as scientists think ice ages may actually start, most of humanity will die.
It's like I'm an adult in a room filled with kindergarteners. "Hey, let's build a big stack of chairs to reach the cookies!" "Yeah! Good idea!"
Programmer 1: Our new format is incompatible with the old format.
Programmer 2: Can we convert them?
Programmer 1: Not easily. Let's just force everybody to re-do their profiles. This new format is very neat, after all, and warms my heart as a programmer. What's the worst that can happen? A few million people get mad at my employer? Bah! That's nothing when weighed against the satisfaction of introducing a neat program that warms my programmer heart.
And sadly that's exactly the way it is at many places. Most programmers are clueless about making user interfaces intuitive (much less testing same, witness the famous Bill Gates letter about MS's tortuous online store ordering system) to say nothing about making sure their "neat new thing" handles upgrades flawlessly.
Is it really that hard to look at it from the user's point? What would you, as a customer, expect? You'd expect to log in to see some new features, but all your data is still there.
Oh, by the way. For millions of users, it's worth it for the company to have a few extra programmers integrate all the old crap and the new crap so it can all work at the same time. Just a small loss in stock price for this fiasco would justify dozens of programmers.
The real problem: poor planning on the part of management for letting the developers dictate the path. Somewhere, somebody above the buffoon programmer who said "well, wipe it all then" was a manager who should have thought, "Well, that'll piss off our customers." But didn't.
Ok, Joe. Here's the next candidate. Type in some stuff and try to see if they're a human or a robot.
Joe (typing): "What do you think of the $700 billion bailout?"
Turing Candidate (onscreen results): "Like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this. We're saying, 'Hey, why bail out Fanny and Freddie and not me?' But ultimately what the bailout does is, help those that are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy to help...uh...it's gotta be all about job creation, too. Also, too, shoring up our economy and putting Fannie and Freddy back on the right track and so healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reigning in spending...'cause Barack Obama, y'know...has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans, also, having a dollar value meal at restaurants. That's gonna help. But one in five jobs being created today under the umbrella of job creation. That, you know...Also..."
Joe: It's a fake!
World-class physicists.
It's just one more VS thing to get in the way when I push F1 on the "class" keyword in VC++ to look up some obscure syntax.
You'd think MSDN would be capable, in an intuitive manner, of putting the C++ stuff first, since I pushed F1 editing a .cpp file in a .cpp project.
But no, I have intermingled all obscure uses of the word in Java, SQL, VBA, this or that server scripting language, Foxpro, Access, .NET framework, and the secret language only identical twins understand.
So heave this one into the mix too. WTH.
Well, at least they're letting some chess experts select four moves for the public to choose from.
The BBC had a "public vs. a grandmaster" game 18 years ago on live TV. "Would the public add up to an awesome chess player with so many minds, or would it be disturbingly poor?"
I think people can guess the answer. Keep that in mind the next time you vote.
Or PvE, it seemed to have more to do with number of ships than whether they were player or NPC.
Losing my new and first battle cruiser when a bunch of frigates and junk jumped me in an L2 mission because I was getting 1 frame every 4-5s was what drove me away.
Keep in mind the mouse movement is tied to the frame rate so to move the mouse to the little click circle takes several frames to line up correctly.
And even if you hotkey "run away! run away!" (as I had by that point) you still end up dying.
10s to warp up to speed and get away takes > 30s because of the horrendous fps.
I rather found it humerous that a number of times I blew up after going into warp, only to have my junk de-warp somewhere in BFE between warp points.
Which is another cool thing. Even though you warp from planet to moon to asteroid to space station within a solar system, you could fly there the hard way under impulse engine (or whatever Eve calls it, I forget) if you wanted to take anywhere from hours to months.
Woo hoo! 8 kps! How long to 1/10 the way to the Oort Cloud?
Say what!?!?!?
Or just start one.
"Casual Players, No Hard Requirements, Corp." will probably get you a stunning amount of applicants. :)
Yes, if you can get into some player corporation and run with their fleet. Load up a missile destroyer or cruiser and just pour it on once the "tackle" happens. Or slugs or lasers or whatever.
The expensive ships are targets anyway.
A slight correction to what you're saying.
Most people view the levels as transient.
And to acquire all pieces of mid-level outfit X would require so much hunting you'd be way out of that level range by the time you got it all.
And even if you got it all, you would be out of the level range shortly anyway, like a day or two for a typical MMO.
Hardly worth the effort when your "old" stuff or store-bought stuff or auction-bought stuff will easily carry you through the levels in question.
> A common personality type wont use any content that doesn't measureably
> increase their usefulness at the highest tier.
There ya go right there.
Why go adventuring when you consider everything but the highest level as something to blow thru as quickly as possible ?
Which is pretty sad, but I don't know how to change the situation this side of hiring way too many people to generate a new zone every day.
The missions are somewhat tedious. Of course you can go into sub-0.5 space (i.e. no guards to save you from being pk'd) but that has its own problems.
I lasted a month before quitting when I lost my first battlecruiser thanks to PvE graphics lag when a bunch of things jumped me and I suddenly was getting 1 frame per 4-5 seconds. It's tough to even click your warp escape button in that scenario.
I suppose if you can get in groups, things would be better (and more realistic as fleet vs. fleet) but that still wouldn't solve the graphics lag issue.
> I gotta find a new crowd.
You ain't kidding. Some slow, lame comment like this is Teh Winnah according to people around here?
For god's sake, frist psot was a play on 2 girls 1 cup. Hell, we've already been through lesbian incest and necrophilia before this l00ser posted this lameosity.
Some people (this poster, and those who +modded him) have got a long way to go to catch up with the average Slashdotter's knowledge of the Wonders of the World.
Let's start a FAQ you can print and hand out to the kids.
Aerospace IT Guy FAQ
Q. What is a FAQ?
A. A FAQ is a list of Frequently Asked Questions and their answers.
Q. What is an IT guy in aerospace?
A. I maintain the computers and network systems the scientists who build space ships use.
Q. Cool! What's it like to program a rocket? Did you program that rover thing on Mars?
A. Um...no. I'm not a real programmer.
It hurts because it's true.
I now await my downmod.
> let's call it the first cyberpunk MMO
Let's not. That would be The Matrix Online, which I need not point out was simultaneously the most "perfect" choice ever for an online avatar game while ending up a total flop.
Building encounters with a bunch of street thugs, level after level after level.
And not enough outfits, either. At least City of Heroes has a ton of sexy stuff you could wear on your girls, and it was all available at level 0.
It's interesting that Matrix Online had a way to "hack" things to gain extra powers. So did Star Wars: Galaxies, for that matter. But not real hacking of the game. No way, no how!
Well, for this case, let's say an "encounter" is one sexual encounter between two people, where one is infected, and there is a non-zero chance of transmission to the non-infected person.
In fact, I ran some interesting numbers myself just now in Excel.
If we use these as our variables (easy to switch around in a spreadsheet):
Infections per encounter: 1/10
Average years before realizing they're infected and stop copulating: 2
Then if everybody averaged 5 distinct sexual encounters with different people, every single day, then after 2 years, this person will have infected 365 people. And if they keep up the same rate, this will balloon to the whole world's population somewhere around the 7th year.
Of course, there are overlaps, and the "heavy hitter" population is a far cry from the whole world's population.
But for other values things get interesting.
For 1 encounter per week (again, 1 new partner per week, and 1 encounter with them) you're looking at about 15 years.
1 new person per week is pretty damned fast.
1 a month gives us somewhere around 21 years to get to the world's population.
Let's say a sex in the city girl has 5 new encounters per year. (Granted, 5 new people would be multiplied by x times per person, but the numbers come out similarly.)
Here it gets fascinating. Presuming the person "hits it" for 2 years before realizing they're infected and then stops (big assumptions), the rate of spread will equal the rate of "die-off", which would represent cessation of sexual activity after 2 years.
I.e. it stops spreading.
And for even less lucky^H^H^H^H^H slutty people, which is probably most of humanity, the rate of "die-off" actually exceeds the rate of spread, and thus the virus would become extinct.
Of course, sub-populations with high rates of copulation could keep it going, or spreading, in their own worlds, as could longer periods of time before cessation of infectious behavior after learning one was infected.
This model is very simple, and ignores those and other parameters, such as different rates of infection depending on the type of encounter, different rates of infection depending on whether it's a male or female "receiving", the average number of copulations per unique partner is considerably greater than 1, relationships are not always serially monogamous, and this is violated more with higher rates of encounters, and so on.
But those are just tweaks to the general exponential situation.
So, yes, AIDS could have petered along, so to speak, not making much headway until hockey-sticking in the 1960's to early 1970's with the sexual revolution, and specifically, the gay sexual revolution. Then increased detection, awareness, treatments, prevention, changes in risky behavior, and a lower rate of transmission female -> male than male -> male or male -> female all combined to put the clamps on the explosion.
For the same reason as the "gas shortages" in the 1970's -- panick causing peoople to top out their tanks. (This, by the way, is also the reason "even/odd" days actually increase the gas station lines, rather than resolve the problem.)
Drive outside Atlanta, and the stations are full, like everywhere else in the country.
It has nothing to do with any real shortages.
From TFA:
> "If Melville had so much as allowed for any possibility at all where Captain Ahab 'wins,'
> no matter how remote, the work's message and its interpretation of the world completely
> changes. Instead of destiny and fate, we would now speak of probability and chance."
On the other hand, even mathematical certainty in the invulnerability of a story or person isn't proof against the cleverness of humanity.
And it makes the incident all that much more epic!
Yes, it's locked into history as solidly as Moby Dick...
You didn't read the rest of the article.
> The council says it is "deeply concerned" by the news, but is confident that
> "multiple layers of security have prevented access to systems and data."
The article continues.
"Indeed, a fax sent by the council to local news outlets later that day confirmed that '[the council's] servers were never breached and we've **CAMILLA P-B IS A HORSEFACE!!!!!!**"
Furthermore, it's a modern conceit to think poetic speech is somehow required to say "3.14" instead of "3".
3 is plenty good when just talking and rounding. It is the proper integer to round pi to, after all.
Moreover, although strained, when you consider "3" is acceptable for rounding from values from 3.499 to 2.500, the description of 3x the diameter most certainly falls within this range.
I.e. the math works out, and it's a fraud to claim this somehow "disproves" the accuracy of the Bible.
Because God knows there's plenty of other junk in there more than capable of it.
Worse, doesn't some law about the Internet and Congress trump any state action?
Can some other domain seize control of KY.gov because Kentucky is behaving illegally according to some other jurisdiction that allows those gambling domains?
Sarah Palin
Al Gore invented The Internet
The same internet that's a "series of tubes" to Ted Stevens.
And the "series of tubes" guy Stevens is also the "bridge to nowhere" guy.
And the "bridge to nowhere" was supported, then disclamed, by Palin.
Full circle. OMFG! It's a cabal trying to control the world!
Weeniepumps? Not a slashdotter's bag? Puh-leeze. Half have probably /b/'d themselves using one.