My first non-throwaway character was an Ogre warrior. I remember standing there in a suit of store-bought chain mail armor (dozens of gold to purchase), and finding some guy running around in Oasis of Marr who would sell me a complete suit of banded armor for "only 60 gold + my ring mail suit".
And it was a deal. And I liked it. At level 19, I had my banded suit (only gods had even one piece of bronze at the time) and my two Minotaur axes, and I ruled.
That orgre still stands there to this day in that once-awesome outfit, as I soon tired of the lameness of the tank and moved on to true power in a necromancer....or would, had years later my son not logged the Ogre in without telling me, run it somewhere, and gotten killed without telling me, then logged out scared. Logged in for fun one day and he was standing back on Oggok in his underpants.
"Ummm, what happened to my Ogre?" (He smiles and looks away. He's a terrible liar, fortunately.)
It does still work, and it's even more impressive on mature servers with loads of 70s feeding ungodly amounts of cash to twink their newbs.
Sometimes you'll see level 19 blue items for sale in the hundreds of gold. This is targeting twinkers optimizing for level 19 Warsong Gulch. Similar bulges happen (but to a lesser extent) at the higher "9" levels.
Higher level items are more profitable, generally, though, but they're also more rare since they get snapped up (low price or not) almost as soon as they get on the market. As a hunter, I can tell you that blue bows, guns, and crossbows are very rare in the 40+ range, excepting for the standard level 70 "newb" crap (so to speak) that nobody wants and so is all over the AH. Crystalforged War Axe anyone? Or Khorium Destroyer?
20 iron ore is currently regularly going for about 6-8 gold on my server. While not what you would use to get thousands of gold quickly, it's awesome for near-newbs who can do iron mining.
And I have occasionally seen and bought the under-priced blue or purple and "flipped" it.
> How about subtracting the user's current gold from the maximum positive int value, then if the amount > being added to the user's gold is greater than the difference, only add the difference. WoW that was hard.
After the fact, I suppose, but your solution is a rather clumsy one if that's the intent. And it would only solve the issue of overflow. There'd now be a running logjam of money building up "upstream", so to speak, itself a massive stress test that I'm sure hasn't been run.
It also presumes the game design allows for a rejection of incoming delta-gold. EverQuest was notorious for running into situations where you were trying to transfer object X to some other inventory as part of some automated process, and there wasn't any rooom, so it poofed instead of going back to wherever it came from.
Ahh, those EverQuest people were cards. For the first three years of the game, most of the players spent most of the time with a book in their face, a wonderful design decision for a groundbreakind 3D visual game. And the magician conjured bag that made whatever you put in it weightless, but poofed, along with contents, if you logged out. Or lost connection, which they forced you to log out then back in to avoid yet another exploit people were doing and were too lazy to fix the right way.
Yeah, those were good days. Casting "numb mind" on your skeleton pet in a newbie area over and over until it turned on you, then zone out and leave it to slaughter newbs as it's now converted into a hateful NPC.
> On one of their podcasts, Insomniac Games mentioned a gamer who had succeeded in rolling the number of > bolts in 'Ratchet & Clank' to be negative, and then none of the vendors would sell him anything.
In the ancient game "Pax Imperia", a space expansion/trade/conquer game (with a quite fun space battle sequence), on the Mac version (was there a PC version?) I somehow had one of my planet's populations roll under and poof, I suddenly had something like 400 billion peole on the planet. (God knows how they calculated that, given that doesn't align sweetly with standard integer sizes and 64 bit was unknown back then as a built-in data size.)
Anyway, with that incomprehensible population, I jammed up the dreadnaught tech advancement, and I popped out the end with about 10 freshly-built dreadnaughts of the latest and greatest design.
Never was able to reproduce it, but that particular game ended quite sweetly.
That article makes two interesting points, one right, and one wrong.
First, that the exponential growth of science cannot continue, is a good point, insofar as it's derivative of more and more of the world's population coming on-line, i.e. leaving the third world. So in a sense, the growth is like the exponential growth in use of a treatment for a serious disease, like a polio vaccine. For a few decades, the growth is exponential, until everybody is covered by it. Then it levels off and only grows as the population does.
But he then makes the error of believing that scientific progress is primarily tied to government expenditures in science (not education, but paying for research directly.) While this may be true for a number of fields, that's hardly true overall. Things like electronics and chemistry still have trillions of private investment dollars driving them, in amounts far greater than any government spends in their wildest dreams.
The point is that with x% of the population generating "new ideas and stuff", then the larger the population, the faster the stuff gets generated. Perhaps the period of rapid growth of this "population" (i.e. non-third world countries, in this aspect) is levelling off, but that won't "slow down" the development, just the growth of development.So no, this won't be exponential, but it will continue to get faster and faster as the population expands. Expands into relatively free societies, that is.
I would fully expect 20 years from now for technology to be expanding even faster, and faster than that 100 years from now, even if it's more a linear extrapolation from now, rather than exponential.
Well, the US education system has long been acknowledged as grotesquely poor in teaching critical thinking. Most people are of the level "If God didn't love the US, why did he write the Bible in English?", an old Johnny Carson joke, but applied to non-religious topics.
To have so blindly missed the point beggars description.
Pop: You've been showboating a bit lately, haven't you?
Clark: Yeah. But gosh, guys like that Brad just make me so...
Pop: Angry?
Clark: Yeah! Is it so wrong to use your abilities? Is it wrong for a bird to fly? For a fish to swim? I could score a touchdown every time. Every time.
Pop: Look, I don't know what it is, but you're hear for a reason. Maybe...well, I don't know. But I know it's not to score touchdowns. (Gives him a daddy-like pat on the shoulders.) Come on, I'll race you to the barn!
Exactly. Even if there weren't, that's the whole point of Hasbro's complaint. Hasbro reserves the right to make money from it's copyrights and trademarks.
Apparently the only issue is what, if any, of the pictures and words they're ripping off, and whether "Scrabulous" is too close to the presumably trademarked "Scrabble". Trademarks are exactly for that purpose: a trade mark. Your mark used to identify your brand or product.
IIRC, you can't clone someone else's packaging too closely for a similar reason. You can see the limits of this in any drug store to see how closely the house brand of the Excedrin knockoff resembles the actual Excedrin bottle right next to it.
I thought it was materials science that was the real driver behind technological advancements. Before building planes out of fantastic new metals, and engines out of fantastic new ceramics, you have to have the fantastic new metals and ceramics. Before you can build VLSIC chips out of semiconductors, you first have to have semiconductors.
If everyone were a Kzinti-like tiger, and could eviscerate, literally, their attackers at a moment's notice, I submit they'd have less crime, not more. Perhaps our high levels of crime are due to the ability of a criminal to easily overpower other people, who have no effective built-in defenses.
Nah. First-order problems solving: Grab it and force it into reverse. Ban guns.
> in an effort to free up more space in British jails.
Wait a minnit! I thought kinder Europe, without guns, laxxer drug laws, and more sympathy to sociological causes of crime, had much smaller prison populations, per capita. Therefore they should have plenty of prison space while still spending just a fraction of what the US spends, per capita.
Unless...unless government always drags ass everywhere it exists, barely doing the minimum in order to spread cash around to as many places as possible, to gain re-election via as many votes as possible.
That could be the case but...
Hey! Lookee! American Gladiators is BACK ON TV! I'm gonna, whoa. WHOA WHOA! There's a Terminator TV show now? ZOMG, I am so there!
> Our Galaxy will get a rain of gas from this cloud, then in about 20 to 40 million years, > the cloud's core will smash into the Milky Way's plane
I wonder if Jesus will have returned by then.
He'll prolly return within the next few to few thousand years. Then the devil will be allowed to reign for another thousand.
Then 19.999 million to 39.999 million years from now, this will happen. I wonder what humanity, walking with God as he is their God, will be doing when this happens?
I humbly await my downmod. Still, ya gotta respect a guy who builds karma so he can afford to take jabs.
Slashdot Mirror
My first non-throwaway character was an Ogre warrior. I remember standing there in a suit of store-bought chain mail armor (dozens of gold to purchase), and finding some guy running around in Oasis of Marr who would sell me a complete suit of banded armor for "only 60 gold + my ring mail suit".
...or would, had years later my son not logged the Ogre in without telling me, run it somewhere, and gotten killed without telling me, then logged out scared. Logged in for fun one day and he was standing back on Oggok in his underpants.
And it was a deal. And I liked it. At level 19, I had my banded suit (only gods had even one piece of bronze at the time) and my two Minotaur axes, and I ruled.
That orgre still stands there to this day in that once-awesome outfit, as I soon tired of the lameness of the tank and moved on to true power in a necromancer.
"Ummm, what happened to my Ogre?" (He smiles and looks away. He's a terrible liar, fortunately.)
It does still work, and it's even more impressive on mature servers with loads of 70s feeding ungodly amounts of cash to twink their newbs.
Sometimes you'll see level 19 blue items for sale in the hundreds of gold. This is targeting twinkers optimizing for level 19 Warsong Gulch. Similar bulges happen (but to a lesser extent) at the higher "9" levels.
Higher level items are more profitable, generally, though, but they're also more rare since they get snapped up (low price or not) almost as soon as they get on the market. As a hunter, I can tell you that blue bows, guns, and crossbows are very rare in the 40+ range, excepting for the standard level 70 "newb" crap (so to speak) that nobody wants and so is all over the AH. Crystalforged War Axe anyone? Or Khorium Destroyer?
20 iron ore is currently regularly going for about 6-8 gold on my server. While not what you would use to get thousands of gold quickly, it's awesome for near-newbs who can do iron mining.
And I have occasionally seen and bought the under-priced blue or purple and "flipped" it.
Really.
Because "non-geek, normal men" never brag about their sexual encounters.
> How about subtracting the user's current gold from the maximum positive int value, then if the amount
> being added to the user's gold is greater than the difference, only add the difference. WoW that was hard.
After the fact, I suppose, but your solution is a rather clumsy one if that's the intent. And it would only solve the issue of overflow. There'd now be a running logjam of money building up "upstream", so to speak, itself a massive stress test that I'm sure hasn't been run.
It also presumes the game design allows for a rejection of incoming delta-gold. EverQuest was notorious for running into situations where you were trying to transfer object X to some other inventory as part of some automated process, and there wasn't any rooom, so it poofed instead of going back to wherever it came from.
Ahh, those EverQuest people were cards. For the first three years of the game, most of the players spent most of the time with a book in their face, a wonderful design decision for a groundbreakind 3D visual game. And the magician conjured bag that made whatever you put in it weightless, but poofed, along with contents, if you logged out. Or lost connection, which they forced you to log out then back in to avoid yet another exploit people were doing and were too lazy to fix the right way.
Yeah, those were good days. Casting "numb mind" on your skeleton pet in a newbie area over and over until it turned on you, then zone out and leave it to slaughter newbs as it's now converted into a hateful NPC.
> On one of their podcasts, Insomniac Games mentioned a gamer who had succeeded in rolling the number of
> bolts in 'Ratchet & Clank' to be negative, and then none of the vendors would sell him anything.
In the ancient game "Pax Imperia", a space expansion/trade/conquer game (with a quite fun space battle sequence), on the Mac version (was there a PC version?) I somehow had one of my planet's populations roll under and poof, I suddenly had something like 400 billion peole on the planet. (God knows how they calculated that, given that doesn't align sweetly with standard integer sizes and 64 bit was unknown back then as a built-in data size.)
Anyway, with that incomprehensible population, I jammed up the dreadnaught tech advancement, and I popped out the end with about 10 freshly-built dreadnaughts of the latest and greatest design.
Never was able to reproduce it, but that particular game ended quite sweetly.
> No modern programming language
COBOL uses a "PIC" representation based on base 10, basically your number is how many digits you need to display.
Oh, wait. I just got what you were saying.
The article continues:
"Researchers report the first thing the AI did was go download a bot to play the game the right way."
> How is that news?
Hold on, lemme tie myself to this telephone pole.
Ok, ready?
WHOOOOOOOOSH!!!!
That article makes two interesting points, one right, and one wrong.
First, that the exponential growth of science cannot continue, is a good point, insofar as it's derivative of more and more of the world's population coming on-line, i.e. leaving the third world. So in a sense, the growth is like the exponential growth in use of a treatment for a serious disease, like a polio vaccine. For a few decades, the growth is exponential, until everybody is covered by it. Then it levels off and only grows as the population does.
But he then makes the error of believing that scientific progress is primarily tied to government expenditures in science (not education, but paying for research directly.) While this may be true for a number of fields, that's hardly true overall. Things like electronics and chemistry still have trillions of private investment dollars driving them, in amounts far greater than any government spends in their wildest dreams.
The point is that with x% of the population generating "new ideas and stuff", then the larger the population, the faster the stuff gets generated. Perhaps the period of rapid growth of this "population" (i.e. non-third world countries, in this aspect) is levelling off, but that won't "slow down" the development, just the growth of development.So no, this won't be exponential, but it will continue to get faster and faster as the population expands. Expands into relatively free societies, that is.
I would fully expect 20 years from now for technology to be expanding even faster, and faster than that 100 years from now, even if it's more a linear extrapolation from now, rather than exponential.
Well, the US education system has long been acknowledged as grotesquely poor in teaching critical thinking. Most people are of the level "If God didn't love the US, why did he write the Bible in English?", an old Johnny Carson joke, but applied to non-religious topics.
To have so blindly missed the point beggars description.
No wonder this is a Slashdot story pick. People around here are very familiar with palms and reproductive spikes.
Pop: You've been showboating a bit lately, haven't you?
Clark: Yeah. But gosh, guys like that Brad just make me so...
Pop: Angry?
Clark: Yeah! Is it so wrong to use your abilities? Is it wrong for a bird to fly? For a fish to swim? I could score a touchdown every time. Every time.
Pop: Look, I don't know what it is, but you're hear for a reason. Maybe...well, I don't know. But I know it's not to score touchdowns. (Gives him a daddy-like pat on the shoulders.) Come on, I'll race you to the barn!
"Now Moses was the most humble man on the Earth" -- Moses
Well, with 540 responses and counting, and this about to fall off the main page, what's the point?
Anyhoo, why wouldn't it be OK to eat? You all would eat a cloned Angelina Jolie, wouldn't ya, and think yourselves lucky?
"No, you can't name it Morgan Webb. No, not Olivia Munn, either."
MOD UP, GOD DAMN IT! This is funny! Think about it...
In any case, no matter what you call the knockoff, Slashdot readers aren't too good at Sexulous.
Exactly. Even if there weren't, that's the whole point of Hasbro's complaint. Hasbro reserves the right to make money from it's copyrights and trademarks.
Apparently the only issue is what, if any, of the pictures and words they're ripping off, and whether "Scrabulous" is too close to the presumably trademarked "Scrabble". Trademarks are exactly for that purpose: a trade mark. Your mark used to identify your brand or product.
IIRC, you can't clone someone else's packaging too closely for a similar reason. You can see the limits of this in any drug store to see how closely the house brand of the Excedrin knockoff resembles the actual Excedrin bottle right next to it.
The idea of a bunch of naked Slashdot readers playing twister makes me want to gag.
For more reasons than one, if the scent of the "Warhammer" room in the back of the hobby shop on Saturday mornings is any indication.
"Hey, MySpace doesn't let me create an account! Dumb parents!"
"That's OK. Go to this other place which will let you."
1. Pay attention to where "kids, these days" are going.
2. Invest heavily in that company before the critical mass.
3. Profit!
I thought it was materials science that was the real driver behind technological advancements. Before building planes out of fantastic new metals, and engines out of fantastic new ceramics, you have to have the fantastic new metals and ceramics. Before you can build VLSIC chips out of semiconductors, you first have to have semiconductors.
Etc.
If everyone were a Kzinti-like tiger, and could eviscerate, literally, their attackers at a moment's notice, I submit they'd have less crime, not more. Perhaps our high levels of crime are due to the ability of a criminal to easily overpower other people, who have no effective built-in defenses.
Nah. First-order problems solving: Grab it and force it into reverse. Ban guns.
> in an effort to free up more space in British jails.
Wait a minnit! I thought kinder Europe, without guns, laxxer drug laws, and more sympathy to sociological causes of crime, had much smaller prison populations, per capita. Therefore they should have plenty of prison space while still spending just a fraction of what the US spends, per capita.
Unless...unless government always drags ass everywhere it exists, barely doing the minimum in order to spread cash around to as many places as possible, to gain re-election via as many votes as possible.
That could be the case but...
Hey! Lookee! American Gladiators is BACK ON TV! I'm gonna, whoa. WHOA WHOA! There's a Terminator TV show now? ZOMG, I am so there!
> Our Galaxy will get a rain of gas from this cloud, then in about 20 to 40 million years,
> the cloud's core will smash into the Milky Way's plane
I wonder if Jesus will have returned by then.
He'll prolly return within the next few to few thousand years. Then the devil will be allowed to reign for another thousand.
Then 19.999 million to 39.999 million years from now, this will happen. I wonder what humanity, walking with God as he is their God, will be doing when this happens?
I humbly await my downmod. Still, ya gotta respect a guy who builds karma so he can afford to take jabs.