Un-mothballed my account just to post this: Slashdot has been an integral part of internet's late 90s and early 00s for me and for most of the geek world. Thanks for all your hard work.
You can buy 'everything' with legit RL money already using the PLEX mechanism.
The problem is that CCP, EVE's creators, are unwilling to specify the length they want to go with microtransactions. A year ago their stance was "no gameplay changing MTs!" - now they reneged on that.
At the moment, even the "your target has paid 10$ to regenerate his shields; do you want to pay 20$ for a special gun effect to remove his shields?" stupidities are not off the table.
I just declared 10 Offtopic moderations of this thread unfair - I suggest everybody does the same.
Yan
Obligatory on-topicness-attempt: The fact that Oracle has a security hole is no big news - *every* software has one. Of course, the more a company brags about SW invincibility, the more people laugh at it when it turns out to be full ob *bleep*. Remember Adobe's unbreakable font format?
Aargh. Yet another wise-ass that has seen 10 minutes of Buffy combined and feels fully qualified to judge it.
I'm not denying your right to like or dislike; I'm just telling you that you're obviously passing judgement on something you have no idea what it's about - in true/. fashion. Jerk.
Re the Hugos - the awards used to stand for something. They've been going down the hill for some time, but when HP beat Martin's ASOS last year that was the last drop. I don't really care who gets Hugos anymore. Only Nebulas left..
Have fun,
Yan (proudly risking karma in defence of Buffy since 2001)
But is there anything fundamentally wrong with that? Do you know exactly how a car works? Probably not. I know I don't understand the, say, automatic gearshifting mechanism, but that doesn't mean I can't use a car to go somewhere.
I do get your point though - the attitude expressed above is inexcusable in a mechanic so I guess that's what you meant. But you must remember that, as with cars, the majority of computer users don't care what's beneath the hood - they just want to look at the pretty pr0n or listen to mp3's. People using computers != people that should know how computers work.
When I think a "SciFi" from the creator of "Buffy" is just gonna make another show with good looking women that bastardizes people like Heinlein.
Funny - when I think of a SF series by Joss Whedon, I think "Finally! Then possibly Farscape wont't be the only SF show really worth watching anymore.."
As a SF and Buffy fan, I for one am thrilled.
Yan
Re:We already have antennas
on
Lunar Lasers
·
· Score: 1
Hello,
or, say, three receiving stations on equator, spaced by 120 degrees - I assume you could point the beam. Four or more would be even better as there would be less atmosphere to penetrate (the angle would be closer to 90 deg in station's starting/finishing positions).
I suppose using orbital mirrors is out of the question because of orbital congestion and all the hammers and stuff flying around? I wonder how big the microwave beam would be upon reaching Earth..
It also makes you less hungry. On the days I work out, I come home STARVED. I hit the gym and by the time I get home, I'm not that hungry.
That's a bit odd. I was told that excercise speeds up the metabolism and makes you hungrier. I know that when I worked out, I'd come home and eat a pound of bread and drink a liter of milk easily - without gaining weight.
ok, let's both raise the tone a bit so we'll understand each other:)
I understand the economic factors involved in a business decision but still believe that a corporation with, say, 10 billion USD could fund a succesful space-tourism venture.
I angrily replied to you because you didn't seem to understand that the possible benefits of space are virtually LIMITLESS and therefore worth a lot of risk. This is not a vacant lot we're talking about that can make 1 mil as a parking space or at the max 5 mil as a business center - this is INFINITE SPACE we're talking about.
Why isn't it space tourism and industry happening? Because the general public has gotten an idea that "space is for scientists", largely a fault of NASA (lately) and US Administration. One of the first heads of NASA, Von Braun, was actually actively involved in promoting further space exploration and quit in disgust after two years of unsuccessful persuasion of US Govt officials who thought that everything's been seen and done by going to the Moon.
Since then, NASA has pursued a "science only" view of space. Kinda like the Internet was in the beginning, but it was not until the general public wanted to come and play, too, that the medium truly blossomed. (insert obligatory AC goatse.cx reply here)
I blame the current space stand-still on a NASA decision to explore space safely. Exploration is _never_ safe. The USA, as you know, was reasonably hostile to the first European settlers and it took centuries for the world to get the benefits that it brought. Lives will be lost - let's accept it and get on with it.
Oh, and before you tell me to put my money where my mouth is, if I am offered a trip to space that involves a, say, 10% chance of getting killed, I'd go in a flash - especially if they could promise me that I'd die on the return journey.:)
Space is risky, and while it may pay off, it's unlikely to.
Space is unlikely to pay off??
That must be the stupidest thing I've read here (and keep in mind, this is Slashdot). One nickel asteroid from the belt would pay for all the expenses many times.
Of course, not if we do it the NASA way - step by step, and don't dare to take another step until everything possible has been done on the first.
For a realistic view of a possible space future check out How To Save Civilization and Make A Little Money by Larry Niven. The full text is available in "N-Space" - the link is just a piece of Niven's mind on the topic.
I mean, come on, USA went to the moon in a glorified bath tub and now, 30+ years later with ten times the tech all we can do is one lousy space station?
If only Bill Gates had a desire for space besides the desire for money - we'd be booking our seats on Microsoft Mars Express right now.
Actually, I think that was a novel called Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams. The main character drives a hovertank and uses a Texas catheter when he's "working".
Isn't that Damnation Alley by Zelazny?
And regarding the topic, you'd think that a would-be author of such a paper would be someone well versed in SF, not someone who'd have to turn to us for help.
I would _love_ everything in that article to be true. I hear Utopia is a fine place to live. However, most of the things listed (free email accounts, free internet access for undeveloped regions etc) are pre-election promises that have not moved one step toward fulfillment in the year since the election. Including the tax returns that another poster mentioned - the last thing heard about that was the annulation of the contract with Microsoft when the public discovered that MS kindly sponsored a lengthy excursion to Britain to "check out how they do e-govt with MS solutions" for a fair number of govt officials. Thanks to that, the soonest it could be implemented is 2003.
I'm from Slovenia. I can tell you that the article is a nice coup for the Slovenian govt marketing dept and pretty much nothing else.
Yes, I can find all the government departments on the net. Yes, there is an "internet ministry". Yes, they all have a nice matching spiffy web graphics. Yes, I can access all the laws online.
So what?
Can I file my tax returns via the net? No.
Can I contact govt officials via the net _and get an answer_? No.
Can I do anything via the net instead of waiting in a queue? Nope.
Did they abolish the monopoly on leased lines and voice communications, held by a company that the govt ownes? Are the voice calls and modem calls cheap? Can I choose my phone operator? No, no, and no.
To top it off, due to the 9/11 terrorist strikes the govt has now usurped the right to check all email (and other forms of communications) without a court order - a thing constitutionally possible just in a state of emergency (read war). Does the parliamentary commision that keep tabs on the police actions object? Nope.
Unfortunately, this is just another example of pretending to give more control to the public while in fact reducing it.
Yan
---
Hello, Mr. Govt Man.
Rise and fall of Daikatana--ok, just fall actually
on
The Future of Gaming
·
· Score: 0
Gamespot has a very interesting article detailing a string of bad decisions that spawned Daikatana. I recommend it to all interested in the process of game design as a "What NOT to do" guide..
Extract from the first page:
After Romero's eyes zero in on the words "sheets of pity," he swivels his chair away from the screen. While not articulating it, it's clear the e-mail vitriol fazed him. "I get that kind of mail on a daily basis," he attests, trying to brush it off. But you can tell no matter how dispassionate he tries to be, each e-mail acts as salt to his wounds, wounds that have grown deeper and wider throughout the development of Daikatana, a first-person shooter that is the first full-scale production from infamous Dallas-based developer Ion Storm.
Yet before you pull out your violin to help paint the somber portrait of Romero being a game designer misunderstood by his fans, you remember the ads that ran three years ago, the ones that screamed, "John Romero Wants To Make You His Bitch!" Back then Daikatana was billed as the glorious follow-up to Quake that was going to be done in seven months. Now, it's a game that is more than two years late, has gone through five lead programmers, and is produced by a company that has reportedly burned through $30 million in a few short years. For a second you think that maybe the e-mail author was right - who is Romero, the legendary designer of games like Doom and Quake, trying to fool?
So what's the solution? Should we geeks go form a new country?
Perhaps we could hack a small but relatively IT-savvy country, throw it in dissarray (like every citizen gets a $10000 tax bill), then come in as saviours and take over. We could institute a mod system for the representatives:)
Well, it can't be worse than the MTBF of IBM GXP drives..
Plus, it's pretty much a given that MTBF(device_with_moving_parts) is less than MTBF(device_with_no_moving_parts). You probably had more hard drives fail on you than memory chips, right?
So I think the only problem regarding reliability is solving the power issue to the satisfaction of the average induhvidual.
I think 10 more years max, and then it's the way of the dodo for our spinning friends.
It demonstrates with great clarity, (provided one is able to pull back from their damned tunnel vision first of all), just how bloody Christ-centric most of the world is. ?By this, I mean, everybody wants to put everybody else in one of those three stupid little boxes; Atheist, Agnostic, or None; people, I find, tend to stutter like the brain damaged when you tell them that their little score card is a conceited piece of shit.
Actually, if you check out the official list, there are almost 400 religions listed, including "Free thinkers", "Ancestor worshippers", "Own belief system" and pretty much everything else.
Yan
* No photons were harmed during the transmission of this message
"The Arecibo message, which was designed by Frank Drake (who was then Director of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and is now Chairman of the Board of the SETI Institute) together with his Observatory staff, was a simple graphic consisting of 73 rows of 23 "bits" per row. This number of rows and columns was chosen because each is a prime number. Prime numbers could be easily guessed by any recipients, and that would help them to decode the graphic. The message was sent by simple shifting of the signal between two frequencies in the 2,380 MHz band. It took three minutes to send the message.
The message itself gives the kind of information that any culture would want to learn about us: where we are located (at least within our solar system), what we look like (a crude stick figure), a simple drawing of the telescope used to send the message, and something about our biological construction (DNA and some of the building blocks of our biochemistry.) This message was sent as a "demonstration" to commemorate the upgrading of the 1,000 foot diameter Arecibo telescope with a new, more accurate reflector surface."
(http://www.seti-inst.edu/general/ao_message_cro p. html)
For those that don't know it, it was a complete BBS program written by a (then) 16-year-old. A lot of nice sysop features, like "noise log-off" that would simulate line noise (btw, why did line noise on 1200/2400 bps almost always translate into square-root-symbols (alt-241 i think)?) and then kick user off, so pretending that it was not the sysop, but the line noise that had killed the session:)
Of course, when error correction arrived it was kind of obvious..
Does anyone know what Bob Farmer does these days? I'd have UBBS running via telnet now if it didn't require fossil (and I can't seem to find a decent telnet2fossil sw)..
Can anyone tell me what they're up to in the 'real' ones? I want to start watching those but I don't know where exactly they're at (Season 3 somewhere?)
Latest ep shown is 3.18 "Fractures". Final four episodes of the season coming in 2002.
Cheapest Farscape DVD's are to my knowledge at Black Star.
Slashdot Mirror
Un-mothballed my account just to post this: Slashdot has been an integral part of internet's late 90s and early 00s for me and for most of the geek world. Thanks for all your hard work.
You can buy 'everything' with legit RL money already using the PLEX mechanism.
The problem is that CCP, EVE's creators, are unwilling to specify the length they want to go with microtransactions. A year ago their stance was "no gameplay changing MTs!" - now they reneged on that.
At the moment, even the "your target has paid 10$ to regenerate his shields; do you want to pay 20$ for a special gun effect to remove his shields?" stupidities are not off the table.
Nokia N90 with Carl Zeiss optics and autofocus. A bit big, but takes very good pictures (for a phone).
Hello,
the thread is in the metamod already!
I just declared 10 Offtopic moderations of this thread unfair - I suggest everybody does the same.
Yan
Obligatory on-topicness-attempt: The fact that Oracle has a security hole is no big news - *every* software has one. Of course, the more a company brags about SW invincibility, the more people laugh at it when it turns out to be full ob *bleep*. Remember Adobe's unbreakable font format?
Buffy? That high-camp soap opera?
/. fashion. Jerk.
Aargh. Yet another wise-ass that has seen 10 minutes of Buffy combined and feels fully qualified to judge it.
I'm not denying your right to like or dislike; I'm just telling you that you're obviously passing judgement on something you have no idea what it's about - in true
Re the Hugos - the awards used to stand for something. They've been going down the hill for some time, but when HP beat Martin's ASOS last year that was the last drop. I don't really care who gets Hugos anymore. Only Nebulas left..
Have fun,
Yan (proudly risking karma in defence of Buffy since 2001)
We don't care how it works so long as it works.
But is there anything fundamentally wrong with that? Do you know exactly how a car works? Probably not. I know I don't understand the, say, automatic gearshifting mechanism, but that doesn't mean I can't use a car to go somewhere.
I do get your point though - the attitude expressed above is inexcusable in a mechanic so I guess that's what you meant. But you must remember that, as with cars, the majority of computer users don't care what's beneath the hood - they just want to look at the pretty pr0n or listen to mp3's. People using computers != people that should know how computers work.
Happy new year,
Yan
When I think a "SciFi" from the creator of "Buffy" is just gonna make another show with good looking women that bastardizes people like Heinlein.
Funny - when I think of a SF series by Joss Whedon, I think "Finally! Then possibly Farscape wont't be the only SF show really worth watching anymore.."
As a SF and Buffy fan, I for one am thrilled.
Yan
Hello,
or, say, three receiving stations on equator, spaced by 120 degrees - I assume you could point the beam. Four or more would be even better as there would be less atmosphere to penetrate (the angle would be closer to 90 deg in station's starting/finishing positions).
Yan
Hah! They wish.
Montenegro is 5,332 sq miles in size.
I suppose using orbital mirrors is out of the question because of orbital congestion and all the hammers and stuff flying around? I wonder how big the microwave beam would be upon reaching Earth..
Yan
Absolutely nothing.
Except that in the trailer, the elf challenging the Riders is not Glorfindel, but Arwen..
Yan
It also makes you less hungry. On the days I work out, I come home STARVED. I hit the gym and by the time I get home, I'm not that hungry.
That's a bit odd. I was told that excercise speeds up the metabolism and makes you hungrier. I know that when I worked out, I'd come home and eat a pound of bread and drink a liter of milk easily - without gaining weight.
Still, YMMV and EPID, I suppose.
Yan
Hello,
:)
:)
ok, let's both raise the tone a bit so we'll understand each other
I understand the economic factors involved in a business decision but still believe that a corporation with, say, 10 billion USD could fund a succesful space-tourism venture.
I angrily replied to you because you didn't seem to understand that the possible benefits of space are virtually LIMITLESS and therefore worth a lot of risk. This is not a vacant lot we're talking about that can make 1 mil as a parking space or at the max 5 mil as a business center - this is INFINITE SPACE we're talking about.
Why isn't it space tourism and industry happening? Because the general public has gotten an idea that "space is for scientists", largely a fault of NASA (lately) and US Administration. One of the first heads of NASA, Von Braun, was actually actively involved in promoting further space exploration and quit in disgust after two years of unsuccessful persuasion of US Govt officials who thought that everything's been seen and done by going to the Moon.
Since then, NASA has pursued a "science only" view of space. Kinda like the Internet was in the beginning, but it was not until the general public wanted to come and play, too, that the medium truly blossomed. (insert obligatory AC goatse.cx reply here)
I blame the current space stand-still on a NASA decision to explore space safely. Exploration is _never_ safe. The USA, as you know, was reasonably hostile to the first European settlers and it took centuries for the world to get the benefits that it brought. Lives will be lost - let's accept it and get on with it.
Oh, and before you tell me to put my money where my mouth is, if I am offered a trip to space that involves a, say, 10% chance of getting killed, I'd go in a flash - especially if they could promise me that I'd die on the return journey.
Yan
* Origin: (2:380/110)
Space is risky, and while it may pay off, it's unlikely to.
Space is unlikely to pay off??
That must be the stupidest thing I've read here (and keep in mind, this is Slashdot). One nickel asteroid from the belt would pay for all the expenses many times.
Of course, not if we do it the NASA way - step by step, and don't dare to take another step until everything possible has been done on the first.
For a realistic view of a possible space future check out How To Save Civilization and Make A Little Money by Larry Niven. The full text is available in "N-Space" - the link is just a piece of Niven's mind on the topic.
I mean, come on, USA went to the moon in a glorified bath tub and now, 30+ years later with ten times the tech all we can do is one lousy space station?
If only Bill Gates had a desire for space besides the desire for money - we'd be booking our seats on Microsoft Mars Express right now.
Yan
* Origin: (2:380/110)
Actually, I think that was a novel called Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams. The main character drives a hovertank and uses a Texas catheter when he's "working".
Isn't that Damnation Alley by Zelazny?
And regarding the topic, you'd think that a would-be author of such a paper would be someone well versed in SF, not someone who'd have to turn to us for help.
Yan
How could it be sour grapes if I'm Slovenian?
I would _love_ everything in that article to be true. I hear Utopia is a fine place to live. However, most of the things listed (free email accounts, free internet access for undeveloped regions etc) are pre-election promises that have not moved one step toward fulfillment in the year since the election. Including the tax returns that another poster mentioned - the last thing heard about that was the annulation of the contract with Microsoft when the public discovered that MS kindly sponsored a lengthy excursion to Britain to "check out how they do e-govt with MS solutions" for a fair number of govt officials. Thanks to that, the soonest it could be implemented is 2003.
Yan
I'm from Slovenia. I can tell you that the article is a nice coup for the Slovenian govt marketing dept and pretty much nothing else.
Yes, I can find all the government departments on the net. Yes, there is an "internet ministry". Yes, they all have a nice matching spiffy web graphics. Yes, I can access all the laws online.
So what?
Can I file my tax returns via the net? No.
Can I contact govt officials via the net _and get an answer_? No.
Can I do anything via the net instead of waiting in a queue? Nope.
Did they abolish the monopoly on leased lines and voice communications, held by a company that the govt ownes? Are the voice calls and modem calls cheap? Can I choose my phone operator? No, no, and no.
To top it off, due to the 9/11 terrorist strikes the govt has now usurped the right to check all email (and other forms of communications) without a court order - a thing constitutionally possible just in a state of emergency (read war). Does the parliamentary commision that keep tabs on the police actions object? Nope.
Unfortunately, this is just another example of pretending to give more control to the public while in fact reducing it.
Yan
---
Hello, Mr. Govt Man.
Gamespot has a very interesting article detailing a string of bad decisions that spawned Daikatana. I recommend it to all interested in the process of game design as a "What NOT to do" guide..
Extract from the first page:
After Romero's eyes zero in on the words "sheets of pity," he swivels his chair away from the screen. While not articulating it, it's clear the e-mail vitriol fazed him. "I get that kind of mail on a daily basis," he attests, trying to brush it off. But you can tell no matter how dispassionate he tries to be, each e-mail acts as salt to his wounds, wounds that have grown deeper and wider throughout the development of Daikatana, a first-person shooter that is the first full-scale production from infamous Dallas-based developer Ion Storm.
Yet before you pull out your violin to help paint the somber portrait of Romero being a game designer misunderstood by his fans, you remember the ads that ran three years ago, the ones that screamed, "John Romero Wants To Make You His Bitch!" Back then Daikatana was billed as the glorious follow-up to Quake that was going to be done in seven months. Now, it's a game that is more than two years late, has gone through five lead programmers, and is produced by a company that has reportedly burned through $30 million in a few short years. For a second you think that maybe the e-mail author was right - who is Romero, the legendary designer of games like Doom and Quake, trying to fool?
Yan
I agree.
:)
:)
So what's the solution? Should we geeks go form a new country?
Perhaps we could hack a small but relatively IT-savvy country, throw it in dissarray (like every citizen gets a $10000 tax bill), then come in as saviours and take over. We could institute a mod system for the representatives
I'm thinking Iceland..
Yan
What's the mtbf on Solid state drives?
Well, it can't be worse than the MTBF of IBM GXP drives..
Plus, it's pretty much a given that MTBF(device_with_moving_parts) is less than MTBF(device_with_no_moving_parts). You probably had more hard drives fail on you than memory chips, right?
So I think the only problem regarding reliability is solving the power issue to the satisfaction of the average induhvidual.
I think 10 more years max, and then it's the way of the dodo for our spinning friends.
Yan
It demonstrates with great clarity, (provided one is able to pull back from their damned tunnel vision first of all), just how bloody Christ-centric most of the world is. ?By this, I mean, everybody wants to put everybody else in one of those three stupid little boxes; Atheist, Agnostic, or None; people, I find, tend to stutter like the brain damaged when you tell them that their little score card is a conceited piece of shit.
Actually, if you check out the official list, there are almost 400 religions listed, including "Free thinkers", "Ancestor worshippers", "Own belief system" and pretty much everything else.
Yan
* No photons were harmed during the transmission of this message
Here.
o p. html)
"The Arecibo message, which was designed by Frank Drake (who was then Director of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and is now Chairman of the Board of the SETI Institute) together with his Observatory staff, was a simple graphic consisting of 73 rows of 23 "bits" per row. This number of rows and columns was chosen because each is a prime number. Prime numbers could be easily guessed by any recipients, and that would help them to decode the graphic. The message was sent by simple shifting of the signal between two frequencies in the 2,380 MHz band. It took three minutes to send the message.
The message itself gives the kind of information that any culture would want to learn about us: where we are located (at least within our solar system), what we look like (a crude stick figure), a simple drawing of the telescope used to send the message, and something about our biological construction (DNA and some of the building blocks of our biochemistry.) This message was sent as a "demonstration" to commemorate the upgrading of the 1,000 foot diameter Arecibo telescope with a new, more accurate reflector surface."
(http://www.seti-inst.edu/general/ao_message_cr
Yan
I miss UltraBBS.
:)
For those that don't know it, it was a complete BBS program written by a (then) 16-year-old. A lot of nice sysop features, like "noise log-off" that would simulate line noise (btw, why did line noise on 1200/2400 bps almost always translate into square-root-symbols (alt-241 i think)?) and then kick user off, so pretending that it was not the sysop, but the line noise that had killed the session
Of course, when error correction arrived it was kind of obvious..
Does anyone know what Bob Farmer does these days? I'd have UBBS running via telnet now if it didn't require fossil (and I can't seem to find a decent telnet2fossil sw)..
Yan
Can anyone tell me what they're up to in the 'real' ones? I want to start watching those but I don't know where exactly they're at (Season 3 somewhere?)
Latest ep shown is 3.18 "Fractures". Final four episodes of the season coming in 2002.
Cheapest Farscape DVD's are to my knowledge at Black Star.
For the monetarilly challenged, eps can most easily be DL-ed via eDonkey2000 or IRC - channel #farscape-central on DALnet.
Yan
someone please explain the draw to this show?
You really don't know?
Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Yan
I *pray* that the next target of the terrorists is Microsoft, their chairman, their HQ, their developers.
Unfortunately, terrorists want to _harm_ US, not help it.. (Related note: White House was not hit, either).
Yan