To be fair, what you suggested and more is already in use in the industry. There are some QoS type appliances that will actually mess with the TCP window size on packets on the wire to reduce their bandwidth without adding unnecessary delays for instance. Some that can even "pause" a connection just by rewriting the window size to 0 on the stream.
The reason you were likely demolished in the peer review is that by delaying the ACK, you're probably going to force the sender to retransmit the data, and when you turn your radio back on you'll have to receive multiple copies of it, blowing away any power savings you might have had from keeping the radio off for a bit longer.
Properly set up a digital camera can shoot a picture over to a printer (wifi) and have it ready in mere seconds. The setup costs are much, much higher than Polaroid, but the ongoing costs are much lower, and you don't have to swap out cartridges nearly as often (the printer holding hundreds of sheets while the old Polaroid camaera holds maybe 10 pictures). The digital setup is more bulky and requires power however, so both solutions have tradeoffs.
That's a problem with the game design though, the cities should have been teeming with alien life, just wandering around doing that sort of third world alien thing that seems so popular in the Star Wars universe.
The "Jedi are supposed to be rare" argument always seemed a bit strange to me. The game could expect what, half a million players at most? Of which maybe 50k would ever be online at the same time. Compared to the number of NPCs in the universe the players would be tiny.
The trick to this would be to highly instance the game so you're not constantly running into Jedi everywhere you go. The downside is that makes it a somewhat single player experience, but that could be worked around with Jedi "hubs" (Corusant(sp?) for instance) where you could meet up and join teams and socalize and whatnot.
Any Star Wars game where you don't get to be a Jedi (or a Sith) is going to fail. There are a few players that would be happy setting up virtual shops and playing support characters, but they'll never be enough to support a major game.
As someone with an active CoH account, I've seen several articles like the above and it strikes me that the only people who are angry enough about this to write online articles (and get them linked) are the gold farmers who were abusing the heck out of the system even after the devs told them to stop and warned them about not abusing it. For regular players this has not been a problem at all.
Ultimately, the biggest problem with the whole situation was that farmers were clogging up the rating system and making it difficult to find good arcs on the admittedly inadequate search system CoH has for the Mission Architect. The price collapse on the player run markets was also a concern, but that was only partially the result of the farmers and more the result of players being able to craft particular (and expensive) items that were typically only available on drop tables that were full of crap. In other words, since the players can react to price spikes of small numbers of items directly and greatly smooth out the market, which is apparently what is happening. What's more, even after the devs implemented the anti-farming provisions the market did not return to its previous state.
In the long run, the Mission Architect has given the players an enormous amount of new content. It really is an amazing system, and it has plenty of headroom to grow even more amazing.
For what it's worth, Champions Online is coming out pretty soon, but the lead developer is the same guy who developed City of Heroes, so don't expect major differences between the two. From what I've heard, a lot of the old disgruntled CoH players that went over there are hopping mad at how the game has turned out, since they left CoH to get away from the very conventions that are starting to show up in CO.
This board is 6"x6". It's not going to be an iPhone competitor. If you want to compete with the iPhone, you need a platform that will fit in your pocket, or at least not look completely dorky on a belt clip.
Supposedly the advantage is that everybody can customize the controls to suit their tastes/preferences. Although TNG did not do this, it wouldn't be impossible to make some sort of substrate that could subtly raise over "buttons" to give tactile feedback at the same time. It probably wouldn't have full IBM clicky keyboard feedback, but it would be like pressing those diaphragm buttons you see on cheaper electronics.
I wanted to like C&C3 and RA3, but both of them used the same network code that doesn't seem to understand how to go through my NAT box, making online play impossible. I still don't understand how a game released in 2008 can be foiled by NAT, I mean it seems like the sort of thing the developers might have considered when making the game...
Their online help is a total joke too. The diagnostic tools are from Ultima Online (which uses, as best I can tell, completely different net code) and they don't tell you anything useful.
IMHO, the Mortgage Broker is supposed to be the person who makes the judgement call as to weather you are a default risk or not. Back in the old days that was the bank manager and they had their skin in the game. In the new system, the bank immediately resells the debt so there is far less incentive to scrutinize the application. In fact there is an incentive to approve as many as possible, because they make a commission on each one. Is it any surprise that this safeguard broke down as a result?
IMHO, the real advantage of OO is that you can declare your state outside of the functional code. In old structured code you were forced to either keep your state global (and then you were stuck with exactly one copy of that state), or pass it in on every function call (and if you have a lot of state this can get messy).
I've never really bought into the "but now you're thinking with objects!" stuff that they teach in school. It's mostly a convenient way to trim down the function call complexity that doesn't result in people getting on your case for defining "global" variables (even though in C all of that would have been safely tucked away in its own file anyway, just as C programmers had been doing for years). Worse, sometimes you get the braindamage where people want to define everything as an object, and suddenly all of the complexity you were saving by going to OO is returned through the declaration of dozens of unnecessary objects (with their associated startup and shutdown complexities) that would have been much better handled as a single simple function.
Listen, anytime the US GDP is mentioned, the number is going to be astronomical. You hear this a lot with stuff like "Oh, the bank bailout is only 5% of our GDP, that's almost nothing!", which is just a ploy to distract you from the fact that the number they are talking about is gigantic. The GDP is the largest number most people will ever think about outside of a handful of scientific areas like Avagadro's Number.
The executive summary of the SciAm article is this: There is no smoking gun for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), however there have been multiple factors that seem to increase the chances of it happening. Beekeepers that are being more gentle with their bees and being more aggressive about keeping the hives clean have been able to reduce the occurrences of CCD. The gist is that bees were already stressed by parasites, viruses, and just being moved around the country to pollenate, the addition of one more factor in several areas seems to have pushed them over the top.
Sometimes I wonder who these people are online that always seem to have terrible customer service wherever they go (except for maybe one store that has amazing customer service). I've ordered dozens of items from Tiger Direct, Newegg, and Amazon (among others) over the years and I can count the number of times I've had trouble on one hand. These days I tend to prefer Newegg, but not because I've had particularly bad service from anywhere, just because their website is so well laid out and it's the first place I think of usually.
Often times I'll check pricewatch first, but if the price difference isn't too big I'll go with Newegg instead of whatever Mom & Pop is cheapest anyway.
The only thing I didn't like about Armada was that both games were shoved out the door maybe 90% done and never looked at again by the developer. There was a lot of potential there, but the unit balance was off and it crashed to the desktop a bit too often for me.
The problem isn't that it's profitable, it is that it is [b]too[/b] profitable. Or more accurately: Because they have local monopolies, they incumbents have no incentive to provide anything beyond the lowest quality service at the highest possible price. In fact, that's exactly what happens. The government in this case provides competition, that forces them to reduce their profit margins, either by providing better service or by lowering their price. If they can't complete, well, maybe the market is best served by the governmental option then.
The question should be: Why is a government monopoly worse than a private sector monopoly for the same resource? Especially if the government version provides better service at lower costs.
Once you know the basics of how these birds work it's not a surprise that people are hijacking transponders for their own use. Anybody can hook up a scope to a dish and scan the sky/spectrum for an unused transponder. Then they just need to broadcast on that transponder and the bird will happily relay it back to Earth. Most birds are just bent pipes, they don't have the kind of smarts you would need to authenticate a signal before retransmitting it.
The reason this isn't common is because the satellite operator will eventually notice the extra power drain on the transponder and will pinpoint the offending transmitter fairly quickly (a few hours to days). Then it's a fairly simple matter to send the authorities to impound your pirate equipment. That appears to be exactly what happened here, although the satellite operators were lazy about tracking down the pirates and let them operate for a fairly long time.
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To be fair, what you suggested and more is already in use in the industry. There are some QoS type appliances that will actually mess with the TCP window size on packets on the wire to reduce their bandwidth without adding unnecessary delays for instance. Some that can even "pause" a connection just by rewriting the window size to 0 on the stream.
The reason you were likely demolished in the peer review is that by delaying the ACK, you're probably going to force the sender to retransmit the data, and when you turn your radio back on you'll have to receive multiple copies of it, blowing away any power savings you might have had from keeping the radio off for a bit longer.
Properly set up a digital camera can shoot a picture over to a printer (wifi) and have it ready in mere seconds. The setup costs are much, much higher than Polaroid, but the ongoing costs are much lower, and you don't have to swap out cartridges nearly as often (the printer holding hundreds of sheets while the old Polaroid camaera holds maybe 10 pictures). The digital setup is more bulky and requires power however, so both solutions have tradeoffs.
That's a problem with the game design though, the cities should have been teeming with alien life, just wandering around doing that sort of third world alien thing that seems so popular in the Star Wars universe.
The "Jedi are supposed to be rare" argument always seemed a bit strange to me. The game could expect what, half a million players at most? Of which maybe 50k would ever be online at the same time. Compared to the number of NPCs in the universe the players would be tiny.
The trick to this would be to highly instance the game so you're not constantly running into Jedi everywhere you go. The downside is that makes it a somewhat single player experience, but that could be worked around with Jedi "hubs" (Corusant(sp?) for instance) where you could meet up and join teams and socalize and whatnot.
Any Star Wars game where you don't get to be a Jedi (or a Sith) is going to fail. There are a few players that would be happy setting up virtual shops and playing support characters, but they'll never be enough to support a major game.
As someone with an active CoH account, I've seen several articles like the above and it strikes me that the only people who are angry enough about this to write online articles (and get them linked) are the gold farmers who were abusing the heck out of the system even after the devs told them to stop and warned them about not abusing it. For regular players this has not been a problem at all.
Ultimately, the biggest problem with the whole situation was that farmers were clogging up the rating system and making it difficult to find good arcs on the admittedly inadequate search system CoH has for the Mission Architect. The price collapse on the player run markets was also a concern, but that was only partially the result of the farmers and more the result of players being able to craft particular (and expensive) items that were typically only available on drop tables that were full of crap. In other words, since the players can react to price spikes of small numbers of items directly and greatly smooth out the market, which is apparently what is happening. What's more, even after the devs implemented the anti-farming provisions the market did not return to its previous state.
In the long run, the Mission Architect has given the players an enormous amount of new content. It really is an amazing system, and it has plenty of headroom to grow even more amazing.
You are getting ripped off on your CD-R blanks. They cost more like $0.05.
Does iTunes support selling an album that has a bunch of artwork but no included music?
Nobody is "offended", rather they look at the post and see a 35 year old with a neckbeard in his mother's basement railing against the machine.
You realize that you lose half of the audience every time you write "M$" or "$ony" in a post right?
For what it's worth, Champions Online is coming out pretty soon, but the lead developer is the same guy who developed City of Heroes, so don't expect major differences between the two. From what I've heard, a lot of the old disgruntled CoH players that went over there are hopping mad at how the game has turned out, since they left CoH to get away from the very conventions that are starting to show up in CO.
This board is 6"x6". It's not going to be an iPhone competitor. If you want to compete with the iPhone, you need a platform that will fit in your pocket, or at least not look completely dorky on a belt clip.
Supposedly the advantage is that everybody can customize the controls to suit their tastes/preferences. Although TNG did not do this, it wouldn't be impossible to make some sort of substrate that could subtly raise over "buttons" to give tactile feedback at the same time. It probably wouldn't have full IBM clicky keyboard feedback, but it would be like pressing those diaphragm buttons you see on cheaper electronics.
I think they just calculated the replacement cost.
I wanted to like C&C3 and RA3, but both of them used the same network code that doesn't seem to understand how to go through my NAT box, making online play impossible. I still don't understand how a game released in 2008 can be foiled by NAT, I mean it seems like the sort of thing the developers might have considered when making the game... Their online help is a total joke too. The diagnostic tools are from Ultima Online (which uses, as best I can tell, completely different net code) and they don't tell you anything useful.
IMHO, the Mortgage Broker is supposed to be the person who makes the judgement call as to weather you are a default risk or not. Back in the old days that was the bank manager and they had their skin in the game. In the new system, the bank immediately resells the debt so there is far less incentive to scrutinize the application. In fact there is an incentive to approve as many as possible, because they make a commission on each one. Is it any surprise that this safeguard broke down as a result?
IMHO, the real advantage of OO is that you can declare your state outside of the functional code. In old structured code you were forced to either keep your state global (and then you were stuck with exactly one copy of that state), or pass it in on every function call (and if you have a lot of state this can get messy).
I've never really bought into the "but now you're thinking with objects!" stuff that they teach in school. It's mostly a convenient way to trim down the function call complexity that doesn't result in people getting on your case for defining "global" variables (even though in C all of that would have been safely tucked away in its own file anyway, just as C programmers had been doing for years). Worse, sometimes you get the braindamage where people want to define everything as an object, and suddenly all of the complexity you were saving by going to OO is returned through the declaration of dozens of unnecessary objects (with their associated startup and shutdown complexities) that would have been much better handled as a single simple function.
Listen, anytime the US GDP is mentioned, the number is going to be astronomical. You hear this a lot with stuff like "Oh, the bank bailout is only 5% of our GDP, that's almost nothing!", which is just a ploy to distract you from the fact that the number they are talking about is gigantic. The GDP is the largest number most people will ever think about outside of a handful of scientific areas like Avagadro's Number.
The executive summary of the SciAm article is this: There is no smoking gun for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), however there have been multiple factors that seem to increase the chances of it happening. Beekeepers that are being more gentle with their bees and being more aggressive about keeping the hives clean have been able to reduce the occurrences of CCD. The gist is that bees were already stressed by parasites, viruses, and just being moved around the country to pollenate, the addition of one more factor in several areas seems to have pushed them over the top.
I also wonder if some of these people are the kind of people who return like 80% of everything they ever buy.
Sometimes I wonder who these people are online that always seem to have terrible customer service wherever they go (except for maybe one store that has amazing customer service). I've ordered dozens of items from Tiger Direct, Newegg, and Amazon (among others) over the years and I can count the number of times I've had trouble on one hand. These days I tend to prefer Newegg, but not because I've had particularly bad service from anywhere, just because their website is so well laid out and it's the first place I think of usually.
Often times I'll check pricewatch first, but if the price difference isn't too big I'll go with Newegg instead of whatever Mom & Pop is cheapest anyway.
The only thing I didn't like about Armada was that both games were shoved out the door maybe 90% done and never looked at again by the developer. There was a lot of potential there, but the unit balance was off and it crashed to the desktop a bit too often for me.
Maybe people realized that it wouldn't be as cool as they thought when they are phasoring 50 Centarian rats for their pelts.
What if your business model is "hire the shadiest accountants in the world to cook the books like crazy and hide the money"?
Hollywood is notorious for their shady accounting practices.
The problem isn't that it's profitable, it is that it is [b]too[/b] profitable. Or more accurately: Because they have local monopolies, they incumbents have no incentive to provide anything beyond the lowest quality service at the highest possible price. In fact, that's exactly what happens. The government in this case provides competition, that forces them to reduce their profit margins, either by providing better service or by lowering their price. If they can't complete, well, maybe the market is best served by the governmental option then.
The question should be: Why is a government monopoly worse than a private sector monopoly for the same resource? Especially if the government version provides better service at lower costs.
Once you know the basics of how these birds work it's not a surprise that people are hijacking transponders for their own use. Anybody can hook up a scope to a dish and scan the sky/spectrum for an unused transponder. Then they just need to broadcast on that transponder and the bird will happily relay it back to Earth. Most birds are just bent pipes, they don't have the kind of smarts you would need to authenticate a signal before retransmitting it.
The reason this isn't common is because the satellite operator will eventually notice the extra power drain on the transponder and will pinpoint the offending transmitter fairly quickly (a few hours to days). Then it's a fairly simple matter to send the authorities to impound your pirate equipment. That appears to be exactly what happened here, although the satellite operators were lazy about tracking down the pirates and let them operate for a fairly long time.