Your scripts get a limited number of cycles in which to execute during each "tick" of the server, however it was still trivial (at least last time I messed with it) to create self replicating objects that quickly crash the server so hard that they force a rollback. A lot of developers have even done that accidentally, and griefers use it from time to time. However, it's not a particularly smart thing to do since crashing the server is an easy way to be banned from SL (or at least put out in the cornfield).
Getting him pinned was only half of the job though, they police also had to get him out of the building without causing further injury to him, themselves, or to bystanders. I think that's where the taser came in, since it was apparent that he was going to continue to struggle once they started moving him out. Just my $0.02
That's pretty rare behavior on consoles though. The only game that I can think of that does that is the Golden Sun series on the GBA, and only because they want you to restart the whole level in the event that an enemy gets a lucky critical hit.
Back when I was in grade school I was taught that the Civil War was about slavery (Yankee schools), later on in high school I learned that it was about States Rights. Once I got to college I realized that all of that states rights stuff was just a smoke screen for slavery.
Don't Bittorrent clients do a checksum against every block downloaded? How can the swarming work? I know I have seen my client report that a chunk has a bogus checksum and re-download it. It's pretty rare but it does happen. It doesn't even have to be malicious, some people have dodgy computers that will silently corrupt data or frankly the TCP checksum isn't all that strong and it's not impossible for corrupt data to get through it.
Shards are basically entire instances of the game world. They may (and often are) spread across multiple servers, and it is theoretically possible (although unwise) to run multiple shards on the same server. To make a suitably geeky reference for Slashdot, Shards are sort of like parallel game world universes, only your character only exists in one of the universes not in all of them.
Well, clearly they have not met their long term demand (10 months is a long time in the console business), and we're getting dangerously close to the Christmas buying season. Plus, those marked up consoles online aren't generating any additional profit for Nintendo, the extra profit is going right into the reseller's hands.
I noticed that my Gamestop has the boxes piled up behind the counter so I went up to ask how many were in stock and the guy told me that those boxes were just to let people know that they actually sell the console, if I wanted one I'd have to come back and wait in line on shipping day like everybody else.
Are we talking about "accidentally cut Venus in half" scaled up? Typically the downside of photonic thrust has been the low power to weight ratio, so for a laser powerful enough to propel a ship to Mars (don't forget that it has to both accelerate and decelerate) that fast I have to wonder just how powerful the laser has to be.
One thing that has shocked me about the Wii is how it can still be perpetually out of stock 10 months after being released. At this point Nintendo doesn't have any excuse, they need to ramp production up and they need to do it 6 months ago. I have a co-worker who is looking to get one and he's actually being told to stand in line outside of the store on shipment day still, and this was after calling just about every retailer in the area looking for one. Even weirder is when you look online and all of the available consoles are marked up over the retail price. That is crazy for a console that has been out on the market for as long as the Wii has.
I found two right away. There is one preventing you from walking around the outside of the lighthouse on the decorative ledges (not a huge deal, but I did find it), and there is another that prevents you from jumping down the hole in the middle of the lighthouse to the Bathysphere. There were a handful of others I found along the way, only one of which was actually annoying (in the garden level there is a hole in the wall that you can't pass through until you get further through the plot, Since there was a recorder right on the other side of the hole I'd assumed there was some trick to getting through it. After awhile I gave up and moved on, only to have that invisible wall go away a little bit later with some more plot development.
I'd say that if you are one of those guys who always tries to get his character up where the designers never intended you to go, you're likely to find a lot of annoying invisible walls in Rapture, but for most gamers they won't be an issue.
It's pretty danged expensive if you ask me. My SMS messages are $0.05US and I still consider them to be too expensive. I might as well go ahead and just make the call or use the data plan on my phone (which is loads cheaper per byte). SMS is ridiculously overpriced in many parts of the world, but people still love it.
Honestly though, I get way more minutes in a month than I ever use (and I'm on the cheapest plan offered by the carrier, or pretty much any major carrier), plus free nights and weekends, so it really doesn't make sense for me to blow a nickel on 50 words when I could call them for no additional cost.
This is another case, like the Comics Code Authority before it, where what is technically voluntary self censorship becomes effectively mandatory self censorship because as soon as you create a ratings authority like this, stores and municipalities all over the country rush to enact policies/laws that prohibit any unrated (or even rated but above a certain threshold) material from being sold.
Although I don't have a reference for it, I'd be willing to bet quite a lot that you simply cannot get a license to publish a console game that is not rated. Where does that leave unrated (or AO rated) games? On the PC, with online sales only, and little advertising. That's a pretty effective way of cutting yourself off at the knees.
They are rated by a panel people, just like how the Movie industry rates films. I don't think they give out names, but you can rest assured that the people on these panels are the ones that deem themselves to have "outstanding moral character" and see themselves as a bulwark against the flood of pron that would result if they just let people do what they want. In the US they tend to be much more concerned with nudity/sex than with violence. An occasional flash of nipple/butt here and there is acceptable on an M game (basically R), but sex tends to be a dealbreaker unless it's "sheets bouncing up and down for a few seconds".
Depends how many people are hit by it. If Microsoft is conservative and only shuts down a handful of known compromised keys, then there is not likely to be much of a backlash. If however they shutdown every computer that throws up a WGA warning, then you might be right.
I think you're right that people would be willing to buy AO games (especially if they weren't _too_ porny, just a flash here and there), the problem is that lots of stores wouldn't sell them, and you would be locked out of the lucrative console market entirely.
Unfortunately, there is a catch-22 with AO games. Publishers know they won't be able to sell or advertise them much, so they're not willing to take much risk with them. This means AO games will be low budget affairs that will tend to suck. This reinforces the idea that AO games are sucky porno titles and the circle continues.
That said, the Japanese make tons of mostly identical porno games, but they tend to be very cheap to make (only a couple hundred drawings, a few thousand words of dialog, no gameplay to speak of) and can turn a profit with even very modest sales.
Except for that Han Chauvinism and some parts of the Islamophobia article (which was a complete mess), all of the articles you quoted look like a pretty neutral starting point for someone trying to learn about them for the first time. They cited lots of sources that a reader can go to for additional research and for the most part kept a neutral point of view. I'd wager that you'd have a tough time finding a more balanced approach to some of these topics, Islamophobia and Afrocentrism especially, from any other source. The kind of people who coin terms like that are generally less interested in neutrality than Wikipedia is.
If the sales figures I've seen are any indication, they don't have much to fear about the PS3 cutting into the PS2 sales. IIRC the PS2 is still outselling the PS3 by a wide margin. Besides, it doesn't make much sense to try to shore up sales on last years model by crippling your more expensive new model. Besides, like many conspiracy theories is acompletely logical explanation that make more sense: Doing the emulation in hardware is more expensive than doing it in software, so to save manufacturing costs on PS3s they dropped the hardware emulation support from the newer versions in favor of software emulation. Console hardware is revised all of the time to save on manufacturing costs (the PS2 has what, almost 20 revisions now?) and this is no different.
Because turning the wireless off turns off the radio? You may be shocked to hear this, but cell phone calls are transmitted over wireless! Also, your Blackberry doesn't do 802.11 if that's what you think wireless means. For what it's worth, the wireless switch is the same thing apple calls "airline" mode on the iPhone, it leaves the phone running but shuts down any RF transmitters/receivers on the phone.
It's due to the way Flash works. A flash bit is basically a conductor surrounded by an insulator. To store a bit, you apply a large charge to the insulator to increase the charge of the conductor, basically your burning through the insulator to get your charge though. Once it is on there, to read the charge you have to apply another large charge to the insulator and see if the resultant charge is n or n + m. The m factor comes from latent charge on the conductor.
Anyway, the upshot of this is that because you have to constantly burn charge through the insulator to use the part, eventually you basically burn out the insulator and cause it to leak charge. Once it starts leaking, you lose your stored bits and the part is useless.
The "good authoring tools" are the stumbling block. Flash is popular because it is easy to develop for (well, at least for simple projects like online animation). Any competitor has a rather high bar to hurdle to make their stuff easier and better than Flash (well, better isn't too hard, but easier...).
Also, there's the fact that everybody already has Flash, so you have to fight the market inertia to get a foothold.
Slashdot Mirror
Your scripts get a limited number of cycles in which to execute during each "tick" of the server, however it was still trivial (at least last time I messed with it) to create self replicating objects that quickly crash the server so hard that they force a rollback. A lot of developers have even done that accidentally, and griefers use it from time to time. However, it's not a particularly smart thing to do since crashing the server is an easy way to be banned from SL (or at least put out in the cornfield).
Getting him pinned was only half of the job though, they police also had to get him out of the building without causing further injury to him, themselves, or to bystanders. I think that's where the taser came in, since it was apparent that he was going to continue to struggle once they started moving him out. Just my $0.02
Oops, that's what I get for posting too early in the morning. The game is actually Fire Emblem.
Yeah, I don't know how many times my Wii online play has been ruined by cheaters thus far...
That's pretty rare behavior on consoles though. The only game that I can think of that does that is the Golden Sun series on the GBA, and only because they want you to restart the whole level in the event that an enemy gets a lucky critical hit.
Back when I was in grade school I was taught that the Civil War was about slavery (Yankee schools), later on in high school I learned that it was about States Rights. Once I got to college I realized that all of that states rights stuff was just a smoke screen for slavery.
Don't Bittorrent clients do a checksum against every block downloaded? How can the swarming work? I know I have seen my client report that a chunk has a bogus checksum and re-download it. It's pretty rare but it does happen. It doesn't even have to be malicious, some people have dodgy computers that will silently corrupt data or frankly the TCP checksum isn't all that strong and it's not impossible for corrupt data to get through it.
Shards are basically entire instances of the game world. They may (and often are) spread across multiple servers, and it is theoretically possible (although unwise) to run multiple shards on the same server. To make a suitably geeky reference for Slashdot, Shards are sort of like parallel game world universes, only your character only exists in one of the universes not in all of them.
Well, clearly they have not met their long term demand (10 months is a long time in the console business), and we're getting dangerously close to the Christmas buying season. Plus, those marked up consoles online aren't generating any additional profit for Nintendo, the extra profit is going right into the reseller's hands.
I noticed that my Gamestop has the boxes piled up behind the counter so I went up to ask how many were in stock and the guy told me that those boxes were just to let people know that they actually sell the console, if I wanted one I'd have to come back and wait in line on shipping day like everybody else.
Are we talking about "accidentally cut Venus in half" scaled up? Typically the downside of photonic thrust has been the low power to weight ratio, so for a laser powerful enough to propel a ship to Mars (don't forget that it has to both accelerate and decelerate) that fast I have to wonder just how powerful the laser has to be.
One thing that has shocked me about the Wii is how it can still be perpetually out of stock 10 months after being released. At this point Nintendo doesn't have any excuse, they need to ramp production up and they need to do it 6 months ago. I have a co-worker who is looking to get one and he's actually being told to stand in line outside of the store on shipment day still, and this was after calling just about every retailer in the area looking for one. Even weirder is when you look online and all of the available consoles are marked up over the retail price. That is crazy for a console that has been out on the market for as long as the Wii has.
I found two right away. There is one preventing you from walking around the outside of the lighthouse on the decorative ledges (not a huge deal, but I did find it), and there is another that prevents you from jumping down the hole in the middle of the lighthouse to the Bathysphere. There were a handful of others I found along the way, only one of which was actually annoying (in the garden level there is a hole in the wall that you can't pass through until you get further through the plot, Since there was a recorder right on the other side of the hole I'd assumed there was some trick to getting through it. After awhile I gave up and moved on, only to have that invisible wall go away a little bit later with some more plot development.
I'd say that if you are one of those guys who always tries to get his character up where the designers never intended you to go, you're likely to find a lot of annoying invisible walls in Rapture, but for most gamers they won't be an issue.
It's pretty danged expensive if you ask me. My SMS messages are $0.05US and I still consider them to be too expensive. I might as well go ahead and just make the call or use the data plan on my phone (which is loads cheaper per byte). SMS is ridiculously overpriced in many parts of the world, but people still love it.
Honestly though, I get way more minutes in a month than I ever use (and I'm on the cheapest plan offered by the carrier, or pretty much any major carrier), plus free nights and weekends, so it really doesn't make sense for me to blow a nickel on 50 words when I could call them for no additional cost.
This is another case, like the Comics Code Authority before it, where what is technically voluntary self censorship becomes effectively mandatory self censorship because as soon as you create a ratings authority like this, stores and municipalities all over the country rush to enact policies/laws that prohibit any unrated (or even rated but above a certain threshold) material from being sold.
Although I don't have a reference for it, I'd be willing to bet quite a lot that you simply cannot get a license to publish a console game that is not rated. Where does that leave unrated (or AO rated) games? On the PC, with online sales only, and little advertising. That's a pretty effective way of cutting yourself off at the knees.
They are rated by a panel people, just like how the Movie industry rates films. I don't think they give out names, but you can rest assured that the people on these panels are the ones that deem themselves to have "outstanding moral character" and see themselves as a bulwark against the flood of pron that would result if they just let people do what they want. In the US they tend to be much more concerned with nudity/sex than with violence. An occasional flash of nipple/butt here and there is acceptable on an M game (basically R), but sex tends to be a dealbreaker unless it's "sheets bouncing up and down for a few seconds".
Basically making AO the NC-17 of the game industry and making a new X rating? Look how well that worked for NC-17 movies.
Depends how many people are hit by it. If Microsoft is conservative and only shuts down a handful of known compromised keys, then there is not likely to be much of a backlash. If however they shutdown every computer that throws up a WGA warning, then you might be right.
I think you're right that people would be willing to buy AO games (especially if they weren't _too_ porny, just a flash here and there), the problem is that lots of stores wouldn't sell them, and you would be locked out of the lucrative console market entirely.
Unfortunately, there is a catch-22 with AO games. Publishers know they won't be able to sell or advertise them much, so they're not willing to take much risk with them. This means AO games will be low budget affairs that will tend to suck. This reinforces the idea that AO games are sucky porno titles and the circle continues.
That said, the Japanese make tons of mostly identical porno games, but they tend to be very cheap to make (only a couple hundred drawings, a few thousand words of dialog, no gameplay to speak of) and can turn a profit with even very modest sales.
Except for that Han Chauvinism and some parts of the Islamophobia article (which was a complete mess), all of the articles you quoted look like a pretty neutral starting point for someone trying to learn about them for the first time. They cited lots of sources that a reader can go to for additional research and for the most part kept a neutral point of view. I'd wager that you'd have a tough time finding a more balanced approach to some of these topics, Islamophobia and Afrocentrism especially, from any other source. The kind of people who coin terms like that are generally less interested in neutrality than Wikipedia is.
If the sales figures I've seen are any indication, they don't have much to fear about the PS3 cutting into the PS2 sales. IIRC the PS2 is still outselling the PS3 by a wide margin. Besides, it doesn't make much sense to try to shore up sales on last years model by crippling your more expensive new model. Besides, like many conspiracy theories is acompletely logical explanation that make more sense: Doing the emulation in hardware is more expensive than doing it in software, so to save manufacturing costs on PS3s they dropped the hardware emulation support from the newer versions in favor of software emulation. Console hardware is revised all of the time to save on manufacturing costs (the PS2 has what, almost 20 revisions now?) and this is no different.
Because turning the wireless off turns off the radio? You may be shocked to hear this, but cell phone calls are transmitted over wireless! Also, your Blackberry doesn't do 802.11 if that's what you think wireless means. For what it's worth, the wireless switch is the same thing apple calls "airline" mode on the iPhone, it leaves the phone running but shuts down any RF transmitters/receivers on the phone.
upshot
It's due to the way Flash works. A flash bit is basically a conductor surrounded by an insulator. To store a bit, you apply a large charge to the insulator to increase the charge of the conductor, basically your burning through the insulator to get your charge though. Once it is on there, to read the charge you have to apply another large charge to the insulator and see if the resultant charge is n or n + m. The m factor comes from latent charge on the conductor.
Anyway, the upshot of this is that because you have to constantly burn charge through the insulator to use the part, eventually you basically burn out the insulator and cause it to leak charge. Once it starts leaking, you lose your stored bits and the part is useless.
The "good authoring tools" are the stumbling block. Flash is popular because it is easy to develop for (well, at least for simple projects like online animation). Any competitor has a rather high bar to hurdle to make their stuff easier and better than Flash (well, better isn't too hard, but easier...).
Also, there's the fact that everybody already has Flash, so you have to fight the market inertia to get a foothold.