Maybe medical technology will progress to the point where the spam mail and web pop-ups relating to "Ancient Sudanese Techniques" to "enhance your masculinity" will actually no longer be spam, merely factual advertisment.
... I suspect the gulf is not so large as you envision or one would wish.
First, corporations do operate under restrictions and do get some limited oversight. Boards of Directors have certain legal liabilities and can be sued quite effectively. Shareholders (especially large investment companies) will go after said boards if the situation warrants it.
OTOH, the government, supposedly accountable, has gone out of its way over the past few years to give itself as near to a dictatorial level of power in the PMO as is possible. Has there been any accountability for the fiasco at Public Works? Gagliano went to Denmark, not jail. Has there been accountability for the PM's meddling in Grand Mere? Nope nor is there signs of it. Part of this stems from the fact the Canadian Federal gov't has far less accountability (and I'm not talking leadership race financing...) than other Parliaments like that of the UK and less than their provincial governments. The non-independence of the various auditors is the first and most telling symptom.
In theory, a public institution or public company should both have greater transparency and greater accountability than a private company, which should still have accountability in a legal and accounting sense. OTOH, current attempts to quash the FOIA and various other obstructionist moves are really killing the transparency (such as it was) and the concentration of power in the PMO and the answering of all government officers who audit to the PM has slain accountability (party whips and PM control of nomination paperwork for candidates has really helped) or dissent. If you lose your job for speaking out or are swept under the rug... that doesn't encourage bringing problems to light.
In a perfect world, you are right. Government should be more transparent. But in the real world, the PM wastes millions of your taxpayer dollars and then says "so what?". The gulf in reality between self-interested corporations and self-interested politicos is less than in the ideal. And those politicos also shape law, process, and bureaucracy to their needs.
What a joke. I'll trust my government more than companies any day of the week.
You said you were Canadian right? And you said THAT with a straight face? You'd trust the current Canadian government beyond companies?
I have one question: Have you watched the news? What's going on in Public Works and DND and other branches of the Gov't and the shenanigans in the PMO and with the ethics and privacy councillors and (as usual) ignoring the Auditor General.... and you'd trust THOSE GUYS?
You pick some pretty poor places to place your trust, my fellow citizen.
As it is, it might nudge us toward a less centralized DNS, which would be a good thing.
I can't believe you think the US Gov't controlling ICANN would be a boon overall for the small guy or that it might force a decentralized DNS. Heh, not by half! Quite the opposite!
This is the same gov't supporting the DMCA and the "War" on Terrorism (or was that civil liberties and citizen's rights?). I think you'd be well advised to look at the things the gov't is laying hands on of late when assessing how democritizing or how useful to the small guy or how open any such Gov't involved affair might be....
Unless of course you want to mark your comments with <NAIVE>....
Assume I have two software modules (A and B, why not?). A has GPL code in it. B has private proprietary UberSecretsOfDoom(TM) in it.
If I link the two in the same app, presumably if I'm GPL compliant, A and B must be returned as source to the public domain.
What if, on the other hand, A and B are embedded in seperate skeleton apps that communicate via sockets?
Or via shared files? Or Pipes?
I _assume_ that GPL wouldn't then force revelation of the contents of module B. My assumption is based on the fact that otherwise anyone whose GPL'd product talked to another system via a network (mail clients, nntp clients, web browsers and servers, etc) would then have a sudden need to be public.
Now if I am correct, this imposes design constraints, but it does mean you can design a system with GPL code in it without actually checking the other parts in to public archives. Just park the other proprietary bits out across some IPC channel or network channel, and then you may protect them (as all you exchange is "data").
Anyone care to tell me if this has a flaw in it? And if so, what?
You've obviously never had inattentive, annoying or sarcastic player! As a GM of more than 20 years now, I can attest the D30 is just large enough to offer:
Good Weight for concussive impact
Good Aerodynamics for throws under 10m
Good Size for throwing ease (and hence accuracy) and speed of launch (fast reaction time)
That's the real purpose of the D30. "Attention Getter" would be another name.
As someone else pointed out, this might be considered a feature by the Kazaa crowd.
It does add network content.
Note, I do agree with you though. It should be something that the UI makes more explicit and defaults should be secure rather than unsecure to the extent possible.
Saying "you deserve it" is like saying "you should understand all the details of the lawyerese in any EULA before using the software". Who really does? Damn few. Even most technical people just click thru them because the choice is use the program (which might provide some key capability) or sit and spin. Does that make hiding nasty stuff in the EULA a good business practice or above board behaviour? I think not.
Possibly. It was GMontag's post's that caught my eye. I replied to this one, perhaps there was a more appropriate one... happens when you get old and senile.... (though I don't have that excuse)
It'd be nice if people could recognize fringe thinking and radical groups as distinct from the main body of the people in a given area. This kind of muddy thinking could have everyone thinking that anyone from Arkansas in inbred, anyone from the Midwest is some sort of pseudo-skinhead militia nut, or that anyone from the American South must believe in Slavery. Or that all Canadians are polite.
The truth is: Generalizations suck. They are automatically problematic when used to describe humans. And when you start treating everyone who has the same facial geometry and skin tone the same (shades of the bad old days long, we had hoped, gone by), you automatically start tossing out the baby with the bathwater, the bad with the good. You do a disservice to a lot of innocent, hard working folks and at the same time you probably focus on one threat vector or problem group and in so doing make it more liely you'll miss others.
Sounds like an excuse for engineered life
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One approach would follow the logic above. If life tends to process waste of other life activity in a closed system, and we've now got non-degradable outputs (in any reasonable time), then maybe we need to break out the genevats and cook up some life to turn the non-degradable outputs into something useful again.
And before anyone rants on, I'm aware of the "we don't know what we're doing" theory of genetics... which is at least partially true... today. But this might well be a worthwhile avenue of approach (ref: using microbes in nuclear disaster and oil disaster cleanup as an example). Maybe in the long run, we can make something that _likes_ polyester (unlike the rest of the universe).
This is kind of a dumb debate. Mainly because people already have entrenched views and it boils down to "duz too!" and "duz not!".
For the record: Most countries spy. However, if a people sanction spying by their country on others and accept that their government has a right to do so (ie they as the people should not be stopping their government from doing it), they can scarcely take the moral high ground when it is done in return to them or when their allies (not enemies I say!) discover they are being spied on and become rather upset.
It's one thing to spy quietly and mostly innocuously and try very hard not to let anyone in your country or anywhere else know you are doing it. It is another thing to publicly make available the fact you are setting out to violate other countries' private communications. Especially when some of those countries are: military allies, political allies, and long standing trade partners.
I think the simple rule here is: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And if you happen to think the fact that America owns an extremely temporary (from a historical perspective) hegemony in technology and military force over most of the world and that somehow confers a right to use such power as a club to forward its own agenda and that this is morally correct behaviour, then you should be equally happy when someone one day returns the favour.
I don't really care what side of this fence anyone is on, but it does piss me off when they try to occupy both sides (spying while decrying same, invading and bombing other sovereign nations and supporting death squads and covert ops in other nations while decrying same).
Another phrase comes to mind: Sew the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Ask yourself which was more useful to the Navy: Someone who served honourably once and is retired (thus a ship could be named after him) or someone who fostered whopping huge arms procurement appropriations? One is useful to a Navy (good sailors are worth having), the other is imperative (a whopping whack of good tech is vital). So don't think that naming things "Ronald Reagan" or after any other military-spending president is a bad choice for the service. They know who got them the goodies.
I recall a (Kingston Ont? based??) company called Haventree who made a flow charting utility called EasyFlow. I recall the manual featured the usual antipiracy copyright spiel, but livened up by threats to send "the Haventree Attack Shark" after you if you violated the terms. Far more entertaining (and probably not too far from a good description of lawyers) than most.
Something like some Dilbert, BOFH, or similar cartoons sprinkled around the manual, or having Dave Barry translate some of the sections would make most manuals far more interesting to read.
Mind you, explaining switches for commands can be about as interesting as pulling your own toenails out with pliers slowly... I really don't see how anyone could remedy that... but broader descriptive texts could easily be spiced up.
Of course, for every one of us that would enjoy some visual cartoon embedding, or little word plays or humorous asides in the text, someone else would complain about buying a manual and getting all this "extra crap" and then some other gene pool shallow-ender would sue... "I followed the instruction that said to reboot the computer using a size 12 hiking boot, your honour. Clearly the company provided a destructive procedure!"...
Interestingly, you could then wire it to installed software which "reset" it automatically when you logged into a system (sending something encrypted with your personal PGP or GPG key or something like that). Thus the resetting does not have to be as onerous as getting regular e-mail. Just "doing business". The only time you'd have a problem is if you went outside of access unexpectedly for more than (some threshold) number of days.
Even then, a hosted service could use a war dialer to call up your contact numbers and verify your lack of contactability (hence possible demise) before undertaking the "in case of death" instructions.
These would mostly be notifications of the "we can't find X and our service is setup to notify people of X's possible demise... but we cannot confirm his demise, just his lack of contactability over (some period)." This is better than saying "If you read this, I am dead."
A managed service like this could be called something like the OmegaOption(c.2002 me) and be a service usable by individuals and corporations providing various service levels depending on how much you wanted to spend (from auto mail outs to more complex legal arrangements and multiple verification levels).
Damn! If only it were 2 years ago, this weak (but possibly maybe sometime valuable) business idea could have launched 100M in VC funding and a flurry of exciting reviews in trade periodicals!
I suspect you are right, principally because most of us don't talk all day. Even most radio announcers don't. And the semantics of most programming languages don't make them fluid in translation to speech.... I mean who really wants to say "command spell P-R-I-N-T-L-N end open parenthisis open quote hello world close quote close parenthisis semicolon".....
However, for a lot of application like letter dictation, splitting the work between voice and hands, and voice command for those with no hands option, the stuff is pretty neat.
Isn't it numbers of seats that should matter?
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If I show on 20 screens with 10 seats each or 1 megatheatre with 343 seats, which gives more opportunity for people to see it? (The answer is: it depends... one option offers more show times and can be better distributed, the other offers more raw seating potential).
Statistics is such a wonderful art of deception (intentional and otherwise)....
Nope. I don't (barring some insanely fast networking) believe you can reasonably batch out collision detection. In fact, most systems feature some amount of this on the client as well as the server, though the server tends to be authoritative.
However, there are a larger number of things (like doing little chunks of the associated ecommerce and marketing work that we'll see a lot more of from the big ubercorps as they wade into this realm eventually) that aren't "hard real time" concerns. Most worlds have a number of housekeeping processes and NPC decision making.... depending on the setup, this may be (to an extent) a distributable process.
The trick in distributed processing is being able to break down the execution into small segments and control dependence on other segments and on external data. This is no mean feat. I'm not saying this is an easy challenge, I just believe that as you head for a MMORPG where NPCs have memory, behave like real people, do real people things, and you have a world that models on-going physical processes, and a whole economic underpinning to the world, a lot of the calculations attached to some of these non-real-time or soft-real-time tasks could be parcelled out (perhaps).
It's certainly worth investigating and pursuing. Just going "Humbug, can't be done!" is the mark of a short sighted (and often wrong) mindset. How many key developments in our world have come from people who took an assumption about what couldn't be done and said... "why not?" or "I bet I can make that work!".
Not really. You have ToS. There *is* a point to such documents. Some may feel "I paid my money, I can mount whatever attack on your system integrity I want" or "I have a good given right to reverse engineer" or "I live to hack". That's too bad, so sad, goodbye.
Any MMORPG that is to be a workable on-going community has to make at least an effort (and no system is fool proof nor any idiot proof) to deal with malicious vandals, script kiddies, cheaters, and the mythic black-hat e-commerce hacker.
If you don't deal with the more common of these threats, you end up with an inviable community. I think we've seen several examples in the last few years have we not?
If you take an account with a company, the company agrees to provide a service (which you agree to use in the prescribed manner) for a fee. If you start taking a swing at the data integrity, start doing DoS or engange in other probing and general hijinx, if they are satisified that it is you, they can refund you the balance of any money and evict you. You have no God-given right to be on their system and in the end this defends the community.
I agree there are risks in such policies (false positives). However, there is a very clear risk in not mounting an active defense. No protocol can be entirely secure (witness N varieties of bot and other hacks). But anyone found rapidly advancing or whose character mysteriously jumps stats/etc (this can be tracked with some data mining) becomes a good candidate for scrutiny.
I can't and won't go into proprietary matters related to how this is implemented nor will I suggest any system is foolproof, but the next few generations of MMORPGs will continue to offer better and more complete security and tighter communities, and in the long run, distributed processing of some form (dunno what it will look like - if I did, I'd invest accordingly and make a mint!) will probably appear on the scene in most worlds... it is one of the only sensible scaling ideas (given a lot of gamers have zippy PCs at home just waiting to help out!).
Heck, you don't have to believe me. I'll let developments vindicate me...;)
This opinion is worth what you paid for it.... every cent...
In case you're wondering, it's an Indonesian art called Pentjak Silat, and the exercises involve sticks (I also take Jujitsu, which does have some wrist stretching, though Aikido would do more).
As a former (and hopefully soon again) Aikidoka, I can say that wrist stretching is certainly a core discipline, otherwise kotagaeshi and other wrist related takedowns and pins would be damaging. I think the stretching excercises (especially the yonko stretch) would be of great use to add flexibility and limberness to the wrists. I assume most other joint lock arts (Aikijitsu, Jujitsu, Taijutsu, possibly Judo) would teach similar stretches. And I think they do wrist stretches in escrima/arnis also (Phillipine).
One thing to keep in mind: Mild stretching is likely to make you more limber and give you a better chance to avoid injury and strains. Serious workouts can stress your joints though (either through stretching or technique) and you notice this more if you then end up at work the next day in front of a computer for 8-14 hours. So try to keep that in the back of your mind while working out.
PS - Idiotic manouvers like shoulder rolling on concrete might end up separating a shoulder...
I switched from a standard QWERTY to an old-style MS-keyboard (which has now outlived three or four large project lifecycles and is underhand at this instant) and the difference was immense. It probably has a lot to do with body geometry. I have short arms and the QWERTY put a sharp kink in my wrists. I'd go numb playing FPS or doing long coding stretches. By elevating the back of the keyboard, dropping the front, and getting rid of the damn crick in the wrist due to the split and angled keypad, all of a sudden I stopped hurting. So, they are clearly NOT worthless to some of us in some situations.
OTOH, I have a friend and her husband who both had pretty crippling RSI and as a consequence could not work for a while. This caused great stress. And then, like the survivor she is, she turned it into a business!
She became an expert (and I think a VAR or something) for Dragon and now helps people with extreme RSI, other handicaps, etc. setup voice command software systems. And the new generation are pretty damn impressive. Everyone from authors who just want to dictate to their systems, to medical and legal secretaries, to government offices looking to avoid future suits related to this kind of injury should take a visit to their website here and think about it.
I used some of the first gen speech reco/voice command stuff and you used to have to train it galore, always had a crappy mike, and it still performed badly. The new stuff without much training is pretty good, with a good mike and a little bit more training verges on awesome. I watched her sitting across the room from her laptop whacking out a story using MS-Word via voice command... pretty kewl beans!
Visit this link to find out a bit more about RSI and some ways to treat it, prevent it, etc.
And I know my lady pal is a./er too.... she hunted me up by my sig from the other side of hte country when I posted something...;)...and this is an entirely unsolicited testimonial, but I think they're great folks and do good things to help people who are really suffering and those who want to avoid suffering.
Hmmm. Allow me to question that assertion. I believe a significant number of things are done server side for the aforementioned security reasons. Also, since most of the world is still on 56kbps or less, you can bet there is a whole whack of things that go on related to filtering what data gets to each end user. Things like collision detection, cell boundary crossing, etc. and a lot of other processes work on the server end in many cases.
The world servers can support hundreds or even thousands of players, although hundreds is a far more common real number. The number supported depends on what the game is. If it is using an EQ style of non-FPS combat, the number supported can go way up. If you're running a MMORPG with FPS combat, things aren't so simple at all.
But as the activities and options for role play and for realistic development of the world and for more advanced AI behaviour appear, more work must be done. If this kind of work can be exported to distributed processing models, then it will be far easier to provide a large scale immersive reality.
But you don't have to believe me. I only work on these things for a living...:)
You can certainly offload a fair amount of background processing, and in big enough world clusters, you can ensure the systems getting funneled data don't get stuff anywhere near them. Also, you can probably arrange redundant operations and do some comparisons on results. If they don't tally, you don't use them.
Anyone who thinks this type of thing is impossible is probably wrong. The question is only if it is possible to do know and worthwhile to explore.
Well, yes, if you offloaded anything relevant to that character. If you offload background processing for some NPCs on the other side of the game world, or the same for PCs on the other side of the game world, the risks are lower. And anytime I found a cracker playing around, I'd can his user ID and he'd be SOL for world access until he paid for a new account.
Yeah, and who handed me this character with moderate Int, decent Edu, but abysmal Str, Dex, and End and a very questionable Soc? In many campaigns, I'm sure he'd be "DAB" (Dead At Birth). But in this one, you have to play your hand or quit the game.
And some of the skills you get are pretty un-useful in the adventuring world: CompleteTaxes-1, ObscureComputerProtocols-3, RPGLore-2, FigurePainting-1, ComputerHacking-3, UselessArtsCourse-2, DoLaundry-2, etc.
Still, at least the game if fun sometimes and you don't tend to take damage too often. If you do though, healing tech just isn't as good as one could wish...
You must have been in my Engineering Algebra course...;)
We all know the correct response to the cloak of Cholesky is the sword of Eigen following by the spell of n-spacial translation.
In n-space, no one can hear you fail the course...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe medical technology will progress to the point where the spam mail and web pop-ups relating to "Ancient Sudanese Techniques" to "enhance your masculinity" will actually no longer be spam, merely factual advertisment.
... I suspect the gulf is not so large as you envision or one would wish.
First, corporations do operate under restrictions and do get some limited oversight. Boards of Directors have certain legal liabilities and can be sued quite effectively. Shareholders (especially large investment companies) will go after said boards if the situation warrants it.
OTOH, the government, supposedly accountable, has gone out of its way over the past few years to give itself as near to a dictatorial level of power in the PMO as is possible. Has there been any accountability for the fiasco at Public Works? Gagliano went to Denmark, not jail. Has there been accountability for the PM's meddling in Grand Mere? Nope nor is there signs of it. Part of this stems from the fact the Canadian Federal gov't has far less accountability (and I'm not talking leadership race financing...) than other Parliaments like that of the UK and less than their provincial governments. The non-independence of the various auditors is the first and most telling symptom.
In theory, a public institution or public company should both have greater transparency and greater accountability than a private company, which should still have accountability in a legal and accounting sense. OTOH, current attempts to quash the FOIA and various other obstructionist moves are really killing the transparency (such as it was) and the concentration of power in the PMO and the answering of all government officers who audit to the PM has slain accountability (party whips and PM control of nomination paperwork for candidates has really helped) or dissent. If you lose your job for speaking out or are swept under the rug... that doesn't encourage bringing problems to light.
In a perfect world, you are right. Government should be more transparent. But in the real world, the PM wastes millions of your taxpayer dollars and then says "so what?". The gulf in reality between self-interested corporations and self-interested politicos is less than in the ideal. And those politicos also shape law, process, and bureaucracy to their needs.
That clearer?
What a joke. I'll trust my government more than companies any day of the week.
You said you were Canadian right? And you said THAT with a straight face? You'd trust the current Canadian government beyond companies?
I have one question: Have you watched the news? What's going on in Public Works and DND and other branches of the Gov't and the shenanigans in the PMO and with the ethics and privacy councillors and (as usual) ignoring the Auditor General.... and you'd trust THOSE GUYS?
You pick some pretty poor places to place your trust, my fellow citizen.
As it is, it might nudge us toward a less centralized DNS, which would be a good thing.
I can't believe you think the US Gov't controlling ICANN would be a boon overall for the small guy or that it might force a decentralized DNS. Heh, not by half! Quite the opposite!
This is the same gov't supporting the DMCA and the "War" on Terrorism (or was that civil liberties and citizen's rights?). I think you'd be well advised to look at the things the gov't is laying hands on of late when assessing how democritizing or how useful to the small guy or how open any such Gov't involved affair might be....
Unless of course you want to mark your comments with <NAIVE>....
Assume I have two software modules (A and B, why not?). A has GPL code in it. B has private proprietary UberSecretsOfDoom(TM) in it.
If I link the two in the same app, presumably if I'm GPL compliant, A and B must be returned as source to the public domain.
What if, on the other hand, A and B are embedded in seperate skeleton apps that communicate via sockets?
Or via shared files? Or Pipes?
I _assume_ that GPL wouldn't then force revelation of the contents of module B. My assumption is based on the fact that otherwise anyone whose GPL'd product talked to another system via a network (mail clients, nntp clients, web browsers and servers, etc) would then have a sudden need to be public.
Now if I am correct, this imposes design constraints, but it does mean you can design a system with GPL code in it without actually checking the other parts in to public archives. Just park the other proprietary bits out across some IPC channel or network channel, and then you may protect them (as all you exchange is "data").
Anyone care to tell me if this has a flaw in it? And if so, what?
That's the real purpose of the D30. "Attention Getter" would be another name.
As someone else pointed out, this might be considered a feature by the Kazaa crowd.
It does add network content.
Note, I do agree with you though. It should be something that the UI makes more explicit and defaults should be secure rather than unsecure to the extent possible.
Saying "you deserve it" is like saying "you should understand all the details of the lawyerese in any EULA before using the software". Who really does? Damn few. Even most technical people just click thru them because the choice is use the program (which might provide some key capability) or sit and spin. Does that make hiding nasty stuff in the EULA a good business practice or above board behaviour? I think not.
Possibly. It was GMontag's post's that caught my eye. I replied to this one, perhaps there was a more appropriate one... happens when you get old and senile.... (though I don't have that excuse)
Even though it is OT. :)
It'd be nice if people could recognize fringe thinking and radical groups as distinct from the main body of the people in a given area. This kind of muddy thinking could have everyone thinking that anyone from Arkansas in inbred, anyone from the Midwest is some sort of pseudo-skinhead militia nut, or that anyone from the American South must believe in Slavery. Or that all Canadians are polite.
The truth is: Generalizations suck. They are automatically problematic when used to describe humans. And when you start treating everyone who has the same facial geometry and skin tone the same (shades of the bad old days long, we had hoped, gone by), you automatically start tossing out the baby with the bathwater, the bad with the good. You do a disservice to a lot of innocent, hard working folks and at the same time you probably focus on one threat vector or problem group and in so doing make it more liely you'll miss others.
One approach would follow the logic above. If life tends to process waste of other life activity in a closed system, and we've now got non-degradable outputs (in any reasonable time), then maybe we need to break out the genevats and cook up some life to turn the non-degradable outputs into something useful again.
And before anyone rants on, I'm aware of the "we don't know what we're doing" theory of genetics... which is at least partially true... today. But this might well be a worthwhile avenue of approach (ref: using microbes in nuclear disaster and oil disaster cleanup as an example). Maybe in the long run, we can make something that _likes_ polyester (unlike the rest of the universe).
This is kind of a dumb debate. Mainly because people already have entrenched views and it boils down to "duz too!" and "duz not!".
For the record: Most countries spy. However, if a people sanction spying by their country on others and accept that their government has a right to do so (ie they as the people should not be stopping their government from doing it), they can scarcely take the moral high ground when it is done in return to them or when their allies (not enemies I say!) discover they are being spied on and become rather upset.
It's one thing to spy quietly and mostly innocuously and try very hard not to let anyone in your country or anywhere else know you are doing it. It is another thing to publicly make available the fact you are setting out to violate other countries' private communications. Especially when some of those countries are: military allies, political allies, and long standing trade partners.
I think the simple rule here is: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And if you happen to think the fact that America owns an extremely temporary (from a historical perspective) hegemony in technology and military force over most of the world and that somehow confers a right to use such power as a club to forward its own agenda and that this is morally correct behaviour, then you should be equally happy when someone one day returns the favour.
I don't really care what side of this fence anyone is on, but it does piss me off when they try to occupy both sides (spying while decrying same, invading and bombing other sovereign nations and supporting death squads and covert ops in other nations while decrying same).
Another phrase comes to mind: Sew the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Ask yourself which was more useful to the Navy: Someone who served honourably once and is retired (thus a ship could be named after him) or someone who fostered whopping huge arms procurement appropriations? One is useful to a Navy (good sailors are worth having), the other is imperative (a whopping whack of good tech is vital). So don't think that naming things "Ronald Reagan" or after any other military-spending president is a bad choice for the service. They know who got them the goodies.
I recall a (Kingston Ont? based??) company called Haventree who made a flow charting utility called EasyFlow. I recall the manual featured the usual antipiracy copyright spiel, but livened up by threats to send "the Haventree Attack Shark" after you if you violated the terms. Far more entertaining (and probably not too far from a good description of lawyers) than most.
Something like some Dilbert, BOFH, or similar cartoons sprinkled around the manual, or having Dave Barry translate some of the sections would make most manuals far more interesting to read.
Mind you, explaining switches for commands can be about as interesting as pulling your own toenails out with pliers slowly... I really don't see how anyone could remedy that... but broader descriptive texts could easily be spiced up.
Of course, for every one of us that would enjoy some visual cartoon embedding, or little word plays or humorous asides in the text, someone else would complain about buying a manual and getting all this "extra crap" and then some other gene pool shallow-ender would sue... "I followed the instruction that said to reboot the computer using a size 12 hiking boot, your honour. Clearly the company provided a destructive procedure!"...
Interestingly, you could then wire it to installed software which "reset" it automatically when you logged into a system (sending something encrypted with your personal PGP or GPG key or something like that). Thus the resetting does not have to be as onerous as getting regular e-mail. Just "doing business". The only time you'd have a problem is if you went outside of access unexpectedly for more than (some threshold) number of days.
;)
Even then, a hosted service could use a war dialer to call up your contact numbers and verify your lack of contactability (hence possible demise) before undertaking the "in case of death" instructions.
These would mostly be notifications of the "we can't find X and our service is setup to notify people of X's possible demise... but we cannot confirm his demise, just his lack of contactability over (some period)." This is better than saying "If you read this, I am dead."
A managed service like this could be called something like the OmegaOption(c.2002 me) and be a service usable by individuals and corporations providing various service levels depending on how much you wanted to spend (from auto mail outs to more complex legal arrangements and multiple verification levels).
Damn! If only it were 2 years ago, this weak (but possibly maybe sometime valuable) business idea could have launched 100M in VC funding and a flurry of exciting reviews in trade periodicals!
Story of my life, good idea, wrong time...
I suspect you are right, principally because most of us don't talk all day. Even most radio announcers don't. And the semantics of most programming languages don't make them fluid in translation to speech.... I mean who really wants to say "command spell P-R-I-N-T-L-N end open parenthisis open quote hello world close quote close parenthisis semicolon".....
However, for a lot of application like letter dictation, splitting the work between voice and hands, and voice command for those with no hands option, the stuff is pretty neat.
If I show on 20 screens with 10 seats each or 1 megatheatre with 343 seats, which gives more opportunity for people to see it? (The answer is: it depends... one option offers more show times and can be better distributed, the other offers more raw seating potential).
Statistics is such a wonderful art of deception (intentional and otherwise)....
Nope. I don't (barring some insanely fast networking) believe you can reasonably batch out collision detection. In fact, most systems feature some amount of this on the client as well as the server, though the server tends to be authoritative.
However, there are a larger number of things (like doing little chunks of the associated ecommerce and marketing work that we'll see a lot more of from the big ubercorps as they wade into this realm eventually) that aren't "hard real time" concerns. Most worlds have a number of housekeeping processes and NPC decision making.... depending on the setup, this may be (to an extent) a distributable process.
The trick in distributed processing is being able to break down the execution into small segments and control dependence on other segments and on external data. This is no mean feat. I'm not saying this is an easy challenge, I just believe that as you head for a MMORPG where NPCs have memory, behave like real people, do real people things, and you have a world that models on-going physical processes, and a whole economic underpinning to the world, a lot of the calculations attached to some of these non-real-time or soft-real-time tasks could be parcelled out (perhaps).
It's certainly worth investigating and pursuing. Just going "Humbug, can't be done!" is the mark of a short sighted (and often wrong) mindset. How many key developments in our world have come from people who took an assumption about what couldn't be done and said... "why not?" or "I bet I can make that work!".
Not really. You have ToS. There *is* a point to such documents. Some may feel "I paid my money, I can mount whatever attack on your system integrity I want" or "I have a good given right to reverse engineer" or "I live to hack". That's too bad, so sad, goodbye.
;)
Any MMORPG that is to be a workable on-going community has to make at least an effort (and no system is fool proof nor any idiot proof) to deal with malicious vandals, script kiddies, cheaters, and the mythic black-hat e-commerce hacker.
If you don't deal with the more common of these threats, you end up with an inviable community. I think we've seen several examples in the last few years have we not?
If you take an account with a company, the company agrees to provide a service (which you agree to use in the prescribed manner) for a fee. If you start taking a swing at the data integrity, start doing DoS or engange in other probing and general hijinx, if they are satisified that it is you, they can refund you the balance of any money and evict you. You have no God-given right to be on their system and in the end this defends the community.
I agree there are risks in such policies (false positives). However, there is a very clear risk in not mounting an active defense. No protocol can be entirely secure (witness N varieties of bot and other hacks). But anyone found rapidly advancing or whose character mysteriously jumps stats/etc (this can be tracked with some data mining) becomes a good candidate for scrutiny.
I can't and won't go into proprietary matters related to how this is implemented nor will I suggest any system is foolproof, but the next few generations of MMORPGs will continue to offer better and more complete security and tighter communities, and in the long run, distributed processing of some form (dunno what it will look like - if I did, I'd invest accordingly and make a mint!) will probably appear on the scene in most worlds... it is one of the only sensible scaling ideas (given a lot of gamers have zippy PCs at home just waiting to help out!).
Heck, you don't have to believe me. I'll let developments vindicate me...
This opinion is worth what you paid for it.... every cent...
In case you're wondering, it's an Indonesian art called Pentjak Silat, and the exercises involve sticks (I also take Jujitsu, which does have some wrist stretching, though Aikido would do more).
As a former (and hopefully soon again) Aikidoka, I can say that wrist stretching is certainly a core discipline, otherwise kotagaeshi and other wrist related takedowns and pins would be damaging. I think the stretching excercises (especially the yonko stretch) would be of great use to add flexibility and limberness to the wrists. I assume most other joint lock arts (Aikijitsu, Jujitsu, Taijutsu, possibly Judo) would teach similar stretches. And I think they do wrist stretches in escrima/arnis also (Phillipine).
One thing to keep in mind: Mild stretching is likely to make you more limber and give you a better chance to avoid injury and strains. Serious workouts can stress your joints though (either through stretching or technique) and you notice this more if you then end up at work the next day in front of a computer for 8-14 hours. So try to keep that in the back of your mind while working out.
PS - Idiotic manouvers like shoulder rolling on concrete might end up separating a shoulder...
I switched from a standard QWERTY to an old-style MS-keyboard (which has now outlived three or four large project lifecycles and is underhand at this instant) and the difference was immense. It probably has a lot to do with body geometry. I have short arms and the QWERTY put a sharp kink in my wrists. I'd go numb playing FPS or doing long coding stretches. By elevating the back of the keyboard, dropping the front, and getting rid of the damn crick in the wrist due to the split and angled keypad, all of a sudden I stopped hurting. So, they are clearly NOT worthless to some of us in some situations.
./er too.... she hunted me up by my sig from the other side of hte country when I posted something... ;) ...and this is an entirely unsolicited testimonial, but I think they're great folks and do good things to help people who are really suffering and those who want to avoid suffering.
OTOH, I have a friend and her husband who both had pretty crippling RSI and as a consequence could not work for a while. This caused great stress. And then, like the survivor she is, she turned it into a business!
She became an expert (and I think a VAR or something) for Dragon and now helps people with extreme RSI, other handicaps, etc. setup voice command software systems. And the new generation are pretty damn impressive. Everyone from authors who just want to dictate to their systems, to medical and legal secretaries, to government offices looking to avoid future suits related to this kind of injury should take a visit to their website here and think about it.
I used some of the first gen speech reco/voice command stuff and you used to have to train it galore, always had a crappy mike, and it still performed badly. The new stuff without much training is pretty good, with a good mike and a little bit more training verges on awesome. I watched her sitting across the room from her laptop whacking out a story using MS-Word via voice command... pretty kewl beans!
Visit this link to find out a bit more about RSI and some ways to treat it, prevent it, etc.
And I know my lady pal is a
Hmmm. Allow me to question that assertion. I believe a significant number of things are done server side for the aforementioned security reasons. Also, since most of the world is still on 56kbps or less, you can bet there is a whole whack of things that go on related to filtering what data gets to each end user. Things like collision detection, cell boundary crossing, etc. and a lot of other processes work on the server end in many cases.
:)
The world servers can support hundreds or even thousands of players, although hundreds is a far more common real number. The number supported depends on what the game is. If it is using an EQ style of non-FPS combat, the number supported can go way up. If you're running a MMORPG with FPS combat, things aren't so simple at all.
But as the activities and options for role play and for realistic development of the world and for more advanced AI behaviour appear, more work must be done. If this kind of work can be exported to distributed processing models, then it will be far easier to provide a large scale immersive reality.
But you don't have to believe me. I only work on these things for a living...
You can certainly offload a fair amount of background processing, and in big enough world clusters, you can ensure the systems getting funneled data don't get stuff anywhere near them. Also, you can probably arrange redundant operations and do some comparisons on results. If they don't tally, you don't use them.
Anyone who thinks this type of thing is impossible is probably wrong. The question is only if it is possible to do know and worthwhile to explore.
Well, yes, if you offloaded anything relevant to that character. If you offload background processing for some NPCs on the other side of the game world, or the same for PCs on the other side of the game world, the risks are lower. And anytime I found a cracker playing around, I'd can his user ID and he'd be SOL for world access until he paid for a new account.
Yeah, and who handed me this character with moderate Int, decent Edu, but abysmal Str, Dex, and End and a very questionable Soc? In many campaigns, I'm sure he'd be "DAB" (Dead At Birth). But in this one, you have to play your hand or quit the game.
And some of the skills you get are pretty un-useful in the adventuring world: CompleteTaxes-1, ObscureComputerProtocols-3, RPGLore-2, FigurePainting-1, ComputerHacking-3, UselessArtsCourse-2, DoLaundry-2, etc.
Still, at least the game if fun sometimes and you don't tend to take damage too often. If you do though, healing tech just isn't as good as one could wish...
You must have been in my Engineering Algebra course... ;)
We all know the correct response to the cloak of Cholesky is the sword of Eigen following by the spell of n-spacial translation.
In n-space, no one can hear you fail the course...