Actually from the "newsworthy" aspect of things their project is going to have more impact than you might have thought. It's not just another distributed computing project, their client is a trojan that opens a backdoor on your system. Watch for the update / followup story...
I LOVE how the client installer creates an enigma-client user! Not only that the installer batchfile gives the enigma-client user a default password.... I wonder just how many slashdotters computers have a gaping backhole at the moment?
I'll stick to DartMUD because I've played with its skillsystem more and am considerably more familiar with it. First, doing things quickly is more difficult than doing things slowly and deliberately. This is represented by the generic "Concentration" stat which governs your actions. Conc is burnt with every action you perform and regens very quickly. Mounting an animal, climbing a wall, casting a spell all burn conc. In combat the speed at which you are attacking (and the speed your opponent is attacking at) affect your conc as well -- attacking with two swords at a high speed burns conc quickly. Parrying with a shield/sword combination and foregoing attacks should let you catch your breath.
So the speed you're going has a rather large impact. Are you walking the animal with frequent restbreaks or are you galloping along as fast as you can? Terrain is going to add a major modifier as well. In town, along a road is going to be a lot easier than out of town crossing the mountains. Hills and plains will be somewhere in between and swimming the horse (mounted) across a river is going to be a real challenge.
Next up your size and stats compared to that of an animal. A gnome attempting to mount a wild elephant is going to find the gnome flying through the air and making a check against their acrobatics skill (with a conc penalty for their very recently attempted action of mounting the animal) to determine how they land -- there'd be a very real chance of it being fatal. A human character on a well-tamed mare is going to have a much easier time of it.
Oh, yes. Taming your mounts. An untamed horse such as you might find on the planes is going to be much harder to ride than a horse which has already been broken. Breaking an animal is a moderately difficult task -- and will likely have you bucked off the animal's back several times while you try it. Stallions are less docile than geldings and mares...
Other factors? Mmm... Well, there's weight -- Mounting an animal in full armor is going to be tricky. Probably wise to go hang it up somewhere while you're getting started. Your nightvision stat vs the brightness of the room (although, really, if you can't see you'll be unlikely to be trying to ride anyways). There are probably a few I'm forgetting and some that I don't know about.
Riiight... Of course it makes absolutely no sense for my horsemanship skill to be based on something silly like how long I spend on a horse. It's clearly a better game mechanic to have the number of giant spiders I've cut up determine my ability to remain mounted.
And, for what it's worth both of the systems I pointed out have the difficulty of the task you're performing with a skill feed into the equation on if you get an improve or not. Too easy or too hard and you don't stand a chance of getting better. So instead of walking the horse up and down the road you need to go out and gallop along the edge of a cliff.
Because unless you're a karma whore you don't care about a downmod and the moderation system is in place to help people who browse at a higher threshold not see Troll/Offtopic/Duplicate/Etc posts.
Hey, bozo, read the post I was responding to and it becomes clear that my post was answering the question "Whether you call it EXP or SP, what's the difference?"... As such I'd like to ask you to keep your "Because it's simple." drivel to yourself.
The difference between an XP and SP based game is that SP-based systems tend to offer increases on the skills you use (DartMud and the Discwold mud are the best examples of this I've encountered online) whereas an XP game yields silly "Well, I just killed my hundredth rat, so now I am more healthy, can speak a new language, and play the oboe."
But the existing games don't have "good quests" as you define it (ie: those that would require work to script). LPMUDs aside the most advanced quest I've seen in an MMORPG had you talk to a guy (after fulfilling a number of get-the-items and talk-to-bob tasks) who turned around and attacked you (with two of his buddies who'd been 'hiding in shadows')..
I mean hell, D20 still has rules to let players roll their stats randomly. That's the ultimate anachronism.
Damn. I liked that too. "Why does your mage have moderately high strength and health?" "Oh... He worked as a page in the university of magic library -- hauling all of those leatherbound tomes to their shelves..." or whatever. Random stats gave a character... Well, character.
*shrug* Like I said above it was just an aside to the person I was responding to. If you look at my post the [sic] wasn't even related to my argument (which is to say I didn't write it as "Dumbshit, you can't spell") my [sic]ing was completely tangent to the point I was trying to make. That said I can't see how it would be seen as arrogant by any reasonable observer.
*shrug* I corrected a spelling error/typo which I saw "en passant<sp>" while I was discussing the actual logic and/or facts he presented. While I was adding to the discussion I made an aside to the poster that he might want to check his spelling on a word.
If I'd been a spelling nazi like you and just replied to the comment with something like "HA-HA FUCKTARD IT'S NOT SPELLED definately MORON" the way you did then I could understand someone fucking with me over a spelling error... But damn, yo.. I was _talking_ to the dude about what he said, not just dicking about spelling.
While you are right that the big box stores do adjust their pricing to make up for the loss, a lot of that money you're foolish to think that they're not watching you. True, they're not interested in "deterrance [sic]" -- but they are definately interested in stopping thieves (and that knowledge is certainly a deterrent to some, I'm sure).
The fact is that a candy bar or an iPod doesn't impact them all that much. But even those add up fast. But the real damage comes from people who find a decent grift and work it well. That can add up to a serious pile of money fast -- doubly bad if their scam takes money out of the registers and into the pockets of the naughty boys.
Personally, I would have gone for a less blatant discount, or refrained from visiting the same store so soon afterwards.
Personally I wouldn't try this at Target at all, mostly because I've seen how the Loss Prevention staff at Target work. My father worked for Target in Loss Prevention and as a company they take it very seriously. I got a chance to go into the security booth and see how it works at Target and... Wow. I went in and looked at all the monitors and said "That's a lot of cameras..." and the guy who was in there laughed and said, "no... This is a lot of cameras" -- and put the entire left-bank of monitors (the control room is rigged for two operators) on sequential scan.
Excepting the interiors of the dressing rooms and restrooms the whole store is pretty much perfectly covered. This was back in '94 when I was in there and my dad was showing me just how cool their shiz was. They had a system which would track a person through the store, switching the monitor from camera to camera to keep them covered. It wasn't perfect, you needed to get them so they were the only moving object in the frame and if they encountered a other people it would pop up the camera numbers for the areas they could go to from there around the borders of the screen. It was confusing to watch because as it shifted from camera to camera 'left' would become 'right' or 'up' but...
The cashiers are watched like -- every cashier has a camera on them, and every scan they make pops up the item number and price. When a card is swiped the card number pops up too. If the same card is used within a given period of time it automatically pops up onto the "suspicious activity" monitor.
The detail view on cashiers was really quite interesting - a series of bar graphs showed how high above/below the averages they were for credit vs cash , store credit vs external credit, dollar amount of sale, and several other indicators. My dad was telling me that because real shoplifting was relatively low cost compared to a clerk participating in a scam they put a lot more effort into finding the crooked clerks.
I'm really sorry that you never had a healthy relationship for you to pattern your own relationships after. First, let me say that when I said "Normal couples don't fight" I didn't mean "Normal couples NEVER fight" more that "Normal couples don't normally fight all the time" like you and your wife do...
Or are you just the kind of person who does exaclty as you're told
So in your understanding a relationship consists of doing what you're told or you have to get in a fight? And somehow hitting walls factors into that?
Riiiight.... You have such a complete lack of self-control that you punch walls and you think that Halo 2 is the cause of your problems...
Try a little bit of introspection and seek a little bit of insight. I'll give you a hint: normal couples don't fight -- even if your parents did. Hitting walls or breaking glasses is not normal, healthy behavior -- even if your parents did.
I think you're thinking about the Republic of Cascadia and no, we do not currently count Alaska as being within our borders. I will say that this sasquatchian would not be adverse to a petition from the Alaskan peoples to rally under our banner.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually from the "newsworthy" aspect of things their project is going to have more impact than you might have thought. It's not just another distributed computing project, their client is a trojan that opens a backdoor on your system. Watch for the update / followup story...
I LOVE how the client installer creates an enigma-client user! Not only that the installer batchfile gives the enigma-client user a default password.... I wonder just how many slashdotters computers have a gaping backhole at the moment?
Excellent film, worth putting in your queue. Pretty intense though.
Hint: the quote was from the movie Trainspotting with WoW replacing junk...
Which books? I remember the Citizen/Adept stuff, but don't see any connection to MMOing there.
...if you collect six of them you can turn them in for a free taco!
Give it a blog and we'll have a shitload of angsty emo-bots on our hands.
Inform them. Call your congresscritter. Write letters. Oppose something? Put it in your slashdot sig and ask people to call their reps as well.
w7com de ke7ewx. Been trying to raise you on 2m for a while, but it seems we're never listening at the same time. 73!
So the speed you're going has a rather large impact. Are you walking the animal with frequent restbreaks or are you galloping along as fast as you can? Terrain is going to add a major modifier as well. In town, along a road is going to be a lot easier than out of town crossing the mountains. Hills and plains will be somewhere in between and swimming the horse (mounted) across a river is going to be a real challenge.
Next up your size and stats compared to that of an animal. A gnome attempting to mount a wild elephant is going to find the gnome flying through the air and making a check against their acrobatics skill (with a conc penalty for their very recently attempted action of mounting the animal) to determine how they land -- there'd be a very real chance of it being fatal. A human character on a well-tamed mare is going to have a much easier time of it.
Oh, yes. Taming your mounts. An untamed horse such as you might find on the planes is going to be much harder to ride than a horse which has already been broken. Breaking an animal is a moderately difficult task -- and will likely have you bucked off the animal's back several times while you try it. Stallions are less docile than geldings and mares...
Other factors? Mmm... Well, there's weight -- Mounting an animal in full armor is going to be tricky. Probably wise to go hang it up somewhere while you're getting started. Your nightvision stat vs the brightness of the room (although, really, if you can't see you'll be unlikely to be trying to ride anyways). There are probably a few I'm forgetting and some that I don't know about.
And, for what it's worth both of the systems I pointed out have the difficulty of the task you're performing with a skill feed into the equation on if you get an improve or not. Too easy or too hard and you don't stand a chance of getting better. So instead of walking the horse up and down the road you need to go out and gallop along the edge of a cliff.
Because unless you're a karma whore you don't care about a downmod and the moderation system is in place to help people who browse at a higher threshold not see Troll/Offtopic/Duplicate/Etc posts.
The difference between an XP and SP based game is that SP-based systems tend to offer increases on the skills you use (DartMud and the Discwold mud are the best examples of this I've encountered online) whereas an XP game yields silly "Well, I just killed my hundredth rat, so now I am more healthy, can speak a new language, and play the oboe."
But the existing games don't have "good quests" as you define it (ie: those that would require work to script). LPMUDs aside the most advanced quest I've seen in an MMORPG had you talk to a guy (after fulfilling a number of get-the-items and talk-to-bob tasks) who turned around and attacked you (with two of his buddies who'd been 'hiding in shadows') ..
...but why should swinging a sword at sewer rats allow me to gain mastery of the orcish language as in the 2nd edition AD&D rules?
Damn. I liked that too. "Why does your mage have moderately high strength and health?" "Oh... He worked as a page in the university of magic library -- hauling all of those leatherbound tomes to their shelves..." or whatever. Random stats gave a character... Well, character.
*shrug* Like I said above it was just an aside to the person I was responding to. If you look at my post the [sic] wasn't even related to my argument (which is to say I didn't write it as "Dumbshit, you can't spell") my [sic]ing was completely tangent to the point I was trying to make. That said I can't see how it would be seen as arrogant by any reasonable observer.
*shrug* I corrected a spelling error/typo which I saw "en passant<sp>" while I was discussing the actual logic and/or facts he presented. While I was adding to the discussion I made an aside to the poster that he might want to check his spelling on a word.
If I'd been a spelling nazi like you and just replied to the comment with something like "HA-HA FUCKTARD IT'S NOT SPELLED definately MORON" the way you did then I could understand someone fucking with me over a spelling error... But damn, yo.. I was _talking_ to the dude about what he said, not just dicking about spelling.
The fact is that a candy bar or an iPod doesn't impact them all that much. But even those add up fast. But the real damage comes from people who find a decent grift and work it well. That can add up to a serious pile of money fast -- doubly bad if their scam takes money out of the registers and into the pockets of the naughty boys.
Personally I wouldn't try this at Target at all, mostly because I've seen how the Loss Prevention staff at Target work. My father worked for Target in Loss Prevention and as a company they take it very seriously. I got a chance to go into the security booth and see how it works at Target and... Wow. I went in and looked at all the monitors and said "That's a lot of cameras..." and the guy who was in there laughed and said, "no... This is a lot of cameras" -- and put the entire left-bank of monitors (the control room is rigged for two operators) on sequential scan.
Excepting the interiors of the dressing rooms and restrooms the whole store is pretty much perfectly covered. This was back in '94 when I was in there and my dad was showing me just how cool their shiz was. They had a system which would track a person through the store, switching the monitor from camera to camera to keep them covered. It wasn't perfect, you needed to get them so they were the only moving object in the frame and if they encountered a other people it would pop up the camera numbers for the areas they could go to from there around the borders of the screen. It was confusing to watch because as it shifted from camera to camera 'left' would become 'right' or 'up' but...
The cashiers are watched like -- every cashier has a camera on them, and every scan they make pops up the item number and price. When a card is swiped the card number pops up too. If the same card is used within a given period of time it automatically pops up onto the "suspicious activity" monitor.
The detail view on cashiers was really quite interesting - a series of bar graphs showed how high above/below the averages they were for credit vs cash , store credit vs external credit, dollar amount of sale, and several other indicators. My dad was telling me that because real shoplifting was relatively low cost compared to a clerk participating in a scam they put a lot more effort into finding the crooked clerks.
We look for things that make us go.
Or are you just the kind of person who does exaclty as you're told
So in your understanding a relationship consists of doing what you're told or you have to get in a fight? And somehow hitting walls factors into that?
Try a little bit of introspection and seek a little bit of insight. I'll give you a hint: normal couples don't fight -- even if your parents did. Hitting walls or breaking glasses is not normal, healthy behavior -- even if your parents did.
Nitendo Wives? It'd never happen. Nintendo had no rumble pack back in the day...
I think you're thinking about the Republic of Cascadia and no, we do not currently count Alaska as being within our borders. I will say that this sasquatchian would not be adverse to a petition from the Alaskan peoples to rally under our banner.