It makes me feel like I'm still programming in the 1980s. It's old and ugly. It's not a required "look", it's just an ancient custom. The compiler works just fine without underbars in names.
Looks like C# from a few years ago. Honestly, it's really good that they're moving C++ forward, it's been lacking these features when other languages have embraced them for some time. I see they still use a plethora of ugly ass underbars, though.
Yeah, I know you're trolling, but C# is a good language. I've coded millions of lines in C, C++, and C# and I can tell you which I'd rather code in any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Combined with VS, you simply get. stuff. done. very quickly and very easily.
1. "Access" a lot of music 2. Use Matching to get iTunes versions of it 3. Delete original set of music 4. RIAA has to prove that your music files aren't legit.
Useful:
I ripped those CDs and the original CD was a) destroyed b) stolen c) thrown into the sun by Superman d) all of the above and no, I don't have receipts for them because I threw the receipts away and paid in cash so no credit card records.
You should check out Pwn2Own. I wonder why Apple products are the ones in the crosshairs all the time. You also might want to read non-Apple published news so you can actually see what exploits there have been and any new ones that come down the pipe.
You might do well to remember this old poem... because, you know... well... I forget, but it's something about repeating;) Ignore these draconian policies at your own peril... Jobs has been known to be extremely fickle and a temper tantrum throwing child. Right now it isn't something you care about but one day it may be.
THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
THEN THEY CAME for me and by that time no one was left to speak up."
You must use the services to "multitask" or run things in the background or have 'threads'.
So, if your app doesn't use the services to multitask, it has no threads, it isn't multitasking, and it doesn't know anything about a "background".
It will not waste any battery by running poorly in the background because the app doesn't use the services so it isn't multitasking, it has no threads, and there is no such thing as a "background for it".
It will not use the processor excessively by running poorly in the background because the app doesn't use the services so it isn't multitasking, it has no threads, and there is no such thing for a "background" for it to be using the processor in.
Your "native apps being profiled by the build tools and such" makes no sense at all. Once the code is compiled (regardless of language), it is an ARM executable binary. It suspends itself when the OS gives it a message telling it to suspend itself by serializing its state and then the OS pauses the process. How each app serializes its state is entirely up to it. It can even ignore the message if it wants, it just will have to start up anew the next time it is 'resumed' since it didn't save what it was doing before. If you notice, not once in this paragraph did I mention anything about what language an app was written in because it *does not matter*. All of those things happen and will happen regardless of what language a developer chooses to write the app in. Except that Apple is declaring that it has to be written in C/C++/Obj-C.
Given that, however, people who need to write hand-optimized ARM assembly cannot do so since it isn't on the blessed list. Sometimes game writers (and other programs where every clock cycle counts) need to do that.
That's the problem... tons of non-technical people (and Apple fans) will just take whatever Jobs tells them as gospel without checking up on the facts or anything.
What about all of the non-OS4 apps that are written? They've never used those APIs. So, are they all suddenly going to perform very badly with regard to battery drain? Since they aren't "multitasking", I'm guessing that would be a "no"... since they have to actually, you know, use the new APIs to actually multitask (or not, if they don't want to participate in that). The "pausing" is because the app receives a message from the OS and then the app can elect to ignore it (as will all pre-OS4 apps because, again, they weren't written to acknowledge those messages) or to save its state. If it doesn't save its state then it doesn't 'pause', it just starts over from initial run. If it does save its state, then it has paused and can pick up where it left off when it gets another (new) message to resume.
The cross compiled stuff is also used to throw off non-technical people. As long as the executable program output by the compiler uses the correct methodology, code in it can be linked to the system libraries to perform the tasks exactly as the Obj-C or whatever ones can. If it didn't make the executable right it wouldn't run correctly anyway. Here's something that is disallowed with this thing... I could write an Obj-C routine that does everything perfectly with respect to the new APIs and all that, but if that Obj-C routine then calls something that was written in another language, somehow it suddenly breaks stuff? It simply doesn't happen that way. As long as the compiler is doing its job properly (and they tend to do that), there's no way the OS could tell what language the application was written in. That's why they are APIs... that stands for Application Programming Interface... Interface being a key word... it's how you interface to the libraries. You have to interface to them correctly or all bets are off in the first place. Choice of language is otherwise completely irrelevant as long as it *interfaces* correctly.
Also, applications being written in C/C++/Obj-C have absolutely zero guarantee that they'll meet the requirments. They could have poor battery usage, poor UIs, etc. just like any other app written in any other language. In fact, there are tons of apps in the AppStore that were written in the "blessed languages" that are crappy. If Apple wanted to make sure things conformed to a stricter UI guideline and such, then they could start by actually, you know, putting stricter UI requirements in place and rejecting the ones that don't measure up *regardless* of language it was written in. However, this is clearly not the purpose of the disclosed requirements.
There has been nothing that Apple or any Apple fan defending Apple has said that holds up to logic. The *only* goals of this are: to make cross-platform development as difficult as possible (thus making developers who originally saved time/money by using cross-development tools have to make a choice of whether to support the iPhone or support another mobile platform... and having two code bases is more than 2x the work and cost so it may be too expensive for some developers to do... thus making them choose which to do), and to hurt Adobe (because Jobs is throwing another temper tantrum), Google (because Droid is dangerous to Apple), and Microsoft (who might someday have a product worthy of competition in that market). This is anticompetitive behavior in its purist form.
Except that you can be useful from day 1. All you need is a frigate and a warp disruptor or warp scrambler to be useful in a fleet fight and you can do that from just about character creation time. EQ/WOW (traditional MMOs) have trained its players into the mindset that you aren't useful until you're maximum level the game allows (raids, etc.). EVE isn't like other MMOs and it's difficult for some players to adjust.
This is what I was thinking... the fact that the OP suggests Python over Fortran shows that he/she has no clue as to why Fortran is still used in preference over numerous other languages. When you have simulations that have runtimes on the order of *weeks* when written in Fortran... how long do you think they'd take when written in Python? Months? It's all about time to results. And why Fortran is better than machine/assembler is that it's portable and higher level and easier to debug.
The euthenasia of this massive organization will breathe new life into the game, but it may also drive a large number of these people who were screwed out of the game, making a huge dent in the userbase.
You get a gold star!;) Seriously... you 'get' it. Yes... BoB controlled a very large, very rich, area of the game universe. This activity has made a huge 'hole' in space... the richest part of space. Before, all of claimable space had been claimed and had become fairly stable. This 'hole' has opened up a very rich region for land grabbing and the like... and with that, there will be squabbles, fights, and all sorts of new fun!
There will probably be a few who quit over this, true, but I doubt many will... life in EVE is like that... BoB has a bunch of very dedicated and extremely skilled players in it... I'm betting they will regroup and try to take back their space... which will stir up all kinds of drama in itself.
EVE lives for drama. The game *IS* made by the players. 99% of the game content is made by the players... who is fighting who? what regions are 'hot'? who just screwed over someone else? The leader of BoB said, and it was true, that BoB has been providing the game with content since they formed and first took space. Missions and all the PVE stuff is just the ISK printing press to fund the "real" part of the game by supplying money to players to buy stuff. The production (crafting) part of EVE is massive and an integral part of the game. If you're flying a ship, it was made by a player (and you're always flying a ship). If you fit tech2 equipment onto your ship, it was made by a player. And yeah, you have to have miners to get minerals, people to tend moon stations to harvest 'rare' minerals, and someone to take all those things and manufacture stuff.
There's really no other game with the complexity and depth of EVE.
The logistics of running a 00 corp/alliance have no comparison to other MMOs. As you said... simply slapping up a homepage and running a raid a night is trivial. Try keeping POSs fueled, minerals/materials moving around to where they need to go to build stuff, defense of your territory, any offensive maneuvers you happen to be involved in, etc... Alliances in EVE (the big ones) are many thousands of players, too... imagine a WoW guild of 3000+ people... heh... are there even that many people on a single WoW server?
The whole bit about climate change is that it's changing in ways that make humans unhappy. I believe life will go on (for something). In the worst case, humans will have just eliminated themselves. The planet will likely correct itself eventually. I don't think we're anywhere near what happened on Venus, we'd all be dead before things get to that level, I believe, and the processes heating us up will stop and eventually be corrected. In a few million years, maybe there will be another intelligent species here. Let's start preserving stuff in amber for them:)
Good point. It's possible that the mounting hardware can mitigate that or that mounting hardware can be made that can mitigate it. I doubt Steve envisioned the iTouch/iPhone having to be rugged enough to survive many recoil shocks during its lifetime. I wonder if you can get it replaced at the AppleStore when it does and what kind of excuse you'd have to use to slip it past the 'Geniuses'.;)
Hunting for the average hunter, no so much I'd imagine. Most hunters shouldn't be firing at targets past the MPBR of their rifle to begin with for ethical kills (much past that and you start getting into issues of hitting non-lethal areas), of course, that won't stop most from taking the shot anyway.
Plus, you have to hope the game sits still (or at least the same range) long enough for you to get the range readings, interface with the program, adjust your scope, and take the shot. I don't know how long that will take... but it's a minor issue because if the game is grazing, it won't be moving too much from your range reading.
No... there are other ways. For example: You can achieve it through backwards compatibility (Windows XP can run 16-bit applications), through emulation (there are emulators for Apple][, C64, Atari ST, Amiga, Nintendo, etc.), and you can make something like WINE.
It can be... if that's how you want to play it:) For me, it's just nice to know that I don't have to log in every day to get on the treadmill like most other games are/were (EQ, WoW, etc.). I don't sweat not logging in for days at a time... I play when I want to play (other than keeping track of skill training and spending 2 minutes some days to log in and set a new skill).
It's been happening fairly often as of late (weekly or even more often some weeks) with BoB losing three or four Titans in the past month or so, for example. Also, plenty of people like making stuff, you don't have to grind materials to make your own ships... just get the ISK from somewhere and buy it from someone else. Plus, many corporations supply ships to their members for combat purposes. Even the tiny corp/alliance I'm in supplies frigates/cruisers for free to all members for PVP. The larger ones supply battleships even. And yeah, some of the larger ships are cranked out by the corp/alliance (Titans, Moms).
If you don't like being an industrialist (making the ships, etc.), then don't. Nothing forces you to.
The biggest thing about Eve that people I've talked to don't like is that they can't 'fly their ship'. Eve is not a space flight simulator.
The biggest thing about Eve that no other game has is that the vast majority of the 'game' is player generated content, in effect. Nobody talks about how fun it was last night to grind that Guristas Extravaganza mission for the 1000th time. What they talk about is the 500 vs. 500 fleet battle in some system that resulted in 20 lost capital ships for one side or the other and the winners took sovereignity of the system when the smoke cleared.
Player organizations waging war on each other is the content. However, you can't have all ship pew-pewers to win wars and hold territory. In fact, that's actually a small part of it (time-wise, anyway). You have to have massive logistics and production... all done by players. Those 20 capital ships that were lost? All built by players. They arrived at the battlefield by players both flying them there and other players who have to fly other ships to the destination to open up jump points for the capitals to jump to (fly through enemy space to get there). Those 50 battleships that were lost? All built by players. To build all those things, you have to mine (or buy from someone who did) minerals from asteroids, minerals mined from moons (requires a station to do that), and your systems can only be 'yours' if you have sovereignity, which requires stations that must be set up and defended.
Yeah... Eve is complex. But, there are those of us who like complex games. It's not for everyone and "that's OK".
One thing that's really nice about Eve... I can play heavily for a day or two and then not play at all for a week or even longer and not have any withdrawal or even think about the game if I don't want to. The only thing really requiring a player to log in is if you make money in the game by running missions. If you have an industrialist, you can make money while not logged in (buy materials and sell your player-made goods on the market while you're offline). You also advance your character even when not logged in. So, when I went on vacation for 10 days over the recent holidays, I had zero withdrawal from the game, didn't log in a single time over those holidays, and didn't worry or really even think about the game at all. When I got back, I had more money than when I logged out before my vacation and a new skill almost completed so I had something new and shiny to play with when I logged in next. Plus, stuff that I had set up to build while I was gone was built and ready for me to use/sell.
It doesn't matter what you do, some of the kids will find ways around it. Eventually, I imagine a parent will find their kid surfing porn on the laptop that you gave them and sue your organization, then we'll have another/. story about your efforts.
You have to have the methods in the game to tack this stuff... records have to be kept about the creation of minerals, etc. and then all of that has to be tied together. Sure, you may have records that moon minerals were being created... there's lots of that going on and it's something probably logged. But you have to correlate that with certain stations not using fuel to create these minerals, if such a think is recorded... "station X used Y amount of fuel and created Z amount of minerals" is something that probably isn't logged (but may be soon). Plus, if there's a bug in the code, those messages may be in the log anyway... just wrong. You can notice large amounts of isk moving around from player to player in-game, but how do you correlate *that* 0.12 isk (out of literally many trillions of ISK in the game) entered the game through an exploit? I don't know of any game that's able to tag every unit of in-game money that way.
As the other poster said, Eve's market is huge. Ships, ammo, as well as lots of modules for ships (and lots of other stuff including *all* tech2 items) are made by players. The market is quite large so it's easy to do speculation, provided you have in-game money. The prices of the raw materials for tech2 item production are getting rarer? Well... that's going to mean the prices of tech2 items are likely to increase. So, buy a bunch off the market right now in the hopes that prices will go up and you'll get a nice profit, just for waiting a few weeks.
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It makes me feel like I'm still programming in the 1980s. It's old and ugly. It's not a required "look", it's just an ancient custom. The compiler works just fine without underbars in names.
Looks like C# from a few years ago. Honestly, it's really good that they're moving C++ forward, it's been lacking these features when other languages have embraced them for some time. I see they still use a plethora of ugly ass underbars, though.
Yeah, I know you're trolling, but C# is a good language. I've coded millions of lines in C, C++, and C# and I can tell you which I'd rather code in any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Combined with VS, you simply get. stuff. done. very quickly and very easily.
1. "Access" a lot of music
2. Use Matching to get iTunes versions of it
3. Delete original set of music
4. RIAA has to prove that your music files aren't legit.
Useful:
I ripped those CDs and the original CD was
a) destroyed
b) stolen
c) thrown into the sun by Superman
d) all of the above
and no, I don't have receipts for them because I threw the receipts away and paid in cash so no credit card records.
You should check out Pwn2Own. I wonder why Apple products are the ones in the crosshairs all the time. You also might want to read non-Apple published news so you can actually see what exploits there have been and any new ones that come down the pipe.
You might do well to remember this old poem... because, you know... well... I forget, but it's something about repeating ;) Ignore these draconian policies at your own peril... Jobs has been known to be extremely fickle and a temper tantrum throwing child. Right now it isn't something you care about but one day it may be.
THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."
You must use the services to "multitask" or run things in the background or have 'threads'.
So, if your app doesn't use the services to multitask, it has no threads, it isn't multitasking, and it doesn't know anything about a "background".
It will not waste any battery by running poorly in the background because the app doesn't use the services so it isn't multitasking, it has no threads, and there is no such thing as a "background for it".
It will not use the processor excessively by running poorly in the background because the app doesn't use the services so it isn't multitasking, it has no threads, and there is no such thing for a "background" for it to be using the processor in.
Your "native apps being profiled by the build tools and such" makes no sense at all. Once the code is compiled (regardless of language), it is an ARM executable binary. It suspends itself when the OS gives it a message telling it to suspend itself by serializing its state and then the OS pauses the process. How each app serializes its state is entirely up to it. It can even ignore the message if it wants, it just will have to start up anew the next time it is 'resumed' since it didn't save what it was doing before. If you notice, not once in this paragraph did I mention anything about what language an app was written in because it *does not matter*. All of those things happen and will happen regardless of what language a developer chooses to write the app in. Except that Apple is declaring that it has to be written in C/C++/Obj-C.
Given that, however, people who need to write hand-optimized ARM assembly cannot do so since it isn't on the blessed list. Sometimes game writers (and other programs where every clock cycle counts) need to do that.
That's the problem... tons of non-technical people (and Apple fans) will just take whatever Jobs tells them as gospel without checking up on the facts or anything.
What about all of the non-OS4 apps that are written? They've never used those APIs. So, are they all suddenly going to perform very badly with regard to battery drain? Since they aren't "multitasking", I'm guessing that would be a "no"... since they have to actually, you know, use the new APIs to actually multitask (or not, if they don't want to participate in that). The "pausing" is because the app receives a message from the OS and then the app can elect to ignore it (as will all pre-OS4 apps because, again, they weren't written to acknowledge those messages) or to save its state. If it doesn't save its state then it doesn't 'pause', it just starts over from initial run. If it does save its state, then it has paused and can pick up where it left off when it gets another (new) message to resume.
The cross compiled stuff is also used to throw off non-technical people. As long as the executable program output by the compiler uses the correct methodology, code in it can be linked to the system libraries to perform the tasks exactly as the Obj-C or whatever ones can. If it didn't make the executable right it wouldn't run correctly anyway. Here's something that is disallowed with this thing... I could write an Obj-C routine that does everything perfectly with respect to the new APIs and all that, but if that Obj-C routine then calls something that was written in another language, somehow it suddenly breaks stuff? It simply doesn't happen that way. As long as the compiler is doing its job properly (and they tend to do that), there's no way the OS could tell what language the application was written in. That's why they are APIs... that stands for Application Programming Interface... Interface being a key word... it's how you interface to the libraries. You have to interface to them correctly or all bets are off in the first place. Choice of language is otherwise completely irrelevant as long as it *interfaces* correctly.
Also, applications being written in C/C++/Obj-C have absolutely zero guarantee that they'll meet the requirments. They could have poor battery usage, poor UIs, etc. just like any other app written in any other language. In fact, there are tons of apps in the AppStore that were written in the "blessed languages" that are crappy. If Apple wanted to make sure things conformed to a stricter UI guideline and such, then they could start by actually, you know, putting stricter UI requirements in place and rejecting the ones that don't measure up *regardless* of language it was written in. However, this is clearly not the purpose of the disclosed requirements.
There has been nothing that Apple or any Apple fan defending Apple has said that holds up to logic. The *only* goals of this are: to make cross-platform development as difficult as possible (thus making developers who originally saved time/money by using cross-development tools have to make a choice of whether to support the iPhone or support another mobile platform... and having two code bases is more than 2x the work and cost so it may be too expensive for some developers to do... thus making them choose which to do), and to hurt Adobe (because Jobs is throwing another temper tantrum), Google (because Droid is dangerous to Apple), and Microsoft (who might someday have a product worthy of competition in that market). This is anticompetitive behavior in its purist form.
Except that you can be useful from day 1. All you need is a frigate and a warp disruptor or warp scrambler to be useful in a fleet fight and you can do that from just about character creation time. EQ/WOW (traditional MMOs) have trained its players into the mindset that you aren't useful until you're maximum level the game allows (raids, etc.). EVE isn't like other MMOs and it's difficult for some players to adjust.
Well, just one example... the aliasing rules for pointers passed to subroutines allow for very aggressive optimization by the compiler.
This is what I was thinking... the fact that the OP suggests Python over Fortran shows that he/she has no clue as to why Fortran is still used in preference over numerous other languages. When you have simulations that have runtimes on the order of *weeks* when written in Fortran... how long do you think they'd take when written in Python? Months? It's all about time to results. And why Fortran is better than machine/assembler is that it's portable and higher level and easier to debug.
Well... I meant MMO ;) (Yes, I've played Go as well)
You get a gold star! ;) Seriously... you 'get' it. Yes... BoB controlled a very large, very rich, area of the game universe. This activity has made a huge 'hole' in space... the richest part of space. Before, all of claimable space had been claimed and had become fairly stable. This 'hole' has opened up a very rich region for land grabbing and the like... and with that, there will be squabbles, fights, and all sorts of new fun!
There will probably be a few who quit over this, true, but I doubt many will... life in EVE is like that... BoB has a bunch of very dedicated and extremely skilled players in it... I'm betting they will regroup and try to take back their space... which will stir up all kinds of drama in itself.
EVE lives for drama. The game *IS* made by the players. 99% of the game content is made by the players... who is fighting who? what regions are 'hot'? who just screwed over someone else? The leader of BoB said, and it was true, that BoB has been providing the game with content since they formed and first took space. Missions and all the PVE stuff is just the ISK printing press to fund the "real" part of the game by supplying money to players to buy stuff. The production (crafting) part of EVE is massive and an integral part of the game. If you're flying a ship, it was made by a player (and you're always flying a ship). If you fit tech2 equipment onto your ship, it was made by a player. And yeah, you have to have miners to get minerals, people to tend moon stations to harvest 'rare' minerals, and someone to take all those things and manufacture stuff.
There's really no other game with the complexity and depth of EVE.
The logistics of running a 00 corp/alliance have no comparison to other MMOs. As you said... simply slapping up a homepage and running a raid a night is trivial. Try keeping POSs fueled, minerals/materials moving around to where they need to go to build stuff, defense of your territory, any offensive maneuvers you happen to be involved in, etc... Alliances in EVE (the big ones) are many thousands of players, too... imagine a WoW guild of 3000+ people... heh... are there even that many people on a single WoW server?
Meh... we didn't need that city anyway ;)
The whole bit about climate change is that it's changing in ways that make humans unhappy. I believe life will go on (for something). In the worst case, humans will have just eliminated themselves. The planet will likely correct itself eventually. I don't think we're anywhere near what happened on Venus, we'd all be dead before things get to that level, I believe, and the processes heating us up will stop and eventually be corrected. In a few million years, maybe there will be another intelligent species here. Let's start preserving stuff in amber for them :)
Good point. It's possible that the mounting hardware can mitigate that or that mounting hardware can be made that can mitigate it. I doubt Steve envisioned the iTouch/iPhone having to be rugged enough to survive many recoil shocks during its lifetime. I wonder if you can get it replaced at the AppleStore when it does and what kind of excuse you'd have to use to slip it past the 'Geniuses'. ;)
Hunting for the average hunter, no so much I'd imagine. Most hunters shouldn't be firing at targets past the MPBR of their rifle to begin with for ethical kills (much past that and you start getting into issues of hitting non-lethal areas), of course, that won't stop most from taking the shot anyway.
Plus, you have to hope the game sits still (or at least the same range) long enough for you to get the range readings, interface with the program, adjust your scope, and take the shot. I don't know how long that will take... but it's a minor issue because if the game is grazing, it won't be moving too much from your range reading.
No... there are other ways. For example: You can achieve it through backwards compatibility (Windows XP can run 16-bit applications), through emulation (there are emulators for Apple][, C64, Atari ST, Amiga, Nintendo, etc.), and you can make something like WINE.
It can be... if that's how you want to play it :) For me, it's just nice to know that I don't have to log in every day to get on the treadmill like most other games are/were (EQ, WoW, etc.). I don't sweat not logging in for days at a time... I play when I want to play (other than keeping track of skill training and spending 2 minutes some days to log in and set a new skill).
It's been happening fairly often as of late (weekly or even more often some weeks) with BoB losing three or four Titans in the past month or so, for example. Also, plenty of people like making stuff, you don't have to grind materials to make your own ships... just get the ISK from somewhere and buy it from someone else. Plus, many corporations supply ships to their members for combat purposes. Even the tiny corp/alliance I'm in supplies frigates/cruisers for free to all members for PVP. The larger ones supply battleships even. And yeah, some of the larger ships are cranked out by the corp/alliance (Titans, Moms).
If you don't like being an industrialist (making the ships, etc.), then don't. Nothing forces you to.
The biggest thing about Eve that people I've talked to don't like is that they can't 'fly their ship'. Eve is not a space flight simulator.
The biggest thing about Eve that no other game has is that the vast majority of the 'game' is player generated content, in effect. Nobody talks about how fun it was last night to grind that Guristas Extravaganza mission for the 1000th time. What they talk about is the 500 vs. 500 fleet battle in some system that resulted in 20 lost capital ships for one side or the other and the winners took sovereignity of the system when the smoke cleared.
Player organizations waging war on each other is the content. However, you can't have all ship pew-pewers to win wars and hold territory. In fact, that's actually a small part of it (time-wise, anyway). You have to have massive logistics and production... all done by players. Those 20 capital ships that were lost? All built by players. They arrived at the battlefield by players both flying them there and other players who have to fly other ships to the destination to open up jump points for the capitals to jump to (fly through enemy space to get there). Those 50 battleships that were lost? All built by players. To build all those things, you have to mine (or buy from someone who did) minerals from asteroids, minerals mined from moons (requires a station to do that), and your systems can only be 'yours' if you have sovereignity, which requires stations that must be set up and defended.
Yeah... Eve is complex. But, there are those of us who like complex games. It's not for everyone and "that's OK".
One thing that's really nice about Eve... I can play heavily for a day or two and then not play at all for a week or even longer and not have any withdrawal or even think about the game if I don't want to. The only thing really requiring a player to log in is if you make money in the game by running missions. If you have an industrialist, you can make money while not logged in (buy materials and sell your player-made goods on the market while you're offline). You also advance your character even when not logged in. So, when I went on vacation for 10 days over the recent holidays, I had zero withdrawal from the game, didn't log in a single time over those holidays, and didn't worry or really even think about the game at all. When I got back, I had more money than when I logged out before my vacation and a new skill almost completed so I had something new and shiny to play with when I logged in next. Plus, stuff that I had set up to build while I was gone was built and ready for me to use/sell.
Is this something that they've just discovered or something that's normal? Just because they just now found it doesn't mean that it's new.
It doesn't matter what you do, some of the kids will find ways around it. Eventually, I imagine a parent will find their kid surfing porn on the laptop that you gave them and sue your organization, then we'll have another /. story about your efforts.
You have to have the methods in the game to tack this stuff... records have to be kept about the creation of minerals, etc. and then all of that has to be tied together. Sure, you may have records that moon minerals were being created... there's lots of that going on and it's something probably logged. But you have to correlate that with certain stations not using fuel to create these minerals, if such a think is recorded... "station X used Y amount of fuel and created Z amount of minerals" is something that probably isn't logged (but may be soon). Plus, if there's a bug in the code, those messages may be in the log anyway... just wrong. You can notice large amounts of isk moving around from player to player in-game, but how do you correlate *that* 0.12 isk (out of literally many trillions of ISK in the game) entered the game through an exploit? I don't know of any game that's able to tag every unit of in-game money that way.
As the other poster said, Eve's market is huge. Ships, ammo, as well as lots of modules for ships (and lots of other stuff including *all* tech2 items) are made by players. The market is quite large so it's easy to do speculation, provided you have in-game money. The prices of the raw materials for tech2 item production are getting rarer? Well... that's going to mean the prices of tech2 items are likely to increase. So, buy a bunch off the market right now in the hopes that prices will go up and you'll get a nice profit, just for waiting a few weeks.
I played the heck out of Dune2 in college. Woohoo! I'm finally 1337!