Are you really going to need immediate access to all your money? Normally I'd recommend you keep about 1/2 your money in a high yield saving account and/or short term cd, you'll be able to get 5% or higher right now, and the other 1/2 in mutual funds. The problem though is if you need immediate access to your money you might end up losing some money that you have in the mutual funds depending on the current market.
Yeah I think I read something about match.com having 2.5mil members and 250 employees. It just doesn't make sense that they'd take that kind of risk, and they don't have nearly enough employees to make any signficant difference.
Our comcast on-demand doesn't require anything other than a cable connection. I have on-demand and nothing is hooked up to the box other then the cable line, defintely no phone line/etc.
Although they might end up being bigger, their problem is the search results. I've tried MS's from time to time and generally the first few links are completely unrelated link farms or the like, while the google first few results generally are what I'm looking for. Sure no search engine is perfect, but I go with the one that gives the best results for the searches I do, not the one that has the most pages indexed on their front page.
I not sure what type of content patches you're used to from other games, but the amount of content that has been in the patches thus have have been very large, at least compared to other most other mmorpg patches.
Some things they've added: 2 new battlegrounds with rewards for various ranks( a third is finishing up testing right now and will most likely be in next week ) 2 new non-raid instance (maraudron, dire maul) A new raid instance (black wing lair, a new one will be added most likely next week) A honor system along with honor ranks/rewards/etc 2 new outdoor raid boss encounters Darkmoon faire
If you combined all these patches together they'd probably be roughly equavalent to an expansion.
Personally I think that the amount of new content being released is fine, I'm more concerned with balance issues. As with every game blizzard has fallen into the hole where everything has to be more powerful than the things before it. This itemization seems to have a greater impact on certain classes (those that rely on items more), such as warriors while classes less reliant on equipment are getting left behind.
I'm not pretended it is easy to keep a balance between the classes, or the factions themselves, but I believe at some portion of the time spent on new content should be spent making sure that people play on a more even playing field in PVP (and to a lesser degree PVE).
Now back to the orginal topic, blizzards expansions have seem to be hit or miss. I think the diablo II expansion for example was defintely worthwhile, but the warcraft III wasn't.
I'm not sure how "enormously successful" the beta was. I played it on and off, well tried to, for about two weeks. Almost the entire time the communciation server was down (you couldn't msg other people or talk at all), it would lag out entirely, or the servers would just go down.
I don't but other people, but them having such a large open beta that they seemed completely unprepared for is what drove me away. Yes I know it's beta, but if such seemingly basic problems still exist, what do you gain by opening it up, and then releasing it with those problems just to be "on-time"?
On the other end of the spectrum you have WoW, which when the open beta started, actually worked. Sure there were the normal patch congestion issues, but you were able to login and play the game and get a good feel for it. It convinced me to give it a try.
As more and more of the players reach the raid level content the instances are becoming more laggy and less stable. On my server for example when there are 8+ raids on our side in Molten Core and probably a comparable number on the opposite faction the instances lag to the point where they are unplayable. It's not uncommon for instant cast spells to take 15-30 seconds to go through. Other times the instances will just lockup completely, the chat channels will work but we can't do anything else.
Because of the number of people required to do these instances (40), it is hard if not impossible for us to schedule these except during prime playing time.
I understand that you have offered transfers off of some of the higher population servers, but this doesn't really address the problem. In the coming months are there any plans to beef up the raid instance servers on the higher population servers to accommodate their increases usage?
There is an updated scheduled in mid-july, but I don't see any mention of choco racing. Can you post a link to a confirmed source for this? It's been rumored to be coming from the orginal english-beta (and probably before).
This is all I could find about it: http://ffxi.somepage.com/news/142
They don't provide a true phone line. You don't have an addressable phone number that anyone can call. This is different from the voip services mentioned in the article that give you a true phone line that you can plug a normal phone into and call/receive calls from normal lines. Also keep in mind skype does not orginate inside the US, so I'm not sure the FCC can regulate them.
I tried this for a little bit, and really am not impressed. Some basic issues:
From a users point of view:
1 - Ignores hosts file, so I end up seeing ads I normally wouldn't see
2 - Cookies work weirdly if at all, a lot more sites that I visit frequently appear to use cookies, and I've noticed some definte weirdness
3 - The time saved on a broadband connection really seems minimal, after an hr or two of surfing it takes a few seconds
4 - The pre-fetching it supports is already in firefox and probably other browsers
From a webmasters point of view:
1 - No way to limit caching of certain pages outside of moving them to SSL. Robots.txt isn't being followed (although probably rightly so, based on the application ).
2 - Because of the flawed cookie support (at least right now) a lot of affilate and different advertising methods have to be modified to support this.
I'm a big google fan, and I use most of their applications daily, but this one defintely needs some work.:)
"Mr Hamel, a nurse, was killed while driving home to Knoxville, Tennessee. Miss Bede, who was travelling in another car with her boyfriend, was seriously injured and has eight fragments of shrapnel in her pelvis."
"Miss Bede and the family of Aaron Hamel plan to sue Take-Two Interactive Software, which publishes Grand Theft Auto, for liability in a wrongful death lawsuit. Take-Two owns Rockstar Games, which is based in Edinburgh and designed the first version of the game in 1997. Sony will also be named in the lawsuit, because Grand Theft Auto was made exclusively for its Play- Station consoles."
The posted summary is wrong I think.
From the article: "Mr Hamel, a nurse, was killed while driving home to Knoxville, Tennessee. Miss Bede, who was travelling in another car with her boyfriend, was seriously injured and has eight fragments of shrapnel in her pelvis."
"Miss Bede and the family of Aaron Hamel plan to sue Take-Two Interactive Software, which publishes Grand Theft Auto, for liability in a wrongful death lawsuit. Take-Two owns Rockstar Games, which is based in Edinburgh and designed the first version of the game in 1997. Sony will also be named in the lawsuit, because Grand Theft Auto was made exclusively for its Play- Station consoles. Sony declined to comment on the case."
You can't make nearly as much money sueing them. They're probably hoping for a quick settlement to save sony/take-two from going to court and potentially getting more bad press.
Actually you don't have to pay for it, just sign up as a trial user, and answer their questionaire every three months and it's completely free.(for a single system at least) Plus you wouldn't be paying for free software, you're paying for them to keep track of your system and notify you of updates. It's simply a convience.
Well I don't think that's much of a problem since you need to use this thing inside of a pool:)
From the article: "And whenever you want to make a call, you will need to have your Isophone with you, plus a heated swimming pool."
The main reason I ended up with a cell phone was price vs a landline. For $40 a month I get unlimited nights/weekends, no charge for long distance, and a decent amount of anytime minutes. Compared to the phone in my house which used to cost about $30 after caller id/etc and included no minutes, this was very nice.
As far as the article itself goes, as has been mentioned before its 100% location based. If you're getting a cell phone talk to people who have one there, and find out what is best.
I can see how someone who doesn't want to hear more about SCO was confused when they saw a story labeled "OSDL Position Paper on SCO and Linux" and decided to read it.. Oh wait:P If you're not interested in the topic of a story, why read it?
doesn't support dvd writing *yet*
on
New Linux PVR Box
·
· Score: 5, Informative
From the FAQ:
Can you record and store TV programs and later burn them on a CD?
Yes, Telly's Video Library supports an archiving feature. Eventually Telly will support DVD burning; the current MC1000 supports a CD-RW drive. You will be able to expand your unit to include a DVD-RW drive in the near future.
Also you can't pause the live feed which is imo one of the best features of Tivo
Is it possible to pause/rewind/skip-commercials of live TV broadcasts?
Currently not on live TV broadcasts, but once recorded, you can skip 30-second intervals, pause, and rewind.
Well that's the way things work. You're knowingly breaking the law, and regardless of whether you agree with it or not you *could* be held accountable for it. In a way it is like speeding, a lot of people do it, they know what they're doing is technically illegal, but for the most part they figure that they won't get caught. File sharing doesn't make you a bad person imo, and neither does speeding, but if I got caught for either I wouldn't complain about the unfairness of the world:)
Because MUDS are run by people..
on
Saving MUDs?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Having had some experience on both sides of a MUD (both playing and running) I can say that no single factor kills a mud, or keeps it alive besides the actual people who are running it. Usually it is a small group of people who have been working together for years, and eventually decide that it is just enough. They grow up, have a family, have other interests, or just realize that they can not devote the amount of time necessary to run it to the level that they would like. Sure some admins are willing to let other people take over, but how many are capable and have the experience? Generally it's better to just take it down.
It seems like the current techniques they use to obscure words/etc works well enough. I remember reading on here a few months ago about a technique that used easily identifyable images as a means of verification. For example a picture of a clown which you'd respond with clown. Granted this would only work for english speaking users, but it seems like a good start. I'm sure it wouldn't eliminate spam entirely, but I don't doubt it'd reduce it at least.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you really going to need immediate access to all your money? Normally I'd recommend you keep about 1/2 your money in a high yield saving account and/or short term cd, you'll be able to get 5% or higher right now, and the other 1/2 in mutual funds. The problem though is if you need immediate access to your money you might end up losing some money that you have in the mutual funds depending on the current market.
Yeah I think I read something about match.com having 2.5mil members and 250 employees. It just doesn't make sense that they'd take that kind of risk, and they don't have nearly enough employees to make any signficant difference.
Our comcast on-demand doesn't require anything other than a cable connection. I have on-demand and nothing is hooked up to the box other then the cable line, defintely no phone line/etc.
Although they might end up being bigger, their problem is the search results. I've tried MS's from time to time and generally the first few links are completely unrelated link farms or the like, while the google first few results generally are what I'm looking for. Sure no search engine is perfect, but I go with the one that gives the best results for the searches I do, not the one that has the most pages indexed on their front page.
I not sure what type of content patches you're used to from other games, but the amount of content that has been in the patches thus have have been very large, at least compared to other most other mmorpg patches.
Some things they've added:
2 new battlegrounds with rewards for various ranks( a third is finishing up testing right now and will most likely be in next week )
2 new non-raid instance (maraudron, dire maul)
A new raid instance (black wing lair, a new one will be added most likely next week)
A honor system along with honor ranks/rewards/etc
2 new outdoor raid boss encounters
Darkmoon faire
If you combined all these patches together they'd probably be roughly equavalent to an expansion.
Personally I think that the amount of new content being released is fine, I'm more concerned with balance issues. As with every game blizzard has fallen into the hole where everything has to be more powerful than the things before it. This itemization seems to have a greater impact on certain classes (those that rely on items more), such as warriors while classes less reliant on equipment are getting left behind.
I'm not pretended it is easy to keep a balance between the classes, or the factions themselves, but I believe at some portion of the time spent on new content should be spent making sure that people play on a more even playing field in PVP (and to a lesser degree PVE).
Now back to the orginal topic, blizzards expansions have seem to be hit or miss. I think the diablo II expansion for example was defintely worthwhile, but the warcraft III wasn't.
I'm not sure how "enormously successful" the beta was. I played it on and off, well tried to, for about two weeks. Almost the entire time the communciation server was down (you couldn't msg other people or talk at all), it would lag out entirely, or the servers would just go down. I don't but other people, but them having such a large open beta that they seemed completely unprepared for is what drove me away. Yes I know it's beta, but if such seemingly basic problems still exist, what do you gain by opening it up, and then releasing it with those problems just to be "on-time"? On the other end of the spectrum you have WoW, which when the open beta started, actually worked. Sure there were the normal patch congestion issues, but you were able to login and play the game and get a good feel for it. It convinced me to give it a try.
As more and more of the players reach the raid level content the instances are becoming more laggy and less stable. On my server for example when there are 8+ raids on our side in Molten Core and probably a comparable number on the opposite faction the instances lag to the point where they are unplayable. It's not uncommon for instant cast spells to take 15-30 seconds to go through. Other times the instances will just lockup completely, the chat channels will work but we can't do anything else.
Because of the number of people required to do these instances (40), it is hard if not impossible for us to schedule these except during prime playing time.
I understand that you have offered transfers off of some of the higher population servers, but this doesn't really address the problem. In the coming months are there any plans to beef up the raid instance servers on the higher population servers to accommodate their increases usage?
Oh wow, must have missed that. Thanks for the info :)
There is an updated scheduled in mid-july, but I don't see any mention of choco racing. Can you post a link to a confirmed source for this? It's been rumored to be coming from the orginal english-beta (and probably before).
This is all I could find about it:
http://ffxi.somepage.com/news/142
They don't provide a true phone line. You don't have an addressable phone number that anyone can call. This is different from the voip services mentioned in the article that give you a true phone line that you can plug a normal phone into and call/receive calls from normal lines. Also keep in mind skype does not orginate inside the US, so I'm not sure the FCC can regulate them.
I agree though, this is an interesting question :)
Tried to paste an example tag, but I guess I can't, anyway, here are the docs on it.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/Link_Prefet ching_FAQ.html
From a users point of view:
1 - Ignores hosts file, so I end up seeing ads I normally wouldn't see
2 - Cookies work weirdly if at all, a lot more sites that I visit frequently appear to use cookies, and I've noticed some definte weirdness
3 - The time saved on a broadband connection really seems minimal, after an hr or two of surfing it takes a few seconds
4 - The pre-fetching it supports is already in firefox and probably other browsers
From a webmasters point of view:
1 - No way to limit caching of certain pages outside of moving them to SSL. Robots.txt isn't being followed (although probably rightly so, based on the application ).
2 - Because of the flawed cookie support (at least right now) a lot of affilate and different advertising methods have to be modified to support this.
I'm a big google fan, and I use most of their applications daily, but this one defintely needs some work. :)
"Mr Hamel, a nurse, was killed while driving home to Knoxville, Tennessee. Miss Bede, who was travelling in another car with her boyfriend, was seriously injured and has eight fragments of shrapnel in her pelvis."
"Miss Bede and the family of Aaron Hamel plan to sue Take-Two Interactive Software, which publishes Grand Theft Auto, for liability in a wrongful death lawsuit. Take-Two owns Rockstar Games, which is based in Edinburgh and designed the first version of the game in 1997. Sony will also be named in the lawsuit, because Grand Theft Auto was made exclusively for its Play- Station consoles."
The posted summary is wrong I think.
From the article:
"Mr Hamel, a nurse, was killed while driving home to Knoxville, Tennessee. Miss Bede, who was travelling in another car with her boyfriend, was seriously injured and has eight fragments of shrapnel in her pelvis."
"Miss Bede and the family of Aaron Hamel plan to sue Take-Two Interactive Software, which publishes Grand Theft Auto, for liability in a wrongful death lawsuit. Take-Two owns Rockstar Games, which is based in Edinburgh and designed the first version of the game in 1997. Sony will also be named in the lawsuit, because Grand Theft Auto was made exclusively for its Play- Station consoles. Sony declined to comment on the case."
You can't make nearly as much money sueing them. They're probably hoping for a quick settlement to save sony/take-two from going to court and potentially getting more bad press.
This sounds very similar if not identical to Kids Kill, Victim Sues Game Maker.
Actually you don't have to pay for it, just sign up as a trial user, and answer their questionaire every three months and it's completely free.(for a single system at least)
Plus you wouldn't be paying for free software, you're paying for them to keep track of your system and notify you of updates. It's simply a convience.
Well I don't think that's much of a problem since you need to use this thing inside of a pool :)
From the article: "And whenever you want to make a call, you will need to have your Isophone with you, plus a heated swimming pool."
The main reason I ended up with a cell phone was price vs a landline. For $40 a month I get unlimited nights/weekends, no charge for long distance, and a decent amount of anytime minutes. Compared to the phone in my house which used to cost about $30 after caller id/etc and included no minutes, this was very nice.
As far as the article itself goes, as has been mentioned before its 100% location based. If you're getting a cell phone talk to people who have one there, and find out what is best.
Here is a reply to a portion of Eben's paper by another lawyer, it brings up some good points.
I can see how someone who doesn't want to hear more about SCO was confused when they saw a story labeled "OSDL Position Paper on SCO and Linux" and decided to read it.. Oh wait :P If you're not interested in the topic of a story, why read it?
Can you record and store TV programs and later burn them on a CD?
Yes, Telly's Video Library supports an archiving feature. Eventually Telly will support DVD burning; the current MC1000 supports a CD-RW drive. You will be able to expand your unit to include a DVD-RW drive in the near future.
Also you can't pause the live feed which is imo one of the best features of Tivo
Is it possible to pause/rewind/skip-commercials of live TV broadcasts?
Currently not on live TV broadcasts, but once recorded, you can skip 30-second intervals, pause, and rewind.
Well that's the way things work. You're knowingly breaking the law, and regardless of whether you agree with it or not you *could* be held accountable for it. In a way it is like speeding, a lot of people do it, they know what they're doing is technically illegal, but for the most part they figure that they won't get caught. File sharing doesn't make you a bad person imo, and neither does speeding, but if I got caught for either I wouldn't complain about the unfairness of the world :)
Having had some experience on both sides of a MUD (both playing and running) I can say that no single factor kills a mud, or keeps it alive besides the actual people who are running it. Usually it is a small group of people who have been working together for years, and eventually decide that it is just enough. They grow up, have a family, have other interests, or just realize that they can not devote the amount of time necessary to run it to the level that they would like. Sure some admins are willing to let other people take over, but how many are capable and have the experience? Generally it's better to just take it down.
It seems like the current techniques they use to obscure words/etc works well enough. I remember reading on here a few months ago about a technique that used easily identifyable images as a means of verification. For example a picture of a clown which you'd respond with clown. Granted this would only work for english speaking users, but it seems like a good start. I'm sure it wouldn't eliminate spam entirely, but I don't doubt it'd reduce it at least.