You can justify buying gold anyway you want. Some people like to totally immerse themselves in the game even if means taking longer to earn that extra gold for that epic helm that will let you hit a bit better.
In games like World of Warcraft where there is no an "official" way to buy gold, and people buy gold from so called "gray market" vendors despite Terms of Service, buying gold encourages several behaviours.
First, buying gold makes things more expensive for everyone since there is an influx of more money into the economy thus raising prices. There is a chance you can get in on the extra gold if you have a rare item that a lot of people want to buy or the like. If no stabilizing/regulating force comes in like say Blizzard cracking down on gold selling and "gold farming", you can eventually screw up a server's economy.
Second, so called "gold farmers" resort to undecutting or price fixing or other means to get as much gold as they can. They basically have to get as much gold over time so if undercutting regular players helps them they will do it. Mid to Worst case scenario, this leads to the user pool having a harder time raising gold by selling items.
To aggrevate this "gold farmers" and their companies resort to finding exploits to duplicate items and gold. Not only that but this also includes writing viruses and trojans that scour the net to infect PCs hoping that the infected PC runs the game, so that it can hijack the username/password and hand it to an individual who runs scripts that log onto the player account, sell or disenchant all the items on the hijacked player account and send it off through the mail system to a dummy account. Then the gold/materials end up being sold to so-called "grey market" companies and this in turn resold to a different player wishing to upgrade their character's gear.
Now ask yourself is this right or wrong? I say wrong. If it only benefitted your character without hurting anyone else by the means outlined above it might be ok. A hard core gamer would shun away from it anyway.
Funny...you say that. A friend of mine who worked in Washington for a certain congressman, once mentioned to me that while talking to RIAA people who he would hang out with (yep lobbyists) they basically said it was just their job to represent the interests of RIAA but they downloaded as much as anyone at home.
Unconfirmed, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was such hypocrisy within both MPAA and RIAA. Even more so because they know they can probably get away with it much more easily.
Noobs..don't you mean test out the FPS in Blackwing Lair?
Re:In case you missed the first 10 comments
on
A New TCP/IP Classic
·
· Score: 1
I'll agree, I thought it was a great book to read about TCP/IP. A lot of very good information in my opinion. Just at the time I picked it up it was as a loaner from the public library, so didn't get a chance to get as involved with it as I would have liked to. Been too lazy to pick up my own copy.
Hi, having played the game for the last 9 months, it is my first MMORPG. I've heard and experienced problems with the Master Loot system when raiding in instances. It usually results with the Master Looter seeing the items and unable to distribute them.
I've heard in other MMORPG games that game masters are able to resolve this issue on the spot, but so far for the smaller instances in World of Warcraft have no such thing happening, and it honestly looks bad when a game master uses a scripted response to acknowledge a bug that seems to have been around for quite some time.
So the question is are there plans to improve this aspect of in-game support, to allow issues to be resolved on the spot for all instances by game masters?
Reminds me of being 18 and claiming Windows had a virus writing SDK:-)
Maybe the 18 year old me would now say "Oh and Spyware SDK too"
I'm perplexed at Microsoft, part of me is just thinking "this is so stupid reward a company that makes my job difficult!"
I mean it's not like they are saying "Oh we are going after people who exploit flaws in our operating system (or internet explorer) or who use deceptive practices to install software that makes our operating system unusable, costing our customer money (which they should be using to buy our new products not fixing their old outdated stuff)" , they seem to be saying quite the opposite to me. Or maybe that's what they meant to do...
My respect in Microsoft just went down five more notches (yes I have a measuring stick! and yes I'm kidding)
You betcha I'm showing my boss this article:-) We've already had a Gator/Claria incident he must remember.
(first IANAL) However, it also means that derivative works (see GPL definition of this) that use the GPL material must be freely available. So you can still sell it, nobody is going to stop you, but the buyer has the same rights you have. You must make the source available to the buyer and the buyer can then turn around and distribute it freely or sell it again for profit.
In any case Wikipedia is licensed under GNU Free Document License, not GPL, though I hear they are similar. I have not read the wikipedia license yet.
So working as the jack of all trades computer guy for a public relations company, I have seen days of praise and days of defiance. Maybe overexaggerated there on the language.
Anyway when I added a feature to Access that allowed staff to go from a record they were looking at to the beginning of a business letter in Word, I got kudos from management. One of the vice presidents (this is a small company of about 30 employees) came down and said thanks. He said "wow that is so amazing and so useful, never in a million years would i have thought of that". Something like that. I probably exaggerated a little.
The same vice president claimed "I know you do your job, but don't take it personal, I think you don't know what you are doing" when I told him that the blackberry that he had bought would not open attachments sent to it unless we installed expensive software. Not only that but he was having problems with his set up. He wanted things working a certain way but wouldn't tell me so it seemed like I was screwing up.
So I know I'm an asset to the company. Sometimes I'm met with praise and other times with defiance. Most of the time I'm completely ignored as I go about my daily routines.
So I say that's kind of normal, can't expect praise every day.
The general rule is management wont notice if things are working just fine unless they are conscientious. Or if they notice they wont bring it up that often as they are busy dealing with things that are not working. But if something breaks and the person woke up on the wrong side of bed, May God help you.:-)
This reminds me of a game/experiment I played with my younger siblings (who were 7 and 11 at the time), trying to show them a bit about quantum states, and how observation can change something. It was by no means scientific, or well grounded, and I have by no means a thorough understanding of quantum mechanics, etc.
Basically we all stood in a line, all facing the same way. I threw a coin behind us, making sure nobody looked at it. After I had thrown it we all agreed on a face value (either heads or tails). Then we all turned to look at it. It was sort of spooky, because most of the time it was actually what we had agreed upon at the end. Of course this is probably better explained by the 50-50 chance of either side being up. This was sort of the reason I choose this to illustrate an idea. Nevertheless, it was fun:-)
I thought it a good way to illustrate the general idea about quantum phenomena and observation.
Shouldnt that be State of the Daemon? I mean daemon as in services doing good useful things running in the OS? vs. the newer form of the word, Demon, usually signifying the exact opposite.
The one reason I'm keeping on eye on this and consider getting the RadioShark, is that for certain radio shows like KROQ's Kevin & Bean Show, which don't have an internet stream and usually start earlier than I wake up, I can now record it and put it on my iPod so I can listen to it on my way to work.
This effectively time-shifts the show for me, which in the case of Kevin & Bean show, I think it worth it. They usually have entertaining or interesting discussions about all sorts of stuff from the weirdest news of the day to stuff like info on MPAA/RIAA lawsuits etc, artists interviews, and on occassion the Mayor of L.A. James Hahn (or a satire of him and other political and sports figures.)
Sure you can get much better audio quality for Music from other sources, but if you want to record a talk show on the radio that you are interested in, now you can.
I think part of the reason that some of these books are out of print is that nobody has bothered, cared, or been able to negotiate with the copyright holder on doing reprints.
this machine probably wont fix that problem, maybe partially (for those books that just havent gotten published because nobody wanted to print them)
It could also be a big boost to public domain books....
though I'd hate to waste the paper and cut down trees...
Still I prefer reading a book over a PDF. books are highly portable, you can carry a book with you almost anywhere. And it doubles as a defense weapon that gains strength by thickness.
Reminds me of my first year in college where I tried logging into the school server from my dorm computer on the school network with login root and password root....
I was just curious at the time:-)
A day later I get a rather straighforward e-mail from the system op, telling me to stop, or they will report me to the appropriate authorities, and about possible disciplinary options.
Well at least I found out that they were smart enough to change the password, and keep on eye on what people were trying to do:-)
Usually, when I don't want to be contacted about something, but am forced to give out an e-mail address before proceeding I enter something like
sfkjdslkf@dsklfja.sdfkjsd
If they verify the e-mail address to make sure it's properly formatted then i just change the last part to.com or something.
My guess is this way the dummy address is very likely to not exist as it is because it is to a point non-standard and somewhat unlikely for someone to use. Not to mention the domain is probably fake as well:) And finally I dont think there's a sdfkjsd top level domain.
When people see me doing this...they always ask "is that your e-mail address?" At which point I explain my privacy concerns and why I use junk dummy e-mail addresses:-)
As an Apple acolyte I must say, that the UK is doing well to embrace iTMS Europe. France and Germany should follow UKs example.
Only through iTMS will both countries reach the musical zen that UK is about to reach! France and Germany dont despair you need but open iTunes and download more.
Oh here's the obligatory tag for those who missed it...
Well, my personal experience is that I started working at this PR company about 4 years ago doing basic drone work in data entry part time (I needed a job, and I dont like to lie on my resumes). I started off with basic stuff...I had some programming background since I'm pursuing a Computer Engineering major.
Shortly I realized they were quite behind in terms of tools they were using, always going about the long way of doing things.
There really wasnt an IT person on staff, except for the IT Consultant they hired to come in occassionally and take care of some problems.
After showing them how to use Access more effectively, and fixing a few problems in Access, I started getting trust from them to go in and start adding and updating stuff for convenience.
One such case was that before if they wanted to create a new list of contacts for a new event based on an older list, they would go in one by one and add them in...Imagine doing that for 1,000 people? That took a long time. Naturally I picked up SQL and Visual Basic, and all of a sudden what used to take a day or two, could be done in under a minute!:-)
We did end up having an IT person hired, but unfortunately the gentleman passed away, and shortly after I kind of got pushed to the front by the CFO. At the moment I dont have an official title, so I gave myself one.
So I do most of the more basic IT support and troubleshooting. If something like say the Exchange server get's borked, then we call in the IT Consultant. I dont presume to know everything, and when there's a problem I really can't fix, I admit to the CFO that's the case and the IT Consultant gets called in.
I dont have any sort of certifications, which may be seen as a bad thing. However, I do have tech experience which gives me an advantage and also I'm trusted by the company to fix something if I know how to.
The basic point here is that you may be able to get away without certifications at a smaller company, but you have to be trusted to not bork anything up.
There are examples of other people in the programming field of which David K. Every of MacKiDo and iGeek fame comes to mind. He doesnt have an official computer science or engineering degree (at least last time I checked), yet he's done contract work for big companies including (I think) Apple. As he put it once "And it's something I warn kids about; you can succeed without a degree, but it is a lot harder."
I would assume the same can be the case with IT certifications, though as David Every also said once "The irony is that while many companies will not hire employees without degrees, they will hire consultants without one."
I'm definitely finding both of these to be true to some degree:-)
Actually due to a poor implementation of Basic that/. that causes a floating point error it adds up to of 2003.99999999999999999 And the integer conversion yields 2004
Just thought I'd mention that Apple Insider (who parent poster quotes) is considered a rumors site and as such, it may not give accurate or complete information.
So though, people are experiencing problems with iPod Mini this does not necessarily correlate with ipod mini shortage. Not unless Apple came out and said so. Though it is likely that the two are related, there might be a possibility they are not.
I would mark parent post as interesting not informative myself.
Slashdot Mirror
You can justify buying gold anyway you want. Some people like to totally immerse themselves in the game even if means taking longer to earn that extra gold for that epic helm that will let you hit a bit better.
In games like World of Warcraft where there is no an "official" way to buy gold, and people buy gold from so called "gray market" vendors despite Terms of Service, buying gold encourages several behaviours.
First, buying gold makes things more expensive for everyone since there is an influx of more money into the economy thus raising prices. There is a chance you can get in on the extra gold if you have a rare item that a lot of people want to buy or the like. If no stabilizing/regulating force comes in like say Blizzard cracking down on gold selling and "gold farming", you can eventually screw up a server's economy.
Second, so called "gold farmers" resort to undecutting or price fixing or other means to get as much gold as they can. They basically have to get as much gold over time so if undercutting regular players helps them they will do it. Mid to Worst case scenario, this leads to the user pool having a harder time raising gold by selling items.
To aggrevate this "gold farmers" and their companies resort to finding exploits to duplicate items and gold. Not only that but this also includes writing viruses and trojans that scour the net to infect PCs hoping that the infected PC runs the game, so that it can hijack the username/password and hand it to an individual who runs scripts that log onto the player account, sell or disenchant all the items on the hijacked player account and send it off through the mail system to a dummy account. Then the gold/materials end up being sold to so-called "grey market" companies and this in turn resold to a different player wishing to upgrade their character's gear.
Now ask yourself is this right or wrong? I say wrong. If it only benefitted your character without hurting anyone else by the means outlined above it might be ok. A hard core gamer would shun away from it anyway.
Funny...you say that. A friend of mine who worked in Washington for a certain congressman, once mentioned to me that while talking to RIAA people who he would hang out with (yep lobbyists) they basically said it was just their job to represent the interests of RIAA but they downloaded as much as anyone at home.
Unconfirmed, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was such hypocrisy within both MPAA and RIAA. Even more so because they know they can probably get away with it much more easily.
Noobs..don't you mean test out the FPS in Blackwing Lair?
I'll agree, I thought it was a great book to read about TCP/IP. A lot of very good information in my opinion. Just at the time I picked it up it was as a loaner from the public library, so didn't get a chance to get as involved with it as I would have liked to. Been too lazy to pick up my own copy.
Hi, having played the game for the last 9 months, it is my first MMORPG. I've heard and experienced problems with the Master Loot system when raiding in instances. It usually results with the Master Looter seeing the items and unable to distribute them. I've heard in other MMORPG games that game masters are able to resolve this issue on the spot, but so far for the smaller instances in World of Warcraft have no such thing happening, and it honestly looks bad when a game master uses a scripted response to acknowledge a bug that seems to have been around for quite some time. So the question is are there plans to improve this aspect of in-game support, to allow issues to be resolved on the spot for all instances by game masters?
Reminds me of being 18 and claiming Windows had a virus writing SDK :-)
:-) We've already had a Gator/Claria incident he must remember.
Maybe the 18 year old me would now say "Oh and Spyware SDK too"
I'm perplexed at Microsoft, part of me is just thinking "this is so stupid reward a company that makes my job difficult!"
I mean it's not like they are saying "Oh we are going after people who exploit flaws in our operating system (or internet explorer) or who use deceptive practices to install software that makes our operating system unusable, costing our customer money (which they should be using to buy our new products not fixing their old outdated stuff)" , they seem to be saying quite the opposite to me. Or maybe that's what they meant to do...
My respect in Microsoft just went down five more notches (yes I have a measuring stick! and yes I'm kidding)
You betcha I'm showing my boss this article
That was my comment btw...I just mistyped my login and hit post by accident :)
Just thought i'd take responsibility for my own posts.
(first IANAL) However, it also means that derivative works (see GPL definition of this) that use the GPL material must be freely available. So you can still sell it, nobody is going to stop you, but the buyer has the same rights you have. You must make the source available to the buyer and the buyer can then turn around and distribute it freely or sell it again for profit.
In any case Wikipedia is licensed under GNU Free Document License, not GPL, though I hear they are similar. I have not read the wikipedia license yet.
So working as the jack of all trades computer guy for a public relations company, I have seen days of praise and days of defiance. Maybe overexaggerated there on the language.
:-)
Anyway when I added a feature to Access that allowed staff to go from a record they were looking at to the beginning of a business letter in Word, I got kudos from management. One of the vice presidents (this is a small company of about 30 employees) came down and said thanks. He said "wow that is so amazing and so useful, never in a million years would i have thought of that". Something like that. I probably exaggerated a little.
The same vice president claimed "I know you do your job, but don't take it personal, I think you don't know what you are doing" when I told him that the blackberry that he had bought would not open attachments sent to it unless we installed expensive software. Not only that but he was having problems with his set up. He wanted things working a certain way but wouldn't tell me so it seemed like I was screwing up.
So I know I'm an asset to the company. Sometimes I'm met with praise and other times with defiance. Most of the time I'm completely ignored as I go about my daily routines.
So I say that's kind of normal, can't expect praise every day.
The general rule is management wont notice if things are working just fine unless they are conscientious. Or if they notice they wont bring it up that often as they are busy dealing with things that are not working. But if something breaks and the person woke up on the wrong side of bed, May God help you.
This reminds me of a game/experiment I played with my younger siblings (who were 7 and 11 at the time), trying to show them a bit about quantum states, and how observation can change something. It was by no means scientific, or well grounded, and I have by no means a thorough understanding of quantum mechanics, etc.
:-)
Basically we all stood in a line, all facing the same way. I threw a coin behind us, making sure nobody looked at it. After I had thrown it we all agreed on a face value (either heads or tails). Then we all turned to look at it. It was sort of spooky, because most of the time it was actually what we had agreed upon at the end. Of course this is probably better explained by the 50-50 chance of either side being up. This was sort of the reason I choose this to illustrate an idea. Nevertheless, it was fun
I thought it a good way to illustrate the general idea about quantum phenomena and observation.
Shouldnt that be State of the Daemon?
I mean daemon as in services doing good useful things running in the OS?
vs. the newer form of the word, Demon, usually signifying the exact opposite.
The one reason I'm keeping on eye on this and consider getting the RadioShark, is that for certain radio shows like KROQ's Kevin & Bean Show, which don't have an internet stream and usually start earlier than I wake up, I can now record it and put it on my iPod so I can listen to it on my way to work.
This effectively time-shifts the show for me, which in the case of Kevin & Bean show, I think it worth it. They usually have entertaining or interesting discussions about all sorts of stuff from the weirdest news of the day to stuff like info on MPAA/RIAA lawsuits etc, artists interviews, and on occassion the Mayor of L.A. James Hahn (or a satire of him and other political and sports figures.)
Sure you can get much better audio quality for Music from other sources, but if you want to record a talk show on the radio that you are interested in, now you can.
Damn, quick someone set up old style dial up bbs :-)
Someone archive all the pr0n, credit card numbers, serial numbers, war3z, dvds, mp3s, AAC, Linux (SCO variant not to be included) on the net on it.
Someone set up a paypal account for donations to help keep it up. wait n/m PayPal will be gone too....
NO!!!!!
I think part of the reason that some of these books are out of print is that nobody has bothered, cared, or been able to negotiate with the copyright holder on doing reprints.
this machine probably wont fix that problem, maybe partially (for those books that just havent gotten published because nobody wanted to print them)
It could also be a big boost to public domain books....
though I'd hate to waste the paper and cut down trees...
Still I prefer reading a book over a PDF. books are highly portable, you can carry a book with you almost anywhere. And it doubles as a defense weapon that gains strength by thickness.
As a Mac user, Of course I am...at least all of you PC users will be so anvilous after you read how perfectly I spelled every single word...
:-)
:-)
Little do you now dad on my Mac, I have spiel check in every application! (Thank You Mac SO X!!!)
Muahahahaah! Don't I look smart now!
If you don't get the joke then don't mod me
Reminds me of my first year in college where I tried logging into the school server from my dorm computer on the school network with login root and password root....
:-)
:-)
I was just curious at the time
A day later I get a rather straighforward e-mail from the system op, telling me to stop, or they will report me to the appropriate authorities, and about possible disciplinary options.
Well at least I found out that they were smart enough to change the password, and keep on eye on what people were trying to do
Usually, when I don't want to be contacted about something, but am forced to give out an e-mail address before proceeding I enter something like
.com or something.
:) And finally I dont think there's a sdfkjsd top level domain.
:-)
sfkjdslkf@dsklfja.sdfkjsd
If they verify the e-mail address to make sure it's properly formatted then i just change the last part to
My guess is this way the dummy address is very likely to not exist as it is because it is to a point non-standard and somewhat unlikely for someone to use. Not to mention the domain is probably fake as well
When people see me doing this...they always ask "is that your e-mail address?" At which point I explain my privacy concerns and why I use junk dummy e-mail addresses
Grrr...that wasnt a flamebait...oh well
As an Apple acolyte I must say, that the UK is doing well to embrace iTMS Europe. France and Germany should follow UKs example.
Only through iTMS will both countries reach the musical zen that UK is about to reach! France and Germany dont despair you need but open iTunes and download more.
Oh here's the obligatory tag for those who missed it...
Shortly I realized they were quite behind in terms of tools they were using, always going about the long way of doing things.
There really wasnt an IT person on staff, except for the IT Consultant they hired to come in occassionally and take care of some problems.
After showing them how to use Access more effectively, and fixing a few problems in Access, I started getting trust from them to go in and start adding and updating stuff for convenience.
One such case was that before if they wanted to create a new list of contacts for a new event based on an older list, they would go in one by one and add them in...Imagine doing that for 1,000 people? That took a long time. Naturally I picked up SQL and Visual Basic, and all of a sudden what used to take a day or two, could be done in under a minute! :-)
We did end up having an IT person hired, but unfortunately the gentleman passed away, and shortly after I kind of got pushed to the front by the CFO. At the moment I dont have an official title, so I gave myself one.
So I do most of the more basic IT support and troubleshooting. If something like say the Exchange server get's borked, then we call in the IT Consultant. I dont presume to know everything, and when there's a problem I really can't fix, I admit to the CFO that's the case and the IT Consultant gets called in.
I dont have any sort of certifications, which may be seen as a bad thing. However, I do have tech experience which gives me an advantage and also I'm trusted by the company to fix something if I know how to.
The basic point here is that you may be able to get away without certifications at a smaller company, but you have to be trusted to not bork anything up.
There are examples of other people in the programming field of which David K. Every of MacKiDo and iGeek fame comes to mind. He doesnt have an official computer science or engineering degree (at least last time I checked), yet he's done contract work for big companies including (I think) Apple. As he put it once "And it's something I warn kids about; you can succeed without a degree, but it is a lot harder."
I would assume the same can be the case with IT certifications, though as David Every also said once "The irony is that while many companies will not hire employees without degrees, they will hire consultants without one."
I'm definitely finding both of these to be true to some degree :-)
Something like the stuff on happytreefriends.com (MAY NOT BE CHILDREN FRIENDLY)?
Neeat ;)
Actually due to a poor implementation of Basic that /. that causes a floating point error it adds up to of 2003.99999999999999999
And the integer conversion yields 2004
Any web engine where software I wrote comes up as first result when searching for an eggtimer is ok with me ;-)
And no I didn't google bomb it or anything.
Just thought I'd mention that Apple Insider (who parent poster quotes) is considered a rumors site and as such, it may not give accurate or complete information.
So though, people are experiencing problems with iPod Mini this does not necessarily correlate with ipod mini shortage. Not unless Apple came out and said so. Though it is likely that the two are related, there might be a possibility they are not.
I would mark parent post as interesting not informative myself.
See here for the details on what Gore did say.