Utter nonsense. Pretty? Yeah sure, I'll give you that. 'pretty' is quite well defined by the media, and Miss World contests. But beautiful?:
"Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction."
Therefore a wife being 'deeply beautiful' isn't such a remote possibity, even if they don't fit the 'supermodel pretty' that we're told is what's important.
Sorry, I'm not buying that - in an FPS the difference between a 60ms and 200ms ping is significant. In EVE the game remains perfectly playable at 1000ms, simply because of the nature of the gameplay. To say one alliance did well because they had a 'low ping' is a fallacy - I know why that one alliance did very well, and it's much more to do with how they operated - they were well organised out of game, and hardcore about their dedication to the cause - they'd always be on voice comms, and turn out to compulsory ops even off timezone. They had a 'phone chain' for people to wake them up for a fleet battle. It's a bit more hardcore than my gaming habits are, but it payed dividend - you get a group who all take it very seriously, then you get some very impressive things happening as a result.
But that's a vital part of the 'multiprocessing' solution - you can't 'force clump' your users, if you want to run a distributed universe. It's one of the things I rather admire about EVE - from day one they set something up that would be that way.
There's some other elements of game design that speak quite clearly that some thought about making an 'epic game' was thought about - the system transition/node swap being one.
Marketing hype? That EVE is a single universe, with a peak concurrent user count of >50k? How's that 'hype' - it's true. Yes, they do multiprocess by switching you onto different servers when you jump system (sometimes). They also multi-process by having a proxy tier, a solar system tier, and a database tier. But that's not 'sharding' either.
When most MMOs have too many users, they end up firing up a new copy of the code on a standalone server, and let there be another 'copy' of the universe, for someone else to be 'king' of.
The only place that's happened with EVE, is the China implementation, and that was solely because China has rules regarding MMOs that... would have been generally negative to implement on the Tranquility (original) cluster.
What's the userbase of those single server MMOs though? The reason it's 'new tech' is that a fully scalable 'single shard' MMO is... rather a computational holy grail.
You're trying to do fully scalable multiprocessing - which is done in HPC circles, and has become fairly easy.
The killer for an MMO though, is the real-time constraint - when I'm doing HPC style calculations, I run a batch job program that does something, and reports back in a few minutes/hours/days.
You can't do that in an MMO - you need very small (milisecond) turnarounds on most of your operations, simply because every time my character moves, everyone needs to see that happen fast enough that they don't notice the delay. That's really an extremely difficult (and interesting) problem to be solving in computational terms - synchronisation between separate processes/processors is 'expensive' in terms of time and effort, and so as you add numbers of things that need to synchronise and pass messages (which you need to, to be able to scale your system) you end up with geometric increases in the amount of work you're doing.
That's why they call it 'new tech' - HPC is done, design your algorithm right given your problem, and leave it numbercrunching for a few days, and fiddle about a bit to save some time.
REAL TIME HPC is... not. No one has really 'done it' yet, because you're essentially solving an NP complete problem.
It's true. But on the flip side, CCP are also one of the few companies that have:
An established setting, with a fanbase
Experience of running an MMO
Deep pockets to finance the development cycle
An existing MMO to act as 'live proving' for... well, at least _some_ of the concepts in there
It has, as they say, potential to be really good - EVE will be rolling out a 'walking in stations' expansion in the near-ish future, that'll serve somewhat as a joint development task for a WOD-MMO rollout - you can re-use a lot of the tech if you do it right.
They've also, I think, got the right attitude for developing a game that isn't just Generic Fantasy MMO Clone #33431121 - EVE is quite unlike anything else, and if they have any brains they won't even _try_ to get the 'WOW Beater' like all the other MMOs out there try to be - because even if you do get something that is IN EVERY WAY better, you'll still have to convince people to leave their existing communities, guilds, and character development. If they go the route of building something that'll apply to a different demographic and world of darkness -> modern day fantasyish with guns - could quite easily provide both a different setting, and a different mode of gameplay.
EVE more or less does this - you have a load of different star systems, which functionally speaking are different servers (they're not in practice - quiet systems get consolidated onto the same physical hardware). Underpinning it you have a 'region' system, which covers things like the market and contracts system and provides another tier if you like, of isolation. (And also, the market can run as a process on a separate server to the one you're using to interact with the star system)
And you 'migrate' server, by 'jumping through a stargate'.
It's really extremely scalable, PROVIDED you don't get chunks of population density. The problem is, that people do naturally congregate - you have market hubs where people go to trade, and have everyone on the same 'server'. And then you have fleet battles, where you have a large number of people able to 'see' and interact with each other - and in turn means you need to start a lot of intercommunication - if a thousand people can see me turn and fire, then all of them need to be informed of the maneuver. That's the bit that doesn't scale well, simply because of the nature of the problem - every person adding into a fight is another person who needs to be informed of events, and another person who generates said events.
Also clearing 50k peak concurrent users, which I feel's actually quite an achievement. And yes, multi-accounting.... well, makes a lot of things a lot more feasible. That's one part I don't really like actually, but I'm fairly sure I've seen statistics that indicate it's not _that_ widespread.
Actually I think that's one thing that EVE does quite well - because of the 'nature of the game' the annoying wombats don't tend to get all that far - skill training being real time for example, is one of the best things ever - because it means you _have_ to be patient, you cannot grind level 60 in 2 weeks.
It also means that there isn't really 'levelling up' - anything you choose to do, doesn't mean you fall behind said 15 year olds. And also, in EVE, the other players are targets, resources and obstacles, which means having more annoying idiots, just gives you that much more of a warming glow when you exploit them mercilessly.
I'm liking the Malazan book of the fallen, but I'm not sure I'd rank it higher. For me, there's a bit too much of just dropping in new settings/locations/people with seemingly no real reason for them to exist.
Matter of taste I guess. I'm certainly enjoying it a lot, but I wasn't quite as much on the edge of my seat for Toll the Hounds as I was for Dance of Dragons.
It is, provided you can accept that it's not finished, and might never be.
The writing style is superb - it's done a chapter at a time, from the point of view of a different character, and he's not shy about switching from protagonist to enemy, and exploring their motivations and reasoning.
There's some truly awe inspiring character development that has you... well, not really _liking_ the 'bad guy(s)' but empathising with them - understanding quite why they did something atrocious, that had you initially hating them for it. There's an excellent cast of well developed characters, and... not really any of them stand out as 'clearly the protagonist'.
Also it's quite brutal and harsh at times - 'key' characters die for reasons that are pointless or unfortunate. I can think of a few cases where that death gets turned around, and you see why someone did, but the motivation isn't 'because he was bad really' and much more tending to 'because sometimes good men have to die for the good of the kingdom'.
Oh, and it's quite low fantasy - there's not really much magic in there, and what little there is a source of mystery and unease, rather than the wizard lobbing fireballs around that you'd get in some 'high' fantasy settings.
In short, I'd say it ranks right near the top of the 'modern fantasy' rankings, and it's _certainly_ worth picking up the first book - A Game of Thrones - and see if you like it - if you do, you'll probably like the rest, but the writing style does make it a little difficult to 'get into'.
Because then it looks like they actually bothered to work out exactly the 'damage' caused by this action, rather than approximating a number and going with that.
I know my employer uses Google Alerts to keep an eye on blogs. I've had a response from 'elsewhere in the company' when I've posted something. Nothing that I'd be embarassed about my employer seeing mind - I've long since decided that my 'social networking' if it's public, it's public, so I might as well ensure it's all something I could be proud of.
None the less, having someone respond (before I worked there) to my 'anyone know about.... I'm looking at a job there', and more recently having someone comment about their apprentice program when I posted about it has made it very clear to me that 'bad mouthing' my employer would be rather moronic. Although I have considered once or twice whether doing so could actaully elicit a 'useful' response to an outstanding issue I've got, generally the conclusion is 'no'. If your employer is doing something dumb, naming and shaming is much more likely to cost you your job than to actually fix the problem.
I'd accidentally found the Baen library via webscriptions, but didn't know what it was. It was mostly because I was looking for a legit ebook from one of my favourite authors. I was quite gratified to find that there were a couple of books there, available for free as well. I didn't actually grab the free one, as it was the first in the series that I wanted the whole lot of, but... I can confirm their notion that exposure means more sales - I've spent more money through their site than I would have done if some of the authors on there didn't have a sampler. And in all fairness, there's a few I've grabbed, read, didn't like, and thus didn't bother.
But either way, that particular author has got more cash from my direction than they would have done otherwise, which I think would be rather the point - I'd actaully prefer and e-copy of 90% of the books I own - there's only a few that I'm so fanatical about that I need a hardcopy on my shelf, and those are the ones that I've bought several times over the years already. k
Speaking personally, I don't actually mind paying 'hardback prices' for a brand new release of a book I've been looking for, even if it is electronic distribution - just to not have to have a bulky hardback to cart around and fill up my bookshelf.
It's going to take a while before my £200 e-reader, with it's actually not any cheaper electronic copies of books, with lesser availability (pirate makes more available, but all too often the formatting is rubbish, and I do _want_ to pay for my books).
However there's one killer - I can drop a paperback, and it'll still be fine. Ebook readers have a long way to go before they stop being fragile and expensive to repair.
I'm afraid your espression of discontent has increases your threat level on the international terrorist register - your opposition to the legitimate functioning of the government puts you at increased risk of conducting terrorist activity, and therefore you're required to present yourself to the nearest government facility for interrogation and re-education.
Pleasant? Hmm, yes. Britain is quite a pleasant country. Free? Not so sure. How do you know you have freedom, unless you try and use it and find you can't? We're looking at ID cards, we're looking at surveillance, we're looking at monitoring the populace and their online activity, we've been complicit in torture (oh we didn't _actually_ do it, we just put someone somewhere where they would be, and gave them a list of questions), we've turned a blind eye to some really quite obnoxious human rights abuses by our allies. We've gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan for... no particular reason it seems - all in the name of 'protecting us from the terrorists/pedophiles/rapists'.
I cannot help but wonder if the only difference between us now, and Nazi Germany pre 1939 is solely hindsight.
Lets face it though, a lot of Star Trek canon was arse.
Much of it existed to glorify Shatner's ego. Useful chunks were directly contradictory, or the product of eminently lazy story telling, where the script writer used the 'insert technobabble here' plot resolutions. And the whole series is a product of it's time, and much less interesting when removed from the culture context of when it was first aired.
Also, it's hilarious to see the nerd rage.
Some of the Star Trek canon was... dubious. VERY dubious. And altogether a product of it's time, culturally speaking, and thus wouldn't have 'fit' with... well, the world today.
I think it's quite reasonable therefore to reboot the universe, provided it comes with the caveat that screwing around with the timeline to resolve plots is epically lame, and should never be allowed, ever. They did not in this movie go 'we will fix the timeline, and save the people' therefore it's ok that they've diverged and will stay that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Therefore a wife being 'deeply beautiful' isn't such a remote possibity, even if they don't fit the 'supermodel pretty' that we're told is what's important.
Sorry, I'm not buying that - in an FPS the difference between a 60ms and 200ms ping is significant. In EVE the game remains perfectly playable at 1000ms, simply because of the nature of the gameplay. To say one alliance did well because they had a 'low ping' is a fallacy - I know why that one alliance did very well, and it's much more to do with how they operated - they were well organised out of game, and hardcore about their dedication to the cause - they'd always be on voice comms, and turn out to compulsory ops even off timezone. They had a 'phone chain' for people to wake them up for a fleet battle. It's a bit more hardcore than my gaming habits are, but it payed dividend - you get a group who all take it very seriously, then you get some very impressive things happening as a result.
But that's a vital part of the 'multiprocessing' solution - you can't 'force clump' your users, if you want to run a distributed universe. It's one of the things I rather admire about EVE - from day one they set something up that would be that way.
There's some other elements of game design that speak quite clearly that some thought about making an 'epic game' was thought about - the system transition/node swap being one.
Marketing hype? That EVE is a single universe, with a peak concurrent user count of >50k? How's that 'hype' - it's true. Yes, they do multiprocess by switching you onto different servers when you jump system (sometimes). They also multi-process by having a proxy tier, a solar system tier, and a database tier. But that's not 'sharding' either. ... would have been generally negative to implement on the Tranquility (original) cluster.
When most MMOs have too many users, they end up firing up a new copy of the code on a standalone server, and let there be another 'copy' of the universe, for someone else to be 'king' of.
The only place that's happened with EVE, is the China implementation, and that was solely because China has rules regarding MMOs that
What's the userbase of those single server MMOs though? The reason it's 'new tech' is that a fully scalable 'single shard' MMO is ... rather a computational holy grail. ... not. No one has really 'done it' yet, because you're essentially solving an NP complete problem.
You're trying to do fully scalable multiprocessing - which is done in HPC circles, and has become fairly easy.
The killer for an MMO though, is the real-time constraint - when I'm doing HPC style calculations, I run a batch job program that does something, and reports back in a few minutes/hours/days.
You can't do that in an MMO - you need very small (milisecond) turnarounds on most of your operations, simply because every time my character moves, everyone needs to see that happen fast enough that they don't notice the delay. That's really an extremely difficult (and interesting) problem to be solving in computational terms - synchronisation between separate processes/processors is 'expensive' in terms of time and effort, and so as you add numbers of things that need to synchronise and pass messages (which you need to, to be able to scale your system) you end up with geometric increases in the amount of work you're doing.
That's why they call it 'new tech' - HPC is done, design your algorithm right given your problem, and leave it numbercrunching for a few days, and fiddle about a bit to save some time.
REAL TIME HPC is
It's true. But on the flip side, CCP are also one of the few companies that have: ... well, at least _some_ of the concepts in there
An established setting, with a fanbase
Experience of running an MMO
Deep pockets to finance the development cycle
An existing MMO to act as 'live proving' for
It has, as they say, potential to be really good - EVE will be rolling out a 'walking in stations' expansion in the near-ish future, that'll serve somewhat as a joint development task for a WOD-MMO rollout - you can re-use a lot of the tech if you do it right.
They've also, I think, got the right attitude for developing a game that isn't just Generic Fantasy MMO Clone #33431121 - EVE is quite unlike anything else, and if they have any brains they won't even _try_ to get the 'WOW Beater' like all the other MMOs out there try to be - because even if you do get something that is IN EVERY WAY better, you'll still have to convince people to leave their existing communities, guilds, and character development. If they go the route of building something that'll apply to a different demographic and world of darkness -> modern day fantasyish with guns - could quite easily provide both a different setting, and a different mode of gameplay.
EVE more or less does this - you have a load of different star systems, which functionally speaking are different servers (they're not in practice - quiet systems get consolidated onto the same physical hardware). Underpinning it you have a 'region' system, which covers things like the market and contracts system and provides another tier if you like, of isolation. (And also, the market can run as a process on a separate server to the one you're using to interact with the star system)
And you 'migrate' server, by 'jumping through a stargate'.
It's really extremely scalable, PROVIDED you don't get chunks of population density. The problem is, that people do naturally congregate - you have market hubs where people go to trade, and have everyone on the same 'server'. And then you have fleet battles, where you have a large number of people able to 'see' and interact with each other - and in turn means you need to start a lot of intercommunication - if a thousand people can see me turn and fire, then all of them need to be informed of the maneuver. That's the bit that doesn't scale well, simply because of the nature of the problem - every person adding into a fight is another person who needs to be informed of events, and another person who generates said events.
Also clearing 50k peak concurrent users, which I feel's actually quite an achievement. And yes, multi-accounting .... well, makes a lot of things a lot more feasible. That's one part I don't really like actually, but I'm fairly sure I've seen statistics that indicate it's not _that_ widespread.
Actually I think that's one thing that EVE does quite well - because of the 'nature of the game' the annoying wombats don't tend to get all that far - skill training being real time for example, is one of the best things ever - because it means you _have_ to be patient, you cannot grind level 60 in 2 weeks.
It also means that there isn't really 'levelling up' - anything you choose to do, doesn't mean you fall behind said 15 year olds. And also, in EVE, the other players are targets, resources and obstacles, which means having more annoying idiots, just gives you that much more of a warming glow when you exploit them mercilessly.
I'm liking the Malazan book of the fallen, but I'm not sure I'd rank it higher. For me, there's a bit too much of just dropping in new settings/locations/people with seemingly no real reason for them to exist.
Matter of taste I guess. I'm certainly enjoying it a lot, but I wasn't quite as much on the edge of my seat for Toll the Hounds as I was for Dance of Dragons.
It is, provided you can accept that it's not finished, and might never be. ... well, not really _liking_ the 'bad guy(s)' but empathising with them - understanding quite why they did something atrocious, that had you initially hating them for it. There's an excellent cast of well developed characters, and ... not really any of them stand out as 'clearly the protagonist'.
The writing style is superb - it's done a chapter at a time, from the point of view of a different character, and he's not shy about switching from protagonist to enemy, and exploring their motivations and reasoning.
There's some truly awe inspiring character development that has you
Also it's quite brutal and harsh at times - 'key' characters die for reasons that are pointless or unfortunate. I can think of a few cases where that death gets turned around, and you see why someone did, but the motivation isn't 'because he was bad really' and much more tending to 'because sometimes good men have to die for the good of the kingdom'.
Oh, and it's quite low fantasy - there's not really much magic in there, and what little there is a source of mystery and unease, rather than the wizard lobbing fireballs around that you'd get in some 'high' fantasy settings.
In short, I'd say it ranks right near the top of the 'modern fantasy' rankings, and it's _certainly_ worth picking up the first book - A Game of Thrones - and see if you like it - if you do, you'll probably like the rest, but the writing style does make it a little difficult to 'get into'.
Well, personally I'm still hoping he'll actually finish writing it at some point.
No, that title is reserved for the varroa-mite
Gassing people in the showers? Which army did you say it was...? I hear that sort of thing was all the rage a few years back.
Because then it looks like they actually bothered to work out exactly the 'damage' caused by this action, rather than approximating a number and going with that.
I know my employer uses Google Alerts to keep an eye on blogs. I've had a response from 'elsewhere in the company' when I've posted something. Nothing that I'd be embarassed about my employer seeing mind - I've long since decided that my 'social networking' if it's public, it's public, so I might as well ensure it's all something I could be proud of. .... I'm looking at a job there', and more recently having someone comment about their apprentice program when I posted about it has made it very clear to me that 'bad mouthing' my employer would be rather moronic. Although I have considered once or twice whether doing so could actaully elicit a 'useful' response to an outstanding issue I've got, generally the conclusion is 'no'. If your employer is doing something dumb, naming and shaming is much more likely to cost you your job than to actually fix the problem.
None the less, having someone respond (before I worked there) to my 'anyone know about
I'd accidentally found the Baen library via webscriptions, but didn't know what it was. It was mostly because I was looking for a legit ebook from one of my favourite authors. I was quite gratified to find that there were a couple of books there, available for free as well. I didn't actually grab the free one, as it was the first in the series that I wanted the whole lot of, but ... I can confirm their notion that exposure means more sales - I've spent more money through their site than I would have done if some of the authors on there didn't have a sampler. And in all fairness, there's a few I've grabbed, read, didn't like, and thus didn't bother.
But either way, that particular author has got more cash from my direction than they would have done otherwise, which I think would be rather the point - I'd actaully prefer and e-copy of 90% of the books I own - there's only a few that I'm so fanatical about that I need a hardcopy on my shelf, and those are the ones that I've bought several times over the years already. k
Speaking personally, I don't actually mind paying 'hardback prices' for a brand new release of a book I've been looking for, even if it is electronic distribution - just to not have to have a bulky hardback to cart around and fill up my bookshelf.
It's going to take a while before my £200 e-reader, with it's actually not any cheaper electronic copies of books, with lesser availability (pirate makes more available, but all too often the formatting is rubbish, and I do _want_ to pay for my books).
However there's one killer - I can drop a paperback, and it'll still be fine. Ebook readers have a long way to go before they stop being fragile and expensive to repair.
And by all accounts, they're doing quite well with slipping councillors in the light of voter apathy.
I'm afraid your espression of discontent has increases your threat level on the international terrorist register - your opposition to the legitimate functioning of the government puts you at increased risk of conducting terrorist activity, and therefore you're required to present yourself to the nearest government facility for interrogation and re-education.
Pleasant? Hmm, yes. Britain is quite a pleasant country. Free? Not so sure. How do you know you have freedom, unless you try and use it and find you can't? We're looking at ID cards, we're looking at surveillance, we're looking at monitoring the populace and their online activity, we've been complicit in torture (oh we didn't _actually_ do it, we just put someone somewhere where they would be, and gave them a list of questions), we've turned a blind eye to some really quite obnoxious human rights abuses by our allies. We've gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan for ... no particular reason it seems - all in the name of 'protecting us from the terrorists/pedophiles/rapists'.
I cannot help but wonder if the only difference between us now, and Nazi Germany pre 1939 is solely hindsight.
Nor will voting for a party, rather than a representative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_court
Lets face it though, a lot of Star Trek canon was arse.
Much of it existed to glorify Shatner's ego. Useful chunks were directly contradictory, or the product of eminently lazy story telling, where the script writer used the 'insert technobabble here' plot resolutions. And the whole series is a product of it's time, and much less interesting when removed from the culture context of when it was first aired.
Also, it's hilarious to see the nerd rage.
Some of the Star Trek canon was ... dubious. VERY dubious. And altogether a product of it's time, culturally speaking, and thus wouldn't have 'fit' with ... well, the world today.
I think it's quite reasonable therefore to reboot the universe, provided it comes with the caveat that screwing around with the timeline to resolve plots is epically lame, and should never be allowed, ever. They did not in this movie go 'we will fix the timeline, and save the people' therefore it's ok that they've diverged and will stay that way.