Oh, no room for Canadians in space, huh? Fine! I'll go build my own spaceship! With blackjack and hookers! In fact, forget the spaceship and the blackjack! Ah, screw the whole thing!
> The bottom line is that blocking all law enforcement access to these technologies is going to cost people their lives, but letting the pigs sniff around where they don't belong is going to ruin everyone's life. This is just another balancing act in the giant circus we call a democratic society.
> >
So, rather than moaning about one side of this argument or another, doesn't it make sense to focus on getting just the right sweet spot in between?
There is no sweet spot.
Technology levels the playing field. Technology is an equalizer. A little over a century ago, "God made all men. Sam Colt made them equal." Today, most democracies and representative republics, even the US, have gun control.
If you and I can encrypt our conversations using a microphone, a computer, some Free client-side software, and some TCP/IP packets, then so can the bad guys. We're all potential providers of VOIP service. ("When outlaws have strong crypto, all crypto ends up outlawed!":)
In an age where technology equalizes citizen adn terrorist, there's no balancing act to be had: Choose - security or liberty - because you can't have both.
So we bring out Ben Franklin - fine. But it's been three years. The people have spoken, and made it pretty clear that they neither want nor deserve either liberty or security.
And if the job of a representative is to respond to his constituents' wishes as best as he can, then our reps are doing a pretty good job of it: Deny liberties to all, and protect the security of those whom they can protect. (Namely themselves and their future lobbyist careers. But it's better to see that secure than nothing secure.:)
> Short attention span version: Please learn to type quickly - regardless of how that is accomplished. U wil luv teh rew@rdz when you dun git pwn3d in teh engrsh claz.
That's bad -- but at least it's a set of discrete sentences. In the extreme cases, IM-speak has degenerated into stream-of-consciousness writing, completely free of punctuation.
What's morbidly fascinating about it is that it *cannot* be read by scanning. If you're literate, you have to stop what you're doing (namely, paging through Slashdot at a pretty good clip) and read. every. word. using subvocalization at approximate the speed of human speech, sounding out the words/sentences, and letting your imaginary narrative voice fill in the "speech" pauses (commas, periods, inflection) for you.
To illustrate, see how long it takes you to read following two passages:
If you have a short attention span, please learn to type quickly, regardless of how that is accomplished. You will love the rewards when you don't get pwn3d by Ms. Foobar in English class every Wednesday. (Man, Ms. Foobar is teh hawt. I'd hit it, wouldn't you? Only the literate need apply.)
Versus:
if u hav short attn span pls lrn 2 typ quickly n e way u can u will luv the rewards u get when u dont get pwned in ms foobar's english class on wed morn man shes teh hawt id hit it wudnt u even if shes a bitch who dusnt like cre8v speling
Either ode to the lovely Ms. Foobar makes perfect sense if you're talking on a telephone or through VOIP, for instance.
But in order to obtain any information out of the second example, you pretty much have to cease using any reading technique that enables you to slurp in large volumes of information at a glance, and start subvocalizing.
I wonder what the long-term impact of an all-IM environment would be on a reader's ability to assimilate information? Use of IMspeak may not merely "illiteracy" in the minor sense of "the inability to use traditional spelling and grammatical constructs", but may actually contribute causally to a much more serious problem: namely "illiteracy", in the sense of of the word that means "an inability to read".
Damn. That's gotta be the fastest metamorphasis from Slashdot in-joke to business plan ever!
So on to the important question: will the Slashdot duplicate read "Microsoft will try out blog service in Japan... in Japan"?
Re:Alter your diet and/or take vitamins/supplement
on
Sleeping Problems?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
> If it doesn't look like something you would feed to your own children regularly as more than a snack, why the HELL are you putting it down your own throat?
...and I'll take "Questions never to ask your wife" for $2000, Alex.
> Be VERY careful not to take an over-the-counter medication like this on any long-term basis (longer than 2-3 days straight) as a "solution" to your sleeping problems. These medications are harsh on your liver and kidneys and are not meant to be taken for longer than a few days, max. If you take them every day over a long period you can permanently screw yourself up.
And if you must use depressants to sleep, use alcohol. A (qty: 1) glass of wine with your evening meal will produce relaxation, is highly unlikely to turn you into an alcoholic, and may (some evidence, albeit inconclusive) carry other health benefits as side effects. Ditto for beer or whisky, though the "healthy" side effects are less likely.
Plus, alcoholic beverages are vastly tastier than OTC sedatives. Available in an insanely wide range of flavors, try them all, and see what kind you like best!
/could really go for a smooth stout beer, a mellow pinot noir, and a smoky Islay malt after dessert. Pretty much in that order.
> Research has found that alcohol induced sleep (even if just one beer) is not as good as real sleep. The alcohol prevents your brain from going into a deep REM sleep.
This is compensated for by the fact that alcohol-deprived wakefulness (anything equal to or less than one beer) is not as good as real wakefulness. Although your frag counts are higher, the lack of alcohol prevents your brain from being able to turn "frag counts" gleeful laughter at the sight of your enemy's gibs being splattered around the room.
> Now, Microsoft want to continue their tax-free status, yet the benefits will go only to Indian tax payers and share holders (most of which probably do pay capital gains in the US, but only when/if they sell their shares.)
From the article.
... Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and Tata Consultancy Services
As in...
Infosys: NASDAQ:INFY
Wipro: NYSE:WIT
Satyam: NYSE:SAY
Tata: Fine, ya got me, not traded on NYSE or NASDAQ.
INFY, WIT, and SAY are as interested in making a buck as anybody. If you believe the benefits of Bill's wads-o-cash are going to end up in the pockets of INFY, WIT, and SAY shareholders, then become one!. You can buy their shares and ADRs just as easily as you can buy MSFT, after all.
> What we really need to do is change the tax laws to tax the hell out of Microsoft Corporation, while releiving the tax burden on it's employees.
What we really need to do is change the laws to tax the hell out of government spending, enabling Microsoft to distribute what it earns to shareholder and employee alike as it sees fit, and simultaneously enabling employee and shareholder alike to keep more of what they've earned, whether said earnings come through owning shares, working, or both.
This is a nonpartisan thing. Remember, for every right-wing running pig-dog lackey of the capitalist class that's fed up with seeing our taxes spent on social services, there's a left-wing granola-eatin', Birkenstock-wearin' hippie vegan freak that's just as fed up with their taxes being spent on our wars.
> > And when it crashes, it crashes hard enough that nothing's writing to the hard drive when I press the hard-reset button. > >
Huh? How is that a benefit? What if it was in the middle of doing a registry update and hard crashes? Next time you reboot, you're gonna get that nice Windows 98 message about the registry hive being corrupted, and to reinstall Windows. Joy!
You boot to DOS, copy a recent copy of the registry from C:\WINDOWS\SYSBCKUP, extract the registry from the compressed CAB file, type ATTRIB a couple of times, and copy the good registry over the corrupted one.
How do you boot to DOS on XP?:)
> Your friend should try hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del to get back to the desktop, or even the "Windows key" gets me back there after a game freezes.
That's what he said. Surprised me too, because I'd never seen an XP or 2K box lock hard enough to require a reset. Isn't always the case. The fault there was with the poorly-coded app, not the OS. The behavior occurred only in the one game in question, and a driver upgrade fixed the problem, so it was clearly not a heat-related hardware fault.
One thing I will give XP props for - NTFS is harder to fix when it fails than FAT32, but it is hella more robust, reducing the probability that you'll ever need to fix it.
> If you're running Win98SE without a firewall, I will bet you a brand new GeForce 6800 Ultra that http://housecall.trendmicro.com will identify at least one virus or worm you're already infected with.
Alas, the gaming rig's at home, not at work, or I'd take you up on that. (Even though under most circumstances, I'd take one look at "x-trendjavascan-plugin" and say "You don't get to run here, whatever you are!", but I trust trendmicro.com for some value of trust.:)
FWIW, the old McAfee standalone "stinger" scanner gives me a clean bill of health every month or so, as does AdAware.
> The rest came in through ICMP and other vectors that Win98 was very vulnerable to.
Source? Other than 98's winnuke (easily patched , and I should have been more specific that the box in question is 98SE, which wasn't subject to that bug), I don't recall ever hearing of a remote exploit for 98SE that didn't require at least some cooperation on the part of the victim.
The gaming rig runs a somewhat more secure setup than an OOBE 98SE (e.g. it never IIS "web services" installed on it, NetBIOS crap is unbound from TCP/IP before it goes on the 'net, it does no network sharing, and is basically as deliberately as standalone a box as I can make it. A real firewall eats most inbound traffic by default, and a software "firewall" on the box (that could admittedly be compromised a'la the BlackIce hole from last year) provides early warning of phone-home apps.
For what it's worth, I'd have taken your bet (even without the hardware firewall) and one of us would have owed the other a new video card.
So my box might not have been that fair of a bet. I'd be confident that I'd win with software-firewall-only, but just for kicks, I might try imaging the OS partition, throwing it onto an old 1.2G drive, and seeing if it also passes with neither hardware nor software firewall.
And finally, having seen a couple of "Joe Sixpack" 9x machines infested from people who think "Oooh, clicky! It's my Buddy!", I'm leaning towards XP + Firewall + deactivate-administrator-account + Force Auto-Updates-And-Auto-Installs-On for anyone who's not clinically paranoid.
Those aren't necessarily the same things. My 9800XT "isn't supported" on my 98SE gaming rig either - but it works just fine.
(Why do I game on 9x? Because it's the same 9x license that came with the box six years ago. Because 9x doesn't run services that listen to ports. Because I can boot with a floppy and reimage -- even though, unlike my friends' 2K/XP boxen, I've never had to, because the box has never been 0wn3d.:)
/me glances at the log of RPC/DCOM worm attacks, every few seconds all bouncing against unopenable ports, from even goddamn dialup IP addresses, and laughs.
Yes, 98SE is a DOS shell. Yes, 98SE isn't a real OS. Yes, 98SE is a toy. Yes 98SE has no security model. And yes, for a single-user gaming rig, that's why it's better than a real OS.
In the meantime, 98SE doesn't require me to "activate" it after I swap hard drives or motherboards. 98SE doesn't phone home. 98SE doesn't run services I don't need. And when it crashes, it crashes hard enough that nothing's writing to the hard drive when I press the hard-reset button. 98SE boxen (as long as you're not using M$'s crapware browser and mail client) can be plugged onto the evil Intarweb - straight out of the box - without even a firewall, and not get 0wn3d.
(This rant expired by the equivalent crashes on the same game played on a friend's XP rig - I observed that when a game in XP goes down hard, the OS keeps running. That's not a feature, that's a bug! No mouse, no GUI, just a frozen 3D rendering of the game, but the hard drive light just flickers happily as the remaining components of the OS busily "manage" the swap file. You sorta wait for the light to flicker out, and hope that you press the hard-reset button before it comes back up. WTF kind of crap is that?)
2K/XP are for Microsoft boxen that do real work. For a gaming rig, they're overkill. Gimme a stripped-down DOS box any day.
Now that the rant's out of the way -- who cares if DOOM3 is "supported" on 98SE. I'm sure we'll find out within 72 hours whether or not it "works anyways".
A LOTR reviewer in 1954 wrote:
> I think we should be well advised to remember that what we have before us now is the first volume of a larger work... and be willing to suspend judgement... until we have seen the whole...
*blink* - I was reading this and somehow the LOTR part of my brain shorted out against the "RPG" part of my brain, and I thought about yesterday's thread on designing games for people who work full time (and the inevitable MMORPG discussion spawned therefrom).
50 years later, we have MMORPG developers saying "Don't blame us if the game sucks! We're not done yet! Just keep paying those monthly fees! We'll implement the fun Real Soon Now! Oh, and here's another 10000 orcs for you to mindlessly slay. That oughta be enough 'content' to keep you busy for the time being."
Density of content appears to be key here, too. LOTR's a huge world/universe with a huge backstory. And although you can tell the story of the One Ring in about half the time it takes to read it, Tolkien made the books work by ensuring that the reader learned something new about that universe in every chapter -- even when it didn't necessarily have anything to do with the plot. (Hence the popularity of both the "movie" and the "mega-extended-remix" DVD set.)
If 2004's MMORPG is the modern answer to 1954's "really long fantasy story", then perhaps the message to aspiring game developers is that as long as you keep the player learning, the story you tell is immaterial.
"The Hobbit" stands on its own, even though from the perspective of LOTR, it's just a paragraph of backstory. But I think we can all remember our joy as first-time readers (regardless of which [quest|book] we [did|read] first) when you put the pieces together. That's good writing, and it makes for great RPG gameplay.
It just struck me as strange that in 50 years, we haven't come full circle when it comes to storytelling in fantasy worlds, we've actually gone backwards.
> Is the segway battery strong enough for a entire game of polo ?
In Aussie Rules Segway Polo, the upright portion of the Segway constitutes the handle of the mallet, and the cylinder whose base is formed by the wheels of the Segway constitutes the head of the mallet.
And then you just drink a lot of beer, grab your Segways, and start clubbing the hell out of whatever poor bastard's closest to the ball. WTF else are you gonna do with a Segway?
> New content to keep the powergamers busy? That's a neverending treadmill.
>
New content to keep the social gamers busy? That's a development nightmare. Social gamers are finicky and given the right environment tend to make their own content, given the wrong environment they blow you off altogether. >
Stop the hologrind and unleash the AFK hordes upon a galaxy already short of spawns and content? That's a revenue bomb.
The key is that given the right environment, social gamers can create their own content. SWG with user-supplied story arcs (a'la NWN) subject to balance constraints might have been fun, as social gamers can usually spell "you" and "your", by using "y" and "o". (And I could have simply chosen not to do player quests that start out with "ur quest is 2 whak u self 10 foozlz of d00m":)
But SWG didn't offer any ability to create content. Putting that ability in would have been a tough call to keep player-generated quests from turning into XP and loot farms. So they can't be faulted for that.
That leaves the "new content to keep the powergamers busy" option. Which is a treadmill, but it's a cheap treadmill!
Grok: with 100,000 subscribers (and probably more like 200,000), SOE was pulling in $1.5M-3M a month in revenue. Let's call it $20M/year revenue.
Are you seriously telling me that with 20,000,000 per year in revenues, profit margins on running a MMORPG are so slim that they couldn't have hired ONE GUY at $100,000 a year ($50K salary, $50K benefits/bonus/cubiclespace/overhead) to write quests?
I'm not talking about an art team to develop custom assets for every quest (though maybe he gets an allocation of 10 artist hours per month). (SWG started with a "monthly" story arc that degenerated into a "quarterly" story arc. Each segment had custom art that cost a small fortune to develop. Compounding the problem, they *removed* the early arc segments from the game, so that new players couldn't even play through prior parts of the story. Who the fuck thought that up? Gee, let's spend a fortune to make custom assets for two hours of content every three months, and blow away the old stuff while we're at it, so that there's never more than two hours of content in the game!:)
I'm talking about a guy who can place a building, an NPC, and when you find the building and do what the NPC asks you to do, you get a shiny and a text message. And you use the text message and the shiny to play a little game-on-rails for a month.
Look at KOTOR: Go to 4 planets. Solve 4 puzzles. Find 4 shinies. What made it work was that as you progressed through the storyline, you unlocked progressively more information about your fellow (NPC) characters and the history of the world around you. In the space of 10-20 hours, you went from "WTF am I doing on this starship?" to a pretty good basic understanding of the Jedi/Sith ideologies and the ancient pre-history of Star Wars early universe.
You can't code KOTOR in a month, but MMORPGs are just graphical wrappers around text-based MUDs. You could code (the text and triggering events, and don't creat any new art) a similar set of quests into SWG in a month. With $20,000,000 a year of cash coming in, could SOE not have hired one goddamn Star Wars Geek to write quests that actually taught the players about the universe in which they lived?
As a simple example, consider the trivia 'bot in the SWG Theed Palace -- if you don't know the answer, you just click at random until you get it right. (So you don't even need to shell out to Google the answer!) Why not have the answers to the 'bot's questions be discoverable by the players in the game through in-game actions? Solve the walkthrough/cheatsheet problem by having the game not ask a question until it knows that the player's avatar has discovered the answer.
> They are running into the frustration of not being able to game any more because they can't blow 40 hours a week on a game. This problem is no more evident then in MMORPGs.
Preach, brother. The other thing is that the time sinks in MMORPGs are about as specfuckingtacularly un-fun as it's possible for something to be.
> So perhaps it takes a little work to be a Jedi Knight,
And while we're at it - talk about a time sink.
For those that didn't try SWG, you had to master 25-32 out of 32 professions. Several of these professions were crafting professions. You were supposed to (I'm not making this up!) craft items by clicking on the same screen locations repeatedly, pause for a second, hit ENTER, pause for a second, hit ENTER again, and start clicking again. No macro system in-game for this. Using third-party automation tools was deemed a violation of the EULA. No skill, no puzzles to solve, no gameplay process of "building" things a'la Tetris, just "Click the box. Click the box. Click the box until you've made forty thousand items, about 200,000 mouse clicks, or 30-40 hours of pure carpal-tunnel-inducing boredom. (Or fuck the EULA, intstall a third-party macro program, and let your computer "play" for two or three days straight). When you'd mastered your profession, you dropped it and went on to the next one. Some of the professions were faster than others, requiring only 10-20000 items.
If you imagine manually renaming, from within a GUI filemanager (i.e. no scripting!), 100,000 "h0tgr1tz12345.jpeg" files to "h0tgr1tz12345.jpg", you've got the right idea.
All told, to become a Jedi required about a 100-150 hours of this dreck. Plus another 100-200 hours of similar mindless auto-attacking mobs, which wasn't quite as easily accelerated, and at least you could choose to take over from the computer and play an unbalanced shooting game in god-mode for a couple of hours a day.)
(+1, Funny): Someone actually expected players to pay $15/month for this.
(-1, Sad): They found 100,000-200,000 people dumb enough to take them up on that offer.
Star Wars Galaxies: The perfect wage slavery game. (Oh, wait, I just RTFA. It's about designing games for wage slaves, not designing games about roleplaying what it's like to be a wage slave. Nevermind.)
> As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there >
And that sign said - no tress passin' >
But on the other side.... it didn't say nothin! >
Now that side was made for you and me!
Ironic -- the original song's sign didn't say "no trespassin", it said "private property".
And on that note: It's pretty weak filk, but it's the best I can do in 30 seconds. Hey, it's Slashdot, whaddya expect, Woody Guthrie or something?
I went to jib-jab - to hear some comedy,
Heard a RIAA landshark - talkin' 'bout his I-P,
Other web-site - was just a paaaa-ro-dy,
That site was made for you and me.
So this whole article is about the UPS Debugger. Just One More Hack, and then he'll put it on the 'net...
Well, I've written a debugger and it suits me just fine
It'll chase away your problems, turn your water into wine
It's got so many features, in fact it's bloody clever,
If it can't solve your problem then your problem probably never
can be solved
so you might as well pack it on in,
coz it's the best debugger that there's ever been.
It's got everything you wanted, everything you desire.
It'll handle fancy structures, set your soul on fire,
It'll indirect through pointers, and catch a falling star,
and if you ask it nicely it'll pop off to the bar and tell your friends
how to solve the problems they're in,
coz it's the best debugger that there's ever been.
If you've got a nasty problem and your data structure's bent
and your pointer's in a tangle with your structure elements,
If you're losing all your memory coz your allocator leaks
And your girl's getting nasty coz she's not seen you for weeks,
then stoke up Mark's debugger
you know it'll win,
coz it's the best debugger that there's ever been....
> Mr. Debugger, I'm running a multithreaded perl app using perl 5.8.3's ithreads. I am using DBD::mysql to talk to a local mysql database. At the program start I spawn a child thread that waits for a thread::queue to be filled with data. Once the child thread receives data it spawns several children of its own to process the data. Each grandchild forms its own dbd connection and successfully processes the data, then gracefully closes the connection and waits to be joined.
Hello SeanTobin(138474)!
I am Surest K. Padebugtel of Mrdebugger.com
I understand that you are having a problem with I'm running a multithreaded perl app using perl 5.8.3's ithreads. I am using DBD::mysql to talk to a local mysql database. At the program start I spawn a child thread that waits for a thread::queue to be filled with data. Once the child thread receives data it spawns several children of its own to process the data. Each grandchild forms its own dbd connection and successfully processes the data, then gracefully closes the connection and waits to be joined.
Please to reboot your system.
Has this helped your problem? (Click "Reply" to this trouble ticket if you feel you need further assistance with I'm running a multithreaded perl app using perl 5.8.3's ithreads. I am using DBD::mysql to talk to a local mysql database. At the program start I spawn a child thread that waits for a thread::queue to be filled with data. Once the child thread receives data it spawns several children of its own to process the data. Each grandchild forms its own dbd connection and successfully processes the data, then gracefully closes the connection and waits to be joined.)
> If all you really care about is catching criminals, rather than about personal rights or privacy or any of that other stuff that gets in the way, then where you really want to live is in a police state. We've had those and most people didn't like them very much.
After a while, most of the people who don't like them... tend to cease objecting. Or doing anything else (like breathing:), for that matter.
> The people are not supposed to be accountable to the government! It is supposed to be the other way around. The police/FBI/CIA/etc are there for YOUR benefit, and they are not supposed to be able to act in secrecy and without public justification.
That was then. This is now. Times change. *shrug*
In a changing ecosystem, all organisms either adapt, or die.
You're still free to choose: you may either adapt yourself to the new ways of thinking and join the rest of society, or you may spend the rest of your short, miserable life waiting in fear for the knock on the door.
"You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the OC-3 to boobies.chemist.com, but that's just peanuts to Google. Listen...", and so on.
(After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell you things you really need to know, like the fact that Google has different DNS entries depending on which server you look them up from, which is only a partial solution to the bandwidth problem -- so that despite the DNS tricks, any net imbalance between the packets you send to Google and the packets Google sends back to you, must be surgically removed from your pipe: so every time you type "natalie portman hot grits" into images.google.com, it is vitally important to get a receipt.)
>
Then there's the question of what this will do to other behavior. It's making a MAJOR change to the internal reward pathways of the brain. How will these people do in school? On the job? How will they respond to advertising? Political propaganda? Religious indoctrination?
How will we respond? What we respond to can be figured out later by those who rule us; what matters is that we will respond more predictably than they did before.
> There are indications that psycopathy is the result of a failure in an emotional pathway, leading to both loss of guilt feelings and risk-taking in an attempt to achieve any feeling at all. Is THIS the pathway in question? Will an "immunization" program raise the incidence of psychopathy from about 1% of the population to the bulk of it? Will we have a generation of used car salesmen, confidence men, gangsters, death-squad members, and political dictators?
...and that's what we've got today! Just think what we'll do when we have mass thought control through controllingthe risk/reward centers of the human brain!:)
> Fooling around with something as basic as the reward hardware of the mind is NOT something you can do and expect no undesirable side-effects.
You look at it from the limited perspective of one not in power. Place yourself in the mindset of your leaders. If they're psychopaths, the benefits are obvious -- but the benefits are also obvious from a humanitarian standpoint. From either vantage point, this is an exquisitly beautiful development.
A society at war with itself will fall; to defend against threats from without -- we must first eliminate war from within. Imagine the millions of us, all of our neural reward pathways under complete control - a harmonious society whose population exchibits a perfect unity of thought, purpose, and deed.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a human face, with the mind behind it re-engineered so that it no longer need the boot that would otherwise have to stomp on it, forever.
Slashdot Mirror
(Bite my maple-sugared ass?)
>
> So, rather than moaning about one side of this argument or another, doesn't it make sense to focus on getting just the right sweet spot in between?
There is no sweet spot.
Technology levels the playing field. Technology is an equalizer. A little over a century ago, "God made all men. Sam Colt made them equal." Today, most democracies and representative republics, even the US, have gun control.
If you and I can encrypt our conversations using a microphone, a computer, some Free client-side software, and some TCP/IP packets, then so can the bad guys. We're all potential providers of VOIP service. ("When outlaws have strong crypto, all crypto ends up outlawed!" :)
In an age where technology equalizes citizen adn terrorist, there's no balancing act to be had: Choose - security or liberty - because you can't have both.
So we bring out Ben Franklin - fine. But it's been three years. The people have spoken, and made it pretty clear that they neither want nor deserve either liberty or security.
And if the job of a representative is to respond to his constituents' wishes as best as he can, then our reps are doing a pretty good job of it: Deny liberties to all, and protect the security of those whom they can protect. (Namely themselves and their future lobbyist careers. But it's better to see that secure than nothing secure. :)
Whoa there, dude. Too. Much. Information.
That's bad -- but at least it's a set of discrete sentences. In the extreme cases, IM-speak has degenerated into stream-of-consciousness writing, completely free of punctuation.
What's morbidly fascinating about it is that it *cannot* be read by scanning. If you're literate, you have to stop what you're doing (namely, paging through Slashdot at a pretty good clip) and read. every. word. using subvocalization at approximate the speed of human speech, sounding out the words/sentences, and letting your imaginary narrative voice fill in the "speech" pauses (commas, periods, inflection) for you.
To illustrate, see how long it takes you to read following two passages:
Versus:
Either ode to the lovely Ms. Foobar makes perfect sense if you're talking on a telephone or through VOIP, for instance.
But in order to obtain any information out of the second example, you pretty much have to cease using any reading technique that enables you to slurp in large volumes of information at a glance, and start subvocalizing.
I wonder what the long-term impact of an all-IM environment would be on a reader's ability to assimilate information? Use of IMspeak may not merely "illiteracy" in the minor sense of "the inability to use traditional spelling and grammatical constructs", but may actually contribute causally to a much more serious problem: namely "illiteracy", in the sense of of the word that means "an inability to read".
So on to the important question: will the Slashdot duplicate read "Microsoft will try out blog service in Japan... in Japan"?
And if you must use depressants to sleep, use alcohol. A (qty: 1) glass of wine with your evening meal will produce relaxation, is highly unlikely to turn you into an alcoholic, and may (some evidence, albeit inconclusive) carry other health benefits as side effects. Ditto for beer or whisky, though the "healthy" side effects are less likely.
Plus, alcoholic beverages are vastly tastier than OTC sedatives. Available in an insanely wide range of flavors, try them all, and see what kind you like best!
This is compensated for by the fact that alcohol-deprived wakefulness (anything equal to or less than one beer) is not as good as real wakefulness. Although your frag counts are higher, the lack of alcohol prevents your brain from being able to turn "frag counts" gleeful laughter at the sight of your enemy's gibs being splattered around the room.
Funny you should say that...
From the article.
As in...
Infosys: NASDAQ:INFY
Wipro: NYSE:WIT
Satyam: NYSE:SAY
Tata: Fine, ya got me, not traded on NYSE or NASDAQ.
INFY, WIT, and SAY are as interested in making a buck as anybody. If you believe the benefits of Bill's wads-o-cash are going to end up in the pockets of INFY, WIT, and SAY shareholders, then become one!. You can buy their shares and ADRs just as easily as you can buy MSFT, after all.
> What we really need to do is change the tax laws to tax the hell out of Microsoft Corporation, while releiving the tax burden on it's employees.
What we really need to do is change the laws to tax the hell out of government spending, enabling Microsoft to distribute what it earns to shareholder and employee alike as it sees fit, and simultaneously enabling employee and shareholder alike to keep more of what they've earned, whether said earnings come through owning shares, working, or both.
This is a nonpartisan thing. Remember, for every right-wing running pig-dog lackey of the capitalist class that's fed up with seeing our taxes spent on social services, there's a left-wing granola-eatin', Birkenstock-wearin' hippie vegan freak that's just as fed up with their taxes being spent on our wars.
>
> Huh? How is that a benefit? What if it was in the middle of doing a registry update and hard crashes? Next time you reboot, you're gonna get that nice Windows 98 message about the registry hive being corrupted, and to reinstall Windows. Joy!
You boot to DOS, copy a recent copy of the registry from C:\WINDOWS\SYSBCKUP, extract the registry from the compressed CAB file, type ATTRIB a couple of times, and copy the good registry over the corrupted one.
How do you boot to DOS on XP? :)
> Your friend should try hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del to get back to the desktop, or even the "Windows key" gets me back there after a game freezes.
That's what he said. Surprised me too, because I'd never seen an XP or 2K box lock hard enough to require a reset. Isn't always the case. The fault there was with the poorly-coded app, not the OS. The behavior occurred only in the one game in question, and a driver upgrade fixed the problem, so it was clearly not a heat-related hardware fault.
One thing I will give XP props for - NTFS is harder to fix when it fails than FAT32, but it is hella more robust, reducing the probability that you'll ever need to fix it.
Alas, the gaming rig's at home, not at work, or I'd take you up on that. (Even though under most circumstances, I'd take one look at "x-trendjavascan-plugin" and say "You don't get to run here, whatever you are!", but I trust trendmicro.com for some value of trust. :)
FWIW, the old McAfee standalone "stinger" scanner gives me a clean bill of health every month or so, as does AdAware.
> The rest came in through ICMP and other vectors that Win98 was very vulnerable to.
Source? Other than 98's winnuke (easily patched , and I should have been more specific that the box in question is 98SE, which wasn't subject to that bug), I don't recall ever hearing of a remote exploit for 98SE that didn't require at least some cooperation on the part of the victim.
The gaming rig runs a somewhat more secure setup than an OOBE 98SE (e.g. it never IIS "web services" installed on it, NetBIOS crap is unbound from TCP/IP before it goes on the 'net, it does no network sharing, and is basically as deliberately as standalone a box as I can make it. A real firewall eats most inbound traffic by default, and a software "firewall" on the box (that could admittedly be compromised a'la the BlackIce hole from last year) provides early warning of phone-home apps.
For what it's worth, I'd have taken your bet (even without the hardware firewall) and one of us would have owed the other a new video card.
So my box might not have been that fair of a bet. I'd be confident that I'd win with software-firewall-only, but just for kicks, I might try imaging the OS partition, throwing it onto an old 1.2G drive, and seeing if it also passes with neither hardware nor software firewall.
And finally, having seen a couple of "Joe Sixpack" 9x machines infested from people who think "Oooh, clicky! It's my Buddy!", I'm leaning towards XP + Firewall + deactivate-administrator-account + Force Auto-Updates-And-Auto-Installs-On for anyone who's not clinically paranoid.
"Won't be supported" or "Won't work"?
Those aren't necessarily the same things. My 9800XT "isn't supported" on my 98SE gaming rig either - but it works just fine.
(Why do I game on 9x? Because it's the same 9x license that came with the box six years ago. Because 9x doesn't run services that listen to ports. Because I can boot with a floppy and reimage -- even though, unlike my friends' 2K/XP boxen, I've never had to, because the box has never been 0wn3d. :)
Yes, 98SE is a DOS shell. Yes, 98SE isn't a real OS. Yes, 98SE is a toy. Yes 98SE has no security model. And yes, for a single-user gaming rig, that's why it's better than a real OS.
In the meantime, 98SE doesn't require me to "activate" it after I swap hard drives or motherboards. 98SE doesn't phone home. 98SE doesn't run services I don't need. And when it crashes, it crashes hard enough that nothing's writing to the hard drive when I press the hard-reset button. 98SE boxen (as long as you're not using M$'s crapware browser and mail client) can be plugged onto the evil Intarweb - straight out of the box - without even a firewall, and not get 0wn3d.
(This rant expired by the equivalent crashes on the same game played on a friend's XP rig - I observed that when a game in XP goes down hard, the OS keeps running. That's not a feature, that's a bug! No mouse, no GUI, just a frozen 3D rendering of the game, but the hard drive light just flickers happily as the remaining components of the OS busily "manage" the swap file. You sorta wait for the light to flicker out, and hope that you press the hard-reset button before it comes back up. WTF kind of crap is that?)
2K/XP are for Microsoft boxen that do real work. For a gaming rig, they're overkill. Gimme a stripped-down DOS box any day.
Now that the rant's out of the way -- who cares if DOOM3 is "supported" on 98SE. I'm sure we'll find out within 72 hours whether or not it "works anyways".
*blink* - I was reading this and somehow the LOTR part of my brain shorted out against the "RPG" part of my brain, and I thought about yesterday's thread on designing games for people who work full time (and the inevitable MMORPG discussion spawned therefrom).
50 years later, we have MMORPG developers saying "Don't blame us if the game sucks! We're not done yet! Just keep paying those monthly fees! We'll implement the fun Real Soon Now! Oh, and here's another 10000 orcs for you to mindlessly slay. That oughta be enough 'content' to keep you busy for the time being."
Density of content appears to be key here, too. LOTR's a huge world/universe with a huge backstory. And although you can tell the story of the One Ring in about half the time it takes to read it, Tolkien made the books work by ensuring that the reader learned something new about that universe in every chapter -- even when it didn't necessarily have anything to do with the plot. (Hence the popularity of both the "movie" and the "mega-extended-remix" DVD set.)
If 2004's MMORPG is the modern answer to 1954's "really long fantasy story", then perhaps the message to aspiring game developers is that as long as you keep the player learning, the story you tell is immaterial.
"The Hobbit" stands on its own, even though from the perspective of LOTR, it's just a paragraph of backstory. But I think we can all remember our joy as first-time readers (regardless of which [quest|book] we [did|read] first) when you put the pieces together. That's good writing, and it makes for great RPG gameplay.
It just struck me as strange that in 50 years, we haven't come full circle when it comes to storytelling in fantasy worlds, we've actually gone backwards.
In Aussie Rules Segway Polo, the upright portion of the Segway constitutes the handle of the mallet, and the cylinder whose base is formed by the wheels of the Segway constitutes the head of the mallet.
And then you just drink a lot of beer, grab your Segways, and start clubbing the hell out of whatever poor bastard's closest to the ball. WTF else are you gonna do with a Segway?
> New content to keep the social gamers busy? That's a development nightmare. Social gamers are finicky and given the right environment tend to make their own content, given the wrong environment they blow you off altogether.
> Stop the hologrind and unleash the AFK hordes upon a galaxy already short of spawns and content? That's a revenue bomb.
The key is that given the right environment, social gamers can create their own content. SWG with user-supplied story arcs (a'la NWN) subject to balance constraints might have been fun, as social gamers can usually spell "you" and "your", by using "y" and "o". (And I could have simply chosen not to do player quests that start out with "ur quest is 2 whak u self 10 foozlz of d00m" :)
But SWG didn't offer any ability to create content. Putting that ability in would have been a tough call to keep player-generated quests from turning into XP and loot farms. So they can't be faulted for that.
That leaves the "new content to keep the powergamers busy" option. Which is a treadmill, but it's a cheap treadmill!
Grok: with 100,000 subscribers (and probably more like 200,000), SOE was pulling in $1.5M-3M a month in revenue. Let's call it $20M/year revenue.
Are you seriously telling me that with 20,000,000 per year in revenues, profit margins on running a MMORPG are so slim that they couldn't have hired ONE GUY at $100,000 a year ($50K salary, $50K benefits/bonus/cubiclespace/overhead) to write quests?
I'm not talking about an art team to develop custom assets for every quest (though maybe he gets an allocation of 10 artist hours per month). (SWG started with a "monthly" story arc that degenerated into a "quarterly" story arc. Each segment had custom art that cost a small fortune to develop. Compounding the problem, they *removed* the early arc segments from the game, so that new players couldn't even play through prior parts of the story. Who the fuck thought that up? Gee, let's spend a fortune to make custom assets for two hours of content every three months, and blow away the old stuff while we're at it, so that there's never more than two hours of content in the game! :)
I'm talking about a guy who can place a building, an NPC, and when you find the building and do what the NPC asks you to do, you get a shiny and a text message. And you use the text message and the shiny to play a little game-on-rails for a month.
Look at KOTOR: Go to 4 planets. Solve 4 puzzles. Find 4 shinies. What made it work was that as you progressed through the storyline, you unlocked progressively more information about your fellow (NPC) characters and the history of the world around you. In the space of 10-20 hours, you went from "WTF am I doing on this starship?" to a pretty good basic understanding of the Jedi/Sith ideologies and the ancient pre-history of Star Wars early universe.
You can't code KOTOR in a month, but MMORPGs are just graphical wrappers around text-based MUDs. You could code (the text and triggering events, and don't creat any new art) a similar set of quests into SWG in a month. With $20,000,000 a year of cash coming in, could SOE not have hired one goddamn Star Wars Geek to write quests that actually taught the players about the universe in which they lived?
As a simple example, consider the trivia 'bot in the SWG Theed Palace -- if you don't know the answer, you just click at random until you get it right. (So you don't even need to shell out to Google the answer!) Why not have the answers to the 'bot's questions be discoverable by the players in the game through in-game actions? Solve the walkthrough/cheatsheet problem by having the game not ask a question until it knows that the player's avatar has discovered the answer.
Look at Morrowind - possibly t
Preach, brother. The other thing is that the time sinks in MMORPGs are about as specfuckingtacularly un-fun as it's possible for something to be.
> So perhaps it takes a little work to be a Jedi Knight,
And while we're at it - talk about a time sink.
For those that didn't try SWG, you had to master 25-32 out of 32 professions. Several of these professions were crafting professions. You were supposed to (I'm not making this up!) craft items by clicking on the same screen locations repeatedly, pause for a second, hit ENTER, pause for a second, hit ENTER again, and start clicking again. No macro system in-game for this. Using third-party automation tools was deemed a violation of the EULA. No skill, no puzzles to solve, no gameplay process of "building" things a'la Tetris, just "Click the box. Click the box. Click the box until you've made forty thousand items, about 200,000 mouse clicks, or 30-40 hours of pure carpal-tunnel-inducing boredom. (Or fuck the EULA, intstall a third-party macro program, and let your computer "play" for two or three days straight). When you'd mastered your profession, you dropped it and went on to the next one. Some of the professions were faster than others, requiring only 10-20000 items.
If you imagine manually renaming, from within a GUI filemanager (i.e. no scripting!), 100,000 "h0tgr1tz12345.jpeg" files to "h0tgr1tz12345.jpg", you've got the right idea.
All told, to become a Jedi required about a 100-150 hours of this dreck. Plus another 100-200 hours of similar mindless auto-attacking mobs, which wasn't quite as easily accelerated, and at least you could choose to take over from the computer and play an unbalanced shooting game in god-mode for a couple of hours a day.)
(+1, Funny): Someone actually expected players to pay $15/month for this.
(-1, Sad): They found 100,000-200,000 people dumb enough to take them up on that offer.
Star Wars Galaxies: The perfect wage slavery game. (Oh, wait, I just RTFA. It's about designing games for wage slaves, not designing games about roleplaying what it's like to be a wage slave. Nevermind.)
> And that sign said - no tress passin'
> But on the other side
> Now that side was made for you and me!
Ironic -- the original song's sign didn't say "no trespassin", it said "private property".
And on that note: It's pretty weak filk, but it's the best I can do in 30 seconds. Hey, it's Slashdot, whaddya expect, Woody Guthrie or something?
I went to jib-jab - to hear some comedy,
Heard a RIAA landshark - talkin' 'bout his I-P,
Other web-site - was just a paaaa-ro-dy,
That site was made for you and me.
So this whole article is about the UPS Debugger. Just One More Hack, and then he'll put it on the 'net...
MP3 version available at: Just One More Hack - Mark WheadonHello SeanTobin(138474)!
I am Surest K. Padebugtel of Mrdebugger.com
I understand that you are having a problem with I'm running a multithreaded perl app using perl 5.8.3's ithreads. I am using DBD::mysql to talk to a local mysql database. At the program start I spawn a child thread that waits for a thread::queue to be filled with data. Once the child thread receives data it spawns several children of its own to process the data. Each grandchild forms its own dbd connection and successfully processes the data, then gracefully closes the connection and waits to be joined.
Please to reboot your system.
Has this helped your problem? (Click "Reply" to this trouble ticket if you feel you need further assistance with I'm running a multithreaded perl app using perl 5.8.3's ithreads. I am using DBD::mysql to talk to a local mysql database. At the program start I spawn a child thread that waits for a thread::queue to be filled with data. Once the child thread receives data it spawns several children of its own to process the data. Each grandchild forms its own dbd connection and successfully processes the data, then gracefully closes the connection and waits to be joined.)
Thank you for your interest in Mrdebugger.com!
Sincerely,
Suresh K. Padebugtel
After a while, most of the people who don't like them... tend to cease objecting. Or doing anything else (like breathing :), for that matter.
> The people are not supposed to be accountable to the government! It is supposed to be the other way around. The police/FBI/CIA/etc are there for YOUR benefit, and they are not supposed to be able to act in secrecy and without public justification.
That was then. This is now. Times change. *shrug*
In a changing ecosystem, all organisms either adapt, or die. You're still free to choose: you may either adapt yourself to the new ways of thinking and join the rest of society, or you may spend the rest of your short, miserable life waiting in fear for the knock on the door.
>Donate
> Buy T-Shirt
1. Donate to legal defense fund / Buy T-shirt.
2. Get charged with providing material support for terrorists.
3. ???
I think I'll pass.
I preferred it when #3 was "Profit!", even though I still haven't solved for the old #2.
Good luck, you'll need it!
"You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the OC-3 to boobies.chemist.com, but that's just peanuts to Google. Listen...", and so on.
(After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell you things you really need to know, like the fact that Google has different DNS entries depending on which server you look them up from, which is only a partial solution to the bandwidth problem -- so that despite the DNS tricks, any net imbalance between the packets you send to Google and the packets Google sends back to you, must be surgically removed from your pipe: so every time you type "natalie portman hot grits" into images.google.com, it is vitally important to get a receipt.)
How will we respond? What we respond to can be figured out later by those who rule us; what matters is that we will respond more predictably than they did before.
> There are indications that psycopathy is the result of a failure in an emotional pathway, leading to both loss of guilt feelings and risk-taking in an attempt to achieve any feeling at all. Is THIS the pathway in question? Will an "immunization" program raise the incidence of psychopathy from about 1% of the population to the bulk of it? Will we have a generation of used car salesmen, confidence men, gangsters, death-squad members, and political dictators?
> Fooling around with something as basic as the reward hardware of the mind is NOT something you can do and expect no undesirable side-effects.
You look at it from the limited perspective of one not in power. Place yourself in the mindset of your leaders. If they're psychopaths, the benefits are obvious -- but the benefits are also obvious from a humanitarian standpoint. From either vantage point, this is an exquisitly beautiful development.
A society at war with itself will fall; to defend against threats from without -- we must first eliminate war from within. Imagine the millions of us, all of our neural reward pathways under complete control - a harmonious society whose population exchibits a perfect unity of thought, purpose, and deed.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a human face, with the mind behind it re-engineered so that it no longer need the boot that would otherwise have to stomp on it, forever.