>I'll admit though that I get surprised when I >hear about people that have been arrested 30+ >times for a DUI and somehow still keep their >license (being a friend of the mayor, bribing >judges, finding a loophole in the law, the >arresting officer doesn't show up to the trial, >etc.)
How about being arrested for a DUI and then becoming President of the country?:)
You don't need nearly the power of a matrox card. You're not managing 32 million colors, or 3d effects, texture loading, or any of that. Just black and white, a video card to handle epaper would be very simple , very cheap and very small.
I can't believe I haven't seen this reason yet, and to those of you who think it isn't at least a partial factor in your own contributions, think about it carefully.
The reason I'm speaking of is to get your name known, be popular, get famous, etc. Whatever you choose to call it, alot of us have a desire to be known for doing something, to have our name mean something to somebody. It makes us feel more connected to the world to know that we are known and liked by others, even if we'll never see or talk to those people.
Yes of course people are genuinely philanthropic with their time, didn't mean to suggest otherwise, but please don't deny that fame isn't a factor also. It makes the whole thing sound more believable to an intelligent politician like Boucher who is apparently trying to understand the motives and drives behind the movement.
You might be interested in all of the work that's been done with UO emulators. These are programs that emulate a UO server on your machine and other players can log into. This lets you really create your own world and some people have remolded UO to their heart's content. I toyed with the idea of creating one myself and with the aid of some friends and started the design, but didn't have the time to finish it. But even the small unfinished bit I worked on was extremely rewarding. I could define my own rules, change the terrain, add buildings, create my own monsters and design their AI, it was fantastic. My imagination and time were the only limitations.
All the emulators need is some slightly more helpful design tools and NWN will be obsolete before it comes out. The best part is that for the most part, the emulators are written via open source techniques (and run on Linux of course:))
Check out
www.uoxdev.com
and
http://vulpin.burdell.org/pol/links.html
But you don't need to design a world to get a taste of what can be done, pick up a cheap copy of the UO client at a store and log into someone's world.
How many other people were banned for exploiting in the same time? I remember very few, and I am fairly certain that were it not for his actions regarding Lord British, he would have not been "prosecuted".
Were it not for him, we'd not have this great story.
If you'll read the article, he hasn't hit level 20 yet. That's where the primrose path becomes choked with thorns. Storytelling and roleplaying takes a backseat to camping and competition. There's still alot to be said for EQ and what it provides, but I don't think it's got what Adams is looking for. The world is sterile by design, players cannot affect it at all. He'll figure that out soon enough.
I would have preferred if he had focussed on Ultima Online instead. Because users are able to change so much, and thus create their own cities and quests within the game.
It's all about user created content, and UO was fantastic in that aspect, whatever you may think of the rest of it. In my mind, none of the other MMORPG's have come close to UO in quality because of this (although Asheron's Call's new housing system may bridge that gap).
Because I hate to see legends of old corrupted by those too lazy to do their fact checking (shame on you Adams), here's what happened with Rainz, the guy who killed Lord British, as told to me by the thief and filtered through 3 years of memory.
The crowd had assembled, or part of it at least. British had just started addressing the crowd when someone in the crowd was peeking around in backpacks of those around him using his thieving skills. He found a firewall scroll, handed it off to Rainz, who threw it at Lord British for the hell of it, he didn't think it would hurt him.
I'm not certain, but I think at this point, British may have mentioned something to the effect that this firewall couldn't hurt him, thinking that his invulnerability flag was on (not a ring, a GM power). Unbeknownst to him, someone had forgotten to turn it on and his life bar was dropping quickly and he fell over dead even as he gloated about his invulnerability. End of story. Rainz was banned, but the thief was never fingered.
Thus was a gaming legend born.
Interestingly, it was probably as a result of this incident and the screenshots circulated of it, that people were able to easily create UO comics depicting a dead Lord British.
I misspoke, shouldn't have used the word guilty. The intent of my message was to demonstrate what laws he was correctly charged with violating here in the US, and not just in Russia, as the parent message implied.
He came here and spoke about his program, hence he trafficked his information here, which is illegal under the DMCA.
Dmitry violated our law on our soil and has been locked up for it. I hate the DMCA as much as any of us, but he is guilty, and proclaiming him as innocent merely makes one look uninformed.
Hard to swallow
on
Mob Software
·
· Score: 3, Funny
This sounds like a couple of guys who are unable to let go of the heady, exciting days of software development in its infancy, and move to the next stage.
Certainly mob creation has it's role in any industry, but as the industry matures, the place for the mob changes. Early on, each element of the mob was a person, creating operating systems, computers. As time has gone on, a person is no longer capable of creating a big application or designing a computer themselves. So now an element of the mob is a design team, or a company. And cooperating in our mostly free market, they act as a mob.
Even within a given time period of an industry, mob development works better in some places than others. The Linux movement? sure, the mob is working well. But the space shuttle code? They honestly and truly believe that something akin to the open source community should have designed the space shuttle code? Sure, the mob mentality would work, IF YOU HAD 20 SPACE SHUTTLES TO THROW AWAY IN SPECTACULAR FIREBALLS BEFORE IT WAS FINISHED.
Yes, disasters and mistakes are the hallmarks of any engineering endeavour, but that doesn't mean we can't try to avoid them.
While the numbers of players are nowwhere close to the big guys (AOK, SC, D2, etc), there are plenty of game available during peak hours, and I rarely have trouble getting a 4v4 game rolling.
I point this out because I fear your terminology will give people the impression that there is no multiplayer community, when in fact a strong core group exists, they just don't post on MFO.
And things will get better, the European release is just around the corner, which will give a strong boost. Just a few months away is the expansion which will revitalize the community even further. I have confidence that the Kohan community will attain enough critical mass to persist for awhile because the game is just that good.
A good example of a game that truly tanked was Submarine Titans. You were often hard pressed to find a game at any time. This game was too similar to previous RTS's to pull people away from the old standbys. Now, as far as I can tell, Subtitans is deader than dead, even the news updates on the main sites are many months old.
Kohan is an outstanding game
on
Kohan for Linux
·
· Score: 3, Informative
While it posesses all of the features of the standard RTS, they're blended in a combination that works very well.
Here are the primary features of the game that I enjoy:
The economic micromanagement aspect that one normally sees (peons harvesting resources) is almost entirely absent, so economic growth is based mainly on the decisions you make, not how well you manipulate virtual slaves to hunt deer.
Units must be supplied with resources in addition to being purchased. Having to support your existing armies is a feature that hasn't really been tried in this genre (yes I know you have to make houses in AOE, but the cost is only noticeable in the beginning). The result is an interesting game dynamic, in that wiping out an army is only effective if you follow it up with some capturing of towns. Give him some time and the troops will be rebuilt and you will have gained little.
Experience for troops is excellent, careful management of your armies lets them effectively go up in level, getting somewhat more powerful(but not overmuch). This rewards the careful planner as opposed to the sloppy turbo-economy player who cranks out troops and lets them die.
Tactics are key, unit companies keep their artillery and leaders in the back (archers/mages and captain), so doing an end run around the front line and hitting the rear is absolutely crippling. It really is a game of how you use your troops, not what troops you buy.
Teamwork is heavily emphasized in that there are few obstacles to trading money or cities back and forth. Also, you can immediately see what your allies are doing (unlike AOK which requires tech research to expose the allied minimap). The result is that there is far more cooperation in the average Kohan game, perfectly accentuating the benefits of multiplayer gaming. Other RTS's often end up being a series of parallel 1v1 matchups on the same board.
The action is very quick. You are generally fighting something or someone within 5 minutes of the start, so there's no 15 minute SimCity game.
The network code works fairly well, disconnected players remember the IP address they were at and try to reconnect. A status indicator lets the whole game know if the player is gone, or attempting a reconnect.
I would recommend this game to any serious strategy gamer without hesitation.
All in all,
Re:You misunderstand the danger
on
Code Redux
·
· Score: 2
Yea, I'm a moron alright, a moron to continue this conversation with you.
You've dissambled THIS worm, but every copy of Win2K ships with the IIS vulnerability, so plenty of new worms could be created that do other things.
Point 2 is exactly my point, the patch is not going to fix the secondary damage caused by the worm in the short time it takes you to destroy it.
The only real fix for something that can be exploited so quickly would be to issue new copies of win 2K to everyone with this hole patched, but that's not going to happen. So this hole will exist for however long it takes MS to release the Win2k replacement.
With Linux, on the other hand, new versions come out several times per year, which means the baseline installation for a majority of the users is generally only a few months out of date.
And "airgap" is not mine, it's been around for quite some time in the security community. It's become a bit outdated with the advent of wireless technology however.
How many people do this? Standard policy at most places is probably just to install/patch and then assume everything is rosy.
You misunderstand the danger
on
Code Redux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, pre-existing worms disappear and no worms of that variety can infect, but in the few minutes of life it had on your system, CodeRed had full access to download other, newer, unpatched, programs that otherwise would be unable to get onboard.
I reiterate, the only safe path is to install on an airgapped machine, or on a well secured LAN. But if you have to download it from the internet, there is a chance that *anything*, not just CodeRed, will be hiding somewhere by the time you patch.
Code red is so profligant (because it require no user intervention to spread), that a new machine installation will likely be hit by it in 10 minutes or less, which of course, is less time than it takes to patch it, which of course means that until you patch it, the remote exploitation is free to install anything else it wants until you close the hole, so you're going to be left with a zombiefied machine unless you install and patch with from an airgapped machine, using a local copy of the patch. I doubt most people do that.
So even with the patch up and available, the problem is far from solved. I bet the number of zombie machines out there surged 10fold today, many of which are on high speed corporate bandwidth, instead of the more meager cable modems with severely crippled upstream access.
You pay much more than for a car, that should play games too...
Computers are not a good platform for gaming because of the hardware variability. This creates huge headaches of developers and detracts from the quality in a big way.
Games such as UO, AC and EQ which were released YEARS ago went far more smoothly. No they weren't perfect, but at least the client mostly worked once the inevitable network congestion problems were overcome.
The excuse "it's a big project, this is hard, noone has done this before" has worn damn thin after being repeated by so many people who should have learned the lessons of others.
One would expect new iterations of the MMORPG line to get better, not worse.
Cornered Rat Studios put out WWII Online. Funcom did AO. But I can see how you could confuse them, WWII has many of the same problems. The minimum requirements are 128MB of RAM, but most people will tell you that it's unplayable with that.
Apart from the frequent bugs and crashes, the game only includes of a fraction of the features listed on the box (including such trivial details as Naval Combat) and is in no way a completed product.
Sadly, alot of people bought it anyway, and the financial message to game developers is "go ahead and release your unfinished product, they'll buy it anyway".
I have yet to see anyone citing or discussing this tidbit at the end....
Looking at the technical details of WPA, we do not think that it is as
problematic as many people have expected. We think so, because WPA is
tolerant with respect to hardware modifications. In addition, it is
likely that more than one hardware component map to a certain value
for a given bit-field. From the above real-world example we know that
the PX-32TS maps to the value 0x37 = 55. But there are probably many
other CD-ROM drives that map to the same value. Hence, it is
impossible to tell from the bit-field value whether it is a PX-32TS
that we are using or one of the other drives that map to the same
value.
In contrast to many critics of Windows Product Activation, we think
that WPA does not prevent typical hardware modifications and,
moreover, respects the user's right to privacy.
No need to wonder why such published opinions are ignored by the/. crowd...
If this caught on bigtime, you can bet the broadband providers would start blocking it and/or making it illegal by contract. The whole idea of giving you more downstream than upstream bandwidth is predicated on web browsing that uses more down than up. Voice by IP requires identical up/down usage and would therefore strain the current DSL/cable configurations.
Just a word of warning: never mention the word "server" in earshot of your cable modem installation tech.:)
One might expect that google could demand some hefty premiums for such data updated on a daily basis to marketing companies. If they keep it all, there is a huge amount of interesting data mining that could be performed. IP logs, for example, would allow information to be broken down by city/state of origin.
Analysis of cultural trends could be taken to a more immediate level by comparing the number of queries about a topic to queries about previous culture flashes (e.g. AYB). This could reveal interesting threshold effects.
This assumes of course that google has sufficient and diverse market share to be accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
>I'll admit though that I get surprised when I >hear about people that have been arrested 30+ >times for a DUI and somehow still keep their >license (being a friend of the mayor, bribing >judges, finding a loophole in the law, the >arresting officer doesn't show up to the trial, >etc.)
:)
How about being arrested for a DUI and then becoming President of the country?
Write them today, a short letter is fine, preferably hand written. Links to their addresses can be found at the bottom of the slashdot article.
And if you're really clever, maybe you'll give your congressperson a snappy bit of speech to use on the floor...
You don't need nearly the power of a matrox card. You're not managing 32 million colors, or 3d effects, texture loading, or any of that. Just black and white, a video card to handle epaper would be very simple , very cheap and very small.
I can't believe I haven't seen this reason yet, and to those of you who think it isn't at least a partial factor in your own contributions, think about it carefully.
The reason I'm speaking of is to get your name known, be popular, get famous, etc. Whatever you choose to call it, alot of us have a desire to be known for doing something, to have our name mean something to somebody. It makes us feel more connected to the world to know that we are known and liked by others, even if we'll never see or talk to those people.
Yes of course people are genuinely philanthropic with their time, didn't mean to suggest otherwise, but please don't deny that fame isn't a factor also. It makes the whole thing sound more believable to an intelligent politician like Boucher who is apparently trying to understand the motives and drives behind the movement.
You might be interested in all of the work that's been done with UO emulators. These are programs that emulate a UO server on your machine and other players can log into. This lets you really create your own world and some people have remolded UO to their heart's content. I toyed with the idea of creating one myself and with the aid of some friends and started the design, but didn't have the time to finish it. But even the small unfinished bit I worked on was extremely rewarding. I could define my own rules, change the terrain, add buildings, create my own monsters and design their AI, it was fantastic. My imagination and time were the only limitations.
:))
All the emulators need is some slightly more helpful design tools and NWN will be obsolete before it comes out. The best part is that for the most part, the emulators are written via open source techniques (and run on Linux of course
Check out
www.uoxdev.com
and
http://vulpin.burdell.org/pol/links.html
But you don't need to design a world to get a taste of what can be done, pick up a cheap copy of the UO client at a store and log into someone's world.
How many other people were banned for exploiting in the same time? I remember very few, and I am fairly certain that were it not for his actions regarding Lord British, he would have not been "prosecuted".
Were it not for him, we'd not have this great story.
If you'll read the article, he hasn't hit level 20 yet. That's where the primrose path becomes choked with thorns. Storytelling and roleplaying takes a backseat to camping and competition. There's still alot to be said for EQ and what it provides, but I don't think it's got what Adams is looking for. The world is sterile by design, players cannot affect it at all. He'll figure that out soon enough.
I would have preferred if he had focussed on Ultima Online instead. Because users are able to change so much, and thus create their own cities and quests within the game.
It's all about user created content, and UO was fantastic in that aspect, whatever you may think of the rest of it. In my mind, none of the other MMORPG's have come close to UO in quality because of this (although Asheron's Call's new housing system may bridge that gap).
Because I hate to see legends of old corrupted by those too lazy to do their fact checking (shame on you Adams), here's what happened with Rainz, the guy who killed Lord British, as told to me by the thief and filtered through 3 years of memory.
The crowd had assembled, or part of it at least. British had just started addressing the crowd when someone in the crowd was peeking around in backpacks of those around him using his thieving skills. He found a firewall scroll, handed it off to Rainz, who threw it at Lord British for the hell of it, he didn't think it would hurt him.
I'm not certain, but I think at this point, British may have mentioned something to the effect that this firewall couldn't hurt him, thinking that his invulnerability flag was on (not a ring, a GM power). Unbeknownst to him, someone had forgotten to turn it on and his life bar was dropping quickly and he fell over dead even as he gloated about his invulnerability. End of story. Rainz was banned, but the thief was never fingered.
Thus was a gaming legend born.
Interestingly, it was probably as a result of this incident and the screenshots circulated of it, that people were able to easily create UO comics depicting a dead Lord British.
I misspoke, shouldn't have used the word guilty. The intent of my message was to demonstrate what laws he was correctly charged with violating here in the US, and not just in Russia, as the parent message implied.
No he is not guilty(yet). Yes I look uninformed.
He came here and spoke about his program, hence he trafficked his information here, which is illegal under the DMCA.
Dmitry violated our law on our soil and has been locked up for it. I hate the DMCA as much as any of us, but he is guilty, and proclaiming him as innocent merely makes one look uninformed.
This sounds like a couple of guys who are unable to let go of the heady, exciting days of software development in its infancy, and move to the next stage.
Certainly mob creation has it's role in any industry, but as the industry matures, the place for the mob changes. Early on, each element of the mob was a person, creating operating systems, computers. As time has gone on, a person is no longer capable of creating a big application or designing a computer themselves. So now an element of the mob is a design team, or a company. And cooperating in our mostly free market, they act as a mob.
Even within a given time period of an industry, mob development works better in some places than others. The Linux movement? sure, the mob is working well. But the space shuttle code? They honestly and truly believe that something akin to the open source community should have designed the space shuttle code? Sure, the mob mentality would work, IF YOU HAD 20 SPACE SHUTTLES TO THROW AWAY IN SPECTACULAR FIREBALLS BEFORE IT WAS FINISHED.
Yes, disasters and mistakes are the hallmarks of any engineering endeavour, but that doesn't mean we can't try to avoid them.
If your only tool is a hammer...
Our html coders know how to make a series of links between a sequence webpages.
While the numbers of players are nowwhere close to the big guys (AOK, SC, D2, etc), there are plenty of game available during peak hours, and I rarely have trouble getting a 4v4 game rolling. I point this out because I fear your terminology will give people the impression that there is no multiplayer community, when in fact a strong core group exists, they just don't post on MFO. And things will get better, the European release is just around the corner, which will give a strong boost. Just a few months away is the expansion which will revitalize the community even further. I have confidence that the Kohan community will attain enough critical mass to persist for awhile because the game is just that good. A good example of a game that truly tanked was Submarine Titans. You were often hard pressed to find a game at any time. This game was too similar to previous RTS's to pull people away from the old standbys. Now, as far as I can tell, Subtitans is deader than dead, even the news updates on the main sites are many months old.
While it posesses all of the features of the standard RTS, they're blended in a combination that works very well.
Here are the primary features of the game that I enjoy:
The economic micromanagement aspect that one normally sees (peons harvesting resources) is almost entirely absent, so economic growth is based mainly on the decisions you make, not how well you manipulate virtual slaves to hunt deer.
Units must be supplied with resources in addition to being purchased. Having to support your existing armies is a feature that hasn't really been tried in this genre (yes I know you have to make houses in AOE, but the cost is only noticeable in the beginning). The result is an interesting game dynamic, in that wiping out an army is only effective if you follow it up with some capturing of towns. Give him some time and the troops will be rebuilt and you will have gained little.
Experience for troops is excellent, careful management of your armies lets them effectively go up in level, getting somewhat more powerful(but not overmuch). This rewards the careful planner as opposed to the sloppy turbo-economy player who cranks out troops and lets them die.
Tactics are key, unit companies keep their artillery and leaders in the back (archers/mages and captain), so doing an end run around the front line and hitting the rear is absolutely crippling. It really is a game of how you use your troops, not what troops you buy.
Teamwork is heavily emphasized in that there are few obstacles to trading money or cities back and forth. Also, you can immediately see what your allies are doing (unlike AOK which requires tech research to expose the allied minimap). The result is that there is far more cooperation in the average Kohan game, perfectly accentuating the benefits of multiplayer gaming. Other RTS's often end up being a series of parallel 1v1 matchups on the same board.
The action is very quick. You are generally fighting something or someone within 5 minutes of the start, so there's no 15 minute SimCity game.
The network code works fairly well, disconnected players remember the IP address they were at and try to reconnect. A status indicator lets the whole game know if the player is gone, or attempting a reconnect.
I would recommend this game to any serious strategy gamer without hesitation.
All in all,
Yea, I'm a moron alright, a moron to continue this conversation with you.
You've dissambled THIS worm, but every copy of Win2K ships with the IIS vulnerability, so plenty of new worms could be created that do other things.
Point 2 is exactly my point, the patch is not going to fix the secondary damage caused by the worm in the short time it takes you to destroy it.
The only real fix for something that can be exploited so quickly would be to issue new copies of win 2K to everyone with this hole patched, but that's not going to happen. So this hole will exist for however long it takes MS to release the Win2k replacement.
With Linux, on the other hand, new versions come out several times per year, which means the baseline installation for a majority of the users is generally only a few months out of date.
And "airgap" is not mine, it's been around for quite some time in the security community. It's become a bit outdated with the advent of wireless technology however.
How many people do this? Standard policy at most places is probably just to install/patch and then assume everything is rosy.
Yes, pre-existing worms disappear and no worms of that variety can infect, but in the few minutes of life it had on your system, CodeRed had full access to download other, newer, unpatched, programs that otherwise would be unable to get onboard.
I reiterate, the only safe path is to install on an airgapped machine, or on a well secured LAN. But if you have to download it from the internet, there is a chance that *anything*, not just CodeRed, will be hiding somewhere by the time you patch.
Code red is so profligant (because it require no user intervention to spread), that a new machine installation will likely be hit by it in 10 minutes or less, which of course, is less time than it takes to patch it, which of course means that until you patch it, the remote exploitation is free to install anything else it wants until you close the hole, so you're going to be left with a zombiefied machine unless you install and patch with from an airgapped machine, using a local copy of the patch. I doubt most people do that.
So even with the patch up and available, the problem is far from solved. I bet the number of zombie machines out there surged 10fold today, many of which are on high speed corporate bandwidth, instead of the more meager cable modems with severely crippled upstream access.
It's going to be a rough year.
It appears to be /.'ed
You pay much more than for a car, that should play games too...
Computers are not a good platform for gaming because of the hardware variability. This creates huge headaches of developers and detracts from the quality in a big way.
Consoles should be the only gaming platform IMO.
Games such as UO, AC and EQ which were released YEARS ago went far more smoothly. No they weren't perfect, but at least the client mostly worked once the inevitable network congestion problems were overcome.
The excuse "it's a big project, this is hard, noone has done this before" has worn damn thin after being repeated by so many people who should have learned the lessons of others.
One would expect new iterations of the MMORPG line to get better, not worse.
This is inexcusable.
Cornered Rat Studios put out WWII Online. Funcom did AO. But I can see how you could confuse them, WWII has many of the same problems. The minimum requirements are 128MB of RAM, but most people will tell you that it's unplayable with that.
Apart from the frequent bugs and crashes, the game only includes of a fraction of the features listed on the box (including such trivial details as Naval Combat) and is in no way a completed product.
Sadly, alot of people bought it anyway, and the financial message to game developers is "go ahead and release your unfinished product, they'll buy it anyway".
I have yet to see anyone citing or discussing this tidbit at the end....
/. crowd...
Looking at the technical details of WPA, we do not think that it is as
problematic as many people have expected. We think so, because WPA is
tolerant with respect to hardware modifications. In addition, it is
likely that more than one hardware component map to a certain value
for a given bit-field. From the above real-world example we know that
the PX-32TS maps to the value 0x37 = 55. But there are probably many
other CD-ROM drives that map to the same value. Hence, it is
impossible to tell from the bit-field value whether it is a PX-32TS
that we are using or one of the other drives that map to the same
value.
In contrast to many critics of Windows Product Activation, we think
that WPA does not prevent typical hardware modifications and,
moreover, respects the user's right to privacy.
No need to wonder why such published opinions are ignored by the
If this caught on bigtime, you can bet the broadband providers would start blocking it and/or making it illegal by contract. The whole idea of giving you more downstream than upstream bandwidth is predicated on web browsing that uses more down than up. Voice by IP requires identical up/down usage and would therefore strain the current DSL/cable configurations.
:)
Just a word of warning: never mention the word "server" in earshot of your cable modem installation tech.
One might expect that google could demand some hefty premiums for such data updated on a daily basis to marketing companies. If they keep it all, there is a huge amount of interesting data mining that could be performed. IP logs, for example, would allow information to be broken down by city/state of origin.
Analysis of cultural trends could be taken to a more immediate level by comparing the number of queries about a topic to queries about previous culture flashes (e.g. AYB). This could reveal interesting threshold effects.
This assumes of course that google has sufficient and diverse market share to be accurate.