1) Look for coding patterns. It's circumstantial, but programmers have their own set of rules on how to produce variable and function names, how to group member functions and variables inside class definitions, and so on.
2) Similar to 1, file naming conventions, location of the project, tree structure of the directories of the project, and so on.
3) If he links in crap from his own libraries that he uses in his own other projects, then that's pretty guilty looking. I doubt a hacker is gonna examine someone's personal library and write to it....and finally...
4) If it's so easy to track, why can't they continue the track backwards for the hacker who hacked into the computer? All connections to the computer should be traceable, and those used by known hacks can be explored further backwards.
What politician will decide how much can be spent annually? Why? Of course, this will not be filled with fraud.
And expect an entire new industry to spring up: Become your own legal religion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmusical artist who can accept this voucher!
And then there's the industry to train people to become their own artists. This new industry will replace training losers to be real estate salesmen, debt management counselors, and the like. Train folks on how to game the system to get that voucher for your own self, legally!
Send only 7 easy payments of $39.95 to the address below.
Remember: To a politician, a dead guy in the hand now is worth a hundred million unnecessary dead over the next 30 years.
They just developed a synthetic cholesterol that clears out arteries. If the FDA delays that for two years, that would be well over a million unnecessary deaths in the US alone. Safety? Compared to what? Efficacy? Compared to what?
We need drug and medical technology advancing as quickly as possible. Having government AND private, greedy industry dumping hundreds of billions a year into it is a good thing.
But for it to work, they have to recoup their investments. If you get some (scientifically illiterate) politician pandering who reduces the sell rate, the profits come in more slowly, and there's less for future investments.
As the years go by, the society's medical technology lags further and further behind where it otherwise would be.
In fifty years, one culture is bragging about how they give out free AIDS drugs and blood pressure medication, the other is saying, "WTF, we cured that shit ten years ago."
Which society would you rather live in?
And in any event, why in god's name do you think you have the right to force others to live in that inferior society?
Anything that slows this technological advancement is demonstrably evil.
With all due respect, the problem of predator/prey relationships was solved with differential equations decades ago.
They demonstrated the idea of equilibrium was not the norm and that, even if it was magically set, fluctuations would rapidly develop.
As the predator population grows, it begins to kill off too much of the prey. As the prey population dwindles, the predators start starving. Eventually a significant proportion starve off. Then the prey population, freed, bounds back. The predators then start to grow again, this never-ending double sign wave of population vs. time, one's population following the other.
> Historically speaking, people 16 and under > generally have NEVER read books for fun.
I read the entire Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, and Thomas Swift (and his amazing xyz!) series twice over summer break between 4th and 5th grade....but the original Atari was still a year or two away.
I've had two epiphanies playing video games:
1. Adventure on the Atari -- 2d glory, but when that first dragon came at me the first time, yikes! I can imagine whatever chemicals in my brain being released en masse, creating an addiction instantly.
2. Downloading the original Quake CTF (after months and months of Duke Nukem online and some Quake online), I see a guy on my team with a wagging flag run by on a small, dark level. Ohhhuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...drool...
That was even better than Adventure. Like Louis DePalma getting his first bribe, I saw the heavenly light of God's blessing in that moment.
This was what all games throughout human history had been leading up to: the first person, online, team-based game.
I proceeded to stay up from 11 am when I installed it to 11 pm of the next day, 36 hours straight, quitting only because I was falling asleep at the keyboard from sheer exhaustion.
I'm in a dry spell of 2 years and counting on that because I only have dialup (Comcast, the lying sacks of shit, said they would have digital cable and cable modem by 2nd quarter of this year. Happy Holloween!)
P.S. Thanks, Slashdot, you cool Cowboys! I do know it's only 15 seconds since I hit reply. I do NOT want to slow down, thank you. It's only 15 seconds because I'm pasting. I'm pasting because I've learned the hard way when at Slashdot to copy and paste my reply in a text document before hitting "Submit" because when, not if, the Slashdot submission mechanism fails miserably, the back button leaves me with an empty form. So I will wait your two minutes put in, like the Nerfs and hacks in EverQuest, to handle abuse rather than proper, long-term, harder fixes. Hacks and quick fixes, easy and seductive are the ways of Microsoft, eh? Now let me copy and paste all this first before I hit "Submit".
> Historically speaking, people 16 and under > generally have NEVER read books for fun.
I read the entire Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, and Thomas Swift (and his amazing xyz!) series twice over summer break between 4th and 5th grade....but the original Atari was still a year or two away.
I've had two epiphanies playing video games:
1. Adventure on the Atari -- 2d glory, but when that first dragon came at me the first time, yikes! I can imagine whatever chemicals in my brain being released en masse, creating an addiction instantly.
2. Downloading the original Quake CTF (after months and months of Duke Nukem online and some Quake online), I see a guy on my team with a wagging flag run by on a small, dark level. Ohhhuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...drool...
That was even better than Adventure. Like Louis DePalma getting his first bribe, I saw the heavenly light of God's blessing in that moment.
This was what all games throughout human history had been leading up to: the first person, online, team-based game.
I proceeded to stay up from 11 am when I installed it to 11 pm of the next day, 36 hours straight, quitting only because I was falling asleep at the keyboard from sheer exhaustion.
I'm in a dry spell of 2 years and counting on that because I only have dialup (Comcast, the lying sacks of shit, said they would have digital cable and cable modem by 2nd quarter of this year. Happy Holloween!)
Actually, you'll note we're using up other countries' oil first, under the ruse of protecting our own for "environmental" reasons. Once it starts to get scarce, we'll really open up Alaska, the coast of California, et al.
My own bet is we'll never run out of oil. The hellish demand will cause the development of oil-producing bacteria (or hell, produce gasoline directly!) Or some other chemical thing, who knows?
We left our (young teen) kids sitting in the car in the parking lot of an antique furniture store across the (country) street from a pig farm. When we got back out, the kids were literally, not figuratively, crying. Gods was it stinky.
Some second ammendment supporters have been cowed over the years.
The purpose of the second ammendment isn't hunting.
The purpose of the second ammendment isn't keeping yourself safe from a criminal.
The purpose of the second ammendment is to allow an armed populace to perform an uprising against its government if necessary. It is one of the checks on government the people retain, along with the vote and the jury system.
So don't whine about hunting or even criminals (Carl Rowe was a real piece of work). Stand up and proudly say it. Let the other side be cowed.
> the main problem is that not only their tech > but their target audience is 12 years old.
This is exactly why UO took so long (years after I quit) to take care of PK issues.
See, if one fanboy convinces his friends to get it, they all log on to the same server at the same time, and they basically camp newbies, or anyone less powerful than their group, then that's more sales to UO!
Therefore, it was a tradeoff they made. They knew that UO, the only game in town, would get all the roleplay or adventurers; they had nowhere else to go! And wouldn't leave! So they knew they could also get the 12 year old crowds' money too.
Two months later, buh-bye. Logged back on 12 months after that, got PK'd leaving the city, and cancelled again.
I found a MUD once where, golly, your starting stats actually made a difference. You could, minimax style, crank up the str of your troll and actually walk out the gate and kill things much tougher than you if you left the strength normal putting it into other stats.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't bother replying. Mudconnector sucks in this respect.
I don't wanna have a tough time with rats. I wanna crank up a troll and an ogre, chain them together, and go kill the level 14 blue armored guard standing out in the cross roads area.
I remember when EQ started, my dwarf fighter was sucking at the crossroads, and cloth armor drops were so nonexistant I was mostly naked at level 7, so I built a "gigantic ogre with maxxed strength".
I remember shouting how, at level 1, I was tough enough to kill a yellow thing! Someone replied they, a caster, could kill reds. OMFFFFFFG! Ahahahahahahahahahahah! Casters could kill reds.:(
> and it's hard to write hundreds of hours worth > of engaging and interesting content.
Yes, so stop writing it!
The solution is slapping them in the face and they don't see it.
Quake & descendents don't have hundreds of hours. A lazy player will take 40 to solve Quake. Quake III doesn't even know what "content" is.
What's exciting? The dynamic interaction. Because things are dynamic, they can power you up quite a bit. Since EQ is anything but dynamic, they have no choice but to make you as wimpy to the monsters as a porcupine is to a Diablo II barbarian. (Note the virtual reversal of roles in the games!)
The solution? Not an idiotic PvP switch, but remember what's exciting: the unexpected!
That means some PvP, if it can be designed correctly (DaoC was a start, but they still forced you to level treadmill before even dreaming of being involved in Realm vs. Realm.)
It also means things like invasion events. EQ has those, but only very rarely, because they designed the system poorly requiring GMs to manually guide things for the most part.
Dynamic, and it can be handled properly and automatically. Don't just schedule an orc invasion at 9 pm every night. (Or 9 pm +/- 2.5 hours at random.)
I will also describe one cool pseudo-event on EQ, and one incredibly lame super-event on EQ.
The best was as a gnome in Steamfont, "Feddy Duger" came by us who were, cough, camping the dragon skeleton. (On retrospect, someone must have trained him.) After a vicious battle by 9 of us, down he went! Exciting! Unexpected! Not sudden death!
The worst was the opening of, I don't remember what. Some Dark Elves took over one of the forests near the Hobbit city (sorry, Halfling), and the human city next to it. The first wave was fought back by us! Then some slaughtering elves popped into existance (story must be moved along) and killed us. Near the human city (High Pass, I think it's called), I was invisible getting my corpse on the way back to the woods, when the slaughter-elves tore through there killing every single PC. See, they were killing the High Pass people to kick them out.
The only problem? They left every single NPC alone, even the guards, who also left them alone.
Incredibly lame, you just died, didn't even get to see a guard fight (even if they'd be scripted to be a tad wimpier than the elves so they'd lose.)
Just the elves slaughter every PC, then freeze and stand there dumbly, as they and the guards did nothing. Then they disappeared. OMFG, how lame.
I bought Warcraft III, set it to hardest level (I'm a Serious Sam on Serious, solo, kind of guy)......and......and found out that my cannons up in towers would not outshoot a damned thing flinging hunks of meat.
No, seriously! A hundred cannon towers would be destroyed by one wagon flinging pieces of meat without firing a shot.
Game "balancing", everything has it's "nemisis", and other braindead decisions, don't ya know. One wonders why the humans didn't put a rocket team up in the cannon tower and shoot even farther.
I LOATHE PLAYING DELIBERATELY CRIPPLED CLASSES. I fought my way half way through the undead portion, then gave up. It's one thing to fight difficult battles with, literally, dozens-to-one kill ratios when all is said and done. It's another to be fighting pointlessly because some ignorant programmer had a woody to pee all over people's heads.
One of the good things about UO (I remember being jealous of a Quake clan member who got into the beta) was the occasional invasion.
It's the dynamic nature that will bring back a lot of people -- that you could do something by fighting back an invasion.
The current games are the complete opposite of an RTS. In EQ (as "in Soviet Russia") you are the chump who hurls himself against units spewed out by machinery. No way to destroy the machinery, no way to push back the frontier of evil from the opening of the city.
And if you do find a way to do that temporarily (such as by tagging a guard, making them run after you, effectively bringing them to what you want to kill) you get punished by the GMs.
There is absolutely no sense of excitement after you get used to the newness of things. Even an expansion pack is just another set of differently skinned things, like going down to the umpteenth level of the original Diablo, wow, how exciting, a different colored dog that spits a different color spit at you. Wow. Another land with meaningless monsters that appear out of nowhere, preventing you from making the area safe for Little Red Riding Hood to walk around. (Retard-o-matic EQ Sony even removed the ability to set your pet up like a guard where they'd go off and kill anything, threatening or otherwise, that got nearby.)
Slashdot Mirror
Now if only a piece of JLo's moon were for sale...
They're not on the land, fool! They're flying a few feet above it.
Particles on the land move very slowly.
Finally! Something we can crack and pirate stuff from them!
1) Look for coding patterns. It's circumstantial, but programmers have their own set of rules on how to produce variable and function names, how to group member functions and variables inside class definitions, and so on.
...and finally...
2) Similar to 1, file naming conventions, location of the project, tree structure of the directories of the project, and so on.
3) If he links in crap from his own libraries that he uses in his own other projects, then that's pretty guilty looking. I doubt a hacker is gonna examine someone's personal library and write to it.
4) If it's so easy to track, why can't they continue the track backwards for the hacker who hacked into the computer? All connections to the computer should be traceable, and those used by known hacks can be explored further backwards.
What's a voucher worth? $5? $100?
What politician will decide how much can be spent annually? Why? Of course, this will not be filled with fraud.
And expect an entire new industry to spring up: Become your own legal religion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmusical artist who can accept this voucher!
And then there's the industry to train people to become their own artists. This new industry will replace training losers to be real estate salesmen, debt management counselors, and the like. Train folks on how to game the system to get that voucher for your own self, legally!
Send only 7 easy payments of $39.95 to the address below.
Remember: To a politician, a dead guy in the hand now is worth a hundred million unnecessary dead over the next 30 years.
They just developed a synthetic cholesterol that clears out arteries. If the FDA delays that for two years, that would be well over a million unnecessary deaths in the US alone. Safety? Compared to what? Efficacy? Compared to what?
We need drug and medical technology advancing as quickly as possible. Having government AND private, greedy industry dumping hundreds of billions a year into it is a good thing.
But for it to work, they have to recoup their investments. If you get some (scientifically illiterate) politician pandering who reduces the sell rate, the profits come in more slowly, and there's less for future investments.
As the years go by, the society's medical technology lags further and further behind where it otherwise would be.
In fifty years, one culture is bragging about how they give out free AIDS drugs and blood pressure medication, the other is saying, "WTF, we cured that shit ten years ago."
Which society would you rather live in?
And in any event, why in god's name do you think you have the right to force others to live in that inferior society?
Anything that slows this technological advancement is demonstrably evil.
Is there a Linux person who didn't wish Linux had the money to pay people to use it?
Didn't think so.
Speaking of dancing, please include Valentine Dancer, WinAmp plugin, as the honorary first winner.
Gods, the creamy white skin and jet black hair, the perfectly modeled and obviously silicone breasts...
The 6 meg .pdf ain't gonna happen on my dialup.
Is the blackened out part a legitimate national security issue, or is it just the government covering up its embarassment?
With all due respect, the problem of predator/prey relationships was solved with differential equations decades ago.
They demonstrated the idea of equilibrium was not the norm and that, even if it was magically set, fluctuations would rapidly develop.
As the predator population grows, it begins to kill off too much of the prey. As the prey population dwindles, the predators start starving. Eventually a significant proportion starve off. Then the prey population, freed, bounds back. The predators then start to grow again, this never-ending double sign wave of population vs. time, one's population following the other.
> Historically speaking, people 16 and under
...but the original Atari was still a year or two away.
> generally have NEVER read books for fun.
I read the entire Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, and Thomas Swift (and his amazing xyz!) series twice over summer break between 4th and 5th grade.
I've had two epiphanies playing video games:
1. Adventure on the Atari -- 2d glory, but when that first dragon came at me the first time, yikes! I can imagine whatever chemicals in my brain being released en masse, creating an addiction instantly.
2. Downloading the original Quake CTF (after months and months of Duke Nukem online and some Quake online), I see a guy on my team with a wagging flag run by on a small, dark level. Ohhhuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...drool...
That was even better than Adventure. Like Louis DePalma getting his first bribe, I saw the heavenly light of God's blessing in that moment.
This was what all games throughout human history had been leading up to: the first person, online, team-based game.
I proceeded to stay up from 11 am when I installed it to 11 pm of the next day, 36 hours straight, quitting only because I was falling asleep at the keyboard from sheer exhaustion.
I'm in a dry spell of 2 years and counting on that because I only have dialup (Comcast, the lying sacks of shit, said they would have digital cable and cable modem by 2nd quarter of this year. Happy Holloween!)
P.S. Thanks, Slashdot, you cool Cowboys! I do know it's only 15 seconds since I hit reply. I do NOT want to slow down, thank you. It's only 15 seconds because I'm pasting. I'm pasting because I've learned the hard way when at Slashdot to copy and paste my reply in a text document before hitting "Submit" because when, not if, the Slashdot submission mechanism fails miserably, the back button leaves me with an empty form. So I will wait your two minutes put in, like the Nerfs and hacks in EverQuest, to handle abuse rather than proper, long-term, harder fixes. Hacks and quick fixes, easy and seductive are the ways of Microsoft, eh? Now let me copy and paste all this first before I hit "Submit".
> Historically speaking, people 16 and under
...but the original Atari was still a year or two away.
> generally have NEVER read books for fun.
I read the entire Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, and Thomas Swift (and his amazing xyz!) series twice over summer break between 4th and 5th grade.
I've had two epiphanies playing video games:
1. Adventure on the Atari -- 2d glory, but when that first dragon came at me the first time, yikes! I can imagine whatever chemicals in my brain being released en masse, creating an addiction instantly.
2. Downloading the original Quake CTF (after months and months of Duke Nukem online and some Quake online), I see a guy on my team with a wagging flag run by on a small, dark level. Ohhhuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...drool...
That was even better than Adventure. Like Louis DePalma getting his first bribe, I saw the heavenly light of God's blessing in that moment.
This was what all games throughout human history had been leading up to: the first person, online, team-based game.
I proceeded to stay up from 11 am when I installed it to 11 pm of the next day, 36 hours straight, quitting only because I was falling asleep at the keyboard from sheer exhaustion.
I'm in a dry spell of 2 years and counting on that because I only have dialup (Comcast, the lying sacks of shit, said they would have digital cable and cable modem by 2nd quarter of this year. Happy Holloween!)
Actually, you'll note we're using up other countries' oil first, under the ruse of protecting our own for "environmental" reasons. Once it starts to get scarce, we'll really open up Alaska, the coast of California, et al.
My own bet is we'll never run out of oil. The hellish demand will cause the development of oil-producing bacteria (or hell, produce gasoline directly!) Or some other chemical thing, who knows?
Eventually, retard. Eventually.
You can slough off tens of atoms a second for a long, long, long damned time.
We left our (young teen) kids sitting in the car in the parking lot of an antique furniture store across the (country) street from a pig farm. When we got back out, the kids were literally, not figuratively, crying. Gods was it stinky.
Bah, it'll beat the biggest volcano in the history of the world by a few months or years.
Some second ammendment supporters have been cowed over the years.
The purpose of the second ammendment isn't hunting.
The purpose of the second ammendment isn't keeping yourself safe from a criminal.
The purpose of the second ammendment is to allow an armed populace to perform an uprising against its government if necessary. It is one of the checks on government the people retain, along with the vote and the jury system.
So don't whine about hunting or even criminals (Carl Rowe was a real piece of work). Stand up and proudly say it. Let the other side be cowed.
> the main problem is that not only their tech
> but their target audience is 12 years old.
This is exactly why UO took so long (years after I quit) to take care of PK issues.
See, if one fanboy convinces his friends to get it, they all log on to the same server at the same time, and they basically camp newbies, or anyone less powerful than their group, then that's more sales to UO!
Therefore, it was a tradeoff they made. They knew that UO, the only game in town, would get all the roleplay or adventurers; they had nowhere else to go! And wouldn't leave! So they knew they could also get the 12 year old crowds' money too.
Two months later, buh-bye. Logged back on 12 months after that, got PK'd leaving the city, and cancelled again.
I found a MUD once where, golly, your starting stats actually made a difference. You could, minimax style, crank up the str of your troll and actually walk out the gate and kill things much tougher than you if you left the strength normal putting it into other stats.
:(
If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't bother replying. Mudconnector sucks in this respect.
I don't wanna have a tough time with rats. I wanna crank up a troll and an ogre, chain them together, and go kill the level 14 blue armored guard standing out in the cross roads area.
I remember when EQ started, my dwarf fighter was sucking at the crossroads, and cloth armor drops were so nonexistant I was mostly naked at level 7, so I built a "gigantic ogre with maxxed strength".
I remember shouting how, at level 1, I was tough enough to kill a yellow thing! Someone replied they, a caster, could kill reds. OMFFFFFFG! Ahahahahahahahahahahah! Casters could kill reds.
> and it's hard to write hundreds of hours worth
> of engaging and interesting content.
Yes, so stop writing it!
The solution is slapping them in the face and they don't see it.
Quake & descendents don't have hundreds of hours. A lazy player will take 40 to solve Quake. Quake III doesn't even know what "content" is.
What's exciting? The dynamic interaction. Because things are dynamic, they can power you up quite a bit. Since EQ is anything but dynamic, they have no choice but to make you as wimpy to the monsters as a porcupine is to a Diablo II barbarian. (Note the virtual reversal of roles in the games!)
The solution? Not an idiotic PvP switch, but remember what's exciting: the unexpected!
That means some PvP, if it can be designed correctly (DaoC was a start, but they still forced you to level treadmill before even dreaming of being involved in Realm vs. Realm.)
It also means things like invasion events. EQ has those, but only very rarely, because they designed the system poorly requiring GMs to manually guide things for the most part.
Dynamic, and it can be handled properly and automatically. Don't just schedule an orc invasion at 9 pm every night. (Or 9 pm +/- 2.5 hours at random.)
I will also describe one cool pseudo-event on EQ, and one incredibly lame super-event on EQ.
The best was as a gnome in Steamfont, "Feddy Duger" came by us who were, cough, camping the dragon skeleton. (On retrospect, someone must have trained him.) After a vicious battle by 9 of us, down he went! Exciting! Unexpected! Not sudden death!
The worst was the opening of, I don't remember what. Some Dark Elves took over one of the forests near the Hobbit city (sorry, Halfling), and the human city next to it. The first wave was fought back by us! Then some slaughtering elves popped into existance (story must be moved along) and killed us. Near the human city (High Pass, I think it's called), I was invisible getting my corpse on the way back to the woods, when the slaughter-elves tore through there killing every single PC. See, they were killing the High Pass people to kick them out.
The only problem? They left every single NPC alone, even the guards, who also left them alone.
Incredibly lame, you just died, didn't even get to see a guard fight (even if they'd be scripted to be a tad wimpier than the elves so they'd lose.)
Just the elves slaughter every PC, then freeze and stand there dumbly, as they and the guards did nothing. Then they disappeared. OMFG, how lame.
I bought Warcraft III, set it to hardest level (I'm a Serious Sam on Serious, solo, kind of guy)... ...and ... ...and found out that my cannons up in towers would not outshoot a damned thing flinging hunks of meat.
No, seriously! A hundred cannon towers would be destroyed by one wagon flinging pieces of meat without firing a shot.
Game "balancing", everything has it's "nemisis", and other braindead decisions, don't ya know. One wonders why the humans didn't put a rocket team up in the cannon tower and shoot even farther.
I LOATHE PLAYING DELIBERATELY CRIPPLED CLASSES. I fought my way half way through the undead portion, then gave up. It's one thing to fight difficult battles with, literally, dozens-to-one kill ratios when all is said and done. It's another to be fighting pointlessly because some ignorant programmer had a woody to pee all over people's heads.
One of the good things about UO (I remember being jealous of a Quake clan member who got into the beta) was the occasional invasion.
It's the dynamic nature that will bring back a lot of people -- that you could do something by fighting back an invasion.
The current games are the complete opposite of an RTS. In EQ (as "in Soviet Russia") you are the chump who hurls himself against units spewed out by machinery. No way to destroy the machinery, no way to push back the frontier of evil from the opening of the city.
And if you do find a way to do that temporarily (such as by tagging a guard, making them run after you, effectively bringing them to what you want to kill) you get punished by the GMs.
There is absolutely no sense of excitement after you get used to the newness of things. Even an expansion pack is just another set of differently skinned things, like going down to the umpteenth level of the original Diablo, wow, how exciting, a different colored dog that spits a different color spit at you. Wow. Another land with meaningless monsters that appear out of nowhere, preventing you from making the area safe for Little Red Riding Hood to walk around. (Retard-o-matic EQ Sony even removed the ability to set your pet up like a guard where they'd go off and kill anything, threatening or otherwise, that got nearby.)
I think that same episode had the guy who saw her opening and closing the Velcro also inventing breast implants about the same time.
Actually, it kind of did.
Mir was around so long, it was building up significant bacteria caking in the guts and electronics of the thing.
Needless to say, it wasn't that healthy.