This survey is still in progress. As time goes on, I'm already seeing the percentage of Vista users going down. Right now, it's 15.35%, over a full percent drop from what was in the story summary.
How well does video / 3D do on it on Linux? CCP recently made a linux version of the Eve Online client available, and I've been curious how it performed. It would be very cool if it worked on a minimalist PC like this.
Better approach: Anonymously send all relevant info to a well-known security researcher or group who is more likely to know what to do with it and not easily silenced without creating a Streisand Effect.
> How many times were the files downloaded? That's one thing I've been curious about in all this. I haven't shared files illegally in many, many years (since before the fall of Napster), but back when I did, I know that I typically logged on, grabbed what I wanted while canceling all attempted uploads, and then logged off. (In all fairness, tho, I do give back 200% at least when I torrent linux.iso's and such these days). Anywho, my point is - what if you never, ever uploaded any songs? Would they still peg you with this crazy rate?
I probably will. In 3 minutes of cursory browsing I found at least 3 albums I'd like. It's really too bad that word of this business didn't get out more, as fishybell alluded to. I'd have definitely been a regular customer, but yeah...never heard of them before just now. He clearly doesn't get advertising these days, as he talked about how he didn't get media coverage. All it takes is getting the front page of Digg / Reddit / del.icio.us/popular once or twice in 6 months and most internet users will know about you - screw old media coverage.
Eve handles lots of other things, though, that you don't see in other MMO's. Each shot from each gun on each ship takes into account tracking speed on the turret, range of the target, size of the target, speed of the ship and the target, which direction they're moving in relative to each other (to get relative speed and angle), damage type, resistances, capacitor use, ammo use, possibly damage to the turret and nearby turrets...
There are many complex issues that the game takes into account, even when you're just flying around, not really doing anything. Compared to most other games where you cast a spell, the dice are rolled, a multiplier may be applied if you're using fire on a zombie, and that's about it, or where running around pretty much just involves animating your character's legs and moving you across the landscape. Generating a landscape isn't the hard part. Once it's there, you're done, and the client side handles the problem of displaying it. All the other stuff arguably makes Eve a harder problem, not an easier one.
There's also the fact that you simply cannot get the more valuable ores in high sec, and you can't profitably macro-mine in low sec. Those valuable ores are required to make most of the stuff in Eve, so it has to be mined...but significant resources have to be invested in defense and cooperation (via corporations and alliances) to get it done profitably. There's also the point that a player can generate large amounts of money - comparable to low-sec mining to some extent - by doing high-end missions in high-security (safe) space, but it requires a competent, attentive player with a significant investment in equipment. It doesn't lend itself to macro-ing at all, so it's not attractive to the stereotypical Chinese-sweatshop-farmers, but it's very effective for a normal player.
Eve just isn't a very good platform for farming for profit...most of the farming that you see is done with alt characters to supplement the income of a main character, rather than large-scale for-profit-in-real-world-money type operations you see in other games.
You're missing the point. It's not about getting the code back. It's about getting credit and owning the license. They cannot claim to own or control the license to the code or to be the author, only to modifications.
Essentially, the problem is about giving credit where credit is due. The BSD license is not the same thing as public domain. It's "Take my code and do whatever you want with it, but I'm maintaining ownership of the license on the original code and I want to be credited if you use it." People always focus on that first part, but the second is still very important. If it weren't, BSD folk would just release their code public domain.
Half a million people are still playing that? Wow. I'm half tempted to give it another look, since I was sort of an early-adopter on PC and their tech support wasn't exactly English-speaker-friendly at that time. But it really seemed like a grind - from what I remember, there was sort of a noob zone, say, level 1 - 8 type stuff (*pulling numbers out my ass here for example's sake*) and an intermediate zone, say, level 15+ stuff, but getting from 9 to 15 seemed like an endless grind of noob monsters. Maybe I was just doing it wrong? It was my first MMO...
I can't play DoD / CS anymore, for some reason. It always seems sort of laggy, but more like keyboard lag or something...I call it 'CS / DoD On Ice' because that's what it feels like; you sort of drift around instead of sharp movements. I first noticed it over a year ago, and have used 3 video cards and essentially 2 entire systems in that time. CS:S / DoD:S and Condition Zero all work fine, tho. It's bizarre.
Well, if you get tired, let your wrist go limp and flop backwards (palm up). Unless they pick up their elbow or have drastically longer arms than you, they can't push straight down hard enough to hurt your wrist, and at the same time they have nothing to push against to force your arm down. It's kind of a cheap trick to pull on friends or as a bar stunt, though. I doubt it's legal for real arm wrestling competitions.
Not sure that's such a good idea. In some states, refusal to take a test (breath, blood, or urine, your choice) equals automatic license suspension for 6 months or so. Even if you fight the case and win, you are still without a license.
But I think that if the über-programmer really does exist, then eventually the free market will figure that out, and compensate him accordingly.
It has, and then some. These "über-programmers" are what you and I know as "wildly successful startup founders." Part of the reason it's so hard to hire them is because they are mostly already independently wealthy and / or personally invested in a project of love that no offer of cash and benefits will draw them away from. Most likely, if the former is not true, the latter will eventually cause it to be true. The best and most common way of hiring an über-programmer is to buy the company they currently work for.
Nothing like sneaking into a house, making sure you're not see, making sure you're wearing an appropriate disguise, grabbing the loot and then discovering that you have been magically tagged as a thief and now everyone wants to kill you.
I think I was pretty clear on that point...if you get caught, you get flagged. If not, no flag. I didn't play Oblivion for more than 40 hours (just couldn't get into it, dunno why...), but if you prefer it be handled by the cops, I see no reason you couldn't run it like Morrowind did...get caught stealing, you lose all your loot (including stolen items not related to the particular offense you got caught at, if you happen to be wearing them at the time...to add realism, say that anybody who has something stolen has to report it to the local NPC cop shop or something inside 72hrs), and you get your XP knocked down an amount equivalent to doing jail time, or can pay a fine as an alternative to the jail time. Then the victims could go to claim their stuff. Easy-peasy.
Main reason I like Eve's system is that it's more directly up to players to deal with theft than NPC's...more player interaction. Also, it discourages people from keeping valuables in a way that would be insecure if it weren't for NPC police (like, say, walking around with all their inventory on their person, instead of in a locked chest...) And more like the real world than an idealistic one where the police are perfect and not discriminating, it's easier to victimize noobs (i.e., the weak and the poor) than the wealthy and powerful. That encourages new players to work together.
That's all well and good if you happen to be in or very near one of the small handful of cities that are 'music centers', but for would-be musicians who aren't in those places and have no reasonable means to get there, the music industry was just as cold before the internet as it is now, if not colder.
Make pocket-picking success depend on something like intelligence, awareness, whatever, of the victim...something that's likely to help you no matter what type of role you play, and improve as you level up. Throw in a luck factor, but ensure that it's very rare for you to be able to pick the pocket of somebody of equivalent attributes to your own. Also make the skill improve on a slower curve than anti-pick-pocketing, so no matter how good you get, the biggest prizes are always hard. Add in something like in Eve-Online, where 'can thieves' (people who rob ore or loot out of a container that is insecure but that you have ownership of) can legally be killed by the person they stole from for an hour or so after the fact, and are flagged in a way that it's obvious that they are who did it, and you can kill them. In this case, I'd say make it so the flag is only set if the pick-pocket is detected. Maybe roll for success and detection separately, so that failing to get anything does not automatically earn you a death sentence, and successfully snatching something doesn't automatically mean the victim didn't notice you doing it.
For other thief-type skills, just put ward, trap, detect invis, detect person, etc., spells in the game.
On the whole, I think it's very workable - with the caveat that it would have to be much like Eve Online, where PvP is everywhere; even in 'secure' space, if you get caught stealing, your victim can shoot you down, right in front of the NPC police, and nobody bats an eye. Breaking into a player guild house, for instance, should be quite do-able...but if anybody's home and you get seen, they should be able to attack you.
I agree with your conclusion (it would be nice to be able to queue orders while paused), but not with your reasons.
What kills me on most RTS games is the harder difficulty levels...but not in RoN. Why? The computer's strategy at harder difficulty levels isn't too bad. It's the computer's speed that I can't compete with. The computer can tell 3 different barracks at 3 different bases each on a different corner of the map to build 10 each of 3 different classes in 1/10 of a second. All the mouse speed + precision + hotkey usage in the world will never let anybody but a few freaky-fast teens in Korea to keep up. I've never run into a strategy from an AI in an RTS that is unbeatable if you're up against a human with the same strategy. That's what drives me up the wall. I play RTS's when I want to exercise the brain a little bit. I play FPS's when I want to practice 'twitch' skills.
Basically, I wouldn't mind losing an RTS on 'Hard' if it was because the computer was adapting and improving it's strategy to beat me (i.e., outhinking me). I do mind losing when it's just doing the same damned thing it did on 'Medium', but at superhuman pace. The really frustrating thing, though, is that even on 'Easy', it's still super-fast. It builds a stupid base defense and a stupid offensive force...really really fast.
I don't need to pause to think out my strategy. I know what I want to do. I just need to pause so I can get it all done at a pace comparable to the computer.
Slashdot Mirror
This survey is still in progress. As time goes on, I'm already seeing the percentage of Vista users going down. Right now, it's 15.35%, over a full percent drop from what was in the story summary.
How well does video / 3D do on it on Linux? CCP recently made a linux version of the Eve Online client available, and I've been curious how it performed. It would be very cool if it worked on a minimalist PC like this.
Better approach: Anonymously send all relevant info to a well-known security researcher or group who is more likely to know what to do with it and not easily silenced without creating a Streisand Effect.
I'll second that. It never ceases to amaze me how unknown Schlock Mercenary seems to be in the wider geek world.
Dang. I was hoping he'd answer the 'what site are you most proud of slashdotting' question.
And yet it still soldiers on. Trying to get an old WP expert to switch is hell.
> How many times were the files downloaded? .iso's and such these days). Anywho, my point is - what if you never, ever uploaded any songs? Would they still peg you with this crazy rate?
That's one thing I've been curious about in all this. I haven't shared files illegally in many, many years (since before the fall of Napster), but back when I did, I know that I typically logged on, grabbed what I wanted while canceling all attempted uploads, and then logged off. (In all fairness, tho, I do give back 200% at least when I torrent linux
I probably will. In 3 minutes of cursory browsing I found at least 3 albums I'd like. It's really too bad that word of this business didn't get out more, as fishybell alluded to. I'd have definitely been a regular customer, but yeah...never heard of them before just now. He clearly doesn't get advertising these days, as he talked about how he didn't get media coverage. All it takes is getting the front page of Digg / Reddit / del.icio.us/popular once or twice in 6 months and most internet users will know about you - screw old media coverage.
Better articles w/ links:
News.com
The Guardian (Blog)
CNN Money
ZDNET
And also, actual Lotus Symphony page on IBM's site, with download link.
Eve handles lots of other things, though, that you don't see in other MMO's. Each shot from each gun on each ship takes into account tracking speed on the turret, range of the target, size of the target, speed of the ship and the target, which direction they're moving in relative to each other (to get relative speed and angle), damage type, resistances, capacitor use, ammo use, possibly damage to the turret and nearby turrets...
There are many complex issues that the game takes into account, even when you're just flying around, not really doing anything. Compared to most other games where you cast a spell, the dice are rolled, a multiplier may be applied if you're using fire on a zombie, and that's about it, or where running around pretty much just involves animating your character's legs and moving you across the landscape. Generating a landscape isn't the hard part. Once it's there, you're done, and the client side handles the problem of displaying it. All the other stuff arguably makes Eve a harder problem, not an easier one.
There's also the fact that you simply cannot get the more valuable ores in high sec, and you can't profitably macro-mine in low sec. Those valuable ores are required to make most of the stuff in Eve, so it has to be mined...but significant resources have to be invested in defense and cooperation (via corporations and alliances) to get it done profitably. There's also the point that a player can generate large amounts of money - comparable to low-sec mining to some extent - by doing high-end missions in high-security (safe) space, but it requires a competent, attentive player with a significant investment in equipment. It doesn't lend itself to macro-ing at all, so it's not attractive to the stereotypical Chinese-sweatshop-farmers, but it's very effective for a normal player.
Eve just isn't a very good platform for farming for profit...most of the farming that you see is done with alt characters to supplement the income of a main character, rather than large-scale for-profit-in-real-world-money type operations you see in other games.
You're missing the point. It's not about getting the code back. It's about getting credit and owning the license. They cannot claim to own or control the license to the code or to be the author, only to modifications.
Essentially, the problem is about giving credit where credit is due. The BSD license is not the same thing as public domain. It's "Take my code and do whatever you want with it, but I'm maintaining ownership of the license on the original code and I want to be credited if you use it." People always focus on that first part, but the second is still very important. If it weren't, BSD folk would just release their code public domain.
Half a million people are still playing that? Wow. I'm half tempted to give it another look, since I was sort of an early-adopter on PC and their tech support wasn't exactly English-speaker-friendly at that time. But it really seemed like a grind - from what I remember, there was sort of a noob zone, say, level 1 - 8 type stuff (*pulling numbers out my ass here for example's sake*) and an intermediate zone, say, level 15+ stuff, but getting from 9 to 15 seemed like an endless grind of noob monsters. Maybe I was just doing it wrong? It was my first MMO...
I can't play DoD / CS anymore, for some reason. It always seems sort of laggy, but more like keyboard lag or something...I call it 'CS / DoD On Ice' because that's what it feels like; you sort of drift around instead of sharp movements. I first noticed it over a year ago, and have used 3 video cards and essentially 2 entire systems in that time. CS:S / DoD:S and Condition Zero all work fine, tho. It's bizarre.
Well, if you get tired, let your wrist go limp and flop backwards (palm up). Unless they pick up their elbow or have drastically longer arms than you, they can't push straight down hard enough to hurt your wrist, and at the same time they have nothing to push against to force your arm down. It's kind of a cheap trick to pull on friends or as a bar stunt, though. I doubt it's legal for real arm wrestling competitions.
Always ensure you have enough HP to survive the landing or an invulnerability artifact when performing a rocket jump.
Pretty sure it's a big ol' mug of Frosty Piss.
Isn't there a legal definition of what is and what is not fair use? Or is it so vague that we have to make up rules and hope the **AA's approve?
Not sure that's such a good idea. In some states, refusal to take a test (breath, blood, or urine, your choice) equals automatic license suspension for 6 months or so. Even if you fight the case and win, you are still without a license.
But I think that if the über-programmer really does exist, then eventually the free market will figure that out, and compensate him accordingly.
It has, and then some. These "über-programmers" are what you and I know as "wildly successful startup founders." Part of the reason it's so hard to hire them is because they are mostly already independently wealthy and / or personally invested in a project of love that no offer of cash and benefits will draw them away from. Most likely, if the former is not true, the latter will eventually cause it to be true. The best and most common way of hiring an über-programmer is to buy the company they currently work for.
Nothing like sneaking into a house, making sure you're not see, making sure you're wearing an appropriate disguise, grabbing the loot and then discovering that you have been magically tagged as a thief and now everyone wants to kill you.
I think I was pretty clear on that point...if you get caught, you get flagged. If not, no flag.
I didn't play Oblivion for more than 40 hours (just couldn't get into it, dunno why...), but if you prefer it be handled by the cops, I see no reason you couldn't run it like Morrowind did...get caught stealing, you lose all your loot (including stolen items not related to the particular offense you got caught at, if you happen to be wearing them at the time...to add realism, say that anybody who has something stolen has to report it to the local NPC cop shop or something inside 72hrs), and you get your XP knocked down an amount equivalent to doing jail time, or can pay a fine as an alternative to the jail time. Then the victims could go to claim their stuff. Easy-peasy.
Main reason I like Eve's system is that it's more directly up to players to deal with theft than NPC's...more player interaction. Also, it discourages people from keeping valuables in a way that would be insecure if it weren't for NPC police (like, say, walking around with all their inventory on their person, instead of in a locked chest...) And more like the real world than an idealistic one where the police are perfect and not discriminating, it's easier to victimize noobs (i.e., the weak and the poor) than the wealthy and powerful. That encourages new players to work together.
That's all well and good if you happen to be in or very near one of the small handful of cities that are 'music centers', but for would-be musicians who aren't in those places and have no reasonable means to get there, the music industry was just as cold before the internet as it is now, if not colder.
Make pocket-picking success depend on something like intelligence, awareness, whatever, of the victim...something that's likely to help you no matter what type of role you play, and improve as you level up. Throw in a luck factor, but ensure that it's very rare for you to be able to pick the pocket of somebody of equivalent attributes to your own. Also make the skill improve on a slower curve than anti-pick-pocketing, so no matter how good you get, the biggest prizes are always hard. Add in something like in Eve-Online, where 'can thieves' (people who rob ore or loot out of a container that is insecure but that you have ownership of) can legally be killed by the person they stole from for an hour or so after the fact, and are flagged in a way that it's obvious that they are who did it, and you can kill them. In this case, I'd say make it so the flag is only set if the pick-pocket is detected. Maybe roll for success and detection separately, so that failing to get anything does not automatically earn you a death sentence, and successfully snatching something doesn't automatically mean the victim didn't notice you doing it.
For other thief-type skills, just put ward, trap, detect invis, detect person, etc., spells in the game.
On the whole, I think it's very workable - with the caveat that it would have to be much like Eve Online, where PvP is everywhere; even in 'secure' space, if you get caught stealing, your victim can shoot you down, right in front of the NPC police, and nobody bats an eye. Breaking into a player guild house, for instance, should be quite do-able...but if anybody's home and you get seen, they should be able to attack you.
I agree with your conclusion (it would be nice to be able to queue orders while paused), but not with your reasons. What kills me on most RTS games is the harder difficulty levels...but not in RoN. Why? The computer's strategy at harder difficulty levels isn't too bad. It's the computer's speed that I can't compete with. The computer can tell 3 different barracks at 3 different bases each on a different corner of the map to build 10 each of 3 different classes in 1/10 of a second. All the mouse speed + precision + hotkey usage in the world will never let anybody but a few freaky-fast teens in Korea to keep up. I've never run into a strategy from an AI in an RTS that is unbeatable if you're up against a human with the same strategy. That's what drives me up the wall. I play RTS's when I want to exercise the brain a little bit. I play FPS's when I want to practice 'twitch' skills.
Basically, I wouldn't mind losing an RTS on 'Hard' if it was because the computer was adapting and improving it's strategy to beat me (i.e., outhinking me). I do mind losing when it's just doing the same damned thing it did on 'Medium', but at superhuman pace. The really frustrating thing, though, is that even on 'Easy', it's still super-fast. It builds a stupid base defense and a stupid offensive force...really really fast.
I don't need to pause to think out my strategy. I know what I want to do. I just need to pause so I can get it all done at a pace comparable to the computer.
I would almost agree, except that turn-based strategy implies a different kind of game...a kind that I hate.