The site is large and not going to buckle under the load of Slashdot's linking it. Ads are few and non-obtrusive. No registration is required to view. Let alone the fact that copying the whole of the text is illegal. But, hey, since when did the typical/.er care about copyright infringement.
Oh, and the text is mutilated. Our friendly AC replaced "power" with "penis size" in the final sentence. Then again, maybe that's why it's being modded up as insightful?
You know, people criticise Slashdot for doing it -- Just copying small pieces of an article, then aiming a link at it. It's not real journalism. Ok, maybe not. But I was a little surprised when, following links for this story, there were two separate articles ( at Innovations Report and at Washington University) which have almost completely identical content, right down to the captions on the pictures... Oh, wait, the Slashdot version doesn't include the pictures. I guess that's what they call editing. Next best thing to journalism.
The article at Washington University is, of course, the original. So, while we're link farming, here is the doctor's homepage.
Nothing like a story involving Microsoft to bring out the haters. Nothing like patents to bring out the righteous indignance. The problem is, most Slashdot readers don't know much of the law behind patents, how they're written, and how they're challenged. Largely, they think if a patent claims something, and the patent is approved, then the claim has force of law.
The fact of the matter is, patents are structured with a series of claims, as you can see in the linked article. Claims are the only thing with meaning in a patent. The rest is provided for reference, clarification, and simple defence. So the only thing of true importance in this document are the claims, near the top.
Secondly, wildly broad claims normally start, and increasingly narrow claims are made as one works down the ordered list. Therefore, the first thing you claim is going to be ridiculously broad. Generally speaking, the first few claims in a patent are not serious attempts to patent something. The last few claims are the ones of importance. And, what do you know, the title of the patent is...the first claim. So before anyone flames Microsoft, have you read claims 11-20? Oh, there's still plenty to complain about, but not as much as the article writer implies.
I've never quite understood homework grading...in HS, sure, make them do work, but in college it should be a matter of learning the subject, *practicing* at home, then being tested on how well you've absorbed and interprete the knowledge.
Actually, I was of the opinion this was the exact purpose of homework. You do the homework as practice and turn it in. The grade you get back is a reflection of how well you really did understand the material. That way one knows what he needs to study for the tests.
I would have no desire to run a bot if Blizzard wasn't letting the dupers/hackers ruin 100% legitimate play.
You presume that preventing dupers would be a trivial matter. Being a fellow who's worked on a few moderately sized programming projects, I can see how it might be impossible to stop such behavior, depending on the game's organization, behavior of multiple servers, versioning, and CPU limitations.
You speak of competing. But competing with whom? I am under the impression that online play for Diablo 2 is entirely voluntary. Unless you are actively invovled in pkill, you are basically in a cooperative adventure. All competition at that point is of a "How much can you bench?" sort. Seems that you have decided to treat a part of the social atmosphere of the game as if it were a necessary facet of the game itself.
Moving on...
Your attitude is a lot like the attitude of people who say "a lie is a lie,"
How does Blizzard feel about Hacking and Cheating? ...Our top priority is to continue to evolve Battle.net and our products to minimize the use of cheats...We encourage players not to use cheats and hacks on Battle.net...We believe that through our ongoing efforts to eliminate cheating combined with the Battle.net community taking a zero-tolerance stance, we can minimize the effects of cheating on Battle.net now and in the future.
Emphasis added. Not my evaluation. As I said before, you cheated as defined by the game's creators. They are the ones who long ago established that this is a black and white issue.
if they didn't squash the free battle.net server that was being worked on.
A move intended to prevent piracy of their games, notably expiring closed betas which are always far more open than intended. I knew at least 6 people who were not beta testers who...were beta testers. Any anti-beta tests or CD checks would be trivially removed given bnetd's open source status. Again, you assume the reasoning here was to reduce server load and not a best effort at removing cheaters.
Not that I'm implying it's easier for you to blame Blizzard, trying to minimize your responsibility for your account's banning.
I play Diablo 2 and I lost an account for 'botting.'
So you cheat, as defined by the game's creators.
a dupe/hack problem that has been rampant in d2 for *years*
But you don't cheat in that way? What gives? Doesn't seem like you have an issue with playing the game on your own terms. Why don't you dupe if it's such a long standing issue that's simply not punished?
The judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of another state, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state.
Boy, those constitutional law people sure now how to be brief.
No pound sign? I'll be damned, you're right. I tried £ (), £ () and just embedding the character directly (). A pound sign of each version should appear in each set of parentheses. I wonder why they're blocking HTML entities. I can understand not allowing one to type the character directly as a character set concern, but why block entities? Heck, looks like I can't even do umlauted vowels: ä (&amul); ouml (ö); ü (). Mumble. Time to check the SoureForge bug list.
Its stated purpose is (or was) to undermine unjust and immoral copyright laws.
This is probably wandering away from the topic at hand, but your statements are rather compelling. I've never heard such a claim before, and a quick Google revealed no results. Reading the frequently asked questions at Gnu's website didn't reveal such a vewipoint either.
I've always been told that the reasoning behind the GPL was to insure that code once in the public domain would never disappear and become 'lost'. It's happened time and again. Freely produced code gets developed by a group, becomes the defacto standard, and then the group disolves. Spurious patches are added, but there is no organized project behind it. Then some company picks up the software, gets investment, and starts developing oft requested features. Soon, they're far in the lead of the free version that no one develops anymore, and they charge a bundle because they've become the new de facto standard.
This situation would exist with the proposed scheme, but only on a grander scale. Since copyrighted works would suddenly become so much less valuable, people would be even more reluctant to release code. (Let alone other works.) Further, the GPL'ed code would be public domain in two years. At that point, a private company can take the code, start making improvements to it, keep it all closed source, tight lock and key, and start making a bundle. Is this perhaps a good thing? Perhaps, but I don't think so. That company wouldn't be anywhere if it weren't first for the great effort put into the initial development, and those developers deserve to get something back for their work.
When I release code under the GPL, my intention is not one of improving the economy and propping up new entrepreneurships. My intent is to make an improvement which benefits others and which will likely come back to benefit me. As I see it, the GPL isn't about good morals as much as it is a certain amount about well-intentioned greed.
They? Who is this mysterious they? Think about what you're saying. You're thinking of some specific people who you feel have abused copyright and proposing a change in the system to punish them. However, your solution would quickly screw over anyone who creates unique material and doesn't get it immediately to market. The result would likely be that the large conglomerates which you're targetting would be the only way an author, an artist, a poet, or a composer could hope to do make a living. Everyone would need a massive advertising splurge to push interest for a month, create the newest fad, and sell all that's possible in the miniscule window of two years.
And that's ignoring the fact that the GPL exists only under the auspices of copyright. You'd destroy that too. Such a proposal as you've made is completely short-sighted.
The content of all of his posts in the past were trolls. I'm making a reasonable assumption about the value of his posts. I view at 2 by default. If he's modded up to 5, -3 puts him in my viewing range all the same.
The grandparent post is a troll posted by a logged in troll. This is what the zoo system is for. Set your Foe modifier to -3, mark him as a troll, and let moderation do its job. As far as AC goes, just give AC -1. Knowledgable ACs normally get modded up anyhow. At that rate, you can generally read small comment articles at 0 with few trolls. That is, if you read often enough to foe logged in trolls.
Modules don't push things into userland, they still run in kernel space.
I stand corrected. Granted, I didn't believe you at first since you posted AC. Pardon my bias. I found a very approachable article on kernel modules. (I wish all HOWTOs could be written so clearly.)
This is why WinCE and Linux are Good Enough as well.
I'm sorry, but, no. The problem is that WinCE (it's WinCE.NET now, if we want to be anal) is not a hard real time OS. [WinXP embedded also exists. It provides no real time support at all.] WinCE is "real time", but not good enough for applications that require a high priority interrupt never be dropped. It doesn't have true guarantees about minimum time for an interrupt to be serviced. However, a hard real time version of linux (RTLinux) is available last I checked.
Linux and Windows arent "bad" they are just profoundly LAZY. Microkernels and doing everything right is way too much work.
My brain says: don't feed the trolls, but I'm compelled anyhow.
The NT kernel, meaning NT, 2000, XP, 2003, is a microkernel. Although obviously different in design, the habit of Linux to push almost everything into userland using modules keeps the kernel relatively small and object orientedish.
I won't go into memory management, rings, IRQLs, and all that fun stuff as I'm pretty sure you were just trying to incite debate to begin with.
I hope the example you gave wasn't intended as a serious one. First of all, there is the issue that most of the time hex numbers are case insensitive. The additional trouble caused by a difference between a and A would be quite a hassle. Once more, for any alphabet that reaches through l (as in 'el', not 'one') or O (as in 'oh', not 'zero') suddenly has problems with font choice for representation. Secondly, consider if you used all of the symbols you recommende. 0-9,a-z,A-Z. That's 62 unique characters, and we need a number of characters that is a power of two for things to work out. So next we have to throw in some other symbol. How about we just say we follow that with ' and " (there are probably better choices, but that's not pertinent). That gives us 64 total characters which represent log2(64)=6 bits in our address. This means that we still need 22 of these hexaquartadecimals. If we wanted to drop this back down to the current 8 characters required, we'll need a system which represents 16 bits per character, or 65,536 unique characters per position.
With hexadecimal, we have a well-established system used several decades for a shorthand form of long binary numbers that required 32 significant characters with no typographic duplicities. This new proposed system will require recoding all software dealing with IPs to be case-sensitive as well as accept new characters, introduce duplicities, and save us not quite one-third of the length. Quite possibly a bit more of a hassle than it's worth.
Re:It's tedious handcraft
on
Saving MUDs?
·
· Score: 1
the tools used for developing the MUD is hard to maintain for legacy reasons... Maintaining 20-30.000 rooms by writing code for each of it, no matter the object oriented paradigm used, is simply too time consuming
You might note that you describe only the experience of an LPMUD, and potentially a limited subset of LPMUDs. Although in LP all rooms, objects, and mobs are objects in their own right, potentially with unique code that needs to mesh with the underlying, shifting lib, many MUD codebases have a more static approach. Frequently, all of these things are static text files with no associated code or a limited set of code that's essentially separate from the actual descriptions. And this is even ignoring LP libs like Lima which keep a constant set of verbs available and discourage wild deviations from existing prototypes. There is a whole world outside of LP. All of ROM and Circle generally work from a codebase that, once established initially, can stay very stable. Well, maybe ROM is a little less stable. Very rarely do areas on such MUDs require upkeep provided they were initially written well.
However, I will vouch to the sheer amount of effort required to make a good zone to start. Writing descriptions for even 100 rooms, 30 mobs to populate those rooms, and 20 objects is a truly gargantuan task. As noted previously, that single zone can easily be 100 hours worth of effort even not adding additional code to customize the area. And it's that initial development which has caused many a MUD to never even get started. The problem is that initial development time is relatively huge. And it's hard to motivate someone to build with the nebulous distinction of being dubbed an 'editor'.
Again, as already noted by others, most MUD developers are former MUD players who really get into the system. If the MUD player happens to be intelligent and dedicated enough to build without the wild streak that would cause her to try to build her own unique MUD, she might just maybe start a zone on a MUD. And, even if those rare circumstances somehow come together, the result is often a half finished zone. School starts up, boyfriends are discovered, and what's left never gets picked up by another builder. Further, as actual MUD players reduce due to the attraction of graphical games, the builder population becomes increasingly small.
Many factors contribute, not the least of which are the large amount of griefers skulking about the remaining MUD community. But there's no doubt that there will be those few of us dedicated to playing with MUDs if, for no other reason, that it's fun to create things that live beyond us.
I attend a small state university that is decidedly not renowned for its CS program. I'm coming up on my senior year. In no less than three class (Data Structure, Software Engineering, Algorithms) I have spent at least a week concentrating purely on proof of the correctness of an algorithm by various methods. Software Engineering took over a month on testing, primarily concentrating on mathematically rigorous proofs and automated tests (because a mathematically correct and proven algorithm can easily be implemented incorrectly). Pardon my insulting question, but when was the last time you attended college?
A little policy issue thrown at the bottom of that article. The U.S. administration is unhappy that marijuana possession in Canada is now a ticketing offense (parking meter sort of thing) instead of a criminal offense. I'm sure someone will have to draw the paralel that's been brought before that the "war on terrorism" has allowed the broadening of police powers which are being used for the "war on drugs". I'm voting Democrat in 2004, and I'm a Libertarian.
DDR was also meant to apply to SDRAM (which is the predecessor to DDR)... I could also have thrown in EDO, parity, SODIMM, etc. I didn't think it was necessary to name every type of system memory available.
As for Flash RAM, I have yet to see any that beats out a fast hard drive. That's not even taking into account the incredibly high price, nor the limited number of erase/rewrite cycles.
Sigh. Tou don't know what you're talking about, as I feared. SRAM is not SDRAM by any stretch of the imagination. SRAM is constructed with transistors which actually hold the state information as opposed to SDRAM which uses thousands of tiny capacitors which are cheaper to make. The L1 cache of your computer is SRAM. SRAM is somewhat bulky but is generally millions of times (10s of ms vs ones of ns) of times faster than a hard drive. SRAM retains its memory so long as it has current applied (and it draws relatively little). Flash RAM, OTOH, clocks at speeds on the order of 10s of ns when reading, so, yes, it blows away HDs still. It has write times that are about the same with modern day hard drives. So when being used in write intensive applications, Flash RAM is expensive both in speed and in current. I hereby justify my original snobbish attitude. Fooie.
Being a small bit of a geek, I think myself qualified to say whether a term is esoteric or not, and I must say, I've never seen FOSS in my life before. My first thought was "How is my local tourist goods shop suddenly competing with Microsoft on a global scale?".
Free Open Source Software (FOSS). Thanks, that's what I want. More adjectives. And, once more, have them all thrown into an acronym I can't recognize. That's not going to encourage cliquishness or scare away people who might otherwise be interested.
Call me strange, but there's already a precedent to deal with this problem: Make comments available to subscribers prior to posting the story; check the comments before actually posting to the front page. Fark does it with Total Fark and has done it for months [natch, they allow all submission to be viewed by subscribers, but Slashdot editors have shown adverse reactions to such an idea]. Dupes are detected pretty reliably by readers, as evidenced by the first four comments on this story. If they want to be real bastards and make more work for themselves, they could even nuke all comments posted prior to the public live time so that you wouldn't see subscribers competing for first post rights.
Or perhaps take the rather simple route of exposing those 'dupe detection' scripts to the world that supposedly help combat this problem. I didn't see them on the slashcode CVS when I checked. Perhaps if we had access to those, someone would kindly touch them up to be a little more intelligent perhaps allowing the editors to look a little more intelligent.
Does it make sense for id to create software for one console, when there are several choices out there? Microsoft would have to pony up a lot of cash to make up for lost revenue from other consoles, which we are all well aware that they can certainly do.
Having not pried into the numbers of this field which are what ultimately determine whether any of your or my points are valid, allow me to offer a converse assertion.
Porting costs can be very high. Each additional platform Doom3 goes on will require (1) rewriting potentially large chunks of graphics code, if not other things if it turns out some things have to be squeezed a little extra to fit inside the console; (2) perhaps more expensive, extensive play testing to confirm the new hardware doesn't cause strange new problems; (3) creating a production line for creating media and packaging; (4) negotiating with stores shelf-space for an additional title; (5) providing tech support for yet another platform.
You seem to assert that for every additional platform the game is available for will mean more incoming revenue. Whether you meant this or not, it is not the case. Many people have multiple platforms -- XBox and a PC, PS2 and a GameCube, etc. Once more, some people may buy a new console simply for the newst, hot game out. And Doom3 will be coming out with a rather large amount of fan fare. If these two groups are a significant portion of the purchasers of Doom3, you start seeing diminishing returns very quicly -- perhaps even after supporting only two platforms (e.g. Windows and XBox)
Further, the game is already going to run in a Windows environment, doubtlessly. This means that XBox will be the easiest to port to, both because of a minimal amount of code rewrite being necessary and because the mostly stock hardware means that not as much XBox specific testing would be necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a karma burn. MOD PARENT DOWN!
The site is large and not going to buckle under the load of Slashdot's linking it. Ads are few and non-obtrusive. No registration is required to view. Let alone the fact that copying the whole of the text is illegal. But, hey, since when did the typical /.er care about copyright infringement.
Oh, and the text is mutilated. Our friendly AC replaced "power" with "penis size" in the final sentence. Then again, maybe that's why it's being modded up as insightful?
You know, people criticise Slashdot for doing it -- Just copying small pieces of an article, then aiming a link at it. It's not real journalism. Ok, maybe not. But I was a little surprised when, following links for this story, there were two separate articles ( at Innovations Report and at Washington University) which have almost completely identical content, right down to the captions on the pictures... Oh, wait, the Slashdot version doesn't include the pictures. I guess that's what they call editing. Next best thing to journalism.
The article at Washington University is, of course, the original. So, while we're link farming, here is the doctor's homepage.
Nothing like a story involving Microsoft to bring out the haters. Nothing like patents to bring out the righteous indignance. The problem is, most Slashdot readers don't know much of the law behind patents, how they're written, and how they're challenged. Largely, they think if a patent claims something, and the patent is approved, then the claim has force of law.
The fact of the matter is, patents are structured with a series of claims, as you can see in the linked article. Claims are the only thing with meaning in a patent. The rest is provided for reference, clarification, and simple defence. So the only thing of true importance in this document are the claims, near the top.
Secondly, wildly broad claims normally start, and increasingly narrow claims are made as one works down the ordered list. Therefore, the first thing you claim is going to be ridiculously broad. Generally speaking, the first few claims in a patent are not serious attempts to patent something. The last few claims are the ones of importance. And, what do you know, the title of the patent is...the first claim. So before anyone flames Microsoft, have you read claims 11-20? Oh, there's still plenty to complain about, but not as much as the article writer implies.
Actually, I was of the opinion this was the exact purpose of homework. You do the homework as practice and turn it in. The grade you get back is a reflection of how well you really did understand the material. That way one knows what he needs to study for the tests.
Moving on...
Quoting Inside Blizzard: General FAQ (http://www.blizzard.com/inblizz/genfaq.shtml)
Emphasis added. Not my evaluation. As I said before, you cheated as defined by the game's creators. They are the ones who long ago established that this is a black and white issue.
A move intended to prevent piracy of their games, notably expiring closed betas which are always far more open than intended. I knew at least 6 people who were not beta testers who...were beta testers. Any anti-beta tests or CD checks would be trivially removed given bnetd's open source status. Again, you assume the reasoning here was to reduce server load and not a best effort at removing cheaters.
Not that I'm implying it's easier for you to blame Blizzard, trying to minimize your responsibility for your account's banning.
So you cheat, as defined by the game's creators.
But you don't cheat in that way? What gives? Doesn't seem like you have an issue with playing the game on your own terms. Why don't you dupe if it's such a long standing issue that's simply not punished?
Wazoo land grab sounded interesting. So I did some research. Looks like you were close. It was a Yazoo land fraud. Thanks for pointing it out, though.
And, for the other curious people out there, the eleventh ammendment, as quoted from http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constituti on.amendmentxi.html:
Boy, those constitutional law people sure now how to be brief.
No pound sign? I'll be damned, you're right. I tried £ (), £ () and just embedding the character directly (). A pound sign of each version should appear in each set of parentheses. I wonder why they're blocking HTML entities. I can understand not allowing one to type the character directly as a character set concern, but why block entities? Heck, looks like I can't even do umlauted vowels: ä (&amul); ouml (ö); ü (). Mumble. Time to check the SoureForge bug list.
This is probably wandering away from the topic at hand, but your statements are rather compelling. I've never heard such a claim before, and a quick Google revealed no results. Reading the frequently asked questions at Gnu's website didn't reveal such a vewipoint either.
I've always been told that the reasoning behind the GPL was to insure that code once in the public domain would never disappear and become 'lost'. It's happened time and again. Freely produced code gets developed by a group, becomes the defacto standard, and then the group disolves. Spurious patches are added, but there is no organized project behind it. Then some company picks up the software, gets investment, and starts developing oft requested features. Soon, they're far in the lead of the free version that no one develops anymore, and they charge a bundle because they've become the new de facto standard.
This situation would exist with the proposed scheme, but only on a grander scale. Since copyrighted works would suddenly become so much less valuable, people would be even more reluctant to release code. (Let alone other works.) Further, the GPL'ed code would be public domain in two years. At that point, a private company can take the code, start making improvements to it, keep it all closed source, tight lock and key, and start making a bundle. Is this perhaps a good thing? Perhaps, but I don't think so. That company wouldn't be anywhere if it weren't first for the great effort put into the initial development, and those developers deserve to get something back for their work.
When I release code under the GPL, my intention is not one of improving the economy and propping up new entrepreneurships. My intent is to make an improvement which benefits others and which will likely come back to benefit me. As I see it, the GPL isn't about good morals as much as it is a certain amount about well-intentioned greed.
They? Who is this mysterious they? Think about what you're saying. You're thinking of some specific people who you feel have abused copyright and proposing a change in the system to punish them. However, your solution would quickly screw over anyone who creates unique material and doesn't get it immediately to market. The result would likely be that the large conglomerates which you're targetting would be the only way an author, an artist, a poet, or a composer could hope to do make a living. Everyone would need a massive advertising splurge to push interest for a month, create the newest fad, and sell all that's possible in the miniscule window of two years.
And that's ignoring the fact that the GPL exists only under the auspices of copyright. You'd destroy that too. Such a proposal as you've made is completely short-sighted.
The content of all of his posts in the past were trolls. I'm making a reasonable assumption about the value of his posts. I view at 2 by default. If he's modded up to 5, -3 puts him in my viewing range all the same.
The grandparent post is a troll posted by a logged in troll. This is what the zoo system is for. Set your Foe modifier to -3, mark him as a troll, and let moderation do its job. As far as AC goes, just give AC -1. Knowledgable ACs normally get modded up anyhow. At that rate, you can generally read small comment articles at 0 with few trolls. That is, if you read often enough to foe logged in trolls.
I stand corrected. Granted, I didn't believe you at first since you posted AC. Pardon my bias. I found a very approachable article on kernel modules. (I wish all HOWTOs could be written so clearly.)
I'm sorry, but, no. The problem is that WinCE (it's WinCE.NET now, if we want to be anal) is not a hard real time OS. [WinXP embedded also exists. It provides no real time support at all.] WinCE is "real time", but not good enough for applications that require a high priority interrupt never be dropped. It doesn't have true guarantees about minimum time for an interrupt to be serviced. However, a hard real time version of linux (RTLinux) is available last I checked.
My brain says: don't feed the trolls, but I'm compelled anyhow.
The NT kernel, meaning NT, 2000, XP, 2003, is a microkernel. Although obviously different in design, the habit of Linux to push almost everything into userland using modules keeps the kernel relatively small and object orientedish.
I won't go into memory management, rings, IRQLs, and all that fun stuff as I'm pretty sure you were just trying to incite debate to begin with.
I hope the example you gave wasn't intended as a serious one. First of all, there is the issue that most of the time hex numbers are case insensitive. The additional trouble caused by a difference between a and A would be quite a hassle. Once more, for any alphabet that reaches through l (as in 'el', not 'one') or O (as in 'oh', not 'zero') suddenly has problems with font choice for representation. Secondly, consider if you used all of the symbols you recommende. 0-9,a-z,A-Z. That's 62 unique characters, and we need a number of characters that is a power of two for things to work out. So next we have to throw in some other symbol. How about we just say we follow that with ' and " (there are probably better choices, but that's not pertinent). That gives us 64 total characters which represent log2(64)=6 bits in our address. This means that we still need 22 of these hexaquartadecimals. If we wanted to drop this back down to the current 8 characters required, we'll need a system which represents 16 bits per character, or 65,536 unique characters per position.
With hexadecimal, we have a well-established system used several decades for a shorthand form of long binary numbers that required 32 significant characters with no typographic duplicities. This new proposed system will require recoding all software dealing with IPs to be case-sensitive as well as accept new characters, introduce duplicities, and save us not quite one-third of the length. Quite possibly a bit more of a hassle than it's worth.
You might note that you describe only the experience of an LPMUD, and potentially a limited subset of LPMUDs. Although in LP all rooms, objects, and mobs are objects in their own right, potentially with unique code that needs to mesh with the underlying, shifting lib, many MUD codebases have a more static approach. Frequently, all of these things are static text files with no associated code or a limited set of code that's essentially separate from the actual descriptions. And this is even ignoring LP libs like Lima which keep a constant set of verbs available and discourage wild deviations from existing prototypes. There is a whole world outside of LP. All of ROM and Circle generally work from a codebase that, once established initially, can stay very stable. Well, maybe ROM is a little less stable. Very rarely do areas on such MUDs require upkeep provided they were initially written well.
However, I will vouch to the sheer amount of effort required to make a good zone to start. Writing descriptions for even 100 rooms, 30 mobs to populate those rooms, and 20 objects is a truly gargantuan task. As noted previously, that single zone can easily be 100 hours worth of effort even not adding additional code to customize the area. And it's that initial development which has caused many a MUD to never even get started. The problem is that initial development time is relatively huge. And it's hard to motivate someone to build with the nebulous distinction of being dubbed an 'editor'.
Again, as already noted by others, most MUD developers are former MUD players who really get into the system. If the MUD player happens to be intelligent and dedicated enough to build without the wild streak that would cause her to try to build her own unique MUD, she might just maybe start a zone on a MUD. And, even if those rare circumstances somehow come together, the result is often a half finished zone. School starts up, boyfriends are discovered, and what's left never gets picked up by another builder. Further, as actual MUD players reduce due to the attraction of graphical games, the builder population becomes increasingly small.
Many factors contribute, not the least of which are the large amount of griefers skulking about the remaining MUD community. But there's no doubt that there will be those few of us dedicated to playing with MUDs if, for no other reason, that it's fun to create things that live beyond us.
I attend a small state university that is decidedly not renowned for its CS program. I'm coming up on my senior year. In no less than three class (Data Structure, Software Engineering, Algorithms) I have spent at least a week concentrating purely on proof of the correctness of an algorithm by various methods. Software Engineering took over a month on testing, primarily concentrating on mathematically rigorous proofs and automated tests (because a mathematically correct and proven algorithm can easily be implemented incorrectly). Pardon my insulting question, but when was the last time you attended college?
A little policy issue thrown at the bottom of that article. The U.S. administration is unhappy that marijuana possession in Canada is now a ticketing offense (parking meter sort of thing) instead of a criminal offense. I'm sure someone will have to draw the paralel that's been brought before that the "war on terrorism" has allowed the broadening of police powers which are being used for the "war on drugs". I'm voting Democrat in 2004, and I'm a Libertarian.
That's an A tag. HREF is an attribute.
Sigh. Tou don't know what you're talking about, as I feared. SRAM is not SDRAM by any stretch of the imagination. SRAM is constructed with transistors which actually hold the state information as opposed to SDRAM which uses thousands of tiny capacitors which are cheaper to make. The L1 cache of your computer is SRAM. SRAM is somewhat bulky but is generally millions of times (10s of ms vs ones of ns) of times faster than a hard drive. SRAM retains its memory so long as it has current applied (and it draws relatively little). Flash RAM, OTOH, clocks at speeds on the order of 10s of ns when reading, so, yes, it blows away HDs still. It has write times that are about the same with modern day hard drives. So when being used in write intensive applications, Flash RAM is expensive both in speed and in current. I hereby justify my original snobbish attitude. Fooie.
Being a small bit of a geek, I think myself qualified to say whether a term is esoteric or not, and I must say, I've never seen FOSS in my life before. My first thought was "How is my local tourist goods shop suddenly competing with Microsoft on a global scale?".
Free Open Source Software (FOSS). Thanks, that's what I want. More adjectives. And, once more, have them all thrown into an acronym I can't recognize. That's not going to encourage cliquishness or scare away people who might otherwise be interested.
I even thought to look at E2 to see if the obscure FOSS had been noded. If it had been, a little link could have at least been provided to make this more accessible. Nope. Then again, I remember reading something in the Slash CVS which mentioned the E2 linking (with those little question marks) was broken.
Flash RAM? Or just normal old SRAM with a battery attached? Do you know what you're talking about?
Call me strange, but there's already a precedent to deal with this problem: Make comments available to subscribers prior to posting the story; check the comments before actually posting to the front page. Fark does it with Total Fark and has done it for months [natch, they allow all submission to be viewed by subscribers, but Slashdot editors have shown adverse reactions to such an idea]. Dupes are detected pretty reliably by readers, as evidenced by the first four comments on this story. If they want to be real bastards and make more work for themselves, they could even nuke all comments posted prior to the public live time so that you wouldn't see subscribers competing for first post rights.
Or perhaps take the rather simple route of exposing those 'dupe detection' scripts to the world that supposedly help combat this problem. I didn't see them on the slashcode CVS when I checked. Perhaps if we had access to those, someone would kindly touch them up to be a little more intelligent perhaps allowing the editors to look a little more intelligent.
Having not pried into the numbers of this field which are what ultimately determine whether any of your or my points are valid, allow me to offer a converse assertion.
Porting costs can be very high. Each additional platform Doom3 goes on will require (1) rewriting potentially large chunks of graphics code, if not other things if it turns out some things have to be squeezed a little extra to fit inside the console; (2) perhaps more expensive, extensive play testing to confirm the new hardware doesn't cause strange new problems; (3) creating a production line for creating media and packaging; (4) negotiating with stores shelf-space for an additional title; (5) providing tech support for yet another platform.
You seem to assert that for every additional platform the game is available for will mean more incoming revenue. Whether you meant this or not, it is not the case. Many people have multiple platforms -- XBox and a PC, PS2 and a GameCube, etc. Once more, some people may buy a new console simply for the newst, hot game out. And Doom3 will be coming out with a rather large amount of fan fare. If these two groups are a significant portion of the purchasers of Doom3, you start seeing diminishing returns very quicly -- perhaps even after supporting only two platforms (e.g. Windows and XBox)
Further, the game is already going to run in a Windows environment, doubtlessly. This means that XBox will be the easiest to port to, both because of a minimal amount of code rewrite being necessary and because the mostly stock hardware means that not as much XBox specific testing would be necessary.