You hit the nail on the head. Back in the 80's, many game makers stopped using copy protection because it cost them customers. I personally hate products that require the original CD be in the drive during operation. If I know that requirement in advance, I will NOT purchase that product. If I find out after the fact, I will hunt down a hack to fix it. Losing access to a program because the CD was scratch is not a good thing.
That was my reaction also. If Google placed a watermark across the image, such that it would no longer be of value, then there would be no issue. However, instead of saying "Google", I would recommend watermarking it with the domainname that it was pulled from. Thus, if it was pulled from the real company, they would get the "free advertising" that Google claims is a benefit to them. If, on the other hand, it was pulled from a site with an illegal copy, it would point the copyright holder at that site, instead of at Google.
Re:Uru Servers limited to 25 people...
on
Uru Makes A Comeback
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· Score: 2, Informative
1 - The other ages weren't part of the online game, so of course they didn't lag. They were the original, single player game. It would have been fun to join other players and discover NEW content in those zones, but that wasn't what they designed.
2 - Neighborhoods were instances where you could gather and talk... again, not part of the game.
The only real multiplayer area was the one, tiny city... where lag was so bad that you could barely move around. Old EQ1 had problems when 200+ people showed up for a GM event. Uru couldn't even handle 10% of that load in the City.
Another factor. The City was the only portion of the online game that was open. One city, smaller than Freeport in EQ1... Where was the rest of the online content? There was no game there... Just a dream.
No combat No tradeskills One scavenger hunt puzzle. Just a dream.... that vanished when we woke up.
Uru, the online Myst game from Cyan Worlds, was taken offline not long after the service was first launched.
Error -- Uru never made it out of Beta.
There was something terribly wrong with their design. The beta servers were capped at 25 players -- and even then the lag was so bad that it could easily be compared to a bad day on WoW, when the server is full and you are near a bank! What multiplayer game could survive with a 25 player cap on each server?
The IMSAI 8080 was my first exposure to a computer, back in the days when everyone who saw it asked, "What good is a computer? Why would anyone ever want one?" Boy have times changed.:)
I only survived SWG three months after the original release, but since I'm one of those with a Station Access pass I drop in every now and then to see what is up. So, I dropped in last night, created a new character on a new server, and started the tutorial.
All I could think of was that I was in a single player game, designed to be no challenge and trivial to beat. I was walking by "agro" mobs without being attacked and killing red-cons without taking any damage!
Not exactly a good re-introduction. It made EQ2 look challenging.
That has nothing to do with this. The Shuttle has been sucking the wind out of NASA's sails for decades. It was designed by committee to please Congress.... so what would you expect? NASA will be much better off when the shuttle is finally scapped, assuming that they can avoid micromanagement by Congress, the President and the Military long enough to design something to replace it that will actually work. (I am not holding my breath.)
I was going to recommend Taos Mountain, because they did solid sysadm consultant work for me at a previous job. However, they appear to have reinvented themselves to the point that, after looking at their web site, I'm not sure what they do...
SHORT RESPONSE: Have a licensed electrician check out your circuits.
Amen!
I actually worked on a system where printer interfaces were burning up because an electrician had reversed neutral and ground in the outlet where the printer was plugged in. There was enough of a difference between neutral and ground to damage the interface of the computer.
1) The world is vast and fun to explore 2) It's fun to play the character classes in that world 3) The battle system is varied and interesting 4) The story line is compelling
I wish I had a mod point. You've hit the nail right on the head!
Spending 45 minutes to put together a group, followed by a half hour to get the group to the hunting location, only to have a wipeout because one player doesn't have a clue, followed by another half hour of recovery... then log off as my two hours of game time runs out... Definately fun, fun, fun.
My son, who started playing table top D&D at the age of ten, lasted two days in Beta. The lack of anyway to advance solo ended his interest in the game. I won't purchase an evaluation copy, for just that reason. I wish them success, but I won't be playing. It is simply not my style.
"Companies, in particular, need to be constantly looking at new storage technologies and have an archiving strategy that allows them to automatically migrate to new technologies," he said. "Otherwise, they're going to wind up in a dead end. And for those sitting on terabytes of crucial data, that could be a colossal problem."
Ask NASA about this issue.
I ended up throwing out a box of backup tapes, made on a MSDOS system, using a tape drive whose controller card was no longer supported with drivers under windows and a backup software package from a company that was no longer in business.
The one advantage of something like CDROM backups is the "hope" that you will have a CDROM drive, installed in a system with a compatible OS, that will be able to read them.
Agreed. I work for a large multinational corporation. The December issue of their internal newspaper stated;
Around 15 million e-mails are received worldwide every month. Only a fifth of them are related to business matters. All other e-mails, 12 million of them, are identified by [company name] as being infected or as spam mails containing advertising.
In other words, 80% of incoming e-mail is identified as containing SPAM or a Virus! That is a improvement?
The U.S. Constitution, Fourth Amendment (1791): "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I couldn't find the phrase "except if you don't want to" anywhere.
"Reich continously amended his books throughout his life, and the owners of Reich's intellectual property actively forbid anything other than the latest revised versions to be reprinted."Wilhelm Reich
Fitting the main thread, the current owners of the Copyrights appear to be blocking true documentation of his work. It would be educational to compare original copies with later publications to see how his thinking evolved. However, in our current state of "freedom", that will not be possible.
I checked Amazon and found that your novel, "Star Dragon" is ranked 400,000 place with only 4 customer reviews. Tell me again why free distribution helps new authors?
Did you read the article? The author gives numbers demonstrating that the sales of his books increased after being posted. Your question implies that Amazon stats are significant. However large it is, Amazon still is only one vendor. Could it be that most online sales go through the Bean site? I have no clue. Possible most sales go through the local book store. Again, I have no clue. The author, however, posted the summary statistics for the sales through all channels. That just might be a clue....
Hmmm.... I wonder about the administration of their servers, given that the most recent note on the home page is a statement that their forums are down... dated September 2003. Attention to detail is critical for a service such as DNS. That note implies that they do not pay attention to detail.
"That also removes anything preventing them from giving you a loooooong vacation too. Remember: If your job is so automated you can do it from the deli, your job is also so automated they can do it from Delhi."
That is the least of my worries. Too much of sysadm work is hands-on and cannot be done remotely. I run two sites; one in California and one in Pennsylvania. I have done as much as I can to allow remote administration of the other site, given financial and time constrants. However, I still need someone local to walk into the room, look at front panel lights, swap out bad cables, etc.
(It sucks when the ethernet cable to the hub that has your serial console concentrator on it dies... as happened this week.)
These days I ask corporate people if they would accept a single provider for a critical part in a product they were manufacturing. When they give the by-the-book answer of, "Of course not." I then ask them why they have allowed their critical corporate IT infrastructure to be tied to a sole source provider and what would be the impact on the corporate bottomline if MicroSoft decided to raised their fees in a significant manner. If we can just change their mindset...
Have whomever is in charge of building maintenance install a temperature sensor and remote monitor connection to the building alarm system in your computer room. I did that at the last four facilities I managed. It is a hassle free solution, the monitoring company can be given a list of people to contact -- with a specific order for contacting them.
That way, you can go on vacation! Too many homebrew solutions end up being dependent on the sysadm being available. Vacations are nice! Try to remove anything that prevent you from taking one.
Amen! One of the worst managers I worked for at NASA was a top project engineer -- with zero people skills. The problem with NASA is management by committee -- with Congress being that committee. micromanagement by Congress, via budgetary controls, smothering regulations and incompitant political appointees, guarantees NASA's failure.
Here's hoping that the private sector initiatives boldly go where no govie has gone before.
In his 1990 book "Nations at Risk: The Impact of the Computer Revolution", Edward Yourdon gave an example of a contract proposal received by Ford Aerospace. The company proposed to do exactly what this new company is talking about; park a ship full of maintenance programmers three miles off the California coast. I don't remember now what reason he listed for them not winning the contract.
It really says something about society when you can get a harsher penalty for sending spam than you could for premeditated homicide.
I suspect that society would be better off if it used community service and financial penalties instead of jail time for nonviolent crimes. As much as I dislike SPAM and SPAMMERS, nine years in jail just doesn't feel correct to me.
I took the SANS security boot camp when they first started. I found it valuable and very well done. A solid week of good, well presented, stuff that you won't find anywhere else.
However, even though I passed all the exams needed for GIAC certification, the follow on requirement to submit papers simply did not fit my work schedule. As the only system administrator for a small startup, I simply did not have time to write papers. So, the requirement they appear to be dropping was the requirement that blocked my certification.
Writing a good paper takes time and focus. Something that working system administrators often find short in supply.
Slashdot Mirror
You hit the nail on the head. Back in the 80's, many game makers stopped using copy protection because it cost them customers. I personally hate products that require the original CD be in the drive during operation. If I know that requirement in advance, I will NOT purchase that product. If I find out after the fact, I will hunt down a hack to fix it. Losing access to a program because the CD was scratch is not a good thing.
1 - The other ages weren't part of the online game, so of course they didn't lag. They were the original, single player game. It would have been fun to join other players and discover NEW content in those zones, but that wasn't what they designed.
2 - Neighborhoods were instances where you could gather and talk... again, not part of the game.
The only real multiplayer area was the one, tiny city... where lag was so bad that you could barely move around. Old EQ1 had problems when 200+ people showed up for a GM event. Uru couldn't even handle 10% of that load in the City.
Another factor. The City was the only portion of the online game that was open. One city, smaller than Freeport in EQ1... Where was the rest of the online content? There was no game there... Just a dream.
No combat
No tradeskills
One scavenger hunt puzzle.
Just a dream.... that vanished when we woke up.
There was something terribly wrong with their design. The beta servers were capped at 25 players -- and even then the lag was so bad that it could easily be compared to a bad day on WoW, when the server is full and you are near a bank! What multiplayer game could survive with a 25 player cap on each server?
The IMSAI 8080 was my first exposure to a computer, back in the days when everyone who saw it asked, "What good is a computer? Why would anyone ever want one?" Boy have times changed. :)
I only survived SWG three months after the original release, but since I'm one of those with a Station Access pass I drop in every now and then to see what is up. So, I dropped in last night, created a new character on a new server, and started the tutorial.
All I could think of was that I was in a single player game, designed to be no challenge and trivial to beat. I was walking by "agro" mobs without being attacked and killing red-cons without taking any damage!
Not exactly a good re-introduction. It made EQ2 look challenging.
That has nothing to do with this. The Shuttle has been sucking the wind out of NASA's sails for decades. It was designed by committee to please Congress.... so what would you expect? NASA will be much better off when the shuttle is finally scapped, assuming that they can avoid micromanagement by Congress, the President and the Military long enough to design something to replace it that will actually work. (I am not holding my breath.)
I was going to recommend Taos Mountain, because they did solid sysadm consultant work for me at a previous job. However, they appear to have reinvented themselves to the point that, after looking at their web site, I'm not sure what they do...
I actually worked on a system where printer interfaces were burning up because an electrician had reversed neutral and ground in the outlet where the printer was plugged in. There was enough of a difference between neutral and ground to damage the interface of the computer.
I wish I had a mod point. You've hit the nail right on the head!
Spending 45 minutes to put together a group, followed by a half hour to get the group to the hunting location, only to have a wipeout because one player doesn't have a clue, followed by another half hour of recovery... then log off as my two hours of game time runs out... Definately fun, fun, fun.
My son, who started playing table top D&D at the age of ten, lasted two days in Beta. The lack of anyway to advance solo ended his interest in the game. I won't purchase an evaluation copy, for just that reason. I wish them success, but I won't be playing. It is simply not my style.
Ask NASA about this issue.
I ended up throwing out a box of backup tapes, made on a MSDOS system, using a tape drive whose controller card was no longer supported with drivers under windows and a backup software package from a company that was no longer in business.
The one advantage of something like CDROM backups is the "hope" that you will have a CDROM drive, installed in a system with a compatible OS, that will be able to read them.
But, will you?
Hmmm.... I wonder about the administration of their servers, given that the most recent note on the home page is a statement that their forums are down... dated September 2003. Attention to detail is critical for a service such as DNS. That note implies that they do not pay attention to detail.
(It sucks when the ethernet cable to the hub that has your serial console concentrator on it dies... as happened this week.)
These days I ask corporate people if they would accept a single provider for a critical part in a product they were manufacturing. When they give the by-the-book answer of, "Of course not." I then ask them why they have allowed their critical corporate IT infrastructure to be tied to a sole source provider and what would be the impact on the corporate bottomline if MicroSoft decided to raised their fees in a significant manner. If we can just change their mindset...
Have whomever is in charge of building maintenance install a temperature sensor and remote monitor connection to the building alarm system in your computer room. I did that at the last four facilities I managed. It is a hassle free solution, the monitoring company can be given a list of people to contact -- with a specific order for contacting them.
That way, you can go on vacation! Too many homebrew solutions end up being dependent on the sysadm being available. Vacations are nice! Try to remove anything that prevent you from taking one.
Fascinating;
You somehow managed to write an AI game without reading the code? No wonder you made it to regional!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/034
Here's hoping that the private sector initiatives boldly go where no govie has gone before.
In his 1990 book "Nations at Risk: The Impact of the Computer Revolution", Edward Yourdon gave an example of a contract proposal received by Ford Aerospace. The company proposed to do exactly what this new company is talking about; park a ship full of maintenance programmers three miles off the California coast. I don't remember now what reason he listed for them not winning the contract.
I took the SANS security boot camp when they first started. I found it valuable and very well done. A solid week of good, well presented, stuff that you won't find anywhere else.
However, even though I passed all the exams needed for GIAC certification, the follow on requirement to submit papers simply did not fit my work schedule. As the only system administrator for a small startup, I simply did not have time to write papers. So, the requirement they appear to be dropping was the requirement that blocked my certification.
Writing a good paper takes time and focus. Something that working system administrators often find short in supply.