Yeah, I think we all do. CS theory is just like math or logic theories. You start with a set of reasonable assumptions and then try to deduce a theorem. It's perfectly correct to say the value of the network increases at C*(node)^2 provided that you're talking about generic nodes. I.e. they are the same.
If you're folding or SETI'ing, the nodes with water-cooled FX-55s will obviously outperform the P3-700 nodes. Or in the case of data-sharing the 100mbps connected nodes(the link between the main ISP hub and all customer hub would be considered a node) will clearly outperform the 1.5mbps nodes. But nodes of variable value were not in Metcalfe's list of assumptions, so why argue about his theorem in cases like these?
Your sig suggests that I could find more reality in a Lewis Carrol novel than in your worldview, but I'll bite anyway.
Oh, well thanks for responding. It's always a pleasure to have a visitation from the condensending intellectuals club.
The solution is to ensure that in-game activities require a human brain to engage in them.
The problem with being so academic however is that you have very little experience with the subject matter you're referring to. The issue here is that a single individual can hire out a dozen chinese workers for 35 cents a day to do nothing but comb resources from the in-game environment. These are not robots, they're people with brains.
someone who spends a lot of time getting gold and trading it to other players. It would also miss a lot of folks
Who? Noone jumps on e-bay and searches for a pirate map to the the combination of the safe hidden under the tree south of stormforge. They search for gold which they want transferred in bulk. There's no way to hide that transaction. Regardless of whatever machinations these people think up, they ultimately have to deliver the product. Detecting that delivery is trivial.
I can assure you that it will make it harder for lesser programmers to access them
Oh? Care to outline an algorithm that can evade the detection of customer delivered goods? If you have no delivery people, you have no business.
The only way the Chinese people will not be able to find a way to sell their cheap time is if the game experience and items have no value.
Why are you so convinced of this? How difficult do you think it is to write a script that detects trades of say...50G for no items in return? Then you just create a graph and arbitrarily decide that anyone at the center of that graph, say someone who's given free money to more than 10 different persons is designated a farmer, and then just ban those accounts?
Blizzard's programmers could probably do this with one hand tied behind their chairs, after all it's their program and they probably designed it to show all kinds of data about players.
There is no point in playing a game that involves doing mindless/repetitive/boring things. If the people who make games don't like this, they should _remove the mindless/repetitive/boring things from their games_.
This is a very veryvery hard problem. You don't see people making comments like "coal is inefficient, so why aren't you jokers using cold fusion?!?"
Why? Because it's their site and they are in no need to follow their own rules. They aren't going to ban themselves but they will ban you.
Actually you and I will ban them. It's a sad but demonstrable fact that the lean-and-mean build great companies and subsequently turn fat-corrupt-and-lazy very quickly these days. Google was the exception until they went IPO and ushered in the beginning of the end. Their quality of service has been declining at a steady pace. Just look at what they did to the newsgroups engine.
Something else will come along soon enough, and the worse a job Google does...the faster it will happen. I'm hoping the next generation will be a P2P service of some kind.
Does it include the pseudo-Pink Floyd music of the Baker years?
The 1980 remix of the Dr. Who theme is probably what you're referring to. It's really great, my fav...though not in any way affiliated with Pink Floyd. There are however some live Pink Floyd covers of this theme(David Gilmour rocks), alas it's very difficult to find =(.
That Texas wants to outlaw such things is stupid and interferes with the functioning of the market -- I *do*, as a result of today's experience, prefer going to Panera now over other coffee shops and similarly-environed businesses. Why Texan regulators think they need to get their greedy mitts around the neck of this wonderful emerging technology is beyond me, although I have plenty of suspicions and could develop some conspiracy theories...
Texas is the asshole of the country. Just look at what's comes out of texas recently.
Did anyone else think that World of Warcraft wasn't that great?
Partially yes. I miss the 'realistic' atmosphere of Everquest. WoW feels more like living in a comic-book world than a 'dungeons and dragons' world. Some of the artistic styles are a bit cheesy, but the low polygon count, like so many other things in that game, are very thoughfully designed.
Most people who've played previous generation MMORPGs appreciate WoW for its gameplay design. Twinking is almost non-existant, the interface is pure "common sense genius", and the questing system is almost seemlessly intigrated w/ xping. WoW sometimes feels like a trade-off, but it's a net-gain tradeoff. It's kinda becoming the McDonalds of MMORPGs.
I don't know, imagine how expensive it's been for them to keep up with demand? They've had to add emergency servers at the authentication, login, and even content levels. They probably needed to hire more staff, bill people for longer hours etc. But who knows I'm not their accountant or anything.
but navigating a UNIX shell is about as tedious and boring as anything I can imagine. Some people find genuine joy in the process, I'd rather go to the dentist. So it's not all smarts, it's also what people find enjoyable that keeps them doing something...I'd rather be working with applications than for them.
I'm surprised that one would have a six year struggle with Linux and not find a distro that fit their needs
I've tried SuSE, Redhat, and Debian and have had nothing but grief except for a somewhat agreeable platform to do my C programming assignments with in college. I guess the problem is that I'm more of a consumer than a producer. I tend to play games, watch movies, listen to music, browse the web etc 90% of the time w/ my pc...I don't run a webserver or an ftp site or a central databse etc.
I guess that's why Linux is still an engineers-only kind of OS after so many years. It's more of an engine than a car, most people just want to get from A to B.
If you were a paid agent of Rove, you could not be more effective at pissing off the undecided voter and making sure the Democrats lose again and again.
I know, and you're right, but I'm not a politician. I believe in calling a spade a spade, and these people I'm referring to are deluded, ignorant, and a danger the world.
Sometimes there's only one thing left to do, and that's take out the trash. I don't have a big enough heart to be 'inclusive' of people who haven't bothered to read a book since they flunked out of high-school, have never travelled outside of their county(yes, county not country) except to go shoot people, and have nothing but contempt for qualities like patience, tolerance, and peace.
Well you do have a good point, XP was such a massive improvement over those operating systems I guess I just forgot about how problematic the older versions were.
I suppose if I mustered up the courage to try another Debian dual-boot install and was lucky enough to get it working I could have a change of heart. But then again, I'm pretty short on courage these days.
Thats why campaign contributions should only be able to be made by those legally able to vote.
OK but as I understand it the democrats had more campaign funding(George Soros, etc.) than the republicans, and they still lost!
No friends, I'm afraid most of the responsibility lies smack dab on the ignorance, laziness, and self-righteous arrogance of the average voting american. I'd actually feel safer with Homer Simpson deciding the next president than having to watch all those red state votes get counted up again in 4 years....talk about a recipe for despair.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a lie and you know it!
Yeah, I think we all do. CS theory is just like math or logic theories. You start with a set of reasonable assumptions and then try to deduce a theorem. It's perfectly correct to say the value of the network increases at C*(node)^2 provided that you're talking about generic nodes. I.e. they are the same.
If you're folding or SETI'ing, the nodes with water-cooled FX-55s will obviously outperform the P3-700 nodes. Or in the case of data-sharing the 100mbps connected nodes(the link between the main ISP hub and all customer hub would be considered a node) will clearly outperform the 1.5mbps nodes. But nodes of variable value were not in Metcalfe's list of assumptions, so why argue about his theorem in cases like these?
lol, that was the best post I've read in a while.
I'd enter this contest just to win the ability to un-read your post.
Your sig suggests that I could find more reality in a Lewis Carrol novel than in your worldview, but I'll bite anyway.
Oh, well thanks for responding. It's always a pleasure to have a visitation from the condensending intellectuals club.
The solution is to ensure that in-game activities require a human brain to engage in them.
The problem with being so academic however is that you have very little experience with the subject matter you're referring to. The issue here is that a single individual can hire out a dozen chinese workers for 35 cents a day to do nothing but comb resources from the in-game environment. These are not robots, they're people with brains.
someone who spends a lot of time getting gold and trading it to other players. It would also miss a lot of folks
Who? Noone jumps on e-bay and searches for a pirate map to the the combination of the safe hidden under the tree south of stormforge. They search for gold which they want transferred in bulk. There's no way to hide that transaction. Regardless of whatever machinations these people think up, they ultimately have to deliver the product. Detecting that delivery is trivial.
I can assure you that it will make it harder for lesser programmers to access them
Oh? Care to outline an algorithm that can evade the detection of customer delivered goods? If you have no delivery people, you have no business.
The only way the Chinese people will not be able to find a way to sell their cheap time is if the game experience and items have no value.
Why are you so convinced of this? How difficult do you think it is to write a script that detects trades of say...50G for no items in return? Then you just create a graph and arbitrarily decide that anyone at the center of that graph, say someone who's given free money to more than 10 different persons is designated a farmer, and then just ban those accounts?
Blizzard's programmers could probably do this with one hand tied behind their chairs, after all it's their program and they probably designed it to show all kinds of data about players.
There is no point in playing a game that involves doing mindless/repetitive/boring things. If the people who make games don't like this, they should _remove the mindless/repetitive/boring things from their games_.
This is a very very very hard problem. You don't see people making comments like "coal is inefficient, so why aren't you jokers using cold fusion?!?"
Harrumph.
Why? Because it's their site and they are in no need to follow their own rules. They aren't going to ban themselves but they will ban you.
Actually you and I will ban them. It's a sad but demonstrable fact that the lean-and-mean build great companies and subsequently turn fat-corrupt-and-lazy very quickly these days. Google was the exception until they went IPO and ushered in the beginning of the end. Their quality of service has been declining at a steady pace. Just look at what they did to the newsgroups engine.
Something else will come along soon enough, and the worse a job Google does...the faster it will happen. I'm hoping the next generation will be a P2P service of some kind.
Does it include the pseudo-Pink Floyd music of the Baker years?
The 1980 remix of the Dr. Who theme is probably what you're referring to. It's really great, my fav...though not in any way affiliated with Pink Floyd. There are however some live Pink Floyd covers of this theme(David Gilmour rocks), alas it's very difficult to find =(.
If you're really interested in this topic, you might enjoy reading 'A History of the Doctor Who Theme'
Yep, same thing with Boston and Rage Against the Machine. Ivy league schools will do that to you.
That Texas wants to outlaw such things is stupid and interferes with the functioning of the market -- I *do*, as a result of today's experience, prefer going to Panera now over other coffee shops and similarly-environed businesses. Why Texan regulators think they need to get their greedy mitts around the neck of this wonderful emerging technology is beyond me, although I have plenty of suspicions and could develop some conspiracy theories...
Texas is the asshole of the country. Just look at what's comes out of texas recently.
Did anyone else think that World of Warcraft wasn't that great?
Partially yes. I miss the 'realistic' atmosphere of Everquest. WoW feels more like living in a comic-book world than a 'dungeons and dragons' world. Some of the artistic styles are a bit cheesy, but the low polygon count, like so many other things in that game, are very thoughfully designed.
Most people who've played previous generation MMORPGs appreciate WoW for its gameplay design. Twinking is almost non-existant, the interface is pure "common sense genius", and the questing system is almost seemlessly intigrated w/ xping. WoW sometimes feels like a trade-off, but it's a net-gain tradeoff. It's kinda becoming the McDonalds of MMORPGs.
I don't know, imagine how expensive it's been for them to keep up with demand? They've had to add emergency servers at the authentication, login, and even content levels. They probably needed to hire more staff, bill people for longer hours etc. But who knows I'm not their accountant or anything.
The point of my thread was I haven't tried to install Linux in about 2 years because of the past frustration.
Nope, I think you're largely correct.
but navigating a UNIX shell is about as tedious and boring as anything I can imagine. Some people find genuine joy in the process, I'd rather go to the dentist. So it's not all smarts, it's also what people find enjoyable that keeps them doing something...I'd rather be working with applications than for them.
Whatever the media tells them is hip and cool. And right now, that's Linux
Wow, how many times can you be wrong in just 14 words? Gotta be a record or something.
Hmm, well which is it? The grandparent post or the post below me.
*scratches head*
Yup, the Republicans must be dumber than Homer Simpson because they don't agree with you.
No no, the Republicans are very smart and very evil. The people are very gullible, and very stupid.
I'm surprised that one would have a six year struggle with Linux and not find a distro that fit their needs
I've tried SuSE, Redhat, and Debian and have had nothing but grief except for a somewhat agreeable platform to do my C programming assignments with in college. I guess the problem is that I'm more of a consumer than a producer. I tend to play games, watch movies, listen to music, browse the web etc 90% of the time w/ my pc...I don't run a webserver or an ftp site or a central databse etc.
I guess that's why Linux is still an engineers-only kind of OS after so many years. It's more of an engine than a car, most people just want to get from A to B.
If you were a paid agent of Rove, you could not be more effective at pissing off the undecided voter and making sure the Democrats lose again and again.
I know, and you're right, but I'm not a politician. I believe in calling a spade a spade, and these people I'm referring to are deluded, ignorant, and a danger the world.
Sometimes there's only one thing left to do, and that's take out the trash. I don't have a big enough heart to be 'inclusive' of people who haven't bothered to read a book since they flunked out of high-school, have never travelled outside of their county(yes, county not country) except to go shoot people, and have nothing but contempt for qualities like patience, tolerance, and peace.
All right, I stand corrected. Thankyou for verifying.
Nice troll otherwise though.
Why is relating my honest 6+ year-long struggle with Linux a troll?
I geuss you forget the days of windows 95/98/ME?
Well you do have a good point, XP was such a massive improvement over those operating systems I guess I just forgot about how problematic the older versions were.
I suppose if I mustered up the courage to try another Debian dual-boot install and was lucky enough to get it working I could have a change of heart. But then again, I'm pretty short on courage these days.
Thats why campaign contributions should only be able to be made by those legally able to vote.
OK but as I understand it the democrats had more campaign funding(George Soros, etc.) than the republicans, and they still lost!
No friends, I'm afraid most of the responsibility lies smack dab on the ignorance, laziness, and self-righteous arrogance of the average voting american. I'd actually feel safer with Homer Simpson deciding the next president than having to watch all those red state votes get counted up again in 4 years....talk about a recipe for despair.
The days when my poor user had to sweat blood to get me onto a laptop are long gone.
The days may be long gone, but they haunt my memories and have me running XP.