Toshiba Satellite (2,6 GHz Celeron, 512 MB, Gentoo Linux) ~ 42 Watt while playing MP3 & reading/. ~ 76 Watt while doing emerge --sync (updating portage cache) - the temperature goes from 68 to 80 C (cat/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature) This is for the notebook only, power consumption of 17" LCD and speakers not included (as that's the same on Windows/Linux)
By the way, playing Warcraft 3 on Windows is about +40 Watt compared to surfing the web.
And some of my friends who didn't like Perl went to PHP because it was simpler.
Now Perl 6 is coming up and it... [is] Just too much for my little brain.
So again I ask the question.. why perl?
Yes, it's true: Perl is not for everyone - think about it:
Early Perl books came with a warning "Do no expose lesser humanoids to the language of the masters because their tiny heads may explode." Strange, but true.
Perl is a language for adults only. Seriously. There is a law in Texas about this, because it is more addictive than sex and could really hurt World of Warcraft sales if everyone started coding in Perl.
On the plus side, Perl does not attract as many kiddies who hype their obscure language on slashdot in a way most consistent with penis enlargement mails.
Perl is taught by enlightened monks to worthy pupils, not peddled like some sort of programmer's snake oil in the dark backyards of the Usenet.
Perl is not for people who value AWESOME lightweight syntax and consistency - but then, those are the people who support Intelligent Design and admit to doing it with Pythons.
So, yes, you are absoulutely right - Perl is not for everyone. To answer your question: "why perl?": It is the light in the wilderness, the diamond among all the rubies, it is the snake-stomping camel of Power, it... it... just get's the job done.
If a player crouches to pick up a gun, i want to see the character pick up the gun like a real person would. I want to see them check it out, reload it, look around.
I am sure we will see this in single-player environments. But for fast paced shooters this seems improbable. Let's face it: Quake3 is faster than real life. And the high speed of play does not work well with most things like "pick up a gun" because well, at the moment it takes a second to switch a weapon. If we had animations showing the model doing this like in RL, it would take several times longer.
Perhaps this could work in Stealth Games, where speed is not the most important thing.
How about a dive and roll? How about seeing two team mates actually give each other their weapons when two players switch weapons.
This would look great in Quake2 if the Stroggs could do such things. Creeping up on a guard whose face becomes visible as he lights his cigarette with a match... nice level of detail. But in a CTF-Game where you live about 30 seconds between two deaths this would be wasted.
I think that fast paced FPS could profit from details like the comments by Duke Nukem as he walks by a mirror [or the units in Warcraft2/3].
But I hope no game designer will ever do something like the jump-shout from Q3...
How about really good deaths? Rag dolls, broken limbs, severed limbs etc. Have flying bodies actually knock over living players if a body flys into them. Have the player drop his gun in that situation.
Make the game more detailed.. make it more intense.. more realistic in a movement sense.
I think more realistic movement would be a great thing.
Models running up/downhill should loose/gain speed and of course someone who climbs a hill will look different from someone doing a dive int a river...
Realistic death: I think we can do without those. In online-FPS which do not tell a story but live from heavy replaying of the same scenes (ie, the same maps over and over), seeing a human turned inside out a hundred times provides very little entertainment.
Humor / situational fun: "And when Brian shoot Joey in front of this big statue of lady justice in the main hall, it took a short peek at the scene and gave him a thumbs up - sometimes justice sees things alright."
Just once, i would like to see an FPS multiplayer online game that takes into account good animation and movement.
Well, DukeNukem Forever will most certainly have good moves on them strippers. That is, if the game is finished before the models are beyond 60 years...
I want to see cool stuff while i play, not just run around and see others running simply with silly guns we've all played with a thousand times already.
I like cut scenes like in Sin or Warcraft 3 - but those would probably be difficult in multiplayer. I think that "not just run around" and "online multiplayer with cool things to watch" are difficult to combine. Of course, they could make Quake5 the MMORPG - Return of the Stroggs, but... that would not be the Quake we know and like.
Bring more stylized movement into the game, more theatrics and less of the old "run and hop" movement.
Perhaps the following models will be included in Q5 to improve theatrics and style:
Michael "Bad" J. - Pelvic Thrust Taunt.
Goatse-Man - Dark Hole of Gravitation
George W.B. - Pretzel-Move
Hm... if only there were a Spider Jerusalem gane.
Re:One of my favorites is "Scotland Yard"
on
Fun Tabletop Games?
·
· Score: 1
If you live in a city with a good public transport system, you can play Scotland Yard in real life.
We did play it 2-3 times before people used cell phones... every team got a pocket full of small coins for the phone booths and reported back to the HQ in regular intervals. It is indeed possible to catch someone this way. With modern phones it should be even easier, if the hunters (inspectors) coordinate their movements without a central HQ.
The only people affected will be those who have a computer, but who don't have a TV. They aren't that many.
I don't think the number of affected people has an impact on the moral wrongness of this law. To collect a fee from those who in no way benefit from it is simply wrong (the word "abzocke" for relieving people of their money by whatever means possible comes to mind...).
I would not mind the fee if I were able to watch TV via Internet. But with a 56kbit modem (which mostly achieves around 3kbyte downstream) it is not possible. And no, in this place, the only option to get broadband is via satellite, which costs a couple cents / MByte. So, I will have to pay an additional 7-8 EUR / month[*] and receive exactly... nothing.
[*] I already pay for the privilege of having a radio. Well, at least d-radio.de is ad-free and high quality radio.
I tried to write a Go programm in Perl which would render a game with Pov-Ray. The project is currently inactive and nowhere finished due to lack of time, but it can render a round Go-board for Circle-Go.
For Linux users, installing Perl modules is no more difficult than installing other software from source.
But for Windows users, it can be a royal pain in the ass. The problem stems from the fact that you simply cannot use CPAN modules which require make or a C-compiler. Many interesting modules need either or both. Of course, the user can install make, and he may even get to installing cygwin or visual C. But if you want to distribute a Perl program to the unwashed masses of Outlook Express users, who get strange pimples on their butt just from looking at source code, this is clearly not the way to go.
Well, I hear some say, "Does he not know about the glorious PPM distributed by Activestate which allows you to install the binary version of many modules?" Indeed, I have used PPM and it will work , but not always. Often, the modules you need are not in the repository or they are far too old or not available for the version of Perl the user has (example: WWW::Mechanize @ activestate.com was about 0.48 while the CPAN version was 0.72).
I am the author of three Perl programs on Sourceforge and the one package which gets the most downloads is the compiled exe for Windows. Sadly, it is also really hard to make those perlish.exe-versions. And yes, I know about PAR and perlbin - but the main problem is: you cannot distribute the perl58.dll by Activestate with your programs as they own the copyright to it. (Perl is free via the Artistic License, but this license also allows some not so nice things). Of course, I could buy the Activestate Perl compiler for $150 or something...
My solution to the distribution problem is: make sure that you have easy to understand instructions for downloading and installing Perl and package those modules you can with the main archive of your code. Mostly, those modules are GPL or PA-licensed and thus it is no problem to include them in free software. Special cases like the modules needed for https/SSL and WWW::Mechanize are covered by an install script. Sadly, some users are not even capable of clicking on "download" on the Activestate-Site...
There are lots of tools used by criminals. Yes, child pornographers use Freenet. It's unfortunate, but it's not the fault of the tool. Terrorists use airplanes and box cutters, but no one is trying to ban them.
Comparing Freenet to an airplane is not a lucky analogy... an airplane at least can be traced, destroyed or secured. Whoever uses an airplane is responsible for it. Whoever uses Freenet denies any responsibility for its contents.
It is one thing to provide a person with basic tools. It is another to provide them with the James Bond version of said tools, a license to kill and an invisiblity cloak.
But perhaps the problem of "evil content" on Freenet will solve itself, when the amount of people requesting such content becomes too small in comparison to the overall user base and the disk space is used for other material.
It amazes me how often people come up with such crappy ideas and even dare to voice them aloud...
The following reasons are cited for turning free email into something we should pay for:
1. There is too much spam. Learn to filter. Eg, SpamAssassin (which is free...) is a great tool for this, as well as others. If you think your time is too valuable to install such software, you can still pay for a spam-free mail account. But at least others, who are more clueful or have less cash will be free to implement other solutions.
2. Spam causes hidden costs to your ISP. It is better to pay for each mail than to pay for it via your monthly rate! So... a 1500 spam mails / month are less than 10Mbyte my, my, this is incredible. How big is the Linux distroy you downloaded yesterday? How many hits does the website your ISP hosts for you get in the same time? The cost of email including spam is still so small that I see no advantage in creating a layer of beaurocracy above it.
3. If mail is no longer free, spam will cease. Think about it: telemarketers are living people, paid to blab into one person's ear at a time. Let me guess, for the cost of one of those, you can harrass tens of thousands of email users by paying the paltry sum of 1 cent / mail. Or think about a commercials - for the price of one, you can probably spam 100k people. And of course you only pay for delivered mails... Paying for mail will be the end of free mailing lists like 'full disclosure' and open source software development lists (linux kernel?). A small price to pay? Bill Gates would think so.
4. But real mail costs money too. Why should you not pay for email? This is not an argument, it is a trick question. Oxygen in gas tanks costs money. Why don't you pay for breathing?
5. There is no loss of anonymity. Hm, so instead of sending mail from my pc to someone else, I will have to use a specific mail server where I need to be a registered and paying customer and this in no way will put my personal information about my mail traffic in the hands of yet another agency? Suuure.
Things most of the cash-for-mail people also do not understand: - they create new bottlenecks and points of failure. - they hurt free speech and the free flow of information (Where better to suppress unwnated opinions and information than at the central mail gateway? The chinese firewall will pale in comparison to those new super-email-relayers; and best: you can track each and every mail because it is digitally signed or paid for...) - they think that a new system for mail can simply replace the old system. - they fail to see why other solutions (filtering, hanging spammers) may be also viable. - they want the victims to pay as well as the spammers ("A thief uses this road. Quick, install a toll booth!" "Criminals watch PayTV. Quick, make all customers wear special glasses and adjust the programm so that you can only view TV with them!") - they create yet another barrier for poor countries who wish to use the internet for something else than 419-Scams. - they cannot conceive of someone hacking this new system. Think about a spammer sending one million emails, each for 1 cent from your account...
They'll store the data on their servers. It will always be accessible (so long as you pay your licensing fees like a good little serf), and you don't have to worry about hard drive crashes or data loss (...) So now you can't switch to some dirty pirate-OS like Linux without forfeiting all of your data.
Sounds like they are moving to an Everquest business model.
Profit: Sell your MSN-account on ebay once you have accumulated enough spam mail to advance to level 20.
filtering is no solution as long as there's no way to stop the spammers!
Or would you say that ignoring the corpses in the gutters would be a solution to the problem of violence on the streets?
Your analogy is slightly flawed. In the case of spam, it would be correct if:
I would have to examine every corpse closely to determine if it is sill alive
I would have to manually remove the corpse from the street
On my system, SpamAssassin kills 99% of the Spam, carries it outside, buries the remains in the spam folder and cleans away the bloodstains on the floor. The less I get in touch with spam, the better.
In the perfect world, there would be a "nuke obnoxious netizen" button on my keyboard. But alas, we have to settle for slightly less efficient methods.
Also, remember that freenet functions to keep alive items that are most frequently accessed, so if the world were free of perverts we wouldn't have the problem in the first place;)
I think this is the point were Freenet could become self-censoring. It depends on the user base. If more people use Freenet for mp3 and Star Trek episodes, the quicker the ugly content will die
10000 people calling for Metallica mp3 will drone out the 10 people who search for illegal porn. Note that this will not work if 1000 people try to look for child porn on the net because "they want to see if there is really such a bad thing stored in Freenet".
Bottom line: Get more normal users on Freenet, so we can banish the bad stuff.:)
The european servers have a history of crashing whith 3500 players.
Note that this happened only if a lot of people entered the same zone, ie only if your realm was doing something important like raiding another realm or hunting the big dragon. A zone crash would mean the enemies castle doors being reset and hours lost, mostly preventing you from completing your objectives as many players would give up in frustration.
Thinking about it, what kind of machine could handle 20k users in realtime without terrible lag?
I was writing a bot to collect all ebay auctions of a given category [ie, DVDs] and build a database to get the current market price of any DVD and archive the auction texts for more than the ususal 90 days [along with the option to detect false bidders using multi-accounts].
Of course, there would be some filtering for the top and lowest prices [to remove the $1000-DVD signed by Agend Smith from messing up the Matrix-prices].
Then I saw the Ebay terms of service, which seem to forbid this type of spidering. Ebay would not answer my mails, so in the end I stopped the project *sigh*. Would have been nice to know what kind of price a DVD/CD/Game will fetch on Ebay.
Remember: Never build your business on Ebay or Google without obtaining their permission first:)
Yes, some sites do still open unrequested windows. Occaisonally, when I use Konqueror (which is default for opening links from Knode etc), some site opens another window.
I guess the only people to use this crap are those who are already sending my this "enlarge your penis"-spam. I mean, a person must be really anal to use ads to annoy possible customers.
When the first site I *want* to see uses this feature, I will reapply my meager programming skills and turn my heise-browser into a real crap-avoider.
The system for playscapes, ie group oriented mini-worlds, seems interesting. But how can my group wreak havoc in their own little universe and than emerge, telling everyone "We did this" when there is no way for the other players to visit our world?
Imagine six parties going for a dungeon. Each one reappears and tells tall tales. The seventh group visits the dungeon - will they a) find an area littered with trash discarded by six groups. b) get their own clean dungeon? c) meet five other groups bashing the overlord?
a) would be new, but hardly exciting. b) would be new, but not a thing to tell your grandchildren about. c) would be the conventional style of current MMOGs.
MMORPGs need to be semi-persistent, so there is a dragon to kill for every player joining the game. Having a really persistend world, where all dragons are extinct, is not fun at all to the aspiring newbie. Somehow I think that cubicilizing the adventures into "everyone can quest and not see everyone else do it" is not going to be the big solution. Granted, you get fewer griefers during your quest, but when you leave a module and form another group, you get the problem with inconsistent worlds - if two play the same module and one does not kill the dragon, does it not irritate the hero who did?
As for the godhood-thingie that gets brandied about - OMG! The developers must be smoking something really strange if they think that 3000 people playing on a server will ever feel 'godly'. The best you can hope for is to be part of a semidevine class of powerlevelers in a sanitarized environment. To be a real GOD you would need to have POWER to create and destroy. Now, being some little attention grabber for a village of goat-shaggers does not sound that godly to me, especially if I cannot wipe out all those other so-called Gods and usurp their villages, too! Try being a god in a MMORPG and you will find out what playing soccer with 22 referees and one player is like.
"...there is no such thing as bad press. I have to wonder if Germany isn't inadvertantly encouraging sales by restricting advertising."
Sales really go down if a game is restricted in Germany. You can no longer order it via mail and will see no ads. Piracy of course will rise, and P2P-distribution makes sure everyone who wants it gets a warez-version.
Besides, the restricted list is not available for everyone. It goes like this: 1. Someone gets worked up about a game, video, website, the president's underwear, whatever.
2. The item is examined and, if deemed dangerous for children, added to the restricted list.
3. A small notice is written in the Bundesanzeiger (the Official Journal), which appears almost daily.
3.1 Distributors and shops receive a notice to quit advertising the product immediately.
4. Media whines or applaudes.
5. Item fades from public view - it vanishes from the shelves and most people do not walk to the counter, demanding the new J.Dahmer-Sim but rather grab one of the publicly displayed games.
The restricted list is only distributed on a need to know basis, there is afaik no way for Joe Average to get his hands on it.
Note that restriction is not about a game being violent, it is about the way the violence is portrayed. A game where you have to reenact Littleton is more likely to get banned than one where you shoot terrorists like in Counterstrike. Games where you dismember or mutilate someone will almost certainly be banned, in extreme cases (Mortal Kombat I) a judge will issue an order to seize and destroy all copies, making posession of said item punishable by law.
Punkbuster, the best spyware you can install, is not invincible. Of course, it will stop the lesser cheaters. But it will not stop professionals with too much time on their hands. Eg, people who set up another PC to analyze the packets and give you information about your enemy like Odin's Eye for DAoC. (And no, encrypting the data is of little use.)
But perhaps Palladium can save the day! Players who do not object to the Punkbuster-EULA will certainly not hesitate to use the best MS has to offer.
Another idea would be a virtual RFID-tag wallet: You store the signature of all your tags in your PDA and zap the original ones. If someone tries to read them, you have the option to authorize access or deny it.
The LED-color should be chosen according to the content transferred... users sharing pr0n via P2P could build their own red-light-destrict!
---
I wonder if powerful LEDs will attract insects and such - the connection speed could be reduced drastically by bugs.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple to setup, easy to learn, like Markdown it can be treated as a simple text file, and is really useful:
http://orgmode.org/
Toshiba Satellite (2,6 GHz Celeron, 512 MB, Gentoo Linux) /. /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature)
~ 42 Watt while playing MP3 & reading
~ 76 Watt while doing emerge --sync (updating portage cache) - the temperature goes from 68 to 80 C
(cat
This is for the notebook only, power consumption of 17" LCD and speakers not included (as that's the same on Windows/Linux)
By the way, playing Warcraft 3 on Windows is about +40 Watt compared to surfing the web.
Now Perl 6 is coming up and it
So again I ask the question.. why perl?
Yes, it's true: Perl is not for everyone - think about it:
On the plus side, Perl does not attract as many kiddies who hype their obscure language on slashdot in a way most consistent with penis enlargement mails.
So, yes, you are absoulutely right - Perl is not for everyone. To answer your question: "why perl?": It is the light in the wilderness, the diamond among all the rubies, it is the snake-stomping camel of Power, it ... it... just get's the job done.
I am sure we will see this in single-player environments. But for fast paced shooters this seems improbable. Let's face it: Quake3 is faster than real life. And the high speed of play does not work well with most things like "pick up a gun" because well, at the moment it takes a second to switch a weapon. If we had animations showing the model doing this like in RL, it would take several times longer.
Perhaps this could work in Stealth Games, where speed is not the most important thing.
This would look great in Quake2 if the Stroggs could do such things. Creeping up on a guard whose face becomes visible as he lights his cigarette with a match... nice level of detail. But in a CTF-Game where you live about 30 seconds between two deaths this would be wasted.
I think that fast paced FPS could profit from details like the comments by Duke Nukem as he walks by a mirror [or the units in Warcraft2/3]. But I hope no game designer will ever do something like the jump-shout from Q3...
I think more realistic movement would be a great thing.
Well, DukeNukem Forever will most certainly have good moves on them strippers. That is, if the game is finished before the models are beyond 60 years...
I like cut scenes like in Sin or Warcraft 3 - but those would probably be difficult in multiplayer. I think that "not just run around" and "online multiplayer with cool things to watch" are difficult to combine. Of course, they could make Quake5 the MMORPG - Return of the Stroggs, but... that would not be the Quake we know and like.
Perhaps the following models will be included in Q5 to improve theatrics and style:
Hm... if only there were a Spider Jerusalem gane.
If you live in a city with a good public transport system, you can play Scotland Yard in real life.
We did play it 2-3 times before people used cell phones... every team got a pocket full of small coins for the phone booths and reported back to the HQ in regular intervals. It is indeed possible to catch someone this way. With modern phones it should be even easier, if the hunters (inspectors) coordinate their movements without a central HQ.
Hamburg public transport: (examples)
http://www.hvv.de/pdf/MetroPlan.pdf
http://www.hvv.de/pdf/schnellbahnplan.pdf
The only people affected will be those who have a computer, but who don't have a TV. They aren't that many.
I don't think the number of affected people has an impact on the moral wrongness of this law. To collect a fee from those who in no way benefit from it is simply wrong (the word "abzocke" for relieving people of their money by whatever means possible comes to mind...).
I would not mind the fee if I were able to watch TV via Internet. But with a 56kbit modem (which mostly achieves around 3kbyte downstream) it is not possible. And no, in this place, the only option to get broadband is via satellite, which costs a couple cents / MByte. So, I will have to pay an additional 7-8 EUR / month[*] and receive exactly... nothing.
[*] I already pay for the privilege of having a radio. Well, at least d-radio.de is ad-free and high quality radio.
I tried to write a Go programm in Perl which would render a game with Pov-Ray. The project is currently inactive and nowhere finished due to lack of time, but it can render a round Go-board for Circle-Go.
PerlGo
It depends.
.exe-versions. And yes, I know about PAR and perlbin - but the main problem is: you cannot distribute the perl58.dll by Activestate with your programs as they own the copyright to it. (Perl is free via the Artistic License, but this license also allows some not so nice things). Of course, I could buy the Activestate Perl compiler for $150 or something...
For Linux users, installing Perl modules is no more difficult than installing other software from source.
But for Windows users, it can be a royal pain in the ass. The problem stems from the fact that you simply cannot use CPAN modules which require make or a C-compiler. Many interesting modules need either or both.
Of course, the user can install make, and he may even get to installing cygwin or visual C. But if you want to distribute a Perl program to the unwashed masses of Outlook Express users, who get strange pimples on their butt just from looking at source code, this is clearly not the way to go.
Well, I hear some say, "Does he not know about the glorious PPM distributed by Activestate which allows you to install the binary version of many modules?" Indeed, I have used PPM and it will work , but not always. Often, the modules you need are not in the repository or they are far too old or not available for the version of Perl the user has (example: WWW::Mechanize @ activestate.com was about 0.48 while the CPAN version was 0.72).
I am the author of three Perl programs on Sourceforge and the one package which gets the most downloads is the compiled exe for Windows. Sadly, it is also really hard to make those perlish
My solution to the distribution problem is: make sure that you have easy to understand instructions for downloading and installing Perl and package those modules you can with the main archive of your code. Mostly, those modules are GPL or PA-licensed and thus it is no problem to include them in free software.
Special cases like the modules needed for https/SSL and WWW::Mechanize are covered by an install script.
Sadly, some users are not even capable of clicking on "download" on the Activestate-Site...
Comparing Freenet to an airplane is not a lucky analogy... an airplane at least can be traced, destroyed or secured. Whoever uses an airplane is responsible for it. Whoever uses Freenet denies any responsibility for its contents.
It is one thing to provide a person with basic tools. It is another to provide them with the James Bond version of said tools, a license to kill and an invisiblity cloak.
But perhaps the problem of "evil content" on Freenet will solve itself, when the amount of people requesting such content becomes too small in comparison to the overall user base and the disk space is used for other material.
It amazes me how often people come up with such crappy ideas and even dare to voice them aloud...
The following reasons are cited for turning free email into something we should pay for:
1. There is too much spam.
Learn to filter. Eg, SpamAssassin (which is free...) is a great tool for this, as well as others. If you think your time is too valuable to install such software, you can still pay for a spam-free mail account. But at least others, who are more clueful or have less cash will be free to implement other solutions.
2. Spam causes hidden costs to your ISP. It is better to pay for each mail than to pay for it via your monthly rate!
So... a 1500 spam mails / month are less than 10Mbyte my, my, this is incredible. How big is the Linux distroy you downloaded yesterday? How many hits does the website your ISP hosts for you get in the same time? The cost of email including spam is still so small that I see no advantage in creating a layer of beaurocracy above it.
3. If mail is no longer free, spam will cease.
Think about it: telemarketers are living people, paid to blab into one person's ear at a time. Let me guess, for the cost of one of those, you can harrass tens of thousands of email users by paying the paltry sum of 1 cent / mail.
Or think about a commercials - for the price of one, you can probably spam 100k people. And of course you only pay for delivered mails...
Paying for mail will be the end of free mailing lists like 'full disclosure' and open source software development lists (linux kernel?). A small price to pay? Bill Gates would think so.
4. But real mail costs money too. Why should you not pay for email?
This is not an argument, it is a trick question. Oxygen in gas tanks costs money. Why don't you pay for breathing?
5. There is no loss of anonymity.
Hm, so instead of sending mail from my pc to someone else, I will have to use a specific mail server where I need to be a registered and paying customer and this in no way will put my personal information about my mail traffic in the hands of yet another agency? Suuure.
Things most of the cash-for-mail people also do not understand:
- they create new bottlenecks and points of failure.
- they hurt free speech and the free flow of information (Where better to suppress unwnated opinions and information than at the central mail gateway? The chinese firewall will pale in comparison to those new super-email-relayers; and best: you can track each and every mail because it is digitally signed or paid for...)
- they think that a new system for mail can simply replace the old system.
- they fail to see why other solutions (filtering, hanging spammers) may be also viable.
- they want the victims to pay as well as the spammers ("A thief uses this road. Quick, install a toll booth!" "Criminals watch PayTV. Quick, make all customers wear special glasses and adjust the programm so that you can only view TV with them!")
- they create yet another barrier for poor countries who wish to use the internet for something else than 419-Scams.
- they cannot conceive of someone hacking this new system. Think about a spammer sending one million emails, each for 1 cent from your account...
They'll store the data on their servers. It will always be accessible (so long as you pay your licensing fees like a good little serf), and you don't have to worry about hard drive crashes or data loss (...) So now you can't switch to some dirty pirate-OS like Linux without forfeiting all of your data.
Sounds like they are moving to an Everquest business model.
Profit: Sell your MSN-account on ebay once you have accumulated enough spam mail to advance to level 20.
filtering is no solution as long as there's no way to stop the spammers!
Or would you say that ignoring the corpses in the gutters would be a solution to the problem of violence on the streets?
Your analogy is slightly flawed. In the case of spam, it would be correct if:
On my system, SpamAssassin kills 99% of the Spam, carries it outside, buries the remains in the spam folder and cleans away the bloodstains on the floor. The less I get in touch with spam, the better.
In the perfect world, there would be a "nuke obnoxious netizen" button on my keyboard. But alas, we have to settle for slightly less efficient methods.
Also, remember that freenet functions to keep alive items that are most frequently accessed, so if the world were free of perverts we wouldn't have the problem in the first place ;)
I think this is the point were Freenet could become self-censoring. It depends on the user base. If more people use Freenet for mp3 and Star Trek episodes, the quicker the ugly content will die
10000 people calling for Metallica mp3 will drone out the 10 people who search for illegal porn. Note that this will not work if 1000 people try to look for child porn on the net because "they want to see if there is really such a bad thing stored in Freenet".
Bottom line: Get more normal users on Freenet, so we can banish the bad stuff. :)
The european servers have a history of crashing whith 3500 players.
Note that this happened only if a lot of people entered the same zone, ie only if your realm was doing something important like raiding another realm or hunting the big dragon. A zone crash would mean the enemies castle doors being reset and hours lost, mostly preventing you from completing your objectives as many players would give up in frustration.
Thinking about it, what kind of machine could handle 20k users in realtime without terrible lag?
Hello? Is this you, my dear mother-in-law? Oh wait, the connection gets worse. Quick, hand the phone to my wife.
Hugh Grant: This is no hooker, officer! She's an oral WiFi assistant technican and merely helps me to keep the connection up.
Yes! Laser pointers which change color at the *crack* of dawn.
The same question occured to me...
:)
I was writing a bot to collect all ebay auctions of a given category [ie, DVDs] and build a database to get the current market price of any DVD and archive the auction texts for more than the ususal 90 days [along with the option to detect false bidders using multi-accounts].
Of course, there would be some filtering for the top and lowest prices [to remove the $1000-DVD signed by Agend Smith from messing up the Matrix-prices].
Then I saw the Ebay terms of service, which seem to forbid this type of spidering. Ebay would not answer my mails, so in the end I stopped the project *sigh*. Would have been nice to know what kind of price a DVD/CD/Game will fetch on Ebay.
Remember: Never build your business on Ebay or Google without obtaining their permission first
Yes, some sites do still open unrequested windows. Occaisonally, when I use Konqueror (which is default for opening links from Knode etc), some site opens another window.
I guess the only people to use this crap are those who are already sending my this "enlarge your penis"-spam. I mean, a person must be really anal to use ads to annoy possible customers.
When the first site I *want* to see uses this feature, I will reapply my meager programming skills and turn my heise-browser into a real crap-avoider.
The system for playscapes, ie group oriented mini-worlds, seems interesting. But how can my group wreak havoc in their own little universe and than emerge, telling everyone "We did this" when there is no way for the other players to visit our world?
Imagine six parties going for a dungeon. Each one reappears and tells tall tales. The seventh group visits the dungeon - will they
a) find an area littered with trash discarded by six groups.
b) get their own clean dungeon?
c) meet five other groups bashing the overlord?
a) would be new, but hardly exciting. b) would be new, but not a thing to tell your grandchildren about. c) would be the conventional style of current MMOGs.
MMORPGs need to be semi-persistent, so there is a dragon to kill for every player joining the game. Having a really persistend world, where all dragons are extinct, is not fun at all to the aspiring newbie.
Somehow I think that cubicilizing the adventures into "everyone can quest and not see everyone else do it" is not going to be the big solution. Granted, you get fewer griefers during your quest, but when you leave a module and form another group, you get the problem with inconsistent worlds - if two play the same module and one does not kill the dragon, does it not irritate the hero who did?
As for the godhood-thingie that gets brandied about - OMG! The developers must be smoking something really strange if they think that 3000 people playing on a server will ever feel 'godly'. The best you can hope for is to be part of a semidevine class of powerlevelers in a sanitarized environment.
To be a real GOD you would need to have POWER to create and destroy. Now, being some little attention grabber for a village of goat-shaggers does not sound that godly to me, especially if I cannot wipe out all those other so-called Gods and usurp their villages, too!
Try being a god in a MMORPG and you will find out what playing soccer with 22 referees and one player is like.
The idea to use the Q2-Engine to create an animation reminds me of The Seal of Nehara, done completely with Quake1 :)
l
http://www.planetquake.com/nehahra/download.htm
"...there is no such thing as bad press. I have to wonder if Germany isn't inadvertantly encouraging sales by restricting advertising."
Sales really go down if a game is restricted in Germany. You can no longer order it via mail and will see no ads. Piracy of course will rise, and P2P-distribution makes sure everyone who wants it gets a warez-version.
Besides, the restricted list is not available for everyone.
It goes like this:
1. Someone gets worked up about a game, video, website, the president's underwear, whatever.
2. The item is examined and, if deemed dangerous for children, added to the restricted list.
3. A small notice is written in the Bundesanzeiger (the Official Journal), which appears almost daily.
3.1 Distributors and shops receive a notice to quit advertising the product immediately.
4. Media whines or applaudes.
5. Item fades from public view - it vanishes from the shelves and most people do not walk to the counter, demanding the new J.Dahmer-Sim but rather grab one of the publicly displayed games.
The restricted list is only distributed on a need to know basis, there is afaik no way for Joe Average to get his hands on it.
Note that restriction is not about a game being violent, it is about the way the violence is portrayed. A game where you have to reenact Littleton is more likely to get banned than one where you shoot terrorists like in Counterstrike.
Games where you dismember or mutilate someone will almost certainly be banned, in extreme cases (Mortal Kombat I) a judge will issue an order to seize and destroy all copies, making posession of said item punishable by law.
"The client is in the hands of the enemy."
Punkbuster, the best spyware you can install, is not invincible. Of course, it will stop the lesser cheaters. But it will not stop professionals with too much time on their hands. Eg, people who set up another PC to analyze the packets and give you information about your enemy like Odin's Eye for DAoC. (And no, encrypting the data is of little use.)
But perhaps Palladium can save the day! Players who do not object to the Punkbuster-EULA will certainly not hesitate to use the best MS has to offer.
Another idea would be a virtual RFID-tag wallet: You store the signature of all your tags in your PDA and zap the original ones. If someone tries to read them, you have the option to authorize access or deny it.
The LED-color should be chosen according to the content transferred... users sharing pr0n via P2P could build their own red-light-destrict! --- I wonder if powerful LEDs will attract insects and such - the connection speed could be reduced drastically by bugs.