First off, lemme make a lil' disclaimer: I'm one of the Core developers at http://www.runuo.com/, the largest Ultima Online emulator around, so I may be a bit biased:)
Anyways, the article seems to have been written by someone who hasn't kept up on the latest UO news. In the past month, EA/OSI released a new expansion with a large landmass, the "samurai empire" expansion. Also, just in the past week infact, They opened up a brand NEW shard, compeltely clean with no players on it. If UO was dying,it wouldn't make economic sense to invest money and time in putting up another server.
In the article, it also lists as a 'reason' for UO's demise as the lack of stores in which to purchase The latest expansions or Gamecodes without the use of a Credit Card. A little searching shows this page listing EB-Games austrailia as a place t' buy 'em.
Another thing that the author didn't take into account is the popularity of free shards. RunUO, in addition to providing highly customizable software, also sponsors 3 shards, all from differing time periods. Combined, they have over 50,000 accounts. And these are active accounts. we purge unused accounts every 90 some days.
Hybrid, Our biggest shard with about 37000 accounts, is based in the Pre-AoS era, with peaks ov over 2000 online at any one time.
Our other shards, Rebirth and Demise, are a super old school shard from the Pre-T2A area, and a Shard from the current era of ultima online, AoS/SE respectively.
Those are just 3 shards. There are MANY more out there which help keep UO alive.
The article in case of slashdotting
on
Why We Fall Apart
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Engineering's reliability theory explains human aging
By Leonid Gavrilov & Natalia Gavrilova
CHILDHOOD IS A SPECIAL TIME INDEED. If only we could maintain our body functions as they are at age 10, we could expect to live about 5000 years on average. Unfortunately, from age 11 on, it's all downhill!
The problem is that our bodies deteriorate with age. For most of our lives, the risk of death is increasing exponentially, doubling every eight years. So, why do we fall apart, and what can we do about it?
Many scientists now believe that, for the first time in human history, we have developed a sophisticated enough understanding of the nature of human aging to begin seriously planning ways to defeat it. These scientists are working from a simple but compelling notion: the body, far from being a perfect creation, is a failure-prone, defect-ridden machine formed through the stochastic process of biological evolution. In this view, we can be further improved through genetic engineering and be better maintained through preventive, regenerative, and antiaging medicine and by repairing and replacing worn-out body parts. In short, the rate at which we fall apart could be decreased, maybe even to a negligible level.
The quest to understand and control aging has led us, two biologists, to draw inspiration from what might seem an unlikely source: reliability engineering. The engineering approach to understanding aging is based on ideas, methods, and models borrowed from reliability theory. Developed in the late 1950s to describe the failure and aging of complex electrical and electronic equipment, reliability theory has been greatly improved over the past several decades. It allows researchers to predict how a system with a specified architecture and level of reliability of its constituent parts will fail over time.
The theory is so general in scope that it can be applied to understanding aging in living organisms as well. In the ways that we age and die, we are not so different from the machines we build. The difference, we have found, is minimized if we think of ourselves in this unflattering way: we are like machines made up of redundant components, many of which are defective right from the start.
THE RELIABILITY ENGINEERING APPROACH to human aging provides a common scientific language and general framework for scientists working in different areas of aging research. It helps them knock down the barriers that specialists have constructed and allows them to understand each other better.
Most important, it helps define more clearly what aging is. In reliability theory, aging is defined through the increased risk of failure [see "Terms To Know"]. More precisely, something ages if it is more likely to fall apart tomorrow than today. If the risk of failure does not increase as time passes, then there is no aging in terms of reliability theory.
By looking closely at human aging data, we can find a striking similarity between how living organisms and technical devices age and fail. In both cases, the failure rate follows a curve shaped roughly like a bathtub [see graph, "Stages of Life"]. The curve consists of three stages, which we call the working-in or infant-mortality, normal-working, and aging periods. Engineers do not often see all three stages in a single product--infant mortality is a somewhat avoidable warranty disaster and most electronics become obsolete well before they would start to age--but the bathtub curve is still illustrative of the way things fail in general.
At the start of a machine's life, the working-in period, failure rates are high; they then decrease with age. During this period, defective components fail. For example, the risk of a new microprocessor failing is often higher at the very start, because of defects in the silicon or because small variations in the fabrication process lead to circuits that give out under the initial stress of operation. The same working-in period exists early in life for most living organisms, includ
How long until somone "hacks" them to just have the glasses display something continuously, or change what is displays?
Imagine the both Good and bad possibilities of this. A dictionary or book right before your eyes,
but, Imagine the cheating implications of thiis. what if someone sets the glasses to display a "cheat sheet" during a test?
If I was in the normal school system for my age, I'd be in middle school, but, I'm in college right now and here's a sytem I use for text entry.
I have an Older PDA, a handspring visor I think, and it serves my needs. What I did, was buy one of those foldable keyboards. They used to made by targus where' it's fold up and connect directly to the bottom of the PDA.. anyways, I'd carry around in a CD case my PDA & Keyboard.
It was quite handy, turned on instantly & also served as a calander for assignment due dates. Best of all, it was about 800 dollars cheaper than a laptop, and much more durable.
Once Verizon's PTT goes through, I can finally give the phone to someone, have them stick it in their pants, And laugh as they wonder who's yelling "The talking pants..."
For a while there, (at least until Age of Shadows) Ultima Online had a good thing going for blacksmiths, carpenters, etc.
Easy enough to be one-a those without killling a single thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that the 250GB drives that go for $50 on Woot.com only have a 2 meg Cache, as well as being refurbished.
Knowing Sony, you would have to pay for all the PlayStation titles again for a version that would work on the PSP.
Didn't Futurama already cover this in one of it's episodes?
Heh, that's neat.
/. crowd...
Whiel looking through some of the tips, apparently they added one in for the
"You can make a lovely hat out of previously-used aluminum foil."
http://www.uodemise.com/tinfoil.png
One way mirrors on the cockpit windows? Let the Lasers just
First off, lemme make a lil' disclaimer: I'm one of the Core developers at http://www.runuo.com/, the largest Ultima Online emulator around, so I may be a bit biased :)
Anyways, the article seems to have been written by someone who hasn't kept up on the latest UO news. In the past month, EA/OSI released a new expansion with a large landmass, the "samurai empire" expansion. Also, just in the past week infact, They opened up a brand NEW shard, compeltely clean with no players on it. If UO was dying,it wouldn't make economic sense to invest money and time in putting up another server.
In the article, it also lists as a 'reason' for UO's demise as the lack of stores in which to purchase The latest expansions or Gamecodes without the use of a Credit Card. A little searching shows this page listing EB-Games austrailia as a place t' buy 'em.
Another thing that the author didn't take into account is the popularity of free shards. RunUO, in addition to providing highly customizable software, also sponsors 3 shards, all from differing time periods. Combined, they have over 50,000 accounts. And these are active accounts. we purge unused accounts every 90 some days.
Hybrid, Our biggest shard with about 37000 accounts, is based in the Pre-AoS era, with peaks ov over 2000 online at any one time.
Our other shards, Rebirth and Demise, are a super old school shard from the Pre-T2A area, and a Shard from the current era of ultima online, AoS/SE respectively.
Those are just 3 shards. There are MANY more out there which help keep UO alive.
Long live Ultima Online!
One Word: Ebay.
Engineering's reliability theory explains human aging
By Leonid Gavrilov & Natalia Gavrilova
CHILDHOOD IS A SPECIAL TIME INDEED. If only we could maintain our body functions as they are at age 10, we could expect to live about 5000 years on average. Unfortunately, from age 11 on, it's all downhill!
The problem is that our bodies deteriorate with age. For most of our lives, the risk of death is increasing exponentially, doubling every eight years. So, why do we fall apart, and what can we do about it?
Many scientists now believe that, for the first time in human history, we have developed a sophisticated enough understanding of the nature of human aging to begin seriously planning ways to defeat it. These scientists are working from a simple but compelling notion: the body, far from being a perfect creation, is a failure-prone, defect-ridden machine formed through the stochastic process of biological evolution. In this view, we can be further improved through genetic engineering and be better maintained through preventive, regenerative, and antiaging medicine and by repairing and replacing worn-out body parts. In short, the rate at which we fall apart could be decreased, maybe even to a negligible level.
The quest to understand and control aging has led us, two biologists, to draw inspiration from what might seem an unlikely source: reliability engineering. The engineering approach to understanding aging is based on ideas, methods, and models borrowed from reliability theory. Developed in the late 1950s to describe the failure and aging of complex electrical and electronic equipment, reliability theory has been greatly improved over the past several decades. It allows researchers to predict how a system with a specified architecture and level of reliability of its constituent parts will fail over time.
The theory is so general in scope that it can be applied to understanding aging in living organisms as well. In the ways that we age and die, we are not so different from the machines we build. The difference, we have found, is minimized if we think of ourselves in this unflattering way: we are like machines made up of redundant components, many of which are defective right from the start.
THE RELIABILITY ENGINEERING APPROACH to human aging provides a common scientific language and general framework for scientists working in different areas of aging research. It helps them knock down the barriers that specialists have constructed and allows them to understand each other better.
Most important, it helps define more clearly what aging is. In reliability theory, aging is defined through the increased risk of failure [see "Terms To Know"]. More precisely, something ages if it is more likely to fall apart tomorrow than today. If the risk of failure does not increase as time passes, then there is no aging in terms of reliability theory.
By looking closely at human aging data, we can find a striking similarity between how living organisms and technical devices age and fail. In both cases, the failure rate follows a curve shaped roughly like a bathtub [see graph, "Stages of Life"]. The curve consists of three stages, which we call the working-in or infant-mortality, normal-working, and aging periods. Engineers do not often see all three stages in a single product--infant mortality is a somewhat avoidable warranty disaster and most electronics become obsolete well before they would start to age--but the bathtub curve is still illustrative of the way things fail in general.
At the start of a machine's life, the working-in period, failure rates are high; they then decrease with age. During this period, defective components fail. For example, the risk of a new microprocessor failing is often higher at the very start, because of defects in the silicon or because small variations in the fabrication process lead to circuits that give out under the initial stress of operation. The same working-in period exists early in life for most living organisms, includ
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/14/203723 7
Same story, better colors.
Dang! That IS Annoying. Going and advertising a book while making us think it's an article!
Let's hope that they don't start taking firewalls seriously too!
Another mirror at runuo.com (Plug: Check out the site while you're there! ;-) )
... ths kids that want Ice Cream.
42!
Until you get 180 pop-ups each second.
How long until somone "hacks" them to just have the glasses display something continuously, or change what is displays? Imagine the both Good and bad possibilities of this. A dictionary or book right before your eyes, but, Imagine the cheating implications of thiis. what if someone sets the glasses to display a "cheat sheet" during a test?
I dunno, I think that Biolazard was just angry cause he had a spaceship up his butt. (It's a spaceship he's attached to, not the moon)
You might wanna check MSFT's Office update:
a spx
http://office.microsoft.com/OfficeUpdate/default.
If I was in the normal school system for my age, I'd be in middle school, but, I'm in college right now and here's a sytem I use for text entry.
I have an Older PDA, a handspring visor I think, and it serves my needs. What I did, was buy one of those foldable keyboards. They used to made by targus where' it's fold up and connect directly to the bottom of the PDA.. anyways, I'd carry around in a CD case my PDA & Keyboard.
It was quite handy, turned on instantly & also served as a calander for assignment due dates. Best of all, it was about 800 dollars cheaper than a laptop, and much more durable.
http://progressive.warnerbros.com/thematrix/us/med /revolutions_640_dl.zip
Zipped version so we dont' have to slashdot their site AS much.
http://progressive.warnerbros.com/thematrix/us/med /revolutions_640_dl.mov
Direct link to the High Quality version of the trailer.
Once Verizon's PTT goes through, I can finally give the phone to someone, have them stick it in their pants, And laugh as they wonder who's yelling "The talking pants..."
Hey! Don't tell them to spam me!
And for another minute after, I thought he meant Me!
For a while there, (at least until Age of Shadows) Ultima Online had a good thing going for blacksmiths, carpenters, etc. Easy enough to be one-a those without killling a single thing.