That's what I thought as well - that during the switching of a CMOS gate from one state to the other, the positive supply and ground are momentarily shorted (well, there's still a lot of resistance there, but compared to normal, quite a lot of current flows).
This doesn't address the most important issue: did Belkin actually ship routers with the firmware including their "feature" installed? Are they planning a recall to flash the firmware for those who can't figure out how? And how many unwitting sysadmins will install one of these routers on a system where the only machines behind the router run automated scripts where they can't click "no thanks" on their ad?
Quite honestly, Pixar doesn't need Disney at all. Pixar could easily get the capital necessary to build their own distribution house, especially considering that digital media are rapidly replacing film in theaters. If they did break off their relationship with Disney, it would provide Pixar the chance to offer some more serious fare, finally giving the US a studio to compete with some of the higher-budget anime of recent years (a la Ghost in the Shell or Final Fantasy).
If she wasn't a white suburb girl, we'd never really hear anything about it.
You must have her confused with Elizabeth Smart.
Anyway, slightly more on-topic, does anyone have a link to The Matrix Online's page past the intro flash widget? I'd at least like to have some idea what they're doing, without having to sell my computer's soul to Satan... er, I mean, Macromedia.
The person of ordinary skill in the relevant art to the claimed invention is a software programmer with at least a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and five years of programming experience in Internet, Web and browser technology, including specific experience with programming in HTML.
The Internet was around for a very long time before the web was invented.
Uhm... it's a larger issue than just bashing SWG. There will be more MMOGs in the future, and every one of those design teams has to make decisions that could make their game the next EQ/SWG/DAoC/WW2OL.
Discussing any game in terms of its design decisions would seem to be a valid (and very timely) topic for/., especially for a game that was as hyped as SWG (which is why it gets so much attention).
I'll have to agree with the article author that there are fundamental problems with the economy in SWG (or, at least, there were - I cancelled my account about a month after the game went live).
The most glaring issue is that there is no real advancement through manufactured goods in terms of the scale of the economy. A top-end weapon costs roughly the same order of magnitude as a newbie weapon in terms of the cost of materials required to construct the weapon. Because of this (and the players' evident unwillingness to charge the exorbitant prices they should for top-end crafted items), the best crafted weapons cost about the same order of magnitude as the bottom-end crafted weapons.
Because of this, there is very little room for more than a few people in the sellers' market. Get a factory fired up, and one person can produce a significant portion of all the goods their local customers need, and can use their spare time to produce special-request items on the side. Thus, new entries into the market must either undercut the market or go completely without sales while they skill up to Master in order to be competitive.
The crafting professions should have been designed so that top-end items were multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than bottom-end items, in terms of material costs to produce. The same % markup would result in a significantly larger inflow for those who specialized in top-end items, thus decreasing the impetus to bottom-feed (make items available at lower levels in the skill tree). This would open up those lower-level markets to relatively unskilled crafters, and would permit them to sell their items rather than simply using the "practice" mode on every attempt.
Additionally, crafting should have been designed so that lower levels of skill permitted the production of widgets necessary in the production of higher-level items. This is true already, in some cases, that you need a few of some crafted item in order to make another crafted item. But in order to prevent high-skilled players from simply cranking those bits out themselves, the quantities needed should have been in the dozens or even hundreds - enough to ensure that there would be a market for those items from lower-skilled players (if for no other reason than to save the high-skilled player a lot of time and trouble).
There are various other flaws with the game in terms of design and the expectation that players would do more than they are doing now. However, there are far more achievers in these games than designers would care to think (almost everyone has a bit of Achiever in them), and not coming to that realization was the design team's fundamental mistake.
Two of my computers rebooted around 9am Friday. My downstairs neighbor had similar problems. This could be mere coincidence, of course, but I don't normally have power fluctuation issues (well, except during gigantic blackouts and such).
The soundtrack to TES:Morrowind (available on CD with the collector's edition, and easily burnable to CD since it's in.mp3 format with the game) finds its way into my car CD player on a regular basis.
Various other game soundtracks would enjoy similar listening, except they're not available on CD or mp3 and are usually in some format better suited for dynamic scoring (transition into combat music as appropriate, then back into exploration music when combat is done).
In this case, the low bar they are setting for themselves will cost them a sale (and, I suspect, more than one). The main reason I didn't buy the new version of Pool of Radiance was because they did such a horrible job of bringing the 3rd Ed. rules to the screen, and fundamental to that failure was somehow being unable to implement basic character classes like "wizard".
Black Isle has done it (mostly) successfully with both 2nd (AD&D) and a variation of 3rd Ed., and created best-selling games in the process, so what's Turbine's problem?
Probably, though, the developers here are just pretty much screwed. Evidently, someone higher up in the MS command hierarchy has decided that releasing an unfinished MMOG is okay, because you can always allude to patching in new functionality in a patch, or better yet, put that functionality in an expansion for which you can charge the players more money. Well, I've got news for them - if you can't make a product that at initial full release will grip the player by the balls and won't let go, you're pretty much hosed, because other successful games in the genre (read: EQ) will eat you for breakfast.
Almost nobody will leave their successful characters in well-established games to try out a game that is vastly incomplete, and by the time the game is completed, the small number of players who did switch over will be high level in the new game, and nobody from the old game will want to abandon their characters for an environment like that. This is all because the fantasy MMOG market is nearly saturated, and the bulk of players of a new MMOG will be those who have already played MMOGs in the past.
On another note, why WotC didn't specify in their license agreement with Turbine that they would be required to implement a certain set of basic 3.5th Ed. features is beyond me.
It occurs to me that perhaps the.name registry could fix the problem themselves by delegating the responses for normally non-delegating records to themselves (the same or a different NS).
Of course, VeriSign could conceivably do the same, which would break the patch.
It was the concept that somebody telling you that "you suck, I don't wanna play with you" hurts in a way that is neurologically similar to the physical pain of them beating the crap out of you.
Plus, there's Jeremy Soule, a composer of Howard Shore's caliber whose best work has appeared in games such as Icewind Dale and Morrowind. (In fact, the Morrowind music CD that came with the collector's edition is one of my favorites for car listening.)
Nobuo Uematsu was mentioned earlier, and perhaps it's because so many people hated FF8 that they didn't bother to play through to the end, but the music during the closing credits was absolutely thrilling, especially as it wove its way into the FF theme at the end brilliantly.
Anybody who thinks that game music isn't reaching the same level as the music of other industries simply isn't playing the right games.
Contact a lawyer for any civil damages. Contact your state Attorney General. If the AG won't do anything, contact your local FBI office.
And once things settle down a bit regarding your civil suit, you might (if permitted by settlement terms) tip off your local TV news's investigative reporter, because they will *eat this stuff for breakfast* and report on these people's impropriety by dinnertime.;)
Why did the article authors mention the guy being a possible white supremacist? They say that in the first paragraph, as if it were something important, and then don't bother going on to connect that to the events described in the article.
I mean, generally speaking, most people agree that any form of racist supremacy is bad, but if it doesn't have anything to do with the charges against him, then mentioning it just incites the audience unfairly. If his political views do have something to do with his actions, then they should have let us know instead of leaving us hanging.
Slashdot Mirror
...except for that part where global warming is a sham.
That's what I thought as well - that during the switching of a CMOS gate from one state to the other, the positive supply and ground are momentarily shorted (well, there's still a lot of resistance there, but compared to normal, quite a lot of current flows).
This doesn't address the most important issue: did Belkin actually ship routers with the firmware including their "feature" installed? Are they planning a recall to flash the firmware for those who can't figure out how? And how many unwitting sysadmins will install one of these routers on a system where the only machines behind the router run automated scripts where they can't click "no thanks" on their ad?
Damn, beat me to it! ;)
Sure they're better than "regular" women. They, while scantily clad, let photographers take pictures of them.
How many women do you know that would let you do that?
Quite honestly, Pixar doesn't need Disney at all. Pixar could easily get the capital necessary to build their own distribution house, especially considering that digital media are rapidly replacing film in theaters. If they did break off their relationship with Disney, it would provide Pixar the chance to offer some more serious fare, finally giving the US a studio to compete with some of the higher-budget anime of recent years (a la Ghost in the Shell or Final Fantasy).
Do you even read the links you submit?
It's okay, because CmdrTaco evidently doesn't read his own website.
I am just a humble caveman. Your modern user interfaces confuse and frighten me.
If she wasn't a white suburb girl, we'd never really hear anything about it.
You must have her confused with Elizabeth Smart.
Anyway, slightly more on-topic, does anyone have a link to The Matrix Online's page past the intro flash widget? I'd at least like to have some idea what they're doing, without having to sell my computer's soul to Satan... er, I mean, Macromedia.
...it's not like there aren't any other Linux distros.
...then what makes anyone think that people will click on the "n bytes in body" link?
/. either.
For reasons I don't understand, this "silver bullet" defense has not been widely reported in the press.
Sorry, Mark, but it didn't quite make front-page on
The person of ordinary skill in the relevant art to the claimed invention is a software programmer with at least a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and five years of programming experience in Internet, Web and browser technology, including specific experience with programming in HTML.
The Internet was around for a very long time before the web was invented.
Uhm... it's a larger issue than just bashing SWG. There will be more MMOGs in the future, and every one of those design teams has to make decisions that could make their game the next EQ/SWG/DAoC/WW2OL.
/., especially for a game that was as hyped as SWG (which is why it gets so much attention).
Discussing any game in terms of its design decisions would seem to be a valid (and very timely) topic for
I'll have to agree with the article author that there are fundamental problems with the economy in SWG (or, at least, there were - I cancelled my account about a month after the game went live).
The most glaring issue is that there is no real advancement through manufactured goods in terms of the scale of the economy. A top-end weapon costs roughly the same order of magnitude as a newbie weapon in terms of the cost of materials required to construct the weapon. Because of this (and the players' evident unwillingness to charge the exorbitant prices they should for top-end crafted items), the best crafted weapons cost about the same order of magnitude as the bottom-end crafted weapons.
Because of this, there is very little room for more than a few people in the sellers' market. Get a factory fired up, and one person can produce a significant portion of all the goods their local customers need, and can use their spare time to produce special-request items on the side. Thus, new entries into the market must either undercut the market or go completely without sales while they skill up to Master in order to be competitive.
The crafting professions should have been designed so that top-end items were multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than bottom-end items, in terms of material costs to produce. The same % markup would result in a significantly larger inflow for those who specialized in top-end items, thus decreasing the impetus to bottom-feed (make items available at lower levels in the skill tree). This would open up those lower-level markets to relatively unskilled crafters, and would permit them to sell their items rather than simply using the "practice" mode on every attempt.
Additionally, crafting should have been designed so that lower levels of skill permitted the production of widgets necessary in the production of higher-level items. This is true already, in some cases, that you need a few of some crafted item in order to make another crafted item. But in order to prevent high-skilled players from simply cranking those bits out themselves, the quantities needed should have been in the dozens or even hundreds - enough to ensure that there would be a market for those items from lower-skilled players (if for no other reason than to save the high-skilled player a lot of time and trouble).
There are various other flaws with the game in terms of design and the expectation that players would do more than they are doing now. However, there are far more achievers in these games than designers would care to think (almost everyone has a bit of Achiever in them), and not coming to that realization was the design team's fundamental mistake.
Two of my computers rebooted around 9am Friday. My downstairs neighbor had similar problems. This could be mere coincidence, of course, but I don't normally have power fluctuation issues (well, except during gigantic blackouts and such).
The soundtrack to TES:Morrowind (available on CD with the collector's edition, and easily burnable to CD since it's in .mp3 format with the game) finds its way into my car CD player on a regular basis.
Various other game soundtracks would enjoy similar listening, except they're not available on CD or mp3 and are usually in some format better suited for dynamic scoring (transition into combat music as appropriate, then back into exploration music when combat is done).
In this case, the low bar they are setting for themselves will cost them a sale (and, I suspect, more than one). The main reason I didn't buy the new version of Pool of Radiance was because they did such a horrible job of bringing the 3rd Ed. rules to the screen, and fundamental to that failure was somehow being unable to implement basic character classes like "wizard".
Black Isle has done it (mostly) successfully with both 2nd (AD&D) and a variation of 3rd Ed., and created best-selling games in the process, so what's Turbine's problem?
Probably, though, the developers here are just pretty much screwed. Evidently, someone higher up in the MS command hierarchy has decided that releasing an unfinished MMOG is okay, because you can always allude to patching in new functionality in a patch, or better yet, put that functionality in an expansion for which you can charge the players more money. Well, I've got news for them - if you can't make a product that at initial full release will grip the player by the balls and won't let go, you're pretty much hosed, because other successful games in the genre (read: EQ) will eat you for breakfast.
Almost nobody will leave their successful characters in well-established games to try out a game that is vastly incomplete, and by the time the game is completed, the small number of players who did switch over will be high level in the new game, and nobody from the old game will want to abandon their characters for an environment like that. This is all because the fantasy MMOG market is nearly saturated, and the bulk of players of a new MMOG will be those who have already played MMOGs in the past.
On another note, why WotC didn't specify in their license agreement with Turbine that they would be required to implement a certain set of basic 3.5th Ed. features is beyond me.
Well, I got the joke part, but took you seriously when you said "What does this have to do with rejection again?"
Hence, I answered your question.
It occurs to me that perhaps the .name registry could fix the problem themselves by delegating the responses for normally non-delegating records to themselves (the same or a different NS).
Of course, VeriSign could conceivably do the same, which would break the patch.
It was the concept that somebody telling you that "you suck, I don't wanna play with you" hurts in a way that is neurologically similar to the physical pain of them beating the crap out of you.
Plus, there's Jeremy Soule, a composer of Howard Shore's caliber whose best work has appeared in games such as Icewind Dale and Morrowind. (In fact, the Morrowind music CD that came with the collector's edition is one of my favorites for car listening.)
Nobuo Uematsu was mentioned earlier, and perhaps it's because so many people hated FF8 that they didn't bother to play through to the end, but the music during the closing credits was absolutely thrilling, especially as it wove its way into the FF theme at the end brilliantly.
Anybody who thinks that game music isn't reaching the same level as the music of other industries simply isn't playing the right games.
"Sticks and stones can break my bones..."
Contact a lawyer for any civil damages. Contact your state Attorney General. If the AG won't do anything, contact your local FBI office.
;)
And once things settle down a bit regarding your civil suit, you might (if permitted by settlement terms) tip off your local TV news's investigative reporter, because they will *eat this stuff for breakfast* and report on these people's impropriety by dinnertime.
Why did the article authors mention the guy being a possible white supremacist? They say that in the first paragraph, as if it were something important, and then don't bother going on to connect that to the events described in the article.
I mean, generally speaking, most people agree that any form of racist supremacy is bad, but if it doesn't have anything to do with the charges against him, then mentioning it just incites the audience unfairly. If his political views do have something to do with his actions, then they should have let us know instead of leaving us hanging.
Yes, but then you would no longer be sharing files, since ZA would be blocking those ports.