Definately good, although to be honest a lot of EVE players (including myself) are hoping and waiting for another SF (even better space-and-ship-based) MMO other than EVE.
Despite being a PvP game, EVE PvP sucks. Hours of escalation with no action, finally ending in a short lagfest fleet battle where the outcome is often decided by pure luck (which side gets the most players in after the node restart...)
The high death penalty means that no one engages unless they're fairly sure of victory, or at least really hurting the enemy. Once the battle is over, it's over for a hours, if not days before another major engagement in the conflict happens, as both sides rebuild their fleets.
Compare that to day-long (or even longer) campaigns in DAoC, which often started with one or two groups of eight players taking a few towers, with the conflict escalating to multiple 100v100 battles all over the frontier by the end of a weekend day. The low death penalty meant that after a defeat, reinforcements would quickly return, more angry than ever, and sometimes players would use strategies with extremely high risk/reward (such as Mistwraith's infamous bomb groups, going into a crowd of 100 enemies with 8 players, hoping to take a decent number of them out before dying.)
As to why I'm playing EVE and not DAoC - Ever since Mythic released the Trials of Atlantis expansion, the game has been hemorraghing players from the more casual ranks, and at this point only the most hardcore are left. Massive campaigns no longer happen, just 8v8 skirmishes where the non-hardcore need not even bother going out. EVE is at least growing, and there is stuff to do other than PvP. (Although while things have improved vastly for industrialists, things still are grim for Gimptaki industrial-oriented characters like myself unless you struck gold without T2 blueprints.)
A space-based MMOG without giant mistakes like the T2 lottery and a more exciting PvP system would grab my attention instantly. CCP's goals of a "factional warfare" system seem to borrow a little of the flavor of DAoC's RvR system, but the game's architecture fundamentally means they can't really do a good factional warfare system (see DAoC's RvR system for factional warfare done right, or at least in terms of fundamental game architecture but not necessarily implementation of all the details) without decimating their existing playerbase a la SWG NGE.
It's slightly more complicated than this - I believe only certain types of breeders can basically guarantee only short-lived waste (fundamentally by being able to "burn" basically any actinide), and those breeder types were still in the research phase in the early 1990s.
That said, the fact that research was 100% halted in the early 1990s by the Clinton administration on one of the most promising of these breeder types (the IFR) due to proliferation concerns (showing a fundamental lack of understanding of the reactor, only seeing the name breeder and saying "breeder = proliferation" even though the waste products from the IFR would have been utterly useless for building nuclear weapons) means we're 15+ years behind in that regard.
I think this is a fundamental problem with any MMOG in terms of expansions.
Basically, to sell an expansion, you need to offer rewards that are significantly better than existing content. But doing so causes a continuing arms race that widens the gap between "haves" and "have-nots". Either way, you're screwed. Either an expansion won't sell, or it will contribute to the death of the game.
By the way, I think (in addition to its initial and continuing "niche" appeal) that this is one of the reasons for the fact that EVE is one of the only MMOGs that is continuing to grow, years after launch. Unlike other MMOGs, EVE has never released an expansion. Some of EVE's major patches have been called "expansions" by CCP, but I consider anything that doesn't involve going out to buy a new box of content (or paying a one-time fee for an expansion activation in addition to subscription fees a la DAoC's latest expansions) to only be a major patch. That, combined with the fact that for the most part major patches only introduce stuff that is "different" (as opposed to better) and rarely requires grinding, keeps EVE's existing players around and makes it stay modern and attract new players.
I just wish the death penalty in EVE weren't so harsh, as while it in some ways increases the "excitement" of PvP and serves as an anti-inflationary measure (using the best equipment in the game isn't always a good idea since you might get it blown up), it prevents epic DAoC-style battles from occuring on a regular basis, and when such battles occur, they are preceded with hours of troop movements without combat, not a small skirmish that steadily escalates like in DAoC (see one of my posts close to this one regarding DAoC escalation compared to EVE escalation).
I think that fundamentally, no MMOG can get things completely right and stay around forever. EVE has a lot of attributes that contribute to long-term growth (such as the nonpermanence of any item except the most utterly basic equipment), but also cause many players to get bored (the aforementioned hours of escalation with no real action). A game that can keep people from that category (which includes myself) interested with constant action fundamentally will end up in an arms race of content and gear. You can't have constant action without a light death penalty (a la DAoC), and it's extremely hard (if not impossible) to prevent an arms race which eventually kills the game without a harsh death penalty (a la EVE).
As a result - A game can last forever (or at least a very long time), but there is a large category of players that such a game can fundamentally never attract. Games that can attract such a playerbase have major challenges at lasting forever (at least a very long time). Thus while some games (EVE) will almost permanently lock in some players, other games (such as EQ, DAoC, and WoW) will eventually die, giving their playerbase to new games. It's just a matter of how quickly they die. Some may stay around a long time (DAoC, WoW likely will too), some will become fundamentally dead in only a year or two (SWG).
I would say that Cats had just the opposite effect of being a "soloing expansion" Once TDs were in play, getting a group was just a matter of going to the appropriate TD. It was very rare to spend more than 10-15 minutes LFG. (As opposed to, for example, praying your realm had DF and you could get an AoE DF Knights group.)
Either way, with the exception of the now massive difference between the "haves" and "have-nots" and the fact that while Mythic has added some rewards for keep/tower RvR, 8v8 is still the king of RPs and hence most of the best players actually steer clear of towers and keeps (and the rest of the realm) unless they can farm them with a bomb group, DAoC is dominated by the hardcore players and the casual ones (even the semi-casual veterans like myself) are screwed and quickly get frustrated and give up. While keep/tower warfare is clearly the primary goal in Mythic's vision for the game, they still can't give enough reason for the RP farmers to do anything other than grow there epeens and RP count in 8-man gank groups. Unfortunately, at this point, anything Mythic does to alter the balance in favor of keep/tower warfare will decimate the remaining hardcore player base because they'll hate it. But without a return to keep/tower warfare dominating RvR, Mythic will not be able to attract or retain new blood, and will continue to hemorrage (crap I KNOW I misspelled that but every attempt at spelling it otherwise looks even worse) the casual and semi-casual players. so basically, whatever they do, Mythic will either destroy the remainder of their existing playerbase in the hopes of gaining new players (SWG proves that this does not work), or fail to attract new blood and slowly lose their existing base, leading to the game's slow death over time.
I'm praying that someone releases a game with a DAoC-like PvP/RvR system, but learning from Mythic's mistakes made during the years of DAoC.
Unfortunately, the realm abilities system, while increasing the gap between the haves and have nots, also kept the game alive. Without the final (and nearly uncappable) goal of increasing one's realm ranks, there wasn't that much incentive to keep playing past 50. Without rewards in RvR past 50, what was the point of the PvE grind up to 50?
It's kind of sad - I loved the epic 200v200 battles in DAoC, but the mechanics of death in EVE mean that such battles are actually frowned upon by the devs. In DAoC, a small skirmish at a keep would escalate over time (with constant action) at a keep or tower. In EVE, once a battle starts, it's over within minutes. Usually, 95% of a "battle" is hours and hours of two fleets slowly escalating, afraid to engage the other fleet until they have enough people, since once you're dead, you're out of the action for a long duration. This hours of escalation without action is now considered "bad" for good reason by EVE's devs (in addition to the servers' inability to handle such large battles), meaning that 200v200 or largers battles may become a thing of the past.
Pretty close, but not quite. MIMO doesn't rely in observing the combined signal at different times, but on the fact that in a multipath environment, there is some independence between an antenna at one location and one located a small distance (on the order of only one wavelength or less) away.
A good example - When listening to an old analog FM radio station in your car, you stop at a traffic light or a traffic jam and the station basically fades out to the point that it is static. For whatever reason, you move your car a few feet, and the station is now coming in strong. (Or when driving along the road, the signal quality "flutters" rapidly). What is happening here is that the signal between the radio station and your antenna isn't necessarily traveling in a straight line - more likely the signal is being reflected off of objects near the radio station or near you. In some cases, the path lenghs of these signals are such that they all add in-phase (constructive interference) and the signal is strong. In other cases, they are out of phase and cancel each other (destructive interference) and you get static.
Now imagine that your car had two antennas with some physical distance between them. Then your radio could choose the signal with the strongest signal, with two antennas there is a significantly reduced probability that BOTH will be experiencing multipath fade at once. This is generally called receive diversity. Some companies now call this MIMO even though it really isn't. Some diversity systems user fancier combining algorithms, but most just use selection diversity. It is also possible to have transmit diversity, although it is somewhat more difficult. Usually the transmit modulation scheme and the transmitters themselves need to be modified to do this, unless the transmitter is aware of the path from it to a receiver (i.e. a point-to-point link with some sort of feedback channel from the receiver back to the transmitter). For a scheme that works without knowledge of the channel, search Google of Wikipedia for Alamouti space-time multiplexing. Such systems provide no benefit in line-of-sight situations, but reduce penalty in multipath situations.
Also, a car with two or more receive antennas could instead combine the signals in such a way as to form a single virtual antenna that was directional, rejecting some of the paths causing interference. Such techniques are known as a phased array antenna. Phased arrays can be fixed (directionality governed by wiring harnesses), and steerable (directionality controlled by configurable phase shifters and configurable delays), and this category can be either manually steered (operator steers the antenna) or adaptively steered (receiver guesses the best way to steer the antenna to maximize the received signal.) Again, some companies now call this MIMO. For example, the "MIMO" system used by Ruckus Wireless (and licensed to Netgear of their RangeMax WPN824) is just an adaptive phased array system. (Not that this is necessarily bad - it's the best way to improve performance with "legacy" endpoints that don't understand true MIMO techniques, but can't achieve the full capacity of a true MIMO system.) Phased array systems provide a Log(N) improvement in capacity in line-of-sight situations, and also a reduction in multipath penalties.
A true MIMO system can analyze the paths between all transmit and receive antennas, and effectively transmit different data on each path. In reality, most such systems do it in a more abstract manner - a matrix is formed in which there is one row for each transmit antenna, and one column for each receive antenna, and each element of the matrix is the gain between the transmit and receive antennas associated with that row/column, the singular value decomposition of this matrix is calculated, and the singular values (which are related to the matrix's eigenvalues by the way) represent the gains of the possible "virtual" channels formed by the MIMO system. (I have a link on my work machine to a VERY good d
Before the playerbase was decimated and all but the most elite hardcore players left, DAoC's PvP system was (and at least in design, still is) the best system I've ever seen.
It's so different from most other systems that it has its own name, RvR (Realm vs. Realm). The basic idea is that there are three realms, and you cannot fight players from your own realm. Players from other realms cannot enter your realm's mainland (giving a safe PvE/farming/leveling area), but everyone can enter the shared "frontiers". In the frontiers, each realm has a landmass covered with keeps and towers. Essentially, DAoC's RvR system is a capture-and-hold game on a massive scale.
On the other hand, it's REALLY hard to come up with a good "endgame" to keep players forever.
The end result is that despite the fact that in general, MMOs are designed to keep players around for extended periods of time, burnout is frequent.
That's why I switched from DAoC to EVE. That's why after a year or so, I switched back to DAoC. (Admittedly with 2-4 months of "nothing but FPSes or outdoor activities" in between). After another two years, I'm back in EVE.
To be honest, I'm at the point where I'm burned out on both games and waiting for the next game that: 1) Appeals to me 2) Looks like it has a good endgame (DAoC's was great until the Trials of Atlantis expansion decimated the game's playerbase, which Mythic has been unable to recover from despite massive improvements over the past year and a half.) 3) Appeals to my friends (the only reason I'm still playing either game)
The fact is that even with frequent patches, expansions, and upgrades, games age. Fundamental aspects of their architecture and design become unworkable for a modern game, and/or the company makes a huge mistake that decimates their playerbase, making it impossible to attract "new blood" even after overhauling their game. (See SWG's NGE, or DAoC's Trials of Atlantis expansion for examples of "big mistakes", see DAoC's Catacombs expansion and many of the past year's "ToA Fix" patches for examples of great overhauls that just weren't enough)
EVE Online has the advantage of a more flexible architecture (which is one reason it has been growing steadily since inception), although it's main advantage is that it never had a huge launch and always has been more of a fringe game. Eventually EVE's devs will make the "Big Mistake" (They've come close with the BoD scandal and how they mishandled it) or it will age. (CCP has the good fortune of being the only MMO with even remotely similar gameplay - I suspect that another space-based MMO could easily give EVE a good run for its money, I know I would try it if it were from anyone other than SOE.)
The Linux userspace ABI has been pretty consistent for years.
Binary applications written a decade ago still run (as long as compatible libc libraries are installed or they are statically linked).
Binary modules are a different story - Internal APIs (and sometimes ABIs) do often change, but that's not what matters (unless you are one of the few vendors insisting on binary-only drivers, and most of those have worked around that problem with open-source "glue" interfacing to their blob.), what matters is the external API/ABI between the kernel and userspace, and that is quite stable (at least the ABI, the API does change a bit.)
The article isn't too clear on this, but if you go to Fon's site at http://www.fon.com/, you'll see that Fon defines three user types:
Aliens - Non-FON users who pay for access at FON access points belonging to either of the following groups. Linuses - FON users who do not receive any monetary compensation (other than a majorly discounted router), but get free access to any FON access point owned by a Linus or Bill Bills - FON users who get 50% of the proceeds from aliens using their access point. They don't get free access to other FON APs owned by Bills or Linuses.
So if you live in the middle of nowhere, it makes lots of sense to become a Linus. Your AP will almost never be used by others (and if it is, you can restrict their bandwidth to a reasonably large degree), but you get free access to any other FON APs when you're on the road.
If I had been in his shoes (my legally bought copy didn't work anymore), I would've said "Fuck this, I'm going to TPB to find a torrent." and then I would have done exactly that.
"Proprietary information should be stored in whatever place is the best place for it. Criteria that need to be measured include security, accessability, and cost. Most corporations cannot do as well with any of these as a specialist company like Google. Most corporations should not be able to do as well with any of these as Google, since their IT departments are cost centers, not profit centers." False. You assume that Google's IT department and a corporate IT department have the same goals.
They don't.
Google's business model depends on providing access to their services to people outside of their network, while making sure those people outside of their network only get access to what they are supposed to access.
Corporate network admins, on the other hand, typically give first priority to doing something that Google fundamentally can't without interfering with their business model - prevent outsiders from obtaing ANY access whatsoever to the internal network. This is pretty easy with a proxying firewall. Optionally, after that begin providing access to authorized external users in a controlled and secure manner, such as an IPSec VPN using RSA SecurID tokens for authentication. Google simply can't force all users of their services to go get a SecurID token and VPN in, especially since such VPN systems usually force the client machine into connecting ONLY to the network it is being connected to via VPN.
Their next priority is usually controlling what internal users get access to what, but this is an easier job than "you vs. rest of world". You can usually ensure by methods already in place (Interviews of potential employees, locked doors with badge access and/or combo locks, etc.) that the likelihood of internal users being a skilled cracker is low, although IT departments should still assume that they are. Google can't place men with guns and network monitoring devices (IDS and other sniffers) at every potential user's home to say, "You may be doing something malicious. Stop now."
Rule #1 of corporate America - Proprietary information does not leave the company boundaries unless an NDA is in place. Proprietary information is only given under NDA if strictly necessary.
These decisions are made by upper management and lawyers, not IT.
There is no way in hell that my company would EVER move to an externally hosted solution. (Disclaimer: I'm not an IT guy there, but I completely agree with them in terms of keeping things centrally hosted.)
In addition, having critical services hosted externally is Just Plain Stupid. There's not just the issue of Google policy, there are all sorts of other issues such as the hundreds or thousands of miles of fiber, all suscptible to a good backhoeing.
Amen. You wouldn't believe what an unholy nightmare the system is if (god forbid) you actually take initiative and try to accelerate your curriculum like I did, and I went to high school long before No Child Left Behind.
If I recall correctly, DHT takes the file name into account when calculating the hash. Thus identical files with different names are treated differently.
Some P2P protocols allow looking up a file by a hash which does not take filename into account, but this will not handle the case where the files differ in only one small section. The best example is the following: Person downloads an MP3. Person finds that the MP3 is not properly tagged (for example, has a comment field saying who ripped it/released the rip, and has no track number.) Person changes the MP3's ID3 tag Now, nearly all existing P2P protocols will treat the new file as a completely different file, when in reality the most important contents (the audio itself) have not changed, only the file's metadata. Other users will go for the "full-file" match with the largest number of sources, thus causing the mistagged MP3 to propagate more than a "fixed" one.
So a P2P system that ignores the ID3 tag when hashing would have significant advantages, in which the user could download the file from many sources and then choose which source to get their metadata from.
I think that's why Google has been so successful with their ad system.
The targeting is one thing, but far more important is that Google's ads tend to be far less intrusive (and thus far less likely to get added to a user's blocklist).
Just the opposite. I believe the cutoff frequency is equivalent to (approximately) the frequency at which the largest dimension of a waveguide is half a wavelength (could be a full wave, but I'm reasonably sure it's a half.)
The most important thing - that cutoff frequency is the LOWEST frequency (longest wavelength) at which anything will propagate in that waveguide, that I am positive of. Higher frequencies will propagate readily. (Frequencies above around 2x the cutoff do start seeing multimode propagation, but that only contributes a little to loss and a lot to modal dispersion, the latter of which is only a problem when trying to communicate, but irrelevant for EMI purposes.)
While you are fairly sure a 600 mW transmitter won't foul anything up, anyone who has used a GSM phone near a speaker system will likely disagree with you. Even if it is highly improbable, there is enough possibility that no sane lawyer who is being properly advised by an engineer will willingly sign off on allowing cell phone transmitters in planes.
Read up on the ICT. Currently disabled for most (if not all) current releases, but it is almost guaranteed that some time in the future, ICT will get switched on. Welcome to the world of 540p, where your $1000+ HDTV and your $500+ BR player perform only slightly better than a $40 progressive scan DVD player.
If you're using that kind of a highend setup, then yeah, a 30" monitor makes sense. That's probably for less than 5% of engineers and 1% of office workers in general (probably even less than 1% of engineers). There are a lot of people who NEVER do 3D work, but lots of programming, graphing, and documentation.
Conservatively: 5% have any need for an SLI setup 90% could effectively use dual monitors but SLI is massive overkill (I'm in this category, I have no idea why my deskop box has a Quadro, i'd rather have a crap video card with dual monitors than a Quadro that's probably worth more than the cost of a second monitor.) 5% don't need dual monitors or large monitors.
"DRM is only a concern to maybe 0.01% of the market (roughly the # of slashdot posters to bitch about it). The key limtiation in install base not DRM. DVD had stronger DRM then VHS. almost no one cared. Ditto with blu-ray/HD DVD vs DVD. People do not tend to try to copy their DVDs, those who do will eventually go with the method to do so with Bluray-HDDVD. Everyone else will shrug."
HDCP? Image Constraint Token?
The fact is that the DRM on high def discs has gone so far in terms of fear of copying that it has begun significantly affecting Joe Average consumer.
For example, all early adopters of HDTVs are screwed - Their sets don't do HDCP, and while so far no one has enabled the ICT, it's a monster looming on the horizon that everyone using an analog connection is worried about.
Even owners of new HDTVs are often screwed - there are numerous stories of failed HDCP handshakes resulting in people's brand new HDCP-capable HDTVs giving them a blank screen when they attempted to plug in .
I'm not even sure if it is possible to region-lock a burned DVD.
Most likely there was something SERIOUSLY wrong with the way the DVD was burned, and the player got so confused that "Region Error" was the best error it could come up with (even though it was the wrong error.)
Most players just crash or hang in such situations. Some require a powercycle after trying to read a misformatted disc.
While that sounds like a huge difference, in reality for most users, it is not. While I can tell the difference between progressive DVDs and HD content, it's rare that the DVD isn't "good enough", and the difference is not that obvious. (For example, the DVD of "Dust to Glory" is very hard to distinguish from the HD version.)
Slashdot Mirror
Definately good, although to be honest a lot of EVE players (including myself) are hoping and waiting for another SF (even better space-and-ship-based) MMO other than EVE.
Despite being a PvP game, EVE PvP sucks. Hours of escalation with no action, finally ending in a short lagfest fleet battle where the outcome is often decided by pure luck (which side gets the most players in after the node restart...)
The high death penalty means that no one engages unless they're fairly sure of victory, or at least really hurting the enemy. Once the battle is over, it's over for a hours, if not days before another major engagement in the conflict happens, as both sides rebuild their fleets.
Compare that to day-long (or even longer) campaigns in DAoC, which often started with one or two groups of eight players taking a few towers, with the conflict escalating to multiple 100v100 battles all over the frontier by the end of a weekend day. The low death penalty meant that after a defeat, reinforcements would quickly return, more angry than ever, and sometimes players would use strategies with extremely high risk/reward (such as Mistwraith's infamous bomb groups, going into a crowd of 100 enemies with 8 players, hoping to take a decent number of them out before dying.)
As to why I'm playing EVE and not DAoC - Ever since Mythic released the Trials of Atlantis expansion, the game has been hemorraghing players from the more casual ranks, and at this point only the most hardcore are left. Massive campaigns no longer happen, just 8v8 skirmishes where the non-hardcore need not even bother going out. EVE is at least growing, and there is stuff to do other than PvP. (Although while things have improved vastly for industrialists, things still are grim for Gimptaki industrial-oriented characters like myself unless you struck gold without T2 blueprints.)
A space-based MMOG without giant mistakes like the T2 lottery and a more exciting PvP system would grab my attention instantly. CCP's goals of a "factional warfare" system seem to borrow a little of the flavor of DAoC's RvR system, but the game's architecture fundamentally means they can't really do a good factional warfare system (see DAoC's RvR system for factional warfare done right, or at least in terms of fundamental game architecture but not necessarily implementation of all the details) without decimating their existing playerbase a la SWG NGE.
It's slightly more complicated than this - I believe only certain types of breeders can basically guarantee only short-lived waste (fundamentally by being able to "burn" basically any actinide), and those breeder types were still in the research phase in the early 1990s.
That said, the fact that research was 100% halted in the early 1990s by the Clinton administration on one of the most promising of these breeder types (the IFR) due to proliferation concerns (showing a fundamental lack of understanding of the reactor, only seeing the name breeder and saying "breeder = proliferation" even though the waste products from the IFR would have been utterly useless for building nuclear weapons) means we're 15+ years behind in that regard.
bleh, got so owned there. That teaches me to write detailed explanations after 2/3 a bottle of wine!
I think this is a fundamental problem with any MMOG in terms of expansions.
Basically, to sell an expansion, you need to offer rewards that are significantly better than existing content. But doing so causes a continuing arms race that widens the gap between "haves" and "have-nots". Either way, you're screwed. Either an expansion won't sell, or it will contribute to the death of the game.
By the way, I think (in addition to its initial and continuing "niche" appeal) that this is one of the reasons for the fact that EVE is one of the only MMOGs that is continuing to grow, years after launch. Unlike other MMOGs, EVE has never released an expansion. Some of EVE's major patches have been called "expansions" by CCP, but I consider anything that doesn't involve going out to buy a new box of content (or paying a one-time fee for an expansion activation in addition to subscription fees a la DAoC's latest expansions) to only be a major patch. That, combined with the fact that for the most part major patches only introduce stuff that is "different" (as opposed to better) and rarely requires grinding, keeps EVE's existing players around and makes it stay modern and attract new players.
I just wish the death penalty in EVE weren't so harsh, as while it in some ways increases the "excitement" of PvP and serves as an anti-inflationary measure (using the best equipment in the game isn't always a good idea since you might get it blown up), it prevents epic DAoC-style battles from occuring on a regular basis, and when such battles occur, they are preceded with hours of troop movements without combat, not a small skirmish that steadily escalates like in DAoC (see one of my posts close to this one regarding DAoC escalation compared to EVE escalation).
I think that fundamentally, no MMOG can get things completely right and stay around forever. EVE has a lot of attributes that contribute to long-term growth (such as the nonpermanence of any item except the most utterly basic equipment), but also cause many players to get bored (the aforementioned hours of escalation with no real action). A game that can keep people from that category (which includes myself) interested with constant action fundamentally will end up in an arms race of content and gear. You can't have constant action without a light death penalty (a la DAoC), and it's extremely hard (if not impossible) to prevent an arms race which eventually kills the game without a harsh death penalty (a la EVE).
As a result - A game can last forever (or at least a very long time), but there is a large category of players that such a game can fundamentally never attract. Games that can attract such a playerbase have major challenges at lasting forever (at least a very long time). Thus while some games (EVE) will almost permanently lock in some players, other games (such as EQ, DAoC, and WoW) will eventually die, giving their playerbase to new games. It's just a matter of how quickly they die. Some may stay around a long time (DAoC, WoW likely will too), some will become fundamentally dead in only a year or two (SWG).
I would say that Cats had just the opposite effect of being a "soloing expansion" Once TDs were in play, getting a group was just a matter of going to the appropriate TD. It was very rare to spend more than 10-15 minutes LFG. (As opposed to, for example, praying your realm had DF and you could get an AoE DF Knights group.)
Either way, with the exception of the now massive difference between the "haves" and "have-nots" and the fact that while Mythic has added some rewards for keep/tower RvR, 8v8 is still the king of RPs and hence most of the best players actually steer clear of towers and keeps (and the rest of the realm) unless they can farm them with a bomb group, DAoC is dominated by the hardcore players and the casual ones (even the semi-casual veterans like myself) are screwed and quickly get frustrated and give up. While keep/tower warfare is clearly the primary goal in Mythic's vision for the game, they still can't give enough reason for the RP farmers to do anything other than grow there epeens and RP count in 8-man gank groups. Unfortunately, at this point, anything Mythic does to alter the balance in favor of keep/tower warfare will decimate the remaining hardcore player base because they'll hate it. But without a return to keep/tower warfare dominating RvR, Mythic will not be able to attract or retain new blood, and will continue to hemorrage (crap I KNOW I misspelled that but every attempt at spelling it otherwise looks even worse) the casual and semi-casual players. so basically, whatever they do, Mythic will either destroy the remainder of their existing playerbase in the hopes of gaining new players (SWG proves that this does not work), or fail to attract new blood and slowly lose their existing base, leading to the game's slow death over time.
I'm praying that someone releases a game with a DAoC-like PvP/RvR system, but learning from Mythic's mistakes made during the years of DAoC.
Unfortunately, the realm abilities system, while increasing the gap between the haves and have nots, also kept the game alive. Without the final (and nearly uncappable) goal of increasing one's realm ranks, there wasn't that much incentive to keep playing past 50. Without rewards in RvR past 50, what was the point of the PvE grind up to 50?
It's kind of sad - I loved the epic 200v200 battles in DAoC, but the mechanics of death in EVE mean that such battles are actually frowned upon by the devs. In DAoC, a small skirmish at a keep would escalate over time (with constant action) at a keep or tower. In EVE, once a battle starts, it's over within minutes. Usually, 95% of a "battle" is hours and hours of two fleets slowly escalating, afraid to engage the other fleet until they have enough people, since once you're dead, you're out of the action for a long duration. This hours of escalation without action is now considered "bad" for good reason by EVE's devs (in addition to the servers' inability to handle such large battles), meaning that 200v200 or largers battles may become a thing of the past.
Pretty close, but not quite. MIMO doesn't rely in observing the combined signal at different times, but on the fact that in a multipath environment, there is some independence between an antenna at one location and one located a small distance (on the order of only one wavelength or less) away.
A good example - When listening to an old analog FM radio station in your car, you stop at a traffic light or a traffic jam and the station basically fades out to the point that it is static. For whatever reason, you move your car a few feet, and the station is now coming in strong. (Or when driving along the road, the signal quality "flutters" rapidly). What is happening here is that the signal between the radio station and your antenna isn't necessarily traveling in a straight line - more likely the signal is being reflected off of objects near the radio station or near you. In some cases, the path lenghs of these signals are such that they all add in-phase (constructive interference) and the signal is strong. In other cases, they are out of phase and cancel each other (destructive interference) and you get static.
Now imagine that your car had two antennas with some physical distance between them. Then your radio could choose the signal with the strongest signal, with two antennas there is a significantly reduced probability that BOTH will be experiencing multipath fade at once. This is generally called receive diversity. Some companies now call this MIMO even though it really isn't. Some diversity systems user fancier combining algorithms, but most just use selection diversity. It is also possible to have transmit diversity, although it is somewhat more difficult. Usually the transmit modulation scheme and the transmitters themselves need to be modified to do this, unless the transmitter is aware of the path from it to a receiver (i.e. a point-to-point link with some sort of feedback channel from the receiver back to the transmitter). For a scheme that works without knowledge of the channel, search Google of Wikipedia for Alamouti space-time multiplexing. Such systems provide no benefit in line-of-sight situations, but reduce penalty in multipath situations.
Also, a car with two or more receive antennas could instead combine the signals in such a way as to form a single virtual antenna that was directional, rejecting some of the paths causing interference. Such techniques are known as a phased array antenna. Phased arrays can be fixed (directionality governed by wiring harnesses), and steerable (directionality controlled by configurable phase shifters and configurable delays), and this category can be either manually steered (operator steers the antenna) or adaptively steered (receiver guesses the best way to steer the antenna to maximize the received signal.) Again, some companies now call this MIMO. For example, the "MIMO" system used by Ruckus Wireless (and licensed to Netgear of their RangeMax WPN824) is just an adaptive phased array system. (Not that this is necessarily bad - it's the best way to improve performance with "legacy" endpoints that don't understand true MIMO techniques, but can't achieve the full capacity of a true MIMO system.) Phased array systems provide a Log(N) improvement in capacity in line-of-sight situations, and also a reduction in multipath penalties.
A true MIMO system can analyze the paths between all transmit and receive antennas, and effectively transmit different data on each path. In reality, most such systems do it in a more abstract manner - a matrix is formed in which there is one row for each transmit antenna, and one column for each receive antenna, and each element of the matrix is the gain between the transmit and receive antennas associated with that row/column, the singular value decomposition of this matrix is calculated, and the singular values (which are related to the matrix's eigenvalues by the way) represent the gains of the possible "virtual" channels formed by the MIMO system. (I have a link on my work machine to a VERY good d
Doesn't sound like much of an endgame to me.
Before the playerbase was decimated and all but the most elite hardcore players left, DAoC's PvP system was (and at least in design, still is) the best system I've ever seen.
It's so different from most other systems that it has its own name, RvR (Realm vs. Realm). The basic idea is that there are three realms, and you cannot fight players from your own realm. Players from other realms cannot enter your realm's mainland (giving a safe PvE/farming/leveling area), but everyone can enter the shared "frontiers". In the frontiers, each realm has a landmass covered with keeps and towers. Essentially, DAoC's RvR system is a capture-and-hold game on a massive scale.
On the other hand, it's REALLY hard to come up with a good "endgame" to keep players forever.
The end result is that despite the fact that in general, MMOs are designed to keep players around for extended periods of time, burnout is frequent.
That's why I switched from DAoC to EVE. That's why after a year or so, I switched back to DAoC. (Admittedly with 2-4 months of "nothing but FPSes or outdoor activities" in between). After another two years, I'm back in EVE.
To be honest, I'm at the point where I'm burned out on both games and waiting for the next game that:
1) Appeals to me
2) Looks like it has a good endgame (DAoC's was great until the Trials of Atlantis expansion decimated the game's playerbase, which Mythic has been unable to recover from despite massive improvements over the past year and a half.)
3) Appeals to my friends (the only reason I'm still playing either game)
The fact is that even with frequent patches, expansions, and upgrades, games age. Fundamental aspects of their architecture and design become unworkable for a modern game, and/or the company makes a huge mistake that decimates their playerbase, making it impossible to attract "new blood" even after overhauling their game. (See SWG's NGE, or DAoC's Trials of Atlantis expansion for examples of "big mistakes", see DAoC's Catacombs expansion and many of the past year's "ToA Fix" patches for examples of great overhauls that just weren't enough)
EVE Online has the advantage of a more flexible architecture (which is one reason it has been growing steadily since inception), although it's main advantage is that it never had a huge launch and always has been more of a fringe game. Eventually EVE's devs will make the "Big Mistake" (They've come close with the BoD scandal and how they mishandled it) or it will age. (CCP has the good fortune of being the only MMO with even remotely similar gameplay - I suspect that another space-based MMO could easily give EVE a good run for its money, I know I would try it if it were from anyone other than SOE.)
The Linux userspace ABI has been pretty consistent for years.
Binary applications written a decade ago still run (as long as compatible libc libraries are installed or they are statically linked).
Binary modules are a different story - Internal APIs (and sometimes ABIs) do often change, but that's not what matters (unless you are one of the few vendors insisting on binary-only drivers, and most of those have worked around that problem with open-source "glue" interfacing to their blob.), what matters is the external API/ABI between the kernel and userspace, and that is quite stable (at least the ABI, the API does change a bit.)
The article isn't too clear on this, but if you go to Fon's site at http://www.fon.com/, you'll see that Fon defines three user types:
Aliens - Non-FON users who pay for access at FON access points belonging to either of the following groups.
Linuses - FON users who do not receive any monetary compensation (other than a majorly discounted router), but get free access to any FON access point owned by a Linus or Bill
Bills - FON users who get 50% of the proceeds from aliens using their access point. They don't get free access to other FON APs owned by Bills or Linuses.
So if you live in the middle of nowhere, it makes lots of sense to become a Linus. Your AP will almost never be used by others (and if it is, you can restrict their bandwidth to a reasonably large degree), but you get free access to any other FON APs when you're on the road.
If I had been in his shoes (my legally bought copy didn't work anymore), I would've said "Fuck this, I'm going to TPB to find a torrent." and then I would have done exactly that.
"Proprietary information should be stored in whatever place is the best place for it. Criteria that need to be measured include security, accessability, and cost. Most corporations cannot do as well with any of these as a specialist company like Google. Most corporations should not be able to do as well with any of these as Google, since their IT departments are cost centers, not profit centers."
False. You assume that Google's IT department and a corporate IT department have the same goals.
They don't.
Google's business model depends on providing access to their services to people outside of their network, while making sure those people outside of their network only get access to what they are supposed to access.
Corporate network admins, on the other hand, typically give first priority to doing something that Google fundamentally can't without interfering with their business model - prevent outsiders from obtaing ANY access whatsoever to the internal network. This is pretty easy with a proxying firewall. Optionally, after that begin providing access to authorized external users in a controlled and secure manner, such as an IPSec VPN using RSA SecurID tokens for authentication. Google simply can't force all users of their services to go get a SecurID token and VPN in, especially since such VPN systems usually force the client machine into connecting ONLY to the network it is being connected to via VPN.
Their next priority is usually controlling what internal users get access to what, but this is an easier job than "you vs. rest of world". You can usually ensure by methods already in place (Interviews of potential employees, locked doors with badge access and/or combo locks, etc.) that the likelihood of internal users being a skilled cracker is low, although IT departments should still assume that they are. Google can't place men with guns and network monitoring devices (IDS and other sniffers) at every potential user's home to say, "You may be doing something malicious. Stop now."
More importantly, nothing prevents you from installing Vista on a Mac with Boot Camp.
(Other than the fact that I'm not sure if Boot Camp has a driver pack for Vista yet, but that's up to Apple not MS.)
Rule #1 of corporate America - Proprietary information does not leave the company boundaries unless an NDA is in place. Proprietary information is only given under NDA if strictly necessary.
These decisions are made by upper management and lawyers, not IT.
There is no way in hell that my company would EVER move to an externally hosted solution. (Disclaimer: I'm not an IT guy there, but I completely agree with them in terms of keeping things centrally hosted.)
In addition, having critical services hosted externally is Just Plain Stupid. There's not just the issue of Google policy, there are all sorts of other issues such as the hundreds or thousands of miles of fiber, all suscptible to a good backhoeing.
Amen. You wouldn't believe what an unholy nightmare the system is if (god forbid) you actually take initiative and try to accelerate your curriculum like I did, and I went to high school long before No Child Left Behind.
If I recall correctly, DHT takes the file name into account when calculating the hash. Thus identical files with different names are treated differently.
Some P2P protocols allow looking up a file by a hash which does not take filename into account, but this will not handle the case where the files differ in only one small section. The best example is the following:
Person downloads an MP3.
Person finds that the MP3 is not properly tagged (for example, has a comment field saying who ripped it/released the rip, and has no track number.)
Person changes the MP3's ID3 tag
Now, nearly all existing P2P protocols will treat the new file as a completely different file, when in reality the most important contents (the audio itself) have not changed, only the file's metadata.
Other users will go for the "full-file" match with the largest number of sources, thus causing the mistagged MP3 to propagate more than a "fixed" one.
So a P2P system that ignores the ID3 tag when hashing would have significant advantages, in which the user could download the file from many sources and then choose which source to get their metadata from.
I think that's why Google has been so successful with their ad system.
The targeting is one thing, but far more important is that Google's ads tend to be far less intrusive (and thus far less likely to get added to a user's blocklist).
Just the opposite. I believe the cutoff frequency is equivalent to (approximately) the frequency at which the largest dimension of a waveguide is half a wavelength (could be a full wave, but I'm reasonably sure it's a half.)
The most important thing - that cutoff frequency is the LOWEST frequency (longest wavelength) at which anything will propagate in that waveguide, that I am positive of. Higher frequencies will propagate readily. (Frequencies above around 2x the cutoff do start seeing multimode propagation, but that only contributes a little to loss and a lot to modal dispersion, the latter of which is only a problem when trying to communicate, but irrelevant for EMI purposes.)
While you are fairly sure a 600 mW transmitter won't foul anything up, anyone who has used a GSM phone near a speaker system will likely disagree with you. Even if it is highly improbable, there is enough possibility that no sane lawyer who is being properly advised by an engineer will willingly sign off on allowing cell phone transmitters in planes.
Read up on the ICT. Currently disabled for most (if not all) current releases, but it is almost guaranteed that some time in the future, ICT will get switched on. Welcome to the world of 540p, where your $1000+ HDTV and your $500+ BR player perform only slightly better than a $40 progressive scan DVD player.
If you're using that kind of a highend setup, then yeah, a 30" monitor makes sense. That's probably for less than 5% of engineers and 1% of office workers in general (probably even less than 1% of engineers). There are a lot of people who NEVER do 3D work, but lots of programming, graphing, and documentation.
Conservatively:
5% have any need for an SLI setup
90% could effectively use dual monitors but SLI is massive overkill (I'm in this category, I have no idea why my deskop box has a Quadro, i'd rather have a crap video card with dual monitors than a Quadro that's probably worth more than the cost of a second monitor.)
5% don't need dual monitors or large monitors.
"DRM is only a concern to maybe 0.01% of the market (roughly the # of slashdot posters to bitch about it). The key limtiation in install base not DRM. DVD had stronger DRM then VHS. almost no one cared. Ditto with blu-ray/HD DVD vs DVD. People do not tend to try to copy their DVDs, those who do will eventually go with the method to do so with Bluray-HDDVD. Everyone else will shrug."
HDCP? Image Constraint Token?
The fact is that the DRM on high def discs has gone so far in terms of fear of copying that it has begun significantly affecting Joe Average consumer.
For example, all early adopters of HDTVs are screwed - Their sets don't do HDCP, and while so far no one has enabled the ICT, it's a monster looming on the horizon that everyone using an analog connection is worried about.
Even owners of new HDTVs are often screwed - there are numerous stories of failed HDCP handshakes resulting in people's brand new HDCP-capable HDTVs giving them a blank screen when they attempted to plug in .
Except that an airplane is an enclosed metal tube (essentially a waveguide), not free space.
The inverse square law doesn't apply in waveguides. Oh, and BTW, it's the inverse square law, not the inverse cube law.
Wave every mobile phone on the market around in every passenger portion of the plane, for every variant of every model they manufacture?
Because that's what it would take before their lawyers would sign off on it.
I'm not even sure if it is possible to region-lock a burned DVD.
Most likely there was something SERIOUSLY wrong with the way the DVD was burned, and the player got so confused that "Region Error" was the best error it could come up with (even though it was the wrong error.)
Most players just crash or hang in such situations. Some require a powercycle after trying to read a misformatted disc.
One error: DVD supports progressive video.
So 720x480 progressive vs. 1920x1080 progressive.
While that sounds like a huge difference, in reality for most users, it is not. While I can tell the difference between progressive DVDs and HD content, it's rare that the DVD isn't "good enough", and the difference is not that obvious. (For example, the DVD of "Dust to Glory" is very hard to distinguish from the HD version.)