For example - It later came out that a person whose ingame name was The Enslaver, a leader of one of the game's major alliances and one of the first 3-4 titan pilots in the game, had been hired as a GM. Let's face it, no matter how impartial a person might try to be, someone THAT connected to an alliance cannot be trusted not to subconsciously favor their alliance in any disputes that may involve it. Yes, The Enslaver left his leadership position in his alliance, but still, one's connection to an organization does not end after one retires from it. Like previously, CCP basically said, "It's OK, trust us, it'll be fine!". Suuuure...
FYI, a Titan is the largest and most expensive ship class in EVE, so expensive that less than ten have been built so far in the game, and the blueprints have been available for over six months.
Re:I can't feel any responsiveness improvements.
on
Gnome 2.18 Released
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· Score: 1
In addition to that, it seems like the Evolution team didn't do ANY regression testing of Palm synchronization between 1.x and 2.0 - The last time I used Evolution, it took me an hour to clean out all the dupe entries from my phone after just two syncs. (Every sync duped every single entry in the phone.)
"And that will either be another gauge that people will have to learn to watch or another idiot light that they will ignore and then their car will stop."
With modern engine control systems, it isn't too hard to back off the timing and the boost when the alcohol runs out.
They'll get a "low on alcohol" idiot light, and while their car will not stop, it will run like shit and they'll go get a refill.
"Again, WoW is making a bit over A BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR, not including box sales, and it only accounts for an estimated 50% of paid MMPORPG subscriptions out there." I'm betting someone will comment that this isn't pure profit (even remotely), and they would be right.
But in the context of this article, it's about competition for what is in gamers' wallets. In that regard, the biggest threat to retail PC games are not consoles, but subscription-based PC games.
There are a lot of people (including myself) who have *severely* cut back on retail gaming purchases (both console and PC) in favor of 1-2 MMOG subscriptions. Many are probably spending MORE money on PC gaming overall, just not in the areas that are easiest to track (retail channels).
It is true that you can't build a system yourself for much cheaper than an average prebuilt system, the fact is that you get what you pay for. Those prebuilts often have some serious corner-cutting (nonstandard power supply, motherboard, and/or case, substandard component quality, etc). With a "do it yourself" system, you know EXACTLY what you're getting.
Yes, it will be more expensive than a "typical" prebuilt of similar specs, but it will be far less than a "high-quality" prebuilt (Alienware, Dell XPS, etc. - and yes I do realize that even the "high-quality" prebuilts are going downhill now) which is what a homebuilt system usually competes with in terms of specifications and component quality.
Like the parent to my post, I the only prebuilts I buy any more are laptops. (The one exception is the PowerEdge SC430 I specced out for my father's file server, but that's because I didn't have the time to support him in assembling it/maintaining it. The PE430 is a pretty good deal anyway.)
I believe in this case, it's essentially "at the pilot's discretion". (With certain limits - some stuff is considered safety-critical and must pass extensive certification, other stuff not necessarily so.)
A general aviation pilot can even use non-aviation radio transmitters (There are a number of pilots who are also ham radio operators and have some VERY sophisticated multiband radio setups in their planes) in flight if they wish - they just take on legal liability for any negative effects of doing so.
The legal liability is why airlines (and their pilots) just blanket-ban everything, but this FDR is geared towards general aviation pilots.
"They're not locked out, they're reduced to a lower resolution. You can still watch them." Not if your video card is limited to digital output only.
Admittedly, display devices/video cards that have DVI but not VGA are rare, but the fact is that you have to essentially use a DIFFERENT output device to view HD-DVD or Blu-Ray content.
Even if it is the same video card and monitor, switching inputs and video card outputs just for your HD-DVDs is a massive PITA. I speak from experience here.
If I recall correctly, something along these lines was done in Japan (or other country generally considered to be "civilized"), although the level of stimulation used was extremely low (as in, not consciously perceptible, and easy enough to consciously override, but someone not putting much effort into walking straight would wind up curving left.)
I believe that rather than trying to use pain/pleasure to "nudge" a person, this particular approach involved skewing a person's sense of balance. Correcting the perceived (but not actual) "lean" would cause them to actually lean in the opposite direction, which would cause their path to curve slightly if attempting to walk straight.
I have a friend who had a number of seizures while in high school. While medication has allowed him to be seizure-free for over a decade, he still becomes sick in the presence of fluorescent lighting. If forced to be exposed to flourescents for extended periods of time he probably would have another seizure. The current state of things (fluorescent lighting in basically any place he might get a job) is bad enough, I can't think of what would happen if someone forced him to use fluorescent lighting at home.
On top of this, many people have claimed that P2P protocols comprise a large portion of Internet backbone traffic, and I wouldn't be surprised if it is 90%+ of many end-user ISP's upstream bandwidth.
P2P is a perfect candidate for multicast. Too bad that even 10-15 years after IP Multicast was developed, no one can figure out how to deploy it. (Admittedly, IP Multicast's design itself is largely to blame for this, but people have had over a decade to realize that IP Multicast didn't stand a chance and develop something better that DID stand a chance of getting deployed.)
Given that many of the biggest bandwidth hogs that are causing "steady state" bandwidth usage instead of "burst" bandwidth usage (like BitTorrent and streaming Internet radio) are inherently simultaneous point-to-multipoint, maybe it's time for ISPs to get their shit together and implement multicast?
If it still proves too hard to implement IP Multicast in its current form, maybe it's time to go back to the drawing board and try again? Since no one implements multicast anyway, it's not a big deal if the current IP Multicast scheme gets scrapped in favor of something that actually gets implemented.
Boom. Within a short time, P2P and streaming Internet radio use far less bandwidth (Once someone re-engineers to take advantage of multicast, which I guarantee someone would figure out the moment multicast became widespread.)
It doesn't help with stuff like YouTube, but YouTube could offer a "YouTube video feed" where the top videos of the day were pushed to the user's computer via multicast instead of unicast, reducing the demand for the videos downloaded the "old way" via unicast.
As others have mentioned, no. If it ever happens, it will probably be via Winelib or the Cedega variant of Winelib.
That said, unlike many MMO companies, I believe CCP actively cooperates with Transgaming to keep EVE and Cedega working (reasonably) well together. (I haven't tried it myself, although I really should. I've heard there are problems with running certain resolutions though.)
This is a good point. While the revamped character creation process with Revelations improved things greatly for the newest players, the fact is that there is still a huge gap between the "haves" and "have-nots", and due to the way things work, it is nearly impossible for existing "have-nots" to become "haves" without existing "haves" taking them under their wing. A new player has little chance whatsoever of getting into an alliance, and without an alliance, a player can't experience 0.0 at all. There's a HUGE brick wall at the 0.0 borders that prevents even experienced semi-casual players (i.e. those who actually go to work during the day like myself) from participating without excessive stress.
Even before POSes, 0.0 life was too stressful for many players (I quit the game for over a year because of it, and the burnout rate in the alliances seems incredible), and in the POS era it's even worse. The proposed changes to missions will make this barrier even worse - missions are how new players save up enough so they can afford the risks of loss in 0.0.
"However, what you say about CCP trying to cover up does not in any way correspond to what I've seen. Every single dev-blog the last month has mentioned this, they are trying to change some of the mechanics to prevent anything like this ever happening again, not to mention that they haven't deleted a single (coherent) post about this on THEIR OWN forums."
I can't believe how utterly inaccurate your statement is.
There have been a total of three dev blogs on the subject. One was t20's confession, one was Hellmar's post, one was from the new "internal affairs" guy.
Keep in mind that despite clear evidence of wrongdoing, t20 wasn't fired or even really punished for his actions.
Kugutsumen discovered quite a bit of evidence that t20 was not the only developer doing "shady" things in regards to BoD. CCP has not responded at all to this evidence other than deleting threads and banning users, including Kugutsumen. (Your claim that CCP has not deleted any posts is blatantly false - CCP was deleting threads and banning users right and left to try and cover things up.)
What about people with forms of photosensitivity that don't allow them to be around flickering lights?
I have a friend who had a few seizures back in high school. He has since been put on medicine and has been seizure-free for over a decade, but there is only so far the medicine can improve things for him - While he no longer has seizures, flickering lights (such as low-refresh-rate CRT monitors and fluorescent lights) make him *very* sick. The problem is so bad and fluorescents are so prevalent in corporate environments that he basically is unable to get a job. He can't even work as a cashier in a department store (in fact, that's the worst possible job for him - the cheapo fluorescents in such stores are especially hard on him.)
With this law, he would effectively be forced to use lighting that makes him sick even in his own home, one of the few sanctuaries he has from fluorescent lighting.
"Yes, I do have an ipod loaded to the gills with music, but to be frank, without Satellite, I wouldn't have any NEW content to keep me awake."
Exactly. Even a 30 gig MP3 collection can sometimes get boring if there is never anything new added.
How to find new stuff to add? Good question, and in my case, XM is the answer. Usually every time I drive somewhere in my car, by the time I'm home there's something new I want to get.
Where the hell did you get a 1 MHz channel spacing for FM?
The FM broadcast band I know has a 200 kHz channel spacing, admittedly with certain limitations on the geographic locations of transmitters on adjacent channels, but even if you left half of the allocated channels unused, that's a 400 kHz spacing, not 1 MHz.
"16-bit, 48kHz audio signal and modulated it with SSB, even if you couldn't do better than 1 bit per cycle, my quick back-of-a-napkin estimate is that you ought to be able to do it in a less than 120 kHz band (instead of 1 MHz for FM)"
If you limit yourself to 1 bit/second/Hz, then you get 120 kilobits/second in a 120 kHz channel.
You claim to somehow be able to fit 1.536 megabits/second (16 bits * 48 kHz * 2 channels for stereo) into 120 kHz and yet not exceed 1 bit/second/Hz??? What alternate reality are you living in?
Assuming approximately 3 bits/second/Hz (a realistic example of something achievable with broadcast SNRs - ATSC runs 19.2 megabits/sec over a 6 MHz channel for digital TV), then with a 120 kHz channel you could achieve (approximately) 360 kilobits/second for audio - which is a pretty decent bitrate for audio, but still compressed with lossy compression. I agree - Terrestrial FM needs to go in favor of something more spectrally efficient.
Satellite, on the other hand, is likely limited to only 1 bit/second/Hz or even less or so by the lower SNR - while the sats usually have clear LOS to the user, they ARE 22,000 miles away and have a relatively limited power supply compared to a terrestrial broadcast station that can easily pump out tens of kilowatts (FM) or hundreds (TV).
To be honest, I find the quality of XM to be quite good. If you're listening to XM and the quality is bad, there are a few possibilities: a) Your connection to your car's audio system is suboptimal. Not many vehicles have aux input, and both FM modulators and tape adapters suck in comparison. b) Your car's audio system itself is crap. XM sounds like shit in my main car, but that's because EVERYTHING sounds like shit in that car - I need a new headunit. c) You're listening to their Internet streams, which ARE at an absurdly low bitrate/quality.
Slashdot Mirror
For example - It later came out that a person whose ingame name was The Enslaver, a leader of one of the game's major alliances and one of the first 3-4 titan pilots in the game, had been hired as a GM. Let's face it, no matter how impartial a person might try to be, someone THAT connected to an alliance cannot be trusted not to subconsciously favor their alliance in any disputes that may involve it. Yes, The Enslaver left his leadership position in his alliance, but still, one's connection to an organization does not end after one retires from it. Like previously, CCP basically said, "It's OK, trust us, it'll be fine!". Suuuure...
FYI, a Titan is the largest and most expensive ship class in EVE, so expensive that less than ten have been built so far in the game, and the blueprints have been available for over six months.
In addition to that, it seems like the Evolution team didn't do ANY regression testing of Palm synchronization between 1.x and 2.0 - The last time I used Evolution, it took me an hour to clean out all the dupe entries from my phone after just two syncs. (Every sync duped every single entry in the phone.)
I almost reached 200 on my backend recently, but I had to reboot to install Xen and a Xen-compatible kernel.
:)
Gotta add that Trixbox PBX lovin'.
"And that will either be another gauge that people will have to learn to watch or another idiot light that they will ignore and then their car will stop."
With modern engine control systems, it isn't too hard to back off the timing and the boost when the alcohol runs out.
They'll get a "low on alcohol" idiot light, and while their car will not stop, it will run like shit and they'll go get a refill.
"Again, WoW is making a bit over A BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR, not including box sales, and it only accounts for an estimated 50% of paid MMPORPG subscriptions out there."
I'm betting someone will comment that this isn't pure profit (even remotely), and they would be right.
But in the context of this article, it's about competition for what is in gamers' wallets. In that regard, the biggest threat to retail PC games are not consoles, but subscription-based PC games.
There are a lot of people (including myself) who have *severely* cut back on retail gaming purchases (both console and PC) in favor of 1-2 MMOG subscriptions. Many are probably spending MORE money on PC gaming overall, just not in the areas that are easiest to track (retail channels).
It is true that you can't build a system yourself for much cheaper than an average prebuilt system, the fact is that you get what you pay for. Those prebuilts often have some serious corner-cutting (nonstandard power supply, motherboard, and/or case, substandard component quality, etc). With a "do it yourself" system, you know EXACTLY what you're getting.
Yes, it will be more expensive than a "typical" prebuilt of similar specs, but it will be far less than a "high-quality" prebuilt (Alienware, Dell XPS, etc. - and yes I do realize that even the "high-quality" prebuilts are going downhill now) which is what a homebuilt system usually competes with in terms of specifications and component quality.
Like the parent to my post, I the only prebuilts I buy any more are laptops. (The one exception is the PowerEdge SC430 I specced out for my father's file server, but that's because I didn't have the time to support him in assembling it/maintaining it. The PE430 is a pretty good deal anyway.)
I believe in this case, it's essentially "at the pilot's discretion". (With certain limits - some stuff is considered safety-critical and must pass extensive certification, other stuff not necessarily so.)
A general aviation pilot can even use non-aviation radio transmitters (There are a number of pilots who are also ham radio operators and have some VERY sophisticated multiband radio setups in their planes) in flight if they wish - they just take on legal liability for any negative effects of doing so.
The legal liability is why airlines (and their pilots) just blanket-ban everything, but this FDR is geared towards general aviation pilots.
Um, cheap? Pentium 3 CPUs aren't made any more, and will likely be extremely expensive if you can find one.
Also, even the fastest P3 can't play back HD without hardware acceleration, and the video hardware in the Xbox is likely not HD-capable.
"They're not locked out, they're reduced to a lower resolution. You can still watch them."
Not if your video card is limited to digital output only.
Admittedly, display devices/video cards that have DVI but not VGA are rare, but the fact is that you have to essentially use a DIFFERENT output device to view HD-DVD or Blu-Ray content.
Even if it is the same video card and monitor, switching inputs and video card outputs just for your HD-DVDs is a massive PITA. I speak from experience here.
If I recall correctly, something along these lines was done in Japan (or other country generally considered to be "civilized"), although the level of stimulation used was extremely low (as in, not consciously perceptible, and easy enough to consciously override, but someone not putting much effort into walking straight would wind up curving left.)
I believe that rather than trying to use pain/pleasure to "nudge" a person, this particular approach involved skewing a person's sense of balance. Correcting the perceived (but not actual) "lean" would cause them to actually lean in the opposite direction, which would cause their path to curve slightly if attempting to walk straight.
There is no way you can get an IBM T60P from the factory. Used yes, from the factory, no.
Maybe a (nearly) identical with (possibly) lower quality Lenovo T60P, but not an IBM T60P.
That's not the only place.
I have a friend who had a number of seizures while in high school. While medication has allowed him to be seizure-free for over a decade, he still becomes sick in the presence of fluorescent lighting. If forced to be exposed to flourescents for extended periods of time he probably would have another seizure. The current state of things (fluorescent lighting in basically any place he might get a job) is bad enough, I can't think of what would happen if someone forced him to use fluorescent lighting at home.
On top of this, many people have claimed that P2P protocols comprise a large portion of Internet backbone traffic, and I wouldn't be surprised if it is 90%+ of many end-user ISP's upstream bandwidth.
P2P is a perfect candidate for multicast. Too bad that even 10-15 years after IP Multicast was developed, no one can figure out how to deploy it. (Admittedly, IP Multicast's design itself is largely to blame for this, but people have had over a decade to realize that IP Multicast didn't stand a chance and develop something better that DID stand a chance of getting deployed.)
While you're at it, implement multicast and convince your peers to also do so please. :)
Given that many of the biggest bandwidth hogs that are causing "steady state" bandwidth usage instead of "burst" bandwidth usage (like BitTorrent and streaming Internet radio) are inherently simultaneous point-to-multipoint, maybe it's time for ISPs to get their shit together and implement multicast?
If it still proves too hard to implement IP Multicast in its current form, maybe it's time to go back to the drawing board and try again? Since no one implements multicast anyway, it's not a big deal if the current IP Multicast scheme gets scrapped in favor of something that actually gets implemented.
Boom. Within a short time, P2P and streaming Internet radio use far less bandwidth (Once someone re-engineers to take advantage of multicast, which I guarantee someone would figure out the moment multicast became widespread.)
It doesn't help with stuff like YouTube, but YouTube could offer a "YouTube video feed" where the top videos of the day were pushed to the user's computer via multicast instead of unicast, reducing the demand for the videos downloaded the "old way" via unicast.
Don't think that would cut it.
Add Bergen County, New Jersey and then I'd believe you.
A New Jersey politician (Brendan Byrne, I believe) once said, "When I die, I want to be buried in Bergen County so I can remain active in politics."
Hmm, may have been Essex County (which includes Newark) instead, not sure...
All your mod point are belong to us!
Well... not anymore...
So is yours.
As others have mentioned, no. If it ever happens, it will probably be via Winelib or the Cedega variant of Winelib.
That said, unlike many MMO companies, I believe CCP actively cooperates with Transgaming to keep EVE and Cedega working (reasonably) well together. (I haven't tried it myself, although I really should. I've heard there are problems with running certain resolutions though.)
This is a good point. While the revamped character creation process with Revelations improved things greatly for the newest players, the fact is that there is still a huge gap between the "haves" and "have-nots", and due to the way things work, it is nearly impossible for existing "have-nots" to become "haves" without existing "haves" taking them under their wing. A new player has little chance whatsoever of getting into an alliance, and without an alliance, a player can't experience 0.0 at all. There's a HUGE brick wall at the 0.0 borders that prevents even experienced semi-casual players (i.e. those who actually go to work during the day like myself) from participating without excessive stress.
Even before POSes, 0.0 life was too stressful for many players (I quit the game for over a year because of it, and the burnout rate in the alliances seems incredible), and in the POS era it's even worse. The proposed changes to missions will make this barrier even worse - missions are how new players save up enough so they can afford the risks of loss in 0.0.
"However, what you say about CCP trying to cover up does not in any way correspond to what I've seen. Every single dev-blog the last month has mentioned this, they are trying to change some of the mechanics to prevent anything like this ever happening again, not to mention that they haven't deleted a single (coherent) post about this on THEIR OWN forums."
I can't believe how utterly inaccurate your statement is.
There have been a total of three dev blogs on the subject. One was t20's confession, one was Hellmar's post, one was from the new "internal affairs" guy.
Keep in mind that despite clear evidence of wrongdoing, t20 wasn't fired or even really punished for his actions.
Kugutsumen discovered quite a bit of evidence that t20 was not the only developer doing "shady" things in regards to BoD. CCP has not responded at all to this evidence other than deleting threads and banning users, including Kugutsumen. (Your claim that CCP has not deleted any posts is blatantly false - CCP was deleting threads and banning users right and left to try and cover things up.)
What about people with forms of photosensitivity that don't allow them to be around flickering lights?
I have a friend who had a few seizures back in high school. He has since been put on medicine and has been seizure-free for over a decade, but there is only so far the medicine can improve things for him - While he no longer has seizures, flickering lights (such as low-refresh-rate CRT monitors and fluorescent lights) make him *very* sick. The problem is so bad and fluorescents are so prevalent in corporate environments that he basically is unable to get a job. He can't even work as a cashier in a department store (in fact, that's the worst possible job for him - the cheapo fluorescents in such stores are especially hard on him.)
With this law, he would effectively be forced to use lighting that makes him sick even in his own home, one of the few sanctuaries he has from fluorescent lighting.
"Yes, I do have an ipod loaded to the gills with music, but to be frank, without Satellite, I wouldn't have any NEW content to keep me awake."
:)
Exactly. Even a 30 gig MP3 collection can sometimes get boring if there is never anything new added.
How to find new stuff to add? Good question, and in my case, XM is the answer. Usually every time I drive somewhere in my car, by the time I'm home there's something new I want to get.
Which reminds me, I need to hunt a track down.
Where the hell did you get a 1 MHz channel spacing for FM?
The FM broadcast band I know has a 200 kHz channel spacing, admittedly with certain limitations on the geographic locations of transmitters on adjacent channels, but even if you left half of the allocated channels unused, that's a 400 kHz spacing, not 1 MHz.
"16-bit, 48kHz audio signal and modulated it with SSB, even if you couldn't do better than 1 bit per cycle, my quick back-of-a-napkin estimate is that you ought to be able to do it in a less than 120 kHz band (instead of 1 MHz for FM)"
If you limit yourself to 1 bit/second/Hz, then you get 120 kilobits/second in a 120 kHz channel.
You claim to somehow be able to fit 1.536 megabits/second (16 bits * 48 kHz * 2 channels for stereo) into 120 kHz and yet not exceed 1 bit/second/Hz??? What alternate reality are you living in?
Assuming approximately 3 bits/second/Hz (a realistic example of something achievable with broadcast SNRs - ATSC runs 19.2 megabits/sec over a 6 MHz channel for digital TV), then with a 120 kHz channel you could achieve (approximately) 360 kilobits/second for audio - which is a pretty decent bitrate for audio, but still compressed with lossy compression. I agree - Terrestrial FM needs to go in favor of something more spectrally efficient.
Satellite, on the other hand, is likely limited to only 1 bit/second/Hz or even less or so by the lower SNR - while the sats usually have clear LOS to the user, they ARE 22,000 miles away and have a relatively limited power supply compared to a terrestrial broadcast station that can easily pump out tens of kilowatts (FM) or hundreds (TV).
To be honest, I find the quality of XM to be quite good. If you're listening to XM and the quality is bad, there are a few possibilities:
a) Your connection to your car's audio system is suboptimal. Not many vehicles have aux input, and both FM modulators and tape adapters suck in comparison.
b) Your car's audio system itself is crap. XM sounds like shit in my main car, but that's because EVERYTHING sounds like shit in that car - I need a new headunit.
c) You're listening to their Internet streams, which ARE at an absurdly low bitrate/quality.