Perhaps instead we could have the orcs replaced later by, say, goblins? But again, no real progress is made: ultimately no real change occurs. If it did, it would ruin the game for the next generation.
true. but if you expelled the orcs, you would have the problem of young elves having to go furthur from home to kill things and gain experience. that opens up new story lines for new players who weren't around for the defeating of the orcs. the world would have to be dynamic, such that if you clear the orc area, elves would move and start a village with merchants or something. this village would be a distance from the main city and be very prone to attacks. so instead of you having to go to the orc village, the orcs come to you trying to take back their land. with no protection of the city, you are forced to group and defend, if you fail, others continually fail, or the area is neglected by newbie elves, orcs eventually take the land back. it doesn't have to be limited to 2 areas interacting, it could be more.
change only ruins the game for the next generation if the change isn't suitably dynamic, or the developers aren't constantly working.
A problem could occur where the areas are always secured and the world became too tame. Then you would just need a suitably large horde of baddies to attack for a long enough time. or people would get bored of hanging around a secure area leaving it exposed, allowing the baddies a window of opportunity to take it back. Though it raises the issue of how long does an area have to be cleared of baddies before it is considered secure, and how do you determine that the enemy has taken it back under their control? If the area is strategically important enough for the enemy, it could lead to higher level monsters comming in to organize the orcs. say in EQ, Dvinn in Crushbone calls up some inkies to go to the orc hill in Gfay and Gfay has a bigger fight on it's hands.
Another problem would be a bored high level player comming in to clear the area with a swing of a sword. It would ruin the realism i think, and can't really be eliminated.
meh, i havn't played EQ in years. the static content bored me, it had promise, but fell short. implementing dynamic worlds is a big undertaking though (that's an understatement).
Re:I don't let my Washing Machine use the phone
on
Planet Broadband
·
· Score: 1
my bosses have not asked me to be available after normal work hours *yet*. when they do, I will say no outright. If they persist, i will ask for some rediculous amount of compensation for it. if they happen to agree and (not fire me;) i will demand a company cell phone, company paid for computer and net access.
i get paid peanuts as it is, 32k before taxes, and live in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country. My free time is more valuable to me than they can afford. If I have to give up some of this time, it will be only on my terms. Thankfully I have some leverage at the place.
Re:I don't let my Washing Machine use the phone
on
Planet Broadband
·
· Score: 1
if anything, a washing machine should open a repair manual on a monitor someplace in the house saying "here is what is broke, this is what you need to fix it. and by the way, I ate 3 more left socks."
Personally, I'm working on a system for generating plot-rich city histories (via personality and relationship modeling). My goal is to get to a point where one could plop down a new town, set some parameters, and "age" the town n years (and get sensible personal relationships, family trees, interesting local history, street layouts, etc).
by the way, i like this idea a lot. my first thought was, what if there was a dragon raid at some point, or bandit raids every so often. it's a great way to spread people and items around the world. say they hit up a blacksmith and take some of his better weapons. or the blacksmith is killed, so this city loses it's main forge and has to strike up trade deals with neighbors, bringing in a wider range of items or corruption. or this town develops better weapons since they are always being harassed.
i'd become addicted to generating towns and walking through them to see what the parameters did, like a fractal... just keep tweaking and zooming in.
a problem i see is that players all want equal opportunity to do the things they see others doing. so if you have one player at level 10 getting some quest because he did something at level 3 to decide that plot, his friend also at level 10 won't be able to do that cool quest and get that cool item because at level 3 he was busy hunting bumblebees or something. Maybe the bumblebee hunter will get some quest that is comparable somehow, but he will still want to do what his friend did.
Like in a 1 player game, you almost always want to explore every area, flip every switch, push every stone, and kill all the chickens just to find that one hidden gem. Players want to do that in MMORPGS as well. atleast i did. I spent hours playing EQ a few years back exploring places that people had left vacant after several expansions, just to see what the developers had put there. I was a late commer to EQ. Then I became too disappointed too often, then the guild i was in disbanded so I quit (after making some newb woodelves very happy with a lot of equipment)
MMO games are very interesting to me. I had an idea for a free roaming free-will kind of game about 12 years ago when i was just a kid watching demos from the BBS scene. I've always wanted to be part of creating such a world. So after forgetting what point I wanted to make, now i'm off to read the publications you linked to.
To add to that, the general web browsing community doesn't need to know the difference, only developers. Whereas with MP3/OOG, the end user has to make a conscious decision to encode in one or the other.
actually, the seeing it a few times in the theater is atleast justifiable to some degree if you can afford it. What you do with your money is your perogative... mostly.
what I don't understand is buying the regular DVD when you know you will be buying the extended edition later on.
I downloaded The Return of the King before it came out on DVD. But I also saw the movie in the theater opening day and three other times after that, plus bought the DVD the day it came out, plus I will buy the Extended Edition DVD the day it comes out as well. But I bet their statistics say they lost money from me downloading it when in fact they have gotten more money from me than the average-joe movie goer who doesn't even know how to click a mouse.
sucker.
can't you hold off for a couple months? talk about instant gratification problems. like the other 2, i saw it once in the theatre, and have/will buy the extended DVD. why line their pockets with 4 times as much money?
Re:For a second (no pun intended) there...
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 1
I thought this was going to be an article about overclocking your wristwatch.
but if you did, how would you know how much faster it is? at best, you'll end up with a broken watch because then it means you have to do something different next time to succeed, ie, you'v elearned something. At worst, you've tried and been unable to conclude that your watch is faster (thus wasting time!), since measuring your watches speed with your overclocked watch would show it's as fast as before but no faster.
in summation, overclocking watches should be left as a theoretical study of hamsters in spacesuits.
Fun and misinformation, all roled into one! 10 years from now, a highschool kid will be researching finland and find a juicy tidbit on how thier primary export is free software written by one solitary penguin monk who hasn't uttered a peep in 30 years. and never touches a text editor, he manually flips bits with his flippers.
Re:What are we reviewing here? Book or license?
on
Lysergically Yours
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
well, because you can now read it and say, "hey this sucks. But just barely. If i were to change this part and this part... add a giant robot here, it would actually be a really good story." Then rewrite those parts, keeping all the rest original, rename it, and not be sued for plagerism or anything else.
or i could just say "...and what's better" is a common phrase also meaning "hey, there's more value here that you might not have noticed"./. has to stop taking everything so literally
With respect to logical reasoning maybe? With repsect to scientific methods? taking the sentence out of context opens up a can of worms. leave it in context.
Take a look at our (U.S.) president. "Being a former oil tycoon and son of a former president, surely he knows what's good for his country."
I'd much rather trust a scientist, almost regardless of what type of scientist.
but seriously, to get back on topic, what would you rather use to chain your bike up. a chain that you can inspect only the links that lock together, or all of the links to make sure the chain is strong enough?
"Mars Attacks" aliens prefered AAC. Don't you remember them running around saying "Aac! Aaac aac aac!"
They were initially on a peacefull mission to exapand our digital audio encoding software. it went all wrong, some would say horribly. The use of Analog playback devices were used to destroy them.
wrong. the Subject line of the parent could be correct, but your statement is wrong. It very well could be a design issue, thus it's not a bug. A correctly implemented design issue is not a bug. However a properly (or improperly) implemented design decision can very well lead to a vulnerability. I see no difference between a vulnerability and "Maybe a 'feature that can be used to trick users.'"
This should be on the front page, not hidden back in developers, if only to make blind followers of $MY_ALTERNATIVE_BROWSER realize that they too are vulnerable, and not just MS.
and now to complete the troll: Slashdot editors never argued that they were fair and just in reporting, so why should this be on the front page?
The following browsers are not affected: * Mozilla Firefox 0.9 for Windows * Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 for Windows * Mozilla 1.7 for Windows * Mozilla 1.7 for Linux
interesting. what about 0.9x for Linux? it's not explicitly listed as confirmed.
Encrpytion is computationally expensive and the average end user doesn't see the need for it
computationally expensive doesn't mean that the end user would notice. they hit send, the message sits in their "outbox" for a second while it is encrypted, then it's sent out. while it's sitting there, they user is free to go about their business.
i also imagine that thousands upon thousands of packets would make up one conversation. the router probably only has a handfull of these in RAM at a time, so the person who has snooped this conversation would have to make an effort to aggregate all of the packets one at a time and reconstruct the conversation. so the whole message wasn't in RAM (which seems to be the turning point of the ruling). If you gather these packets and reconstruct the conversation, your also breaking laws which demand that all parties involved in a recorded phone conversation be notified that the conversation is being recorded. (maybe this falls under some section of the wiretap laws...)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps instead we could have the orcs replaced later by, say, goblins? But again, no real progress is made: ultimately no real change occurs. If it did, it would ruin the game for the next generation.
true. but if you expelled the orcs, you would have the problem of young elves having to go furthur from home to kill things and gain experience. that opens up new story lines for new players who weren't around for the defeating of the orcs. the world would have to be dynamic, such that if you clear the orc area, elves would move and start a village with merchants or something. this village would be a distance from the main city and be very prone to attacks. so instead of you having to go to the orc village, the orcs come to you trying to take back their land. with no protection of the city, you are forced to group and defend, if you fail, others continually fail, or the area is neglected by newbie elves, orcs eventually take the land back. it doesn't have to be limited to 2 areas interacting, it could be more.
change only ruins the game for the next generation if the change isn't suitably dynamic, or the developers aren't constantly working.
A problem could occur where the areas are always secured and the world became too tame. Then you would just need a suitably large horde of baddies to attack for a long enough time. or people would get bored of hanging around a secure area leaving it exposed, allowing the baddies a window of opportunity to take it back. Though it raises the issue of how long does an area have to be cleared of baddies before it is considered secure, and how do you determine that the enemy has taken it back under their control? If the area is strategically important enough for the enemy, it could lead to higher level monsters comming in to organize the orcs. say in EQ, Dvinn in Crushbone calls up some inkies to go to the orc hill in Gfay and Gfay has a bigger fight on it's hands.
Another problem would be a bored high level player comming in to clear the area with a swing of a sword. It would ruin the realism i think, and can't really be eliminated.
meh, i havn't played EQ in years. the static content bored me, it had promise, but fell short. implementing dynamic worlds is a big undertaking though (that's an understatement).
There are left and right socks?
depends which sock you put on first.
my bosses have not asked me to be available after normal work hours *yet*. when they do, I will say no outright. If they persist, i will ask for some rediculous amount of compensation for it. if they happen to agree and (not fire me ;) i will demand a company cell phone, company paid for computer and net access.
i get paid peanuts as it is, 32k before taxes, and live in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country. My free time is more valuable to me than they can afford. If I have to give up some of this time, it will be only on my terms. Thankfully I have some leverage at the place.
if anything, a washing machine should open a repair manual on a monitor someplace in the house saying "here is what is broke, this is what you need to fix it. and by the way, I ate 3 more left socks."
Personally, I'm working on a system for generating plot-rich city histories (via personality and relationship modeling). My goal is to get to a point where one could plop down a new town, set some parameters, and "age" the town n years (and get sensible personal relationships, family trees, interesting local history, street layouts, etc).
by the way, i like this idea a lot. my first thought was, what if there was a dragon raid at some point, or bandit raids every so often. it's a great way to spread people and items around the world. say they hit up a blacksmith and take some of his better weapons. or the blacksmith is killed, so this city loses it's main forge and has to strike up trade deals with neighbors, bringing in a wider range of items or corruption. or this town develops better weapons since they are always being harassed.
i'd become addicted to generating towns and walking through them to see what the parameters did, like a fractal... just keep tweaking and zooming in.
a problem i see is that players all want equal opportunity to do the things they see others doing. so if you have one player at level 10 getting some quest because he did something at level 3 to decide that plot, his friend also at level 10 won't be able to do that cool quest and get that cool item because at level 3 he was busy hunting bumblebees or something. Maybe the bumblebee hunter will get some quest that is comparable somehow, but he will still want to do what his friend did.
Like in a 1 player game, you almost always want to explore every area, flip every switch, push every stone, and kill all the chickens just to find that one hidden gem. Players want to do that in MMORPGS as well. atleast i did. I spent hours playing EQ a few years back exploring places that people had left vacant after several expansions, just to see what the developers had put there. I was a late commer to EQ. Then I became too disappointed too often, then the guild i was in disbanded so I quit (after making some newb woodelves very happy with a lot of equipment)
MMO games are very interesting to me. I had an idea for a free roaming free-will kind of game about 12 years ago when i was just a kid watching demos from the BBS scene. I've always wanted to be part of creating such a world. So after forgetting what point I wanted to make, now i'm off to read the publications you linked to.
To add to that, the general web browsing community doesn't need to know the difference, only developers. Whereas with MP3/OOG, the end user has to make a conscious decision to encode in one or the other.
actually, the seeing it a few times in the theater is atleast justifiable to some degree if you can afford it. What you do with your money is your perogative... mostly.
what I don't understand is buying the regular DVD when you know you will be buying the extended edition later on.
I downloaded The Return of the King before it came out on DVD. But I also saw the movie in the theater opening day and three other times after that, plus bought the DVD the day it came out, plus I will buy the Extended Edition DVD the day it comes out as well. But I bet their statistics say they lost money from me downloading it when in fact they have gotten more money from me than the average-joe movie goer who doesn't even know how to click a mouse.
sucker.
can't you hold off for a couple months? talk about instant gratification problems. like the other 2, i saw it once in the theatre, and have/will buy the extended DVD. why line their pockets with 4 times as much money?
I thought this was going to be an article about overclocking your wristwatch.
but if you did, how would you know how much faster it is? at best, you'll end up with a broken watch because then it means you have to do something different next time to succeed, ie, you'v elearned something. At worst, you've tried and been unable to conclude that your watch is faster (thus wasting time!), since measuring your watches speed with your overclocked watch would show it's as fast as before but no faster.
in summation, overclocking watches should be left as a theoretical study of hamsters in spacesuits.
nicking my, now ex, girlfriend :)
someone define "nicking" for the, um... curiously imaginative.
Fun and misinformation, all roled into one! 10 years from now, a highschool kid will be researching finland and find a juicy tidbit on how thier primary export is free software written by one solitary penguin monk who hasn't uttered a peep in 30 years. and never touches a text editor, he manually flips bits with his flippers.
well, because you can now read it and say, "hey this sucks. But just barely. If i were to change this part and this part... add a giant robot here, it would actually be a really good story." Then rewrite those parts, keeping all the rest original, rename it, and not be sued for plagerism or anything else.
/. has to stop taking everything so literally
or i could just say "...and what's better" is a common phrase also meaning "hey, there's more value here that you might not have noticed".
With respect to logical reasoning maybe? With repsect to scientific methods? taking the sentence out of context opens up a can of worms. leave it in context.
Take a look at our (U.S.) president. "Being a former oil tycoon and son of a former president, surely he knows what's good for his country."
I'd much rather trust a scientist, almost regardless of what type of scientist.
but seriously, to get back on topic, what would you rather use to chain your bike up. a chain that you can inspect only the links that lock together, or all of the links to make sure the chain is strong enough?
6) SGI is dying
what is this SGI thing, leetspeak for BSD?
Now, how many fingers?
i think the correct question, appropriate for a "news for nerds" site is "How many lights are there?"
"Mars Attacks" aliens prefered AAC. Don't you remember them running around saying "Aac! Aaac aac aac!"
They were initially on a peacefull mission to exapand our digital audio encoding software. it went all wrong, some would say horribly. The use of Analog playback devices were used to destroy them.
yes, I do mean Rigel IV
See! BSD is dying!!
/. article next year! oh happy days!
i can't wait for the
Yeah, I'd hardly call this a vulnerability.
wrong. the Subject line of the parent could be correct, but your statement is wrong. It very well could be a design issue, thus it's not a bug. A correctly implemented design issue is not a bug. However a properly (or improperly) implemented design decision can very well lead to a vulnerability. I see no difference between a vulnerability and "Maybe a 'feature that can be used to trick users.'"
This should be on the front page, not hidden back in developers, if only to make blind followers of $MY_ALTERNATIVE_BROWSER realize that they too are vulnerable, and not just MS.
and now to complete the troll: Slashdot editors never argued that they were fair and just in reporting, so why should this be on the front page?
The following browsers are not affected:
* Mozilla Firefox 0.9 for Windows
* Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 for Windows
* Mozilla 1.7 for Windows
* Mozilla 1.7 for Linux
interesting. what about 0.9x for Linux? it's not explicitly listed as confirmed.
unless you were required to encrypt it with their key as well.
just hypothetical, you never know what regulations they'll think of next.
ask someone at a shopping mall, "Do you use email, if so, do you think it's private?"
so to answer your questions in order, plenty long, not enough, and not enough.
Encrpytion is computationally expensive and the average end user doesn't see the need for it
computationally expensive doesn't mean that the end user would notice. they hit send, the message sits in their "outbox" for a second while it is encrypted, then it's sent out. while it's sitting there, they user is free to go about their business.
not understanding the need for it is a different story. i think that's why the ACM publishes a Code of Ethics (see section 2.7)
i also imagine that thousands upon thousands of packets would make up one conversation. the router probably only has a handfull of these in RAM at a time, so the person who has snooped this conversation would have to make an effort to aggregate all of the packets one at a time and reconstruct the conversation. so the whole message wasn't in RAM (which seems to be the turning point of the ruling). If you gather these packets and reconstruct the conversation, your also breaking laws which demand that all parties involved in a recorded phone conversation be notified that the conversation is being recorded. (maybe this falls under some section of the wiretap laws...)