My friends and I have found several places that you're not really supposed to go to in Silkroad Online. These are mostly accessed through small invisible holes in a wall or bridge or similar.
- in Jangan, there is a river to the north. My guild used to go under the water to do Pandora's Box parties and the like where we wouldn't be disturbed.
- In Jangan, the mountains to the south can be climbed. There's nothing up there, but you can climb around up there to the edge of the map.
- In Hotan, if you run into the south bridge just right, you can go under the river that circles around the city.
- in Karakoram, there's a tunnel that leads to Takla Makaan (Dark Caves I think). There's a spot in the wall of the cave you can walk through if you do it right, and you'll end up on top of the mountains that the cave goes through. I'm told there's a good amount of land to explore there, just not really anything to do there.
- West of Samarkand at the ampitheater, you can walk under the theater... and get stuck.
I haven't personally suggested it, but I've been told it's been brought up before, and something about the IT department not having it in their budget to do overtime (department is pretty much all contracted out).
I'm not sure I buy it considering these patches should be able to be scheduled. Admin sets up the schedule in the afternoon before he goes home, and it runs overnight on it's own.
I wouldn't mind having the devs on our own subnet. Not that I have the ability to make that call though.
That's nothing. I used to play an MMO where several, or many, characters stand in each of the 5 towns shouting advertisements. Literally hundreds of bot characters clog up the 37 servers running all over the map killing mobs for gold that they sell on external websites to other players in the game. The company sells premium tickets so users can get priority access to log into "full" servers. You have to actually log in with a character in order to buy the premium ticket that allows you to log in with priority access... so new players don't have much luck. The company has a supposed "war on bots", but their GMs have been essentially extinct in the past 2 or 3 years. They used to publish lists of 30,000 banned bots every few weeks across all servers, but now we're lucky to see a few hundred or thousand banned every few months.
I'm a programmer where I work and I would tend to agree that programmers are lower maintenance for IT departments. However, often times it seems our IT department goes out of their way to make our programming jobs harder. The IT department pushes patches out on the network every Wednesday, often requiring a forced reboot. These are always done during the day at random times between about 10 and 3. Sometimes they pop up a 15-minute warning on our computers about a pending push, warning us to save our work. Often times that 15-minute warning doesn't work. The patching begins immediately and the computer is forced to shut down.
The programmers on my team have Admin rights on our local workstations, so we can abort the shutdown, and disable the Windows Update service, but the service gets restarted shortly thereafter, and sometimes the shutdown abort doesn't work out. Those 15-minute warnings are alright - when they work - but it's frustrating when you have a large project compiling for a while, and while you are at a meeting, or stepped away to work on something else, your system reboots. I've lost count of the number of times that I'd be working on something, having several windows open across my dual display, and suddenly all the open windows start flashing, grabbing focus, closing one by one, and the reboot starts - often without warning.
I guess I could disconnect from the network when I don't want to be disturbed, but then if they are unable to apply a patch, my workstation may be flagged non-compliant and booted off the domain until it is brought back into compliance. Seems it would be so much better if these patches were applied over night when no one is using the system.
Perhaps the answer to reaching the next star is not trying to cover that distance at a higher rate of speed, but lowering the effective distance between us.
What about the kid who plays Mike Tyson's Punchout (original Nintendo) all day long, every day? Is he going to translate that to real life and start punching people whenever ropes get strung up around 4 posts he happens to be standing between?
I used to play a bit of River City Ransom on Nintendo years ago, where you punch and kick the bad guys, cut them with knives, throw bats at them, etc, to save the girl at the end of the game. That hasn't translated to real life.
Sure the game in TFA is creepy to most people, but so is scat porn. People who are mentally disturbed enough to try it in real life aren't going to be influenced even more by the existance of a game. GTA shouldn't be banned for potentially causing people to murder anymore than Punchout should be banned for potentially causing people to punch other people out. Why not just handle the people that actually do commit those crimes? Perhaps provide education as well?
How much do artists, say songwriters for example, actually get paid out of the total revenue for distribution of their CDs? How much to the recording companies get?
I think if it wasn't for the Internet, and for all of this 'theft' and piracy, these artists wouldn't be as widely known. Musicians can still tour around the world doing live concerts to make money. I'm sure there are thousands of bands, songwriters, movie directors out there that a lot of us know nothing about. If we happen to see their stuff on the Internet and download (or "steal") it, we may find we like it a lot and want to go see them live, or want to go buy an official branded CD or DVD.
All this piracy and "stealing" isn't preventing people from purchasing music or movies. If anything, it's exposing more people to the content and potentially increasing the number of people who will buy. The ones that don't buy probably wouldn't have bought the content in the first place.
I agree these games need more skill instead of just using your most powerful skills to do the most damage to every opponent every time. It should be possible to use even a weak skill, at precisely the right time, to take someone down.
I was just thinking of something that might be interesting in MMORPGs regarding PVP, possibly. What about putting in some kind of (minor?) weakness into the characters? This can be randomized somewhat so not every wizard has the same fault, or not every warlock or swordsman has the same flaw.
I'm not sure how well that would work out, but it could potentially give lower level players a chance against higher level players if they can find that weakness. Players can train themselves in a certain way to help fix that weakness, but it might create another one.
The chances of your wife being 'deeply beautiful' are almost nil. So yes you are sucking up to your wife. And no men don't gradually find girls they live with to be more and more attractive over time. On the other hand, women find men they like to be more attractive than they really are.
To me, and I'm sure also a lot of men (and women) out there, 'attractiveness' is more than just physical. Personality can also play a key role in attractiveness. I may find a "perfect 10" woman, but if she has no personality, some of that attractiveness is lost.
Women find men to be as attractive as those men are [b]to that woman[/b].
My first time using Linux was to host a MySQL database for an application I was developing for a previous employer.
Before then, I've never used Linux before, but I did have a Unix account in college. I really just used that to log in and run 'pine' to check my email. I learned a few little commands like 'cd' and 'ls'.
The original app from that job was just an MS Access database, but I ended up writing a front end in Visual Basic 6.0 and then migrating the DB from Access to MySQL. Instead of hosting MySQL on Windows, I thought I'd try out this new Linux thing, Mandrake 9.0 at the time.
So I was the lead developer for the project, DB admin, and server admin for the box.:)
The main problem with linux desktop usage is that all the games are made for Windows
What about this list of the Top 25 Linux Games for 2008? There's a nice variety of games on that list from different genres.
I haven't played them all, but I have a few installed on my Gentoo system at home.
I'm sure there are other decent/good Linux games out there as well. You can also bring some Windows games to Linux via WINE. There are some popular games on their Top 10 Platinum List and the Top 10 Gold List (scroll down past Platinum) on the WINE appdb site including World of Warcraft, Eve Online, Guild Wars, Counter Strike: Source, Silkroad Online, Half-Life 2, and others.
So it's not like gaming on Linux is non-existant. It's much more than just simple games like kbounce or kasteroids, kminesweeper or the other 10+ mini-games (like Solitare on Windows) that come with the OS.
When a tax is levied on a corporation, it is paid by one of two groups of individuals: its shareholders, or its customers.
Well I guess the government can make all corporations tax exempt. Then the corporations will lower their prices on goods and services right? They won't have to 'pass the tax burden' on to customers.
Then government can raise the income tax to make up for this, and we as individuals will be able to pay it since we're not paying corporate sales tax anymore.
Come to think of it, does it even make sense to tax corporations? They'll just 'pass the burden' onto customers. Individuals should pay their fair share of taxes according to their income. Loopholes shouldn't even exist in laws that allow multi-billionaires with their high-paid lawyers to help them 'cheat' on their taxes.
Agreed. I had a math professor in college who taught calculus, statistics, discrete math, among other classes. He is a brilliant mathematician, I'll give him that, but he had a hard time "coming down to" the students' level some times. Meaning, he had a hard time explaining the concepts in a way that the students would understand.
For example, in one Discrete Math semester, this professor wrote the book that the students were using. Every single student in his class was failing. So the professor wrote "Chapter Zero" in attempt to explain the core concepts more clearly to help the students. It didn't help much.
He knew his stuff, but just couldn't seem to share that knowledge with the students very well.
I don't think it's always about trying to cut education funding.
There was a teacher back when I went to high school who taught some form of history class. I've talked to many fellow students who had him and they report that all he ever did was put a movie up for the class, and sleep in the back. There may have been a few days a year that he actually taught anything, and even then there wasn't much to his teaching. Should he be allowed to continue wasting the students' time?
Maybe the answer shouldn't always be "let's fire the bad teacher". Maybe this teacher in question was bored with teaching history, perhaps it wasn't his specialty but the administration forced him into it? In that case, he should be given the opportunity to teach something else. I don't know the situation really as I never had him personally as a teacher, but it seems like a problem when teachers are allowed to just sleep in the back while their students watch movies every day.
I received an email a while back about a Linux Test Drive website that seemed interesting. The site appears to be gone now (Linux Test Drive) but some information about it can be found here.
It sounded like a pretty good idea anyway. Perhaps have a Linux commercial, like the Freedom one from the contest, and pop up a link to this testdrive site at the end so the person seeing the ad can get some help picking out a Linux that works for them.
You are totally off, installing MSOffice Photoshop and WoW are very common occurrences on OSX. If linux where supported at the same level by developers then it would be more than a sandbox for nerds.
Well I did get marked 4,Informative for my post (doesn't seem to happen too often for me;) ). So I guess at least some people agree with me.
Granted, I've never used a Mac before, except for old Macintosh systems back in the late 80's or early 90's. I understand a lot of Mac users will install apps like MSOffice, Photoshop, and WoW according to your post. Are these applications actually ported to the Mac? I would assume so.
Again, why would someone try to install a Windows application in Linux? I'm sure gamers out there don't try to play their Xbox 360 games on a Nintendo Gamecube. If you buy a box for Halo 3 and it says Xbox 360 on it, you wouldn't try to play it on a Dreamcast. If you buy an app that says "Mac" on the box, but not "Windows" you probably wouldn't try to install it in Vista. I realize there aren't many (if any) Linux applications sold at retail stores, but if someone buys MS Office and it says "Windows and Mac" on it, they should know that Linux isn't Windows, and Linux isn't Mac OS X.
Although they might be pleased to know that even though that nice new application they bought won't work natively in Linux, it might just work fine in wine under Linux:)
Yes, but when the average consumer is looking to buy something online, do they search for it on a search engine, or in the 'search' box of their favorite store's website? There are plenty of 'Linux' search results on Walmart.com for various Linux books that have CDs and/or DVDs, some of which are for OpenSUSE or Fedora.
My wife barely knows what Linux is, other than seeing me using that 'weird thing she knows nothing about', but when she shops online, she goes to specific store websites, generally not to google.
I do understand what you are saying. People don't even know what Linux is, but isn't that the point of advertising? These ads can tell people what Linux is. Granted, a lot of people probably don't even know what Windows is. They might know that there's this Windows XP or Windows Vista logo that comes up on their screen, but just know that it's what's running on their computer. We can tell them that there are many other alternatives out there if they are looking for a change.
When the average consumer sees any product on TV that they never heard of before, but looks interesting, what can they do? Search for it. They can see if it's in their favorite brick and mortar store, or go online.
People can't just walk into a store and buy that Linux thing they saw an ad for on TV. However, one can get Linux online. I'm not just talking about going to distrowatch or any of the distribution's websites. A search for "Linux" on walmart.com (hey a lot of non-tech savvy people shop at Walmart) returns a list of Linux books, several of which come with CDs or DVDs for Fedora or OpenSUSE or others.
Might be nice to have various Linux distros come with wine preinstalled, or at least an option in the installation. Then those.exe files would work, as long as they're supported in wine's appdb (a lot of them are). Wine could be configured so that if it executes an.exe file that fails to install, it could prompt the user with a nice error message telling them that the software is not compatible. Perhaps it could recommend alternatives (and offer to install those)
I'm sure that's easier said than done. I can already see some issues with it, but it could be a 'nice to have' up front anyway.
Then again, that would make it easier for Joe Sixpack to run around installing BritneySpearsPics.exe on all their Linux boxes.:-P
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Maybe this is a sign that Microsoft is giving up on operating systems development and moving into the fashion industry.
My friends and I have found several places that you're not really supposed to go to in Silkroad Online. These are mostly accessed through small invisible holes in a wall or bridge or similar.
- in Jangan, there is a river to the north. My guild used to go under the water to do Pandora's Box parties and the like where we wouldn't be disturbed.
- In Jangan, the mountains to the south can be climbed. There's nothing up there, but you can climb around up there to the edge of the map.
- In Hotan, if you run into the south bridge just right, you can go under the river that circles around the city.
- in Karakoram, there's a tunnel that leads to Takla Makaan (Dark Caves I think). There's a spot in the wall of the cave you can walk through if you do it right, and you'll end up on top of the mountains that the cave goes through. I'm told there's a good amount of land to explore there, just not really anything to do there.
- West of Samarkand at the ampitheater, you can walk under the theater... and get stuck.
Anyone know of any others?
I haven't personally suggested it, but I've been told it's been brought up before, and something about the IT department not having it in their budget to do overtime (department is pretty much all contracted out).
I'm not sure I buy it considering these patches should be able to be scheduled. Admin sets up the schedule in the afternoon before he goes home, and it runs overnight on it's own.
I wouldn't mind having the devs on our own subnet. Not that I have the ability to make that call though.
That's nothing. I used to play an MMO where several, or many, characters stand in each of the 5 towns shouting advertisements. Literally hundreds of bot characters clog up the 37 servers running all over the map killing mobs for gold that they sell on external websites to other players in the game. The company sells premium tickets so users can get priority access to log into "full" servers. You have to actually log in with a character in order to buy the premium ticket that allows you to log in with priority access... so new players don't have much luck. The company has a supposed "war on bots", but their GMs have been essentially extinct in the past 2 or 3 years. They used to publish lists of 30,000 banned bots every few weeks across all servers, but now we're lucky to see a few hundred or thousand banned every few months.
But hey, it's a free game. :)
I'm a programmer where I work and I would tend to agree that programmers are lower maintenance for IT departments. However, often times it seems our IT department goes out of their way to make our programming jobs harder. The IT department pushes patches out on the network every Wednesday, often requiring a forced reboot. These are always done during the day at random times between about 10 and 3. Sometimes they pop up a 15-minute warning on our computers about a pending push, warning us to save our work. Often times that 15-minute warning doesn't work. The patching begins immediately and the computer is forced to shut down.
The programmers on my team have Admin rights on our local workstations, so we can abort the shutdown, and disable the Windows Update service, but the service gets restarted shortly thereafter, and sometimes the shutdown abort doesn't work out. Those 15-minute warnings are alright - when they work - but it's frustrating when you have a large project compiling for a while, and while you are at a meeting, or stepped away to work on something else, your system reboots. I've lost count of the number of times that I'd be working on something, having several windows open across my dual display, and suddenly all the open windows start flashing, grabbing focus, closing one by one, and the reboot starts - often without warning.
I guess I could disconnect from the network when I don't want to be disturbed, but then if they are unable to apply a patch, my workstation may be flagged non-compliant and booted off the domain until it is brought back into compliance. Seems it would be so much better if these patches were applied over night when no one is using the system.
Perhaps the answer to reaching the next star is not trying to cover that distance at a higher rate of speed, but lowering the effective distance between us.
What about the kid who plays Mike Tyson's Punchout (original Nintendo) all day long, every day? Is he going to translate that to real life and start punching people whenever ropes get strung up around 4 posts he happens to be standing between?
I used to play a bit of River City Ransom on Nintendo years ago, where you punch and kick the bad guys, cut them with knives, throw bats at them, etc, to save the girl at the end of the game. That hasn't translated to real life.
Sure the game in TFA is creepy to most people, but so is scat porn. People who are mentally disturbed enough to try it in real life aren't going to be influenced even more by the existance of a game. GTA shouldn't be banned for potentially causing people to murder anymore than Punchout should be banned for potentially causing people to punch other people out. Why not just handle the people that actually do commit those crimes? Perhaps provide education as well?
Silly example, I know.
How much do artists, say songwriters for example, actually get paid out of the total revenue for distribution of their CDs? How much to the recording companies get?
I think if it wasn't for the Internet, and for all of this 'theft' and piracy, these artists wouldn't be as widely known. Musicians can still tour around the world doing live concerts to make money. I'm sure there are thousands of bands, songwriters, movie directors out there that a lot of us know nothing about. If we happen to see their stuff on the Internet and download (or "steal") it, we may find we like it a lot and want to go see them live, or want to go buy an official branded CD or DVD.
All this piracy and "stealing" isn't preventing people from purchasing music or movies. If anything, it's exposing more people to the content and potentially increasing the number of people who will buy. The ones that don't buy probably wouldn't have bought the content in the first place.
I agree these games need more skill instead of just using your most powerful skills to do the most damage to every opponent every time. It should be possible to use even a weak skill, at precisely the right time, to take someone down.
I was just thinking of something that might be interesting in MMORPGs regarding PVP, possibly. What about putting in some kind of (minor?) weakness into the characters? This can be randomized somewhat so not every wizard has the same fault, or not every warlock or swordsman has the same flaw.
I'm not sure how well that would work out, but it could potentially give lower level players a chance against higher level players if they can find that weakness. Players can train themselves in a certain way to help fix that weakness, but it might create another one.
The chances of your wife being 'deeply beautiful' are almost nil. So yes you are sucking up to your wife. And no men don't gradually find girls they live with to be more and more attractive over time. On the other hand, women find men they like to be more attractive than they really are.
To me, and I'm sure also a lot of men (and women) out there, 'attractiveness' is more than just physical. Personality can also play a key role in attractiveness. I may find a "perfect 10" woman, but if she has no personality, some of that attractiveness is lost.
Women find men to be as attractive as those men are [b]to that woman[/b].
My first time using Linux was to host a MySQL database for an application I was developing for a previous employer.
Before then, I've never used Linux before, but I did have a Unix account in college. I really just used that to log in and run 'pine' to check my email. I learned a few little commands like 'cd' and 'ls'.
The original app from that job was just an MS Access database, but I ended up writing a front end in Visual Basic 6.0 and then migrating the DB from Access to MySQL. Instead of hosting MySQL on Windows, I thought I'd try out this new Linux thing, Mandrake 9.0 at the time.
So I was the lead developer for the project, DB admin, and server admin for the box. :)
I could go on with you and your "unix daymon" retarded pronunciation habit as well, but my arm is getting tired of the cane shaking.
Honestly, I don't really know how daemon is supposed to be pronounced. I've always pronounced it daymon.
I wish I could get to see the numbers (or percentages) they (ID Software) estimate to be the potential size of Linux and Mac OS X users.
How can software on a remote system at ID Software estimate the size of Linux and Mac users? :-P
Of course, Vista and 7 tried to be a $500 way of running Windows apps, while XP was a $100 way of running Windows apps.
And that's why XP is still vastly more popular than Vista.
Or maybe because it isn't bloatware?
Wasn't XP considered bloatware when it first came out?
83% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
What about this list of the Top 25 Linux Games for 2008? There's a nice variety of games on that list from different genres.
I haven't played them all, but I have a few installed on my Gentoo system at home.
I'm sure there are other decent/good Linux games out there as well. You can also bring some Windows games to Linux via WINE. There are some popular games on their Top 10 Platinum List and the Top 10 Gold List (scroll down past Platinum) on the WINE appdb site including World of Warcraft, Eve Online, Guild Wars, Counter Strike: Source, Silkroad Online, Half-Life 2, and others.
So it's not like gaming on Linux is non-existant. It's much more than just simple games like kbounce or kasteroids, kminesweeper or the other 10+ mini-games (like Solitare on Windows) that come with the OS.
Well I guess the government can make all corporations tax exempt. Then the corporations will lower their prices on goods and services right? They won't have to 'pass the tax burden' on to customers.
Then government can raise the income tax to make up for this, and we as individuals will be able to pay it since we're not paying corporate sales tax anymore.
Come to think of it, does it even make sense to tax corporations? They'll just 'pass the burden' onto customers. Individuals should pay their fair share of taxes according to their income. Loopholes shouldn't even exist in laws that allow multi-billionaires with their high-paid lawyers to help them 'cheat' on their taxes.
Agreed. I had a math professor in college who taught calculus, statistics, discrete math, among other classes. He is a brilliant mathematician, I'll give him that, but he had a hard time "coming down to" the students' level some times. Meaning, he had a hard time explaining the concepts in a way that the students would understand.
For example, in one Discrete Math semester, this professor wrote the book that the students were using. Every single student in his class was failing. So the professor wrote "Chapter Zero" in attempt to explain the core concepts more clearly to help the students. It didn't help much.
He knew his stuff, but just couldn't seem to share that knowledge with the students very well.
I don't think it's always about trying to cut education funding.
There was a teacher back when I went to high school who taught some form of history class. I've talked to many fellow students who had him and they report that all he ever did was put a movie up for the class, and sleep in the back. There may have been a few days a year that he actually taught anything, and even then there wasn't much to his teaching. Should he be allowed to continue wasting the students' time?
Maybe the answer shouldn't always be "let's fire the bad teacher". Maybe this teacher in question was bored with teaching history, perhaps it wasn't his specialty but the administration forced him into it? In that case, he should be given the opportunity to teach something else. I don't know the situation really as I never had him personally as a teacher, but it seems like a problem when teachers are allowed to just sleep in the back while their students watch movies every day.
I received an email a while back about a Linux Test Drive website that seemed interesting. The site appears to be gone now (Linux Test Drive) but some information about it can be found here.
It sounded like a pretty good idea anyway. Perhaps have a Linux commercial, like the Freedom one from the contest, and pop up a link to this testdrive site at the end so the person seeing the ad can get some help picking out a Linux that works for them.
Well I did get marked 4,Informative for my post (doesn't seem to happen too often for me ;) ). So I guess at least some people agree with me.
Granted, I've never used a Mac before, except for old Macintosh systems back in the late 80's or early 90's. I understand a lot of Mac users will install apps like MSOffice, Photoshop, and WoW according to your post. Are these applications actually ported to the Mac? I would assume so.
Again, why would someone try to install a Windows application in Linux? I'm sure gamers out there don't try to play their Xbox 360 games on a Nintendo Gamecube. If you buy a box for Halo 3 and it says Xbox 360 on it, you wouldn't try to play it on a Dreamcast. If you buy an app that says "Mac" on the box, but not "Windows" you probably wouldn't try to install it in Vista. I realize there aren't many (if any) Linux applications sold at retail stores, but if someone buys MS Office and it says "Windows and Mac" on it, they should know that Linux isn't Windows, and Linux isn't Mac OS X.
Although they might be pleased to know that even though that nice new application they bought won't work natively in Linux, it might just work fine in wine under Linux :)
Yes, but when the average consumer is looking to buy something online, do they search for it on a search engine, or in the 'search' box of their favorite store's website? There are plenty of 'Linux' search results on Walmart.com for various Linux books that have CDs and/or DVDs, some of which are for OpenSUSE or Fedora.
My wife barely knows what Linux is, other than seeing me using that 'weird thing she knows nothing about', but when she shops online, she goes to specific store websites, generally not to google.
I do understand what you are saying. People don't even know what Linux is, but isn't that the point of advertising? These ads can tell people what Linux is. Granted, a lot of people probably don't even know what Windows is. They might know that there's this Windows XP or Windows Vista logo that comes up on their screen, but just know that it's what's running on their computer. We can tell them that there are many other alternatives out there if they are looking for a change.
When the average consumer sees any product on TV that they never heard of before, but looks interesting, what can they do? Search for it. They can see if it's in their favorite brick and mortar store, or go online.
People can't just walk into a store and buy that Linux thing they saw an ad for on TV. However, one can get Linux online. I'm not just talking about going to distrowatch or any of the distribution's websites. A search for "Linux" on walmart.com (hey a lot of non-tech savvy people shop at Walmart) returns a list of Linux books, several of which come with CDs or DVDs for Fedora or OpenSUSE or others.
WINE Is Not an Emulator. It's an open source implementation of the Win32 API, or something like that. :P
Might be nice to have various Linux distros come with wine preinstalled, or at least an option in the installation. Then those .exe files would work, as long as they're supported in wine's appdb (a lot of them are). Wine could be configured so that if it executes an .exe file that fails to install, it could prompt the user with a nice error message telling them that the software is not compatible. Perhaps it could recommend alternatives (and offer to install those)
I'm sure that's easier said than done. I can already see some issues with it, but it could be a 'nice to have' up front anyway.
Then again, that would make it easier for Joe Sixpack to run around installing BritneySpearsPics.exe on all their Linux boxes. :-P