IMHO I think it is less to do with the client and more to do with the fact the servers don't scale. In fact they they have something like 1 processor per grid with a limit of 50 people per package (area of land). someone with more knowledge can explain better.:)
If your on the grid off-peak times the whole thing runs very smoothly, everything renders fast and it is very usable. That is with a tablet PC (1gb memory, no gfx card) to an XPS laptop (2gb + 7800gtx).
I find from 5pm GMT time the whole thing turns into a complete joke. Stuff doesn't render, laggy even client lags. So yes it is more dependent on the back end rather then the client itself.
You can mitigate it somewhat by lowering gfx settings and setting max bandwidth to 200, but still pretty much unusable during peak times.
Hardly. They could spend a couple of $1000 and do what they are suggesting and still make back their money after a couple of months. Wouldn't even cover the normal money they dump into renovating an already good house in real life.
Apart from the ability to offer houses at reasonable prices in SL, they could for example design some houses that are on market. People could tour a representation of a load of them and then figure out which one they might want to waste their time on in real life looking at.
It is better to think of it like a 3D medium. I wouldn't call it a game. More of a browser in a 3D world.
For example if I'm interested in star trek I can find places in the grid that cater for me. If I have an interest in RPG/D&D there are places for that too. Likewise with Coding, design, general chatting, etc.
Shooting someone in an area that allows it but not allowed by rules can get you warned/banned/suspended.
The money aspect is give or take. You can get free cash in the game if you take time to look, certainly loads of free skins/clothes/etc to look more personalised.
But if you go in thinking its a game you will probably be disappointed.
> I can see the appeal of pretending to be a psionic goblin (or whatever) > and running around in a pretend world with lots of other psionic goblins. > But playing around with *REAL ESTATE*??? Sheesh, you people SURE know > how to have a GOOD TIME!!!
Even a Psionic Goblin needs to relax at home sometime. Been a few years since I played D&D but I recal real estate was also in it.:p
> Thanks for that definition and for your sacrifice for the benefit of all.
*shrug* The issue that most people find it crap is that they expect a game like WOW, UO. It isn't. It is a basically a 3D medium to do what you want in the same way Web pages are a 2D medium. Just because you think its nerdy is your issue not mine.
> You really ought to try the real thing in a loving monogamous relationship
Thanks but I already am. I was just describing what some areas of SL are like.
1. You need a good machine with good graphics card. 2. You need a good internet connection. 3. You need to be on the grid at the right time of the day. 4. You need to know where the right places are.
Your correct, if your starting off for private tour to figure out what is going on, depending on when you enter the grid can make the place look like crap.
Do a bit of exploring. Some of the stuff is very impressive. Some of the places I found cool (in relation to design, neat).
Thought I would respond to this (and one of your responses) in one go.
If Linden Labs increase the land size it will have no real effect on the people with the houses.
As it stands now lets say you have the premium account (about $72 a year). That allows you to buy up to 512m3 without incurring extra costs. However the price to do that is about $1600 then a couple of $100 a month on top of that. Once you have land you can lease land for cheaper (works around $30 for three months) but you incur extra costs on top of that.
Even if you have the land you have to pay for prims (objects like walls, etc). If you want a good job of it you normally pay someone to build your houses/landscape.
But if you own land you can make money from it, mainly because there are people in the world who can't afford the initial prices. A price of say $9-$10 a month where you have a fixed abode to put your own items down is reasonable for a lot of people. I pay more then that for playing Eve. Apart from buying stuff in game, a lot of people use it as a kind of paypal.
It is also possible to earn money in the world, of course the better pay requires more work but if it is just general spending money you can find places like that too. Lots of places will have "camping spots". You basically sit down and do something for a set time and they pay you (more people in the zone bumps them up the searches). But some stores will actually pay people to act as store staff.
As to why do people play the "game". You need to change that mindset. It is not a game. It is a virtual world. There is no leveling/no high score. Lots of areas fall into sex related or shops but there are huge sections of the grid that put some of the current games in shame to the level of detail (eg "Lost Gardens of Apollo"). There are game areas, for example Toxican (vampire city) or Dune worlds. If thats what you are in to.
SL is probably not the future (IMHO their hardware can't handle it) but it gives a good idea of what the future could be. I've been using it for holding meetings with other team members around the world, as well as studying some coding from real world apps into/out of SL.
> Why not publicly announce the player-names of the GMs and their corporation/alliance?
Eve is a very harsh game. If you annoy the wrong people your pretty much out of the game for good unless you like sitting in a space station. There is no where you can go that a group of people won't get you, even rejoining a starter corp and living in Empire space doesn't guarantee your safety.
Also a lot of the game is designed based on how the GMs see the game. While its possible to do this a lot of people don't because there are conditions in the game that can counter it. In the GMs case this may not be viable as any action the GM takes to counter such attacks will be taken as favoritism for the GM or the GM using their *special abilities* to stop people pissing them off.
Thier option at that point is to reroll or discuss ways to change the code to counter this while leaving an element of risk in the game.
> Intriguing. Are they the top ten alliances because of the CCP employees are in them?
To become a major player in the game requires a huge amount of resources and people working for you. It has dick to do with what happened with ONE GM. Maybe you should focus on that instead of just blaming it on imaginary enemies.
There have been major corps/alliances that have been on top that never had a Dev in them. Take m0o for example who actually through their own skills forced CCP to change major portions of how the game works.
One GM spawning a couple of T2 blueprints (and not great ones at that) did squat in the grand scheme of things.
> Can I do that with a full length feature film and distribute it legally?
Probably not and the same with a full YGO show. However if you watch the videos you will see that he doesn't do that at all. He takes less then 5 minutes of the show and condenses it with funny voice overs.
Not sure why that got modded off topic. Littlekuriboh is a very good example of what will happen when YT implements blanket deletions or software to remove *potential* copyright infringements.
For example. Take littlekuriboh. For anyone who doesn't know him he created a parody called "Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series". Basically a poke at the stupid cartoon. Perfectly legal (as its parody and not a straight rip of the cartoon).
Extremely popular series as well, as soon as he posts an episode it goes to the top of the page.
However YouTube started nuking his episodes claiming copyright infringement. There are still a couple left on his account.
The end result, everyone copied the episodes nuked and started reposting them back to youtube. Meanwhile littlekuriboh has moved to other sites like Dailymotion (full series here).
I think Youtubes honeymoon is over and you will find people will just move to other sites that will cater for what they want.
I wonder how far forward this was thought through by the government tbh. There is going to be a some serious headaches for some time as everything starts upgrading to DST.
And I am not talking about America either, there are probably a lot of places in Europe this week wondering why things are going wrong due to not updating to support DST.
With Y2K we had a number of years to start working on fixing potential issues before the date.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. If anything 9/11 is probably going to lower the chances of hijackings as most hijackers to that point had demands and would except a couple of passengers to be out of line. Now if anyone even sneezes the wrong way they are liable to get jumped on and beaten by everyone on the plane.
As for the remote control system I don't think it will stop it if people are determined. Whats to stop the signal being hijacked?
Or for that matter how about 1 hijacker to each plane rushes the cockpit and causes the remote control system to activate while his friends on the ground either sabotage the remote control or take control (like siege the control towers). Hey presto they take down a whole load of planes in one go.
Heck what if they hack the system and activate the remote control on all nearby planes?
They already have a source control system. If you look at thomas.loc.gov you can see it in action. However as you will see after a while that they have already learnt to make it painful to read.
Some examples. 1. Multiple edits in a document but only the edits shown seperate with page numbers to link to the real bill. In this case the edits on their own don't mean much but you may have to read paragraphs to understand the context of the change, while a bit further down the context changes again on the edits.
2. Multiple bills put in with the same results.
3. Riders put onto bills that are not related to the bill.
4. Multiple versions of the same bill being moved around making it hard to determine which is the main one.
Add to that information overload. Some of the bills can take days to read. The Patriot act got passed because no one had time to fully read it.
But even with a system of checks and balances mistakes are also likely to happen. Take Ireland for example. Last summer they rushed a law through that stopped pedophiles being let off free due to a loophole and in doing so accidently removed a clause that made it illegal to solict children online. That is only being changed today.
I've always wondered how such a model managed to survive for so long in the US. Mainly because the US has a habit of building market models that are very cheap for the consumer. Seems to be the exception with phones.
In Ireland for example I just buy my phone (cheapest good phone $52) that comes with $105 free credit. The phone isn't normally locked to the SIM and if it is you just get it unlocked. A new SIM is $6 and you basically preload your sim with the credit beforehand. I've had my current phone for over a year and only spent $40 total in fees (not including the free credit), and that is with full web access. I still have around $23 left on the phone.
England is not that much different if I recall correctly.
Actually they don't. Taking UK/Irish law for example if you were presented with the wrong price the shop can explain the correct price or make a deal. They are not bound by law to respect the smaller price.
At the same time however, once you have made the sale the transaction is final in regards to price. You still have rights to return the goods, but if you have already paid and have a receipt then they can't come after you later looking for more money.
> Amazon is the one big corporation I have found that cares about its customers.
Milage varies.
mid-last year I put an order in for a book one time that they said they would deliver in 2 weeks ("Sun Certified Developer for Java Web Services: Study Guide (Exam 310-220) (Certification Press) (Paperback)") . It kept getting delayed by week after week. No explanation why even when I mailed them. Finally I checked the publishers to find it wasn't released until 2007 (late). Even now its not due for release until September and Amazon still lists it as something you can buy and be shipped within two weeks. You have to scroll way down to see that they are lying.
Another time I had an order to ship as one group, instead for some unknown reason they shipped it as two parts and charged me twice for delivery when I asked not to. When I asked about it I kept getting the same form response over and over and never got my money back.
Compared to brick and mortar they are better however if there were competing companies I'd be gone in a shot.
Re:This is silly
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The whole thing seems silly. I recall a story a long time ago (2 years ago.. has it been that long?) that basically was an expose on PJ. Which turned out to be a stalker based reporting not showing anything except how creepy a reporter paid for by SCO could be.
It even got to a point where PJ declared that she was not suicidal in anyway (after a mysterious suicide in relation to the SCO case) in the event she was found dead under mysterious circumstances.
To the layman reading Groklaw/Slashdot it clearly looks like an elaborate pump'n'dump share scheme by SCO (or rather the group that bought them). Having people actively pointing out this is what is hurting it.
The sooner SCO go to jail for what they are doing the better.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO I think it is less to do with the client and more to do with the fact the servers don't scale. In fact they they have something like 1 processor per grid with a limit of 50 people per package (area of land). someone with more knowledge can explain better. :)
If your on the grid off-peak times the whole thing runs very smoothly, everything renders fast and it is very usable. That is with a tablet PC (1gb memory, no gfx card) to an XPS laptop (2gb + 7800gtx).
I find from 5pm GMT time the whole thing turns into a complete joke. Stuff doesn't render, laggy even client lags. So yes it is more dependent on the back end rather then the client itself.
You can mitigate it somewhat by lowering gfx settings and setting max bandwidth to 200, but still pretty much unusable during peak times.
Hardly. They could spend a couple of $1000 and do what they are suggesting and still make back their money after a couple of months. Wouldn't even cover the normal money they dump into renovating an already good house in real life.
Apart from the ability to offer houses at reasonable prices in SL, they could for example design some houses that are on market. People could tour a representation of a load of them and then figure out which one they might want to waste their time on in real life looking at.
Similar to looking at their website.
It is better to think of it like a 3D medium. I wouldn't call it a game. More of a browser in a 3D world.
For example if I'm interested in star trek I can find places in the grid that cater for me. If I have an interest in RPG/D&D there are places for that too. Likewise with Coding, design, general chatting, etc.
Shooting someone in an area that allows it but not allowed by rules can get you warned/banned/suspended.
The money aspect is give or take. You can get free cash in the game if you take time to look, certainly loads of free skins/clothes/etc to look more personalised.
But if you go in thinking its a game you will probably be disappointed.
> I can see the appeal of pretending to be a psionic goblin (or whatever)
:p
> and running around in a pretend world with lots of other psionic goblins.
> But playing around with *REAL ESTATE*??? Sheesh, you people SURE know
> how to have a GOOD TIME!!!
Even a Psionic Goblin needs to relax at home sometime. Been a few years since I played D&D but I recal real estate was also in it.
> Thanks for that definition and for your sacrifice for the benefit of all.
*shrug* The issue that most people find it crap is that they expect a game like WOW, UO. It isn't. It is a basically a 3D medium to do what you want in the same way Web pages are a 2D medium. Just because you think its nerdy is your issue not mine.
> You really ought to try the real thing in a loving monogamous relationship
Thanks but I already am. I was just describing what some areas of SL are like.
The issues really are.
2 6/128/601/ 43/29
:)
1. You need a good machine with good graphics card.
2. You need a good internet connection.
3. You need to be on the grid at the right time of the day.
4. You need to know where the right places are.
Your correct, if your starting off for private tour to figure out what is going on, depending on when you enter the grid can make the place look like crap.
Do a bit of exploring. Some of the stuff is very impressive. Some of the places I found cool (in relation to design, neat).
Lost gardens of apollo: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Apollo/125/221/24
IBM: http://slurl.com/secondlife/IBM/104/3/601
Cisco: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cisco%20Systems%202/1
Ivory Tower (teaches coding): http://slurl.com/secondlife/Natoma/189/164/26
Wolf Mountain Ski resort: http://slurl.com/secondlife/PeachTree%20Resort/62
Dublin city center: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dublin/126/189/25
Little Seoul (still being built): http://slurl.com/secondlife/Korea2/13/0/27
Nexus Prime (gibson CyberPunk): http://slurl.com/secondlife/Gibson/128/128/0
There are many more but still exploring.
Thought I would respond to this (and one of your responses) in one go.
If Linden Labs increase the land size it will have no real effect on the people with the houses.
As it stands now lets say you have the premium account (about $72 a year). That allows you to buy up to 512m3 without incurring extra costs. However the price to do that is about $1600 then a couple of $100 a month on top of that. Once you have land you can lease land for cheaper (works around $30 for three months) but you incur extra costs on top of that.
Even if you have the land you have to pay for prims (objects like walls, etc). If you want a good job of it you normally pay someone to build your houses/landscape.
But if you own land you can make money from it, mainly because there are people in the world who can't afford the initial prices. A price of say $9-$10 a month where you have a fixed abode to put your own items down is reasonable for a lot of people. I pay more then that for playing Eve. Apart from buying stuff in game, a lot of people use it as a kind of paypal.
It is also possible to earn money in the world, of course the better pay requires more work but if it is just general spending money you can find places like that too. Lots of places will have "camping spots". You basically sit down and do something for a set time and they pay you (more people in the zone bumps them up the searches). But some stores will actually pay people to act as store staff.
As to why do people play the "game". You need to change that mindset. It is not a game. It is a virtual world. There is no leveling/no high score. Lots of areas fall into sex related or shops but there are huge sections of the grid that put some of the current games in shame to the level of detail (eg "Lost Gardens of Apollo"). There are game areas, for example Toxican (vampire city) or Dune worlds. If thats what you are in to.
SL is probably not the future (IMHO their hardware can't handle it) but it gives a good idea of what the future could be. I've been using it for holding meetings with other team members around the world, as well as studying some coding from real world apps into/out of SL.
I've been playing for years. I am not in a major alliance but mainly because I don't have the time.
d =424
The T2 BP list was detailed by the devs on their blogs. There were six in total.
You can read it here.
http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bi
> Why not publicly announce the player-names of the GMs and their corporation/alliance?
Eve is a very harsh game. If you annoy the wrong people your pretty much out of the game for good unless you like sitting in a space station. There is no where you can go that a group of people won't get you, even rejoining a starter corp and living in Empire space doesn't guarantee your safety.
Also a lot of the game is designed based on how the GMs see the game. While its possible to do this a lot of people don't because there are conditions in the game that can counter it. In the GMs case this may not be viable as any action the GM takes to counter such attacks will be taken as favoritism for the GM or the GM using their *special abilities* to stop people pissing them off.
Thier option at that point is to reroll or discuss ways to change the code to counter this while leaving an element of risk in the game.
> Intriguing. Are they the top ten alliances because of the CCP employees are in them?
To become a major player in the game requires a huge amount of resources and people working for you. It has dick to do with what happened with ONE GM. Maybe you should focus on that instead of just blaming it on imaginary enemies.
There have been major corps/alliances that have been on top that never had a Dev in them. Take m0o for example who actually through their own skills forced CCP to change major portions of how the game works.
One GM spawning a couple of T2 blueprints (and not great ones at that) did squat in the grand scheme of things.
He probably thought you wouldn't figure it out.
Judges can slap you if your vocal about not meaning the apology. Why do you think he didn't do the apology in a sarcastic voice?
It is clearly forced apology. If you look at his comments on youtube you can clearly see he is a bitter person and didn't mean the apology at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWVJG7lr6UE
The actual interview is here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGyG1lVXLBw
I am not a big fan of H&C but verbally kicking this guy in the nuts was funny.
> Can I do that with a full length feature film and distribute it legally?
Probably not and the same with a full YGO show. However if you watch the videos you will see that he doesn't do that at all. He takes less then 5 minutes of the show and condenses it with funny voice overs.
In his case yes it would be a legal parody.
Not sure why that got modded off topic. Littlekuriboh is a very good example of what will happen when YT implements blanket deletions or software to remove *potential* copyright infringements.
I think the consumer could end up worse for it.
For example. Take littlekuriboh. For anyone who doesn't know him he created a parody called "Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series". Basically a poke at the stupid cartoon. Perfectly legal (as its parody and not a straight rip of the cartoon).
Extremely popular series as well, as soon as he posts an episode it goes to the top of the page.
However YouTube started nuking his episodes claiming copyright infringement. There are still a couple left on his account.
The end result, everyone copied the episodes nuked and started reposting them back to youtube. Meanwhile littlekuriboh has moved to other sites like Dailymotion (full series here).
I think Youtubes honeymoon is over and you will find people will just move to other sites that will cater for what they want.
So Fox news are reporting time travel is impossible? They also reported Scooter Libby as not guilty.
So does that mean that time travel is possible?
I wonder how far forward this was thought through by the government tbh. There is going to be a some serious headaches for some time as everything starts upgrading to DST.
And I am not talking about America either, there are probably a lot of places in Europe this week wondering why things are going wrong due to not updating to support DST.
With Y2K we had a number of years to start working on fixing potential issues before the date.
I am aware life isn't an action movie. I am also aware that terrorists aren't stupid, including the ones that intentionally kill themselves.
The fact that terrorists took the easiest method to take the planes suggests they are not stupid at all.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. If anything 9/11 is probably going to lower the chances of hijackings as most hijackers to that point had demands and would except a couple of passengers to be out of line. Now if anyone even sneezes the wrong way they are liable to get jumped on and beaten by everyone on the plane.
As for the remote control system I don't think it will stop it if people are determined. Whats to stop the signal being hijacked?
Or for that matter how about 1 hijacker to each plane rushes the cockpit and causes the remote control system to activate while his friends on the ground either sabotage the remote control or take control (like siege the control towers). Hey presto they take down a whole load of planes in one go.
Heck what if they hack the system and activate the remote control on all nearby planes?
I really think this hasn't been thought through.
They already have a source control system. If you look at thomas.loc.gov you can see it in action. However as you will see after a while that they have already learnt to make it painful to read.
Some examples.
1. Multiple edits in a document but only the edits shown seperate with page numbers to link to the real bill. In this case the edits on their own don't mean much but you may have to read paragraphs to understand the context of the change, while a bit further down the context changes again on the edits.
2. Multiple bills put in with the same results.
3. Riders put onto bills that are not related to the bill.
4. Multiple versions of the same bill being moved around making it hard to determine which is the main one.
Add to that information overload. Some of the bills can take days to read. The Patriot act got passed because no one had time to fully read it.
But even with a system of checks and balances mistakes are also likely to happen. Take Ireland for example. Last summer they rushed a law through that stopped pedophiles being let off free due to a loophole and in doing so accidently removed a clause that made it illegal to solict children online. That is only being changed today.
IIRC Canada already has a law in place to send back draft dodgers. They closed up that loophole long time ago.
I've always wondered how such a model managed to survive for so long in the US. Mainly because the US has a habit of building market models that are very cheap for the consumer. Seems to be the exception with phones.
In Ireland for example I just buy my phone (cheapest good phone $52) that comes with $105 free credit. The phone isn't normally locked to the SIM and if it is you just get it unlocked. A new SIM is $6 and you basically preload your sim with the credit beforehand. I've had my current phone for over a year and only spent $40 total in fees (not including the free credit), and that is with full web access. I still have around $23 left on the phone.
England is not that much different if I recall correctly.
> Advertised prices have to be honored.
Actually they don't. Taking UK/Irish law for example if you were presented with the wrong price the shop can explain the correct price or make a deal. They are not bound by law to respect the smaller price.
At the same time however, once you have made the sale the transaction is final in regards to price. You still have rights to return the goods, but if you have already paid and have a receipt then they can't come after you later looking for more money.
> Amazon is the one big corporation I have found that cares about its customers.
Milage varies.
mid-last year I put an order in for a book one time that they said they would deliver in 2 weeks ("Sun Certified Developer for Java Web Services: Study Guide (Exam 310-220) (Certification Press) (Paperback)") . It kept getting delayed by week after week. No explanation why even when I mailed them. Finally I checked the publishers to find it wasn't released until 2007 (late). Even now its not due for release until September and Amazon still lists it as something you can buy and be shipped within two weeks. You have to scroll way down to see that they are lying.
Another time I had an order to ship as one group, instead for some unknown reason they shipped it as two parts and charged me twice for delivery when I asked not to. When I asked about it I kept getting the same form response over and over and never got my money back.
Compared to brick and mortar they are better however if there were competing companies I'd be gone in a shot.
The whole thing seems silly. I recall a story a long time ago (2 years ago.. has it been that long?) that basically was an expose on PJ. Which turned out to be a stalker based reporting not showing anything except how creepy a reporter paid for by SCO could be.
5 0509145744287
It even got to a point where PJ declared that she was not suicidal in anyway (after a mysterious suicide in relation to the SCO case) in the event she was found dead under mysterious circumstances.
This will get you started researching it..
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=200
To the layman reading Groklaw/Slashdot it clearly looks like an elaborate pump'n'dump share scheme by SCO (or rather the group that bought them). Having people actively pointing out this is what is hurting it.
The sooner SCO go to jail for what they are doing the better.