I think the folks jumping on top of parent need to read this line again and take a deep breath. Yeah, I agree, Freenet wouldn't be necessarily a bad thing if it just happened to let in a little child porn around the edges while enabling a massively social benefit, like the postal service or the Internet does. Heck, I'm a regular defender of Bittorrent because it has significant non-infringing uses (Linux distros, WoW patches, etc) even though I know the use the technology is primarily put to is copyright infringement. But Freenet doesn't have just a little child pornography. It doesn't have even a mere majority of child pornography. As it is currently being employed, Freenet has a theoretical capability as a dissident-speech-protecting network dipping its toes in the edges of a flowing river of child pornography. I know the creator probably didn't intend for that to happen. Nobel had some quixotic dreams about dynamite being used primarily for mining. Zyklon B was an agricultural pesticide. Even if you support mining and bug-free crops it does not imply that dynamite and Zyklon B are, on balance, socially beneficial inventions.
And wouldn't this be the perfect game for the DS, which already comes with a "paintbrush"? Another thing to add to their "Your grandmother will love you if you get her this for her birthday" list along with Brain Training/Nintendogs/whatever. Maybe even allow you to export your creations via that underused wireless connection -- mail them to your friends, post them on your website, etc.
*grumble grumble* Don't count on it. You'll have to jump through all the hoops that you do for getting foreign store access in iTunes currently. No technical reason for them, but the contractual nastiness of giving certain distributors exclusive rights in territory X/Y/Z means that they'll have a fragmented sales model and some sort of CC-linked proof-of-legal-residence requirement, just like iTunes.
Distribution numbers, like hit counts, are meaningless. Sooner or later, the secret to making money is to convince someone that the product you are selling has value. The.{2}AA and company have that side of the equation nailed down pretty well. Some of the new distribution models (the iTunes/iPod conglomerate comes to mind) do, too. Has the indie music movement figured out a way to monetize their popularity yet? Because "old industry" isn't going to be a sinking ship if its got the exclusive source of profits in audio entertainment.
My bank (BoA) sends me emails that sound like this: "You have a new balance statement! Remember, increasing reports of identity theft means that its more important than ever that you be on top of this! Click here to sign into our secure server and validate your statement!" That mail got flagged by SpamAssassin 4 times out of 5 as a phishing scam and its no wonder why. I eventually called the bank up and asked them "Pardon me, under what circumstances would you guys send me an email?" and they told me "Either you've got mail in your bank mailbox, and we send you an email to tell you to check it, or you have a new statement scheduled". So, blimey, its actually legit! How about educating the customer to never, ever, ever click on a link and then sending out mails saying "Hiya, your bank has a statement ready. You know the web address, go there now and read it." Hurts usability, I know, but depending on how much phishing actually accomplishes it might be worth it.
That was just a simply brilliant piece of troll-by-mod. Not that I support it but it was clever enough to provoke a laugh out of me.
On the filtering, I don't imagine you'd save yourself enough time to make it worthwhile if you actually had to hand-train the classifier, especially given the nearly infinite number of ways to troll on Slashdot.
Microsoft releases one patch day a month because their corporate customers, the lion's share of their market, demand it. And they demand it because "release a million little patches as soon as that individual patch is done" is unworkable in a corporate environment. You can plan around one big patch a month -- the magic word is "scheduled downtime". It is less bad for some customers to be periodically marginally more vulnerable for a period of two weeks or so then to be continusouly vulnerable to unscheduled downtime due to patching. "Publish early and often" works well with an enthusiast running one machine but when you've got an IT department overseeing a cast of thousands spread over 14 time zones things get a little more dicey.
Which explains why there hundreds of companies bidding for adds on facebook. Oh, wait, there are essentially none. Their advertising model is currently targetted at student groups, as an alternative to flyering campus. Its almost DESIGNED for failure.
Re:As someone currently engrossed in the game...
on
In Defense of FFXII
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· Score: 1
There are "go crazy when your HP are low" attacks. They take a lot of License Points turn earn (go south from your characters' inital investments in the top License Board), which means you'll need to kill monsters to get the LP to learn the abilities and this naturally cause you to level. You can, however, cleverly script a party to keep one member of three at perpetually low HP if really want that. Here's a quick example:
Say you've got one Tank, one damage platform, and one healer (these can be any of the main characters since you've got almost an entirely free hand in customizing their ability loadouts -- they have no personality in terms of combat other than that you give them and a weeeeeeeeeeeeee little bit in their initial skill selection which lasts about 5 minutes if you're determined to overcome it). Customize your healer's gambits to something like 1) Target: healer (by name), Action: Cast healing spell. 2) Target: tank (by name), Action: Cast healing spell. 3) Target: leader's target. Action: attack. There is not to my knowledge (12 hours in) a "target X if HP Y%" target available for discovery, but your guys have a modicrum of AI and won't cast spells or use items if its a complete waste (i.e. if your first command is Target: Leader, Action: Use Potion you won't use a potion if the leader hasn't taken damage). This will, of course, be a heck of a lot more mana intensive than Target: Party member with 70% HP Action: Cast Cure.
Re:As someone currently engrossed in the game...
on
In Defense of FFXII
·
· Score: 1
There are three ways to disable scripting for your characters (in battle, click an option right below the Attack/Magic/etc bar, on your menu screen mark all of their programmed Gambits as Off, or give them Gambits which are intentionally unsatisfiable ("Target someone not in your party with Potion", etc). Any of these will let you play the game in the traditional FF fashion. There's one MAJOR problem with this work-around, though -- you don't get the traditional prompts for action. This means, every time you get done with the cooldown on, say, an attack, you have to click circle, navigate to the proper character, and THEN give them an order -- and they only start charging for the order after its input, meaning you're wasting efficiency on both them and all your other characters this way.
I work for a government sponsored technology incubator in Japan and I will never tire of telling this story: I once had the pleasure of listening in on a conference-call/reaming by one professor at $NAME_BRAND_INSTITUTION to his IT department because they had tossed all email from *.jp into/dev/null to control "that Asian spam stuff". Because, you know, nobody from his institution would need to get, oh, an email offering them a five-figure speaking fee for appearing at a conference in one of these "Here Be Spammers" countries. Or the two followups warning the professor we'd have to go with our second choice if he didn't get back to us in a timely manner.
Every time I hear slack-jawed idiocy from IT professionals about partiontioning the US from the rest of the world using technology I am at once enraged and pleased. Enraged because its embarassing to share a profession with folks who through some combination of odious nativism and sheer blindness don't realize how interconnected we are at the moment and how quickly this trend is accelerating. Pleased because it means my strategy of "you can globalize yourself or you can globalize your job: pick one" will continue to result in job security over folks who just don't get it.
There are some servers that suffer frequent downtime and many that do not (I'm on Draenor, which never has problems unless *every* server goes down), and its generally the same groups of servers (including Kargath). This leads me to believe that they have internal problems, or perhaps problems upstream, some but not all of their server clusters. Its also why WoW forums simultaneously hold a lot of "OMG this game sucks I get disconnected 12 times a minute" and "STFU rock solid here!"
Re:Manned exploration is a stupid vanity project
on
US Plans Lunar Motel
·
· Score: 1
Robotic exploration is ALSO a stupid vanity project. Seriously, lets suppose you send up a couple billion dollars worth of robots to the moon. What is "something useful" that they can build for us? The world's most exclusive tourist resort? A staging area so they can make another, equally purposeless but vastly more expensive, base on Mars? Transmute lead into gold, and lose money because it costs more to transport the lead than the value of the gold?
They should disband NASA, let private companies take over the sat-boosting business (the only worthwhile endeavor in space -- unless you count spending hundreds of millions of dollars to perform "important scientific work" such as seeing what happens to snail shells when they're exposed to zero gravity), and dole out the funds to do civilian and military R&D without having to waste huge portions on the whole "Oh, and move the experimental apparatus to space!" step of the process. Since we're not throwing money into an almost endless black void anymore, with the money left over from our New and Improved R&D Slush Fund (NIRDSF, the successor organization to NASA) we can organize a really kick-butt Fourth of July parade to satisfy folks who are really nostalgic for some national-greatness type projects.
I think its that they have too many customers playing WoW and have reached their farm limit. Spawn more overlords!
No, seriously, that wasn't just a joke. Where is the higher return on investment for a couple million dollars and thousands of hours of programmer time -- improving WoW's sales by 5% or delivering a smash-hit console FPS? When you sell a box of FPS: The Killing for the PlayCube360, you have to split the pie with the console manufacturer (license fees) and the retail store. When you sell an auto-billed monthly subscription to MMORPG: The Farming, you send Mastercard their 50 cents and then the rest is almost pure profit directly in your pocket (we'll ignore Blizzard's China operations, where they get a very, very tiny slice of the pie relative to their Chinese partner -- its still Almost Free Money from their perspective). Add to that WoW is currently dominating its category and the FPS market is saturated by a bunch of name brands, none of which have "Blizzard" on the box...
I bought FFXI totally because it gave me the opportunity to practice Japanese with real people without having to leave the country. Unfortunately, my textbooks hadn't included the phrase "punishing level grind which you have to repeat multiple times". But it was a worthwhile experiment, and while there was a certain segment of both the JP/NA (North America) playerbases that was rather unhappy with the arrangement and wouldn't dream of grouping with The Dirty Foreigners (TM) I did get in quite a few groups that had a great time despite language barriers. Incidentally, "You can practice English here without paying by the hour!" was a selling point in Japan.
Now, the reason for an Aussie preferred server isn't that Aussies like playing with only Aussies. The reason for an Aussie prefered server is Aussies (and you can throw me in there, because now I live in Japan and are closer to their timezone than the US's) have peak playing hours which are waaaaaaaaaaay off the American ones, and when WoW is in its MMORPG moments you need a bunch of people playing together to make it fun. For example, our weekday raids last four hours starting at 1:00 AM in the morning California time, and require 20-40 people. Or, much more irksome, PVP starting up on a server requires several dozen players simultaneously online, attentive, and desiring PVP. Designating a server as Aussie preferred just lets everyone know "Hey, if you go here you can find people in your time zone".
[i]I guess as long as their two cash cows, Windows and Office, continue to deliver amazing profits, people will see them as successful, and repeated failures will be ignored.[/i]
Yeah, I know what you mean. Amazing that Thomas Alva Edison could even show his face around town after 7,999 of his 8,000 tries to invent the lightbulb failed.
Their security feature was making it multiple gigabytes, which neatly stops most people from mailing it. Now, P2P networking, on the other hand, still working on that one. But email is definately out as a pirate method. So is hand-transcribing to papyrus, and nailing to the back of a squirrel.
I was pleasantly suprised the first time I came home from Japan and my JP GBA worked fine with everything. Then my US GBA SP worked fine with my Japanese games, and I my new JP DS plays everything I put in it (US GB, US GBA, JP GBA, JP DS, etc...)
When you're looking at an Estimated Time To Solution measured in years (for a trivially codable problem with no real-world utility which we used to stress-test our grid, try n-queens with N at 21 or 22), you start to realize that a) pennies per hour does not scale and b) depending on what you're running, you'd think paying $1 per CPU hour was cheap compared to the eventual output you get.
Here's an example: when your $1 billion (thats billion with a B) commercial highrise in Japan is undergoing earthquake testing, "Screw the grid alternative, I've got an Alienware at home we can run this on, should have the results back by 2127 or so..." and paying for, oh, 100,000 CPU hours (pulling number of of thin air) looks like a very attractive proposition (consider what you'd have to spend as an architectural firm to afford your own supercomputer or grid to make that happen, plus the maintenance and employee costs to keep it running, and the fact that you get no use of it for weeks or months at a time in between earthquake tests but the tests need to be done right and done fast so you can get on with construction).
One of the target markets for the Gifu Grid (a prefectural initiative here in Japan which we're supporting at my place of employment) is architectural firms doing earthquake simulations. I'm not privvy to the specifics, but apparently their big use case is spend a lot of man hours making changes to the building plan, get to Friday, hit "test for structural soundness" and go out drinking. When you're on a n-week construction cycle, spending two weeks waiting for the results of your compile (oops, sorry, at a 6.2 quake with certain assumptions this fails... BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD!) costs you both money and your completition-on-time goal. But during the vast majority of the project cycle you *don't* need a server farm -- you've got X desktops running your favorite CAD software, which is all well and good, but if you had a supercomputer or beowulf cluster in the back room it would be powered down 98% of the time. So, theoretically, we could sell them time on our network -- we'll have your simulation done by Monday, you don't worry your architectural heads about setting up a Beowulf cluster.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the folks jumping on top of parent need to read this line again and take a deep breath. Yeah, I agree, Freenet wouldn't be necessarily a bad thing if it just happened to let in a little child porn around the edges while enabling a massively social benefit, like the postal service or the Internet does. Heck, I'm a regular defender of Bittorrent because it has significant non-infringing uses (Linux distros, WoW patches, etc) even though I know the use the technology is primarily put to is copyright infringement. But Freenet doesn't have just a little child pornography. It doesn't have even a mere majority of child pornography. As it is currently being employed, Freenet has a theoretical capability as a dissident-speech-protecting network dipping its toes in the edges of a flowing river of child pornography. I know the creator probably didn't intend for that to happen. Nobel had some quixotic dreams about dynamite being used primarily for mining. Zyklon B was an agricultural pesticide. Even if you support mining and bug-free crops it does not imply that dynamite and Zyklon B are, on balance, socially beneficial inventions.
And wouldn't this be the perfect game for the DS, which already comes with a "paintbrush"? Another thing to add to their "Your grandmother will love you if you get her this for her birthday" list along with Brain Training/Nintendogs/whatever. Maybe even allow you to export your creations via that underused wireless connection -- mail them to your friends, post them on your website, etc.
*grumble grumble* Don't count on it. You'll have to jump through all the hoops that you do for getting foreign store access in iTunes currently. No technical reason for them, but the contractual nastiness of giving certain distributors exclusive rights in territory X/Y/Z means that they'll have a fragmented sales model and some sort of CC-linked proof-of-legal-residence requirement, just like iTunes.
Hey, there is Hello Kitty Online. And why not? No reason little girls shouldn't have some online entertainment, too.
Distribution numbers, like hit counts, are meaningless. Sooner or later, the secret to making money is to convince someone that the product you are selling has value. The .{2}AA and company have that side of the equation nailed down pretty well. Some of the new distribution models (the iTunes/iPod conglomerate comes to mind) do, too. Has the indie music movement figured out a way to monetize their popularity yet? Because "old industry" isn't going to be a sinking ship if its got the exclusive source of profits in audio entertainment.
My bank (BoA) sends me emails that sound like this: "You have a new balance statement! Remember, increasing reports of identity theft means that its more important than ever that you be on top of this! Click here to sign into our secure server and validate your statement!" That mail got flagged by SpamAssassin 4 times out of 5 as a phishing scam and its no wonder why. I eventually called the bank up and asked them "Pardon me, under what circumstances would you guys send me an email?" and they told me "Either you've got mail in your bank mailbox, and we send you an email to tell you to check it, or you have a new statement scheduled". So, blimey, its actually legit! How about educating the customer to never, ever, ever click on a link and then sending out mails saying "Hiya, your bank has a statement ready. You know the web address, go there now and read it." Hurts usability, I know, but depending on how much phishing actually accomplishes it might be worth it.
... and yet you have experienced kill-stealing by the guards. Shame. I would personally raze their city in retaliation.
On the filtering, I don't imagine you'd save yourself enough time to make it worthwhile if you actually had to hand-train the classifier, especially given the nearly infinite number of ways to troll on Slashdot.
Microsoft releases one patch day a month because their corporate customers, the lion's share of their market, demand it. And they demand it because "release a million little patches as soon as that individual patch is done" is unworkable in a corporate environment. You can plan around one big patch a month -- the magic word is "scheduled downtime". It is less bad for some customers to be periodically marginally more vulnerable for a period of two weeks or so then to be continusouly vulnerable to unscheduled downtime due to patching. "Publish early and often" works well with an enthusiast running one machine but when you've got an IT department overseeing a cast of thousands spread over 14 time zones things get a little more dicey.
Which explains why there hundreds of companies bidding for adds on facebook. Oh, wait, there are essentially none. Their advertising model is currently targetted at student groups, as an alternative to flyering campus. Its almost DESIGNED for failure.
Say you've got one Tank, one damage platform, and one healer (these can be any of the main characters since you've got almost an entirely free hand in customizing their ability loadouts -- they have no personality in terms of combat other than that you give them and a weeeeeeeeeeeeee little bit in their initial skill selection which lasts about 5 minutes if you're determined to overcome it). Customize your healer's gambits to something like 1) Target: healer (by name), Action: Cast healing spell. 2) Target: tank (by name), Action: Cast healing spell. 3) Target: leader's target. Action: attack. There is not to my knowledge (12 hours in) a "target X if HP Y%" target available for discovery, but your guys have a modicrum of AI and won't cast spells or use items if its a complete waste (i.e. if your first command is Target: Leader, Action: Use Potion you won't use a potion if the leader hasn't taken damage). This will, of course, be a heck of a lot more mana intensive than Target: Party member with 70% HP Action: Cast Cure.
There are three ways to disable scripting for your characters (in battle, click an option right below the Attack/Magic/etc bar, on your menu screen mark all of their programmed Gambits as Off, or give them Gambits which are intentionally unsatisfiable ("Target someone not in your party with Potion", etc). Any of these will let you play the game in the traditional FF fashion. There's one MAJOR problem with this work-around, though -- you don't get the traditional prompts for action. This means, every time you get done with the cooldown on, say, an attack, you have to click circle, navigate to the proper character, and THEN give them an order -- and they only start charging for the order after its input, meaning you're wasting efficiency on both them and all your other characters this way.
If you don't know how to clear a single cookie, then leave Slashdot and never come back. :)
Fixed.
Say what, you? The bomb somebody will set us up.
Every time I hear slack-jawed idiocy from IT professionals about partiontioning the US from the rest of the world using technology I am at once enraged and pleased. Enraged because its embarassing to share a profession with folks who through some combination of odious nativism and sheer blindness don't realize how interconnected we are at the moment and how quickly this trend is accelerating. Pleased because it means my strategy of "you can globalize yourself or you can globalize your job: pick one" will continue to result in job security over folks who just don't get it.
There are some servers that suffer frequent downtime and many that do not (I'm on Draenor, which never has problems unless *every* server goes down), and its generally the same groups of servers (including Kargath). This leads me to believe that they have internal problems, or perhaps problems upstream, some but not all of their server clusters. Its also why WoW forums simultaneously hold a lot of "OMG this game sucks I get disconnected 12 times a minute" and "STFU rock solid here!"
They should disband NASA, let private companies take over the sat-boosting business (the only worthwhile endeavor in space -- unless you count spending hundreds of millions of dollars to perform "important scientific work" such as seeing what happens to snail shells when they're exposed to zero gravity), and dole out the funds to do civilian and military R&D without having to waste huge portions on the whole "Oh, and move the experimental apparatus to space!" step of the process. Since we're not throwing money into an almost endless black void anymore, with the money left over from our New and Improved R&D Slush Fund (NIRDSF, the successor organization to NASA) we can organize a really kick-butt Fourth of July parade to satisfy folks who are really nostalgic for some national-greatness type projects.
No, seriously, that wasn't just a joke. Where is the higher return on investment for a couple million dollars and thousands of hours of programmer time -- improving WoW's sales by 5% or delivering a smash-hit console FPS? When you sell a box of FPS: The Killing for the PlayCube360, you have to split the pie with the console manufacturer (license fees) and the retail store. When you sell an auto-billed monthly subscription to MMORPG: The Farming, you send Mastercard their 50 cents and then the rest is almost pure profit directly in your pocket (we'll ignore Blizzard's China operations, where they get a very, very tiny slice of the pie relative to their Chinese partner -- its still Almost Free Money from their perspective). Add to that WoW is currently dominating its category and the FPS market is saturated by a bunch of name brands, none of which have "Blizzard" on the box...
Now, the reason for an Aussie preferred server isn't that Aussies like playing with only Aussies. The reason for an Aussie prefered server is Aussies (and you can throw me in there, because now I live in Japan and are closer to their timezone than the US's) have peak playing hours which are waaaaaaaaaaay off the American ones, and when WoW is in its MMORPG moments you need a bunch of people playing together to make it fun. For example, our weekday raids last four hours starting at 1:00 AM in the morning California time, and require 20-40 people. Or, much more irksome, PVP starting up on a server requires several dozen players simultaneously online, attentive, and desiring PVP. Designating a server as Aussie preferred just lets everyone know "Hey, if you go here you can find people in your time zone".
Yeah, I know what you mean. Amazing that Thomas Alva Edison could even show his face around town after 7,999 of his 8,000 tries to invent the lightbulb failed.
Their security feature was making it multiple gigabytes, which neatly stops most people from mailing it. Now, P2P networking, on the other hand, still working on that one. But email is definately out as a pirate method. So is hand-transcribing to papyrus, and nailing to the back of a squirrel.
I was pleasantly suprised the first time I came home from Japan and my JP GBA worked fine with everything. Then my US GBA SP worked fine with my Japanese games, and I my new JP DS plays everything I put in it (US GB, US GBA, JP GBA, JP DS, etc...)
Here's an example: when your $1 billion (thats billion with a B) commercial highrise in Japan is undergoing earthquake testing, "Screw the grid alternative, I've got an Alienware at home we can run this on, should have the results back by 2127 or so..." and paying for, oh, 100,000 CPU hours (pulling number of of thin air) looks like a very attractive proposition (consider what you'd have to spend as an architectural firm to afford your own supercomputer or grid to make that happen, plus the maintenance and employee costs to keep it running, and the fact that you get no use of it for weeks or months at a time in between earthquake tests but the tests need to be done right and done fast so you can get on with construction).
One of the target markets for the Gifu Grid (a prefectural initiative here in Japan which we're supporting at my place of employment) is architectural firms doing earthquake simulations. I'm not privvy to the specifics, but apparently their big use case is spend a lot of man hours making changes to the building plan, get to Friday, hit "test for structural soundness" and go out drinking. When you're on a n-week construction cycle, spending two weeks waiting for the results of your compile (oops, sorry, at a 6.2 quake with certain assumptions this fails... BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD!) costs you both money and your completition-on-time goal. But during the vast majority of the project cycle you *don't* need a server farm -- you've got X desktops running your favorite CAD software, which is all well and good, but if you had a supercomputer or beowulf cluster in the back room it would be powered down 98% of the time. So, theoretically, we could sell them time on our network -- we'll have your simulation done by Monday, you don't worry your architectural heads about setting up a Beowulf cluster.
Yep. That deserves a Funny +6.