The black dye tubs were the result of a program called FUSE (Fallo's UO Server Emulator), which along with UOX (the Ultima Offline eXperiment) were server emulators.
The author of FUSE included a hidden setting in the loader program for the emulator that, when used on legitimate servers, would dye tubs black automatically. It took several weeks for it to be patched.
UO Extreme was called UOE, and its primary feature was the ability to see hidden players.
You have the gist of the story correct, but the details are all wrong.
This wasn't written by me; I copied it off of the somethingawful.com forums.
Actual conversation between me and my girlfriend:
Me: If we get engaged, don't expect much in the way of a ring. I'm pretty broke. Her: It's OK. I don't need a very expensive ring. Me [uneasy at the qualifier "very"]:... because your brother just got engaged, and that ring he gave her was pretty impressive... Her: Yes, it was beautiful! I'd love to have a ring like that! Me:... and I'm worried that anything I could give you wouldn't measure up to that. Her: Don't be silly. I wouldn't want more than you could afford. Me: Define "afford." Her: Two months' salary is normal. Me [calculating]: Um... wow. That would be, like, $4000. That's a lot. Her: Gross, dear, not net. It would be more like $6000. Me: Who makes up these rules? Her: That's just the custom, honey. Me: You know that's just a marketing gimmick started by the diamond cartels around the turn of the century, don't you? Her: Silly. I don't need an expensive ring. Me: The conversation up to this point notwithstanding? Her: Two months' salary is normal. It's not expensive. Me: So if you found, say, $6000 worth of computer hardware on our joint credit card, I could say "Hey, that's not expensive; it's just what computers cost!" Her: That's different. That would be just for you. The ring is for both of us. Me: So I get to wear this ring part of the time? Her: Silly. The ring shows everyone how much you love me. Me: And what shows everyone how much you love me? Her: The ring. Me: Do you see a certain asymmetry in this arrangement? Her: You should be proud that everyone sees me wearing your ring. It tells the world how much you value me. Me: Approximately $6000 worth, apparently. Does this mean that rich men value their wives more than poor men? Her: No. It's two months' salary for everyone. Me: Ah, so wives are priced on a sliding scale, then, like low-income housing? Her: I wouldn't put it that way. Me: How would you put it? Her: A little money is a small price to pay for something that lasts forever. Me: You lifted that directly from a jewelery commercial. Her: That doesn't make it untrue. Me: Touché. Her: Look, if you live to be 80... Me: I don't like that "if." Her [ignoring me]:... and you're 33 now, that's $6000 divided by 47 years of marriage. That's like, $130 a year. You spend more than that on video games. Me: I'm alarmed at how quickly you arrived at that number. Her [ignoring me]: $130 a year isn't so much for my love, is it? Me: Well, it's a good deal cheaper than escort services.... OW! OW! Quit hitting; I'm driving here! Her: You get a lot more from this relationship than sex. Me: Yeah, the contusions make it all worthwhile. Her: Baby. Me: Y'know, this actually works out better for you if I die early. Your yearly value increases inversely to the length of my life. If I only live to 50.... Her: I'm tired of talking about this. Me: That's because you're losing. Her: I'm not losing. We're not competing. You told me you couldn't afford an expensive ring, and I said that was OK. Me: Ah, so it's the "affording" part that's irrelevant. Her: Stop being so silly. I've bought jewelry on credit before; it's no big deal. Me: That's the solution! Her: What is? Me: You buy the ring. Her: That's not how it works, honey. Me: If people look at the ring to see how much I love you, wouldn't it make sense to get the most expensive ring available? You've got better credit than me, so.... Her: But the point is for you to buy it, so people can see how much you value me. Me: How are people going to know who bought it? Do the salespeople engrave the credit card holder's name on the band? Her: I'll know. Me: Well, yes, that's a given. Her: I'll know you didn't want to pay for my ring. Me: I thought we'd established that. Her: I'm tired of talking about this. Forget it. Me: I'm trying to understand, really. We're supposed to have a token of our love, right? Her: Whatever. Right. Me: This token is something you would want anyway, a piece of jewelry. Her: Honey... Me: Bear with me. The token is sized for you, presumably styled the way I think you'd like it... Her: Actually, I get to pick it out. Me: Even better for my purposes. So the token is styled just for you, sized so only you can wear it. You keep it with you always. Do we both own it? Her: No, the bride owns the ring always. Me: OK. So you get a ring that may or may not be expensive, depending on your definition, which is your exclusive property to do with as you please. I get to pay for it. Remember what I said about asymmetry? Her: So you want a ring? Me: No. To be symmetrical, it would have to be something I want. A laptop, for instance. Her: You want an engagement laptop? Me: That's just an example. Her: That's not parallel. Computers depreciate; good jewelry doesn't. Me: Good point. I guess there's no such thing as a ring upgrade. Her: Actually, they make these things called "sleeves" which you buy for major anniversaries.... Me: Dude, I'm gettin' a Dell!
I bought an IBM 60GXP-series drive back in July and it's been running with no problems whatsoever. I actually specifically avoided buying the 75GXP line because I had heard similar horror stories from friends.
Rainz was a notorious exploiter, both in the pre-alpha test and the beta. At the time he killed Lord British, he had millions of hit points (whereas the max for your average player is 100).
I dislike that history is being skewed in his favor, making him out to be a good guy. My friends and I used to go out and hunt him with (literally) a dozen people, surround him, and beat on him for 15-20 minutes until he died.
"We are not worried about copycats taking our program," Barabasi said.
But variations could be engineered to make online piracy much more efficient, he cautioned.
If it will make piracy more efficient, I'm pretty sure the pirates would be very interested in finding out more about it.
Hell, in my experience, most pirates would use a modem that belched huge clouds of carbon monoxide and was powered by grinding up kittens in a big hopper if it got them an extra 10k/s on their downloads.
Hey, if anyone figures out how to design a network properly, let the good folks over at The College of New Jersey know.
With 6 T1s serving about 3000 students and computer labs/classrooms/faculty offices, you'd think it would be enough for reasonable Internet usage. But you're wrong.
Someone, somewhere, ensured that unless you were using the Internet between the hours of 3 am to 7 am, packet loss would be in the 75% range.
It's impossible to load even a simple webpage in anything less than 5 minutes.
I don't know what it is... A bad or poorly-configured firewall, too much bandwidth being reserved for the labs, or Satanic interference... but it's bad enough to make me want to get a dial-up connection.
To think that I'm giving up my cable modem in 2 weeks to go back there... ughhh.
Why, that sounds like LossySoft! Compress gigabytes of files to bits!
An excerpt from LampreySoft's page:
After a typical LossySoft HSV compression cycle you achieve a 16:1 compression ratio, or
9 gigabytes = approx 600 megabytes. You've compressed your data on your very expensive hard drive into a size that will fit on an average 2 gigabyte hard drive with PLENTY of room to spare.
Here's where the REAL excitement comes in - let's run the compression cycle TEN TIMES!
Cycle Size in bytes
9,663,676,416 (9 gigs, it takes a huge hard drive to hold)
603,979,776 (approx 600 megs, fits on an Iomega Jaz disk, a Syquest SyJet disk, or a CD-R)
37,748,736 (approx 35 megs, fits on an Iomega Zip disk, a Syquest Ezflyer disk, or a LS-120 disk)
2,359,296 (approx 2 megs, transfers fairly quickly on a 28.8K or faster modem)
147,456 (approx 150K, fits on all current removable media)
9,216 (9K - wow!)
576 (just over HALF a K!)
36 (that's BYTES, folks!)
2.25 (incredible, isn't it?)
0.140625 (AMAZING!)
Current technology can't split bytes very well, so the minimum you can compress any disk to is 1 bit.
(Note: future LampreySoft products will use advanced features of quantum mathematics to reduce the lowest unit of information measure to sub-bit levels)
I was really excited when I saw the title of the article, because I had mis-read it as "RoboCop 2001 Underway." Imagine my disappointment when I saw it was actually "RoboCup."
I am part man, part machine.
Excuse me, I must go. Somewhere a crime is happening.
Actually, VQF has disappeared because it wasn't all that great. I decided to give it a test recently, and encoded a couple of my favorite MP3s. There was significant, prolonged distortion in places in each one. I'm not an audiophile, nor am I musically inclined, so I couldn't describe what the distortion was or where it came from... all I know is that it made my Aphex Twin and Autechre MP3s sound horrible.
Krusty: And all I keep seeing is dead celebrities hawking products! You've got poor old Vincent Price floating around in a toilet keg telling me about the *horrors* of an unfresh bowl!
Although the script doesn't have the joke, he also says, "I seriously doubt that Winston Churchill would eat at Der Wienerschnitzel!"
Ahh, Matt Groening... when will your show stop being so damn relevent?
Ugh. I just wrote up an interesting idea I had for "booth babes" on Unhelpful.org. I'll just paste it here:
"Now, if I had my own game company, I would hire post-op transsexuals to be my "booth babes." After each lonely, horny geekboy comes up to have his picture taken, I'd have the girls hand each one a card that says, "Congratulations! You have just had your picture taken with a transsexual!"
For maximum enjoyment, I would have to video tape their reactions upon reading the card, of course."
Even though the exact details weren't perfect, it encapsulated the average UO player very well in one paragraph:
One day, I spent several hours in the room, sitting next to the young man who plays Game Master Quinnly. Game Master Quinnly wears a red robe and tries to remain courtly even under difficult circumstances. "Hail, I'm GM Quinnly," he told one young knight accused of killing a friend and then looting his corpse. "GMs suck ass," the knight responded.
Todd Pratt (he plays for the Mets, although I have no idea what position) also plays Ultima Online as "Ian Stormbringer." He's been featured on their site a number of times, and I believe his endorsement was featured on the box of UO:R.
Family Guy is one of the single best television shows in years. The gags are all on-target, although it's a little crude at times. It definitely ranks up there with "The Simpsons" and "Futurama" as one of my favorite animated shows.
The humor is a little divergent from "The Simpsons" and "Futurama," though. The Simpsons tends to be more satirical (or used to), while Futurama is a little more sight gag/pun oriented.
Family Guy's approach is different. It just throws crude and offensive material at you until you can't help laughing.
If Fox dumped "King of the Hill" (funny, but not side-splittingly so) and replaced it with Family Guy, my ass would be glued to the couch from 7 to 10 pm every Sunday. (Fox lineup until 9, then the Sopranos on HBO)
"Find the essential elements of creating good software, do them all of the time, and discard everything else."
So, they're saying, "Figure out what's good and do it," huh? Well, it's good advice, but isn't it pretty much what we're supposed to in the first place?
I've never had someone come up to me and say "Write good code!"
I always thought that the "write good code" statement was implicit. If I'm writing code in any serious fashion, it's going to be the best I can do.
Maybe everyone else has been writing bad code intentionally all this time... They just needed to be told to do a good job! "Well, no one ever SAID 'Write good code' to me..."
My experience with the Sims was rather negative. I started out by creating my character and playing for a few hours... I got bored with it, as I tend to do with games, and started haxx0ring it.
I h4xx0r3d myself up a ton of money, and set to work building "The Sims Skinner Box!"
I put a 'fridge on one end, boxed the people in with it, and made a complex maze leading up to a toilet.
My Sims all died, standing in puddles of their own urine. Poor bastards. If only they could navigate a maze, that terrible tragedy could have been avoided.
I then attempted to create an M.C. Escher-esque house, but the game's structure was too rigid. Why CAN'T I have stairs coming out of the walls, leading to nowhere? Damn Maxis. They stifle my creativity at every turn.
The market is getting thinner now. We're down to PS/2, and vaporous offerings from Microsoft and Nintendo.
You seem to be forgetting about the Republic console! I mean, the thing will be powered with a Voodoo 5 5500 (according to the page, "it a video card").
How can they go wrong with that?
The Republic Gaming Console
Denny Sargent couldn't resist humming the theme to ''2001: A Space Odyssey,'' when he walked up to touch the imposing object, which stands on a grassy knoll in Magnuson Park like the movie's enigmatic extraterrestrial guardian.
I wish people would realize that it's not JUST the "theme from 2001," it's a piece of music called "Also Sprach Zarathrusta" by Richard Strauss.
People still actually use the 'Home page' feature? I've had my 'home page' set to a blank page for about 3 years, and ever since IE allowed customization of the toolbar, I haven't had a little 'Home' button.
It's AOL's browser, they can do whatever they want with it. If you don't like AOL's browser, then don't use it. I can't imagine why anyone would in the first place; the thing is a piece of crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Your details are incorrect.
The black dye tubs were the result of a program called FUSE (Fallo's UO Server Emulator), which along with UOX (the Ultima Offline eXperiment) were server emulators.
The author of FUSE included a hidden setting in the loader program for the emulator that, when used on legitimate servers, would dye tubs black automatically. It took several weeks for it to be patched.
UO Extreme was called UOE, and its primary feature was the ability to see hidden players.
You have the gist of the story correct, but the details are all wrong.
This wasn't written by me; I copied it off of the somethingawful.com forums.
... because your brother just got engaged, and that ring he gave her was pretty impressive... ... and I'm worried that anything I could give you wouldn't measure up to that. ... and you're 33 now, that's $6000 divided by 47 years of marriage. That's like, $130 a year. You spend more than that on video games.
Actual conversation between me and my girlfriend:
Me: If we get engaged, don't expect much in the way of a ring. I'm pretty broke.
Her: It's OK. I don't need a very expensive ring.
Me [uneasy at the qualifier "very"]:
Her: Yes, it was beautiful! I'd love to have a ring like that!
Me:
Her: Don't be silly. I wouldn't want more than you could afford.
Me: Define "afford."
Her: Two months' salary is normal.
Me [calculating]: Um... wow. That would be, like, $4000. That's a lot.
Her: Gross, dear, not net. It would be more like $6000.
Me: Who makes up these rules?
Her: That's just the custom, honey.
Me: You know that's just a marketing gimmick started by the diamond cartels around the turn of the century, don't you?
Her: Silly. I don't need an expensive ring.
Me: The conversation up to this point notwithstanding?
Her: Two months' salary is normal. It's not expensive.
Me: So if you found, say, $6000 worth of computer hardware on our joint credit card, I could say "Hey, that's not expensive; it's just what computers cost!"
Her: That's different. That would be just for you. The ring is for both of us.
Me: So I get to wear this ring part of the time?
Her: Silly. The ring shows everyone how much you love me.
Me: And what shows everyone how much you love me?
Her: The ring.
Me: Do you see a certain asymmetry in this arrangement?
Her: You should be proud that everyone sees me wearing your ring. It tells the world how much you value me.
Me: Approximately $6000 worth, apparently. Does this mean that rich men value their wives more than poor men?
Her: No. It's two months' salary for everyone.
Me: Ah, so wives are priced on a sliding scale, then, like low-income housing?
Her: I wouldn't put it that way.
Me: How would you put it?
Her: A little money is a small price to pay for something that lasts forever.
Me: You lifted that directly from a jewelery commercial.
Her: That doesn't make it untrue.
Me: Touché.
Her: Look, if you live to be 80...
Me: I don't like that "if."
Her [ignoring me]:
Me: I'm alarmed at how quickly you arrived at that number.
Her [ignoring me]: $130 a year isn't so much for my love, is it?
Me: Well, it's a good deal cheaper than escort services.... OW! OW! Quit hitting; I'm driving here!
Her: You get a lot more from this relationship than sex.
Me: Yeah, the contusions make it all worthwhile.
Her: Baby.
Me: Y'know, this actually works out better for you if I die early. Your yearly value increases inversely to the length of my life. If I only live to 50....
Her: I'm tired of talking about this.
Me: That's because you're losing.
Her: I'm not losing. We're not competing. You told me you couldn't afford an expensive ring, and I said that was OK.
Me: Ah, so it's the "affording" part that's irrelevant.
Her: Stop being so silly. I've bought jewelry on credit before; it's no big deal.
Me: That's the solution!
Her: What is?
Me: You buy the ring.
Her: That's not how it works, honey.
Me: If people look at the ring to see how much I love you, wouldn't it make sense to get the most expensive ring available? You've got better credit than me, so....
Her: But the point is for you to buy it, so people can see how much you value me.
Me: How are people going to know who bought it? Do the salespeople engrave the credit card holder's name on the band?
Her: I'll know.
Me: Well, yes, that's a given.
Her: I'll know you didn't want to pay for my ring.
Me: I thought we'd established that.
Her: I'm tired of talking about this. Forget it.
Me: I'm trying to understand, really. We're supposed to have a token of our love, right?
Her: Whatever. Right.
Me: This token is something you would want anyway, a piece of jewelry.
Her: Honey...
Me: Bear with me. The token is sized for you, presumably styled the way I think you'd like it...
Her: Actually, I get to pick it out.
Me: Even better for my purposes. So the token is styled just for you, sized so only you can wear it. You keep it with you always. Do we both own it?
Her: No, the bride owns the ring always.
Me: OK. So you get a ring that may or may not be expensive, depending on your definition, which is your exclusive property to do with as you please. I get to pay for it. Remember what I said about asymmetry?
Her: So you want a ring?
Me: No. To be symmetrical, it would have to be something I want. A laptop, for instance.
Her: You want an engagement laptop?
Me: That's just an example.
Her: That's not parallel. Computers depreciate; good jewelry doesn't.
Me: Good point. I guess there's no such thing as a ring upgrade.
Her: Actually, they make these things called "sleeves" which you buy for major anniversaries....
Me: Dude, I'm gettin' a Dell!
George Carlin was in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. He was the hitchhiker who taught Jay "the unwritten rules of the road."
I bought an IBM 60GXP-series drive back in July and it's been running with no problems whatsoever. I actually specifically avoided buying the 75GXP line because I had heard similar horror stories from friends.
Rainz was a notorious exploiter, both in the pre-alpha test and the beta. At the time he killed Lord British, he had millions of hit points (whereas the max for your average player is 100).
I dislike that history is being skewed in his favor, making him out to be a good guy. My friends and I used to go out and hunt him with (literally) a dozen people, surround him, and beat on him for 15-20 minutes until he died.
If it will make piracy more efficient, I'm pretty sure the pirates would be very interested in finding out more about it.
Hell, in my experience, most pirates would use a modem that belched huge clouds of carbon monoxide and was powered by grinding up kittens in a big hopper if it got them an extra 10k/s on their downloads.
Hey, if anyone figures out how to design a network properly, let the good folks over at The College of New Jersey know.
With 6 T1s serving about 3000 students and computer labs/classrooms/faculty offices, you'd think it would be enough for reasonable Internet usage. But you're wrong.
Someone, somewhere, ensured that unless you were using the Internet between the hours of 3 am to 7 am, packet loss would be in the 75% range.
It's impossible to load even a simple webpage in anything less than 5 minutes.
I don't know what it is... A bad or poorly-configured firewall, too much bandwidth being reserved for the labs, or Satanic interference... but it's bad enough to make me want to get a dial-up connection.
To think that I'm giving up my cable modem in 2 weeks to go back there... ughhh.
Oh yeah? He thinks he's so good? Well, I got the highscore in Ms. Pacman (a true crusader for womens' rights!) at the local arcade about 15 years ago!
So there, Mr. Big-Shot Quake 3 player!
An excerpt from LampreySoft's page:
LossySoft!
I was really excited when I saw the title of the article, because I had mis-read it as "RoboCop 2001 Underway." Imagine my disappointment when I saw it was actually "RoboCup."
I am part man, part machine.
Excuse me, I must go. Somewhere a crime is happening.
Actually, VQF has disappeared because it wasn't all that great. I decided to give it a test recently, and encoded a couple of my favorite MP3s. There was significant, prolonged distortion in places in each one. I'm not an audiophile, nor am I musically inclined, so I couldn't describe what the distortion was or where it came from... all I know is that it made my Aphex Twin and Autechre MP3s sound horrible.
(Thanks to SNPP.com
Krusty: And all I keep seeing is dead celebrities hawking products! You've got poor old Vincent Price floating around in a toilet keg telling me about the *horrors* of an unfresh bowl!
Although the script doesn't have the joke, he also says, "I seriously doubt that Winston Churchill would eat at Der Wienerschnitzel!"
Ahh, Matt Groening... when will your show stop being so damn relevent?
Ugh. I just wrote up an interesting idea I had for "booth babes" on Unhelpful.org. I'll just paste it here:
"Now, if I had my own game company, I would hire post-op transsexuals to be my "booth babes." After each lonely, horny geekboy comes up to have his picture taken, I'd have the girls hand each one a card that says, "Congratulations! You have just had your picture taken with a transsexual!"
For maximum enjoyment, I would have to video tape their reactions upon reading the card, of course."
I don't know, I think it would be funny.
The above paragraph is perfect.
Todd Pratt (he plays for the Mets, although I have no idea what position) also plays Ultima Online as "Ian Stormbringer." He's been featured on their site a number of times, and I believe his endorsement was featured on the box of UO:R.
Professional atheletes like killings orcs too!
Family Guy is one of the single best television shows in years. The gags are all on-target, although it's a little crude at times. It definitely ranks up there with "The Simpsons" and "Futurama" as one of my favorite animated shows.
The humor is a little divergent from "The Simpsons" and "Futurama," though. The Simpsons tends to be more satirical (or used to), while Futurama is a little more sight gag/pun oriented.
Family Guy's approach is different. It just throws crude and offensive material at you until you can't help laughing.
If Fox dumped "King of the Hill" (funny, but not side-splittingly so) and replaced it with Family Guy, my ass would be glued to the couch from 7 to 10 pm every Sunday. (Fox lineup until 9, then the Sopranos on HBO)
So, they're saying, "Figure out what's good and do it," huh? Well, it's good advice, but isn't it pretty much what we're supposed to in the first place?
I've never had someone come up to me and say "Write good code!"
I always thought that the "write good code" statement was implicit. If I'm writing code in any serious fashion, it's going to be the best I can do.
Maybe everyone else has been writing bad code intentionally all this time... They just needed to be told to do a good job! "Well, no one ever SAID 'Write good code' to me..."
My experience with the Sims was rather negative. I started out by creating my character and playing for a few hours... I got bored with it, as I tend to do with games, and started haxx0ring it.
I h4xx0r3d myself up a ton of money, and set to work building "The Sims Skinner Box!"
I put a 'fridge on one end, boxed the people in with it, and made a complex maze leading up to a toilet.
My Sims all died, standing in puddles of their own urine. Poor bastards. If only they could navigate a maze, that terrible tragedy could have been avoided.
I then attempted to create an M.C. Escher-esque house, but the game's structure was too rigid. Why CAN'T I have stairs coming out of the walls, leading to nowhere? Damn Maxis. They stifle my creativity at every turn.
A friend of mine had his own magical "The Sims" experience, which he chronicled at this URL:
The Secret of Happiness, Sims-style
In other news, a man caught shoplifting CDs from a local record store in East Brunswick, New Jersey was arrested today for theft.
Can you believe that? They arrested someone! For stealing! First the thieves, then the child molestors and rapists! What's this world coming to?
This reminds me of a George Carlin bit.
"Did you ever get a pink slip? I didn't. Usually a guy would come up to my desk and say, 'GET THE FUCK OUT! GET YOUR SHIT AND GET THE FUCK OUT!'"
Apparently, we don't even get that anymore.
I wish people would realize that it's not JUST the "theme from 2001," it's a piece of music called "Also Sprach Zarathrusta" by Richard Strauss.
This was posted on slashdot a while ago.
People still actually use the 'Home page' feature? I've had my 'home page' set to a blank page for about 3 years, and ever since IE allowed customization of the toolbar, I haven't had a little 'Home' button.
It's AOL's browser, they can do whatever they want with it. If you don't like AOL's browser, then don't use it. I can't imagine why anyone would in the first place; the thing is a piece of crap.
Who the hell is going to the library to look at porn?
I could just see the scandal... "Paul Reubens (Pee-wee Herman [one of my personal heroes]) arrested for porn browsing in the library!"