After the new patent changes no longer requiring the patent application to disclose prior art, but just focus on who filed the patent for it first, Microsoft will be right there patenting both paper and ink.
Well, maybe I should have rejected them twice instead of just once. But I looked at those logs every day, and they would just call back. I was hoping for a slam-dunk when I added greylisting and didn't get that. Spamcop and other RBLs were the magic bullet -- they'd get nearly everything, and SpamAssassin would get most of the rest.
I didn't think of rejecting twice. So maybe that's the root of my issues with greylisting.
Greylisting was designed on the single proposition that spam mailers wouldn't "call back" if they got a "call back later" code from the site they were spamming. And maybe that was true for awhile. In my last job I had to add spam filtering to our email and greylisting was one of the first things I tried.
The spammers just kept trying until they got through.
Spamming has evolved past greylisting and it is now worthless.
Bayesian keyword filtering is decent, but is constantly attacked by images or hiding the spam content in random text. If you train it well, you can eventually just pass through the sort of mail you normally get and spam that doesn't mesh with your normal mail might get blocked, but when you take this to a company level it fails unless everyone separates their spam from their real mail and makes appropriate filters and rules -- which they won't do.
It's a tough problem, and there's no one solution that can do the whole job. A well-trained Bayesian along with an RBL like Spamcop can get about 80% of them.
GEM was running on Intel hardware well before it was ported to the Atari ST. Digital Research, the authors, were embroiled in a lawsuit with Apple about how much they duplicated the Macintosh look-and-feel which blocked them from moving forward aggressively with GEM. As a result, Microsoft with their deeper pockets and willingness to fight Apple, went ahead with Windows.
DRI, already suffering from losing the CP/M86-MSDOS battle, and now losing the GEM-Windows battle for the graphical desktop, went out of business soon after.
Destroying evidence of a crime is also a crime. The best thing to do is to encrypt your data as a matter of course. They can't ask you to decrypt it for them because that would potentially ask you to incriminate yourself. And if they're so wonderful at DRM, let them figure out how to get at it.
This blog has exactly one entry, this comparison. The site address is btcompare.blogspot.com. It was made only to post this article and get it on news conglomeration sites like Digg and SlashDot. It mentions a BitTorrent tracking site few have heard of, but is apparently the most complete and popular one in the world.
What are the chances this WASN'T done by someone involved with BTJunkie?
Oh, right, no, they aren't. So this comment comes from where? Are there any other games you don't like that aren't being made into movies you think should be added to discussions of games that are?
Checkers. The Checkers movie will SUCK. Unless all the kings fight it out in a cage match at the end.
Would you have felt as offended if one of the women was Chinese, and the other Japanese? Or one of the women was Mexican and the other Salvadoran? Or one of the women was British and the other French? And yet all these would be offensive to people from other cultures.
Racism isn't acknowledging that people have skin of differing colors, or speak different languages, or live in different countries. It's about making assumptions of people based not on who they are, but on things they cannot easily change.
First thing I noticed about the ad was the white woman's weird hair....
Wow... didn't know anyone else suffered from this...
This same thing happened to me several years back. I was a happy Java engineer working on a JSP project and I just couldn't program anymore. I just ended up trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life until they eventually laid me off.
I haven't held a programming job since. I moved over half a step to low-level IT and am slowly working my way back to coding. Just Javascript and some PHP for now; easy, basic stuff. I still don't know if I could write a real application of any complexity again.
Coding is a hard train to catch. Once you've left it, your skills quickly become outdated.
If you're staring in the mirror, trying to figure out what you're going to do with yourself, it's time for a change. Don't wait.
The virus author gets paid by the pharmacies to do a virus ad campaign. Victims pay money to the pharmacies. They tell the virus author someone has paid up, author releases the key to them.
No money goes directly from victim to virus author.
Guild I was in required them, along with Ventrilo. All we were were warm bodies in the raid machine.
Raids were setting the mods right, listening for instructions where to stand over Vent, then hitting my two buttons. I never got the chance to "try and crack that hard egg". On my server, half the people had been in endgame guilds on other servers, and knew exactly how to do everything. We never had to try and figure ANYTHING out. Was just a matter of executing the script perfectly (and getting the correct resists up).
But then, I wasn't in WoW from Day 1. I started this last October, reached endgame in January, was bored with it by March. And I did leave once I reached pointlessness (and half the guild went to another server to restart, another quarter just quit, as I did, and the last quarter joined other high-end guilds).
This strays from the point. You burn through content in WoW extremely quickly - and then what happens? The raids are fun the first couple of times, but they get old fast.
My favorite memories are burning spiders in Duskwood with my mage, or exploring the world in Beta with a stranger I met who became a close friend.
The game itself could only be improved by letting players control more of the content. Heck, do like old EQ and stop instancing. A race through MC with another guild to see who gets to Rag first would be exciting. I have LOTS of good memories from EQ1 of racing to Rallos Zek or Trakanon or even Vex Thal. Our enemies weren't Yelinak or Klandicar or the Avatar of War; they were Affliction, Ring of Destiny and Midnight Fury. And when raids were done, we'd do some casual grouping in some experience zone and laugh about the competition.
WoW's overuse of instancing for most raid targets makes guild competition meaningless. All you fight are the scripts, which after all, are designed solely for the purpose of feeding you loot and getting you to return to do them again.
In Halo, etc.; the maps mean little, really. Just like the WoW battlegrounds. You are playing against other people, you don't hardly even think of the maps. In Arathi Basin, for instance, you know the weak points and strong points based on who from the other team is guarding them. It's all about player content - in this case, the players themselves - instead of static scripted content - in WoW's case, the boss fights which are so tightly scripted my guild (and most other guilds) had a UI mod which told us everything to do and when to do it.
(Those idiotic, required UI mods really burn me up. Turned my job, healing, into a two button affair - one for healing, one for curing. Just read the screen to see where to stand. Watch the raid wipe because someone was trying to do something unscripted.)
The point of the original article was that when players are allowed to be innovative and creative, you no longer have to worry what to do when the content runs out - the players are inventing their own goals and rewards. The ONLY way in WoW (et al) to do that is by playing the metagame of the endgame guild itself - on message boards, the blizzard forums, what have you - playing out social interactions out of game because the game itself does not value anything beyond the grind.
I never played Shadowbane (was in DAoC at time), but it sounds pretty much like the kind of game he would have wanted. That game failed, but maybe someone needs to give it another shot.
Endgame in WoW is ALL about doing the same thing, again and again, every single night until you can't bear to log in again. EVERY weekend, while I played, was spent in MC and ZG. Then they added the resets so every single night of the week was scheduled by Blizzard.
No thanks, I don't want to do Scholo for the three hundredth time. Seen enough of Strat, live and dead. UBRS is a Uber Bore. I play a holy spec priestess because my guild demanded I switch from shadow - faction grinding or farming gold for repairs is therefore incredibly slow and anything but fun.
I made alts, but the realization I'd have to subject myself to nights and nights more of Scholo, Strat and UBRS just to get geared enough to torture myself with more MC and ZG made me hang up my WoW account.
Guild after guild on my server imploded when they got to the endgame; and after awhile, so did the one I was in. Too many people left or restarted on other servers or returned to previous servers.
I read the article. He's spot on about the lack of imagination in current MMOs. One thing about EQ1 - leveling was so slow that many stopped worrying about getting a level a day (or week) and started doing the social things - the buff days, races, arena battles, role playing in Plane of Hate - the kinds of things you end up doing when levels and loot are fairly hard to come by.
Nobody would stand for that now. WoW, EQ2 and the others (including EQ1 since Luclin) have conditioned people to thinking that if they aren't making levels and not getting uber loot, that there is no fun to be had in the game.
The author of the article says sandbox PvP is the answer. I'm not sure about that - griefers live to ruin those kinds of things - but heck, it's about time for a game that can see beyond the grind.
I don't think grinding is fun. At all. Just wanted to say that first. Should always be a REASON for getting experience. In EQ2, getting xp and levels (for me, anyway) is just a by-product of doing quests; I haven't yet had to grind levels like in EQ1 or (to a far lesser extent, of course) WoW.
But what is wrong with slow leveling? Fast leveling separates friends from each other. A friend in WoW I met in my 30s just blew past me to 60 and we couldn't group again for weeks. Fast leveling means you never really get to do everything there is to do at a certain level. I spent no more than a day or two in any particular zone of WoW, except for the Barrens.
Slashdot Mirror
After the new patent changes no longer requiring the patent application to disclose prior art, but just focus on who filed the patent for it first, Microsoft will be right there patenting both paper and ink.
ODF has had this support since 2002.
See: http://opendocument.xml.org/milestones
Well, maybe I should have rejected them twice instead of just once. But I looked at those logs every day, and they would just call back. I was hoping for a slam-dunk when I added greylisting and didn't get that. Spamcop and other RBLs were the magic bullet -- they'd get nearly everything, and SpamAssassin would get most of the rest.
I didn't think of rejecting twice. So maybe that's the root of my issues with greylisting.
Greylisting was designed on the single proposition that spam mailers wouldn't "call back" if they got a "call back later" code from the site they were spamming. And maybe that was true for awhile. In my last job I had to add spam filtering to our email and greylisting was one of the first things I tried.
The spammers just kept trying until they got through.
Spamming has evolved past greylisting and it is now worthless.
Bayesian keyword filtering is decent, but is constantly attacked by images or hiding the spam content in random text. If you train it well, you can eventually just pass through the sort of mail you normally get and spam that doesn't mesh with your normal mail might get blocked, but when you take this to a company level it fails unless everyone separates their spam from their real mail and makes appropriate filters and rules -- which they won't do.
It's a tough problem, and there's no one solution that can do the whole job. A well-trained Bayesian along with an RBL like Spamcop can get about 80% of them.
It's that old thought experiment -- if you have an axe and you get a new head for it and then later replace the handle, is it the same axe?
Humans show a picture to the system and give it a list of elements present in the picture. That's where it gets the words.
Back in the old days, you lifted your phone, banged the hook a few times to wake up the operator downtown, and asked her to connect you to your party.
Now in the 21st century, you can just ask the FBI tapping your phone to connect you.
Now THAT'S PROGRESS!
Well, Zork takes longer to finish.
GEM was running on Intel hardware well before it was ported to the Atari ST. Digital Research, the authors, were embroiled in a lawsuit with Apple about how much they duplicated the Macintosh look-and-feel which blocked them from moving forward aggressively with GEM. As a result, Microsoft with their deeper pockets and willingness to fight Apple, went ahead with Windows.
DRI, already suffering from losing the CP/M86-MSDOS battle, and now losing the GEM-Windows battle for the graphical desktop, went out of business soon after.
Destroying evidence of a crime is also a crime. The best thing to do is to encrypt your data as a matter of course. They can't ask you to decrypt it for them because that would potentially ask you to incriminate yourself. And if they're so wonderful at DRM, let them figure out how to get at it.
Well, let's see...
This blog has exactly one entry, this comparison. The site address is btcompare.blogspot.com. It was made only to post this article and get it on news conglomeration sites like Digg and SlashDot. It mentions a BitTorrent tracking site few have heard of, but is apparently the most complete and popular one in the world.
What are the chances this WASN'T done by someone involved with BTJunkie?
Pretty slim.
All you're missing are the ads upon ads upon ads. Really. The summary is the whole thing.
They're making a WoW movie, live action, and it might not suck.
http://www.blizzard.com/press/060509.shtml
They're making a movie from EverQuest?
Oh, right, no, they aren't. So this comment comes from where? Are there any other games you don't like that aren't being made into movies you think should be added to discussions of games that are?
Checkers. The Checkers movie will SUCK. Unless all the kings fight it out in a cage match at the end.
I have to use both Oracle and SQL Server most every day, depending on which database I am accessing.
This book sounds incredibly useful.
Would you have felt as offended if one of the women was Chinese, and the other Japanese? Or one of the women was Mexican and the other Salvadoran? Or one of the women was British and the other French? And yet all these would be offensive to people from other cultures.
Racism isn't acknowledging that people have skin of differing colors, or speak different languages, or live in different countries. It's about making assumptions of people based not on who they are, but on things they cannot easily change.
First thing I noticed about the ad was the white woman's weird hair....
Wow... didn't know anyone else suffered from this...
This same thing happened to me several years back. I was a happy Java engineer working on a JSP project and I just couldn't program anymore. I just ended up trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life until they eventually laid me off.
I haven't held a programming job since. I moved over half a step to low-level IT and am slowly working my way back to coding. Just Javascript and some PHP for now; easy, basic stuff. I still don't know if I could write a real application of any complexity again.
Coding is a hard train to catch. Once you've left it, your skills quickly become outdated.
If you're staring in the mirror, trying to figure out what you're going to do with yourself, it's time for a change. Don't wait.
you also forgot:
lol... this is not a dupe!
The one which cause a fighter plane to flip over when it crossed the equator?
The virus author gets paid by the pharmacies to do a virus ad campaign. Victims pay money to the pharmacies. They tell the virus author someone has paid up, author releases the key to them.
No money goes directly from victim to virus author.
Guild I was in required them, along with Ventrilo. All we were were warm bodies in the raid machine.
Raids were setting the mods right, listening for instructions where to stand over Vent, then hitting my two buttons. I never got the chance to "try and crack that hard egg". On my server, half the people had been in endgame guilds on other servers, and knew exactly how to do everything. We never had to try and figure ANYTHING out. Was just a matter of executing the script perfectly (and getting the correct resists up).
But then, I wasn't in WoW from Day 1. I started this last October, reached endgame in January, was bored with it by March. And I did leave once I reached pointlessness (and half the guild went to another server to restart, another quarter just quit, as I did, and the last quarter joined other high-end guilds).
This strays from the point. You burn through content in WoW extremely quickly - and then what happens? The raids are fun the first couple of times, but they get old fast.
My favorite memories are burning spiders in Duskwood with my mage, or exploring the world in Beta with a stranger I met who became a close friend.
The game itself could only be improved by letting players control more of the content. Heck, do like old EQ and stop instancing. A race through MC with another guild to see who gets to Rag first would be exciting. I have LOTS of good memories from EQ1 of racing to Rallos Zek or Trakanon or even Vex Thal. Our enemies weren't Yelinak or Klandicar or the Avatar of War; they were Affliction, Ring of Destiny and Midnight Fury. And when raids were done, we'd do some casual grouping in some experience zone and laugh about the competition.
WoW's overuse of instancing for most raid targets makes guild competition meaningless. All you fight are the scripts, which after all, are designed solely for the purpose of feeding you loot and getting you to return to do them again.
In Halo, etc.; the maps mean little, really. Just like the WoW battlegrounds. You are playing against other people, you don't hardly even think of the maps. In Arathi Basin, for instance, you know the weak points and strong points based on who from the other team is guarding them. It's all about player content - in this case, the players themselves - instead of static scripted content - in WoW's case, the boss fights which are so tightly scripted my guild (and most other guilds) had a UI mod which told us everything to do and when to do it.
(Those idiotic, required UI mods really burn me up. Turned my job, healing, into a two button affair - one for healing, one for curing. Just read the screen to see where to stand. Watch the raid wipe because someone was trying to do something unscripted.)
The point of the original article was that when players are allowed to be innovative and creative, you no longer have to worry what to do when the content runs out - the players are inventing their own goals and rewards. The ONLY way in WoW (et al) to do that is by playing the metagame of the endgame guild itself - on message boards, the blizzard forums, what have you - playing out social interactions out of game because the game itself does not value anything beyond the grind.
I never played Shadowbane (was in DAoC at time), but it sounds pretty much like the kind of game he would have wanted. That game failed, but maybe someone needs to give it another shot.
Endgame in WoW is ALL about doing the same thing, again and again, every single night until you can't bear to log in again. EVERY weekend, while I played, was spent in MC and ZG. Then they added the resets so every single night of the week was scheduled by Blizzard.
No thanks, I don't want to do Scholo for the three hundredth time. Seen enough of Strat, live and dead. UBRS is a Uber Bore. I play a holy spec priestess because my guild demanded I switch from shadow - faction grinding or farming gold for repairs is therefore incredibly slow and anything but fun.
I made alts, but the realization I'd have to subject myself to nights and nights more of Scholo, Strat and UBRS just to get geared enough to torture myself with more MC and ZG made me hang up my WoW account.
Guild after guild on my server imploded when they got to the endgame; and after awhile, so did the one I was in. Too many people left or restarted on other servers or returned to previous servers.
I read the article. He's spot on about the lack of imagination in current MMOs. One thing about EQ1 - leveling was so slow that many stopped worrying about getting a level a day (or week) and started doing the social things - the buff days, races, arena battles, role playing in Plane of Hate - the kinds of things you end up doing when levels and loot are fairly hard to come by.
Nobody would stand for that now. WoW, EQ2 and the others (including EQ1 since Luclin) have conditioned people to thinking that if they aren't making levels and not getting uber loot, that there is no fun to be had in the game.
The author of the article says sandbox PvP is the answer. I'm not sure about that - griefers live to ruin those kinds of things - but heck, it's about time for a game that can see beyond the grind.
I don't think grinding is fun. At all. Just wanted to say that first. Should always be a REASON for getting experience. In EQ2, getting xp and levels (for me, anyway) is just a by-product of doing quests; I haven't yet had to grind levels like in EQ1 or (to a far lesser extent, of course) WoW.
But what is wrong with slow leveling? Fast leveling separates friends from each other. A friend in WoW I met in my 30s just blew past me to 60 and we couldn't group again for weeks. Fast leveling means you never really get to do everything there is to do at a certain level. I spent no more than a day or two in any particular zone of WoW, except for the Barrens.
Slow leveling is not a bad thing.
Grinding is bad.
We don't run it here, but Microsoft Exchange does exactly that.