I suppose. There were some pretty cool things you could do with the map mods though. I recall that people had some pretty crazy things they did with 'just' maps - they called them 'nurple' maps I believe. Included 'new' units (unlocked and heavily modified units originally hidden in the game) and some pretty serious event scripting. I remember one where they'd taken the standard bomber used for airstrikes and such and had it flying across the map every couple minutes and para-dropping tanks as reinforcements for certain teams. I'm not sure about new graphics, but _everything_ else they managed to distribute with the maps. Best part was the mods only held for those maps then. Damn near _every_ map at the very least increased the game speed beyond what was normally allowed by the game to compensate for lag and slowness caused by network play.
Either way, someone will come up with a third-party tool to do it. It's just a matter of time.
It worked fine in the Command and Conquer series of games without a server - if you played against someone using a map you didn't have it would automatically send the map to you. It was a good way to get new maps actually.
The original Command and Conquer games never had dedicated servers, yet they still had plenty of player mods. I'd think it would be much _easier_ to mod it without dedicated servers. Because all you have to do it mod your own local machines. What do servers have to do with mods and clans and tournaments?
I was using PulseAudio for a while. Every time I booted up I'd have to manually restart pulse. Then one day it just stopped working entirely. So then every time I booted I'd have to manually stop pulse and start alsa. Then that stopped working entirely. Finally I just completely removed PulseAudio, and everything has been working perfectly ever since.
really? I'm posting from my iPod touch, and I've always found slashdot to be one of the easiest sites to use on this. Hell, it beats most special iPhone mobile versions of sites in my opinion.
"If numbers derived from a calculation on a copyrightable number are themselves "derivative works" in the copyright sense, it would cause far-reaching problems well beyond calculators. For one thing, it would be illegal to distribute SHA-1 hashes of copyrighted material without permission."
It would be illegal to distribute _anything_. Hell, Maxtor could sue me for everything I create - after all, I'm just modifying the data they originally had on my hard drive.
Exactly! Perhaps it was just because I was only 6 years old when I started playing the C&C series, so my strategy wasn't that great, but there were single missions in the original games that would take longer to beat than entire games these days. Remember...I think it was soviet mission 6 in the original Red Alert - the one with the big center island? If you didn't take out the MCV before it made it across it could easily take an entire week to beat that mission. I have yet to see a game by EA that takes more than a week to beat the entire game. Hell, I started playing Call of Duty the other day and beat the entire game in about 10 hours.
Personally I think the original Red Alert was the best in the series, followed closely by Tiberium Sun. With the complexity of the missions and the ease of creating custom maps and custom units, you could play nothing but Red Alert for years and still have fun with it. But now they want the game to be as simple as possible. You pay for the game and beat it. Then you pay for an expansion pack. Then you pay to download more maps. And pay to download more units. And by that time you've spent over $100 and gotten maybe a week of enjoyment from it.
If this was being done by the guys of the old Westwood, then I'd say go for it. Because you know if those guys did it, it would be awesome. But EA has done nothing but destroy the C&C franchise, so I don't really want to see them try this.
On the other hand, it would be extremely interesting to see how they would pull off something like that. If done well it could be very good. But it's EA, they don't do anything well.
Yes, and that's exactly how they work currently. The problem is, say your MMO world is the state of Pennsylvania. You have a server for Pittsburgh, a server for Philly, and a server for everywhere else. But the Philly server is still too full. What do you do? You can maybe divide the city up into a few regions and put those on their own servers, but eventually you reach a point where you just cannot add any more servers. In the specific case mentioned in the article, the problem was that there were too many players in the single beginning zone. It's hard to add more servers to a zone that small.
The problem, I think, is this: If I am on server A in some city, and you are on server B in that same city...you also have to be on server A, otherwise I can't interact with you. I'll admit, I don't know a whole lot about these things either, though I am a comp sci major, but it seems to me that the server sending me all the information about the world has to handle all the information about any people near me in the world, or I will not see them. So if we have two different servers sending us information, and we are right next to each other, then 90% of what those servers are sending us is the exact same information. If the issue was purely bandwidth, or mostly static content, then sure, you can just add more servers. But because of the way players need to interact in these games, that isn't quite possible. You can't just randomly throw players onto different servers, because the world content isn't static. In fact, I believe the way most of these games work is that the static content is hosted from your PC locally anyway. The only thing the servers really deal with are player (and NPC) interactions.
Haha, I know, neither can I. I've never even read the comic...or any comic books really...I've just seen the movie a couple times. Anyway, yea, the second version powered his suit too, sure. My argument was just that it wasn't a pacemaker.
holy crap. lol. I think you'd be better of using the surface area of the power plant (I'm gonna say 954 acres based on the Davis-Besse plant). 25m seems a bit small for me, but I think surface area is a better guess anyway - when I think 'the size of a nuclear power plant' I think of something the same surface area and likely larger height. But maybe that's just me. Strange though, when I do that I come up with 1109m across but that's only giving me 146kg. I think you did one of your conversions wrong - 25m/19.05mm should be about 1000, so that should give you about 3kg...
"So, make an inventory of the smoke detectors you own. If the total is above 3 then you are in possession of enough nuclear material that would require you to get a license from the NRC. If you don't have a license from the NRC and own more than 3 smoke detectors you are likely in possession of an illegal amount of barium and could be flagged as an enemy combative and thanks to George W. Bush enemy combative have no right to any legal representation and can be summarily executed or detained for an indefinite amount of time without even informing anyone that they took you into custody."
First of all, don't most smoke detectors use Americium, not Barium? Secondly, from what I can find, the NRC doesn't required a license unless you have more than 10 microcuries (for Barium), and most smoke detectors use only 1.
Yea, and how powerful was that phone 15 years ago? If you have a very basic phone, it will run for weeks without a charge. I know, I have one. It's just the damn iPhones and Sidekicks that won't last more than a day. But really, that thing is more powerful than the mainframes of 15 years ago, so it's no surprise that the battery won't last longer than a cell phone then did...
Maybe for a power user it's annoying to switch...for someone like myself who's just using it to type up papers and such, there is absolutely no difference. I doubt the users that this adware office is aimed at will have any trouble switching to OOo.
Many years ago I had a myspace profile entirely removed for uploading one song that I created using 'cat [textfile] >/dev/audio'. Yea. Apparently the title I decided to give it was too close to a song that they had listed in their database as being copyrighted or something so they killed my entire profile immediately. I sent a couple emails to the address they had given to contact in such cases and I never got a response. I'm amazed he even managed to get in contact with anybody...
Ah! I remembered! FMDs. There was a 50GB prototype demonstrated at COMDEX in 2000, the second and third generation discs were apparently capable of holding up to a terrabyte.
Wasn't there a company promising this exact same technology about ten years ago? I've found articles from 2005 talking about a holographic disc from InPhase, and I seem to recall hearing about another company working on something similar even earlier than that, though I can't recall the name of it...what I do recall is hearing something along the lines of the company shutting down several years ago.
It's not just a Texas thing - you can find the Mexican Coke in some standard supermarkets (specifically, Wegmans) even up here in central Pennsylvania. I bought some not too long ago - it was good stuff. And it's not just people who are used to having that kind who buy it. Clearly people are willing to pay a premium for it, and buy enough of it that it's worth keeping in stock. I'd imagine people would be willing to pay a premium for video games from other regions as well if it was possible to play them....
Slashdot Mirror
...and it doesn't have a leg to stand on
Interesting. I wasn't aware that I was alive in 1787. Also, I guess my signature must have faded off the constitution, huh? :)
Yea, but you can just give them as much as you have completed at the deadline and say it's abstract :)
I suppose. There were some pretty cool things you could do with the map mods though. I recall that people had some pretty crazy things they did with 'just' maps - they called them 'nurple' maps I believe. Included 'new' units (unlocked and heavily modified units originally hidden in the game) and some pretty serious event scripting. I remember one where they'd taken the standard bomber used for airstrikes and such and had it flying across the map every couple minutes and para-dropping tanks as reinforcements for certain teams. I'm not sure about new graphics, but _everything_ else they managed to distribute with the maps. Best part was the mods only held for those maps then. Damn near _every_ map at the very least increased the game speed beyond what was normally allowed by the game to compensate for lag and slowness caused by network play.
Either way, someone will come up with a third-party tool to do it. It's just a matter of time.
It worked fine in the Command and Conquer series of games without a server - if you played against someone using a map you didn't have it would automatically send the map to you. It was a good way to get new maps actually.
The original Command and Conquer games never had dedicated servers, yet they still had plenty of player mods. I'd think it would be much _easier_ to mod it without dedicated servers. Because all you have to do it mod your own local machines. What do servers have to do with mods and clans and tournaments?
I was using PulseAudio for a while. Every time I booted up I'd have to manually restart pulse. Then one day it just stopped working entirely. So then every time I booted I'd have to manually stop pulse and start alsa. Then that stopped working entirely. Finally I just completely removed PulseAudio, and everything has been working perfectly ever since.
really? I'm posting from my iPod touch, and I've always found slashdot to be one of the easiest sites to use on this. Hell, it beats most special iPhone mobile versions of sites in my opinion.
"If numbers derived from a calculation on a copyrightable number are themselves "derivative works" in the copyright sense, it would cause far-reaching problems well beyond calculators. For one thing, it would be illegal to distribute SHA-1 hashes of copyrighted material without permission."
It would be illegal to distribute _anything_. Hell, Maxtor could sue me for everything I create - after all, I'm just modifying the data they originally had on my hard drive.
Exactly! Perhaps it was just because I was only 6 years old when I started playing the C&C series, so my strategy wasn't that great, but there were single missions in the original games that would take longer to beat than entire games these days. Remember...I think it was soviet mission 6 in the original Red Alert - the one with the big center island? If you didn't take out the MCV before it made it across it could easily take an entire week to beat that mission. I have yet to see a game by EA that takes more than a week to beat the entire game. Hell, I started playing Call of Duty the other day and beat the entire game in about 10 hours.
Personally I think the original Red Alert was the best in the series, followed closely by Tiberium Sun. With the complexity of the missions and the ease of creating custom maps and custom units, you could play nothing but Red Alert for years and still have fun with it. But now they want the game to be as simple as possible. You pay for the game and beat it. Then you pay for an expansion pack. Then you pay to download more maps. And pay to download more units. And by that time you've spent over $100 and gotten maybe a week of enjoyment from it.
If this was being done by the guys of the old Westwood, then I'd say go for it. Because you know if those guys did it, it would be awesome. But EA has done nothing but destroy the C&C franchise, so I don't really want to see them try this.
On the other hand, it would be extremely interesting to see how they would pull off something like that. If done well it could be very good. But it's EA, they don't do anything well.
Yes, and that's exactly how they work currently. The problem is, say your MMO world is the state of Pennsylvania. You have a server for Pittsburgh, a server for Philly, and a server for everywhere else. But the Philly server is still too full. What do you do? You can maybe divide the city up into a few regions and put those on their own servers, but eventually you reach a point where you just cannot add any more servers. In the specific case mentioned in the article, the problem was that there were too many players in the single beginning zone. It's hard to add more servers to a zone that small.
The problem, I think, is this:
If I am on server A in some city, and you are on server B in that same city...you also have to be on server A, otherwise I can't interact with you. I'll admit, I don't know a whole lot about these things either, though I am a comp sci major, but it seems to me that the server sending me all the information about the world has to handle all the information about any people near me in the world, or I will not see them. So if we have two different servers sending us information, and we are right next to each other, then 90% of what those servers are sending us is the exact same information. If the issue was purely bandwidth, or mostly static content, then sure, you can just add more servers. But because of the way players need to interact in these games, that isn't quite possible. You can't just randomly throw players onto different servers, because the world content isn't static. In fact, I believe the way most of these games work is that the static content is hosted from your PC locally anyway. The only thing the servers really deal with are player (and NPC) interactions.
Haha, I know, neither can I. I've never even read the comic...or any comic books really...I've just seen the movie a couple times. Anyway, yea, the second version powered his suit too, sure. My argument was just that it wasn't a pacemaker.
holy crap. lol. I think you'd be better of using the surface area of the power plant (I'm gonna say 954 acres based on the Davis-Besse plant). 25m seems a bit small for me, but I think surface area is a better guess anyway - when I think 'the size of a nuclear power plant' I think of something the same surface area and likely larger height. But maybe that's just me. Strange though, when I do that I come up with 1109m across but that's only giving me 146kg. I think you did one of your conversions wrong - 25m/19.05mm should be about 1000, so that should give you about 3kg...
"So, make an inventory of the smoke detectors you own. If the total is above 3 then you are in possession of enough nuclear material that would require you to get a license from the NRC. If you don't have a license from the NRC and own more than 3 smoke detectors you are likely in possession of an illegal amount of barium and could be flagged as an enemy combative and thanks to George W. Bush enemy combative have no right to any legal representation and can be summarily executed or detained for an indefinite amount of time without even informing anyone that they took you into custody."
First of all, don't most smoke detectors use Americium, not Barium? Secondly, from what I can find, the NRC doesn't required a license unless you have more than 10 microcuries (for Barium), and most smoke detectors use only 1.
Yea, and how powerful was that phone 15 years ago? If you have a very basic phone, it will run for weeks without a charge. I know, I have one. It's just the damn iPhones and Sidekicks that won't last more than a day. But really, that thing is more powerful than the mainframes of 15 years ago, so it's no surprise that the battery won't last longer than a cell phone then did...
Iron Man's reactor wasn't powering a pacemaker. It was an electromagnet to keep the shrapnel in his blood from entering his heart.
I would only be impressed by that if it was still legal tender....
Wonder how much that much copper (or zinc) would be worth...
Maybe for a power user it's annoying to switch...for someone like myself who's just using it to type up papers and such, there is absolutely no difference. I doubt the users that this adware office is aimed at will have any trouble switching to OOo.
Try reading the post again...he already said himself that the idea only applies if there are open source ones out there already. Way to be redundant.
Many years ago I had a myspace profile entirely removed for uploading one song that I created using 'cat [textfile] > /dev/audio'. Yea. Apparently the title I decided to give it was too close to a song that they had listed in their database as being copyrighted or something so they killed my entire profile immediately. I sent a couple emails to the address they had given to contact in such cases and I never got a response. I'm amazed he even managed to get in contact with anybody...
Ah! I remembered! FMDs. There was a 50GB prototype demonstrated at COMDEX in 2000, the second and third generation discs were apparently capable of holding up to a terrabyte.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_Multilayer_Disc
Wasn't there a company promising this exact same technology about ten years ago? I've found articles from 2005 talking about a holographic disc from InPhase, and I seem to recall hearing about another company working on something similar even earlier than that, though I can't recall the name of it...what I do recall is hearing something along the lines of the company shutting down several years ago.
It's not just a Texas thing - you can find the Mexican Coke in some standard supermarkets (specifically, Wegmans) even up here in central Pennsylvania. I bought some not too long ago - it was good stuff. And it's not just people who are used to having that kind who buy it. Clearly people are willing to pay a premium for it, and buy enough of it that it's worth keeping in stock. I'd imagine people would be willing to pay a premium for video games from other regions as well if it was possible to play them....