This doesn't seem to be a very effective spam technique. It works pretty well at fooling my "bayesian" spam filter, but the spam messages have gibberish subject lines! Who's going to read a message titled "deprecatory parrot bizarre dessert"? (an actual example)
Another worry with the leaked source is that it's possible for competitors to rip off Valve's fancy new game engine. Any proprietary techniques in the code aren't secret any more.
Re:Slashdot contracts viral marketing piece, again
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The remnants of the aborted film include 150 storyboards, drawings and paintings, which have sat for the last half-century in the Disney vaults. Notably, some of the project was modeled on the animation program Maya.
I don't care whether spam is advertising a product, or asking for money, or asking for my vote. If it's unsolicited, bulk email then it's spam. Note bulk, not a single email to a single person about a topic that concerns him specifically. I don't see how you could confuse an offer to invest in my company (which couldn't be part of a bulk mailing, right?) with spam.
Neverwinter Nights comes with a toolset that includes a compiler for a C-like scripting language. A beginning programmer can write simple programs to create monsters, make them do things, cast magic spells, etc. It's got to be the most fun way to learn programming I've ever seen.
A few years ago someone won over $600,000 from a machine at the Montreal Casino by analyzing patterns in the numbers that came up. The sequence repeated because the machine wasn't seeding the pseudo-random number generator properly. More info in Risks Digest.
I downloaded the new supposedly "fixed" version of this patch today, and it has the same problem.
After I installed patch 811493 last month, programs became very slow to start up. The problem went away when I uninstalled the patch. Today I downloaded the patch again (from here, which is linked from here). Again it takes a long time to run simple programs like mspaint.exe. Remove the patch again and it's back to normal.
100 years ago a proof of the difficulty of factoring large numbers might only have been interesting to mathematicians. Now that we use encryption based on the difficulty of factoring products of large primes, it's very important.
Galois fields are used for checksum algorithms, something I'm sure Galois never thought of.
Fourier transforms are used for image compression (JPEG).
Who knows what Poincaré's topology might be used for in the future?
I wonder if it's even possible to put a P4 in one of these things. If they're sealed ("waterproof, vaporproof") then I don't think they could cool a fast CPU. Even the new Pentium M laptops need fans and air vents.
For me, playing NWN with a DM running an original campaign is way more fun than BGII, or any other computer game I've played.
Tactics are everything when you're playing against a DM. Now, if we could only stop the insane amnesiac dwarf from running headlong into every fight...
Note that this is a beta version. BioWare has said that after the final release they will make the game data available for download from several mirror sites. So you won't have to make friends with a Windows user to install it.
I think I have different standards than you. To me, "a major hack" is putting adb -k in the boot script.:-)
They told the same lie as every other game company, namely that the game was finished when they shipped it. I stopped believing that one a few years ago, and "the Linux client is almost done" didn't sound much different to me.
Generic XML parsers are memory intensive and can't be as fast as regular expressions. That's just computer science. Deal with it.
You're right, but the problem is that "deal with it" may equate to "don't use XML" in a lot of cases, which makes XML less of the universal data representation language than it wants to be.
When the parser uses a lot of memory (like DOM reading the entire input into a tree) it becomes inefficient, sometimes infeasible, to handle large input documents. That's one of the specific problems mentioned by Tim Bray and others.
Yes, Majestic was a very well-publicized example of what the article is talking about, except it was a dismal failure which kinda contradicts the slant of the article.
A) Patch, install, whatever. The way games are these days, I can't tell the difference between beta, release and patch anyway.
B) Microsoft has mandated (or pushed for industry comittees to mandate) lots of PC hardware standards. They "invented" mouse scroll wheels, funny keys on the keyboard, etc. yet somehow Logitech manages to stay in business. Standards for hardware compatibility are good for users.
C) GameSpy won't dry up and blow away just because Microsoft introduces a metching service. Direct3D hasn't killed OpenGL. DirectPlay hasn't made all developers stop writing their own net code - because DirectPlay sucks. If Microsoft's matchmaker is less crappy than GameSpy, then they have a problem. Fair warning to GameSpy.
D) "One controller, for all games" - That's you talking, not Microsoft. There can't be one controller for all types of games. They're just talking about a standard layout for gamepads. And if people don't like it, Logitech will offer different products. After all, how's Microsoft going to stop me from plugging a huge fricking machine into my USB port if I want to?
Software companies learned back in the 80s that extreme copy protection just drives buyers away.
No they haven't. Companies are still using crappy copy-protection schemes that don't work on many computers. Neverwinter Nights, for example, had to be patched to remove the SecureROM software that prevented many customers from running the game. Some were using the "illegal" no-CD crack on their purchased copies.
Slashdot Mirror
This doesn't seem to be a very effective spam technique. It works pretty well at fooling my "bayesian" spam filter, but the spam messages have gibberish subject lines! Who's going to read a message titled "deprecatory parrot bizarre dessert"? (an actual example)
How is this different from the "fire insurance" scam that the FTC has accused D Squared of?
Another worry with the leaked source is that it's possible for competitors to rip off Valve's fancy new game engine. Any proprietary techniques in the code aren't secret any more.
I did that. He seems to be Australian.
I don't care whether spam is advertising a product, or asking for money, or asking for my vote. If it's unsolicited, bulk email then it's spam. Note bulk, not a single email to a single person about a topic that concerns him specifically. I don't see how you could confuse an offer to invest in my company (which couldn't be part of a bulk mailing, right?) with spam.
can they be charged under the PATRIOT Act?
Neverwinter Nights comes with a toolset that includes a compiler for a C-like scripting language. A beginning programmer can write simple programs to create monsters, make them do things, cast magic spells, etc. It's got to be the most fun way to learn programming I've ever seen.
A few years ago someone won over $600,000 from a machine at the Montreal Casino by analyzing patterns in the numbers that came up. The sequence repeated because the machine wasn't seeding the pseudo-random number generator properly. More info in Risks Digest.
After I installed patch 811493 last month, programs became very slow to start up. The problem went away when I uninstalled the patch. Today I downloaded the patch again (from here, which is linked from here). Again it takes a long time to run simple programs like mspaint.exe. Remove the patch again and it's back to normal.
100 years ago a proof of the difficulty of factoring large numbers might only have been interesting to mathematicians. Now that we use encryption based on the difficulty of factoring products of large primes, it's very important.
Galois fields are used for checksum algorithms, something I'm sure Galois never thought of.
Fourier transforms are used for image compression (JPEG).
Who knows what Poincaré's topology might be used for in the future?
I wonder if it's even possible to put a P4 in one of these things. If they're sealed ("waterproof, vaporproof") then I don't think they could cool a fast CPU. Even the new Pentium M laptops need fans and air vents.
and I can't fix it because my posts in the right place are rejected. Sigh.
Looks like there's no difference between Linux and Windows users after all.
Tactics are everything when you're playing against a DM. Now, if we could only stop the insane amnesiac dwarf from running headlong into every fight...
I think I have different standards than you. To me, "a major hack" is putting adb -k in the boot script. :-)
Click Direct Connect and enter "lmp.dyndns.org" or 216.58.114.38.
NOTE: This is a Windows server if that matters to you.
They told the same lie as every other game company, namely that the game was finished when they shipped it. I stopped believing that one a few years ago, and "the Linux client is almost done" didn't sound much different to me.
By the way, for whoever modded this "flamebait", my web server is Apache. Running on Windows XP Home Edition. Really.
Here's how you can cast a bunch of LED's into a block of resin. It's not 6 inches thick, but who says you have to make a sphere?
You're right, but the problem is that "deal with it" may equate to "don't use XML" in a lot of cases, which makes XML less of the universal data representation language than it wants to be.
When the parser uses a lot of memory (like DOM reading the entire input into a tree) it becomes inefficient, sometimes infeasible, to handle large input documents. That's one of the specific problems mentioned by Tim Bray and others.
Would you also send them the list of Apache security alerts? Or is that too much truth for you?
Yes, Majestic was a very well-publicized example of what the article is talking about, except it was a dismal failure which kinda contradicts the slant of the article.
B) Microsoft has mandated (or pushed for industry comittees to mandate) lots of PC hardware standards. They "invented" mouse scroll wheels, funny keys on the keyboard, etc. yet somehow Logitech manages to stay in business. Standards for hardware compatibility are good for users.
C) GameSpy won't dry up and blow away just because Microsoft introduces a metching service. Direct3D hasn't killed OpenGL. DirectPlay hasn't made all developers stop writing their own net code - because DirectPlay sucks. If Microsoft's matchmaker is less crappy than GameSpy, then they have a problem. Fair warning to GameSpy.
D) "One controller, for all games" - That's you talking, not Microsoft. There can't be one controller for all types of games. They're just talking about a standard layout for gamepads. And if people don't like it, Logitech will offer different products. After all, how's Microsoft going to stop me from plugging a huge fricking machine into my USB port if I want to?
No they haven't. Companies are still using crappy copy-protection schemes that don't work on many computers. Neverwinter Nights, for example, had to be patched to remove the SecureROM software that prevented many customers from running the game. Some were using the "illegal" no-CD crack on their purchased copies.