You want to read this. It's a bit more advanced than your theory. Social interactions is just one of the things that keeps people in a multiplayer online game.
Lastly I'd personally want to see an economic model worth a damn.
Try Arctic. It's a MUD. I haven't played it in a while but the economy there was the best I've seen, both for equipment and for xp (and even large quantities of currency were hard to get, so that the coins were actually worth something rather than just being 'gamble money' like in games like Diablo 2). Good equipment there was really rare, because 1) it popped very rarely, and 2) the total number active in the game was capped. So you definitely wouldn't see 50 ppl running around with a "Death Sword of Thakisis" or stuff like that. You probably wouldn't even see one uber item cause they would only use it while doing really hard zones with their clan - otherwise the risk of being ambushed by other ppl just for the purpose of recovering that item was too great.
Add to that that some items could only be repaired in very hard to reach zones (read, you have to go there with a buff party of experienced players to stand a chance to make it to the shop), that others simply could not be repaired, and that all levied a 'rent' while you were away from the MUD which cost more (a lot more) for good items, and there's your balanced economy of scarcity.
I'm not sure why no other online game that I've seen so far has been able to reproduce that at all. Imho they should hire the people who designed Arctic and get them to balance their games for them.
Another option is to play a less popular game. MUDs, being so cheap to run, had the advantage of being so numerous that even the most popular of MUDs didn't have a lot of information available on the net. The only pages with such information were private clan pages, on a MUD I played.
Another trick is to make that information *very* costly (and not in monopoly money, but in ingenuity, time, etc), so that people who do discover it will not be so quickly inclined to put it on a webpage so that joe newbie can make use of it and swamp the spawn point. This goes very well along with making the objective of the quest very scarce and valuable - because then advanced players will not share the secret very simply because they want the items for themselves, so the fewer ppl know about it, the better.
Finally, keeping the world updated helps a lot, for instance by changing things around so that the previous way to solve the quest becomes the way to die. Someone who discovered the hard-to-figure trick themselves will likely be well aware if something has changed and will be cautious, whereas joe faq-reader will just happily stumble into the trap and learn to be a lot more cautious of advice gleaned on the net, and that advice will get more complex (do this, but if you see this do that, and if you see this do that instead, and if you see this and that together then don't go there) so that figuring out the faq becomes as much work as figuring out the quest itself.
With many no-levels systems, you still get points for achieving stuff (so there is a levelling system, but it's hidden). So for instance if you've been playing for a long time and you've put a lot of points in various skills, you might be a lot more likely to dodge that backstab and respond in kind than if you just started.
And these systems are simply more realistic. Hitpoints that increase so drastically as in AD&D are a fun but stupid concept - no matter how great you are, if someone slashes at you with a big sword or a huge mace and hits you hard, you're out, if not dead.
It's interesting to consider how a system would work without levels at all (neither hidden nor visible), but there we're getting into real role-playing rather than hack'n'slash, which is what most computer rpg's are about. And we start needing an intelligent DM, which no program is yet close to (and many humans don't achieve either!!).
It might be of some use if you actually told us what libraries you used, what methods, etc, not just "I tried to parse some XML files". Is that result of 20 concurrent requests using a SAX parser or DOM? Are you using the standard java DOM implementation (slow and bulky), or one of the slicker ones like JDOM, dom4j, etc (there's a bunch you should have a look at). Another thing you could do t o improve performance is to identify the points where you don't really need a DOM (eg you're just reading the values once and discarding) and use a SAX parser instead to fill in a custom class or a hashtable or such.
The Sims is highly popular with women because it's just a re-hash of dolls. It's exactly what little girls do with dolls, except in a computer surrounding...
Search on google for "Randy Morrow" book (not that far-fetched, it was only my second search-term attempt) and you find this page, already linked in another post, in fifth place. This gives you at least the publisher, year and one of the titles of the series. The rest is all simple tedious work to find second-hand copies of an out-of-print book.
To add another level of fun to this little game, don't store chunks that mean anything - XOR the file with a random stream of bits and share two chunks which, when xor'ed together, give back the original chunk. So all you're sharing is chunks of meaningless bits.:-)
So long as, as you suggested, no one actually keeps all the chunks for a single file on their computer they can hardly be accused of sharing mp3 files, can they?:-)
I'll agree to that. Can't people research basic stuff themselves? And more importantly, can't slashdot editors realise that some questions, which can be researched easily with little effort by the asker, and which are really unrelated to/.'s areas of interest, are simply not worth posting on slashdot?
I must say, however, that I thought the PHB question was interesting. I wouldn't lump it in with the teeth whitening and obscure google-able children's book.
Even if two people are both HIV+ they might have:
1) Different strains of the virus
2) Different virus counts
And so they don't want to mix these anyway, to avoid increasing their chances of developping AIDS symptoms.
Only problem is the guy who wrote this blatantly has no idea how statistics work. There's about 300'000'000 ppl in the US. If the odds for someone of being "trampled by a herd of zebra above the Arctic Circle, while being hit by a meteor and lightning" were 1 in 10'000 (say per year, but you can adapt this to any period of time), the odds would of course increase as you go south - so they would be even greater (read 10'000 gets smaller) in the US. Imagine they stayed the same. This would mean that every year 30'000 people would get "trampled by a herd of zebra, while being hit by a meteor and lightning". Obviously completely stupid. The odds of all these things happening at the same time are much, much smaller than 1 in 10'000.
So basically, the author of the article needs to go back to secondary school and learn some basic maths. The odds of getting snuffed by the RIAA are pretty significant. 1 in 10'000, given 35 million file swappers, would mean that about 3'500 will get caught, put in prison, fined large amounts of money. And the ones who are most likely to be caught are, sadly, the ones sharing the most music (logically). The conclusions seem pretty straightforward, and unfortunately are not good for file-sharing.
An alternative theory to the Big Bang was proposed in 1948 by Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Sir Fred Hoyle It was called the steady-state theory. They found the idea of a sudden beginning to the universe philosophically unsatisfactory.
I was just disputing the declaration that "there's no such thing as other universes", not claiming that my version is necessarily true - it's just a possibility, which gives meaning to the term "another universe".
They could exist theoretically, and they could even have consequences on our universe. For instance, if the fundamental laws of physics are symmetrical to the extreme then we might find that each possible law exists in some parallel universe (meaning all possible universes with all possible combinations and variations on the laws of physics exist). None of these other universes would be anything we could interact with, yet they determine (by the particular combination of laws that they don't contain) the fundamental laws of our universe.
You need a better client mate. Any decent client, and your scenario turns to: Mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm has walked into room. > kill m[TAB] You annihilate mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm with your slash. You annihilate mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm with your crush. Mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm flees from the room! > scan North: Nothing special. South: Nothing special. East: Mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm is standing there. West: Nothing special. Up: Nothing special. Down: Nothing special. > e You walk east. A Plain Room. Mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm is standing here. > kill m[TAB] You annihilate mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm with your slash. Mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm is dead! R.I.P.! > get all corpse
For those who don't know what an H-R (Hertzsprung-Russel) diagram is, it's a diagram plotting all the stars in a graph with the following axes: Temperature (which can be measured accurately by looking at the spectrum of the star), and (absolute) Luminosity.
The thing to realise for the non-initiated here is that stars move around the H-R diagram throughout their life-time, as they form, expand into red dwarfs, blow away their outer shells, shrink into white dwarfs, etc. Through all this their temperature varies and their luminosity (which is largely dependent on their size, which changes vastly between, say, a star like the sun and the same star 5 billion years later when it's turned into a red giant) varies too.
However the vast majority of the stars in a cluster of average age will be stuck on a line which represents what is called the "main sequence", which is what our sun is on. Where they are on the line depends on their starting mass. Stars stay on the main sequence longer if they are lighter (heavy stars have much shorter lives), so there is a "turn-off" point on the main sequence line (a point where the stars move off the main sequence into the red giant phase) which can be used to evaluate the age of the cluster, assuming all the stars formed at roughly the same time.
Maybe he can claim that he's been driven to a nervous breakdown by the fact that he's underpaid, that it's destroyed his life, that it's ruined his future prospects - hell, it even got him as far as making a post on/. about it!!!
Poker is not a card game, it's a people game (aka don't play the cards, play the people). It's all about bluffing and reading other people's bluffs. I'm baffled that people even bother playing poker on the internet. Even with webcams the game wouldn't be the same at all.
Slashdot Mirror
You want to read this. It's a bit more advanced than your theory. Social interactions is just one of the things that keeps people in a multiplayer online game.
Daniel
Lastly I'd personally want to see an economic model worth a damn.
Try Arctic. It's a MUD. I haven't played it in a while but the economy there was the best I've seen, both for equipment and for xp (and even large quantities of currency were hard to get, so that the coins were actually worth something rather than just being 'gamble money' like in games like Diablo 2). Good equipment there was really rare, because 1) it popped very rarely, and 2) the total number active in the game was capped. So you definitely wouldn't see 50 ppl running around with a "Death Sword of Thakisis" or stuff like that. You probably wouldn't even see one uber item cause they would only use it while doing really hard zones with their clan - otherwise the risk of being ambushed by other ppl just for the purpose of recovering that item was too great.
Add to that that some items could only be repaired in very hard to reach zones (read, you have to go there with a buff party of experienced players to stand a chance to make it to the shop), that others simply could not be repaired, and that all levied a 'rent' while you were away from the MUD which cost more (a lot more) for good items, and there's your balanced economy of scarcity.
I'm not sure why no other online game that I've seen so far has been able to reproduce that at all. Imho they should hire the people who designed Arctic and get them to balance their games for them.
Daniel
Another option is to play a less popular game. MUDs, being so cheap to run, had the advantage of being so numerous that even the most popular of MUDs didn't have a lot of information available on the net. The only pages with such information were private clan pages, on a MUD I played.
Another trick is to make that information *very* costly (and not in monopoly money, but in ingenuity, time, etc), so that people who do discover it will not be so quickly inclined to put it on a webpage so that joe newbie can make use of it and swamp the spawn point. This goes very well along with making the objective of the quest very scarce and valuable - because then advanced players will not share the secret very simply because they want the items for themselves, so the fewer ppl know about it, the better.
Finally, keeping the world updated helps a lot, for instance by changing things around so that the previous way to solve the quest becomes the way to die. Someone who discovered the hard-to-figure trick themselves will likely be well aware if something has changed and will be cautious, whereas joe faq-reader will just happily stumble into the trap and learn to be a lot more cautious of advice gleaned on the net, and that advice will get more complex (do this, but if you see this do that, and if you see this do that instead, and if you see this and that together then don't go there) so that figuring out the faq becomes as much work as figuring out the quest itself.
Daniel
With many no-levels systems, you still get points for achieving stuff (so there is a levelling system, but it's hidden). So for instance if you've been playing for a long time and you've put a lot of points in various skills, you might be a lot more likely to dodge that backstab and respond in kind than if you just started.
And these systems are simply more realistic. Hitpoints that increase so drastically as in AD&D are a fun but stupid concept - no matter how great you are, if someone slashes at you with a big sword or a huge mace and hits you hard, you're out, if not dead.
It's interesting to consider how a system would work without levels at all (neither hidden nor visible), but there we're getting into real role-playing rather than hack'n'slash, which is what most computer rpg's are about. And we start needing an intelligent DM, which no program is yet close to (and many humans don't achieve either!!).
Daniel
Agreed 500% - this site looks absolutely awful.
Daniel
It might be of some use if you actually told us what libraries you used, what methods, etc, not just "I tried to parse some XML files". Is that result of 20 concurrent requests using a SAX parser or DOM? Are you using the standard java DOM implementation (slow and bulky), or one of the slicker ones like JDOM, dom4j, etc (there's a bunch you should have a look at). Another thing you could do t o improve performance is to identify the points where you don't really need a DOM (eg you're just reading the values once and discarding) and use a SAX parser instead to fill in a custom class or a hashtable or such.
Daniel
that isn't funny at all, are you people morons?
No. What about you?
Daniel
The Sims is highly popular with women because it's just a re-hash of dolls. It's exactly what little girls do with dolls, except in a computer surrounding...
Daniel
Search on google for "Randy Morrow" book (not that far-fetched, it was only my second search-term attempt) and you find this page, already linked in another post, in fifth place. This gives you at least the publisher, year and one of the titles of the series. The rest is all simple tedious work to find second-hand copies of an out-of-print book.
Daniel
To add another level of fun to this little game, don't store chunks that mean anything - XOR the file with a random stream of bits and share two chunks which, when xor'ed together, give back the original chunk. So all you're sharing is chunks of meaningless bits. :-)
:-)
So long as, as you suggested, no one actually keeps all the chunks for a single file on their computer they can hardly be accused of sharing mp3 files, can they?
Daniel
I'll agree to that. Can't people research basic stuff themselves? And more importantly, can't slashdot editors realise that some questions, which can be researched easily with little effort by the asker, and which are really unrelated to /.'s areas of interest, are simply not worth posting on slashdot?
I must say, however, that I thought the PHB question was interesting. I wouldn't lump it in with the teeth whitening and obscure google-able children's book.
Daniel
Even if two people are both HIV+ they might have:
1) Different strains of the virus
2) Different virus counts
And so they don't want to mix these anyway, to avoid increasing their chances of developping AIDS symptoms.
Daniel
Only problem is the guy who wrote this blatantly has no idea how statistics work. There's about 300'000'000 ppl in the US. If the odds for someone of being "trampled by a herd of zebra above the Arctic Circle, while being hit by a meteor and lightning" were 1 in 10'000 (say per year, but you can adapt this to any period of time), the odds would of course increase as you go south - so they would be even greater (read 10'000 gets smaller) in the US. Imagine they stayed the same. This would mean that every year 30'000 people would get "trampled by a herd of zebra, while being hit by a meteor and lightning". Obviously completely stupid. The odds of all these things happening at the same time are much, much smaller than 1 in 10'000.
So basically, the author of the article needs to go back to secondary school and learn some basic maths. The odds of getting snuffed by the RIAA are pretty significant. 1 in 10'000, given 35 million file swappers, would mean that about 3'500 will get caught, put in prison, fined large amounts of money. And the ones who are most likely to be caught are, sadly, the ones sharing the most music (logically). The conclusions seem pretty straightforward, and unfortunately are not good for file-sharing.
Daniel
The inquirer handles pretty hefty traffic normally (a lot like the register). No need to make a copy of it.
Daniel
Ah, Google, when you got me...
An alternative theory to the Big Bang was proposed in 1948 by Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Sir Fred Hoyle It was called the steady-state theory. They found the idea of a sudden beginning to the universe philosophically unsatisfactory.
Daniel
Let the Wookie win.
Sorry, I had to...
Daniel
I was just disputing the declaration that "there's no such thing as other universes", not claiming that my version is necessarily true - it's just a possibility, which gives meaning to the term "another universe".
Daniel
They could exist theoretically, and they could even have consequences on our universe. For instance, if the fundamental laws of physics are symmetrical to the extreme then we might find that each possible law exists in some parallel universe (meaning all possible universes with all possible combinations and variations on the laws of physics exist). None of these other universes would be anything we could interact with, yet they determine (by the particular combination of laws that they don't contain) the fundamental laws of our universe.
Daniel
You need a better client mate. Any decent client, and your scenario turns to:
Mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm has walked into room.
> kill m[TAB]
You annihilate mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm with your slash.
You annihilate mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm with your crush.
Mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm flees from the room!
> scan
North:
Nothing special.
South:
Nothing special.
East:
Mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm is standing there.
West:
Nothing special.
Up:
Nothing special.
Down:
Nothing special.
> e
You walk east.
A Plain Room.
Mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm is standing here.
> kill m[TAB]
You annihilate mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm with your slash.
Mnmnmnnnmnmnmnmmm is dead! R.I.P.!
> get all corpse
Daniel
For those who don't know what an H-R (Hertzsprung-Russel) diagram is, it's a diagram plotting all the stars in a graph with the following axes: Temperature (which can be measured accurately by looking at the spectrum of the star), and (absolute) Luminosity.
The thing to realise for the non-initiated here is that stars move around the H-R diagram throughout their life-time, as they form, expand into red dwarfs, blow away their outer shells, shrink into white dwarfs, etc. Through all this their temperature varies and their luminosity (which is largely dependent on their size, which changes vastly between, say, a star like the sun and the same star 5 billion years later when it's turned into a red giant) varies too.
However the vast majority of the stars in a cluster of average age will be stuck on a line which represents what is called the "main sequence", which is what our sun is on. Where they are on the line depends on their starting mass. Stars stay on the main sequence longer if they are lighter (heavy stars have much shorter lives), so there is a "turn-off" point on the main sequence line (a point where the stars move off the main sequence into the red giant phase) which can be used to evaluate the age of the cluster, assuming all the stars formed at roughly the same time.
Daniel
Maybe he can claim that he's been driven to a nervous breakdown by the fact that he's underpaid, that it's destroyed his life, that it's ruined his future prospects - hell, it even got him as far as making a post on /. about it!!!
Daniel
Does that go on the expense account? I'm sure it can be arranged.
Daniel
Though i guess for now it only supports java - but there's nothing preventing you from writing custom tasks for it.
It's called Ant.
Daniel
Poker is not a card game, it's a people game (aka don't play the cards, play the people). It's all about bluffing and reading other people's bluffs. I'm baffled that people even bother playing poker on the internet. Even with webcams the game wouldn't be the same at all.
Daniel
Damn, and there I was thinking this article was going to be about top models taking on the Open Source cause and giving us all free porn...
Daniel