Wow, I just lost all respect for Scott Adams.
No, not because of the Gary Johnson endorsement. That's fine.
In a single post, he used an apostrophe to pluralize "Clinton"...TWICE.
Come on, man, you're better than that.
I think the rationale behind this isn't entirely malicious. Consider the fact that domains are valuable property. If you were in the process of buying a domain, and had to take the time to fill our user information, credit card information and all of the textboxes that they make you fill out (particularly if you are a first time user), there is a good chance that someone from another registrar could snatch the domain out from under you simply because they were a faster typer, or had previously registered. In this way, if you do a WHOIS search with NSI, the name is locked for a short time to allow you to complete your transaction, and to disallow anyone else who may be following in your tracks to buy you your name before you can.
It makes sense, and I'm frankly surprised that no one hasn't noticed this before. I for one am glad that someone peeking over my shoulder can buy a domain from their iPhone before I can finish clicking "buy".
...watching Max Headroom in the late 80's and thinking "Blipvert? That will never catch on.". Once again, reality mirrors science fiction. I guess all I have to look forward to now is the 30 second version of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant".
...will unmanned probes (or even manned missions) generate the 600 degrees (C) of thermal energy needed to extract the He-3 from the lunar dust? It's not like He-3 is stored in a solid form. Extracting the isotope could be slightly interesting.
Sounds like MUD/MUSH code to me. I can't think of many games with 500K lines of source code written exclusively in C/C++ that aren't MUDs.
If that's the case, itistoday is right in that MUD code is built around a game timer (for fixed rate logic, MUDs use 'ticks', generally firing off around once every 30 seconds), and it's also built around clever use of sockets to allow multiple realtime connections, which is generally one of the harder things to accomplish (read, was).
If I wanted to get to the nitty gritty of game code, I'd learn all about sockets first, game timing secondly, and then read into general game mechanics (balance, theme, style, story).
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I just lost all respect for Scott Adams. No, not because of the Gary Johnson endorsement. That's fine. In a single post, he used an apostrophe to pluralize "Clinton"...TWICE. Come on, man, you're better than that.
I thought it was a Minecraft screen grab, but yeah, what you said makes sense, too.
I think the rationale behind this isn't entirely malicious. Consider the fact that domains are valuable property. If you were in the process of buying a domain, and had to take the time to fill our user information, credit card information and all of the textboxes that they make you fill out (particularly if you are a first time user), there is a good chance that someone from another registrar could snatch the domain out from under you simply because they were a faster typer, or had previously registered. In this way, if you do a WHOIS search with NSI, the name is locked for a short time to allow you to complete your transaction, and to disallow anyone else who may be following in your tracks to buy you your name before you can.
It makes sense, and I'm frankly surprised that no one hasn't noticed this before. I for one am glad that someone peeking over my shoulder can buy a domain from their iPhone before I can finish clicking "buy".
...watching Max Headroom in the late 80's and thinking "Blipvert? That will never catch on.". Once again, reality mirrors science fiction. I guess all I have to look forward to now is the 30 second version of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant".
...will unmanned probes (or even manned missions) generate the 600 degrees (C) of thermal energy needed to extract the He-3 from the lunar dust? It's not like He-3 is stored in a solid form. Extracting the isotope could be slightly interesting.
Sounds like MUD/MUSH code to me. I can't think of many games with 500K lines of source code written exclusively in C/C++ that aren't MUDs. If that's the case, itistoday is right in that MUD code is built around a game timer (for fixed rate logic, MUDs use 'ticks', generally firing off around once every 30 seconds), and it's also built around clever use of sockets to allow multiple realtime connections, which is generally one of the harder things to accomplish (read, was). If I wanted to get to the nitty gritty of game code, I'd learn all about sockets first, game timing secondly, and then read into general game mechanics (balance, theme, style, story).