My kingdom for some mod points. About time someone started talking sense. The truth is, if "adults" wouldn't freak out about sex so much it wouldn't be that big a deal for the kids. Half of them are only really interested in it because it's something they're not supposed to know about, and the other half are getting to the age where they really should be educated about it.
Oh yeah? What about yelling 'Censorship is always necessary!' in a crowded ACLU meeting? You can take that to the bank and smoke it. And what's that got to do with censorship? Are you saying it should be illegal to do that? As far as I'm concerned it should be everyones right to try your experiment. I make no claims as to the results of course, and I wouldn't recommend doing it, but I'm not about to propose any legal restrictions on it.
It's not so much that they're doing anything innovative--it's that they have massive acquisitions. They want to be all things technology--it's kinda frightening, when you think about it. I doubt there has ever been a better prompt for the following quote (I make no guarantee of accuracy, but it's approximately the following):
"We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. Your uniqueness will be assimilated and added to the collective."
Fair enough, although even considering the amount of sales it brings in you have to discount the cost of development. It's not pure profit so figuring a straight sales figure only tells half the story. I honestly don't think Microsoft has a "core product" at this point. The OS does act to tie everything together as it's the common base between it all, but I don't really think MS values the OS much higher than any of their other offerings. MS has its fingers in so many pies at this point that you can't really point at any one and say "That's it, that's their main product". In some ways that's a smart strategy, it gives them plenty of leeway to make bad choices because even if they manage to tank one product it's such a small percentage of their sales it doesn't hurt the bottom line much. As an example, I'd be interested to see a chart comparing revenue from sales of Windows versus sales of Microsoft Office. I'd be rather surprised if they didn't tie, or even have Office out in front. On the other hand that sort of strategy means they spend a lot of money on products that are going to show minimal return on investment, or possible even losses, and any massive gains they may manage to make are usually used to underwrite less successful ventures.
Instead of spending time trying to beat Google at their own game, they could concentrate their efforts at improving their core products. Like, say, operating systems! Operating Systems? Their core product? No, operating systems are leverage for Microsoft, nothing more. The OS is just another way for them to push sales of their other products. They would be upset to lose dominance in the OS market because it would level the playing field, but it wouldn't do much to their bottom line directly, although they would take indirect losses due to reduced leverage with their other products.
That I can recall, I've only ever clicked on an ad banner twice. One time was to a link for a product on thinkgeek that I wasn't aware they carried. A second time was for a new product by another company that I can't recall right now, but which looked interesting. In both cases I didn't buy anything, although I did go back and eventually buy the product on thinkgeek. If banner ads are done tastefully and unobtrusively such that they inform about products without being annoying I don't mind them. The problem is, banner ads are almost never tasteful and unobtrusive anymore (I always block flash ads on principle, even the unobtrusive ones often cause nasty resource usage) and I find myself block all ads more and more because I have no way to differentiate between good ads and bad ads. Just about the only ads I see these days are the text ads from google, which I don't mind because they don't jump out and try to assault my senses.
According to wikipedia, Titanium Dioxide is used in many things, including as a food dye and in many toothpastes. So yeah, odds are you already swallow a good amount of the stuff as is.
Re:Micro-Transactions and game balance
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The Future of MMOs
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· Score: 1
While it's true players prefer not to link endgame content to real-world money, micro transactions are wildly popular and there is little stigma to "buying in" to an elevated gear/skill level. At least one of your fellow slashdot readers seems to disagree with you. I know personally that several guilds I've belonged to have kicked out members that we later found had bought characters or levels (was actually less about the buying and more that they didn't know how to play worth jack). There is a stigma, possibly deserved. My point though wasn't about the stigma, just that people tend to get frustrated if they can't compete without having to shell out extra money, and often times these pay items tend to cause just that. Really I don't think paying for levels is a big deal (assuming you know how to play at any rate), but paying for items probably is.
The MMOs I'm familiar have multiple servers and you get to choose which one you log into when you play. Suppose the game owner were to establish some fraction of those servers as the "pay for stuff" servers where you can buy levels, equipment, etc. using real money. Those who didn't want to play that way could still play on the other servers feeling more confident that those around them didn't buy extra stuff. Which servers do you think would be more popular? The quasi-MMO gunbound took this approach. It ultimately leads to two almost completely different games, as you then have the watered down non-pay servers that anyone can play, and the pay servers that you can really only play if you spend a ton of money because everyone else is decked out in uber equipment.
Re:Micro-Transactions and game balance
on
The Future of MMOs
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· Score: 1
I just want to limit the level 70 Johnny B. Noob syndrome That's really where guilds come in. By belonging to a guild that limits the people it allows in (say by having trial periods) you have a guarantee that your fellow guild members know how to play the game.
A game is supposed to be fun. If you don't have time for the game, do something else with your time. If you use a lvling service you're literally paying somebody else to play your game. "Here's 250 bucks, go play WoW and tell me how much fun it is"
Then when you get your account back in a few days you'll have no idea how to do anything and other high lvl players will know you bought your account and you won't be able to play again because everybody hates you. Unless of course you've already leveled other characters up to max level, possibly even of the same class. Grinding is not fun, and never has been, but some of the things you do after you get done grinding are fun, and that's the catch. You need to do the grind to get to the fun. Using a leveling service is really almost a form of optimization as you can be doing more interesting or useful things instead of grinding, and then come back and enjoy the good parts of the game.
For the record, I do not, and never have used a leveling service, but if the MMOs I played offered the option to pay for levels I probably would (at least for some levels, the ones towards the end just get ridiculous).
Yep, which is why I don't use leveling services. That being said, having played several characters to max level the grind gets old real fast and sometimes I would just like to get to max level and start raiding instead of wasting my time questing. I really don't enjoy quests as it's mostly mindless repetition. A raid on the other hand, now that's exciting because you need to work in a group with others to accomplish your goals. If I just wanted to quest I could run a single player game and save myself a bunch of money.
Re:Micro-Transactions and game balance
on
The Future of MMOs
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· Score: 1
Yep. Guilds are really the junk filter of the MMO world. The main reason to join a guild is to avoid PUGing so that you have a consistent and reasonably skilled group of people to work with.
Re:Micro-Transactions and game balance
on
The Future of MMOs
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· Score: 1
You mean "Catch-22", but that's definitely a typo in search of a definition! If someone wants a Jargon File entry, and if Eric Raymond isn't too distracted with whatever it is he does nowadays to add it, here's your chance...
Oh god, I didn't even notice that... the jargon is starting to seep into my brain! I think maybe it's time for me to head home before I start talking about taking bytes out of sandwiches. Of course now I can't stop thinking about what an entry for cache 22 would be in the Jargon File...
"Depends greatly on how much your time is worth. It's one of the reasons that leveling services are able to stay in business, some people value their time much differently than others."
In this context we're talking about putting a dollar value on your time, and specifically the time you spend playing a MMO. There is no "different", there is only more or less.
In a pay to play game like WoW you only have to invest more time in order to be better than others, which is another post all together, but I think is cheaper in the long run. Depends greatly on how much your time is worth. It's one of the reasons that leveling services are able to stay in business, some people value their time much higher than others.
Micro-Transactions and game balance
on
The Future of MMOs
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Micro-transactions aren't as popular here because they tend to give an advantage to people with more money. Most American gamers prefer games that emphasize skill and reward players for that, and would tend to be put off if you could simply buy an uber-item and win every time. On the other hand those same individuals wouldn't want to shell out money for only a slight advantage, so you have almost a cache 22, where you need to make the items powerful to get people to buy them, but limit them so that skillful players would still have the advantage of those that merely have a lot of money to spend on the game.
Personally, my suggestion is to eliminate the grind by allowing players to buy levels. That preserves the skill because at high level they still need to be able to use the character, and there would still be items that must be collected, but eliminates the tedium of grinding and is compelling enough that many people would be willing to pay for it.
Yeah, I tend to agree with you, in that this isn't really that big of a deal. It's interesting research, but from a practical standpoint really doesn't mean much. I do disagree about the rootkit thing though. Yes, on most systems in use now it's relatively trivial to install a rootkit, but in theory at least (and we're already well into theory with this attack), the user could be running a secure OS that prevents you from installing a rootkit, or otherwise accessing the running system without user intervention, in which case this is possibly a valid attack vector. Of course the BIOS should probably be locked down, but even assuming it isn't doing something as simple as storing the encryption keys at 0000:7C00 as I stated in another post would likely prevent this sort of thing. Some people suggested a number of other possible preventative measures in the comments for TFA but the authors shot them down by saying an attacker could pull the DRAM and put it in specially crafted hardware to read the data off it. Personally I say that's kind of a stupid argument as if the attacker has that much access he's already won as there are a number of busses and such he could probe and just rip the data as it streams by anyway. This is really the key problem when talking about security. No matter how secure you make the system, there's always some way to bypass it, you just keep moving into increasingly unlikely or time consuming scenarios.
No one said anything about "seducing". Essentially the person was just being a dick. Sort of trolling with a more personal touch. In this case however the person be targeted obviously wasn't prepared to deal with people and must have had some other issues as well. Really this is more a case of a disturbed individual who needed help, more than it's a case of "OMG! Cyber-bully killed someone!".
Probably because of the fact that when you ask the OS for a chunk of memory, you don't get to specify what it's address is. With virtual memory systems, you likely wouldn't even know the real physical address of the memory you're writing to. Also, by the time you have booted into your favourite OS, that memory segment is probably being used for something else. It is possible to request specific memory offsets, it just requires co-operation of the OS to do so. Likewise the address probably is being used, but it should be possible to get the OS to help out with that. If you're doing full-disk encryption your already having to load in a stub driver at boot just to get the OS into a working state, so reserving a chunk of memory shouldn't be that big a deal, and it becomes even simpler if you're using a hypervisor.
Hard drives need to use 1-time passwords to be very secure. Of course then you need a physical token like secure-id or an iButton or something, but at least then the dork has to lose his laptop and his keys/secure-id before the attack would succeed. Queue horror stories of lUsers taping the secure tokens to the back of the laptops. Think there was an article about that on thedailywtf.com a while back... now I need to go look that up.
Slashdot Mirror
My kingdom for some mod points. About time someone started talking sense. The truth is, if "adults" wouldn't freak out about sex so much it wouldn't be that big a deal for the kids. Half of them are only really interested in it because it's something they're not supposed to know about, and the other half are getting to the age where they really should be educated about it.
"We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. Your uniqueness will be assimilated and added to the collective."
Fair enough, although even considering the amount of sales it brings in you have to discount the cost of development. It's not pure profit so figuring a straight sales figure only tells half the story. I honestly don't think Microsoft has a "core product" at this point. The OS does act to tie everything together as it's the common base between it all, but I don't really think MS values the OS much higher than any of their other offerings. MS has its fingers in so many pies at this point that you can't really point at any one and say "That's it, that's their main product". In some ways that's a smart strategy, it gives them plenty of leeway to make bad choices because even if they manage to tank one product it's such a small percentage of their sales it doesn't hurt the bottom line much. As an example, I'd be interested to see a chart comparing revenue from sales of Windows versus sales of Microsoft Office. I'd be rather surprised if they didn't tie, or even have Office out in front. On the other hand that sort of strategy means they spend a lot of money on products that are going to show minimal return on investment, or possible even losses, and any massive gains they may manage to make are usually used to underwrite less successful ventures.
That I can recall, I've only ever clicked on an ad banner twice. One time was to a link for a product on thinkgeek that I wasn't aware they carried. A second time was for a new product by another company that I can't recall right now, but which looked interesting. In both cases I didn't buy anything, although I did go back and eventually buy the product on thinkgeek. If banner ads are done tastefully and unobtrusively such that they inform about products without being annoying I don't mind them. The problem is, banner ads are almost never tasteful and unobtrusive anymore (I always block flash ads on principle, even the unobtrusive ones often cause nasty resource usage) and I find myself block all ads more and more because I have no way to differentiate between good ads and bad ads. Just about the only ads I see these days are the text ads from google, which I don't mind because they don't jump out and try to assault my senses.
You know that soap will kill you. Also, water is the deadliest substance on Earth, says so right here.
According to wikipedia, Titanium Dioxide is used in many things, including as a food dye and in many toothpastes. So yeah, odds are you already swallow a good amount of the stuff as is.
For the record, I do not, and never have used a leveling service, but if the MMOs I played offered the option to pay for levels I probably would (at least for some levels, the ones towards the end just get ridiculous).
Yep, which is why I don't use leveling services. That being said, having played several characters to max level the grind gets old real fast and sometimes I would just like to get to max level and start raiding instead of wasting my time questing. I really don't enjoy quests as it's mostly mindless repetition. A raid on the other hand, now that's exciting because you need to work in a group with others to accomplish your goals. If I just wanted to quest I could run a single player game and save myself a bunch of money.
Yep. Guilds are really the junk filter of the MMO world. The main reason to join a guild is to avoid PUGing so that you have a consistent and reasonably skilled group of people to work with.
You mean "Catch-22", but that's definitely a typo in search of a definition! If someone wants a Jargon File entry, and if Eric Raymond isn't too distracted with whatever it is he does nowadays to add it, here's your chance...
Oh god, I didn't even notice that... the jargon is starting to seep into my brain! I think maybe it's time for me to head home before I start talking about taking bytes out of sandwiches. Of course now I can't stop thinking about what an entry for cache 22 would be in the Jargon File...In this context we're talking about putting a dollar value on your time, and specifically the time you spend playing a MMO. There is no "different", there is only more or less.
Hmm... I wonder if my KoL account is still active. It's been what, 2 or 3 years since I last signed on.
Micro-transactions aren't as popular here because they tend to give an advantage to people with more money. Most American gamers prefer games that emphasize skill and reward players for that, and would tend to be put off if you could simply buy an uber-item and win every time. On the other hand those same individuals wouldn't want to shell out money for only a slight advantage, so you have almost a cache 22, where you need to make the items powerful to get people to buy them, but limit them so that skillful players would still have the advantage of those that merely have a lot of money to spend on the game.
Personally, my suggestion is to eliminate the grind by allowing players to buy levels. That preserves the skill because at high level they still need to be able to use the character, and there would still be items that must be collected, but eliminates the tedium of grinding and is compelling enough that many people would be willing to pay for it.
Yeah, I tend to agree with you, in that this isn't really that big of a deal. It's interesting research, but from a practical standpoint really doesn't mean much. I do disagree about the rootkit thing though. Yes, on most systems in use now it's relatively trivial to install a rootkit, but in theory at least (and we're already well into theory with this attack), the user could be running a secure OS that prevents you from installing a rootkit, or otherwise accessing the running system without user intervention, in which case this is possibly a valid attack vector. Of course the BIOS should probably be locked down, but even assuming it isn't doing something as simple as storing the encryption keys at 0000:7C00 as I stated in another post would likely prevent this sort of thing. Some people suggested a number of other possible preventative measures in the comments for TFA but the authors shot them down by saying an attacker could pull the DRAM and put it in specially crafted hardware to read the data off it. Personally I say that's kind of a stupid argument as if the attacker has that much access he's already won as there are a number of busses and such he could probe and just rip the data as it streams by anyway. This is really the key problem when talking about security. No matter how secure you make the system, there's always some way to bypass it, you just keep moving into increasingly unlikely or time consuming scenarios.
Found it. Clueless users FTW (and the WTF).
No one said anything about "seducing". Essentially the person was just being a dick. Sort of trolling with a more personal touch. In this case however the person be targeted obviously wasn't prepared to deal with people and must have had some other issues as well. Really this is more a case of a disturbed individual who needed help, more than it's a case of "OMG! Cyber-bully killed someone!".
Yes that was the word I was looking for, thank you.