Saying that IE's renderer is obviously inferior to Firefox/Opera is like saying that Linux is obviously more difficult to use on a desktop than Mac OSX. It's just plain true. If you had ever designed a complex web site making extensive use of CSS, you'd know this. The only reason you never see IE rendering pages wrong is because every web developer out there has taken extreme pains to work around all of IE's problems.
The pad seen in the photo (in this article) appears to be the Red Octane Ignition. Or, at least, it looks identical to the ones my sister has. Anyway, they cost something like $110 each, not including game. That's still only going to come to $20k or so, but I'm sure a good chunk of the money goes to paying the researchers, paying for medical exams to monitor progress, etc.
$30 pads do not make for a good gaming experience.
I'm saying that it's unreasonable to call random third parties greedy for not wanting to help obese kids simply out of the goodness of their hearts. Parents are not random third parties.
The problem is not figuring out what the kids need to do. They need to exercise. The problem is figuring out how to make them do it. Most exercise is boring, therefore kids don't do it. DDR is fun. Is it fun enough that your obese kid will actually play it enough to lose weight? Let's find out!
Trust me, Blizzard hasn't reached it yet. And it doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling when they start posting for key database and network positions soon after the release.
I don't trust you. How would you know? Do you maintain their servers? It seems to be pretty obvious that if high-population servers have lag problems and low-population servers don't, then high-population servers must be pushing the hardware limits.
1. Not screw up how they assign players: i.e. Agent Dawn server. This is a RPG server, as labeled by Blizzard, but for 3 months(?) everyone who allowed the game to pick a PvE server got assigned to it.
I'll grant you that's an obvious mistake. But that isn't even related to the main issue here.
2. Have the ability to move characters to another server. They are only this limited functionality now, months after it should have been.
This is a lot more complicated than it sounds. The servers weren't designed with this in mind in the first place. What happens to stuff you have in the auction house when you move your character? What happens to your mail? Discard all that? OK, now what happens if your name is already taken on the new server? What happens if you have unique items which are owned by someone else on the target server?
Of course, the biggest problem is just engineering a way to move the character data itself, since the systems weren't designed to be used like that. Again, this is a lot more complicated than you think. I don't know the details, but at present the Warsong and Bonechewer servers are "linked" somehow to allow transfers, and this link manages to cause lag when using mail and auction house functions even for Bonechewer players. And Bonechewer is still a low-population server at this point.
You can say "They should have allowed transfers from anywhere to anywhere!" all you want, but the fact is you have not a clue what this really means.
3. Assign limits to servers. If you have a friend who is on the server, have them "sponser" you so you can get on. Do something to limit it.
In hindsight, that sounds like a good idea. However, try to imagine Blizzard's thoughts before releasing the game. FFXI had a system in place to limit servers, and people hated it. They hated it so much that Penny-Arcade devoted a comic and a news post to bashing the concept and explaining how it ruined the game. So your options are:
- Enforce limits and piss everyone off. - Don't enforce limits, and piss everyone off.
At least in the future, players will understand when limits are enforced.
There's no "rate limiter" that notices when both realms have balanced out at medium-pop and disallows further transfers (or even warns about them).
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that transfers will end if the populations balance out. But I also kind of doubt that will happen. It seems that most people are staying on their native servers.
I mean, really. 90% of WoW players are too stupid to comprehend these concepts. How these people manage to get themselves up to level 60 without brains is beyond me, but I've grouped with enough of them to know they exist.
Low-population server. Which is most of them. These articles really need to specify that it is only the top 10-15 realms -- if that, even -- that have problems. New players should obviously not create characters there, and existing players now have the option to transfer to a low-pop server.
I mean, really... a server can only handle so many players. The hardware has limits. What do you expect Blizzard to do about it, beyond what they have done? Either they can start assigning players to low-population realms by force (like FFXI, which everyone hated for that) or they can try very hard to encourage players to choose low-pop servers and let the rest suffer the consequences.
The problem isn't that there aren't enough servers. If all the players were evenly distributed among all current servers, there would be no problem. The problem is that players have naturally wanted to play with their friends, which has encouraged people to gravitate towards a few servers while the rest lay mostly empty. And, so, yeah, those servers have problems. And even if Blizzard added 20 more, the high-pop servers would still have problems.
World of Warcraft has had extended downtime in the past 24 hours
That's odd. I have been playing World of Warcraft for the past 21 hours. Literally. I don't know of this outage of which you speak. I was disconnected maybe three or four times in 21 hours of play, which is more that usual, but I'm typically disconnected from AIM three or four times a day and no one ever complains that AIM isn't reliable. I did not lose any progress any of the times I was disconnected and was able to reconnect immediately.
The reports of WoW's instability are perhaps massively exaggerated. Also, note that netcraft's graph of the web server doesn't say anything about the game servers. I couldn't care less if www.worldofwarcraft.com is working while I play. thottbot.com and allakhazam.com are more important, frankly. In all likelihood, the web server was having trouble serving all the people who went to read about the patch and bitch on the forums about everything new that they hated.
The motherboard mfgrs weren't getting enough positive feedback from it, it was expensive (the Dolby license was not the only reason), and Creative bought Sensura, whose technology it used.
Sure, you can come up with all the excuses you want for why soundstorm died, but we all know the real reason is this.
That's not random. It's pseudo-random. For applications like shuffling a playlist, that would be fine. For applications like choosing a cryptographic key, that would be unacceptable (a cracker could repeat your algorithm to figure out your key).
This is not a problem of a bad shuffle algorithm. The problem here is thousands of years old. It is human nature. People see patterns where there are none. People generate theories based on these non-existent patterns. This is how people concluded that the sun orbits the Earth: "Oh, look, the sun looks like it is orbiting the Earth! Therefore it must be!"
The problem is, if you just put together a playlist with a bunch of artists and play it, it is entirely likely that someone will be played three times in the first hour. And in this guy's case, that someone was Steely Dan. So what does that prove?
About 500 years ago, we invented something called the "scientific method". Although it is taught to most people in both science and history classes, few seem to understand it.
The scientific method says that you cannot use past observations to make a conclusion. You must develop a specific test to prove or disprove your hypothesis. You must show before you perform the test that the outcome of the test is relevant to your hypothesis. You can then perform the test and use the results to back your conclusion.
The scientific method could very easily be applied here. What this guy needs to do is start with the prediction that Steely Dan or whoever will be played three times in the first hour. He must use statistics to compute the probability of this happenning in a purely random shuffle, and should show that the chances are less than 1% (this is a pretty straight-forward use of standard statistical methods). Then he should run the experiment and see what happens.
My guess? Steely Dan will not play three times in the first hour.
Without a proper scientific experiment proving this guy's theory, there is no story here.
You would know by analyzing the algorithm which produced the numbers, not by analyzing the output. Of course, the fact that the numbers are produced by an algorithm proves that they are not random. If you ran the same algorithm again, you'd get the same numbers. Since computation is deterministic by design, there is no purely computational way to generate truly random numbers.
If you're not a programmer, try to imagine writing out a mathematical equation which, when evaluated, comes out to a random number, different every time. It doesn't make sense, does it? How could the same equation have a different result every time, without changing the inputs?
So someone with $36 million to throw around can, in 56 hours, produce two random messages with the same SHA-1.
Great.
So, presumably, this devious (and very rich) hacker might produce the following two messages: "bma p3 rjphta,-9p.u2#H50982u.yha,cp. hxasnip" and "BUEQXBBX2 jma93#9g5xbaida htuEXOAhkra1255,y"
And then, of course, he'd somehow trick me into signing "bma p3 rjphta,-9p.u2#H50982u.yha,cp. hxasnip". Because I sign random pieces of gibberish all the time, if asked. And then, having done this, he could go around claiming that I had actually signed "BUEQXBBX2 jma93#9g5xbaida htuEXOAhkra1255,y".
OH NO!::cough::
Sure. Moving to SHA-256 is all well and good. But, frankly, I think these reports are horribly overblown. Crypto geeks are jumping up and down with their hair on fire (just like George Tenet!) because their perfect algorithm is slighly less perfect in a way that doesn't have any real practical meaning in most situations.
Meanwhile, there are real security problems out there in the form of poorly written software and poorly administered systems. Please, please do not spend your time rewriting your software to use SHA-256 when you could be patching real security holes. Leave SHA-256 until you have nothing better to do.
For those who don't know: Parent is referring to an actual person who actually is a gay prostitute and actually did get a press pass to a presidential press conference. He even managed to ask Bush a question in which he called Democrats "detached from reality" or something like that.
When I think "message queue" I think something like "Win32 message queue" (GetMessage()/SendMessage(), used for basic GUI operation) or FreeBSD's kernel queues. Or even RT signal queues. All these things are commonly known as "message queues", yet are clearly not what is being discussed here.
Anyway, I wasn't really complaining. I was just making a dumb joke out of the fact that people use such generic terms to refer to such specific systems. Turns out the joke was dumber than I realized at the time. Oh well.
My point: Everyone knows what "operating system" and "database" and "file system" mean. Maybe it's just me, but I have no idea what "message queuing" means. There's nothing wrong with that, but since it's non-obvious what they mean, it would be nice if they'd stick a one-paragraph explanation in the article.
And, yes, I do believe that if a software term is non-obvious to me, then it is probably non-obvious to most computer professionals.
#include <queue> #include <string> #include <iostream> using namespace std;
int main() {
queue<string> messageQueue;
string message;
cout << "Enter a message: ";
cin >> message;
messageQueue.push(message);
cout << "Your message has been queued." << endl; }
Licensed under the GPL! Feel free to use it to queue all the messages you want!
(I hate it when people use totally generic terms like "message queuing" when they are actually referring to some much more specific functionality. I especially hate it when articles written about such systems make no attempt to explain what that functionality might be.)
The admins had a point: This silly march was harming the gameplay experience for other players. Dun Morogh is a beginner region, so causing that area to have technical problems from server load will hurt people who are trying to play the game for the first time, perhaps leading to believe that the game sucks in general.
If you want to compare to the real-life right to assemble, then what the protesters were doing is more analogous to blocking traffic. If you block traffic in real life as part of a protest, you will be arrested. The right to assemble does not imply the right to make things difficult for other people with your assembly.
In any case, the whining about balance issues misses an important point: "Balance" does not mean that any two players of equal level will be evenly matched in a 1v1 duel. "Balance" means that each class has a niche to fill. For every class there is some situation where that class is better than all the others.
It seems silly to complain about warriors because warriors serve one of the most important roles in the game. Every group needs warriors to stand in front and take the damage ("tank") while the others do their things. It is, in fact, more important for a warrior to be able take damage than deal damage. The only other class that you could say this of is paladins, but even that is debatable.
And, anyway, who cares which class is most powerful? It's obviously more important to consider which class is most fun to play, and that completely depends on your own taste. If you don't enjoy playing a warrior, don't play a warrior.
Slashdot Mirror
Saying that IE's renderer is obviously inferior to Firefox/Opera is like saying that Linux is obviously more difficult to use on a desktop than Mac OSX. It's just plain true. If you had ever designed a complex web site making extensive use of CSS, you'd know this. The only reason you never see IE rendering pages wrong is because every web developer out there has taken extreme pains to work around all of IE's problems.
The pad seen in the photo (in this article) appears to be the Red Octane Ignition. Or, at least, it looks identical to the ones my sister has. Anyway, they cost something like $110 each, not including game. That's still only going to come to $20k or so, but I'm sure a good chunk of the money goes to paying the researchers, paying for medical exams to monitor progress, etc.
$30 pads do not make for a good gaming experience.
I'm saying that it's unreasonable to call random third parties greedy for not wanting to help obese kids simply out of the goodness of their hearts. Parents are not random third parties.
The problem is not figuring out what the kids need to do. They need to exercise. The problem is figuring out how to make them do it. Most exercise is boring, therefore kids don't do it. DDR is fun. Is it fun enough that your obese kid will actually play it enough to lose weight? Let's find out!
I play DDR and bike (outside!) regularly. DDR is way more fun.
Dude... That's the whole point of capitalism. It's working as designed.
Are you concerned about the physical welfare of children? How much money have you spent trying to improve it?
Trust me, Blizzard hasn't reached it yet. And it doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling when they start posting for key database and network positions soon after the release.
I don't trust you. How would you know? Do you maintain their servers? It seems to be pretty obvious that if high-population servers have lag problems and low-population servers don't, then high-population servers must be pushing the hardware limits.
1. Not screw up how they assign players: i.e. Agent Dawn server. This is a RPG server, as labeled by Blizzard, but for 3 months(?) everyone who allowed the game to pick a PvE server got assigned to it.
I'll grant you that's an obvious mistake. But that isn't even related to the main issue here.
2. Have the ability to move characters to another server. They are only this limited functionality now, months after it should have been.
This is a lot more complicated than it sounds. The servers weren't designed with this in mind in the first place. What happens to stuff you have in the auction house when you move your character? What happens to your mail? Discard all that? OK, now what happens if your name is already taken on the new server? What happens if you have unique items which are owned by someone else on the target server?
Of course, the biggest problem is just engineering a way to move the character data itself, since the systems weren't designed to be used like that. Again, this is a lot more complicated than you think. I don't know the details, but at present the Warsong and Bonechewer servers are "linked" somehow to allow transfers, and this link manages to cause lag when using mail and auction house functions even for Bonechewer players. And Bonechewer is still a low-population server at this point.
You can say "They should have allowed transfers from anywhere to anywhere!" all you want, but the fact is you have not a clue what this really means.
3. Assign limits to servers. If you have a friend who is on the server, have them "sponser" you so you can get on. Do something to limit it.
In hindsight, that sounds like a good idea. However, try to imagine Blizzard's thoughts before releasing the game. FFXI had a system in place to limit servers, and people hated it. They hated it so much that Penny-Arcade devoted a comic and a news post to bashing the concept and explaining how it ruined the game. So your options are:
- Enforce limits and piss everyone off.
- Don't enforce limits, and piss everyone off.
At least in the future, players will understand when limits are enforced.
There's no "rate limiter" that notices when both realms have balanced out at medium-pop and disallows further transfers (or even warns about them).
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that transfers will end if the populations balance out. But I also kind of doubt that will happen. It seems that most people are staying on their native servers.
I mean, really. 90% of WoW players are too stupid to comprehend these concepts. How these people manage to get themselves up to level 60 without brains is beyond me, but I've grouped with enough of them to know they exist.
Your information is out of date. The following transfers are currenty allowed:
Warsongers have been trashing my home server of Bonechewer for many days now. Trust me, transfers are active.
I guess your server isn't on the list, though. Sorry.
Low-population server. Which is most of them. These articles really need to specify that it is only the top 10-15 realms -- if that, even -- that have problems. New players should obviously not create characters there, and existing players now have the option to transfer to a low-pop server.
I mean, really... a server can only handle so many players. The hardware has limits. What do you expect Blizzard to do about it, beyond what they have done? Either they can start assigning players to low-population realms by force (like FFXI, which everyone hated for that) or they can try very hard to encourage players to choose low-pop servers and let the rest suffer the consequences.
The problem isn't that there aren't enough servers. If all the players were evenly distributed among all current servers, there would be no problem. The problem is that players have naturally wanted to play with their friends, which has encouraged people to gravitate towards a few servers while the rest lay mostly empty. And, so, yeah, those servers have problems. And even if Blizzard added 20 more, the high-pop servers would still have problems.
World of Warcraft has had extended downtime in the past 24 hours
That's odd. I have been playing World of Warcraft for the past 21 hours. Literally. I don't know of this outage of which you speak. I was disconnected maybe three or four times in 21 hours of play, which is more that usual, but I'm typically disconnected from AIM three or four times a day and no one ever complains that AIM isn't reliable. I did not lose any progress any of the times I was disconnected and was able to reconnect immediately.
The reports of WoW's instability are perhaps massively exaggerated. Also, note that netcraft's graph of the web server doesn't say anything about the game servers. I couldn't care less if www.worldofwarcraft.com is working while I play. thottbot.com and allakhazam.com are more important, frankly. In all likelihood, the web server was having trouble serving all the people who went to read about the patch and bitch on the forums about everything new that they hated.
(And, yeah, before you ask... I'm on vacation.)
I thought he was a COM interface at first.
The motherboard mfgrs weren't getting enough positive feedback from it, it was expensive (the Dolby license was not the only reason), and Creative bought Sensura, whose technology it used.
Sure, you can come up with all the excuses you want for why soundstorm died, but we all know the real reason is this.
That's not random. It's pseudo-random. For applications like shuffling a playlist, that would be fine. For applications like choosing a cryptographic key, that would be unacceptable (a cracker could repeat your algorithm to figure out your key).
This is not a problem of a bad shuffle algorithm. The problem here is thousands of years old. It is human nature. People see patterns where there are none. People generate theories based on these non-existent patterns. This is how people concluded that the sun orbits the Earth: "Oh, look, the sun looks like it is orbiting the Earth! Therefore it must be!"
The problem is, if you just put together a playlist with a bunch of artists and play it, it is entirely likely that someone will be played three times in the first hour. And in this guy's case, that someone was Steely Dan. So what does that prove?
About 500 years ago, we invented something called the "scientific method". Although it is taught to most people in both science and history classes, few seem to understand it.
The scientific method says that you cannot use past observations to make a conclusion. You must develop a specific test to prove or disprove your hypothesis. You must show before you perform the test that the outcome of the test is relevant to your hypothesis. You can then perform the test and use the results to back your conclusion.
The scientific method could very easily be applied here. What this guy needs to do is start with the prediction that Steely Dan or whoever will be played three times in the first hour. He must use statistics to compute the probability of this happenning in a purely random shuffle, and should show that the chances are less than 1% (this is a pretty straight-forward use of standard statistical methods). Then he should run the experiment and see what happens.
My guess? Steely Dan will not play three times in the first hour.
Without a proper scientific experiment proving this guy's theory, there is no story here.
You would know by analyzing the algorithm which produced the numbers, not by analyzing the output. Of course, the fact that the numbers are produced by an algorithm proves that they are not random. If you ran the same algorithm again, you'd get the same numbers. Since computation is deterministic by design, there is no purely computational way to generate truly random numbers.
If you're not a programmer, try to imagine writing out a mathematical equation which, when evaluated, comes out to a random number, different every time. It doesn't make sense, does it? How could the same equation have a different result every time, without changing the inputs?
So someone with $36 million to throw around can, in 56 hours, produce two random messages with the same SHA-1.
::cough::
Great.
So, presumably, this devious (and very rich) hacker might produce the following two messages:
"bma p3 rjphta,-9p.u2#H50982u.yha,cp. hxasnip"
and
"BUEQXBBX2 jma93#9g5xbaida htuEXOAhkra1255,y"
And then, of course, he'd somehow trick me into signing "bma p3 rjphta,-9p.u2#H50982u.yha,cp. hxasnip". Because I sign random pieces of gibberish all the time, if asked. And then, having done this, he could go around claiming that I had actually signed "BUEQXBBX2 jma93#9g5xbaida htuEXOAhkra1255,y".
OH NO!
Sure. Moving to SHA-256 is all well and good. But, frankly, I think these reports are horribly overblown. Crypto geeks are jumping up and down with their hair on fire (just like George Tenet!) because their perfect algorithm is slighly less perfect in a way that doesn't have any real practical meaning in most situations.
Meanwhile, there are real security problems out there in the form of poorly written software and poorly administered systems. Please, please do not spend your time rewriting your software to use SHA-256 when you could be patching real security holes. Leave SHA-256 until you have nothing better to do.
Jesus Christ. In the time it took to write my post (all of 30 seconds), five other people replied to you.
Just goes to show, the quickest and most effective way to get information on the net is to post something that is wrong.
2^80 / 2^69 = 2^11 = 2048
For those who don't know: Parent is referring to an actual person who actually is a gay prostitute and actually did get a press pass to a presidential press conference. He even managed to ask Bush a question in which he called Democrats "detached from reality" or something like that.
When I think "message queue" I think something like "Win32 message queue" (GetMessage()/SendMessage(), used for basic GUI operation) or FreeBSD's kernel queues. Or even RT signal queues. All these things are commonly known as "message queues", yet are clearly not what is being discussed here.
Anyway, I wasn't really complaining. I was just making a dumb joke out of the fact that people use such generic terms to refer to such specific systems. Turns out the joke was dumber than I realized at the time. Oh well.
My point: Everyone knows what "operating system" and "database" and "file system" mean. Maybe it's just me, but I have no idea what "message queuing" means. There's nothing wrong with that, but since it's non-obvious what they mean, it would be nice if they'd stick a one-paragraph explanation in the article.
And, yes, I do believe that if a software term is non-obvious to me, then it is probably non-obvious to most computer professionals.
(I hate it when people use totally generic terms like "message queuing" when they are actually referring to some much more specific functionality. I especially hate it when articles written about such systems make no attempt to explain what that functionality might be.)
The admins had a point: This silly march was harming the gameplay experience for other players. Dun Morogh is a beginner region, so causing that area to have technical problems from server load will hurt people who are trying to play the game for the first time, perhaps leading to believe that the game sucks in general.
If you want to compare to the real-life right to assemble, then what the protesters were doing is more analogous to blocking traffic. If you block traffic in real life as part of a protest, you will be arrested. The right to assemble does not imply the right to make things difficult for other people with your assembly.
In any case, the whining about balance issues misses an important point: "Balance" does not mean that any two players of equal level will be evenly matched in a 1v1 duel. "Balance" means that each class has a niche to fill. For every class there is some situation where that class is better than all the others.
It seems silly to complain about warriors because warriors serve one of the most important roles in the game. Every group needs warriors to stand in front and take the damage ("tank") while the others do their things. It is, in fact, more important for a warrior to be able take damage than deal damage. The only other class that you could say this of is paladins, but even that is debatable.
And, anyway, who cares which class is most powerful? It's obviously more important to consider which class is most fun to play, and that completely depends on your own taste. If you don't enjoy playing a warrior, don't play a warrior.
Maybe you're in for the love of the game, but you really wouldn't mind having an assload of money to go with it?