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Role Playing (Games)

The City of Heroes Expansion & the Issues of User-Created Content 150

Posted by Soulskill from the can't-you-just-play-nice dept.
eldavojohn writes "Wired has a piece on the new City of Heroes content that is created by players — or rather the severe abuse of it. Namely, creating missions for the characters. The problem is that gamers game this system, even though Paragon City has tried to maintain a good risk/reward ratio for experience in these missions. Making the situation even worse is that people who architect highly-rated missions get architect awards, which are redeemable for prizes — almost ensuring experience farming missions. Eric Heimburg (lead engineer and producer of Asheron's Call and the upcoming Star Trek MMO) comments on this: 'It may seem sad that giving the players what they want is detrimental to the player's overall length of enjoyment of the game, but that's the truth. Once you reached that top of the hill, if there's nothing left to do or see, players are likely to move on. Length of enjoyment (equals) amount of money earned, so developers have a strong incentive to keep players from gaining power and levels too quickly.' Matt Miller (lead designer of CoH), addressed the community on this very topic. This is resulting in an unexplained ban/loss of experience if you are determined to be abusing the mission architect, causing an uproar in the community. Is user-generated content a dead end for an MMORPG?" Update: 05/20 20:27 GMT by T : Rather than lead engineer of Asheron's Call or the Star Trek MMO, a correction at Wired says rather that "Heimburg worked as Star Trek Online's systems designer at Perpetual Entertainment, prior to the game's transfer to Cryptic Studio."
Image

External Airbag Designed to Protect Pedestrians 253

Posted by samzenpus from the safe-at-any-speed dept.
Thanks to researchers at Cranfield University, you don't have to feel bad when you plow into a group of pedestrians who are crossing the street too slowly. They have designed an external airbag that mounts to your hood at the base of the windshield. Research shows that this is the area where a pedestrian's head is most likely to hit in an accident. "Test results indicate that the system works extremely well. When fitted to a demonstrator vehicle not originally designed with pedestrian protection in mind, the results were well inside all current legal criteria for pedestrian protection currently in force in Europe," Roger Hardy of the university's Cranfield Impact Centre said.

Comment Re:YAN... Oh, never mind. (Score 2, Insightful) 1240

by billDCat (#27321953) Attached to: Strip-Search Case Tests Limits of 4th Amendment

Absolutely. Even if she actually had pot or worse, a strip search is totally inappropriate. It's a violation and can cause major emotional damage. Why were the parents not called? What kind of school is this where kids are treated as criminals? How can this possibly be justified? As a parent, I would be absolutely irate to hear that a school would even consider strip searches, much less actually apply them. Kids do need rules and structure, but more than anything they need people who care and who support them and provide a safety net. This kind of act from people the kids should be looking up to utterly destroys that sense of safety.
It's funny. Laugh.

Lame Duck Challenge Ends With Free Codeweavers Software For All 433

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the well-that-didn't-end-as-planned dept.
gzipped_tar writes to tell us that The Codeweavers "Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge" has ended in surprise and free software all day Tuesday (October 28, 2008) at the Codeweavers site. A while back Codeweavers gave President Bush a challenge to meet one of several goals before he left office. One of these goals was to lower gas prices in the Twin Cities below $2.79 a gallon, which has since transpired. "How was I to know that President Bush would take my challenge so seriously? And, give the man credit, I didn't think there was *any* way he could pull it off. But engineering a total market meltdown - wow - that was pure genius. I clearly underestimated the man. I'm ashamed that I goaded him into this and take full responsibility for the collapse of any savings you might have. Please accept our free software as my way of apologizing for the global calamity we now find ourselves embroiled in."
Networking

Submission + - Linux Networking Cookbook

Submitted by
dinotrac
dinotrac writes: "Somebody special is coming over for dinner. You're not a chef, but you can cook well enough to get by, so you grab your best cookbook and get to work.

That's the idea behind O'Reilly's Linux Networking Cookbook, by Carla Schroder. Carla has gathered a group of networking recipes that a reasonably Linux-savvy reader can use to address network needs like a seasoned sysadmin. If you want to find out how to hook your Linux workstation to a LAN, get another book. If you are reasonably comfortable with Linux, need to set up an LDAP server, configure single sign-on with Samba for a mixed Linux/Windows LAN, set up a VPN, or troubleshoot network problems without some uppity online geek telling you to RTFM, this book may be what you're looking for.

One of the great strengths and weaknesses of Linux is that everything you could possibly need to know is already on your computer in the form of man pages, or out on the internet in newsgroups, forums, or a massive autumn's leaf-pile of how-tos. Finding what you need in a form that you can use is sometimes a bigger problem than the problem you're trying to solve.

The Linux Networking Cookbook improves on that situation in a couple of ways. First is the author herself. Carla is an experienced System Administrator and a good technical writer. She was one of the early Linuxchix, and has spent years mentoring and otherwise helping new and experienced Linux folk through their assorted dilemmas. The result is a friendly and direct, information-packed and ego-free writing style. Unlike the typical how-to that provides a list of steps that have worked for the author, Carla's discussions fill in the blanks and tell you why she takes the steps that she does.

The Cookbook is organized into an introduction followed by 18 chapters that are complete stand-alone solutions to specific problems.

The obligatory introduction is short and is not required by any of the solutions in the book, but it's worth reading. Its' eleven pages read quickly, but contain, among other things, a good explanation of the difference between bandwidth and latency and a decent overview of the whys and whens of linux-based computers as routers versus mid-range and high-end commercial routers.

Each chapter begins with an introduction of the overall topic, Routing with Linux, for example, followed by a series of short recipes organized as problem-solution-discussion. This format is convenient for diving right into work and takes advantage Carla's mentoring talents.

One problem facing any writer of Linux books is the sheer number of Linux distributions, many of which have their own distinct ways of doing things. The Linux Networking Cookbook provides solutions for both Debian and Fedora Linux. It's an excellent choice when you consider that most Linuxes derive from one of those two bases, including all of the *buntus, Knoppix, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, CentOS, and many more. The recipes employ generic tools, which makes them easier to transport across distributions, even the SuSEs, which are based on neither Debian nor Red Hat.

For example, before obtaining The Cookbook, I needed to create a self-signed SSL certificate for a PostgreSQL server on an Ubuntu server. I'd done it a few times, but not enough to remember, so I went off to the net. The Ubuntu-themed How-To I found relied on a script called apache2-ssl-certificate. An apache script didn't bother me because I could move the pieces when I was done, or just break open the script and make it do what I wanted done. Ubuntu Feisty, however, had managed to leave the script out of the distribution, so I had to go back to the net to find an alternative approach.

Had I used The Cookboock, my task would have been simpler, though not quite as easy as it should be. Inexplicably for a book that includes network security and SSL-based VPNs, there is no entry for SSL Certificate in the index. A browse through the table of contents turns up a couple of recipes for Creating SSL-Keys for a Syslog-ng Server: one for Debian and one for Fedora. Fortunately, the Table of Contents is short and can be browsed completely in seconds, because those recipes are in the Troubleshooting Networks chapter, which is not intuitively obvious. They appear in that chapter because it contains the recipes for network monitoring, which includes installation of Syslog-ng.

The recipe itself is suitably generic, using the CA.sh script, which is part of openssl, and openssl itself to generate keys and certificates. A quick check of my Ubuntu servers, my Fedora VPS server, and my OpenSuSE workstation found CA.sh on all of them.

My OpenSuSE machine did throw one small curve:

CA.sh on my openSUSE box was located in /usr/lib/ssl/misc, as on the other boxes. However, the book tells us that CA.sh, and a moderatley competent Linux user is likely to know that rpm -ql openssl will list all of the files in the openssl package or that rpm-ql openssl | grep CA.sh will spit out the location of the script.

Given the variety of Linux distributions, it is hard to imagine a better approach to take.

The Glossary of Networking Terms in Appendix B deserves special mention. Each term is explained in plain but precise language that goes beyond the cursory definitions so common in glossaries. For example, the explanation for WEP notes that it is very weak protection and urges the reader to use WPA/WPA2 instead.

Sometimes, the extra information can soften a definition's focus, but, overall, the glossary is an outstanding tool for anyone who doesn't spend his or her time knee-deep in subnet definitions, routers, and tcp dumps.

The same is true of the book.

As is usual for O'Reilly, updates, errata, and scripts from the book are available on the web.
 "
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Re : Thoughts On Music - Steve Jobs

Submitted by
luna6
luna6 writes: "Steve Jobs recent open letter on embracing DRM free music, if the record companies agreed, is a noble idea. Yet, this article asks the question if Mr. Jobs really embraces the idea of music being able to be played on all hardware, why not allow iTunes to play all music formats? http://lunapark6.com/?p=2956"
Media (Apple)

Submission + - DVD jon on Job's "give up DRM if I could"

Submitted by
Whiney Mac Fanboy
Whiney Mac Fanboy writes: ""Dvd" Jon Johansen has posted several sceptical blog entries reacting to Steve Job's blog posting about DRM. One post questions Job's misuse of statistics that attempts to prove consumers aren't tied to iPods through ITMS.

Many iPod owners have never bought anything from the iTunes Store. Some have bought hundreds of songs. Some have bought thousands. At the 2004 Macworld Expo, Steve revealed that one customer had bought $29,500 worth of music.
The other question's the DRM-free in a heartbeat claim. There are apparantly, many Indie artists who would love to sell DRM-free music on iTunes, but Apple will not allow them.

It should not take Apple's iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users.
"
Security

Submission + - DNS Attack only a warning shot?

Submitted by ancientribe
ancientribe writes: The attack on the Internet infrastructure yesterday may signal a hint of bigger things to come: the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack on the Domain Name System (DNS) root servers was likely a test-run for a potentially larger and more disruptive attack.

It was the latest in a series of DDOS attacks on DNS servers that began late last year with attacks on EveryDNS and EasyDNS. Experts had predicted it was only a matter of time before botnet operators hit a bigger and higher-profile DNS target, and that's just what happened yesterday, according to this article in Dark Reading.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=116 685&WT.svl=news1_1
Windows

Submission + - Apple mocks Vista - Cancel or Allow?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple has posted a new "Get a Mac" ad that hilariously mocks the security features in Windows Vista. I haven't laughed so hard in ages.

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