1  ...  8  9  10  11  12  13  |   Order by default

Dec 20, 2003, 10:01pm

just taking names and counting heads.. not reading anything...
not even by accident when replying...

[View Quote] <snipping... but not reading what I'm snipping>
<ummm... this part below looks aesthetically pleasing
... but I have no idea what it says cause I didn't read it >

> ya'll are lucky im such a nice person, strike, if it were for you, it
would
> have said Private Message To Strike!!!
> Code, i know you looked when replying! might have been by accident, but
you
> read anyway! Jstone, ty for quickly shifting your eyes from the post :)
> as i said, lucky im such a nice person! :)
>
> -SWE

Dec 20, 2003, 2:09am

May we use it as the key to a one time pad cipher?

> Licence:
>
> You may not decompile this program, you may not eat this program when you
> are hungry, you may not use EXE binders to try and distribute viruses via
> this program.
>
> You may distribute... but be it on your own heads if you end up being
> involved with some form of virus or trojan.

Jul 5, 2003, 4:09pm

I'm a newbie to AW, but as a world owner, I have no interest whatsoever in
allowing *totally anonymous* people to enter my world for any reason.

I dont' care one whit wether they paid or not. Give them free accounts..
whatever.... the economics of it are up to AWI, but noone comes into my
world with a cit number of '0'.... period.

No sane website will allow you to post without *verifying* your email
address, but anyone can come into AW and cause trouble by supplying a fake
email address and I just won't have that.

Yes.. I was a tourist too once, but I gave a valid email address and would
have quite happily waited to reply to a confirmation emal before trying out
the AW software.

The concept of tourists is a good one, but the way it is implemented (i.e.
you can't tell tourists apart) could use a fresh look.

Jul 5, 2003, 4:43pm

As a world owner, I don't want anyone to be completely anonymous.

How much you charge and how you manage that is up to you. Free or not, that
is not an issue to me and I wish you all the success in the world staying in
business, and indeed I hope you find a way to fill both your coffers and the
AW universe(s) with a lot of fresh new paying customers.

I am currently working with two museums to implement a VR facsimile of their
facilities, and the pro's and cons of using both Adobe Atmosphere and Active
Worlds were weighed and considered.

Since the museums are government funded, and must ensure that they are
'friendly' to all visitors, the primary decision to go with Adobe Atmosphere
was made because there is currently no way to allow the general public into
an AW world without also allowing them to be completely anonymous.

During our evaluation of technologies, the people who run the museum were
very excited about the possibility of allowing the many museum volunteers to
work on displays in an online and collaborative environment. The economics
of buying citizenships to do so were not an issue for them. Their smiles
started to droop though as I explained the tourists/citizen model and how
the only way they could allow the general public in was as completely
anonymous and unidentifiable entities.

The museums have IT departments who are quite familiar with online content.
They do not allow unregistered people to post to their own newsgroups
(incidentally neither does AW), so why should they allow visitors to be
subjected to comments from anonymous visitors?

Do what you want about the economics Enzo, but please consider doing
something other than just labelling everyone who's taking AW for a test
drive as 'cit 0'.

For one thing.. don't let anyone in until you've sent an email to the
address they are planning on using. That alone would give me some assurance
that you can at least track down a bad tourist even if they are citizen 0.

But better yet... give them free cit numbers that have restricted abilities.


[View Quote]

Jul 5, 2003, 4:54pm

[View Quote] All you have to do to destroy a tourist build is throw away your ID (i.e.
your cit) and log on with an anonymous email adress as a tourist.

There is no way to tell one tourist from another.. that's the main problem.

Imagine if eveyone visiting the USA was issued a temporary VISA with a
serial number of 00000000.

I don't think such a policy would deter terrorism or mischief makers.

Jul 6, 2003, 3:03am

This is a very big step in the direction of a solution, but in order to
satisfy
people like lawyers representing government funded institutions, you would
need to satisfy them that the visitors register *before* being allowed to
speak publicly.

Given however the new disable all chat feature and a bot that could
do as you suggest in the 'foyer' world, it sounds like a workable solution
could now be made to satisfy this kind of application. As long as you don't
stock it with avatars that can perform rude gestures, you could now ensure
a reasonably 'safe' area in the initial world.

Although having to fund an entire universe wasn't in the original plan,
the fact that it comes with a number of citizenships gets around the other
main problem which was to have a cit pool available for staff, tour guides,
VIP's and the like.

It also might be workable with just a Galaxy server given the ability for a
bot to moderate all chat. Since bots can now force feed the av choice as
well, the visitors could be given a completely invisible avatar until they
do
register, meaning they would interact very weakly if at all with anyone
else (neutrino cits).

Thanks for giving me a fresh way to look at that Builderz!

[View Quote]

Jul 7, 2003, 12:00am

IP addresses change all the time too.

But a user account with a proper password and a verified email address
is a user account with a proper password and a verified email address.

[View Quote]

Jul 7, 2003, 5:40pm

You probably need to enable cookies for the domain in question.

[View Quote]

Jul 8, 2003, 4:07pm

The fact is that most of the 'fun' technology we all enjoy started out
as research for medical, scientific, industrial or other uses.

It's the commercialization of such technologies that pays for the research
(government funding is a pittance compared to the private research money)
and eventually lowers the cost of everything so we can afford to use it
in 'toys', but that benefits the serious uses as well by lowering their
costs
too.

<friendly sarcasm>

Don't bother replying. Just take the moral high ground and get rid of
your computer. You shouldn't have such a useful piece of technology
simply to use it as a toy.

Donate it to a hospital or something. :-)

</friendly sarcasm>

[View Quote]

Jul 20, 2003, 9:38am

> By the way, what is monolith?
> Is it one stone or something?

You might think so.. close.. but in fact it means "stoned one"

Aug 23, 2003, 3:31pm

Wow.. is there like a coffee or nicotine shortage I'm not aware of?

Lot of bitchy people around all of a sudden.

Aug 27, 2003, 3:50am

It was never actually intended to be an encryption algorithm.. one obvious
clue to that being that you don't need a password to decode it, and there
is nowhere to put a password if you wanted one anyway.

ROT-13 encoding is just a way to pack as much data as possible
into the 7 bit character set. This was a desirable feature back in the
old days.

ROT-13 encoders therefore got built into a lot of mail and newsgroup
programs so people could post binary data via 7 bit transport
mechanisms.

In theory, if you really wanted to post images in this newsgroup, you
wold post them in ROT-13 so those real keeners who we all know
and love and who post a lot here can read them with their text
browsers and appreciate the lovely colors they will be able to
imagine.

[View Quote]

Sep 25, 2003, 11:54am

The script you wrote is a big hole into your webhost.

You should never, ever, ever just use input supplied by the user
like you do below without making sure it is not possible for them
to retreive arbitrary files from your system through it.

http://hostname/account/php.php?url=/etc/passwd

might let me download the password file from your web
host if their permissions are not set up right.

I could also use my own webhost to set up a webpage with
forms on it, and then retreive it through your script:

http://hostname/account/php.php?
url=http://myhost.com/my_malicious_page.htm

Now I can make any webpage I want think it came from
your host, and get access to a lot of information I shouldn't
have. The webpage really is coming from your host, and
you have made a mechanism to allow anyone to more or
less put arbitrary HTML on your server.

If you really want to do this, at least hardcode the http path
to your tripod account into the code:

<?php
$image = $HTTP_GET_VARS["url"];
$image = "http://account.tripod.com/" . $image ;
readfile($image);
?>

This way noone can retreive any files local to your server,
or any files from their own server. Only files from the tripod
account can be retreived.

It's shorter to invoke it too:

create picture http://yourhost.com/script.php?url=image_name.jpg

[View Quote]

Oct 26, 2003, 9:25am

Just to nipick... it's 'when having sex.seq' (or just 'seqs'), not sex.rwx

Let's get our nouns.rwx and verbs.seq in order.

[View Quote]

Oct 31, 2003, 11:18am

Since the 'float' depends on what you set your 'don't let the framerate
go below ??', why not try setting your desired framerate very high.

Also, why not look into using the Settings->Advanced->Local Path
feature so that the browser will look for objects on your local hard
disk before trying to get them from your actual HTTP server. If
you are willing to do what you are doing backing up your cache,
using the "Local Path" option is definitely what you should do
instead.

Finally, if your object path is serving objects out through a PHP script,
there is a pretty good chance that no matter what you do, objects will
be downloaded every time you go into your world. This isn't AW's
fault.. it's the server and script's fault.

[View Quote]

Nov 5, 2003, 11:02pm

>
> Main problem with AWI no communication link between staff and customers.

Last Friday I wrote an email to support at AW with a fairly involved
technical
question, and received a fully satisfactory reply Monday morning.

That's actually pretty darn good considering the nature of my inquiry.

Nov 6, 2003, 10:31am

Coudln't they just move the GZ to a new location?

Leave the historical builds as is, and just have the
new entry be somewhere else.

[View Quote]

Nov 6, 2003, 12:08pm

[View Quote] I expect to *see* them falling all over themselves to support third party
developers. If they are a small company or can't afford to hire the tech
staff to enhance the product, they should be focussing on the things that
will allow others to do so ex post facto.

I know I don't speak for everyone, but for a lot of people AW is half a
product, and the various bots, op path systems etc. that are available
are the other half.

If it were not for 'bots', I would not be here. If it were not for 'bots',
a lot of worlds would be sitting there empty because the owner accidentally
wiped out all the objects and have no way to seed anything.

So whatever else they do, I keep my eye on their actions toward
developers and what features they add to expand the possibilities for
third party extensions, because at least half of the cool stuff takes
place outside the browser in the domain of the bots.

Do you use a Xelagot? Do you *rely* on your Xelagot?

I do, and I don't want to hear rumours that he was not invited to be
in a beta program. If my Xela stops working in some future release,
then my AW stops working and I'm not stupid enough to assume
that it was any fault of Alex's if something breaks. I will become one
of the AWmish, and in all likelihood will just go play with one of the
other VR systems with a more 'legitamized' developers program.

The same thing goes for any of the other bots that exist now. People
use them, and they become irreversably 'part of'' AW, and AW should
think twice before considering those things as 'external'. It's not the
perception of people who work inside AW that matters, it's the
perception of the people who fork out money to use the stuff that
matters, and my perception at least is that the thrid party stuff that
I use every single day is just as important and just as much a part of
"Active Worlds" as the browser and the server.

The same applies to avatars, objects and textures. I know the latest
release 'broke' some things with regard to masked textures that
were not the same aspect ratio as the textures they masked, and it's
not that the things broke that is the issue, but that it wasn't until full
release that it was discovered.

In case it sounds like I am opposed to change, I most definitely am
not. I just want to know what is coming, so I can prepare for it,
and if something changes suddenly, and it breaks things, then I get
upset as do most people. If I know it's going to break beforehand,
but for a good reason and with additional benefits after it is fixed,
then I'm usually all for it.

But I want to know that if someone who has made some bots I
use is still actively developing them, and is willing and has offered to
make sure that their stuff will work with any changes AW is planning,
that AW didn't turn them away because their name didn't come out
of the hat.

It's really not important who the person is, or what their demeanor.
They might be the biggest asshole in the world (no Alex.. I don't
think that at all), but this is business, and business is about dealing
with assholes be they customers, suppliers or partners with a cheery
smile and a "Thanks for choosing Active Worlds!".

Spite has no place in a business.

Your beta program doesn't work very well ENZO. Your developer
program is just an SDK and some documentation. Your support email
answers question, but it would be better even if only for appearances
if you perhaps had a developers at email address.

Your opaque selection method for beta's is pretty bad. At least put
some visibility into the selection methodology. As I ranted above,
hearing Alex was not included and hearing Strike bragging all the
time about his insight into your product roadmap is really not
making me feel good about investing time. money or effort into
Active Worlds, but those are the only things I see.. I see nothing
coming from Active Worlds officially to challenge those perceptions.

I see a wishlist that appears to be just a one way mailslot that goes
to /dev/null

I hope you surprise me :-)

This assholes rant is now concluded.

PS - I love you too ENZO!

Nov 6, 2003, 9:58pm

Thanks for your considered reply, and it's good to see you taking
time out today to deal with rants. I appreciate you taking the time
to respond.

I hope I didn't sound *too* upset, but hey.. it's a 'rant' thread :-)

If I didn't think this technology was cool or fun or worth spending
time on, I wouldn't feel passionate about it one way or another.
It's too bad we don't often take the time to enumerate the many,
many things you people have done right, but you have and they
are appreciated. Your fans are very loyal as you well know and
I am glad to be one of them (I get that brain implant thing next
month!).

And I do commend AWI for it's SDK, and documentation.
It's great that I can obtain either one right off your website without
any additional paperwork.

My main concern is really that the main developers who create the
SDK applications that people use all the time are able to ensure
ahead of time that their applications are going to work with any
enhancements or changes that are made as your product evolves.

My other concerns have to do with whether AWI listens to the
SDK developers and considers their input when deciding on
new features and that your SDK in fact does change and improve
and evolve.

AW almost certainly has bugs, and so do the Xelagots, and
so does any version of the operating system anyone is going to
run it on. I am not suggesting that AW has any more bugs than
other products or that you do any less to avoid them.

My point is that the people who produce third party apps that
are relied on by a lot of us should have access to anything 'new'
on your end as early as possible so that they have as much chance
as possible to prevent changes you may make in your stuff from
turning into bugs in *their* stuff and affecting the users.

I don't truly know who is in the alpha or beta, but have heard
rumours that Alex was not involved in 'something' that he had
a desire to be involved in, and without knowing any of the details,
this can cause a lot of concern. As said.. many people rely on the
Xelagot, just as many of us rely on other bots, and I am sure
that we are all concerned that everything possible is done to
keep them running smoothly without any surprises.

So while you may choose an adequate group of people to
test your browser and server, I want to be sure that there
is an avenue available to people who produce applications
that work with your technology to test their own stuff, and a
lottery or hand chosen system has the potential to leave
people like that out in the cold.

I would love to help you test your latest efforts, but I would
just as happily take my chances with that on a lottery style or
hand chosen system. I don't have herds of people relying on
anything I've done to date, so I can easily adapt the few things
I have in my own time as AWI sees fit to come out with updates
and releases.

I'm really not comfy though thinking that Andras or Alex or
Magine or some of the other people whose stuff I use everyday
would have to rely on a lottery to be included. I'm not
that concerned with the selection of beta testers being fair
so much as I am concerned with it ensuring coverage of the
most important and widely used bot applications.

Surely you have stats on which bots are most widely used by
people and can ensure you make special efforts to involve their
creators in alphas/betas etc.

You may already do something like that anyway, and my
current worries could be unfounded, but rumour is all I have
to go on.

As I said at the beginning.. I'm not that upset, and I do love
this product. It's just that I see the third party stuff as part of it,
and am looking for some official indication that AWI does too,

Given that you replied to this, I will take that as an indication
that you *are* interested in developers, and that you do indeed
'love us' too.

The AW SDK is a very big part of your product, and I'm sure
you recognize that or you would not have made it. I suppose I
am also concerned that in your efforts to improve the product,
you don't forget that improvements in that part of it pay larger
dividends than say a button to put lightning in your skybox might.

I would be more comfortable knowing that you listen to the
requests of the bot developers (again in proportion to the
popularity of the bots they produce), and make efforts to
accomodate any reasonable requests they might have for
features in the SDK that will allow them to make better bots.

You may have had a history of this in the past, but it is not
that evident anymore if that was the case.

Please have faith that any effort you spend in support of
improved features in the SDK will pay off down the road many
times over in new and improved bots that everyone can use.

I don't envy you all the choices you face and nothing will make
everyone happy, but it's good to see your posts now and again
just to know you're listening. I do truly respect that you still come
in here and post after all this time in the face of criticism and even
unproductive name calling.

If I'm still here in a year bugging you, take comfort in the fact
that if I'm still here you're all doing your job. :-)

[View Quote]

Nov 7, 2003, 12:29am

OH MY GOD!!

OK.. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH THE REAL BOWEN???!?!?

Don't worry Bowen.. I know we've had our differnces, but we're coming to
get you back...

BB.. you with me? This evil (whatever it is) cannot stand unchallenged.
You or I might be next.

[View Quote]

Nov 11, 2003, 3:21am

I was at AWGate today when a new cit stopped in called "someone"

A little while later another new cit came to say hello called "noone"

They were both introduced to AW by their friend who was already a cit called
"everyone"

Someone has a world named "Somewhere".

Noone has a world called "Nowhere"

Everyone has a world called... take a guess.. "Everywhere"

So "noone" invited "everyone" to go "somewhere", but "someone" decided to go
"nowhere", and while "everyone" was getting ready to go "somewhere",
"noone" was going "anywhere".

"Anywhere" was not really owned by "anyone".. "noone" really owned it, or
"everyone" did depending on who you asked. I don't really know "anyone"
anyway, although apparently "everyone" does.

But in any case, "anyone" and "everyone" were having a lot of fun
"somewhere" with "noone" in particular but "someone" is really PO'd that
they weren't invited.

So if you you don't know "anyone" don't worry about it, but wether you care
about "everyone" or "noone", you may want to tell "someone" to go
"somewhere".. she's currently going "nowhere".

I'll be going "elsewhere" now, but that's a different post. See you soon
"Elseone".

Nov 11, 2003, 3:24am

that was in honor of Abbot and Costellow BTW

:-)

Nov 11, 2003, 10:27am

Are you anyone then?

Everyone was talking about you until someone told them to shut up
but noone was paying attention.

[View Quote]

Nov 11, 2003, 10:32am

You should see some of the models these people have
made.

Someone made nothing.rwx .. worth a look if you can find it.

Noone made anything.rwx .. you can see that one all over.

Everyone made everything.rwx but you knew that already.

Anyone could have made anything.rwx . I don't know for sure.

Nov 22, 2003, 10:53am

But what about us sociopaths?

[View Quote]

Nov 25, 2003, 2:56pm

> send 1.1.1.1 to 999.999.999.999

I guess someone isn't nearly as tech savvy as they let on....

"Said the blind man to his deaf son as the man with no legs got
up and walked away."

Nov 25, 2003, 8:27pm

maybe he meant:

3D7:3D7::3D7:3D7

[View Quote]

Nov 28, 2003, 11:53am

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Do you know how many posts there will be now ranting against him
*just* to get into your troublemaker book?

Didn't you learn anything from tourists and GK's and the 'how many
times can I get ejected' game?

You just drew a line in the sand for people to whom a line in the sand
is about as far in front of their face as they can see.

I'm personally going to keep my eye on everyone, and anyone I catch
acting decent and being civil is definitely going to be labelled a radical.

[View Quote]

Nov 28, 2003, 6:58pm

I just received one of those fake emails from

objectpasswords at activeworlds.com

It has a list of valid object path names and object passwords that
are verified to be correct passwords.

If you use a password on your zip files, you might want to change it.

Dec 1, 2003, 1:40pm

Never password your sound (.wav) files for the same reason.

[View Quote]

1  ...  8  9  10  11  12  13  |   Order by default