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Can asynchronicity work for more than simple board games? Indie developer Derek Bruneau describes the process of building asynchronous gameplay to RPG Conclave, examining the history of the form and how it works for him. How much time do you have to play games? For many of us, the answer is, "Not enough." Finding time is often even more difficult when it comes to multiplayer games: not only does each player need to have free ...

To what degree do players own what's on the disc, and how does authorship influence the direction for DLC?

Welcome to the preview release of codename "Alchemy." Alchemy is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The purpose of this preview is to assess the level of community interest in reusing existing C and C++ libraries in Web applications that run on Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe AIR®.

With Alchemy, Web application developers can now reuse hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform.  Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web applications with minimal degradation on AVM2.  The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.

Alchemy is primarily intended to be used with C/C++ libraries that have few operating system dependencies. Ideally suited for computation-intensive use cases, such as audio/video transcoding, data manipulation, XML parsing, cryptographic functions or physics simulation, performance can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0 and anywhere from 2-10x slower than native C/C++ code. Alchemy is not intended for general development of SWF applications using C/C++.

Download and Discuss

• Get the Alchemy toolkit preview
• Get and share ported libraries
• Discuss Alchemy in the Labs forums

With Alchemy, it is easy bridge between C/C++ and ActionScript 3.0 to expand the capabilities of applications on the Flash Platform, while ensuring that the generated SWCs and SWFs cannot bypass existing Flash Player security protections.

Adobe is providing some example libraries, and developers are encouraged to share their ported libraries.

About

“Abandon Thread” is a catchphrase that is used in online forums to indicate that a discussion thread has degraded in quality and should be abandoned. The phrase is often used as a reaction to thread jacking, flame wars or more general trolling behavior. In image macros and animated GIFs, the phrase is often paired with people or animals that appear as if they are attempting to flee. (See also Hey Guys What’s Going on in Here)

Origin

The phrase has been used in discussions threads on sites like the Democratic Underground^[5] forums as far back as January 19th, 2004.

The earliest known animated GIF version shows a snail transforming its shell into a jetpack before flying out of frame with the caption “Abandon Thread” flashing in red. It was uploaded to ThreadBombing.com^[1] on August 14th, 2009. The GIF was made from a clip of a CGI test video from Spon.com^[3] titled “Spontaneous Snail” that was uploaded to YouTube on November 21st, 2006.

Spread

Usage of the phrase in discussion threads have been noted across a wide range of forums and websites like Lone Portal^[8], Gaia Online^[9] and IGN forums.^[11] In addition, GIF derivatives of “Abandon Thread” images can be found on sites like Funny Junk^[4], GIF Ninja^[10], GIF Soup^[6], Ebaumsworld^[7], and Threadbombing’s “Thread Sucks” category.^[2]

Notable Examples

Fuck This Thread I’m Outta Here

Similar to “abandon thread” responses, another set of image macros and animated GIFs featuring the catchphrase “fuck this thread I’m out of here” can be used in the same context.

Search Interest

Search queries for “abandon thread” had a small spike in July 2010 before picking back up in January of 2011.

External References

^[1]Abandon Thread – Thread Bombing / 8-14-2009

^[2]Thread Bombing – Thread Sucks

^[3]Spon.com – Spon

^[4]Funny Junk – abandon thread=

^[5]Democratic Underground – Abandon thread! Abandon thread!

^[6]GIF Soup – Gif Results for abandon thread

^[7]Ebaumsworld – abandon thread

^[8]Lone Portal – ABANDON THREAD!

^[9]Gaia Online – Abandon thread. Troll attack.

^[10]GIF Ninja – abandon thread

^[11]IGN Forums – Someone cap Abandon Thread with this GIF

CDE: Using System Call Interposition to Automatically Create Portable Software Packages

Google Tech Talk (more info below) February 11, 2011 Presented by Philip Guo. ABSTRACT It can be painfully difficult to take software that runs on one person's machine and get it to run on another machine. Online forums and mailing lists are filled with discussions of users' troubles with compiling, installing, and configuring software and their myriad of dependencies. To eliminate this dependency problem, we created a tool called CDE that uses system call interposition to monitor the execution of x86-Linux programs and package up the Code, Data, and Environment required to run them on other x86-Linux machines, without any installation or configuration. CDE is easy to use: Simply prepend any Linux command (or series of commands) with 'cde', and CDE will execute that command, monitor its actions using ptrace, and copy all files it accesses (eg, executables, libraries, plug-ins, scripts, configuration/data files) into a self-contained package. Now you can transfer that package to another Linux machine and run that exact same command without installing anything. In short, if you can run a set of Linux commands on your x86 machine, then CDE enables others to run it on theirs. People in both academia and industry have used CDE to distribute portable software, demo research prototypes, make their scientific experiments reproducible, run software natively on older Linux distros, and quickly deploy experiments to compute clusters. CDE is free and open-source, available here: www <b>...</b>
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"Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain" is a scholarly research paper reporting on a well-designed study of the way that spam works, from fast-flux DNS to bulletproof hosting to payment processing to order fulfillment. The researchers scraped mountains of spam websites, ordered their pills and fake software, and subjected it all to rigorous comparison and analysis. They were looking for spam ecosystem bottlenecks, places where interdicting one or two companies could have a major impact on spam.

Figure 1 illustrates the spam value chain via a concrete
example from the empirical data used in this study.
On October 27th, the Grum botnet delivered an email
titled VIAGRA R Official Site. The body of the mes-
sage includes an image of male enhancement pharma-
ceutical tablets and their associated prices (shown). The
image provides a URL tag and thus when clicked
directs the user's browser to resolve the associated domain
name, medicshopnerx.ru. This domain was registered by
REGRU-REG-RIPN (a.k.a. reg.ru) on October 18th --
it is still active as of this writing. The machine providing
name service resides in China, while hosting resolves to a
machine in Brazil. The user's browser initiates an HTTP
request to the machine, and receives content that renders
the storefront for "Pharmacy Express," a brand associated
with the Mailien pharmaceutical affiliate program based in
Russia.

After selecting an item to purchase and clicking on
"Checkout", the storefront redirects the user to a payment
portal served from payquickonline.com (this time serving
content via an IP address in Turkey), which accepts the
user's shipping, email contact, and payment information, and
provides an order confirmation number. Subsequent email
confirms the order, provides an EMS tracking number, and
includes a contact email for customer questions. The bank
that issued the user's credit card transfers money to the
acquiring bank, in this case the Azerigazbank Joint-Stock
Investment Bank in Baku, Azerbaijan (BIN 404610).
Ten days later the product arrives, blister-packaged, in a
cushioned white envelope with postal markings indicating
a supplier named PPW based in Chennai, India as its
originator.

Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain (PDF)

(via MeFi)