No, I haven't bothered to even post on the forums in many months. There's just no point, really. CCP is a typical gaming company in that they are run by a bunch of people at the top who are looking for their next cool thing. Or if it weren't cold and snowing all the time/was in the U.S, their next golf game. We all know the type. Fixing bugs is something that they leave to the grunts down in the cave/server room. When it comes to their weekly Powerpoint discussions, they want glossy and flashy over grinding out problems.
Of course, you and others are right in that that is *exactly* how most online games are operated. But CCP also has made a point of spamming press releases all the time and trying to make themselves look concerned and like they're trying. It just leaves a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. Sony and EA, for instance, may be similar for most of their games, but we all know that they are asses looking for the money and we live with that. They at least are honest about what they are.
But when CCP yet again for the hundredth time asks for suggestions and then ignores them, then blathers in the media about how they "care"... 128 ideas maybe a dozen actually look like they might be worked on. Eventually.
Most of CCP's bad karma, though, comes from the iron-fisted way they police and nerf their own boards. And the issue of employees cheating, well, they also break the #1 rule that Blizzard(WoW) enforces(for good reason, IMO) - they actually encourage employees to play in the game as characters. There's a reason that so many stories about people knowing when things were happening or had mysterious pre-release/patch knowledge that gave them an advantage. It's only human nature to cheat and break the rules.
Making the OS non-writable is the most stupid idea I've heard all day. Most operating systems ship with one or more security holes that aren't found until after the release, and making it non-writable also means making it non-fixable.
The EeePC approach only really protects you from accidental harm. Malware sill simply install itself on the top partition. You delete the OS, reinstall, and then mount the user partition on top again and suddenly the malware is back.
IIRC, Apple had a machine once that solved this as well - it had a stripped down second version of the OS in ROM and it could be used to boot into a 100% true "safe mode". This is what I'm talking about. It wouldn't keep you from getting re-infected if you booted normally, but it would essentially give you real control over the machine and make it a lot easier to clean up things. And it booted up in under 10 seconds.
"My machine is infected..."(reboot into ROM mode) - okay, let's just yank the entire root directory and replace with a backup from a week or two ago when it wasn't infected...
This actually described using that machine. Yank a fresh copy of the System folder over and delete the offending program/files. Reboot. Spend 5 minutes setting up the look and feel again, at most.
God - I'd love it if Windows had this ability to be fixed in 5 minutes. I also do part-time computer work and the insanity on people's machines and the time it takes is appalling.
A lot of this also happens to depend on how the OS itself works. Some don't require writes to the OS areas(Apple's old OSs from the 80s and 90s, for instance, as well as most of the 16 bit OSs some were in ROM as well and the applications ran on to of that, almost like in a gaming console. For many typical users, the eeePC approach or a "gaming console" approach is about their speed as well.
Now in Linux, you can get easily a read-only bootable version of the OS on a CD. This in fact is a common way to distribute it lately. Even having this at your disposal is a godsend over Windows. I can't tell you the number of times I've fixed clients' Windows boxes with Knoppix. Because it gives me the same control as the older ROM based OSs did. I think every serious PC tech has a Knoppix CD in their toolkit these days for exactly that reason.
What's really important here isn't how much they listen or plan or talk, but what they actually implement. CCP has one of the worst track records in the entire gaming industry for actually fixing or addressing player concerns.
To be a bit more serious what I mean by "from orbit" is run everything from some sort of media that the malware never had a chance of touching - preferably a completely different OS on read only media. Then the partitions go and the new ones get formatted before use etc etc.
I remember when a lot of laptops (and a couple of PCs) did exactly this via OS in ROMs. Nice clean boot up every time, with no viruses or other idiocy. Perhaps PCs should consider making a move back to this again?
With the advent of flash media, it's entirely possible as well that you could load the "OS" on a special card and it be non-writable(thinking physical tab/button similar to 3.5" floppies). This way you could manually lock down your root directory, say, in Linux, and nothing short of an act of God would allow a hacker to gain access to it or change it, even IF they gained the correct permissions somehow.
Also, what shocks me is the move in Windows 7 away from simpler methods. It was a great chance for Microsoft to streamline and get some real security into their OS. That is, in many older computers, you could literally yank the offending OS folder entirely and restore it with a clean copy and all of your data and programs would remain untouched. No registry or other idiocy like hidden files and processes that don't show up even when you run the built in applications to check on the machine's status. Many older OSs merely required a simple file replacement and reboot. Yes, they were largely simpler as well, but that's not an entirely bad thing.
According to the article, these things can kill a dog in a single bite. Even given that venomous spiders the size of an adult male's fist aren't really photogenic, (won't have some "humane solution" protesters) what can the town do about them? Poison all the possible breeding areas? Make a civil patrol with bug zappers? Should be interesting to see how it works out.
If this was Florida, this wouldn't be an issue. Giant spiders? Wouldn't be an issue, though the cleanup of the shotgun shells and beer cans might be...
Ok final hypothesis, let's say you actually do speak Korean. What are you going to say? It's not like you're calling from AT&T to offer him 5$ less monthly fee if he subscribes to the service for 24 additional months. **** Easy, actually. USB flash drive in your pocket. Plane ticket.
The actual number of critical/important documents on any hard drive is usually under a gig or two. Stupidly easy to move about and get to people who have bad intentions - if you have a mind to.
And simply "deleting" the files - almost any idiot can recover data from that - just get a copy of Easy Recovery Pro or Norton or similar.
Deleting or destroying the data properly is the only recourse, obviously. But saying that it's too difficult to engage in corporate espionage... It's not 1989 anymore, folks...
Why do we see so many (innovative and clone) products from China? Because they don't have the stupidities of US patent and copyright laws.
It's interesting to note that we did the exact same thing in the 1800s with any and all technology that we could manage to get our hands on during our industrial revolution phase.
Copyright law in the United States is a perverted abomination, mutated over decades by powerful corporations to benefit only themselves to the detriment of the people on whos backs they've built their gargantuan regimes.
**** I'd also like to add that when the U.S. was trying to grow and expand in its early years, we blatantly stole and copied everything that we could get our hands on. If you want to innovate and get ahead of the competition, a policy of ignoring copyrights and patents and so on is a very smart move.
China is kicking our butts right now because of it. There was an article yesterday about new stem cell advances. Buried in the article was a mention that they were recruiting scientists and biologists from the U.S. We're slipping behind precisely because we are mired down in too many rules.
I know if I was a new grad student and just wanted to work on the cutting edge of my field, I'd be awfully tempted to go to China, because I could probably do the same things in half the time.
And as I've been saying, it's extremely likely that people with those secondary problems seek attention. And we have a ton of options to treat pneumonia and asthma in the U.S. and Europe. So far, almost none of the 90+ cases in the U.S. are proving to be fatal. We are well taught to take drugs for any serious illness by now.
Too bad people in Africa, Asia, South America, and other places with a larger population that's more rural don't have the ability or access to deal with more than a handful of serious cases. Note - this also would apply to rural and hard to reach areas in the U.S., like Alaska. It appears that survivability is directly based upon how quickly you can get to medical help.
True, but my point wasn't so much about potential death rates as much as the ability of the more modernized nations to deal with those acute cases and save as many as possible. If you have one 1 out of 100 with serious complications, and then you can treat them in a hospital with say, only a 10-20% death rate, that's a huge factor compared to a poorer country where those who have such complications just die.
Wow. You have just far too much faith in the governments of the world, and medicine **** We've had one death so far in the U.S., and it was a baby. Two of the drugs that we do have available are effective, and I heard that there are roughly enough of those two to treat 30-50 million people in the U.S.
My comment wasn't about the people in the richer nations being so much better off so much as it being a commentary on the sad state of affairs where the poor get hit the hardest, like they do pretty much any time a disaster happens.
I don't have much faith in governments, but those populations without ANY modern medicine at all are going to suffer a large number of deaths. Be it from overactive immune systems or compromised ones - both extremes seem to be a problem in these sorts of situations.
In India, you have millions of people who are so poor that they burn garbage to keep warm. When droves of them start dying, secondary diseases and epidemics become a real worry as well. No, not everyone in India is like that, obviously, but with nearly a billion people all living in a pretty close proximity to each other, it's not likely that things will be good, either.
The sad thing is that it will affect the poor and the Third World most of all. Only the extremely ill, old, young, and those with compromised immune systems will have a problem in more developed countries where antiviral medicine is available.
$50 for some medicine is pretty much nothing in the U.S., for instance. If you're in India or China, well... life's going to get rough for a lot of people there.
Current GPUs have more processing power than our CPUs, so instead you will likely see a shift to multi-core GPUs.
That said, the current best that they can do with an 8 core computer is about 20-30fps. Not too bad, considering that this is purely software rendering. With a new generation of video cards that do even some of this in hardware, you could see it become a reality. Much like how HDR was considered impossible five years ago. Now every card does it and with a fairly minimal speed hit in most games.
I really don't. Read the contract. And net neutrality isn't the same thing as providing unlimited and unrestricted service. So your bittorrents are being squeezed, there are options open to you - or just deal with it at a slower speed. The option is that if you pay for their business level service, it's never limited. Consumer grade service is always limited and restricted in one way or another, because they aren't giving you a dedicated line.
Just some companies are worse than others. But many choices exist, thankfully.
As for the issue of speed, I just don't get why people whine. After all, I can download a TV show from Japan, for instance, in about an hour even at slow speeds. It's a *tad* better than getting my friend to snail-mail me a CD with the video file on it like I used to have to do in the early 90s.
I second this comment. And I'll also add that what matters in business isn't the software but the implementation. They aren't paying you for what code you program but what service you are providing. Or they should be. If your company is based purely upon code and nothing else, well, you're walking a dangerous line between profit and poverty.
You're missing the point, though. Gravity is an *acceleration*. These guys will be *decelerating*. You know, like zero gee is zero acceleration? Since they'll be slowing down, they won't feel a thing. It's genius!
**** I wonder if the impact will be over with quicker than their neurons can fire? I suspect that if it fails, yes, they won't feel a thing.
The specs for DX11, such as they are at this point, call for real-time ray tracing. This will require a massive increase in power that frankly this new card is only starting to get close to being capable of. There's tons of new room to grow here. Perhaps it would be the last DX10 card you'd ever need, but not even close for future use.
That said, there should also be a standardized ray tracing test in the video suites. IIRC, there is already a ray traced version of Quake 4 out.
Since when was joining a political party automatically equal to becoming a mind-slave to them?
Good for him. I'd personally love to see half of the entire RNC defect as Independents. Cripple them enough and something better will come out of it to replace it.
It's almost certainly not porn that they'll be removing - it's all of the various manuals and "self help" books for the would-be anarchist and survivalist. Anything that could be used to make or build anything that the government or the powers-that-are-in-charge deem to be inappropriate.
I don't think they honestly care at all about censoring porn at Google.
In keeping with the device described in TFA, let's keep with as much current technology as possible. At 70 bit per electron, an iron atom could carry 227 bytes plus a 4 bit checksum. As iron oxide, each molecule would have 34 electrons, giving 297 bytes plus checksum. It would take 3367003367 molecules of iron oxide to carry a terabyte. What's the density of iron oxide on a disk in terms of molecules per given area? **** 1.1x10^22 atoms per gram of iron. I get 3,276,000,000 Terrabytes in a milligram of iron stored this way. (3.276 Zettabytes if I'm counting the number of zeros on my calculator correctly.)
Note - this might blow a hole in the idea of quantum limits on computing if we move from atoms to electrons.
The real question is how robust the things are to scratches and other negative environmental effects. If it has to be enclosed in a case like the old Zip disks were, then it's effectively a fancy hard drive in a smaller and lighter format.(though slower by a huge margin I'd bet).
Unless it's as damage resistant as a normal CD or DVD, it's not going to make a blip in the marketplace.
I'd be happy if they just made it possible to filter out all of the shopping reviews and blogs.
When I'm looking for information, I don't want to know 500 people's uneducated opinion on something(actually millions but who searches more than 10 or so pages deep in Google?). I'm 99% of the time looking for the original source data.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I haven't bothered to even post on the forums in many months. There's just no point, really. CCP is a typical gaming company in that they are run by a bunch of people at the top who are looking for their next cool thing. Or if it weren't cold and snowing all the time/was in the U.S, their next golf game. We all know the type. Fixing bugs is something that they leave to the grunts down in the cave/server room. When it comes to their weekly Powerpoint discussions, they want glossy and flashy over grinding out problems.
Of course, you and others are right in that that is *exactly* how most online games are operated. But CCP also has made a point of spamming press releases all the time and trying to make themselves look concerned and like they're trying. It just leaves a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. Sony and EA, for instance, may be similar for most of their games, but we all know that they are asses looking for the money and we live with that. They at least are honest about what they are.
But when CCP yet again for the hundredth time asks for suggestions and then ignores them, then blathers in the media about how they "care"... 128 ideas maybe a dozen actually look like they might be worked on. Eventually.
Most of CCP's bad karma, though, comes from the iron-fisted way they police and nerf their own boards. And the issue of employees cheating, well, they also break the #1 rule that Blizzard(WoW) enforces(for good reason, IMO) - they actually encourage employees to play in the game as characters. There's a reason that so many stories about people knowing when things were happening or had mysterious pre-release/patch knowledge that gave them an advantage. It's only human nature to cheat and break the rules.
Making the OS non-writable is the most stupid idea I've heard all day. Most operating systems ship with one or more security holes that aren't found until after the release, and making it non-writable also means making it non-fixable.
The EeePC approach only really protects you from accidental harm. Malware sill simply install itself on the top partition. You delete the OS, reinstall, and then mount the user partition on top again and suddenly the malware is back.
IIRC, Apple had a machine once that solved this as well - it had a stripped down second version of the OS in ROM and it could be used to boot into a 100% true "safe mode". This is what I'm talking about. It wouldn't keep you from getting re-infected if you booted normally, but it would essentially give you real control over the machine and make it a lot easier to clean up things. And it booted up in under 10 seconds.
"My machine is infected..."(reboot into ROM mode) - okay, let's just yank the entire root directory and replace with a backup from a week or two ago when it wasn't infected...
This actually described using that machine. Yank a fresh copy of the System folder over and delete the offending program/files. Reboot. Spend 5 minutes setting up the look and feel again, at most.
God - I'd love it if Windows had this ability to be fixed in 5 minutes. I also do part-time computer work and the insanity on people's machines and the time it takes is appalling.
A lot of this also happens to depend on how the OS itself works. Some don't require writes to the OS areas(Apple's old OSs from the 80s and 90s, for instance, as well as most of the 16 bit OSs some were in ROM as well and the applications ran on to of that, almost like in a gaming console. For many typical users, the eeePC approach or a "gaming console" approach is about their speed as well.
Now in Linux, you can get easily a read-only bootable version of the OS on a CD. This in fact is a common way to distribute it lately. Even having this at your disposal is a godsend over Windows. I can't tell you the number of times I've fixed clients' Windows boxes with Knoppix. Because it gives me the same control as the older ROM based OSs did. I think every serious PC tech has a Knoppix CD in their toolkit these days for exactly that reason.
What's really important here isn't how much they listen or plan or talk, but what they actually implement. CCP has one of the worst track records in the entire gaming industry for actually fixing or addressing player concerns.
To be a bit more serious what I mean by "from orbit" is run everything from some sort of media that the malware never had a chance of touching - preferably a completely different OS on read only media. Then the partitions go and the new ones get formatted before use etc etc.
I remember when a lot of laptops (and a couple of PCs) did exactly this via OS in ROMs. Nice clean boot up every time, with no viruses or other idiocy. Perhaps PCs should consider making a move back to this again?
With the advent of flash media, it's entirely possible as well that you could load the "OS" on a special card and it be non-writable(thinking physical tab/button similar to 3.5" floppies). This way you could manually lock down your root directory, say, in Linux, and nothing short of an act of God would allow a hacker to gain access to it or change it, even IF they gained the correct permissions somehow.
Also, what shocks me is the move in Windows 7 away from simpler methods. It was a great chance for Microsoft to streamline and get some real security into their OS. That is, in many older computers, you could literally yank the offending OS folder entirely and restore it with a clean copy and all of your data and programs would remain untouched. No registry or other idiocy like hidden files and processes that don't show up even when you run the built in applications to check on the machine's status. Many older OSs merely required a simple file replacement and reboot. Yes, they were largely simpler as well, but that's not an entirely bad thing.
(imagines a shop vac like this):
http://www.madvac.com/images/photoGallery/61.1_LR.jpg
I think 5-6 inches would probably clog anything smaller...
Plus, if you read the original article, they killed the thing with an entire CAN of bug spray. Gotta love how tough bugs are in Australia...
According to the article, these things can kill a dog in a single bite. Even given that venomous spiders the size of an adult male's fist aren't really photogenic, (won't have some "humane solution" protesters) what can the town do about them? Poison all the possible breeding areas? Make a civil patrol with bug zappers? Should be interesting to see how it works out.
If this was Florida, this wouldn't be an issue. Giant spiders? Wouldn't be an issue, though the cleanup of the shotgun shells and beer cans might be...
Ok final hypothesis, let's say you actually do speak Korean. What are you going to say? It's not like you're calling from AT&T to offer him 5$ less monthly fee if he subscribes to the service for 24 additional months.
****
Easy, actually. USB flash drive in your pocket. Plane ticket.
The actual number of critical/important documents on any hard drive is usually under a gig or two. Stupidly easy to move about and get to people who have bad intentions - if you have a mind to.
And simply "deleting" the files - almost any idiot can recover data from that - just get a copy of Easy Recovery Pro or Norton or similar.
Deleting or destroying the data properly is the only recourse, obviously. But saying that it's too difficult to engage in corporate espionage... It's not 1989 anymore, folks...
Why do we see so many (innovative and clone) products from China? Because they don't have the stupidities of US patent and copyright laws.
It's interesting to note that we did the exact same thing in the 1800s with any and all technology that we could manage to get our hands on during our industrial revolution phase.
Copyright law in the United States is a perverted abomination, mutated over decades by powerful corporations to benefit only themselves to the detriment of the people on whos backs they've built their gargantuan regimes.
****
I'd also like to add that when the U.S. was trying to grow and expand in its early years, we blatantly stole and copied everything that we could get our hands on. If you want to innovate and get ahead of the competition, a policy of ignoring copyrights and patents and so on is a very smart move.
China is kicking our butts right now because of it. There was an article yesterday about new stem cell advances. Buried in the article was a mention that they were recruiting scientists and biologists from the U.S. We're slipping behind precisely because we are mired down in too many rules.
I know if I was a new grad student and just wanted to work on the cutting edge of my field, I'd be awfully tempted to go to China, because I could probably do the same things in half the time.
And as I've been saying, it's extremely likely that people with those secondary problems seek attention. And we have a ton of options to treat pneumonia and asthma in the U.S. and Europe. So far, almost none of the 90+ cases in the U.S. are proving to be fatal. We are well taught to take drugs for any serious illness by now.
Too bad people in Africa, Asia, South America, and other places with a larger population that's more rural don't have the ability or access to deal with more than a handful of serious cases. Note - this also would apply to rural and hard to reach areas in the U.S., like Alaska. It appears that survivability is directly based upon how quickly you can get to medical help.
True, but my point wasn't so much about potential death rates as much as the ability of the more modernized nations to deal with those acute cases and save as many as possible. If you have one 1 out of 100 with serious complications, and then you can treat them in a hospital with say, only a 10-20% death rate, that's a huge factor compared to a poorer country where those who have such complications just die.
Wow. You have just far too much faith in the governments of the world, and medicine
****
We've had one death so far in the U.S., and it was a baby. Two of the drugs that we do have available are effective, and I heard that there are roughly enough of those two to treat 30-50 million people in the U.S.
My comment wasn't about the people in the richer nations being so much better off so much as it being a commentary on the sad state of affairs where the poor get hit the hardest, like they do pretty much any time a disaster happens.
I don't have much faith in governments, but those populations without ANY modern medicine at all are going to suffer a large number of deaths. Be it from overactive immune systems or compromised ones - both extremes seem to be a problem in these sorts of situations.
In India, you have millions of people who are so poor that they burn garbage to keep warm. When droves of them start dying, secondary diseases and epidemics become a real worry as well. No, not everyone in India is like that, obviously, but with nearly a billion people all living in a pretty close proximity to each other, it's not likely that things will be good, either.
The sad thing is that it will affect the poor and the Third World most of all. Only the extremely ill, old, young, and those with compromised immune systems will have a problem in more developed countries where antiviral medicine is available.
$50 for some medicine is pretty much nothing in the U.S., for instance. If you're in India or China, well... life's going to get rough for a lot of people there.
Current GPUs have more processing power than our CPUs, so instead you will likely see a shift to multi-core GPUs.
That said, the current best that they can do with an 8 core computer is about 20-30fps. Not too bad, considering that this is purely software rendering. With a new generation of video cards that do even some of this in hardware, you could see it become a reality. Much like how HDR was considered impossible five years ago. Now every card does it and with a fairly minimal speed hit in most games.
I really don't. Read the contract. And net neutrality isn't the same thing as providing unlimited and unrestricted service. So your bittorrents are being squeezed, there are options open to you - or just deal with it at a slower speed. The option is that if you pay for their business level service, it's never limited. Consumer grade service is always limited and restricted in one way or another, because they aren't giving you a dedicated line.
Just some companies are worse than others. But many choices exist, thankfully.
As for the issue of speed, I just don't get why people whine. After all, I can download a TV show from Japan, for instance, in about an hour even at slow speeds. It's a *tad* better than getting my friend to snail-mail me a CD with the video file on it like I used to have to do in the early 90s.
I second this comment. And I'll also add that what matters in business isn't the software but the implementation. They aren't paying you for what code you program but what service you are providing. Or they should be. If your company is based purely upon code and nothing else, well, you're walking a dangerous line between profit and poverty.
You're missing the point, though. Gravity is an *acceleration*. These guys will be *decelerating*. You know, like zero gee is zero acceleration? Since they'll be slowing down, they won't feel a thing. It's genius!
****
I wonder if the impact will be over with quicker than their neurons can fire? I suspect that if it fails, yes, they won't feel a thing.
The specs for DX11, such as they are at this point, call for real-time ray tracing. This will require a massive increase in power that frankly this new card is only starting to get close to being capable of. There's tons of new room to grow here. Perhaps it would be the last DX10 card you'd ever need, but not even close for future use.
That said, there should also be a standardized ray tracing test in the video suites. IIRC, there is already a ray traced version of Quake 4 out.
http://www.idfun.de/temp/q4rt/
Since when was joining a political party automatically equal to becoming a mind-slave to them?
Good for him. I'd personally love to see half of the entire RNC defect as Independents. Cripple them enough and something better will come out of it to replace it.
It's almost certainly not porn that they'll be removing - it's all of the various manuals and "self help" books for the would-be anarchist and survivalist. Anything that could be used to make or build anything that the government or the powers-that-are-in-charge deem to be inappropriate.
I don't think they honestly care at all about censoring porn at Google.
Or imagine shopping and they have these hooked up to IR sensors.
"Check out this deal on Bug Light! (starts playing radio commercial)"
Yes, it is horrible. Moreso than most people can imagine.
In keeping with the device described in TFA, let's keep with as much current technology as possible. At 70 bit per electron, an iron atom could carry 227 bytes plus a 4 bit checksum. As iron oxide, each molecule would have 34 electrons, giving 297 bytes plus checksum. It would take 3367003367 molecules of iron oxide to carry a terabyte. What's the density of iron oxide on a disk in terms of molecules per given area?
****
1.1x10^22 atoms per gram of iron. I get 3,276,000,000 Terrabytes in a milligram of iron stored this way. (3.276 Zettabytes if I'm counting the number of zeros on my calculator correctly.)
Note - this might blow a hole in the idea of quantum limits on computing if we move from atoms to electrons.
The real question is how robust the things are to scratches and other negative environmental effects. If it has to be enclosed in a case like the old Zip disks were, then it's effectively a fancy hard drive in a smaller and lighter format.(though slower by a huge margin I'd bet).
Unless it's as damage resistant as a normal CD or DVD, it's not going to make a blip in the marketplace.
I'd be happy if they just made it possible to filter out all of the shopping reviews and blogs.
When I'm looking for information, I don't want to know 500 people's uneducated opinion on something(actually millions but who searches more than 10 or so pages deep in Google?). I'm 99% of the time looking for the original source data.
This probably will eventually happen.
"Sorry, until you clean up and police your own users' bad behavior, we cannot allow them access to (country/region)"
Make the "Great Firewall" a reality and see how fast they comply.