I'd like to step aside from all the hardware and software questions people are going to throw at you and focus on a more tangible topic: footware. When someone like yourselves accept a job stomping on baby ducks all day, do you invest in new boots, or do you just come to work in whatever old shoes you have in your closet?
Tell the person asking to search your bag at the supermarket that you refuse to allow this invasion. Store employees have no right to search your belongings. At best they can call the police and accuse you of shoplifting. You don't have to even stay at the store waiting for the police to arrive. The security guards have no right to hold you, either. Security guards can only act intimidatingly and yell at you. If they order you to come to some back office, just say "no" and leave. If they have an off-duty cop rented to guard the store, though, all bets are off.
If you don't charge, you don't have any responsibility for problems. No support required. If you charge, you've got to have staff able to answer questions about DNS, firewall, blah, blah, blah.
As for the liability issue, it's a red herring. Service Providers aren't liable for the behavior of their users. If the cafe offers a phone for free local calls and the person calls in a bomb threat to the local city hall, the cafe is not responsible. Same with people downloading pirated content. This doesn't hold true if people are DDOSing a host due to a trojan-conquered zombie laptop, though. The coffee shop's upstream provider might chop their service.
Have the advertisers pay for some UT2k4 servers, then set the respawn to 15 seconds, and play adverts after you're gibbed!
This is how I would like to see advertizers get involved in the gaming industry. If they bring value to the table, consumers will appreciate their involvement. Sadly, these greedheads aren't looking to support gamers by hosting servers and providing bandwidth. They want to exploit gamers as a captive audience for their solicitations. No different from commercials in movie theaters. Advertizers are instead creating a hostile relationship with consumers.
Support gaming through sponsorship = goodwill generated
Exploit captive audience = irritating
While on the topic of Silent PSU's, I'd like to throw a huge endorsement to Antec's Neo Power PSU. I have had about 4 PSUs over the years, but this was the first one I dropped more than $90 on. And now I understand why it's worth it.
1. Absolutely quiet. 2. Controls case fans automatically and makes them quiet also!! 3. Modular cables so you only have what you need in your case. 4. Not fanless, but absolutely quiet (see #1).
Here's a review on some british mod site that I'm not affiliated with in any way. I've seen this at Fry's for about $80 with some kind of rebate. Here's Antecs specs page for the Neo Power.
And so is Gamestop. Consider the movie Team America: World Police sold by Barnes and Noble (owner of GameStop) on DVD. The theatrical version of the film contained a tame sex scene featuring puppets. In the DVD version, without any warning, this sex scene is expanded with clips of one puppet defecating on the face of another. If a parent had viewed this film at the theater and thought it was appropriate for a 16 year old, then bought the DVD from GameStop's parent company, isn't that parent being 'deceived'?
With the internet's penetration into most homes across the United States, it's become ridiculous for the FCC or 'Family Values' promoters to get upset over Howard Stern or Janet Jackson. Kids are readily able to access much more controversial content over the internet. You can pretty much bet that the kids who unlock the Hot Coffee feature in GTA have seen non-animated versions of the same behavior elsewhere.
rbanzai is correct. The BF:1942 and BF2 engines are completely flawed when it comes to collision checking artillery. There's no concept of splash damage, either. Tank shells should obliterate a foot soldier if they land anywhere within a 30-ft radius. In none of the BF games is this the case, even with stationary tanks and soldiers.
In so many ways, the original Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam came across as an unfinished, unpolished beta. The engine in Battlefield 2 seems very optimized and scrutinized, but the interface still comes across as inelegant. The GP here is voicing a complaint about one of many things that illustrate this rough interface. And it makes no sense that if you've assigned the 'ctrl' key to something in the 'AIR' controls this conflicts with your 'INFANTRY' controls.
One important topic missing from this review is that it doesn't reference the Battlefield 1942: Desert Combat mod which was created by the team that was then bought by EA to create this game. Battlefield2 is more an evolution of that mod than of the original 1942 release.
If you make a mistake in your little game, they will screw you over royally.
Please provide some examples of Americans being physically attacked in America by 419 scammers. It's pretty expensive for Nigerian con men to punish Americans for yanking their chain over the internet. It's much cheaper for them to simply move on to the next mark. What do they have to gain? Revenge, yes. But from a business perspective, they've simply silenced a single crank.
I'm afraid you're not looking at this from an organizational perspective. The folks sending the emails and responding to the cranks are real cheap telemarketers. Labor in Nigeria is super cheap. The people you see in those photos on 419eater aren't nearly as educated as their bosses or the foreigners who persuaded them to take silly photos of themselves. They're being double-team screwed by their bosses and the foreigners. Their bosses aren't going to lift a finger to put the hurt on an American overseas for convincing one of their foot soldiers to bathe in a pool of milk with a goat.
As for that guy from Poland who disappeared, it sounds like he may have confronted the scammers on their own turf. Of course he's going to disappear.
Actually, the individuals sending out the messages and responding to baiters are employees of organized crime bosses. They don't own their own computers, nor do they belong to the Nigerian elite. At best they make a commission on the funds they can swindle for their bosses. They're basically telemarketers.
The BBC article this slashdot story is about is unique in that the Nigerian responsible for the swindle appears to be the one who received the $242 million. But it happened in the nineties, when the industry was so young...
the oligopy in place knows very well that serving the low-end market would be suicide for the high-end.
That isn't really true these days. For starters, I don't know that Fujitsu has its hands in LCD production. There is so much competition in the PC / Laptop market, Fujitsu will find many companies eager to deploy this technology at as cheap a price as is possible with Fujitsu's licensing.
The oligopy you're referring to used to be real. Look at DVD players for example. When the devices were first released, only a few established companies were members of the DVD Consortium and anybody else looking to build DVD players has to buy a DVD decryption license from the consortium. The big players planned slow, incremental feature releases so the lifecycle would draw out for several years and the prices would be high for a long time.
Then APEX came along and said, "Hey, we'll sell these players for $100 and cram ALL the features into them." Bingo! Competition.
If Netflix and TiVO work this out correctly, this is going to jam a sharp stick in the eye of pay-per-view AND Blockbuster. It may not seem convenient to you at a quick glance, but I'm guessing you haven't re-organized your TV usage through a Tivo or Netflix subscription. I'm not criticizing you, but pointing out that this makes sense to people who have.
Sure, downloading a movie is annoying to satisfy an immediate whim craving for a film. That's where the local video store cannot be beat. The TiVO-Netflix partnership trounces the local video store in new releases, however. Blockbuster may carry 100 copies of Batman when it's eventually released on DVD and make a big promise about availability. But Blockbuster doesn't do this for the smaller movies that you and every other film nerd in your neighborhood want to see. It'll stock two copies that'll be perpetually checked out.
Online Netflix means that you'll be able to create wish lists prior to the release of movies on DVD so that you'll be assured of getting them the day of their release. When you turn on your TiVO, you'll be greeted with a list of movies that have already downloaded, so it's not some deal where you have to actively select an online movie and wait for it to be transmitted. Besides, with Fiber-to-the-home looming in the future as well as IP-over-electric lines, our bandwidth future will speed up the download process for that scenario.
If you look closely at the garbage movie, Twister, there are a couple scenes where the meteorologists are out in the field with their stupid school bus looking at satellite data on a laptop. I'm guessing because they got a deal on CGI work, Silicon Graphics wanted every computer in the movie to be one of theirs. So on this laptop, they had a piece of masking tape on the bottom of the screen with the letters handwritten- 'SGI'.
More ridiculous than that, though, was when the hailstorm came. This ragtag group of meteorologists, working on a shoestring budget, grabbed their stuff and ran for cover. Philip Seymour Hoffman's character uses the 'SGI laptop' as a shield from the hail holding it over his head as he ran towards the school bus.
there are more financial facets
on
P2P and TV
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Jedidiah,
Consider these other aspects of a TV Pilot. In the real world where we all live, everyone working on a TV pilot is paid a minimum fee with contingency clauses in their contracts that mean these actors, set designers, costumers, directors, makeup artists, etc. will get a cut of the action if a network chooses to buy the show. So it's a big gamble for these people. For an actor, I think the day rate is like $800. And these acting gigs come few and far between. So a lot is riding on this for a lot of people.
If a show fails to get picked to run on a TV network, it's shelved. But there's an investment in there both from the production company and all the above-mentioned workers. The production company will continue to shop it around. They may even re-edit it.
If the pilot gets leaked, prospective buyers are going to look at it not always that there's a positive buzz, but that interest in this comodity has disappated.. it's been diluted. A prospective buyer is thinking that X number of people have already seen it (on the internet) and are unlikely to sit through commercials to watch it again when they've got a commercial-free version already available. Those eyeballs watching the pilot are critical to the prospective buyer because they've got to use those Nielsen stats from the airing of the pilot to then lasso advertisers.
So by leaking this shelved pilot, it decreases the chances that those crew members will get paid properly for their work.
Because it's obvious, not interesting. Interesting is when you provide some insight no one else had considered. Interesting is when you have some background in a topic and inject a piece of information not readily available to the rest of the audience. Interesting is not grabbing the low-hanging fruit and offering it to the people standing next to you within arms reach of said fruit.
Ideally I would hope that what you're saying would come to pass. What I fear is that by selling dual-boot Mac OS X and Wintel boxes, software vendors will feel even less of an incentive to port applications (games) to Mac OS X. Currently, companies port stuff to Mac OS X to address some 9% of the desktop market. If half of that 9% had the capability to dual-boot into Windows to run important applications, do people think the makers of those important applications would ever port them to Mac OS X to address 4.5% of the desktop market? And companies like Adobe and Quark would discontinue their Mac OS X releases in favor of saving development costs.
Just a concern I have. This decision will truly be a leap of faith for Apple-- Should their computers dual-boot?
I do remember BeOS R5 PE. I installed it on my PowerComputing 150. The problem with their business model wasn't that they gave away a version for free. I think the problem was that there weren't a lot of compelling applications available for BeOS. It was way cool. It did real multitasking-- that was the big 'gee-whiz' for me.
This situation with Apple is different. They've already achieved a critical mass of applications for MacOS X. If people were to install a free version, they'd recognize the credibility of the OS in day-to-day use. BeOS just didn't get over that hurdle.
It was a network intrusion like these worms create that resulted in Paris Hilton's private Sidekick data to be comprimised. That's how the net got a hold of her private nude photos.
You're totally right. An elegant solution would be expensive to do. How about a more crude implementation:
1. Buy 6 cheap netgear APs at Fry's for $10 each.
2. Configure each one with a different, but simple WEP. Use masking tape to label each one with its WEP.
3. Connect each one to one of those cheap electric outlet timer gizmos so it runs for an hour then shuts off. Sync the timers so one there is always at least one running.
4. Put all this junk behind the counter.
5. Magic marker a sign that says, "Ask cachier to write the wi-fi password on your receipt." Attach to front of counter.
The barrista can easily look at the APs to see which is turned on and give out the password taped on it. I agree that one hour is a little short. With this timer deal, you can even set it for 1.5 hours. Sure, over time, a crafty customer is going to collect all the passwords. You could change them each week and relabel the masking tape on the APs.
I read that story from top to bottom. I think it's fake. If not fake, highly embellished. It was well-written, but the quote from the judge where she says, "We'll get you later on down the road" comes across as too over-the-top.
So, I checked google for 'Joshua Krawiek' and couldn't find an actual newspaper website where this story had been printed. Every site containing references to this story were non-news sites. Even the 'Idaho Observer' is a political activist website. Sounds like an urban legend to me.
I live in Austin, and I used to be very enthusiastic about the Alamo Drafthouse formula. Then I visited Portland, Oregon and found that basically every movie theater there is also a bar and restaurant. I think restaurants in other cities are going to pick up on this formula eventually. The thing that will continue to distinguish the orignal alamo theaters is their programming. So far as yet, the Alamo franchises don't have unique programming, so there's not a whole lot of benefit they get from buying a franchise vs. just setting it up themselves. It's the new generation of 'dinner theater'.
I'd be surprised if the Sundance Theaters didn't sell food and booze when they get built.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to step aside from all the hardware and software questions people are going to throw at you and focus on a more tangible topic: footware. When someone like yourselves accept a job stomping on baby ducks all day, do you invest in new boots, or do you just come to work in whatever old shoes you have in your closet?
Appreciatively,
Seth
bag searches at supermarkets
Tell the person asking to search your bag at the supermarket that you refuse to allow this invasion. Store employees have no right to search your belongings. At best they can call the police and accuse you of shoplifting. You don't have to even stay at the store waiting for the police to arrive. The security guards have no right to hold you, either. Security guards can only act intimidatingly and yell at you. If they order you to come to some back office, just say "no" and leave. If they have an off-duty cop rented to guard the store, though, all bets are off.
Seth
If you don't charge, you don't have any responsibility for problems. No support required. If you charge, you've got to have staff able to answer questions about DNS, firewall, blah, blah, blah.
As for the liability issue, it's a red herring. Service Providers aren't liable for the behavior of their users. If the cafe offers a phone for free local calls and the person calls in a bomb threat to the local city hall, the cafe is not responsible. Same with people downloading pirated content. This doesn't hold true if people are DDOSing a host due to a trojan-conquered zombie laptop, though. The coffee shop's upstream provider might chop their service.
Seth
Have the advertisers pay for some UT2k4 servers, then set the respawn to 15 seconds, and play adverts after you're gibbed!
This is how I would like to see advertizers get involved in the gaming industry. If they bring value to the table, consumers will appreciate their involvement. Sadly, these greedheads aren't looking to support gamers by hosting servers and providing bandwidth. They want to exploit gamers as a captive audience for their solicitations. No different from commercials in movie theaters. Advertizers are instead creating a hostile relationship with consumers.
Support gaming through sponsorship = goodwill generated
Exploit captive audience = irritating
Stop invasive commercials in movie theaters.
Seth
You're right. Nevermind.
Seth
While on the topic of Silent PSU's, I'd like to throw a huge endorsement to Antec's Neo Power PSU. I have had about 4 PSUs over the years, but this was the first one I dropped more than $90 on. And now I understand why it's worth it. Here's a review on some british mod site that I'm not affiliated with in any way. I've seen this at Fry's for about $80 with some kind of rebate. Here's Antecs specs page for the Neo Power.
Seth
And so is Gamestop. Consider the movie Team America: World Police sold by Barnes and Noble (owner of GameStop) on DVD. The theatrical version of the film contained a tame sex scene featuring puppets. In the DVD version, without any warning, this sex scene is expanded with clips of one puppet defecating on the face of another. If a parent had viewed this film at the theater and thought it was appropriate for a 16 year old, then bought the DVD from GameStop's parent company, isn't that parent being 'deceived'?
With the internet's penetration into most homes across the United States, it's become ridiculous for the FCC or 'Family Values' promoters to get upset over Howard Stern or Janet Jackson. Kids are readily able to access much more controversial content over the internet. You can pretty much bet that the kids who unlock the Hot Coffee feature in GTA have seen non-animated versions of the same behavior elsewhere.
Seth
rbanzai is correct. The BF:1942 and BF2 engines are completely flawed when it comes to collision checking artillery. There's no concept of splash damage, either. Tank shells should obliterate a foot soldier if they land anywhere within a 30-ft radius. In none of the BF games is this the case, even with stationary tanks and soldiers.
Seth
In so many ways, the original Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam came across as an unfinished, unpolished beta. The engine in Battlefield 2 seems very optimized and scrutinized, but the interface still comes across as inelegant. The GP here is voicing a complaint about one of many things that illustrate this rough interface. And it makes no sense that if you've assigned the 'ctrl' key to something in the 'AIR' controls this conflicts with your 'INFANTRY' controls.
One important topic missing from this review is that it doesn't reference the Battlefield 1942: Desert Combat mod which was created by the team that was then bought by EA to create this game. Battlefield2 is more an evolution of that mod than of the original 1942 release.
Seth
Encoding video is several magnitudes more processor-intensive than decoding. To do video encoding, more chips would need to be added and more battery.
Seth
If you make a mistake in your little game, they will screw you over royally
Please provide some examples of Americans being physically attacked in America by 419 scammers. It's pretty expensive for Nigerian con men to punish Americans for yanking their chain over the internet. It's much cheaper for them to simply move on to the next mark. What do they have to gain? Revenge, yes. But from a business perspective, they've simply silenced a single crank.
I'm afraid you're not looking at this from an organizational perspective. The folks sending the emails and responding to the cranks are real cheap telemarketers. Labor in Nigeria is super cheap. The people you see in those photos on 419eater aren't nearly as educated as their bosses or the foreigners who persuaded them to take silly photos of themselves. They're being double-team screwed by their bosses and the foreigners. Their bosses aren't going to lift a finger to put the hurt on an American overseas for convincing one of their foot soldiers to bathe in a pool of milk with a goat.
As for that guy from Poland who disappeared, it sounds like he may have confronted the scammers on their own turf. Of course he's going to disappear.
Seth
They are the Nigerian elite, so to speak.
Actually, the individuals sending out the messages and responding to baiters are employees of organized crime bosses. They don't own their own computers, nor do they belong to the Nigerian elite. At best they make a commission on the funds they can swindle for their bosses. They're basically telemarketers.
The BBC article this slashdot story is about is unique in that the Nigerian responsible for the swindle appears to be the one who received the $242 million. But it happened in the nineties, when the industry was so young...
Seth
the oligopy in place knows very well that serving the low-end market would be suicide for the high-end.
That isn't really true these days. For starters, I don't know that Fujitsu has its hands in LCD production. There is so much competition in the PC / Laptop market, Fujitsu will find many companies eager to deploy this technology at as cheap a price as is possible with Fujitsu's licensing.
The oligopy you're referring to used to be real. Look at DVD players for example. When the devices were first released, only a few established companies were members of the DVD Consortium and anybody else looking to build DVD players has to buy a DVD decryption license from the consortium. The big players planned slow, incremental feature releases so the lifecycle would draw out for several years and the prices would be high for a long time.
Then APEX came along and said, "Hey, we'll sell these players for $100 and cram ALL the features into them." Bingo! Competition.
Seth
If Netflix and TiVO work this out correctly, this is going to jam a sharp stick in the eye of pay-per-view AND Blockbuster. It may not seem convenient to you at a quick glance, but I'm guessing you haven't re-organized your TV usage through a Tivo or Netflix subscription. I'm not criticizing you, but pointing out that this makes sense to people who have.
Sure, downloading a movie is annoying to satisfy an immediate whim craving for a film. That's where the local video store cannot be beat. The TiVO-Netflix partnership trounces the local video store in new releases, however. Blockbuster may carry 100 copies of Batman when it's eventually released on DVD and make a big promise about availability. But Blockbuster doesn't do this for the smaller movies that you and every other film nerd in your neighborhood want to see. It'll stock two copies that'll be perpetually checked out.
Online Netflix means that you'll be able to create wish lists prior to the release of movies on DVD so that you'll be assured of getting them the day of their release. When you turn on your TiVO, you'll be greeted with a list of movies that have already downloaded, so it's not some deal where you have to actively select an online movie and wait for it to be transmitted. Besides, with Fiber-to-the-home looming in the future as well as IP-over-electric lines, our bandwidth future will speed up the download process for that scenario.
Seth
If you look closely at the garbage movie, Twister, there are a couple scenes where the meteorologists are out in the field with their stupid school bus looking at satellite data on a laptop. I'm guessing because they got a deal on CGI work, Silicon Graphics wanted every computer in the movie to be one of theirs. So on this laptop, they had a piece of masking tape on the bottom of the screen with the letters handwritten- 'SGI'.
More ridiculous than that, though, was when the hailstorm came. This ragtag group of meteorologists, working on a shoestring budget, grabbed their stuff and ran for cover. Philip Seymour Hoffman's character uses the 'SGI laptop' as a shield from the hail holding it over his head as he ran towards the school bus.
Jedidiah,
Consider these other aspects of a TV Pilot. In the real world where we all live, everyone working on a TV pilot is paid a minimum fee with contingency clauses in their contracts that mean these actors, set designers, costumers, directors, makeup artists, etc. will get a cut of the action if a network chooses to buy the show. So it's a big gamble for these people. For an actor, I think the day rate is like $800. And these acting gigs come few and far between. So a lot is riding on this for a lot of people.
If a show fails to get picked to run on a TV network, it's shelved. But there's an investment in there both from the production company and all the above-mentioned workers. The production company will continue to shop it around. They may even re-edit it.
If the pilot gets leaked, prospective buyers are going to look at it not always that there's a positive buzz, but that interest in this comodity has disappated.. it's been diluted. A prospective buyer is thinking that X number of people have already seen it (on the internet) and are unlikely to sit through commercials to watch it again when they've got a commercial-free version already available. Those eyeballs watching the pilot are critical to the prospective buyer because they've got to use those Nielsen stats from the airing of the pilot to then lasso advertisers.
So by leaking this shelved pilot, it decreases the chances that those crew members will get paid properly for their work.
Because it's obvious, not interesting. Interesting is when you provide some insight no one else had considered. Interesting is when you have some background in a topic and inject a piece of information not readily available to the rest of the audience. Interesting is not grabbing the low-hanging fruit and offering it to the people standing next to you within arms reach of said fruit.
The parent post here got modded +5 interesting for asking obvious questions that are answered in the google video faq.
Good job, mods.
Ideally I would hope that what you're saying would come to pass. What I fear is that by selling dual-boot Mac OS X and Wintel boxes, software vendors will feel even less of an incentive to port applications (games) to Mac OS X. Currently, companies port stuff to Mac OS X to address some 9% of the desktop market. If half of that 9% had the capability to dual-boot into Windows to run important applications, do people think the makers of those important applications would ever port them to Mac OS X to address 4.5% of the desktop market? And companies like Adobe and Quark would discontinue their Mac OS X releases in favor of saving development costs.
Just a concern I have. This decision will truly be a leap of faith for Apple-- Should their computers dual-boot?
Seth
Is your site 100% Flash? Unless you're trolling, post a link here to your site and I'll tell you why it's not getting indexed.
Seth
I do remember BeOS R5 PE. I installed it on my PowerComputing 150. The problem with their business model wasn't that they gave away a version for free. I think the problem was that there weren't a lot of compelling applications available for BeOS. It was way cool. It did real multitasking-- that was the big 'gee-whiz' for me.
This situation with Apple is different. They've already achieved a critical mass of applications for MacOS X. If people were to install a free version, they'd recognize the credibility of the OS in day-to-day use. BeOS just didn't get over that hurdle.
Seth
It was a network intrusion like these worms create that resulted in Paris Hilton's private Sidekick data to be comprimised. That's how the net got a hold of her private nude photos.
You're totally right. An elegant solution would be expensive to do. How about a more crude implementation: 1. Buy 6 cheap netgear APs at Fry's for $10 each. 2. Configure each one with a different, but simple WEP. Use masking tape to label each one with its WEP.
3. Connect each one to one of those cheap electric outlet timer gizmos so it runs for an hour then shuts off. Sync the timers so one there is always at least one running.
4. Put all this junk behind the counter.
5. Magic marker a sign that says, "Ask cachier to write the wi-fi password on your receipt." Attach to front of counter.
The barrista can easily look at the APs to see which is turned on and give out the password taped on it. I agree that one hour is a little short. With this timer deal, you can even set it for 1.5 hours. Sure, over time, a crafty customer is going to collect all the passwords. You could change them each week and relabel the masking tape on the APs.
Seth
I read that story from top to bottom. I think it's fake. If not fake, highly embellished. It was well-written, but the quote from the judge where she says, "We'll get you later on down the road" comes across as too over-the-top.
So, I checked google for 'Joshua Krawiek' and couldn't find an actual newspaper website where this story had been printed. Every site containing references to this story were non-news sites. Even the 'Idaho Observer' is a political activist website. Sounds like an urban legend to me.
Seth
I live in Austin, and I used to be very enthusiastic about the Alamo Drafthouse formula. Then I visited Portland, Oregon and found that basically every movie theater there is also a bar and restaurant. I think restaurants in other cities are going to pick up on this formula eventually. The thing that will continue to distinguish the orignal alamo theaters is their programming. So far as yet, the Alamo franchises don't have unique programming, so there's not a whole lot of benefit they get from buying a franchise vs. just setting it up themselves. It's the new generation of 'dinner theater'. I'd be surprised if the Sundance Theaters didn't sell food and booze when they get built.