That would be funny.. of course such a thing is impossible since you can't force a virtual character to do anything (and they're just pixels anyway). There would be lots of press of course and Jack Thomson would call for it to be banned..
It's an MMORPG with no mobs, basically. A particularly slow/crappy one too.. never saw the attraction myself.
There's not even any collision detection, so you can just fly everywhere.. there's nothing to achieve and nothing to do except maybe look at some geeks interpretation of a virtual starship enterprise.
If it happens widely AT&T will either drop it entirely or start selling it at its full price. At the moment they make a loss every time someone does this. If it's half a dozen slashdotters wanting to turn their new phone into an overpriced 4GB ipod then that's not going to affect much. If a full hack comes out and thousands of people do it... then expect AT&T to react.
In the UK having not having car insurance is illegal (OTOH if they catch you they normally just take the car off you and crush it). It's fairly analogous - companies having a legal right to your money mandated by the government. Competition doesn't help much.. there are lots of insurance companies but they all charge the same fees, so unless someone breaks ranks and starts offering really cheap insurance then the price will stay the same, more or less.
Can't imagine mandatory health insurance.. I had that through my employer once and turned it down as it wasn't worth the paper it was written on. It did't cover preexisting conditions, chronic conditions, accidents, anything to do with sport or 'dangerous' hobbies, basically pretty much anything you'd possibly need a hospital for. I think they specialise in breast enlargement or something... can't think of what their niche is. All the private health insurance in this country is the same - god help you if it's the same in the US.
Any half decent player can output at 24fps. Even the ps3 can do it now.. certainly I wouldn't buy one without. It's OK for you in the US - you're used to your stop-motion 60hz videos but we're more used to things being smooth (albeit 4% faster, which isn't noticable).
Indeed. The RIAA (who have no say in russia at all, or indeed any country outside the US) jump up and down saying they're too cheap, and suddenly a bunch of slashbots claim they're illegal.
Based on the exchange rate they're actually slightly expensive compared to the cost of music in russia.. but compared to what we're used to paying it seems cheap. Buying something overseas and importing it is not illegal.
That's why they're so big on upnp.. it's very easy to bypass the access list of a upnp enabled router (not just for the OS either... upnp has no verification or security of any kind).
Re:This is my single biggest push to free software
on
Vista is Watching You
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· Score: 4, Informative
HP drivers are pathetic. The printer driver for my printer is a 600mb minimum install (the 'enhanced' software is another 500mb). Every 3 or 4 minutes a console window flashes on the screen - their phone home software is a console app and they haven't even bothered to hide the window.
Oh and that's just for the printer.. the scanner part of the driver is nonfunctional on vista (despite the driver being the latest vista driver), and the whole thing won't install on OSX (a small (for them) 250mb driver) because they stopped supporting it after 10.4.2 and it's hardcoded to reject a version higher than that.
For a while now I've been telling people to avoid HP like the plague because their drivers are is spyware infested bug ridden crap.
Re:To all those complainers
on
GPLv3 Released
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· Score: 1
It's certainly going to murder the cross-development that happens at the moment. gplv2 and v3 are essentially incompatible in that they both have the viral aspect - you can't include gplv3 code without licensing your entire app that way, and since large chunks of code are v2 only would have to throw out or rewrite sections of it, which just means the new code won't go in.
I've got to face the annoying prospect of introducing submission rules to the projects I edit now, because if anyone copies in any v3 code we could be in trouble.. it's no longer enough to say 'this bit is gpl, this bit is lgpl, don't muck around with the licenses and keep the lgpl code independent of the gpl code'. Now we have to talk about license versions, the reason why gplv3 (and lgplv3 if it exists) are verbotten and probably end up in a half a dozen heated debates from rms fanboys.
You do know that DD-WRT along with all the wrt54g firmwares run on an unmodifiable proprietary broadcom version of Linux? (about 50% of it is a binary hard linked into the linux kernel so you can't even change the compile options without breaking it).
Broadcom wouldn't know what the GPL was if it came up and bit them, but it hasn't stopped people creating new software for it.
Likewise with Tivo - my Tivo is hacked to hell and back, and runs loads of third party code. I don't see the problem.
Well it won't actually let them download the spyware... UAC is as flaky as hell.
I actually have about half a dozen icons on my desktop it's impossible to delete. You hit delete, the UAC prompt comes up, you confirm, and *nothing happens*. You'd think that would have come out in beta testing.. maybe it did, and MS ignored it.
I'm currently offloading my work into a win2k3 client ready to ditch vista for good.. taking much longer than I'd hoped, but my six months of vista hell is nearly over (yay!!!). We dropped vista as a supported platform, because our customers had basically reached the conclusion we had - it's nowhere near ready for primtime.
Teredo doesn't really work though - I've wanted to use it on a couple of occasions just to get some connectivity on a temporary net connection.. and it's never worked once. It seems to require port forwarding setup on the router - and if you're going to do that you might as well open port 41 and use a 6to4, so you haven't gained anything.
ESX is a bitch to get working. We got a demo, set up a machine with hardware entirely on VMWare's 'approved' list - and it wouldn't install because it was missing drivers. VMWare couldn't help because we hadn't parted with any money yet... we went with RHEL w/ the free VMWare server which 'just works' (xen doesn't have the I/O performance to be deployed seriously yet).
I've tried them and the performance still isn't great - xen seems to have bottlenecks on its network and disk I/O that are a result of using qemu to do it in software... the maximum net throughput even on PV is a fraction of a 100mb link let alone a gigabit one, and my old 486 firewall does faster disk access.
My boss used to work designing these things and he told me how difficult it is... in computing you have operation that does X, it'll always do X. In chip design it's just not that deterministic because electrons do what they damned well please, and have never any of the theory textbooks. Engineers have libraries of 'what worked last time' that they use because textbook examples rarely do what you'd expect (he went into an example about electron flow going backwards under certain circumstances but I forgot the details).
You'd be surprised - there are all sorts of gotchas on different platforms... different OS library support, different word length, different byte orders, alignment issues, etc. then at the OS level you have path separators (/,\,.,:,whatever plus existence of drives eg SYS$SYSTEM:[00000] is a path on VMS, C:\ is a path on Windows - and not all filesystems support paths in the sense Unix does anyway, Character set assumptions (you can't assume the platform supports utf8, or even ASCII), Case sensitivity, Character set sensitivity, etc.
No code (except assembler) is CPU specific.. you can compile an average (well written) C app on pretty much anything with a C compiler, but it's often unknowningly architecture/OS specific - until you've been through the pain of translating to an entirely different OS (HPUX is fun, VMS is even more fun, or for *lots* of fun try OS/360) it's difficult to know - and that goes for any language, including Java (which mitigates some of the issues but by no means all of them.. not to mention the jvm isn't available on many platforms).
lol. Expecting a manager to look at the long term sustainability.
Customer X has $Y to spend next month on a feature. You could hack something together that works in a month, or you could do it properly in 3 months. You do it in a month, because the manager insists (for understandable reasons). That then becomes the base of the next release. Customer Y comes along and wants something changing. The code is still the hacked version. You could cludge it in a few weeks, or rewrite it in 3 months. Manager says cludge it
Go forward a year or two and the ball of spagetti that's left that nobody dares touch might get rewritten and it's going to take 2-3 years. However the manager that caused it is now at another company so he doesn't care.
You see, in the manager world deadlines and money rule. Quality comes a poor third, if that.
The US iphone is 2.5G but if Apple actually want to sell any of them in europe it'll have to be have 3G as a minimum requirement. Phones as 3G data devices is *extremely* common here... even the cheap phones have it. OTOH Wifi hotspots are still limited to Startbucks and a couple of other places, so not nearly as useful.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be funny.. of course such a thing is impossible since you can't force a virtual character to do anything (and they're just pixels anyway). There would be lots of press of course and Jack Thomson would call for it to be banned..
Since when is second life not a game?
It's an MMORPG with no mobs, basically. A particularly slow/crappy one too.. never saw the attraction myself.
There's not even any collision detection, so you can just fly everywhere.. there's nothing to achieve and nothing to do except maybe look at some geeks interpretation of a virtual starship enterprise.
It's when you pretend you have a girlfriend.
Most slashdotters should be familiar with the concept...
iPeen
If it happens widely AT&T will either drop it entirely or start selling it at its full price. At the moment they make a loss every time someone does this. If it's half a dozen slashdotters wanting to turn their new phone into an overpriced 4GB ipod then that's not going to affect much. If a full hack comes out and thousands of people do it... then expect AT&T to react.
In the UK having not having car insurance is illegal (OTOH if they catch you they normally just take the car off you and crush it).
It's fairly analogous - companies having a legal right to your money mandated by the government. Competition doesn't help much.. there are lots of insurance companies but they all charge the same fees, so unless someone breaks ranks and starts offering really cheap insurance then the price will stay the same, more or less.
Can't imagine mandatory health insurance.. I had that through my employer once and turned it down as it wasn't worth the paper it was written on. It did't cover preexisting conditions, chronic conditions, accidents, anything to do with sport or 'dangerous' hobbies, basically pretty much anything you'd possibly need a hospital for. I think they specialise in breast enlargement or something... can't think of what their niche is. All the private health insurance in this country is the same - god help you if it's the same in the US.
Any half decent player can output at 24fps. Even the ps3 can do it now.. certainly I wouldn't buy one without. It's OK for you in the US - you're used to your stop-motion 60hz videos but we're more used to things being smooth (albeit 4% faster, which isn't noticable).
Indeed. The RIAA (who have no say in russia at all, or indeed any country outside the US) jump up and down saying they're too cheap, and suddenly a bunch of slashbots claim they're illegal.
Based on the exchange rate they're actually slightly expensive compared to the cost of music in russia.. but compared to what we're used to paying it seems cheap. Buying something overseas and importing it is not illegal.
That's why they're so big on upnp.. it's very easy to bypass the access list of a upnp enabled router (not just for the OS either... upnp has no verification or security of any kind).
HP drivers are pathetic. The printer driver for my printer is a 600mb minimum install (the 'enhanced' software is another 500mb). Every 3 or 4 minutes a console window flashes on the screen - their phone home software is a console app and they haven't even bothered to hide the window.
Oh and that's just for the printer.. the scanner part of the driver is nonfunctional on vista (despite the driver being the latest vista driver), and the whole thing won't install on OSX (a small (for them) 250mb driver) because they stopped supporting it after 10.4.2 and it's hardcoded to reject a version higher than that.
For a while now I've been telling people to avoid HP like the plague because their drivers are is spyware infested bug ridden crap.
It's certainly going to murder the cross-development that happens at the moment. gplv2 and v3 are essentially incompatible in that they both have the viral aspect - you can't include gplv3 code without licensing your entire app that way, and since large chunks of code are v2 only would have to throw out or rewrite sections of it, which just means the new code won't go in.
I've got to face the annoying prospect of introducing submission rules to the projects I edit now, because if anyone copies in any v3 code we could be in trouble.. it's no longer enough to say 'this bit is gpl, this bit is lgpl, don't muck around with the licenses and keep the lgpl code independent of the gpl code'. Now we have to talk about license versions, the reason why gplv3 (and lgplv3 if it exists) are verbotten and probably end up in a half a dozen heated debates from rms fanboys.
That's not a beard... it's a space station!
You do know that DD-WRT along with all the wrt54g firmwares run on an unmodifiable proprietary broadcom version of Linux? (about 50% of it is a binary hard linked into the linux kernel so you can't even change the compile options without breaking it).
Broadcom wouldn't know what the GPL was if it came up and bit them, but it hasn't stopped people creating new software for it.
Likewise with Tivo - my Tivo is hacked to hell and back, and runs loads of third party code. I don't see the problem.
Well it won't actually let them download the spyware... UAC is as flaky as hell.
I actually have about half a dozen icons on my desktop it's impossible to delete. You hit delete, the UAC prompt comes up, you confirm, and *nothing happens*. You'd think that would have come out in beta testing.. maybe it did, and MS ignored it.
I'm currently offloading my work into a win2k3 client ready to ditch vista for good.. taking much longer than I'd hoped, but my six months of vista hell is nearly over (yay!!!). We dropped vista as a supported platform, because our customers had basically reached the conclusion we had - it's nowhere near ready for primtime.
dammit. I meant protocol 41.
stupid posting filter.
stupid posting filter.
stupid posting filter.
stupid posting filter.
goddammit I need a submit macro.
Teredo doesn't really work though - I've wanted to use it on a couple of occasions just to get some connectivity on a temporary net connection.. and it's never worked once. It seems to require port forwarding setup on the router - and if you're going to do that you might as well open port 41 and use a 6to4, so you haven't gained anything.
ESX is a bitch to get working. We got a demo, set up a machine with hardware entirely on VMWare's 'approved' list - and it wouldn't install because it was missing drivers. VMWare couldn't help because we hadn't parted with any money yet... we went with RHEL w/ the free VMWare server which 'just works' (xen doesn't have the I/O performance to be deployed seriously yet).
I hope you paid for that xenserver....
I've tried them and the performance still isn't great - xen seems to have bottlenecks on its network and disk I/O that are a result of using qemu to do it in software... the maximum net throughput even on PV is a fraction of a 100mb link let alone a gigabit one, and my old 486 firewall does faster disk access.
I guess you could try to cool it to -274... that'd be an invalid temperature.
My boss used to work designing these things and he told me how difficult it is... in computing you have operation that does X, it'll always do X. In chip design it's just not that deterministic because electrons do what they damned well please, and have never any of the theory textbooks. Engineers have libraries of 'what worked last time' that they use because textbook examples rarely do what you'd expect (he went into an example about electron flow going backwards under certain circumstances but I forgot the details).
You'd be surprised - there are all sorts of gotchas on different platforms... different OS library support, different word length, different byte orders, alignment issues, etc. then at the OS level you have path separators (/,\,.,:,whatever plus existence of drives eg SYS$SYSTEM:[00000] is a path on VMS, C:\ is a path on Windows - and not all filesystems support paths in the sense Unix does anyway, Character set assumptions (you can't assume the platform supports utf8, or even ASCII), Case sensitivity, Character set sensitivity, etc.
/OS specific - until you've been through the pain of translating to an entirely different OS (HPUX is fun, VMS is even more fun, or for *lots* of fun try OS/360) it's difficult to know - and that goes for any language, including Java (which mitigates some of the issues but by no means all of them.. not to mention the jvm isn't available on many platforms).
No code (except assembler) is CPU specific.. you can compile an average (well written) C app on pretty much anything with a C compiler, but it's often unknowningly architecture
lol. Expecting a manager to look at the long term sustainability.
Customer X has $Y to spend next month on a feature. You could hack something together that works in a month, or you could do it properly in 3 months. You do it in a month, because the manager insists (for understandable reasons). That then becomes the base of the next release. Customer Y comes along and wants something changing. The code is still the hacked version. You could cludge it in a few weeks, or rewrite it in 3 months. Manager says cludge it
Go forward a year or two and the ball of spagetti that's left that nobody dares touch might get rewritten and it's going to take 2-3 years. However the manager that caused it is now at another company so he doesn't care.
You see, in the manager world deadlines and money rule. Quality comes a poor third, if that.
No IM? Are you serious? Not even SMS/MMS?
4.4 billion texts were sent in the just in UK in the single month of March. Apple missed a market *that big*??
'unlimited' Where have I heard that before?
Check the small print. It's probably subject to a 1GB 'fair use' cap or possibly even less.
The US iphone is 2.5G but if Apple actually want to sell any of them in europe it'll have to be have 3G as a minimum requirement. Phones as 3G data devices is *extremely* common here... even the cheap phones have it. OTOH Wifi hotspots are still limited to Startbucks and a couple of other places, so not nearly as useful.