Hopefully you're the only one, since it's a joke. Something this idiotic subject badly needs.
As people's brains cease to function when discussing child porn, I'll now state the obvious. You're not supposed to give offhand jokes serious consideration. It's like reading Alice in Wonderland as if it were an encylopaedia. It's not disturbing because it doesn't reflect any real behaviour or thought. There are various words describing the practise: stupidity, foolishness, idiocy, straw-man...
I avoid dependence on the media, I prefer to use them as a backup. I have a folder on my hard disc for each game I own, with the ISOs, keys, patches, mods and cracks I want conveniently stored inside.
I don't understand. A hard disc has five to ten times the read/write rate of a flash drive, so decreased load times would be the last thing I would expect.
Seems more likely that it was cached in RAM or something. With L4D specifically, I noticed that load times fall dramatically after it loads the level for the first time. So if you were playing for a while the load times would be only a few seconds.
That's true and worth bearing in mind. I got Fallout 3 as a gift lately; I noticed in the email that instead of telling me I now owned the game, it stated that I had a 'subscription' to it.
I only use Steam for Valve games on a permanent basis. Sometimes I buy third-party games through it, but there are ways to 'decouple' them so they don't need Steam anymore and fall fully under my control. Most third-party games can be made stand-alone simply by using a cracked executable.
I did that with Doom 3, Stalker, Deus Ex, Grid, and a bunch of others. I'll do it to Fallout 3 later. I reject your executable and substitute my own!
Insert a 'choose two' adage here. Quality will be poor, necessitated by such a low price. You'll also surrender control completely; there will be no resale of games, you won't own anything but a set-top box, and you'll be completely dependent on them to play. Naturally there will be no uptime guarantees either. Hardly a "win for the consumer." It's a trade-off, control and quality dropped in exchange for a lower price.
You're right though, people will buy it en masse if it's marketed correctly. As Microsoft demonstrated with the Xbox 360, quality is almost irrelevant. Price matters.
I wouldn't get your hopes up. The 360 and PS3 aren't much on a cutting-edge PC, but they aren't weak either. The processing and bandwidth requirements per customer would be astronomical with that kind of detail. If it weren't, you'd have it locally already. And since it's a service industry, the quality produced will be the lowest level the majority of customers will tolerate, in order to maximise profits.
Also in a normal online game the time you press the button at your end means nothing... what matters is when the button press event gets to the server. So as long as the rendering server is in the same line of hops (ie co-located with ISP) to the actual game server then you won't have any more than a couple ms extra lag.
That's incorrect. When you press the button in a normal online game, the game shows the action being performed instantaneously before it even sends the packet to the server. The server decides what happens in the game logic but not what's shown onscreen. Games have various methods of hiding latency; immediately showing actions being performed, irrespective of the connection, is one of the more common ones.
It's done that way because perceived latency is a big deal. Not doing it is much more obvious than occasional minor timing discrepancies; it's only obvious in very high latency situations (the 'jerking' motion). Needless to say, that technique will be impossible to utilise if the game is remotely rendered.
Put two instances of a game side by side - one remotely rendered, another local, and the remote one will have greater perceived latency than the local one just for the lack of that technique alone, all other things being equal.
That's pretty misleading. Firstly, that generalisation is far too wide to be useful. The input lag depends on the panel type and the display's individual features.
Besides that, if anything the generalisation should be the exact opposite. Computer monitors are mostly TN panels; no input delay. The only other feature they have is typically a scaler, so there isn't much to cause a delay. Meanwhile, LCD TVs have tuners, more advanced scalers, picture-in-picture, and even some features which require a whole frame or two to do processing on the image before displaying it, like inter-frame interpolation. Pretty hard to believe that they would be the faster group.
I don't hold any ill will towards people who do this. It's called marketing and it happens all the time.
You don't hold any ill will towards people who lie to you constantly, blatantly, in order to con you into buying their crap? Can't say I feel the same.
If the law is not applied uniformly and evenly to all, it is no longer law - it becomes rules - as in, one set of rules for you, one set of rules for me.
Guilt is not a variable. The law in most places accomodates this by permitting sentence flexibility at judgement. I.e., BBC may never pay one pence in damages nor suffer any legal sanctions because they didn't do anything wrong, but they are still guilty of a violation of law.
If that's the point you were making before then we're in agreement. I don't dispute this condition, the law should apply to everyone equally. I didn't mean my posts to look like I'm saying, "Nah the law doesn't apply to these guys," - I'm not - but rather that it shouldn't be the sole focus in consideration of the story.
In this instance, a sentence of zero punishment may make sense, but that does not change the fact that the BBC knowingly and intentionally did something they knew to be illegal. They intentionally broke the law, and then boasted about it.
[...] Question for you - did the BBC break the law? Never mind if punishment is in order, did they break the law?
I honestly don't know about that. People here are quick to say they're in violation of such-and-such, but laws have non-intuitive exceptions and conditions and that's why we have lawyers. They aren't lawyers so I'll take those accusations with a grain of salt.
As for whether it was intentional if they did: someone else posted a quote further down showing that they got legal advice beforehand. Surely they were told it wasn't illegal since that's what the article repeats. As a result I don't think it was intentional. They probably said what they did so it would look 'edgy', as opposed to boasting.
Why, are you going to perform a denial of furniture attack on my neighbours?
Theft from my house is making the analogy inaccurate. They didn't take anything but a minor amount of transfer bandwidth. That's about as serious as stealing the oxygen in my house by breathing.
The analogy would be closer if you simply got into my house without telling me (causing no damage), performed some pre-arranged DDoS with a security company who agreed to it previously, and then vacated, leaving everything as it was before you arrived. After leaving, you then proceed to tell me why you did it, how you did it and how to stop you doing it again. Later you tell the world about such things through a respected news service, in a report about the insecurity of houses like mine and the people who exploit them for profit to the detriment of others.
In that case, I wouldn't like it much but I wouldn't want to sue you or anything either. It would be embarrassing and annoying. I'd probably become quite conscious about the crappy security of my house and fix it up.
I'd be more interested in hearing about whether you think it was the right thing to do or not, instead of shouting "You broke the rules!" like a child in a schoolyard. If they didn't do any harm it isn't very important that they broke the law. Follow the spirit, not the letter.
Reading the article tells me: They disabled the botnet and told the computer owners afterward, and they advised them on how to secure their gear in future. They performed a DDoS on a site, but with prior agreement from the owner.
That's thousands of people who probably learned a valuable lesson. Better to learn that way than to have their credit card details stolen, or their bandwidth used in a malicious DDoS. Given the incredible amount of PCs that are compromised in general, this would seem inevitable without some education to prevent it.
Of course you can make a good argument that it was unethical to invade their PCs, but don't just dismiss the benefits of this out of hand. It's boring, and not really insightful at all.
Uh... That's pretty damned tenuous. The dynamic at work there is absolutely nothing like the subject the parent is talking about. Nations, not single individuals. Political motivations. The logic if both is incomparable, it's just a blatant emotional appeal with nothing behind it.
Take the obvious real-world example, the WTC attack eight years ago. Retaliation was a failure there. The attackers were already dead as part of the plan, while the planner himself remains at large even now. It lead to further events which damaged the US' reputation globally, unnecessary loss of life and all at a huge monetary cost.
Now what do you suppose would've happened if there was no US retaliation attempt? More or less Americans dead? I'm going to have to say less. I doubt things would be any different either, insofar as terrorism is concerned. Besides the fact that their goal of creating a gigantic clusterfuck would've failed rather than succeeded.
I'm not a pacifist, but I recognise that sometimes pacifism is the best option available. When confronted by a rapist it isn't. When dealing with large-scale politically motivated attacks and national responses, it requires serious consideration.
On an old Pentium 4 system I had, it took 18 seconds to reach fully-ready desktop from a cold boot. This was a five-year-old installation, in constant use as my main computer.
Anybody browsing this article probably has the technical competence and interest needed to maintain the OS so it never takes any longer than 30 seconds.
Unless you've got McAfee installed, of course, in which case it'll take a significant fraction of your lifespan...
Aside: PEBKAC is tongue in cheek for alliterative goodness. I know developers bear more of the blame owing to the fact that it's their fault anything needs to be done at all.
Slashdot Mirror
GHZ contradictions.
Shhh. Intel marketing people start to sweat profusely when you mention this.
Hopefully you're the only one, since it's a joke. Something this idiotic subject badly needs.
As people's brains cease to function when discussing child porn, I'll now state the obvious. You're not supposed to give offhand jokes serious consideration. It's like reading Alice in Wonderland as if it were an encylopaedia. It's not disturbing because it doesn't reflect any real behaviour or thought. There are various words describing the practise: stupidity, foolishness, idiocy, straw-man...
What about a button that causes Kdawson to be kicked in the crotch? You can call it 'Kickdot', as a sleight against the size of his man-spheres.
Show a counter next to it, it'll be great. It'll be the first virtual button ever to get worn out from overuse.
Pedant to pedant, the dictionary has definitions for both the verb and noun form.
Use a label sticker.
I avoid dependence on the media, I prefer to use them as a backup. I have a folder on my hard disc for each game I own, with the ISOs, keys, patches, mods and cracks I want conveniently stored inside.
I wonder if they can condense the remaining Buster vapor into a dummy mold...
Abandonware? Assumedly it would only be a removal of the DRM for users who already have the relevant games, nothing else would be affected.
I don't understand. A hard disc has five to ten times the read/write rate of a flash drive, so decreased load times would be the last thing I would expect.
Seems more likely that it was cached in RAM or something. With L4D specifically, I noticed that load times fall dramatically after it loads the level for the first time. So if you were playing for a while the load times would be only a few seconds.
That's true and worth bearing in mind. I got Fallout 3 as a gift lately; I noticed in the email that instead of telling me I now owned the game, it stated that I had a 'subscription' to it.
I only use Steam for Valve games on a permanent basis. Sometimes I buy third-party games through it, but there are ways to 'decouple' them so they don't need Steam anymore and fall fully under my control. Most third-party games can be made stand-alone simply by using a cracked executable.
I did that with Doom 3, Stalker, Deus Ex, Grid, and a bunch of others. I'll do it to Fallout 3 later. I reject your executable and substitute my own!
Insert a 'choose two' adage here. Quality will be poor, necessitated by such a low price. You'll also surrender control completely; there will be no resale of games, you won't own anything but a set-top box, and you'll be completely dependent on them to play. Naturally there will be no uptime guarantees either. Hardly a "win for the consumer." It's a trade-off, control and quality dropped in exchange for a lower price.
You're right though, people will buy it en masse if it's marketed correctly. As Microsoft demonstrated with the Xbox 360, quality is almost irrelevant. Price matters.
I wouldn't get your hopes up. The 360 and PS3 aren't much on a cutting-edge PC, but they aren't weak either. The processing and bandwidth requirements per customer would be astronomical with that kind of detail. If it weren't, you'd have it locally already. And since it's a service industry, the quality produced will be the lowest level the majority of customers will tolerate, in order to maximise profits.
Also in a normal online game the time you press the button at your end means nothing... what matters is when the button press event gets to the server. So as long as the rendering server is in the same line of hops (ie co-located with ISP) to the actual game server then you won't have any more than a couple ms extra lag.
That's incorrect. When you press the button in a normal online game, the game shows the action being performed instantaneously before it even sends the packet to the server. The server decides what happens in the game logic but not what's shown onscreen. Games have various methods of hiding latency; immediately showing actions being performed, irrespective of the connection, is one of the more common ones.
It's done that way because perceived latency is a big deal. Not doing it is much more obvious than occasional minor timing discrepancies; it's only obvious in very high latency situations (the 'jerking' motion). Needless to say, that technique will be impossible to utilise if the game is remotely rendered.
Put two instances of a game side by side - one remotely rendered, another local, and the remote one will have greater perceived latency than the local one just for the lack of that technique alone, all other things being equal.
That's pretty misleading. Firstly, that generalisation is far too wide to be useful. The input lag depends on the panel type and the display's individual features.
Besides that, if anything the generalisation should be the exact opposite. Computer monitors are mostly TN panels; no input delay. The only other feature they have is typically a scaler, so there isn't much to cause a delay. Meanwhile, LCD TVs have tuners, more advanced scalers, picture-in-picture, and even some features which require a whole frame or two to do processing on the image before displaying it, like inter-frame interpolation. Pretty hard to believe that they would be the faster group.
About 12%, as reported here.
I don't hold any ill will towards people who do this. It's called marketing and it happens all the time.
You don't hold any ill will towards people who lie to you constantly, blatantly, in order to con you into buying their crap? Can't say I feel the same.
If the law is not applied uniformly and evenly to all, it is no longer law - it becomes rules - as in, one set of rules for you, one set of rules for me. Guilt is not a variable. The law in most places accomodates this by permitting sentence flexibility at judgement. I.e., BBC may never pay one pence in damages nor suffer any legal sanctions because they didn't do anything wrong, but they are still guilty of a violation of law.
If that's the point you were making before then we're in agreement. I don't dispute this condition, the law should apply to everyone equally. I didn't mean my posts to look like I'm saying, "Nah the law doesn't apply to these guys," - I'm not - but rather that it shouldn't be the sole focus in consideration of the story.
In this instance, a sentence of zero punishment may make sense, but that does not change the fact that the BBC knowingly and intentionally did something they knew to be illegal. They intentionally broke the law, and then boasted about it. [...] Question for you - did the BBC break the law? Never mind if punishment is in order, did they break the law?
I honestly don't know about that. People here are quick to say they're in violation of such-and-such, but laws have non-intuitive exceptions and conditions and that's why we have lawyers. They aren't lawyers so I'll take those accusations with a grain of salt.
As for whether it was intentional if they did: someone else posted a quote further down showing that they got legal advice beforehand. Surely they were told it wasn't illegal since that's what the article repeats. As a result I don't think it was intentional. They probably said what they did so it would look 'edgy', as opposed to boasting.
Flameware sounds like a great name for some forum software.
Why, are you going to perform a denial of furniture attack on my neighbours?
Theft from my house is making the analogy inaccurate. They didn't take anything but a minor amount of transfer bandwidth. That's about as serious as stealing the oxygen in my house by breathing.
The analogy would be closer if you simply got into my house without telling me (causing no damage), performed some pre-arranged DDoS with a security company who agreed to it previously, and then vacated, leaving everything as it was before you arrived. After leaving, you then proceed to tell me why you did it, how you did it and how to stop you doing it again. Later you tell the world about such things through a respected news service, in a report about the insecurity of houses like mine and the people who exploit them for profit to the detriment of others.
In that case, I wouldn't like it much but I wouldn't want to sue you or anything either. It would be embarrassing and annoying. I'd probably become quite conscious about the crappy security of my house and fix it up.
It probably is illegal, this is the UK we're talking about. Midgets could be construed as children!
I'd be more interested in hearing about whether you think it was the right thing to do or not, instead of shouting "You broke the rules!" like a child in a schoolyard. If they didn't do any harm it isn't very important that they broke the law. Follow the spirit, not the letter.
Reading the article tells me: They disabled the botnet and told the computer owners afterward, and they advised them on how to secure their gear in future. They performed a DDoS on a site, but with prior agreement from the owner.
That's thousands of people who probably learned a valuable lesson. Better to learn that way than to have their credit card details stolen, or their bandwidth used in a malicious DDoS. Given the incredible amount of PCs that are compromised in general, this would seem inevitable without some education to prevent it.
Of course you can make a good argument that it was unethical to invade their PCs, but don't just dismiss the benefits of this out of hand. It's boring, and not really insightful at all.
Smell detected: bullshit
Your sig is making me more than a little curious about what you were arrested for.
How fortunate! Around here the traditional tactic is to press the print button again, twenty more times at the least...
Uh... That's pretty damned tenuous. The dynamic at work there is absolutely nothing like the subject the parent is talking about. Nations, not single individuals. Political motivations. The logic if both is incomparable, it's just a blatant emotional appeal with nothing behind it.
Take the obvious real-world example, the WTC attack eight years ago. Retaliation was a failure there. The attackers were already dead as part of the plan, while the planner himself remains at large even now. It lead to further events which damaged the US' reputation globally, unnecessary loss of life and all at a huge monetary cost.
Now what do you suppose would've happened if there was no US retaliation attempt? More or less Americans dead? I'm going to have to say less. I doubt things would be any different either, insofar as terrorism is concerned. Besides the fact that their goal of creating a gigantic clusterfuck would've failed rather than succeeded.
I'm not a pacifist, but I recognise that sometimes pacifism is the best option available. When confronted by a rapist it isn't. When dealing with large-scale politically motivated attacks and national responses, it requires serious consideration.
On an old Pentium 4 system I had, it took 18 seconds to reach fully-ready desktop from a cold boot. This was a five-year-old installation, in constant use as my main computer.
Anybody browsing this article probably has the technical competence and interest needed to maintain the OS so it never takes any longer than 30 seconds.
Unless you've got McAfee installed, of course, in which case it'll take a significant fraction of your lifespan...
Aside: PEBKAC is tongue in cheek for alliterative goodness. I know developers bear more of the blame owing to the fact that it's their fault anything needs to be done at all.