What is a "routing server"? How does it get "pounded" because people use P2P clients.
By "routing server", grandparent meant the gateway installed at a telco's central office that connects the DSL customers to an upstream Internet access provider. It's usually somewhat oversold, and P2P clients constantly serve files to other users. For instance, even if you have 768 kbps down and 384 kbps up, the DSL provider may have only provisioned 64 kbps up sustained for each customer. If all customers try to use 384 kbps up at the same time, they all get knocked down to 64 kbps.
They are also stifling legal uses such as freely distributable bootlegs, indy music from bands that want everyone to download a copy etc.
Then how does an independent band pay the songwriter, who gets eight cents per track by US law? If members of the band write the songs that the band plays, how do they verify that they didn't unconsciously plagiarize another song?
Anyone with half an ounce of technology smarts would know that simply encrypting sensitive digital documents would be DRM-enough. Who cares if you can copy a 512bit-encrypted PDF if you don't have the key to open it up?
The difference between digital restrictions management and just using public key cryptographic software based on the OpenPGP standard is that DRM aims to make it harder for a malicious attacker to leak the key to a third party.
out of curiosity, where do you get those tech specs?
If you want to get started programming the Game Boy Advance, start at gbadev.org. Write a few demos to become familiar with the hardware. Then you can attack porting ROTT. You may have to run the game in GOTA386 mode (flat-shaded floors and ceilings) if you have trouble optimizing the horizontal tmapper to get the game to run at a solid 20 fps.
I don't know the gba so I don't know if it has chunkypixel modes like std. VGA mode 10 (320x200 256 as used in all of these old games), but if it does, use that.
You mean mode 0x13. The GBA has something like that, called "Mode 4", but you can only do 16- or 32-bit writes. If you try to write 8 bits, it'll be written to the pixel you chose and the horizontally adjacent pixel in the same 16 bits. For instance, a write to (153, 49) will write the same thing to (152, 49) and vice versa. You have to 1. do read-modify-write, 2. draw through a buffer in fast RAM (difficult because fast RAM is 32 KB, and your code will take up about 8 KB of that), or 3. do as Doom for GBA did and just accept that byte writes will give you 120x160 effective pixels instead of 240x160 pixels.
How many tens of thousands of distributed.net users are now idle since they finally cracked the RC5 challenge?
They have moved onto RC5-72 or OGR. Besides, distributed.net computers on dial-up or ISDN connect to the Internet only about once a day, and some don't connect to the Internet at all; they connect only to a personal proxy on the local network.
Sadly that wouldn't work at all, except on the very oldest of httpd's, in the modern age of multiplexing web servers many hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections can be served in a second.
But the database servers still have resources associated with them. If you manage to hit a page that's expensive to generate, then request that page repeatedly, varying the query string slightly from request to request so that your target can't do server side caching.
QT is not free if you want to do commercial applications.
Trolltech's Qt is free for use in commercial free software such as Red Hat's distribution of KDE, or any other boxed distribution of a GPL'd application.
Linux's ideas about how interfaces work don't translate well in the game world.
Just so that some reader doesn't take this joke the wrong way, I should note that Quake III Arena works on Linux. It's possible to use SDL to configure the keyboard into a keydown/keyup mode to provide the input expected in an arcade style game.
Imagine typing 'strlft' to strafe left!
Actually, Quake 1 did have such commands; you used them with the bind command in the console or in the init file. For instance, it was common to add +mlook to Q1's init file to keep mlook turned on permanently without having to hold down a mouse button.
What was the first FPS game to have a command console? The popular Doom source ports have one now; if ROTT didn't have one, it probably will after a couple months when the ROTT source ports begin to flood into VA Software's websites.
Or only make a set of printers specially for Europe, and Europe only, leaving chips in those destined for elsewhere?
That's trivial to work around. The only "region coding" on PC peripherals is the mains potential, which is twice in Europe (220 V) what it is in North America (110 V). That's easy to fix by substituting an appropriate power brick. But even if your printer uses challenge-response authentication to the power brick (gimme a break), you can still turn North American voltage into European voltage with a simple 1:2 transformer.
Or maybe it isn't. Perhaps the printer maker could make the EU printer protocol subtly different from the USA printer protocol and ban imports of the copyrighted EU printer driver software into North America. (Under United States law, the owner of a copyright has the right to ban imports of a copyrighted work.)
The problem is that there is no company with a 'cheap ink, expensive printer' business model, unless you're looking for Dot-matrix.
Last time I checked (August 2002), Epson and Canon have relatively cheap ink because they don't put the inkjet mechanism in the same package as the ink itself. Epson builds the jets into the printer. Canon does the sensible thing and puts the ink and jets on separate replaceable cartridges; for details, see my other comment.
1) HP replacement cartridges contain not just ink but also the jets themselves.
I prefer the way Canon does it. A Canon BubbleJet(tm) printer comes with a replaceable jet cartridge. A jet cartridge contains the inkjet mechanism and comes with four replaceable ink cartridges (c, m, y, k) or two replaceable ink cartridges (cmy, k) depending on the model. Ink is cheap, but a jet cartridge costs as much as an HP cartridge. I tend to run out of ink in a month; the jets wear out after about half a year.
Additionally the circuitry is able to keep track of how much ink is in a cartridge.
Canon BubbleJet S520 printers put the circuitry for this on the jet cartridge.
Also the chip identifies the cartridge, probably copyrighted, so other manufacturers couldn't possibly reproduce it.
In the United States, nobody can copyright something that is primarily functional and not expressive. US court precedents include Feist v. Rural and, more to the point, Sega v. Accolade. Thus, challenge-response authentication from one part to another where the response is a copyrighted work is ineffective because copying such a copyrighted work is considered fair use.
There already is a topichumor
on
Starcraft
·
· Score: 1
What picture would work for "you've got to be fucking kidding".
Actually, the fact that McDonald's Big Mac sauce is Kraft brand thousand island dressing has been known since 1982, when Big Secrets by William Poundstone was published. Once a recipe has been published, it's "generally known to the public" and no longer a trade secret.
you cant for instance have binary-encrypted elements
Oh yes you can: just put a doctype, then <word xmlns="http://xmlns.microsoft.net/office/11/word"> , then a block of MIME encoded data, then </word>. If not, what in the XML specification prohibits this?
Unfortunatly with everything in a proprietary format you then end up having to build scripting languages into everything making all of your data files potential entry points for malicious code.
Either that, or build features into applications that expose parsers to the existing scripting languages on the machine. On Windows, this would usually be Jscript, VBScript, or any other WSH language interacting with COM objects; on Mac OS 7-9, AppleScript and Frontier can talk to any Mac program supporting high-level events.
If the copyright owner is out of business and the item out of print, who's going to sue me for copyright infringement?
When a corporation goes out of business, other corporations buy its assets, such as copyrights and patents.
However, the fact that nobody has brought suit in regard to derivative works of "Zero Wing" by defunct video game publisher Toaplan shows that if something is obscure enough, the company that owns the copyright after several successive corporate acquisitions will probably not know that it owns it and thus will not take legal action against infringers. No plaintiff, no judge.
On the other hand, the SimEarth brand computer game is not obscure. It was developed and published by Maxis, now a division of Electronic Arts, the Disney of video games.
Not at this rate, they don't. Given that Congress seems to want to extend the copyright term by 20 years every 20 years so that its members can collect more campaign money, everything first published on or after 1923 will be under a perpetual copyright if the Supremes uphold the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
-- Moderating serious replies to bad jokes as "Overrated" is the real anonymous cowardice.
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I still believe it would be hard to make a game as pleasing/atmospheric as they did in '96 with the 64.
Not even Sunshine?
No, but they advertised it then
OptimumOnline never advertised the ability to upload. Rather, OptimumOnline advertised the ability to download.
What is a "routing server"? How does it get "pounded" because people use P2P clients.
By "routing server", grandparent meant the gateway installed at a telco's central office that connects the DSL customers to an upstream Internet access provider. It's usually somewhat oversold, and P2P clients constantly serve files to other users. For instance, even if you have 768 kbps down and 384 kbps up, the DSL provider may have only provisioned 64 kbps up sustained for each customer. If all customers try to use 384 kbps up at the same time, they all get knocked down to 64 kbps.
They are also stifling legal uses such as freely distributable bootlegs, indy music from bands that want everyone to download a copy etc.
Then how does an independent band pay the songwriter, who gets eight cents per track by US law? If members of the band write the songs that the band plays, how do they verify that they didn't unconsciously plagiarize another song?
Anyone with half an ounce of technology smarts would know that simply encrypting sensitive digital documents would be DRM-enough. Who cares if you can copy a 512bit-encrypted PDF if you don't have the key to open it up?
The difference between digital restrictions management and just using public key cryptographic software based on the OpenPGP standard is that DRM aims to make it harder for a malicious attacker to leak the key to a third party.
out of curiosity, where do you get those tech specs?
If you want to get started programming the Game Boy Advance, start at gbadev.org. Write a few demos to become familiar with the hardware. Then you can attack porting ROTT. You may have to run the game in GOTA386 mode (flat-shaded floors and ceilings) if you have trouble optimizing the horizontal tmapper to get the game to run at a solid 20 fps.
I don't know the gba so I don't know if it has chunkypixel modes like std. VGA mode 10 (320x200 256 as used in all of these old games), but if it does, use that.
You mean mode 0x13. The GBA has something like that, called "Mode 4", but you can only do 16- or 32-bit writes. If you try to write 8 bits, it'll be written to the pixel you chose and the horizontally adjacent pixel in the same 16 bits. For instance, a write to (153, 49) will write the same thing to (152, 49) and vice versa. You have to 1. do read-modify-write, 2. draw through a buffer in fast RAM (difficult because fast RAM is 32 KB, and your code will take up about 8 KB of that), or 3. do as Doom for GBA did and just accept that byte writes will give you 120x160 effective pixels instead of 240x160 pixels.
How many tens of thousands of distributed.net users are now idle since they finally cracked the RC5 challenge?
They have moved onto RC5-72 or OGR. Besides, distributed.net computers on dial-up or ISDN connect to the Internet only about once a day, and some don't connect to the Internet at all; they connect only to a personal proxy on the local network.
Sadly that wouldn't work at all, except on the very oldest of httpd's, in the modern age of multiplexing web servers many hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections can be served in a second.
But the database servers still have resources associated with them. If you manage to hit a page that's expensive to generate, then request that page repeatedly, varying the query string slightly from request to request so that your target can't do server side caching.
There's nothing stopping browser developers adding a Logout button to the navbar when it's using HTTP auth.
And in fact, there's an RFE about this very issue filed in Mozilla's bug database. See bug 55181.
QT is not free if you want to do commercial applications.
Trolltech's Qt is free for use in commercial free software such as Red Hat's distribution of KDE, or any other boxed distribution of a GPL'd application.
ROTT was the first game I experienced where a bad guy could go down but only be wounded, and get back up again.
Didn't you play nightmare mode on the other FPS games out there?
Linux's ideas about how interfaces work don't translate well in the game world.
Just so that some reader doesn't take this joke the wrong way, I should note that Quake III Arena works on Linux. It's possible to use SDL to configure the keyboard into a keydown/keyup mode to provide the input expected in an arcade style game.
Imagine typing 'strlft' to strafe left!
Actually, Quake 1 did have such commands; you used them with the bind command in the console or in the init file. For instance, it was common to add +mlook to Q1's init file to keep mlook turned on permanently without having to hold down a mouse button.
What was the first FPS game to have a command console? The popular Doom source ports have one now; if ROTT didn't have one, it probably will after a couple months when the ROTT source ports begin to flood into VA Software's web sites.
Or only make a set of printers specially for Europe, and Europe only, leaving chips in those destined for elsewhere?
That's trivial to work around. The only "region coding" on PC peripherals is the mains potential, which is twice in Europe (220 V) what it is in North America (110 V). That's easy to fix by substituting an appropriate power brick. But even if your printer uses challenge-response authentication to the power brick (gimme a break), you can still turn North American voltage into European voltage with a simple 1:2 transformer.
Or maybe it isn't. Perhaps the printer maker could make the EU printer protocol subtly different from the USA printer protocol and ban imports of the copyrighted EU printer driver software into North America. (Under United States law, the owner of a copyright has the right to ban imports of a copyrighted work.)
The problem is that there is no company with a 'cheap ink, expensive printer' business model, unless you're looking for Dot-matrix.
Last time I checked (August 2002), Epson and Canon have relatively cheap ink because they don't put the inkjet mechanism in the same package as the ink itself. Epson builds the jets into the printer. Canon does the sensible thing and puts the ink and jets on separate replaceable cartridges; for details, see my other comment.
1) HP replacement cartridges contain not just ink but also the jets themselves.
I prefer the way Canon does it. A Canon BubbleJet(tm) printer comes with a replaceable jet cartridge. A jet cartridge contains the inkjet mechanism and comes with four replaceable ink cartridges (c, m, y, k) or two replaceable ink cartridges (cmy, k) depending on the model. Ink is cheap, but a jet cartridge costs as much as an HP cartridge. I tend to run out of ink in a month; the jets wear out after about half a year.
Additionally the circuitry is able to keep track of how much ink is in a cartridge.
Canon BubbleJet S520 printers put the circuitry for this on the jet cartridge.
Also the chip identifies the cartridge, probably copyrighted, so other manufacturers couldn't possibly reproduce it.
In the United States, nobody can copyright something that is primarily functional and not expressive. US court precedents include Feist v. Rural and, more to the point, Sega v. Accolade. Thus, challenge-response authentication from one part to another where the response is a copyrighted work is ineffective because copying such a copyrighted work is considered fair use.
What picture would work for "you've got to be fucking kidding".
How about a bald bare foot?
Instead of giving the product away why not simply charge for it?
Ximian does sell boxed distributions of Ximian Desktop based on the GNOME desktop for 30 USD.
Why would anyone want to play a game that looks like DooM on the PS3 or XBox 2?
Why would anyone want to play a game that looks like the original Super Mario Bros. on a 2 GHz Pentium 4 based PC with a GeForce 4 processor?
Why would anyone want to play Solitaire on that same system?
Why would anyone want to play Tetris on that same system?
Because they're still fun.
someone giving away trade secrets of McDonald's.
Actually, the fact that McDonald's Big Mac sauce is Kraft brand thousand island dressing has been known since 1982, when Big Secrets by William Poundstone was published. Once a recipe has been published, it's "generally known to the public" and no longer a trade secret.
you cant for instance have binary-encrypted elements
Oh yes you can: just put a doctype, then <word xmlns="http://xmlns.microsoft.net/office/11/word"> , then a block of MIME encoded data, then </word>. If not, what in the XML specification prohibits this?
Unfortunatly with everything in a proprietary format you then end up having to build scripting languages into everything making all of your data files potential entry points for malicious code.
Either that, or build features into applications that expose parsers to the existing scripting languages on the machine. On Windows, this would usually be Jscript, VBScript, or any other WSH language interacting with COM objects; on Mac OS 7-9, AppleScript and Frontier can talk to any Mac program supporting high-level events.
If the copyright owner is out of business and the item out of print, who's going to sue me for copyright infringement?
When a corporation goes out of business, other corporations buy its assets, such as copyrights and patents.
However, the fact that nobody has brought suit in regard to derivative works of "Zero Wing" by defunct video game publisher Toaplan shows that if something is obscure enough, the company that owns the copyright after several successive corporate acquisitions will probably not know that it owns it and thus will not take legal action against infringers. No plaintiff, no judge.
On the other hand, the SimEarth brand computer game is not obscure. It was developed and published by Maxis, now a division of Electronic Arts, the Disney of video games.
copyrights expire
Not at this rate, they don't. Given that Congress seems to want to extend the copyright term by 20 years every 20 years so that its members can collect more campaign money, everything first published on or after 1923 will be under a perpetual copyright if the Supremes uphold the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
--
Moderating serious replies to bad jokes as "Overrated" is the real anonymous cowardice.