b) the sandbox mode still isn't sandbox because your actors and directors are still Simmish. They need TLC, need to be able to work together, need trailers to keep themselves occupied, etc.
That's actually somewhat inaccurate (I worked on this game so I have to defend this:) You need to check the "Star's don't misbehave" and "Scripts shoot instantly" options on the sandbox dialog to enable these options. That should make the sandbox behave more as you'd like.
With regards to point a) if you check the Lionhead boards you'll find some posts on how to bypass this if you don't want to play through the game. The sandbox actually unlocks 30 years ahead of where you've played in the game so you only really need to get up to 1970:)
I've been using Password Safe for a number of years now after encountering similar problems trying to remember a dozen passwords or so.
You can use PS to automatically generate random passwords when you add a new entry (according to a configurable policy), so you no longer need to share passwords between sites.
PS stores passwords in a Blowfish (or maybe AES now?) encrypted file so no need to leave your passwords lying around in plaintext on your system.
95% of the time the patches install fine. It's the other 5% that's the problem though.
When I finally got broadband I managed to cripple my PC by installing Win2k SP2. In its wisdom the installer decided to decompress the files to my decidedly flaky second drive and install them from there. Halfway through the install process I got a nice message telling me that the CRC on the file had failed, and would I like to retry. I had no way of finishing or aborting the process, and on reboot I just got a blue screen every time.
Admittedly I should have backed up my system before installing (not to mention not using a drive I knew to be dodgy as spare space!). At the end of the day the kind of users that don't install patches for themselves are also the kind of users who aren't going to be running regular backups.
Software breaking is definitely a problem, but how often does it really happen? I'd imagine that the liklihood of these people getting a virus / worm is greater than the liklihood of an ms patch breaking a piece of software...
Yeah, but at the end of the day, who's decision is that to make? Mine or Microsoft's (or the author of an anti-worm?)
I've used PasswordSafe from Counterpane Systems (think Bruce Schneier) for a long time now. Every time I need a new password/login for a site I fire it up, add a new entry and generate a random 8 character password. It's very quick, stable, secure and free (possibly in both senses of the word - there was some talk about making it open source some time ago).
Have you been drinking too much coffee? Jeez. Ok, so we're talking about a crystal rather than a gas. I've not idea what kind of impact this has on quantum computing, but thinking about the implications of materials with such a high refractive index is interesting. I remember a while back there was talk about materials with negative refractive indices (Radical Lens Theory Repeals Diffraction Limit), but as far as I can tell it was all theory. Does anyone know (or want to speculate) if similar types of substances could be used to create "flat" lenses?
I could be completely mistaken, but you're suggesting the message is exchanged using this method, rather than the key. I thought the method was used in order to allow two parties to exchange a series of bits that could be used as a one time pad. This one time pad can then be used to encrypt the message, which can be sent by carrier pigeon if so desired.
If a third party is eavesdropping, their interference could be detected and the process restarted (to generate a new one time pad that the sender and receiver know hasn't been intercepted).
Of course, one time pads are only uncrackable provided that they are generated using a truly random source, and are never reused.
Mr Bennett, on the other hand, wants to win the $10m (£7m) X-Prize. This award, from a US foundation, will go to the first
non-governmental outfit to put people on a rocket 100 kilometres (62 miles) above the Earth.
Looks like a mistake by the poster.
Re:Technology is not the problem
on
Blaming Encryption
·
· Score: 2, Funny
From the BBC article you referenced:
Before now, there has been speculation that Osama Bin Laden has hidden messages in pornographic images posted and swapped on Usenet, eBay and Amazon.
However, after analysing over two million images from eBay, Niels Provos and colleagues from the University of Michigan have said they found no evidence of hidden messages. Mr Provos and his colleagues are now extending their work to check more images.
Yeah, right. Any excuse to look at porn.
Excuse me - I just have to recheck my stash of porn to see if any contain hidden terrorist communications.
With a good encryption algorithm the ciphertext it produces should closely resemble random bits (that is, it should have all of the properties of random bits). It is likely that encrypted messages have some kind of standard header (which might be a recquired part of the protocol).
The thing is, who is likely to send large volumes of random text across the internet? Compressed data shares many properties with random bits, but it's usually identifiable by standard headers.
There's actually a lot that can be derived from communications, even if they are encrypted: details of the sender/receiver pair, the time/date that messages were sent and the size and frequency of the messages are all useful information to eavesdroppers. I'd bet that one of the tasks of Echelon is to build up huge networks of sender/receiver pairs for further analysis, even if the contents of the messages are encrypted.
Yes, but then so do all the clients involved in distributed.net, but the system is designed so that the overhead of communication and synchronisation is kept to a minimum.
Fortunately your reasoning doesn't take into account parallelism. For instance, in 100 years time processors might have hit some limit (say of of 10e-40 seconds) for executing a single operation, but what about 10,000 fpus on a single chip? What about 1,000,000 of these processors running in parallel? This is the approach the EFF took to building Deep Crack.
I think the problems facing engineers in the future will be finding ways of increasing parellism within hardware, and of course developing software to take advantage of those features.
There was an article a while back (I've lost it now, but you could try Liongames.com) where Peter Molyneux talked about this. Apparently they had to scrap the idea because it would have been too difficult to retailers to manage the product at two different price points. It's a bit of a shame really, as it would have been good to see how it worked out.
Then again, there's nothing stopping you sending $5 to a charity of your choice when you buy the game.
..and that this was a Novalogic game. I remember almost having a seizure when I saw this running on a 486 for the first time.
Novalogic have recent received a new patent on their use of Voxels for rendering realtime 3d terrains (see also this patent, or here).
IIRC, the big problem with the use of voxels in the past is that Novalogic have actively enforced their patent, which has made many games companies reluctant to use voxels in games (to represent terrain, in any case. Bladerunner used voxels to represent characters, IIRC). Hardware acceleration may be good, but I'm wondering how many games companies will take advantage of the technology. From the Yahoo article it sounds like the technology is going to be aimed at the professional marketplace anyway.
In my own opinion, voxels are great for representing distant terrain, but they look horrible at short range (not to mention the memory requirements needed to represent a detailed scene with voxels). With today's TnL acceleration, polygon based scenery is more likely to provoke the response I had when seeing Comanche for the first time.
I've also used a media player, by MS, on Linux about 18 months ago. I can't remember any of the details, and until I read your post, I was sure that I'd gone nuts (or just been crippled with deja vu). And I'm sure I read the story on/. at the time...
Slashdot Mirror
With regards to point a) if you check the Lionhead boards you'll find some posts on how to bypass this if you don't want to play through the game. The sandbox actually unlocks 30 years ahead of where you've played in the game so you only really need to get up to 1970 :)
I've been using Password Safe for a number of years now after encountering similar problems trying to remember a dozen passwords or so. You can use PS to automatically generate random passwords when you add a new entry (according to a configurable policy), so you no longer need to share passwords between sites. PS stores passwords in a Blowfish (or maybe AES now?) encrypted file so no need to leave your passwords lying around in plaintext on your system.
When I finally got broadband I managed to cripple my PC by installing Win2k SP2. In its wisdom the installer decided to decompress the files to my decidedly flaky second drive and install them from there. Halfway through the install process I got a nice message telling me that the CRC on the file had failed, and would I like to retry. I had no way of finishing or aborting the process, and on reboot I just got a blue screen every time.
Admittedly I should have backed up my system before installing (not to mention not using a drive I knew to be dodgy as spare space!). At the end of the day the kind of users that don't install patches for themselves are also the kind of users who aren't going to be running regular backups.
Software breaking is definitely a problem, but how often does it really happen? I'd imagine that the liklihood of these people getting a virus / worm is greater than the liklihood of an ms patch breaking a piece of software...
Yeah, but at the end of the day, who's decision is that to make? Mine or Microsoft's (or the author of an anti-worm?)
I've used PasswordSafe from Counterpane Systems (think Bruce Schneier) for a long time now. Every time I need a new password/login for a site I fire it up, add a new entry and generate a random 8 character password. It's very quick, stable, secure and free (possibly in both senses of the word - there was some talk about making it open source some time ago).
http://www.counterpane.com/passsafe.html
Have you been drinking too much coffee? Jeez. Ok, so we're talking about a crystal rather than a gas. I've not idea what kind of impact this has on quantum computing, but thinking about the implications of materials with such a high refractive index is interesting. I remember a while back there was talk about materials with negative refractive indices (Radical Lens Theory Repeals Diffraction Limit), but as far as I can tell it was all theory. Does anyone know (or want to speculate) if similar types of substances could be used to create "flat" lenses?
I thought this story sounded familiar. Stop, Light?
If a third party is eavesdropping, their interference could be detected and the process restarted (to generate a new one time pad that the sender and receiver know hasn't been intercepted).
Of course, one time pads are only uncrackable provided that they are generated using a truly random source, and are never reused.
From the BBC article you referenced:
Before now, there has been speculation that Osama Bin Laden has hidden messages in pornographic images posted and swapped on Usenet, eBay and Amazon.
However, after analysing over two million images from eBay, Niels Provos and colleagues from the University of Michigan have said they found no evidence of hidden messages. Mr Provos and his colleagues are now extending their work to check more images.
Yeah, right. Any excuse to look at porn.
Excuse me - I just have to recheck my stash of porn to see if any contain hidden terrorist communications.
With a good encryption algorithm the ciphertext it produces should closely resemble random bits (that is, it should have all of the properties of random bits). It is likely that encrypted messages have some kind of standard header (which might be a recquired part of the protocol).
The thing is, who is likely to send large volumes of random text across the internet? Compressed data shares many properties with random bits, but it's usually identifiable by standard headers.
There's actually a lot that can be derived from communications, even if they are encrypted: details of the sender/receiver pair, the time/date that messages were sent and the size and frequency of the messages are all useful information to eavesdroppers. I'd bet that one of the tasks of Echelon is to build up huge networks of sender/receiver pairs for further analysis, even if the contents of the messages are encrypted.
I sure hope it's more accurate than some of the speech recognition tools I've used.
Yes, but then so do all the clients involved in distributed.net, but the system is designed so that the overhead of communication and synchronisation is kept to a minimum.
Fortunately your reasoning doesn't take into account parallelism. For instance, in 100 years time processors might have hit some limit (say of of 10e-40 seconds) for executing a single operation, but what about 10,000 fpus on a single chip? What about 1,000,000 of these processors running in parallel? This is the approach the EFF took to building Deep Crack.
I think the problems facing engineers in the future will be finding ways of increasing parellism within hardware, and of course developing software to take advantage of those features.
There was an article a while back (I've lost it now, but you could try Liongames.com) where Peter Molyneux talked about this. Apparently they had to scrap the idea because it would have been too difficult to retailers to manage the product at two different price points. It's a bit of a shame really, as it would have been good to see how it worked out.
Then again, there's nothing stopping you sending $5 to a charity of your choice when you buy the game.
So where's the QNX port?
..and that this was a Novalogic game. I remember almost having a seizure when I saw this running on a 486 for the first time.
Novalogic have recent received a new patent on their use of Voxels for rendering realtime 3d terrains (see also this patent, or here).
IIRC, the big problem with the use of voxels in the past is that Novalogic have actively enforced their patent, which has made many games companies reluctant to use voxels in games (to represent terrain, in any case. Bladerunner used voxels to represent characters, IIRC). Hardware acceleration may be good, but I'm wondering how many games companies will take advantage of the technology. From the Yahoo article it sounds like the technology is going to be aimed at the professional marketplace anyway.
In my own opinion, voxels are great for representing distant terrain, but they look horrible at short range (not to mention the memory requirements needed to represent a detailed scene with voxels). With today's TnL acceleration, polygon based scenery is more likely to provoke the response I had when seeing Comanche for the first time.
...not once has Java crashed on me unless I wrote some bad code
Funny - I was going to say the same about my C++...
http://www.nist.gov/public_ affairs/releases/g00-108.htm
I don't think this press release is referenced at the Science News article.
I've also used a media player, by MS, on Linux about 18 months ago. I can't remember any of the details, and until I read your post, I was sure that I'd gone nuts (or just been crippled with deja vu). And I'm sure I read the story on /. at the time...