Sheesh, I'd trade him in a second. Not because I want the money itself - I don't - but because I want to found my own games company, and for that, having a lot of money would help.
What's wrong with people when "I'm rich" immediately leads to "I have nothing to do with my life"? There's more to life than getting rich!
Not quite CD quality - I'm an audio snob, rip my CDs into FLAC, and while Launch is mighty close, it's not quite the same quality level.
Which should come as no surprise.
But it's damn close, and I shell out $36/yr so I can use it at the high quality with no commercial breaks, and it is probably responsible for hundreds of dollars of CD sales from me alone.:)
I believe you have missed the entire point of my post. I wasn't talking about *any* of that from a political point of view, I was talking about it from a technical point of view.
If you want, change "asking Linux" into "The earth has been invaded by aliens, and they will destroy the entire galaxy unless Linus Torvalds removes zlib entirely from all distributions of Linux". I realize it's a completely nonsensical proposition, but I don't care how likely that is, I'm merely pointing out how difficult a job Microsoft is looking at when people say "Just remove Media Player".
And no, that's not a typo. Linus Torvalds, removing zlib from every Linux package on the planet. Think it's impossible? You're right - and that's what many people are asking when they want Media Player removed entirely.
Betcha MS is just removing the frontend. It's a few orders of magnitude easier.:)
There's some subtlety with the media player that I don't think most people realize. Like any good media player app, the Microsoft media player is made up of two major components - the frontend and the backend. The frontend handles minor things like displaying the video and interface, the backend handles the actual decoding.
On Windows, the backend is an integral part of the operating system. Many other applications use it, many other applications plug into it - it's designed to be a central location for codec storage, and it succeeds in that goal admirably.
The frontend, obviously, is not.
Removing the frontend would be trivial. Removing the backend would be devastating because of all the programs that rely on it - akin to removing Internet Explorer entirely, for the exact same set of reasons.
I don't pretend to know which they've been ordered to remove. I don't put it past them for the courts to have said "remove Media Player" and for Microsoft to have said "aha! If we take that to mean the backend, we can argue that it would damage the user experience!" But it's worth pointing out that the bulk of what most moderately-technical people would consider Media Player - the chunk that does the actual decoding and playing of media - is, in fact, pretty deeply built into Windows. As is Internet Explorer. (I've seen many many MANY apps that embed IE in one way or another.)
An analogy - this would be similar to asking Linux to remove zlib entirely. Because, you know, not many people ever really need to compress things, right? Therefore zlib couldn't be that important, right?
Sometimes the user interface is only a small part of the usage a piece of software has within the system.
Now, it *would* be entirely reasonable to ask Microsoft to provide hooks to replace these modules. However that would be an extremely nontrivial programming job - I might demand it for Longhorn, but asking that they spend less than a year or so on it is really just begging for serious problems.
1) I'm a game developer. Therefore, don't whine to me about how hard it is to make a living writing games. Trust me. I know.
2) Yes, I would have removed it from their HD afterwards. (Isn't it funny that everyone immediately assumes I'm lying about that?)
3) As a consumer, I found their copy protection overbuilt and will not be buying games from them in the future. They also lost at least one other sale on their current game because of this. I know of absolutely nobody who decided to buy it because it was made marginally harder to pirate due to this copy protection. Therefore, the copy protection method has failed.
Honestly - why does this make it harder to pirate? Because it requires you to spend seventeen seconds more looking for a crack? I don't see how anyone can possibly argue that their copy protection is effective, or even a net gain from their perspective.
I suppose it might depend on what you're doing with it. I was going for "Hi, I'm trying to install this on a friend's machine so I can show her the multiplayer and delete it afterwards" and they basically told me to buy another copy.
In any case, I paid for it, I figure I have the right to play it wherever I want - without having to justify myself on a case-by-case basis.
I bought Gish, but after discovering how their copy protection worked, I ended up warning all my friends about it. None of them bought it. Quick summary: you get X activations (i.e. installs), and once you're out of activations, sucks to be you. You might be able to convince them to increase the number of activations, but don't count on it - I tried and they refused. (I was trying to install it at a friend's house so we could play multiplayer.)
I don't really regret buying it - what I do regret is that I now have to keep a crack on a server so I can play it if I want. Several of my friends that don't want to deal with cracks simply didn't buy it.
If there was ever a perfect example of why overbearing copy protection is counterproductive, this is it.:)
Why is everyone complaining about this prize? Oh no, earth orbit, it's too hard! Let's just take our X-prize, go home, and never launch again. Waah waah.
WHAT THE HELL.
If anyone on the planet would say "wonderful, now we've got an incentive to get to the next stage", I'd think it would be the people here on Slashdot - but all of a sudden it's too difficult to reach orbit, with a fifty million dollar budget, in half a decade?
Did anyone really look at the X-prize and say "Oh, that's easy, no problem"? Then why are you looking at this and assuming it will be a problem? There's a lot of time to work on it and at least one group that's already a significant fraction of the way there.
If you think it's hard, okay, sure, no argument, it's hard - but how many times have you learned something new by practicing easy stuff over and over again? It's an opportunity to invent some new low-cost fabrication and launching techniques. It's research. And possibly, it'll even lead to true commercial spaceflight.
I think this is a fantastic turn of events. I can't wait to see who decides to tackle it.
Funny, I think that's a pretty lousy rebuttal. I think the big sticking point here - at least the big sticking point I would be looking at, if I were Sun - is the binary incompatability. And yet he doesn't have *any* good arguments for it. Most of them sum down to "it's too hard". And, you know, if he thinks it's too hard, that's fine - but "it's too hard" isn't a reason that Sun should look at and say "oh, okay, that's fine then".
Windows has binary compatability. Windows runs in both SMP mode and single-processor mode. Windows might not have as glitteringly perfect of a driver model as Linux, but let's be honest here, it gets the job done.
He's given a lot of good reasons Linux doesn't have binary compatibility. Okay. Sure. How about listing the reasons Sun wants binary compatibility and showing how those goals are achievable in other ways, instead of just throwing away Sun's requirements as insignificant?
I personally am not (I'm working at Google:) ) but I don't know if Snowblind is or not. However, they have a forum frequented by the admins, so if you ask there somebody will know.
Whether they'll tell you or not is another matter entirely.:P
And yes, the PS2 does struggle quite a bit on that game - we're maxing out an amazing amount of the PS2's hardware:) I'm really not sure how much prettier it's possible to make a PS2 game - at least, I can't think of any resources we left untapped or any serious inefficiencies (well, one, that I thought of a year after the game was released, but.)
Depending on how you're looking at it, that's either not a problem or not possible.:)
I know we had a ton of useful tools, all of which worked extremely well. However, somebody still has to code them. I don't believe it's possible to write a general toolkit for games (in another way of looking at it, I believe we already have one - it's called C++) and so I think what we've got now is as good as it will get.
This says nothing with regards to lousy programmers who don't understand how important tools are, of course - if your level designer has to talk to a programmer for every small change, something's seriously wrong. But even if the tools are completely perfect, the designer isn't - people make mistakes, and so everything (EVERYTHING) has to be tested.
Personally I use text files as the links. Yes, this means I end up doing things step-by-step, but for my work that's usually what I do anyway.
You're right, with some exceptions, languages aren't very interoperable. Python is an exception, and the entire.net family is an exception - I've made some great tools combining C++ and C# with.net, and to be honest, I was very very impressed by the whole thing.
COM and CORBA and so on and so forth do a reasonably good job of bridging most gaps, but unfortunately they have a learning curve best described as "astronomical".
It's obviously an area there's a lot of work left to do in.
I'll say "Wow! This music rocks! But it sucks that it's not encoded at a really high bitrate."
And then I'll go BUY THE CD.
The only complaint I'd have is if I'm not *allowed* to get high-quality music. Like, say, for example, if the only version I could play is the DRM'ed low-quality version. As a purely hypothetical example.
How many do we need? Two. Personally, I'd pick C++ and assembly, though I know quite a few people who'd pick Java and assembly. (And assembly's only so we can make OSes.)
How many do we want? More.
Imagine I want to do some quick parsing. Both C++ and Java suck at this. So I'll use Perl instead.
Imagine I want to write code for a GPU. Sure, I could do it in bytecode. I could do it with some library for C++. Or I could write a custom language - say, Cg or Sh - that works well for that purpose.
Imagine I want to embed code in a virtual machine. I wouldn't want to try this with C++ or Java, but Python does it easily.
Any other languages you've used occasionally? Shellscript? VB? Javascript? (Yes, that's right, all your web browsers must now also function as C++ interpreters!) PHP? SQL?
I consider myself an expert in precisely one language - C++. I can get by in Java, Python, SQL, C#, and PHP. I suck at shellscript and Perl. All of these languages have their uses, and I use them all when it's appropriate. (Well, except Perl, which I pretty much avoid.)
On the other hand - learning new languages isn't hard. I can look at just about any sane language (no Brainfuck comments, please) and tell what it does quickly. I say "I can get by in Python" because I realized I needed to write some Python code, and learned enough Python in a day to do it. I'm told that people who learn human languages can do something similar.
So it's not like your analogy at all - it's more like if you wanted to work at the United Nations and said you knew English and Spanish, and also that you could learn new languages easily, and they said "Okay, go learn Sanskrit and Tagalog."
Very lossy. They "started" as 32-bit color, and, well, they're textures. They tend to be pretty monochromatic. It's amazing how many bits you can get rid of when your source is highly monochromatic.:) Every world texture in the game is compressed, and, well, how many texture artifacts did you see?:P
(There are a few, but you have to kind of know what you're looking for - they look surprisingly like MPEG2 decoding artifacts, despite absolutely no similarity between the algorithms.)
And thanks for the compliment ^^
The problem with extra content is that somebody has to generate it and debug it. I mean, yeah, we would have loved to add tons of new character classes and weapons and levels and quests, but the fact is that spending twice as long making the game wouldn't have generated twice the sales. Even all the different colorings on the pieces of armor - I watched our artists wandering around the office for *days* with long reams of paper, doublechecking that every single armor color matched up properly (and boy did I not envy them, although I did the same thing with the minimaps, so there you have it.)
Content, unfortunately, is surprisingly expensive to produce.:/
A game that I worked on - Everquest: Champions of Norrath - used the entire dual-layer DVD. In fact, if we'd had more, we could have used it. In fact, we ended up having to remove some of the data for the international version because the voice files were too big to fit. I personally wrote a compression algorithm to compress our textures down to about half their previous size (and yes, they were compressed before also.)
I think one level had around 10gb of textures uncompressed, brought down to under half a gig after heavy processing.
That said, if we'd had access to a really fast processor and GPU, none of that would have been necessary. So I don't know what people can use 50gb for, given that the system is extremely fast.
The latest was the search bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen when searching in the page. How brilliant! After years of search boxes popping up on top of the text that you're reading, someone figured to drop it in a place that wasn't intrusive.
I installed the new version of Firefox the day it was released, and didn't notice anything different. I went to search for something, hit ctrl-f, typed normally, and found it, no problems.
About ten seconds later I suddenly realized "wait a second, where was the search box?" I hit ctrl-f again and . . . basically stared in total surprise.
It's brilliant. It's simple. I can't think of a single downside beyond "will people think to look for it there". Kudos to the Firefox team.
The only setting change I need now is something to prompt for overwrite when I try to create two identically-named bookmarks - this is a feature I use all the time in IE, and it's literally the only thing keeping me from switching over to Mozilla 100%.
However, all the ideas I have are currently being implemented by one person or another, at least largely, and I don't really have the time to spend on duplicating code.
On the other hand, I definitely have time to explain why poorly-thought-out "solutions" are doomed.:)
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (X) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Why can't these changes be integrated into SMTP-as-we-know-it?
It's all very nice to say "it needs to change", but until you explain why changing it is the best solution - or even vaguely useful - it's not going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . .
BAHAHAHAHahhahahahahahah *snicker* *chortle* hahahahahah
Sheesh, I'd trade him in a second. Not because I want the money itself - I don't - but because I want to found my own games company, and for that, having a lot of money would help.
What's wrong with people when "I'm rich" immediately leads to "I have nothing to do with my life"? There's more to life than getting rich!
What would you have done if someone's computer had broken down and they'd sued you?
:P
I presume you didn't have insurance.
Not quite CD quality - I'm an audio snob, rip my CDs into FLAC, and while Launch is mighty close, it's not quite the same quality level.
:)
Which should come as no surprise.
But it's damn close, and I shell out $36/yr so I can use it at the high quality with no commercial breaks, and it is probably responsible for hundreds of dollars of CD sales from me alone.
I just wish it didn't require IE.
I believe you have missed the entire point of my post. I wasn't talking about *any* of that from a political point of view, I was talking about it from a technical point of view.
:)
If you want, change "asking Linux" into "The earth has been invaded by aliens, and they will destroy the entire galaxy unless Linus Torvalds removes zlib entirely from all distributions of Linux". I realize it's a completely nonsensical proposition, but I don't care how likely that is, I'm merely pointing out how difficult a job Microsoft is looking at when people say "Just remove Media Player".
And no, that's not a typo. Linus Torvalds, removing zlib from every Linux package on the planet. Think it's impossible? You're right - and that's what many people are asking when they want Media Player removed entirely.
Betcha MS is just removing the frontend. It's a few orders of magnitude easier.
There's some subtlety with the media player that I don't think most people realize. Like any good media player app, the Microsoft media player is made up of two major components - the frontend and the backend. The frontend handles minor things like displaying the video and interface, the backend handles the actual decoding.
On Windows, the backend is an integral part of the operating system. Many other applications use it, many other applications plug into it - it's designed to be a central location for codec storage, and it succeeds in that goal admirably.
The frontend, obviously, is not.
Removing the frontend would be trivial. Removing the backend would be devastating because of all the programs that rely on it - akin to removing Internet Explorer entirely, for the exact same set of reasons.
I don't pretend to know which they've been ordered to remove. I don't put it past them for the courts to have said "remove Media Player" and for Microsoft to have said "aha! If we take that to mean the backend, we can argue that it would damage the user experience!" But it's worth pointing out that the bulk of what most moderately-technical people would consider Media Player - the chunk that does the actual decoding and playing of media - is, in fact, pretty deeply built into Windows. As is Internet Explorer. (I've seen many many MANY apps that embed IE in one way or another.)
An analogy - this would be similar to asking Linux to remove zlib entirely. Because, you know, not many people ever really need to compress things, right? Therefore zlib couldn't be that important, right?
Sometimes the user interface is only a small part of the usage a piece of software has within the system.
Now, it *would* be entirely reasonable to ask Microsoft to provide hooks to replace these modules. However that would be an extremely nontrivial programming job - I might demand it for Longhorn, but asking that they spend less than a year or so on it is really just begging for serious problems.
When mathematics became profitable.
1) I'm a game developer. Therefore, don't whine to me about how hard it is to make a living writing games. Trust me. I know.
2) Yes, I would have removed it from their HD afterwards. (Isn't it funny that everyone immediately assumes I'm lying about that?)
3) As a consumer, I found their copy protection overbuilt and will not be buying games from them in the future. They also lost at least one other sale on their current game because of this. I know of absolutely nobody who decided to buy it because it was made marginally harder to pirate due to this copy protection. Therefore, the copy protection method has failed.
Honestly - why does this make it harder to pirate? Because it requires you to spend seventeen seconds more looking for a crack? I don't see how anyone can possibly argue that their copy protection is effective, or even a net gain from their perspective.
I suppose it might depend on what you're doing with it. I was going for "Hi, I'm trying to install this on a friend's machine so I can show her the multiplayer and delete it afterwards" and they basically told me to buy another copy.
In any case, I paid for it, I figure I have the right to play it wherever I want - without having to justify myself on a case-by-case basis.
I bought Gish, but after discovering how their copy protection worked, I ended up warning all my friends about it. None of them bought it. Quick summary: you get X activations (i.e. installs), and once you're out of activations, sucks to be you. You might be able to convince them to increase the number of activations, but don't count on it - I tried and they refused. (I was trying to install it at a friend's house so we could play multiplayer.)
:)
I don't really regret buying it - what I do regret is that I now have to keep a crack on a server so I can play it if I want. Several of my friends that don't want to deal with cracks simply didn't buy it.
If there was ever a perfect example of why overbearing copy protection is counterproductive, this is it.
Why is everyone complaining about this prize? Oh no, earth orbit, it's too hard! Let's just take our X-prize, go home, and never launch again. Waah waah.
WHAT THE HELL.
If anyone on the planet would say "wonderful, now we've got an incentive to get to the next stage", I'd think it would be the people here on Slashdot - but all of a sudden it's too difficult to reach orbit, with a fifty million dollar budget, in half a decade?
Did anyone really look at the X-prize and say "Oh, that's easy, no problem"? Then why are you looking at this and assuming it will be a problem? There's a lot of time to work on it and at least one group that's already a significant fraction of the way there.
If you think it's hard, okay, sure, no argument, it's hard - but how many times have you learned something new by practicing easy stuff over and over again? It's an opportunity to invent some new low-cost fabrication and launching techniques. It's research. And possibly, it'll even lead to true commercial spaceflight.
I think this is a fantastic turn of events. I can't wait to see who decides to tackle it.
Funny, I think that's a pretty lousy rebuttal. I think the big sticking point here - at least the big sticking point I would be looking at, if I were Sun - is the binary incompatability. And yet he doesn't have *any* good arguments for it. Most of them sum down to "it's too hard". And, you know, if he thinks it's too hard, that's fine - but "it's too hard" isn't a reason that Sun should look at and say "oh, okay, that's fine then".
Windows has binary compatability. Windows runs in both SMP mode and single-processor mode. Windows might not have as glitteringly perfect of a driver model as Linux, but let's be honest here, it gets the job done.
He's given a lot of good reasons Linux doesn't have binary compatibility. Okay. Sure. How about listing the reasons Sun wants binary compatibility and showing how those goals are achievable in other ways, instead of just throwing away Sun's requirements as insignificant?
I personally am not (I'm working at Google :) ) but I don't know if Snowblind is or not. However, they have a forum frequented by the admins, so if you ask there somebody will know.
:P
:) I'm really not sure how much prettier it's possible to make a PS2 game - at least, I can't think of any resources we left untapped or any serious inefficiencies (well, one, that I thought of a year after the game was released, but.)
Whether they'll tell you or not is another matter entirely.
And yes, the PS2 does struggle quite a bit on that game - we're maxing out an amazing amount of the PS2's hardware
Depending on how you're looking at it, that's either not a problem or not possible. :)
I know we had a ton of useful tools, all of which worked extremely well. However, somebody still has to code them. I don't believe it's possible to write a general toolkit for games (in another way of looking at it, I believe we already have one - it's called C++) and so I think what we've got now is as good as it will get.
This says nothing with regards to lousy programmers who don't understand how important tools are, of course - if your level designer has to talk to a programmer for every small change, something's seriously wrong. But even if the tools are completely perfect, the designer isn't - people make mistakes, and so everything (EVERYTHING) has to be tested.
Personally I use text files as the links. Yes, this means I end up doing things step-by-step, but for my work that's usually what I do anyway.
.net family is an exception - I've made some great tools combining C++ and C# with .net, and to be honest, I was very very impressed by the whole thing.
You're right, with some exceptions, languages aren't very interoperable. Python is an exception, and the entire
COM and CORBA and so on and so forth do a reasonably good job of bridging most gaps, but unfortunately they have a learning curve best described as "astronomical".
It's obviously an area there's a lot of work left to do in.
I'll be arguing then, absolutely!
I'll say "Wow! This music rocks! But it sucks that it's not encoded at a really high bitrate."
And then I'll go BUY THE CD.
The only complaint I'd have is if I'm not *allowed* to get high-quality music. Like, say, for example, if the only version I could play is the DRM'ed low-quality version. As a purely hypothetical example.
Cough cough.
How many do we need? Two. Personally, I'd pick C++ and assembly, though I know quite a few people who'd pick Java and assembly. (And assembly's only so we can make OSes.)
How many do we want? More.
Imagine I want to do some quick parsing. Both C++ and Java suck at this. So I'll use Perl instead.
Imagine I want to write code for a GPU. Sure, I could do it in bytecode. I could do it with some library for C++. Or I could write a custom language - say, Cg or Sh - that works well for that purpose.
Imagine I want to embed code in a virtual machine. I wouldn't want to try this with C++ or Java, but Python does it easily.
Any other languages you've used occasionally? Shellscript? VB? Javascript? (Yes, that's right, all your web browsers must now also function as C++ interpreters!) PHP? SQL?
I consider myself an expert in precisely one language - C++. I can get by in Java, Python, SQL, C#, and PHP. I suck at shellscript and Perl. All of these languages have their uses, and I use them all when it's appropriate. (Well, except Perl, which I pretty much avoid.)
On the other hand - learning new languages isn't hard. I can look at just about any sane language (no Brainfuck comments, please) and tell what it does quickly. I say "I can get by in Python" because I realized I needed to write some Python code, and learned enough Python in a day to do it. I'm told that people who learn human languages can do something similar.
So it's not like your analogy at all - it's more like if you wanted to work at the United Nations and said you knew English and Spanish, and also that you could learn new languages easily, and they said "Okay, go learn Sanskrit and Tagalog."
Very lossy. They "started" as 32-bit color, and, well, they're textures. They tend to be pretty monochromatic. It's amazing how many bits you can get rid of when your source is highly monochromatic. :) Every world texture in the game is compressed, and, well, how many texture artifacts did you see? :P
:/
(There are a few, but you have to kind of know what you're looking for - they look surprisingly like MPEG2 decoding artifacts, despite absolutely no similarity between the algorithms.)
And thanks for the compliment ^^
The problem with extra content is that somebody has to generate it and debug it. I mean, yeah, we would have loved to add tons of new character classes and weapons and levels and quests, but the fact is that spending twice as long making the game wouldn't have generated twice the sales. Even all the different colorings on the pieces of armor - I watched our artists wandering around the office for *days* with long reams of paper, doublechecking that every single armor color matched up properly (and boy did I not envy them, although I did the same thing with the minimaps, so there you have it.)
Content, unfortunately, is surprisingly expensive to produce.
A game that I worked on - Everquest: Champions of Norrath - used the entire dual-layer DVD. In fact, if we'd had more, we could have used it. In fact, we ended up having to remove some of the data for the international version because the voice files were too big to fit. I personally wrote a compression algorithm to compress our textures down to about half their previous size (and yes, they were compressed before also.)
I think one level had around 10gb of textures uncompressed, brought down to under half a gig after heavy processing.
That said, if we'd had access to a really fast processor and GPU, none of that would have been necessary. So I don't know what people can use 50gb for, given that the system is extremely fast.
But maybe it's not as fast as I think it is.
The latest was the search bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen when searching in the page. How brilliant! After years of search boxes popping up on top of the text that you're reading, someone figured to drop it in a place that wasn't intrusive.
I installed the new version of Firefox the day it was released, and didn't notice anything different. I went to search for something, hit ctrl-f, typed normally, and found it, no problems.
About ten seconds later I suddenly realized "wait a second, where was the search box?" I hit ctrl-f again and . . . basically stared in total surprise.
It's brilliant. It's simple. I can't think of a single downside beyond "will people think to look for it there". Kudos to the Firefox team.
The only setting change I need now is something to prompt for overwrite when I try to create two identically-named bookmarks - this is a feature I use all the time in IE, and it's literally the only thing keeping me from switching over to Mozilla 100%.
Even worse, they'll be right. Look through the comments that have been modded up to +5.
What makes you think I haven't?
:)
However, all the ideas I have are currently being implemented by one person or another, at least largely, and I don't really have the time to spend on duplicating code.
On the other hand, I definitely have time to explain why poorly-thought-out "solutions" are doomed.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I recently got a much higher-paying job. I've been planning to get a nice big HDTV and a Tivo.
Guess I won't be doing that anymore.
Watch their sales drop . . .
How would you change it?
Why can't these changes be integrated into SMTP-as-we-know-it?
It's all very nice to say "it needs to change", but until you explain why changing it is the best solution - or even vaguely useful - it's not going to happen.