If you want people to not shoot civilians you build punishments into the game for doing so. In America's Army you can blow away your drill instructor if you want but you end up in prison. In Brothers In Arms you can frag your teammates but you die.
So it's not impossible to punish bad play while putting some realism in there. For example the penalty could be to withhold promotions / achievements, or to make the population "turn" against you (adding crowds of stone throwers, snipers and extra ambushes) making the game harder to the point of impossible, or even terminating play for deliberate kills. Adding civilians adds realism and probably makes the game more tense too.
Yeah, because I want someone to be able to steal my key file and have access to my files forever.
Well then, encrypt your stuff before you save it off. e.g. an encrypted zip file. I strongly believe DropBox should do more to support encryption (e.g. allowing users to designate an encrypted folder and encryption key which never leaves the client PC) but the reality is you can encrypt to it already.
No, they have. They realized that they were completely dependent on Google to draw in customers for them, and that they had no way to differentiate themselves from a half-dozen competitors that are in exactly the same business, not to mention any number of HTC wannabes that could pop up at any moment.
They're not completely dependent on Google. HTC also produce Windows and even BREW phones. Of course it may be those other handsets aren't exactly flying off shelves but then HTC should be asking why they're selling so many Android phones and why they're questioning getting their own OS.
I certainly don't see much merit in using WebOS instead unless HTC are going to go the whole hog and open source it. They simply won't get the interest otherwise.
You have to wonder what was going on in politicians heads to pass this stupid law. It's so easy to bypass and so draconian that it stifles free speech and does nothing to protect against what it is supposed to exist for.
I'm quite certain that Korea could have implemented a national OpenID server (perhaps operated privately and under strict rules about information disclosure) where people could register and create aliases but still be accountable should someone pay a large deposit and file the legal paperwork to reveal who they were.
I expect Windows 8 will feel like a tablet on a tablet and will feel like a desktop on your desktop. If you have a tablet and a dock, you'll likely get to choose which experience you get depending on if it's docked / undocked.
If you watch The Prisoner in HD, it looks absolutely stunning. You wouldn't believe it was a 60s show. That's because it was shot in 35mm colour and transferred to VT. I expect other shows are filmed in a similar way. So ironically some 60s and 70s shows will benefit hugely from HD. But does that extend into the 90s?
Was Star Trek The Next Generation shot on film, or on video tape? If the latter, what exactly can be done with the content? Did the studio record to higher than broadcast resolution? I suppose they could sharpen it and upscale content, and redo titles and some of the effects. The higher res and audio / video codecs might yield a superior presentation. But is it really HD? Seems a bit deceptive to claim it is if it isn't.
The beauty of web of trust is it opens up all kinds of models. Some people might prefer CAs (which sign PGP keys already), some notaries, some their ISPs, some their business associates, others their vendors / ISPs. Some will charge, some won't.
The rationale I've always seen for throwing up a big warning for self-signed certificates and not for plaintext is that HTTPS in the address bar with an unverifiable public key gives the end user a false sense of security.
That might have been the intent but in reality it splits websites into two groups - those who are prepared to pay a tax on security and those who aren't. For the sake of a secure web there has to be a cert which perhaps has a different trust model to CAs but still allows crypto and without a price in time, effort or money.
Most cities have notaries. Why shouldn't it be possible to turn up at your local notary with your credentials and get them to digitally sign your key? I'm sure there would be other ad hoc ways to bestow some trust. e.g. your ISP / host might sign your cert since you're running on their site, or your business suppliers might sign your key and you theirs. Basically the web of trust could have a formal network of signers and an informal network of signers which would form the web of trust.
I also wonder how big a deal trust actually is for many sites. Many sites run plaintext because trust doesn't matter so much or the hassle of getting a cert is greater than the requirement for trust. So what does it really matter if they run a cert which has not been signed by anyone else. At the very least it would also allow encryption where none existed before which hopefully everyone (except governments, nosy enterprise admins) would see as a good thing.
I want to know why browsers don't extend SSL to support PGP signed certs. Browsers would allow users to browse a web of trust, including perhaps "notaries" to establish whether they trust the site or not. Obviously it wouldn't be suitable for every site, but it would certainly would for personal sites where the hassle of obtaining a CA signed cert means many sites don't even bother with encryption at all.
Unless Ubuntu uses some screwy scheduler, or has some nasty process in the background stealing CPU, it's likely that any performance issues are nothing with the kernel in the first place. It seems more likely that it would be display related, especially window manager / X11 related. That would be especially true if the window manager is compositing surfaces and therefore taking chunks of the GPU's memory, or other resources.
Yes Microsoft is evil. It may have had its wings clipped but there is no doubt that if it hadn't we might not even recognize the internet that exists today. And Apple is even more evil.
I didn't say it would be easy, but it would have to be what they do if they don't want to treat their customers as pirates. I'd note that requiring all potentially 1 million+ registrants to contact customer service as the GP suggested would likely be MORE work than this way would be. A few largely automated processes would whittle the list of probable pirates down to a fraction.
How the hell does a patent so vague and obvious get granted when there is so much prior art? Video conferencing, IRC, VR, muds / MMOs, remote controlled sex devices, outdoor screens, pub quizes, remote TV broadcasts, etc. etc. There is prior art stretching back years.
You open a support ticket, show proof of purchase and a picture of the media/CD key or whatever they require, and they reallocate the proper CD key back to your account. No biggie.
No biggie? Legit customers would be treated by default as pirates unless they supplied proof of purchase, and until they did that could risk everything from their account being locked to being perma banned.
A correct and more sensible option would be for AMD to supply Steam with a list of email addresses of users who registered. Probably 90% of those are using the same email address on Steam and can be eliminated. Then you audit the hardware of the remainder through Steam (and it's already capable of this) and see who is running AMD hardware that the promotion applied to eliminate them too. Then you look for the date that the exploit got into the wild (probably obvious from a graph of # registrations per day) and you eliminate all of them before that date. Finally you're probably looking at a small % of legit owners to track down. You might then mailshot every game owner and tell them the game will be disabled in 10 days unless they run it on the proper hardware and then you eliminate people who do that. Finally you mailshot again and warn them to contact customer service with proof of purchase within 30 days or risk a perma ban.
Is it a major screwup by AMD? Yes. But Valve and AMD should make all reasonable efforts to not inconvenience legit users. Only as a last resort should a ban or account freeze should be necessary.
It sounds like Groupon's communications VP walked just prior to this email going out. Of course it might be a coincidence or it might be that he was strongly advised not to do what he was doing, chose to do it anyway and the VP resigned rather than be party to it.
I agree it's not out of the gates yet but it does exist in prototypes and products have been announced that will sport it. From what is known and can be seen on YouTube clips (by people walking around trade shows), it is a far more compelling solution than e-ink color. It has a fast refresh speed, possibly enough for video but certainly more than sufficient for a UI, it produces vivid colours, and it's low power tech like e-ink. It can even supposedly be backlit but it will make do with ambient light. Even on the vids up on YouTube you can see there is a vast difference in quality between the two.
Groupon have massive overheads, countless other companies offer similar services (often on more favourable terms for businesses), they're generating bad word of mouth everywhere they go and their daily deals are turning to crap. Businesses are slowly realising that offering the same goods and services at 25% income to a bunch of random freeloaders is not a good promotion. Groupon site visitors are slowly realising that more and more offers are along the lines of fish pedicures, eyebrow waxes, haircuts and so on.
There was already some fairly convincing comment when the IPO was first announced that Groupon operated like a ponzi with later investors paying for the early investors to exit. The IPO, should it ever happen has disaster written all over it. I wonder what deep discounts investors can look forward to on their stock when the realisation sinks in.
Even the massively-hyped Web 2.0 technologies have shown to be failures when applied to real problems, where data actually has value and reliability is important. Ruby on Rails applications often have horrible performance and poor maintainability. NoSQL databases can barely be called "databases" due to their tendency to lose data and the most inopportune times. JavaScript is an absolute joke. HTML5 is by far the shittiest standard of our day.
Exactly. Amazon sell apps, movies, music, games as well as books. It's obviously in their interests to sell a device capable of receiving them all of that content even if it upsets some purists who want e-ink devices. I'm sure they'll supply e-ink for some time to come, possibly even in colour. But the future is clearly not e-ink.
No, the technology is poised to be amazing and will really take off. Think about all of the books you've ever read, now think about the pictures in them. Black and white right? Unless they included a few extra glossy pages at high cost? Now you can add good quality color images to what are essentially paperback books at no cost. This will be great for maps, diagrams, and any other application which doesn't specifically need the highest quality images. Even at just 4096 colors 300 ppi color e-ink will be an amazing game changer. and it is an impressive advancement.
Amazing tech? It's the existing 16 level grayscale e-ink with a layer on top of red, green, and blue filters which turn on or off. It's 4096 colours because 3 grayscale pixels tinted for each colour produces 4096 combinations. It will produce a low contrast tinted display with all the drawbacks of e-ink. Perhaps it's better than purely monochrome e-ink but it certainly isn't a game changer.
I expect the industry to grab an alternate solution with both hands at the first opportunity. I mentioned Mirasol because it is a low power display which produces vivid colours and does it with a high refresh rate. The tech has been demoed at trade shows for over a year now so clearly something is being worked on which will use it. I expect when it does appear the industry will grab it with both hands, or settle for OLED.
With Mirasol around the corner and greater consumer preference for responsive colour displays, e-ink color is going to be DOA.
It is just e-ink with a coloured filter over the top. To imagine the effect print out a picture in grayscale on a piece of grey cardboard and colour it in with pencils. It will look awful, washed out, faded like some colourized B&W picture.
Any one could have figured out what they were up to. Amazon's app store makes zero sense in any other context. It is also obvious from looking at Barnes & Noble's success with the Nook Color that Amazon would have to respond.
It's pretty damned certain Google knew it too and probably had high level discussions about it too. The problem with Amazon is they're an Apple wannabe and they want to have their cake and eat it too. I'm sure Google knew this too and considered that withholding the Android 3.x source would be a good way to bring them around to a more open platform. As it turns out it didn't happen but I reckon that was the play Google were making.
As for the length of time Amazon's device was in development, I don't see it as a big deal if it started on 2.x. If 3.x had been made available to them, or if 4.x becomes available to them, you can bet they'll move up eventually.
Amazon is likely to sell tens of millions of these things. Possibly as many as all other Android tablets combined. Furthermore, since they don't ship with Google's apps they are competing against the Android platform. So if you can't comprehend why Google might consider Amazon a threat and wish to withhold source you clearly aren't thinking it through.
I wonder if someone shouldn't produce a script which does this so lots of sites can implement similar behaviour. Not just Facebook but also Google+, Digg etc.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's not impossible to punish bad play while putting some realism in there. For example the penalty could be to withhold promotions / achievements, or to make the population "turn" against you (adding crowds of stone throwers, snipers and extra ambushes) making the game harder to the point of impossible, or even terminating play for deliberate kills. Adding civilians adds realism and probably makes the game more tense too.
Yeah, because I want someone to be able to steal my key file and have access to my files forever.
Well then, encrypt your stuff before you save it off. e.g. an encrypted zip file. I strongly believe DropBox should do more to support encryption (e.g. allowing users to designate an encrypted folder and encryption key which never leaves the client PC) but the reality is you can encrypt to it already.
No, they have. They realized that they were completely dependent on Google to draw in customers for them, and that they had no way to differentiate themselves from a half-dozen competitors that are in exactly the same business, not to mention any number of HTC wannabes that could pop up at any moment.
They're not completely dependent on Google. HTC also produce Windows and even BREW phones. Of course it may be those other handsets aren't exactly flying off shelves but then HTC should be asking why they're selling so many Android phones and why they're questioning getting their own OS.
I certainly don't see much merit in using WebOS instead unless HTC are going to go the whole hog and open source it. They simply won't get the interest otherwise.
I'm quite certain that Korea could have implemented a national OpenID server (perhaps operated privately and under strict rules about information disclosure) where people could register and create aliases but still be accountable should someone pay a large deposit and file the legal paperwork to reveal who they were.
I expect Windows 8 will feel like a tablet on a tablet and will feel like a desktop on your desktop. If you have a tablet and a dock, you'll likely get to choose which experience you get depending on if it's docked / undocked.
Was Star Trek The Next Generation shot on film, or on video tape? If the latter, what exactly can be done with the content? Did the studio record to higher than broadcast resolution? I suppose they could sharpen it and upscale content, and redo titles and some of the effects. The higher res and audio / video codecs might yield a superior presentation. But is it really HD? Seems a bit deceptive to claim it is if it isn't.
The rationale I've always seen for throwing up a big warning for self-signed certificates and not for plaintext is that HTTPS in the address bar with an unverifiable public key gives the end user a false sense of security.
That might have been the intent but in reality it splits websites into two groups - those who are prepared to pay a tax on security and those who aren't. For the sake of a secure web there has to be a cert which perhaps has a different trust model to CAs but still allows crypto and without a price in time, effort or money.
A city-wide web of trust is easy:
Most cities have notaries. Why shouldn't it be possible to turn up at your local notary with your credentials and get them to digitally sign your key? I'm sure there would be other ad hoc ways to bestow some trust. e.g. your ISP / host might sign your cert since you're running on their site, or your business suppliers might sign your key and you theirs. Basically the web of trust could have a formal network of signers and an informal network of signers which would form the web of trust.
I also wonder how big a deal trust actually is for many sites. Many sites run plaintext because trust doesn't matter so much or the hassle of getting a cert is greater than the requirement for trust. So what does it really matter if they run a cert which has not been signed by anyone else. At the very least it would also allow encryption where none existed before which hopefully everyone (except governments, nosy enterprise admins) would see as a good thing.
I want to know why browsers don't extend SSL to support PGP signed certs. Browsers would allow users to browse a web of trust, including perhaps "notaries" to establish whether they trust the site or not. Obviously it wouldn't be suitable for every site, but it would certainly would for personal sites where the hassle of obtaining a CA signed cert means many sites don't even bother with encryption at all.
Unless Ubuntu uses some screwy scheduler, or has some nasty process in the background stealing CPU, it's likely that any performance issues are nothing with the kernel in the first place. It seems more likely that it would be display related, especially window manager / X11 related. That would be especially true if the window manager is compositing surfaces and therefore taking chunks of the GPU's memory, or other resources.
Yes Microsoft is evil. It may have had its wings clipped but there is no doubt that if it hadn't we might not even recognize the internet that exists today. And Apple is even more evil.
Well they never did in the past so no.
I didn't say it would be easy, but it would have to be what they do if they don't want to treat their customers as pirates. I'd note that requiring all potentially 1 million+ registrants to contact customer service as the GP suggested would likely be MORE work than this way would be. A few largely automated processes would whittle the list of probable pirates down to a fraction.
How the hell does a patent so vague and obvious get granted when there is so much prior art? Video conferencing, IRC, VR, muds / MMOs, remote controlled sex devices, outdoor screens, pub quizes, remote TV broadcasts, etc. etc. There is prior art stretching back years.
You open a support ticket, show proof of purchase and a picture of the media/CD key or whatever they require, and they reallocate the proper CD key back to your account. No biggie.
No biggie? Legit customers would be treated by default as pirates unless they supplied proof of purchase, and until they did that could risk everything from their account being locked to being perma banned.
A correct and more sensible option would be for AMD to supply Steam with a list of email addresses of users who registered. Probably 90% of those are using the same email address on Steam and can be eliminated. Then you audit the hardware of the remainder through Steam (and it's already capable of this) and see who is running AMD hardware that the promotion applied to eliminate them too. Then you look for the date that the exploit got into the wild (probably obvious from a graph of # registrations per day) and you eliminate all of them before that date. Finally you're probably looking at a small % of legit owners to track down. You might then mailshot every game owner and tell them the game will be disabled in 10 days unless they run it on the proper hardware and then you eliminate people who do that. Finally you mailshot again and warn them to contact customer service with proof of purchase within 30 days or risk a perma ban.
Is it a major screwup by AMD? Yes. But Valve and AMD should make all reasonable efforts to not inconvenience legit users. Only as a last resort should a ban or account freeze should be necessary.
It sounds like Groupon's communications VP walked just prior to this email going out. Of course it might be a coincidence or it might be that he was strongly advised not to do what he was doing, chose to do it anyway and the VP resigned rather than be party to it.
I agree it's not out of the gates yet but it does exist in prototypes and products have been announced that will sport it. From what is known and can be seen on YouTube clips (by people walking around trade shows), it is a far more compelling solution than e-ink color. It has a fast refresh speed, possibly enough for video but certainly more than sufficient for a UI, it produces vivid colours, and it's low power tech like e-ink. It can even supposedly be backlit but it will make do with ambient light. Even on the vids up on YouTube you can see there is a vast difference in quality between the two.
There was already some fairly convincing comment when the IPO was first announced that Groupon operated like a ponzi with later investors paying for the early investors to exit. The IPO, should it ever happen has disaster written all over it. I wonder what deep discounts investors can look forward to on their stock when the realisation sinks in.
Even the massively-hyped Web 2.0 technologies have shown to be failures when applied to real problems, where data actually has value and reliability is important. Ruby on Rails applications often have horrible performance and poor maintainability. NoSQL databases can barely be called "databases" due to their tendency to lose data and the most inopportune times. JavaScript is an absolute joke. HTML5 is by far the shittiest standard of our day.
Does netcraft confirm it?
Exactly. Amazon sell apps, movies, music, games as well as books. It's obviously in their interests to sell a device capable of receiving them all of that content even if it upsets some purists who want e-ink devices. I'm sure they'll supply e-ink for some time to come, possibly even in colour. But the future is clearly not e-ink.
No, the technology is poised to be amazing and will really take off. Think about all of the books you've ever read, now think about the pictures in them. Black and white right? Unless they included a few extra glossy pages at high cost? Now you can add good quality color images to what are essentially paperback books at no cost. This will be great for maps, diagrams, and any other application which doesn't specifically need the highest quality images. Even at just 4096 colors 300 ppi color e-ink will be an amazing game changer. and it is an impressive advancement.
Amazing tech? It's the existing 16 level grayscale e-ink with a layer on top of red, green, and blue filters which turn on or off. It's 4096 colours because 3 grayscale pixels tinted for each colour produces 4096 combinations. It will produce a low contrast tinted display with all the drawbacks of e-ink. Perhaps it's better than purely monochrome e-ink but it certainly isn't a game changer.
I expect the industry to grab an alternate solution with both hands at the first opportunity. I mentioned Mirasol because it is a low power display which produces vivid colours and does it with a high refresh rate. The tech has been demoed at trade shows for over a year now so clearly something is being worked on which will use it. I expect when it does appear the industry will grab it with both hands, or settle for OLED.
It is just e-ink with a coloured filter over the top. To imagine the effect print out a picture in grayscale on a piece of grey cardboard and colour it in with pencils. It will look awful, washed out, faded like some colourized B&W picture.
It's pretty damned certain Google knew it too and probably had high level discussions about it too. The problem with Amazon is they're an Apple wannabe and they want to have their cake and eat it too. I'm sure Google knew this too and considered that withholding the Android 3.x source would be a good way to bring them around to a more open platform. As it turns out it didn't happen but I reckon that was the play Google were making.
As for the length of time Amazon's device was in development, I don't see it as a big deal if it started on 2.x. If 3.x had been made available to them, or if 4.x becomes available to them, you can bet they'll move up eventually.
Amazon is likely to sell tens of millions of these things. Possibly as many as all other Android tablets combined. Furthermore, since they don't ship with Google's apps they are competing against the Android platform. So if you can't comprehend why Google might consider Amazon a threat and wish to withhold source you clearly aren't thinking it through.
I wonder if someone shouldn't produce a script which does this so lots of sites can implement similar behaviour. Not just Facebook but also Google+, Digg etc.