Given that the code is freely available to bypass this if you really need to, supporting the format's ability to enforce versioning controls (which is what stopping your average user from editing the text is) or stopping the printing 400 page documents when you don't want users to seems like a useful thing to me. As long as there is a way to get round this, which there is when the source and diffs to switch it are available, then this is hardly the end of the world.
Perhaps they should include the change so that it can be made if necessary, but ship the binary of the copy protect version. This one also is more likely to keep Adobe off our backs.
"atom bombs (not thermonuclear weapons, mind you - we're talking Fat Man and Little Boy here"
I suggest we get the UN involved here. These non security council member organisations are suspected of owning weapons of mass destruction. A Thetan spokesalien said in their defense "Its all lies; the most we have are a few low megatonnage atom bombs, nothing bigger than a medium-sized town could get wiped out with one of them"
Indeed. But then people taking the test with nervous sweaty hands are obviously the true belivers and should be elevated to the higher planes (at their own expense, of course).
"Microsoft has an 800-number for people to call and speak with someone to get the activation code"
I thought the point was that this code was going to be specific to a particular box's hardware? If they have no net then you can't use a network card MAC address, and I'm guessing that people aren't going to be too happy reading a bignum digit number correctly down the phone to be given another one back in any case.
If we get QMP, then we will probably have quantum encryption up and running. Since this means that any recipient can tell if their message has been intercepted you can be sure if your one-time pad has been safely and securely transmitted. From that point, any interceptor doesn't stand a chance; every message looks like every other message of the same length.
I don't disagree with you on the subject of your common-or-garden radio wave, but our mobile phones are right near the top of the range labelled 'radio' (the 3G band is a significant fraction (either 1/4 or 1/2, can't remember which) of the bottom of the microwave spectrum, which gets blocked easily. Combined with the aforementioned low power our impromptu experiments in private (plus a quick play in the pub) showed that there was no danger of being blocked outside the door of the establishment - we couldn't even block phones at the other end of the room.
I've actually seen tests of the blocking devices, and they are quite low-level radiation. Any decent piece of wall, even window glass does a good job of negating their effects. Blocking seeping out into the street is highly unlikely unless the cafe owner was to try blocking their outside tables, in which case they should not be awarded their license for the things.
One of my friends bought one; they are depressingly weak. As a test (don't worry, no calls were made) one person sitting in the middle of a movie theatre couldn't block the signal level of another sitting at the back. Most of these devices (in order to not get in too much trouble over people playing with them inappropriately) only work about line-of-sight for blocking.
Well, if your phone or conversation wrecks the atmosphere of a film for me, then thats my entry fee wasted, yes. Why do you think DVD sales are so high? Its because people like me who actually want to WATCH a film can do so without having to put up with the rest of the audience ruining the atmosphere for us.
It may well be of little practical use, but with its USB ports to hook a hub up to I'd give better odds on Apache running on a PS2 than I would on Nintendo's second biggest draw after Mario doing so.
You're correct about screen size (although you can hold a phone a lot closer to you than a 14" tv), so I'm sure that the designers will have to be careful about single-pixel bullets etc, but the old lo-res atari with a one button joystick reflects the constraints of the phones very well.
The only flaw in that plan is that any necessary central server for banners trashes the advantage of p2p; ie you still have a central server to kill. Any proper p2p solution involves getting rid of a showstopping central server, not just cutting down the bandwidth one needs.
Well, on the one side, he successfully raised $10,000 capital to launch fairtunes, but on the other he has singularly failed to get that back in revenue on the site, so raising the $15,000 p.a. to pay for HavenCo location will be a neat trick
That depends - If someone declares "the independent republic of Texas", and the British said 'do you mind us saving you the bother of getting rid of these nutcases yourselves' then they might go for it.
Never. Far more likely to shoot the British contingent of the attack force instead.
Given the minimal use of the platform now (why it was abandoned in the first place), if they were serious about taking the thing by force then it would be much simpler to wipe the thing off the surface of the sea.
Finally - someone points out the obvious (sorry if there is a post hidden somewhere else that does the same). All Microsoft are doing here is allowing programmers to read the very same DVD BIOS rating setting that the video discs are getting access to. Why on earth this isn't standard on the PS2 as well is the real mystery here.
"Does your VCR check video tapes to see if the person pressing play is old enough, or even if anyone is present to enter a code to watch particular levels of films?"
No, because the VHS standard doesn't include a flag for the rating of the material contained. My digital TV and DVD player both do, however, and I can choose to turn such features on if I want them.
All this appears to boil down to is that the DVD Video standard has a code for the rating of the picture, so as the box needs to support this for video playback it only seems reasonable to be able to use it for the software being played on the machine as well.
Its good to see you can find the funny side and don't hold a grudge; while slightly juvenile of the./ crew it did make me smirk when I read it.
Of course, on a serious note I could completely sympathise if e.g. Verant took a similiar stance on eBay trading of virtual property - its understandable to slap circumventing of the rules in place for allocation of the stuff. Coming back to this example, allowing a goat troll to post with +2 bonus simply because they bought an account would be irritating, to say the least.
"are the pictures really free?" No, as you point out they are paid with by taxation. "is it worth it"? Hell yes. It beats hiding under a rock while being ever so slightly (to the tune of a couple of dollars) richer, even if you ignore the fact that the money gets ploughed back into the economy to build this stuff, rather than disappearing into thin air.
That couple of billion paid for some pretty snazzy research, some quite stunning engineering and a whole bunch of people worked their asses off getting paid not unreasonable sums of cash to do so. These taxpaying citizens then give some of the money back too, and so on.
I'm sure others can give some more detail; suffice to say that most taxes end up back in the hands of others, be they government employees or companies hired by them.
Well, I agree, but someone ought to explain to Dubya that that isn't a good reason to basically chant "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough" at the rest of the world.
TANSTAAFL - There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
From Heinlein's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"; the acronym stumped me for a moment, so I thought I'd save others the bother of doing some Google digging. Yeah, I know, karma whore and all that. Just ignore me rather than mod me down, please!
Troll, I know, but don't criticize Quake and contrast it with Mario64 because the latter has great handling - a fact that in itself I don't deny; Miyamoto's classic is one of the greatest games in the history of computing, and I truly wish that Lara Croft, Spyro and Sonic would learn a thing or two about how to control a character in a 3D third-person view.
However, for a first-person view the combination of mouselook and keyboard movement has been taken by nearly every subsequent first-person game. Admittedly, this is in part because their target audiences are used to the controls, but what few attempts at deviating from the formula have been shot down in a wall of flames. Wouldn't you agree (if you're not actually trolling) that the popularity of the keyboard and mouse bundle for the Dreamcast Quake 3 suggests that they had something right here?
"Call me a sensualist, but I'd rather play a bad game with good eye candy than a bad game with bad eye candy".
True, and the arts of cinematography, film scoring lighting and set design are not worthless either. That doesn't mean that Dogme 95 is not an interesting challenge to a director's assumptions about film making.
The point of the article is that when you have new limitations imposed on your usual working method, either by an artificial Dogme list of abstentions, or by coding for a smaller platform such as the Gameboy or one of the old machines, you're required to think in new ways, and that can only be good. After all, when your eye candy is bad you've got nowhere to hide your gameplay.
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Given that the code is freely available to bypass this if you really need to, supporting the format's ability to enforce versioning controls (which is what stopping your average user from editing the text is) or stopping the printing 400 page documents when you don't want users to seems like a useful thing to me. As long as there is a way to get round this, which there is when the source and diffs to switch it are available, then this is hardly the end of the world.
Perhaps they should include the change so that it can be made if necessary, but ship the binary of the copy protect version. This one also is more likely to keep Adobe off our backs.
I believe he is referring to the fact that the files are held in the . c x TLD, infamous for containing a site about animal abuse.
"atom bombs (not thermonuclear weapons, mind you - we're talking Fat Man and Little Boy here"
I suggest we get the UN involved here. These non security council member organisations are suspected of owning weapons of mass destruction. A Thetan spokesalien said in their defense "Its all lies; the most we have are a few low megatonnage atom bombs, nothing bigger than a medium-sized town could get wiped out with one of them"
Indeed. But then people taking the test with nervous sweaty hands are obviously the true belivers and should be elevated to the higher planes (at their own expense, of course).
"Microsoft has an 800-number for people to call and speak with someone to get the activation code"
I thought the point was that this code was going to be specific to a particular box's hardware? If they have no net then you can't use a network card MAC address, and I'm guessing that people aren't going to be too happy reading a bignum digit number correctly down the phone to be given another one back in any case.
If we get QMP, then we will probably have quantum encryption up and running. Since this means that any recipient can tell if their message has been intercepted you can be sure if your one-time pad has been safely and securely transmitted. From that point, any interceptor doesn't stand a chance; every message looks like every other message of the same length.
I don't disagree with you on the subject of your common-or-garden radio wave, but our mobile phones are right near the top of the range labelled 'radio' (the 3G band is a significant fraction (either 1/4 or 1/2, can't remember which) of the bottom of the microwave spectrum, which gets blocked easily. Combined with the aforementioned low power our impromptu experiments in private (plus a quick play in the pub) showed that there was no danger of being blocked outside the door of the establishment - we couldn't even block phones at the other end of the room.
I've actually seen tests of the blocking devices, and they are quite low-level radiation. Any decent piece of wall, even window glass does a good job of negating their effects. Blocking seeping out into the street is highly unlikely unless the cafe owner was to try blocking their outside tables, in which case they should not be awarded their license for the things.
One of my friends bought one; they are depressingly weak. As a test (don't worry, no calls were made) one person sitting in the middle of a movie theatre couldn't block the signal level of another sitting at the back. Most of these devices (in order to not get in too much trouble over people playing with them inappropriately) only work about line-of-sight for blocking.
Well, if your phone or conversation wrecks the atmosphere of a film for me, then thats my entry fee wasted, yes. Why do you think DVD sales are so high? Its because people like me who actually want to WATCH a film can do so without having to put up with the rest of the audience ruining the atmosphere for us.
It may well be of little practical use, but with its USB ports to hook a hub up to I'd give better odds on Apache running on a PS2 than I would on Nintendo's second biggest draw after Mario doing so.
You're correct about screen size (although you can hold a phone a lot closer to you than a 14" tv), so I'm sure that the designers will have to be careful about single-pixel bullets etc, but the old lo-res atari with a one button joystick reflects the constraints of the phones very well.
The only flaw in that plan is that any necessary central server for banners trashes the advantage of p2p; ie you still have a central server to kill. Any proper p2p solution involves getting rid of a showstopping central server, not just cutting down the bandwidth one needs.
Well, on the one side, he successfully raised $10,000 capital to launch fairtunes, but on the other he has singularly failed to get that back in revenue on the site, so raising the $15,000 p.a. to pay for HavenCo location will be a neat trick
That depends - If someone declares "the independent republic of Texas", and the British said 'do you mind us saving you the bother of getting rid of these nutcases yourselves' then they might go for it.
"they'ed shoot themselfs on route!"
Never. Far more likely to shoot the British contingent of the attack force instead.
Given the minimal use of the platform now (why it was abandoned in the first place), if they were serious about taking the thing by force then it would be much simpler to wipe the thing off the surface of the sea.
Finally - someone points out the obvious (sorry if there is a post hidden somewhere else that does the same). All Microsoft are doing here is allowing programmers to read the very same DVD BIOS rating setting that the video discs are getting access to. Why on earth this isn't standard on the PS2 as well is the real mystery here.
"Does your VCR check video tapes to see if the person pressing play is old enough, or even if anyone is present to enter a code to watch particular levels of films?"
No, because the VHS standard doesn't include a flag for the rating of the material contained. My digital TV and DVD player both do, however, and I can choose to turn such features on if I want them.
All this appears to boil down to is that the DVD Video standard has a code for the rating of the picture, so as the box needs to support this for video playback it only seems reasonable to be able to use it for the software being played on the machine as well.
Its good to see you can find the funny side and don't hold a grudge; while slightly juvenile of the ./ crew it did make me smirk when I read it.
Of course, on a serious note I could completely sympathise if e.g. Verant took a similiar stance on eBay trading of virtual property - its understandable to slap circumventing of the rules in place for allocation of the stuff. Coming back to this example, allowing a goat troll to post with +2 bonus simply because they bought an account would be irritating, to say the least.
"are the pictures really free?" No, as you point out they are paid with by taxation. "is it worth it"? Hell yes. It beats hiding under a rock while being ever so slightly (to the tune of a couple of dollars) richer, even if you ignore the fact that the money gets ploughed back into the economy to build this stuff, rather than disappearing into thin air.
That couple of billion paid for some pretty snazzy research, some quite stunning engineering and a whole bunch of people worked their asses off getting paid not unreasonable sums of cash to do so. These taxpaying citizens then give some of the money back too, and so on.
I'm sure others can give some more detail; suffice to say that most taxes end up back in the hands of others, be they government employees or companies hired by them.
Well, I agree, but someone ought to explain to Dubya that that isn't a good reason to basically chant "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough" at the rest of the world.
TANSTAAFL - There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
From Heinlein's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"; the acronym stumped me for a moment, so I thought I'd save others the bother of doing some Google digging. Yeah, I know, karma whore and all that. Just ignore me rather than mod me down, please!
Troll, I know, but don't criticize Quake and contrast it with Mario64 because the latter has great handling - a fact that in itself I don't deny; Miyamoto's classic is one of the greatest games in the history of computing, and I truly wish that Lara Croft, Spyro and Sonic would learn a thing or two about how to control a character in a 3D third-person view.
However, for a first-person view the combination of mouselook and keyboard movement has been taken by nearly every subsequent first-person game. Admittedly, this is in part because their target audiences are used to the controls, but what few attempts at deviating from the formula have been shot down in a wall of flames. Wouldn't you agree (if you're not actually trolling) that the popularity of the keyboard and mouse bundle for the Dreamcast Quake 3 suggests that they had something right here?
"Call me a sensualist, but I'd rather play a bad game with good eye candy than a bad game with bad eye candy".
True, and the arts of cinematography, film scoring lighting and set design are not worthless either. That doesn't mean that Dogme 95 is not an interesting challenge to a director's assumptions about film making.
The point of the article is that when you have new limitations imposed on your usual working method, either by an artificial Dogme list of abstentions, or by coding for a smaller platform such as the Gameboy or one of the old machines, you're required to think in new ways, and that can only be good. After all, when your eye candy is bad you've got nowhere to hide your gameplay.
eek. Ethical dilemma there for a moment. Posted that AC from work, logged in at home and I had mod points. Still, by replying to it I can't mod now.