Re:Without remorse there is no rehabilitation.
on
Kevin Mitnick Answers
·
· Score: 1
"...their hero is a crook. And he always will be in my eyes... etc"
There's only so much remorse and contrition one individual can show for something. What do you expect? Him to personally come around, apologise and prostrate himself before you, offer to fall on his own sword, buy you a beer and clean out your gutters?
You never claimed to actually have suffered because of the database hack (that someone else did) so I think you need to rethink your ideas because they completely unrealistic and you are way off being a decent human being. And you always will be in my eyes, until I see some contrition and some forgiveness for what he's done.
"I found this article to be such a waste of the time of the author, poster, server, RSS aggregator, RSS client, and (of course) me that I thought I'd waste even more of my (and their) time by posting a scathing reply condemning the tiny grain of sensationalism injected into the summary instead of just skimming over it in the index of the general news channel and then not opening it or reading it."
Some of us do find this stuff interesting. I do tech support for a large number of Mac-based creative companies and agencies and don't have time to go ferreting around every nook and cranny of an OS every time there's a new release, patch, hot-fix or update. I don't know exactly how useful this will be in time but it certainly made me take note. No more installing Kismac on client's machines just to troubleshoot their WLAN dead spots.
Posit: The rich abuse their wealth to gain political and economic control of a country. Consequence: Wealth is concentrated towards the powerful, the poor become poorer. Result: Over time a politically, economically and morally disenfranchised underclass is created. Conclusion: Democracy cannot survive when run exclusively for the benefit of the top 1%.
They aren't fighting the power for any political ends, they're looting and burning for their own personal gain and enjoyment. These are the kind of people governments are supposed to protect us against.
But here's a hypothetical situation. Imagine some leader all these idiots respect rose up, gathered them together, charged them up with political messages about their deprivation over the decades, gave them politically astute targets to attack, disciplined them to stick to the mission and *then* let them loose, THEN you'd have a point, I'd be out there providing medical assitance for them all not typing this, and a neo-capitalist government might actualy have to make changes to make the lives of the poor better instead of sucking all the wealth up to the top. Oh, if only...
There aren't enough police to deal with this. The agitators have figured that out and are taking advantage of it. Police state my arse! Who's rhetoric have you been listening to? *spits*
I don't even know if there's enough reservists left to call up to have any impact, a lot of them have already been tapped for Afghanistan. Even if they're available, don't think they'll be ready for deployment until tomorrow at the earliest.
The trigger for all this may have been a hijacked peaceful protest but I think the sheer number of people involved in the rioting and looting shows a deep-running undercurrent of disaffection and disenfranchisement of a significant portion of the population. That kind of thing doesn't happen quickly, I think this situation has taken decades to develop and stems from the false capitalist assertions of trickle-down benefits and the redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich over the last 30+ years. The poor get poorer and have no opportunities to better themselves anymore. In the meantime, turn on the news and you'll see all kinds of rich people getting richer, government bailouts for bankers when they screw up so badly the world almost comes crashing to a halt. Maybe I'm just saying that because I'm looking to blame anything I can on neoconservatism and ubercapitalists, but if the shoe fits...
I hate what these violent thugs are doing but by god do I sympathise with them.
Despite everyone calling them protestors, these people aren't even using the pretence of any kind of political message or resistance to anything at all. I have no problem with governments shutting down comms and calling in the army to deal with roaming gangs of criminals and anyone who says they're anything more than that is woefully uninformed. It seems to have developed like this:
Step 1 - Peaceful protest by family and friends after a guy got shot dead by police and the complaints process meant they couldn't talk to his family Step 2 - Bunch of morons spot a flashpoint where they could have a go at the police and violently hijack the protest Step 3 - Several groups launch preordained plans to loot specific targets after previously predicting the above opportunity Step 4 - News of the looting spreads and a large number of spontaneous groups form to loot other targets spread across London Step 5 - Looting breaks down into general vandalism, widespread gratuitous destruction of property results
Damn right we're a democratic country, no-one is protesting against the government, there is no uprising to crush, it's civil disobedience without political intent and if the army needs to be deployed or some comms systems messed around with to maintain the democratic rights and personal safety and liberty of the majority, they have my complete blessing!
It'll quietly piss all over something as simple as MythTV.
Also, 16x PCIe 1.0 was shown by Tom's Hardware Guide to be pretty massive overkill a few years ago. Even taking into account increased texture resolutions pumping larger quantities of data over the bus, I suspect the performance hit will be pretty minimal - I'd estimate about 5% based on Tom's old figures but I'd still like to re-run the test on up-to-date hardware to find out.
I saw an article on Tom's Hardware Guide a few years ago where this very topic was examined by reducing the number of PCIe lanes available to, what was at the time, a high-end graphics card. The were drops in frame rate but they were suprisingly small with the difference between 4 and 16 lanes being about 10% IIRC. However, times have changed, games have been tailored to higher resolutions with larger textures and modern graphics cards expect much higher available bandwidth than when this test was originally carried out. Think it's time to redo the test.
Considering recent theories about how small underpowered cars are really dangerous, this exhibit should be immediately destroyed to stop the public seeing these tiny unpowered little cars whizzing around in perfect harmony. It'll never happen! In the real world, thousands of leprechauns would be killed under the wheels of SUVs, 18-wheelers, Winnebagos and Segways the very second they drove onto the public roads in these things! Ban the tiny cars! BAN THEM!
Just because a codec isn't mainstream doesn't mean it's a faliure. Vorbis and Bink video (remember that? still going after 20+ years!) are the darlings of the video gaming world because the license for their decoders are zero and bugger-all respectively. Quality and performance are not the only metrics when selecting a codec for a project like that. Hell, Battlefield 2 used Bink video, as do most of the Command and Conquer games.
WebM may never achieve the ubiquity that H.264 has, but that doesn't automatically mean faliure by any stretch of the imagination. Divx video barely registers as a feature in the consumer video player market but the company ain't doin' so bad. They're tiny compared to Google, so the indications are that something big may well come of this, just not from the direction anyone is expecting.
It is possible to argue that resold games do have a longer online lifespan than ones held by a single owner. It's also possible to argue that resold games actually have a considerably shorter first-owner online lifespan and that the quick resale comes from the fact the original owner disliked it. There is some discrepancy here because if you are the original owner of a resold game then you still own the original "license" to play it online but you don't actually have the game anymore so it's value to you is zero. This highlights a difference between online console gaming, MMO gaming and traditional PC online multiplayer gaming.
- Consoles connect to 1st party servers run by the publisher, so the publisher is paying for the bandwidth and server farm to support this online game. Seeing as how bandwidth is cheap and servers can be repurposed for other titles or even run concurrently, I don't see any reason why the bandwidth cost couldn't be absorbed in the original sale price.
- MMO's also use 1st party servers but players can often rack up an awful lot more hours on them and expect continual releases of new content, hence the need for in-game stores, expansion packs, monthly fees, whatever. They also have rather more specialised servers that have less scope for reuse afterwards and tend to require the entire effort of a major publisher, usually meaning there's no side-projects that can slide in alongside it.
- PC multiplayer games used to (and to a wide extent still do) depend on user-hosted servers that cost the original publisher nothing but add huge value to their titles. They still need to run some servers themselves, usually login and stats servers and the like, but as the majority of the cost is being eaten up by the game's users anyway, running an online multiplayer game like this doesn't really cost anything noteworthy.
None of these is really better than any of the others, they all have their upsides and downsides and I'm just looking at the economics here. The problem I would like to highlight is that the price of console gaming with 1st party servers appears to be rising at a much faster rate than the either of the others and that charges for subsequent users of a single copy of a game means that either someone got their pricing really badly wrong or someone is making a cynical move to take a cut from preowned game sales. I wouldn't want to bet either way myself but giving the original owner the non-transferrable right to play a game online is actually a neat way of decreasing the value of a preowned game to the next person and doesn't add any value what-so-ever to the original owner.
The Internet is a great place for meeting people who think exactly like you do in order to ridicule those who don't. It also disguises short-term popularity as long-term success and the slightest flash of inspiration as life-long genius. The vastly overwhelming majority of people who come to/. will never actually achieve anything that hasn't been achieved before, including myself, but we can gather round to celebrate those dwindling number of successes and feel like we were there when the trail was blazed and the boundaries pushed back. But if we then pooh-pooh the very processes by which we learn to extend human capability (and I may be wrong but I always seem to detect a hint of jealousy whenever I hear people make those arguments) then we contribute to the threatened developmental stagnation of the human race as a whole. Lucky for us, the real people doing the work most likely don't read this crap, they just go on with their research and development blissfully unaware that a bunch of undermotivated morons and nay-sayers think they're doing it wrong.
Tell me, anti-intellectual fools, how do you fit the Large Hadron Collider into your college-is-a-waste-of-time ramblings?
Mac Pro pluses: More expansion card slots, extra hard drive bay, optical drive bays.
Considering the larger heatsinks, fans and better zoned cooling in the Mac Pro, can't say I can see any way the Xserve has better cooling. Graphics card power is so a non-issue - idle power difference between the two gpus is negligible. Rack mounting isn't exactly a benefit, shelving units are cheaper than racks.
Which leaves the redundant power supply as the only real benefit of an Xserve.
The Xserve has been largely redundant since Apple discontinued the Xraid. When you pair them up they make great file servers, the publishing company I used to work for loved them (yup, that's right, there *are* people for whom Apple servers make sense, go home haters).
Seeing as how there's nothing you can do with an Xserve that you can't do with a Mac Pro, the only difference is the rackmounting. Considering the way forward is Xsan, that's completely optional now even if all your storage is rackmounted. The SAN controller can be on the other side of the building as long as your fibre reaches it.
Nice as it was, goodbye redundant product. You'll be missed, but not for long.
On one had, I like the flash storage built on to the logic board to save space, makes good space & weight sense. On the other hand, I don't like the flash storage built on to the logic, you can't upgrade or replace it once it leaves the shop.
The Macbook Air is Apple's ultraportable. If you hadn't noticed, *everyone* makes ultraportables with C2D's running at speeds like that, usually using ULV chips to avoid caning the meagre battery capacity that such a small form factor entails.That said, I haven't seen a ULV running at 1.8 before, so maybe they're using standard laptop parts that they've underclocked and undervolted? But the point is, 1.4 is pretty much par for the course in this form factor.
I'm personally sceptical of the low battery life of the 11" version. 5 hours is probably more like 2.5-3 if you're pushing this system, but that's still not bad for a system that's 1Kg. Of course the biggest change is.... 2 USB PORTS! The Air just became usable!
Been hearing about ideas for complete internet data retention for a good few years now. Here's how it usually goes:
1) An idiot cabinet politician comes up with a "simple good idea" 2) Lots of people speculate about how good an idea it is and how useful it's results would be 3) The media cotton on to the idea resulting in larges amounts of WTF??!!!111!!!1/?1 4) Someone finally tells the cabinet politician how expensive and dangerous the idea is 5) Cabinet politician blusters about how it's still a good idea for years without making any progress towards implementation 6) Cabinet gets reorg'd and the idea is quietly shelved as a higher priority "simple good idea" comes along
Yup, this kind of thing comes along fairly regularly and this old chestnut always gets shot down fairly quickly. Move along folks, this isn't just old news, it's not even news-worthy.
I used to work in a LAN gaming centre, so allow me to furnish you with the creed of the MMO addict:
1 - Maintain the highest level and best equipment available throughout the expansions.
2 - Maintain dominance in PvP.
3 - Time spent obeying verse 1 is an investment. Invest as much as possible.
Getting someone off this kind of game requires you find something they want to do more than play. Good look finding that. Either that or wait until the game closes. Considering that Everquest and Dark Ages of Camelot are still going, despite World of Warcraft being released after them, that could be a long, long time.
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"...their hero is a crook. And he always will be in my eyes... etc"
There's only so much remorse and contrition one individual can show for something. What do you expect? Him to personally come around, apologise and prostrate himself before you, offer to fall on his own sword, buy you a beer and clean out your gutters?
You never claimed to actually have suffered because of the database hack (that someone else did) so I think you need to rethink your ideas because they completely unrealistic and you are way off being a decent human being. And you always will be in my eyes, until I see some contrition and some forgiveness for what he's done.
What he meant to say:
"I found this article to be such a waste of the time of the author, poster, server, RSS aggregator, RSS client, and (of course) me that I thought I'd waste even more of my (and their) time by posting a scathing reply condemning the tiny grain of sensationalism injected into the summary instead of just skimming over it in the index of the general news channel and then not opening it or reading it."
Some of us do find this stuff interesting. I do tech support for a large number of Mac-based creative companies and agencies and don't have time to go ferreting around every nook and cranny of an OS every time there's a new release, patch, hot-fix or update. I don't know exactly how useful this will be in time but it certainly made me take note. No more installing Kismac on client's machines just to troubleshoot their WLAN dead spots.
Prior art: Wargames, hacker types on keyboard while saying what he's typing for the benefit of the audience who aren't looking at the screen.
"What... {bashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbash} ...is... {bashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbash} ...the primary... {bashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbashbash} ...goal?"
Hollywood couldn't even do a chatbot session right back in the 80's!
Posit: The rich abuse their wealth to gain political and economic control of a country.
Consequence: Wealth is concentrated towards the powerful, the poor become poorer.
Result: Over time a politically, economically and morally disenfranchised underclass is created.
Conclusion: Democracy cannot survive when run exclusively for the benefit of the top 1%.
They aren't fighting the power for any political ends, they're looting and burning for their own personal gain and enjoyment. These are the kind of people governments are supposed to protect us against.
But here's a hypothetical situation. Imagine some leader all these idiots respect rose up, gathered them together, charged them up with political messages about their deprivation over the decades, gave them politically astute targets to attack, disciplined them to stick to the mission and *then* let them loose, THEN you'd have a point, I'd be out there providing medical assitance for them all not typing this, and a neo-capitalist government might actualy have to make changes to make the lives of the poor better instead of sucking all the wealth up to the top. Oh, if only...
There aren't enough police to deal with this. The agitators have figured that out and are taking advantage of it. Police state my arse! Who's rhetoric have you been listening to? *spits*
I don't even know if there's enough reservists left to call up to have any impact, a lot of them have already been tapped for Afghanistan. Even if they're available, don't think they'll be ready for deployment until tomorrow at the earliest.
The trigger for all this may have been a hijacked peaceful protest but I think the sheer number of people involved in the rioting and looting shows a deep-running undercurrent of disaffection and disenfranchisement of a significant portion of the population. That kind of thing doesn't happen quickly, I think this situation has taken decades to develop and stems from the false capitalist assertions of trickle-down benefits and the redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich over the last 30+ years. The poor get poorer and have no opportunities to better themselves anymore. In the meantime, turn on the news and you'll see all kinds of rich people getting richer, government bailouts for bankers when they screw up so badly the world almost comes crashing to a halt. Maybe I'm just saying that because I'm looking to blame anything I can on neoconservatism and ubercapitalists, but if the shoe fits...
I hate what these violent thugs are doing but by god do I sympathise with them.
Despite everyone calling them protestors, these people aren't even using the pretence of any kind of political message or resistance to anything at all. I have no problem with governments shutting down comms and calling in the army to deal with roaming gangs of criminals and anyone who says they're anything more than that is woefully uninformed. It seems to have developed like this:
Step 1 - Peaceful protest by family and friends after a guy got shot dead by police and the complaints process meant they couldn't talk to his family
Step 2 - Bunch of morons spot a flashpoint where they could have a go at the police and violently hijack the protest
Step 3 - Several groups launch preordained plans to loot specific targets after previously predicting the above opportunity
Step 4 - News of the looting spreads and a large number of spontaneous groups form to loot other targets spread across London
Step 5 - Looting breaks down into general vandalism, widespread gratuitous destruction of property results
Damn right we're a democratic country, no-one is protesting against the government, there is no uprising to crush, it's civil disobedience without political intent and if the army needs to be deployed or some comms systems messed around with to maintain the democratic rights and personal safety and liberty of the majority, they have my complete blessing!
It'll quietly piss all over something as simple as MythTV.
Also, 16x PCIe 1.0 was shown by Tom's Hardware Guide to be pretty massive overkill a few years ago. Even taking into account increased texture resolutions pumping larger quantities of data over the bus, I suspect the performance hit will be pretty minimal - I'd estimate about 5% based on Tom's old figures but I'd still like to re-run the test on up-to-date hardware to find out.
I saw an article on Tom's Hardware Guide a few years ago where this very topic was examined by reducing the number of PCIe lanes available to, what was at the time, a high-end graphics card. The were drops in frame rate but they were suprisingly small with the difference between 4 and 16 lanes being about 10% IIRC. However, times have changed, games have been tailored to higher resolutions with larger textures and modern graphics cards expect much higher available bandwidth than when this test was originally carried out. Think it's time to redo the test.
Considering recent theories about how small underpowered cars are really dangerous, this exhibit should be immediately destroyed to stop the public seeing these tiny unpowered little cars whizzing around in perfect harmony. It'll never happen! In the real world, thousands of leprechauns would be killed under the wheels of SUVs, 18-wheelers, Winnebagos and Segways the very second they drove onto the public roads in these things! Ban the tiny cars! BAN THEM!
Just because a codec isn't mainstream doesn't mean it's a faliure. Vorbis and Bink video (remember that? still going after 20+ years!) are the darlings of the video gaming world because the license for their decoders are zero and bugger-all respectively. Quality and performance are not the only metrics when selecting a codec for a project like that. Hell, Battlefield 2 used Bink video, as do most of the Command and Conquer games.
WebM may never achieve the ubiquity that H.264 has, but that doesn't automatically mean faliure by any stretch of the imagination. Divx video barely registers as a feature in the consumer video player market but the company ain't doin' so bad. They're tiny compared to Google, so the indications are that something big may well come of this, just not from the direction anyone is expecting.
It is possible to argue that resold games do have a longer online lifespan than ones held by a single owner. It's also possible to argue that resold games actually have a considerably shorter first-owner online lifespan and that the quick resale comes from the fact the original owner disliked it. There is some discrepancy here because if you are the original owner of a resold game then you still own the original "license" to play it online but you don't actually have the game anymore so it's value to you is zero. This highlights a difference between online console gaming, MMO gaming and traditional PC online multiplayer gaming.
- Consoles connect to 1st party servers run by the publisher, so the publisher is paying for the bandwidth and server farm to support this online game. Seeing as how bandwidth is cheap and servers can be repurposed for other titles or even run concurrently, I don't see any reason why the bandwidth cost couldn't be absorbed in the original sale price.
- MMO's also use 1st party servers but players can often rack up an awful lot more hours on them and expect continual releases of new content, hence the need for in-game stores, expansion packs, monthly fees, whatever. They also have rather more specialised servers that have less scope for reuse afterwards and tend to require the entire effort of a major publisher, usually meaning there's no side-projects that can slide in alongside it.
- PC multiplayer games used to (and to a wide extent still do) depend on user-hosted servers that cost the original publisher nothing but add huge value to their titles. They still need to run some servers themselves, usually login and stats servers and the like, but as the majority of the cost is being eaten up by the game's users anyway, running an online multiplayer game like this doesn't really cost anything noteworthy.
None of these is really better than any of the others, they all have their upsides and downsides and I'm just looking at the economics here. The problem I would like to highlight is that the price of console gaming with 1st party servers appears to be rising at a much faster rate than the either of the others and that charges for subsequent users of a single copy of a game means that either someone got their pricing really badly wrong or someone is making a cynical move to take a cut from preowned game sales. I wouldn't want to bet either way myself but giving the original owner the non-transferrable right to play a game online is actually a neat way of decreasing the value of a preowned game to the next person and doesn't add any value what-so-ever to the original owner.
The Internet is a great place for meeting people who think exactly like you do in order to ridicule those who don't. It also disguises short-term popularity as long-term success and the slightest flash of inspiration as life-long genius. The vastly overwhelming majority of people who come to /. will never actually achieve anything that hasn't been achieved before, including myself, but we can gather round to celebrate those dwindling number of successes and feel like we were there when the trail was blazed and the boundaries pushed back. But if we then pooh-pooh the very processes by which we learn to extend human capability (and I may be wrong but I always seem to detect a hint of jealousy whenever I hear people make those arguments) then we contribute to the threatened developmental stagnation of the human race as a whole. Lucky for us, the real people doing the work most likely don't read this crap, they just go on with their research and development blissfully unaware that a bunch of undermotivated morons and nay-sayers think they're doing it wrong.
Tell me, anti-intellectual fools, how do you fit the Large Hadron Collider into your college-is-a-waste-of-time ramblings?
Whoops, missed a bit off there. Twice. Note to self: don't play Plants vs Zombies while commenting on /.
The whole benefits / no downsides bit it from Apple's point of view.
*calls fail on self*
Mac Pro pluses: More expansion card slots, extra hard drive bay, optical drive bays.
Considering the larger heatsinks, fans and better zoned cooling in the Mac Pro, can't say I can see any way the Xserve has better cooling. Graphics card power is so a non-issue - idle power difference between the two gpus is negligible. Rack mounting isn't exactly a benefit, shelving units are cheaper than racks.
Which leaves the redundant power supply as the only real benefit of an Xserve.
The Xserve has been largely redundant since Apple discontinued the Xraid. When you pair them up they make great file servers, the publishing company I used to work for loved them (yup, that's right, there *are* people for whom Apple servers make sense, go home haters).
Seeing as how there's nothing you can do with an Xserve that you can't do with a Mac Pro, the only difference is the rackmounting. Considering the way forward is Xsan, that's completely optional now even if all your storage is rackmounted. The SAN controller can be on the other side of the building as long as your fibre reaches it.
Nice as it was, goodbye redundant product. You'll be missed, but not for long.
On one had, I like the flash storage built on to the logic board to save space, makes good space & weight sense. On the other hand, I don't like the flash storage built on to the logic, you can't upgrade or replace it once it leaves the shop.
The Macbook Air is Apple's ultraportable. If you hadn't noticed, *everyone* makes ultraportables with C2D's running at speeds like that, usually using ULV chips to avoid caning the meagre battery capacity that such a small form factor entails.That said, I haven't seen a ULV running at 1.8 before, so maybe they're using standard laptop parts that they've underclocked and undervolted? But the point is, 1.4 is pretty much par for the course in this form factor.
I'm personally sceptical of the low battery life of the 11" version. 5 hours is probably more like 2.5-3 if you're pushing this system, but that's still not bad for a system that's 1Kg. Of course the biggest change is.... 2 USB PORTS! The Air just became usable!
Been hearing about ideas for complete internet data retention for a good few years now. Here's how it usually goes:
1) An idiot cabinet politician comes up with a "simple good idea"
2) Lots of people speculate about how good an idea it is and how useful it's results would be
3) The media cotton on to the idea resulting in larges amounts of WTF??!!!111!!!1/?1
4) Someone finally tells the cabinet politician how expensive and dangerous the idea is
5) Cabinet politician blusters about how it's still a good idea for years without making any progress towards implementation
6) Cabinet gets reorg'd and the idea is quietly shelved as a higher priority "simple good idea" comes along
Yup, this kind of thing comes along fairly regularly and this old chestnut always gets shot down fairly quickly. Move along folks, this isn't just old news, it's not even news-worthy.
I used to work in a LAN gaming centre, so allow me to furnish you with the creed of the MMO addict:
1 - Maintain the highest level and best equipment available throughout the expansions.
2 - Maintain dominance in PvP.
3 - Time spent obeying verse 1 is an investment. Invest as much as possible.
Getting someone off this kind of game requires you find something they want to do more than play. Good look finding that. Either that or wait until the game closes. Considering that Everquest and Dark Ages of Camelot are still going, despite World of Warcraft being released after them, that could be a long, long time.