The author, in my opinion, does not fully appreciate the ramifications of his scheme.
If it works as advertised and causes spammers to capitulate by putting working unsubscribes in, then he is correct: the bandwidth price paid up front would be worth the savings down the road.
But one has to consider the possibility (and, I argue, probability) that this cunning plan will not convince spammers to honor the desires of the, um, spammees. Looking at the uproar over the federal Do Not Call list by legitimate telemarketers, it shouldn't be hard to recognize that the sales-by-irritation mentality would probably result in spammers ignoring the costs of spidering on their servers or, more likely, coming up with countermeasures of their own to disregard spiders.
At the end of the day, I think it is quite likely that if this idea is adopted, it would result in a non-trivial increase in global bandwidth usage that perhaps wouldn't rival the cost of P2P but would be a great waste of resources nonetheless.
I grew up with the Usenet warning that my posts would be relayed through hundreds of thousands of systems at a fair cost to the resources of the Internet community, and I think we'd all do well to return to that way of thinking and not the current wisdom that $20/month pays for anything we'd care to dump into or pull out of Earth's biggest LAN.
The recognizable words (neonatal, pedant, betsy) might be a weak attempt at that in addition to creating non-identical subjects, although they'd need a lot more non-spammy words buried in the article to get through... which they usually do, surrounded with HTML to make them invisible.
Having every recipient spider the links in the spam they get will not only make spamming inefficient, but web browsing as well. Enough with anti-spam cures that are worse than the disease -- the last almost killed SomethingAwful, and this might knock off the rest of the websites.
Lawsuits aren't going to do anything but make lawyers richer.
Besides, every time I see an exploit, it's after Microsoft has already issued a patch. This would seem to suggest that they aren't as responsible for the problems as many seem to think they are; as soon as they're aware of an issue, they fix it. Maybe they could design the stuff secure out of the box, but they'd be the first manufacturer to accomplish such a feat.
Stop using it if it's a problem. There are alternatives now.
I was wondering when we'd finally see 128MB in a palmtop system. I'm kind of torn between getting one of these or a Tablet PC, although I suppose I'm inclined towards the latter because of the size and speed as well as the ease of use of Windows CE and compatibility that platform offers.
Ctrl-Alt-Del is the only key combination on your computer that has its own hardware interrupt (similar to Ctrl-Open Apple/Closed Apple-Reset on Macs). Again, this was to prevent interception in real mode, however protected mode changes all rules.
Re:Search and destroy
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Here's why I don't understand all of the complaints:
For RFIDs to be exploitable in the way many seem to think they will be, and for them to be at all useful in a similar manner to bar codes for taking product inventory and the like, they're going to have to have a very generic way of checking the code. Otherwise the store is going to need several readers to check their stock, and the whole usefulness of the scheme will be lost.
If they can read it easily, you can read it easily. It's just a matter of getting a much lower power transciever or tweaking the wavelength in an existing one to manipulate the distance of the read -- you can easily narrow down the position of an RFID tag in an object if you have a modified reader that only works from a millimeter away, right?
The next time you attempt to establish uplink communications with the Telstar 4 transponder, or receive any downlink transmissions, you will be unsuccessful.
I used to use an S3 card back in the day (Virge?) for 2D processing. I'm a bit curious about how they're going to break into the current 3D marketplace, though, given the barrier to entry posed by the market leader ATi and the technically superior nVidia lines.
Maybe they're looking at creating bargain chips, a la AMD's entry into CPU development that promises to unseat Intel, but the price differential between Intel and AMD is far greater than that S3 could possibly achieve between its chips and those of nVidia/ATi.
To be honest, it's mostly fanboys that are buying up all the new cards anyway to squeeze another frame or two per second out, so it's possible S3 could do something like offer longer warranties on older technology to drive the price point down while delivering all the graphics power anybody could need. It'll be interesting to see what happens, of course, but it's good to see S3 back regardless.
Does anybody have a link to a site that has a quote like "There are (small X) game publishers that made up (large Y%) of the total games published in the last year"?
I've got a feeling that we've gotten down to a few large houses, which are all cramming what I consider overreaching EULAs and aggravating copy protections down our throats, and would like to confirm my suspicion (didn't gaming feel a bit more diverse and fun between five and ten years ago?)
I think his point is that we wouldn't need to put you in concrete storage for several years and fine you six figures if you downloaded Ender's Game. He'd still like you to pay for the book, but doesn't necessarily feel his great-grandchildren need to receive tiny royalty payments from his effort (well, in addition to the publishing houses continuing to reap profits for nearly a century.)
Refreshing attitude. If copyright was reformed to be meaningful in today's environment, where a reasonable profit can be realized in a much shorter time than when copyrights were first introduced due to the capability and speed of worldwide marketing/distribution, eliminating P2P of copywritten works may be a worthwhile trade for the people currently using it for piracy.
is just a bit insulting, isn't it? I thought the essay was very articulate and well-written, if short on details about how you can be friendly to filetraders and turn a profit with intellectual property (maybe part 2?)
On the one hand, I appreciate diversity in television, and would hate to see it disappear. So the idea that they're taking strides towards that is encouraging.
On the other hand, I believe such diversity will only be strengthened by allowing the people with the most resources free rein to develop channels/media as they see fit. You get duplication of effort now (CNN, FOX, MSNBC), where later we could perhaps have two or three media giants offering a broader spectrum (CNN Politics, CNN Music, CNN Sports).
So in a way I wonder if we should be upset about this.
I think the one I enjoyed the most at the time I played it was Final Fantasy IV, although the story and game were neutered in the US version. It was the first for the SNES, and the sound/graphics were fantastic compared to Final Fantasy I.
If I had to pick from all of them today, it'd be Final Fantasy V. The job system added a great deal to the gameplay, although the story could have been better. Then again, aren't they all essentially the same story with different chrome, gibberish, and awkward actions?
I'd like to see a new Final Fantasy Tactics, particularly a Final Fantasy that combines typical FF combat and exploration with tactical combat depending on the situation. But I thought Final Fantasy X sucked... I played maybe 33% in and just lost interest (same with FF8) -- they had my hopes up with FF9, which I enjoyed quite a bit, but I doubt I'll be getting X-2.
I worked on somebody's IBM PC with Rapid Resume technology that had something similar happen. The computer locked to the point where Ctrl-Alt-Del didn't work, and every time you turned it on it happily Resumed the session where it was locked.
I had to look up the solution using a separate PC, and there was some key/combination you could hold down while the machine was booting to interrupt its resume. It wasn't mentioned anywhere on the screen, and if I was able to get into the BIOS (can't remember because this was maybe five years ago) it didn't mention the key combination either.
I was able to turn Rapid Resume off completely after breaking the loop. I worked on maybe three such PCs and all of them had some problem that went away with turning off that feature. More than likely, Windows just wasn't made to run that long, although now it's got uptimes comparable with Linux so they must be making headway.
My guess is no, but even if that's the case there's still the pricey controllers, memory, ethernet, etc. not to mention the tiny piece of every game sold to factor in there.
I was wondering why they weren't doing things like making PS2 joysticks for the PC, turning the system into a mini media center with Linux and a decent hard drive unit, or the like, but they must be doing something right if they've sold 60 million already. Maybe PS3 will do more of that.
But they really get you on the accessories. I was looking at all the stuff the GameCube's got (and the connection to the Game Boy Advance is pure genius) and figured out why they kept the price of the main unit down. If they get some decent RPGs I might check it out.
Magnetic memory?
on
MRAM in 2004?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm sure there probably isn't anything to worry about, but isn't there a chance of problems if you put magnetic things near storage media?
An interesting sidenote to this, 'bug' was actually in usage before the bug was found; it was an acronym for Byte Under Guard, used when an if/then block failed to test the byte properly.
Also, bytes became commonly known as 8-bit values later, when IBM determined that was the sanest value for them. Before that, they were simply a common usage unit, much as 'int' has become today.
SCO does have one good point: open source leaves way too much to chance where intellectual property is concerned. Maybe releases should be certified by an independent agency that hires lawyers to help work out the patent issues... or maybe they should just release in countries like Europe until we fix some of the absurdities in our patent system?
I think one can treat their kids with respect without turning them into sociopaths or idiots. I've got a sneaking suspicion that these aren't children that came home every day from school to the parent(s) asking how their day went and if they need any help with their schoolwork.
I don't know the particulars of this case, but I'll bet their problem had less to do with not getting frequent whuppings and more to do with not getting any meaningful attention whatsoever. What's left to set the moral compass by: peers, video games, TV?
That's a good point. People keep downloading illegal music because they think they can get away with it, but they're still under the RIAA yoke even if they don't get caught.
I started listening to some of the indie bands that are doing all of the things people say the RIAA should do. The fact that they aren't getting more support than they are makes two things clear: they need better marketing, and the only argument left for P2Ping is wanting something for nothing.
The types of video games kids get their hands on nowadays amount to a pornography of violence. I don't know how we've made the leap so quickly from Pong to Postal, but I've come around to see the point of people who call games like Grand Theft Auto 3 and Doom "murder simulators".
It doesn't seem to matter that there's a sticker on the front of the box that says M; 13 year olds are playing this stuff, and one can see with MMORPGs that the lines between fantasy and real life are dangerously blurred for people much older than that. The industry has been warned to clean things up, and has promised to do so, but this mental sugar keeps getting dumped to the shelves because it costs less to package violence than plot (look at movies as an example.)
Maybe the development of decent games like Myst should be subsidized; maybe the distribution of violent games should be hindered for the public good? I think we've moved well beyond establishing that violent or extremely compelling video games are a danger to some individuals and the people around them: now is the time for research into potential solutions.
First, the Penny Arcade thing hit the nail on the head. Fragile personalities should not be on the front line of your PR effort, especially when it involves delivering a stream of fluff and BS to gamers ("The release has been pushed ahead to August, and will definitely hit the shelves at the end of the month.", "It will support Windows, Linux, and MacOS out of the box.", "The next patch will address the crash to desktop issue."). The sad fact is that most gamers are not socially adept enough to accept delays or bugs, and most manufacturers push the developers into a timetable that ruins a perfect release.
The solution? Discussion with gamers is going to be at its most helpful for the company during the early parts of game development, when ideas and features can be requested and demand can be built up in advance of a marketing campaign. As the project approaches beta testing, employees should cease discussion with the outside world and instead talk only with the beta testers, and interaction with gamers should be done with fancy advertisements in magazines and giveaways until the product hits the shelves. Afterwards, bug reports and patch requests should be handled privately, with the details of each report being filtered down to an exact set of problems for the patch team, relieving developers of the need to talk with disgruntled gamers. Obviously, neither camp can handle civilized discussion, so the only time they should talk is during the heady period before all the letdowns start occurring.
If you do the math, the regular old light bulb is still most efficient overall when compared to fluorescents or neobulbs. The amount of energy, resources, and pollution that goes into something has to be taken into account if you're really looking at reducing your impact on the environment.
Additionally, you can't go wrong with nuclear power if you're looking at least polluting power sources. Many people look at solar as if its some sort of panacea, but the amount of energy that goes into making a tile is far more than you'll ever get out of it -- turns out that at the end of the day the thing everybody's been complaining about is the best option because all the pollution is contained.
I thought Mac OS X was BSD-derived and largely compatible with Linux stuff, especially with something like Apache which is pretty vanilla, looking over Slash I doubt it's too horrible about its demands on a Unix-like platform. What caused the problems?
Slashdot Mirror
If it works as advertised and causes spammers to capitulate by putting working unsubscribes in, then he is correct: the bandwidth price paid up front would be worth the savings down the road.
But one has to consider the possibility (and, I argue, probability) that this cunning plan will not convince spammers to honor the desires of the, um, spammees. Looking at the uproar over the federal Do Not Call list by legitimate telemarketers, it shouldn't be hard to recognize that the sales-by-irritation mentality would probably result in spammers ignoring the costs of spidering on their servers or, more likely, coming up with countermeasures of their own to disregard spiders.
At the end of the day, I think it is quite likely that if this idea is adopted, it would result in a non-trivial increase in global bandwidth usage that perhaps wouldn't rival the cost of P2P but would be a great waste of resources nonetheless.
I grew up with the Usenet warning that my posts would be relayed through hundreds of thousands of systems at a fair cost to the resources of the Internet community, and I think we'd all do well to return to that way of thinking and not the current wisdom that $20/month pays for anything we'd care to dump into or pull out of Earth's biggest LAN.
The recognizable words (neonatal, pedant, betsy) might be a weak attempt at that in addition to creating non-identical subjects, although they'd need a lot more non-spammy words buried in the article to get through... which they usually do, surrounded with HTML to make them invisible.
Having every recipient spider the links in the spam they get will not only make spamming inefficient, but web browsing as well. Enough with anti-spam cures that are worse than the disease -- the last almost killed SomethingAwful, and this might knock off the rest of the websites.
Besides, every time I see an exploit, it's after Microsoft has already issued a patch. This would seem to suggest that they aren't as responsible for the problems as many seem to think they are; as soon as they're aware of an issue, they fix it. Maybe they could design the stuff secure out of the box, but they'd be the first manufacturer to accomplish such a feat.
Stop using it if it's a problem. There are alternatives now.
I was wondering when we'd finally see 128MB in a palmtop system. I'm kind of torn between getting one of these or a Tablet PC, although I suppose I'm inclined towards the latter because of the size and speed as well as the ease of use of Windows CE and compatibility that platform offers.
Ctrl-Alt-Del is the only key combination on your computer that has its own hardware interrupt (similar to Ctrl-Open Apple/Closed Apple-Reset on Macs). Again, this was to prevent interception in real mode, however protected mode changes all rules.
For RFIDs to be exploitable in the way many seem to think they will be, and for them to be at all useful in a similar manner to bar codes for taking product inventory and the like, they're going to have to have a very generic way of checking the code. Otherwise the store is going to need several readers to check their stock, and the whole usefulness of the scheme will be lost.
If they can read it easily, you can read it easily. It's just a matter of getting a much lower power transciever or tweaking the wavelength in an existing one to manipulate the distance of the read -- you can easily narrow down the position of an RFID tag in an object if you have a modified reader that only works from a millimeter away, right?
Hope this helps.
Maybe they're looking at creating bargain chips, a la AMD's entry into CPU development that promises to unseat Intel, but the price differential between Intel and AMD is far greater than that S3 could possibly achieve between its chips and those of nVidia/ATi.
To be honest, it's mostly fanboys that are buying up all the new cards anyway to squeeze another frame or two per second out, so it's possible S3 could do something like offer longer warranties on older technology to drive the price point down while delivering all the graphics power anybody could need. It'll be interesting to see what happens, of course, but it's good to see S3 back regardless.
I've got a feeling that we've gotten down to a few large houses, which are all cramming what I consider overreaching EULAs and aggravating copy protections down our throats, and would like to confirm my suspicion (didn't gaming feel a bit more diverse and fun between five and ten years ago?)
Refreshing attitude. If copyright was reformed to be meaningful in today's environment, where a reasonable profit can be realized in a much shorter time than when copyrights were first introduced due to the capability and speed of worldwide marketing/distribution, eliminating P2P of copywritten works may be a worthwhile trade for the people currently using it for piracy.
is just a bit insulting, isn't it? I thought the essay was very articulate and well-written, if short on details about how you can be friendly to filetraders and turn a profit with intellectual property (maybe part 2?)
On the other hand, I believe such diversity will only be strengthened by allowing the people with the most resources free rein to develop channels/media as they see fit. You get duplication of effort now (CNN, FOX, MSNBC), where later we could perhaps have two or three media giants offering a broader spectrum (CNN Politics, CNN Music, CNN Sports).
So in a way I wonder if we should be upset about this.
I think the one I enjoyed the most at the time I played it was Final Fantasy IV, although the story and game were neutered in the US version. It was the first for the SNES, and the sound/graphics were fantastic compared to Final Fantasy I.
If I had to pick from all of them today, it'd be Final Fantasy V. The job system added a great deal to the gameplay, although the story could have been better. Then again, aren't they all essentially the same story with different chrome, gibberish, and awkward actions?
I'd like to see a new Final Fantasy Tactics, particularly a Final Fantasy that combines typical FF combat and exploration with tactical combat depending on the situation. But I thought Final Fantasy X sucked... I played maybe 33% in and just lost interest (same with FF8) -- they had my hopes up with FF9, which I enjoyed quite a bit, but I doubt I'll be getting X-2.
I had to look up the solution using a separate PC, and there was some key/combination you could hold down while the machine was booting to interrupt its resume. It wasn't mentioned anywhere on the screen, and if I was able to get into the BIOS (can't remember because this was maybe five years ago) it didn't mention the key combination either.
I was able to turn Rapid Resume off completely after breaking the loop. I worked on maybe three such PCs and all of them had some problem that went away with turning off that feature. More than likely, Windows just wasn't made to run that long, although now it's got uptimes comparable with Linux so they must be making headway.
I was wondering why they weren't doing things like making PS2 joysticks for the PC, turning the system into a mini media center with Linux and a decent hard drive unit, or the like, but they must be doing something right if they've sold 60 million already. Maybe PS3 will do more of that.
But they really get you on the accessories. I was looking at all the stuff the GameCube's got (and the connection to the Game Boy Advance is pure genius) and figured out why they kept the price of the main unit down. If they get some decent RPGs I might check it out.
I'm sure there probably isn't anything to worry about, but isn't there a chance of problems if you put magnetic things near storage media?
Also, bytes became commonly known as 8-bit values later, when IBM determined that was the sanest value for them. Before that, they were simply a common usage unit, much as 'int' has become today.
SCO does have one good point: open source leaves way too much to chance where intellectual property is concerned. Maybe releases should be certified by an independent agency that hires lawyers to help work out the patent issues... or maybe they should just release in countries like Europe until we fix some of the absurdities in our patent system?
I don't know the particulars of this case, but I'll bet their problem had less to do with not getting frequent whuppings and more to do with not getting any meaningful attention whatsoever. What's left to set the moral compass by: peers, video games, TV?
I started listening to some of the indie bands that are doing all of the things people say the RIAA should do. The fact that they aren't getting more support than they are makes two things clear: they need better marketing, and the only argument left for P2Ping is wanting something for nothing.
It doesn't seem to matter that there's a sticker on the front of the box that says M; 13 year olds are playing this stuff, and one can see with MMORPGs that the lines between fantasy and real life are dangerously blurred for people much older than that. The industry has been warned to clean things up, and has promised to do so, but this mental sugar keeps getting dumped to the shelves because it costs less to package violence than plot (look at movies as an example.)
Maybe the development of decent games like Myst should be subsidized; maybe the distribution of violent games should be hindered for the public good? I think we've moved well beyond establishing that violent or extremely compelling video games are a danger to some individuals and the people around them: now is the time for research into potential solutions.
The solution? Discussion with gamers is going to be at its most helpful for the company during the early parts of game development, when ideas and features can be requested and demand can be built up in advance of a marketing campaign. As the project approaches beta testing, employees should cease discussion with the outside world and instead talk only with the beta testers, and interaction with gamers should be done with fancy advertisements in magazines and giveaways until the product hits the shelves. Afterwards, bug reports and patch requests should be handled privately, with the details of each report being filtered down to an exact set of problems for the patch team, relieving developers of the need to talk with disgruntled gamers. Obviously, neither camp can handle civilized discussion, so the only time they should talk is during the heady period before all the letdowns start occurring.
Additionally, you can't go wrong with nuclear power if you're looking at least polluting power sources. Many people look at solar as if its some sort of panacea, but the amount of energy that goes into making a tile is far more than you'll ever get out of it -- turns out that at the end of the day the thing everybody's been complaining about is the best option because all the pollution is contained.
I thought Mac OS X was BSD-derived and largely compatible with Linux stuff, especially with something like Apache which is pretty vanilla, looking over Slash I doubt it's too horrible about its demands on a Unix-like platform. What caused the problems?