I'd really hope that doesn't work with any sane NAT implementation. Most NAT implementations view TCP and UDP as separate protocols, because - well, because they are separate protocols. So using this technique to punch a UDP hole would offer absolutely nothing when it comes to establishing a TCP connection. While the port numbers are similar, they apply only to their individual protocol. TCP port 80 has no relation to UDP port 80. The only thing similar about the two is that they both run over IP.
The core BitTorrent protocol uses TCP, so the UDP technique the article describes won't work. (As far as I know, there's no corresponding technique for doing something similar with TCP.)
There's been a bit of work on various UDP protocol replacements for BitTorrent, but nothing that's really gained any cohesion that I'm aware of. So, when it comes to BitTorrent, no, there really isn't much work on making such a technique work.
There might be other P2P platforms that do attempt to do something like the technique described in the article, but the official BitTorrent protocol uses TCP and therefore can't use the technique.
No. It's not supposed to be intuitive. It's supposed to be useful.
There are quite a few really useful Windows short cuts that aren't exactly easy to find. They're there for power users more than they're there for "regular" users. Once you learn to use them, they're very useful. I'm sure someone can find Mac OS X shortcuts that aren't exactly easy to discover but make certain tasks far easier.
Unfortunately Windows makes it painfully difficult to discover these shortcuts (they're not listed as accelerators in the right-click menu or in the corresponding menu in the application menu) but that's a different complaint.
Adult Swim on Cartoon Network seems to do the reverse (starting five minutes early)
If they are doing it intentionally, they're idiots, because people using DVRs aren't the only people who change channels on the hour boundaries. Some people watch shows on other channels that run right up to the hour marker, and then change the channel to discover that the new show they were watching has already started. (Or in your example, be forced to choose between watching the end of one show and the start of another one.)
Comedy Central seems to have perfected the art of getting the Daily Show to start at 11:00 sharp, while allowing it to run slightly over 11:30 and then having the Colbert Report run a minute after 12:00, cutting off the end for DVR users like me.
TV ads never used to bother me until I got my TiVo and discovered just how long they are. I've learned that if I wait 20 minutes after an hour-long show starts, I can watch the entire thing without commercials. 20 minutes of commercials for an hour long show! (OK, to be fair, it's closer to 18 minutes of commercials, but still - that's a pretty lousy signal to noise ratio.)
And Firefox works the same on Linux as it does on windows.
Not quite. It's similar (gee?), but there are differences. The biggest difference is the way Firefox under Linux handles the middle mouse button (although you can change that through about:config), but there are other minor changes like the Tools -> Options being renamed Edit -> Preferences. And not so minor changes like the order of OK/Cancel being reversed under Linux (or at least under GNOME?), and of course the file chooser is different.
So while Firefox under Linux is very similar to Firefox under Windows, they're not quite the same. Which actually makes adjusting to using it under Linux far more annoying than it otherwise would have to be. (Especially since it follows GNOME's messed up notion that people read buttons right to left in left to right lanugages.)
There's Netbeans which has a GUI builder. (Which, IMHO, sucks. Or at least did the last time I used it.)
Eclipse also has plugins (the Visual Editor) to allow creating GUIs graphically. (Which is, IMHO, worse than Netbeans's.)
So, there are GUI building tools. They just suck. (IMHO, of course.)
Personally I'd like to see something like XUL where the GUI is specified using a markup language. Which is why I started writing one and then never released it.
The newest run of $20s are mixed green/peach. They're green on the edges with a peach color-ed center. The newest run of $10 are a straight yellow-ish color, and the newest run of $50s are kind of a mixed pink, yellow, and blue thing.
Unfortunately there's still way too much old money in circulation, but the US is slowly changing over to having the different denominations have different colors.
However, while the latest batch of bills does indeed have low-vision features, the bills are all still exactly the same size and texture, making them totally inaccessible to the blind. But the latest bill designs do attempt to make it easier to tell the bills apart.
The thing is, Okami delivers on the violence and tits. (Although it's cartoony violence and tits, so I guess that might not count.) It's not exactly "high art." You defeat one of the early bosses by getting him drunk. One of the unlockable abilities is a "taunt" move where the main character (a white wolf) pees on her enemies. Not exactly high art, and definitely not things that "average Americans" wouldn't understand.
Unfortunately it is on the stylistic side, and some people find the cartoony graphics a put-off. Plus it deals heavily in Japanese mythology, so most American players (like me) will have no freaking clue about the mythology behind the plot elements. But it really doesn't matter, the game explains everything you need to know.
Because of this Japan-centric style, "average" Americans are probably less willing to play it than they should. It's a really good game. While the Japanese aspects make the story and setting unfamiliar, they don't prevent someone who knows absolutely nothing about Japanese mythology from enjoying the game.
Yes. Because Pong is the only example of a game that's a game.
Apparently the only part of FFXII that you're expected to play are the boss battles. Everything else is fluff between cutscenes and other boss battles. What's the point behind "playing" a game that you don't actually play?
If you're not actively doing anything, then it's not a game. There are plenty of examples of games that involve actually playing something and still having a story. Things like Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VI, Oblivion, and so on.
Apparently with FFXII they realized that forced random battles are boring. Instead of replacing them with something fun, they automated them. A nice thought, but I'd prefer they replace the boring parts with something not boring, rather than just making it so you don't have to play them.
Close. It's based on Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which was sort of like FFT with all the things that were fun about it removed.
No job points. A total of something like 8 jobs per race. Abilities were earned by equipping different weapons, exactly like FFIX. A plot that made little to no sense. (The main character was sucked into Ivalice from "the real world" or something like it.)
That's his point, though, they stress suspension of disbelief to the breaking point.
People are willing to suspend disbelief for fictional stories as long as they remain internally consistent. If you create a world which contains a "highly trained" army of soldiers, and some 17-year old street urchin can out-class them after fighting various creatures for a couple of weeks, you're severely stretching the suspension of disbelief.
When you have people wielding swords that are as tall as a person that are about as effective in combat as someone chucking some form of neutrally-buoyant sports ball, you're stretching the suspension of disbelief.
So, yes, a game can stress the willing suspension of disbelief past the breaking point. In video games, though, you generally have to add a willingness to ignore completely illogical things that are done to prevent the game from sucking. So people accept the medkit being able to magically heal a guy instantly because it would suck otherwise. People accept the idea that your characters can become immensely powerful just by beating up random monsters along the country side because being forced to grind at a training dojo for a month would suck.
The suspension of disbelief required for a fantasy story may not be enough to get over the completely illogical concepts a game has for gameplay reasons, but for the game to be fun, you have to accept some compromises for realism. I don't know how Solid Snake manages to carry 20 guns, three cardboard boxes he can hide in, and assorted equipment, on his person, but it's more fun that way.
With a game as lengthy as Final Fantasy XII, a decent story would quickly become boring if you had to slog through the gameplay.
Wait, WHAT?! Apparently I'm one of the unenlightened few who mistakes video games as, well, games. What do you mean "if you had to slog through the gameplay?" I understand not wanting to play boring gameplay, but that makes it sound more like you're talking about skipping the gameplay altogether, removing it from a "video game" and turning it into a video.
When loaded up, these Gambits dictate the actions of the characters within the game world.
So you do mean you get to skip almost all of the gameplay. You don't actually have to do anything distracting like play the game to move through the story. So it's a what, 40+ hour movie? With truly mindless gameplay that was so boring they had to automate it to make it palatable?!
These non-stereotypical fights almost require a return to the series' turn-based roots, so that each character can execute the most efficient set of instructions possible.
Oh, goody, so you can be pumping through menus in real-time now. Having played the demo, I know just how stupidly unwieldy the menus are. Having to select options is real-time is an effort in frustration, considering that most commands are at least three menus deep.
I think I'll stick with video games where the idea is to play the game and not watch an overly-long story. If I want to watch a 40-hour long story, I can always go out and get the first couple of seasons of the new Battlestar Galactica. Except if I did that, I wouldn't be shackled to a Sony console.
DualShock: Use two sticks and twelve buttons to control.
SixAxiS: Use two sticks, twelve buttons, and be very careful about how you hold the controller to avoid accidental input.
Also, for added fun, grab something in both hands as if you were holding a PlayStation controller. Anything solid will do. See how much motion you can get out of it, solely by moving your hands. Now imagine trying to do a sharp banking turn in a flying game. You'll have to start moving your arms to get useful motion out of it.
Presumably the intention is that people will only be holding the controller one-handed when using the tilt controls. Unfortunately, that'll leave it off-balance, since it continues the original DualShock shape which was designed to be held in two hands.
Ultimately, though, you'll probably be right: it won't be any more complicated than the PS2, because after the first batch of games that use the tilt feature, no one will be using it any more. How many games did you play that used the analog buttons on the PS2? How many of those were released early in the PS2's life?
Even worse are screensavers that waste energy. Whenever I'm running under Linux and XScreensaver pops up, the fan on my laptop slowly starts to ramp up to "jet aircraft" levels. I have a feeling if I SSHed in and pulled up top, XScreensaver would be using 100% CPU to pull off 100FPS of lines moving around.
Personally I prefer something like the default Windows 2000/XP screensaver, which is just the Windows logo being displayed at a random location that changes every couple of seconds. Very low CPU power needed, and here's the most important part, it gives you a chance to wake the computer up if you don't want the screensaver to become active. I can't remember if XScreensaver did this or not, but Windows has a 5-second (configurable) "grace" period after the screensaver activates that you can cancel it without having the PC lock. I think it does, but I can't remember.
So my tweak to your idea would be having a low-CPU usage screensaver come up after x minutes of activity, probably around 5 minutes, and then dropping to the various DPMS sleep modes after that. Overly complicated screensavers are a relic of monitors that didn't support DPMS, where since the monitor wouldn't turn off anyway it might as well show pretty pictures.
Oh, and also, I wish OSes would drop into DPMS mode something like a minute after I lock the workstation. If I manually lock it, chances are I'm locking it because I'm walking away for it for a while and won't be needing it too soon.
I suspect one of the editors of/. just met her and is smitten with her. Now he can call and say "gee, I hope we didn't [nervous laugh] slashdot your site [more nervous laughter]"
To be fair, it's BusinessWeek.com making the assertion that she's the "latest 'cewebrity'" - complete with the, uh, clever "cewebrity" joke. Slashdot is just reporting on BusinessWeek.com's story.
Although, based on the article over at BusinessWeek.com, simply replacing "/." with "BusinessWeek.com" provides a likely true statement.
Depending on how far out the game is, they may be more in a "wait and see" mode, waiting to decide which console to release the game on prior to starting software development.
Square's jumped consoles before - everyone assumed FFVII would be for the N64 until it was announced it would be for the PlayStation.
Or you could, you know, wait until after Christmas and not fight in line for it. That's what I plan on doing for the Wii.
You don't have to get it OMG RIGHT NOW, you can wait. Given the massive production problems that Sony's having, you may have to wait anyway.
Who knows, if you're lucky, Sony will cut prices next year once they find the magical pixie dust required to fix their production problems. (Unfortunately it has a 0.5% drop rate on a rare spawn, so it may take a while.) Lord knows that if they don't get production up soon, they'll lose this generation solely due to lack of install base.
The first one million consoles will be an easy sell for sony all over the world
Assuming, of course, they ever hit their two million unit goal. After all, there aren't even one million consoles available at launch. The first million sales might be a bit hard to reach when they only have half that available right now...
Is a random battle on a huge, open plain where a 40 foot tall monster snuck up on you, and now you have to hold down the X button on your turbo controller to 'Attack' it to death so much better than FFXII's system where you get to see them coming, run in a realistic fashion (and draw aggro), and take a hands-off / high-level approach to control the flow of the battle instead of the individual movements of each character?
Of course not. Not including meaningless battles would be better. Automating meaningless battles is one of the dumbest, laziest ways out of it. You still have to watch the pointless, meaningless battle play out. If there's no point to the fights - don't include them.
If the battles are meaningless to the point that they can be automated, maybe they shouldn't be in the game in the first place. One of the most annoying things in most console RPGs is traveling through an area you're far too powerful for and having to churn through the same stupid enemies, who even your healer can kill in a single hit, every ten steps. It's boring and slow.
Making it so that the battles are automatic and you don't have to mash X doesn't make the battles any less pointless. If the battle is so simple that the developers decide to automate it to prevent the game from being boring, the battle shouldn't be in the game in the first place.
There's absolutely no reason why a bot would have to actually display the browser. The browser engines themselves are designed to allow embedding into other applications. There's no reason why a bot application would ever have to bother actually displaying the window created to house the browser's control. It would still run in the background, never displaying any UI, simply hosting the browser's control in an invisible window. (Windows has a class of windows that do not appear in the task bar, so the bot wouldn't even have to worry about that.)
Most current bots work by infecting the machine using a small "stub." Then they later download the rest of the bot after connecting to a "control" system. So, yes, Firefox itself would be too large for the initial infection, but once infected, nothing's too large to download. And no UI need even be seen.
In any case, even if the bot writer couldn't figure out how to use the browser controls without displaying a window, the JavaScript engines themselves are also accessible.
It would amaze me if the bot writers weren't already using JavaScript-capable bots. Internet Explorer is an ActiveX control that bots can use. Firefox offers plenty of ways to access its browser programmatically. (Imagine a SpamBot extension.) Firefox's JavaScript engine is open source, and I think Internet Explorer exports their via the Windows Scripting... thingy. (You'll have to forgive me for being more knowledgeable of how Firefox works than Internet Explorer.) In any case, the JS engines can also be accessed programmatically without using the full browser.
The added benefit of using available browsers that allow programmatic access is that it becomes nearly impossible to tell a bot from a normal user. Not only are the user-agents the same, but all other performance characteristics are as well, since it's directly using the browser. Plus it removes the need to implement HTTP, an HTML parsers, an image renderer, and, as mentioned, a JavaScript engine. Most bots are run on hacked[1] machines. Wasting processor power and memory is not a concern to the bot writer - they're not running them on their machines, anyway.
So, in any case, I expect that most bots are already using a JavaScript interpretor. And I expect it won't be long until they adapt to the CSS hacks suggested. After all, they already have access to a CSS parser...
[1] Give it up. Cracked suggests someone dropped it on the floor. Language evolves.
Tools, Options, Preferences (tab), E-mail Options, change "When forwarding a message" to "Attach original message."
Note that I haven't actually checked to see if that really does attach the entire message, but it sure looks like it did. (Clicking Forward created a new email with the message attached, and opening the attachment I was able to get the full headers via the View, Options ("Options?" WTF?) menu item.
I noticed that when Best Buy recently sent me a catalog advertising all their "Holiday gift ideas."
The Wii had a full two page picture as the lead-in to the video game section, plus it's own half-page within the game section next to the rest of the Nintendo games.
The only mention of the PS3 was stuck on a quarter of the PlayStation page, split with the PSP and various games.
And I'll bet you're right. Best Buy knows that each store will get something on the order of 5-10 PS3s total in time for Christmas. (OK, that number was pulled out of my ass. But it's something ridiculously low, since it's 400,000 units spread out amongst all retailers.)
I don't know how many Wiis they expect to get, but I'll bet it's in the 50-100 unit range per store. Again, a made up number, but since Nintendo will be releasing 4 million units, it's at least the correct ratio compared to the PS3 numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd really hope that doesn't work with any sane NAT implementation. Most NAT implementations view TCP and UDP as separate protocols, because - well, because they are separate protocols. So using this technique to punch a UDP hole would offer absolutely nothing when it comes to establishing a TCP connection. While the port numbers are similar, they apply only to their individual protocol. TCP port 80 has no relation to UDP port 80. The only thing similar about the two is that they both run over IP.
The core BitTorrent protocol uses TCP, so the UDP technique the article describes won't work. (As far as I know, there's no corresponding technique for doing something similar with TCP.)
There's been a bit of work on various UDP protocol replacements for BitTorrent, but nothing that's really gained any cohesion that I'm aware of. So, when it comes to BitTorrent, no, there really isn't much work on making such a technique work.
There might be other P2P platforms that do attempt to do something like the technique described in the article, but the official BitTorrent protocol uses TCP and therefore can't use the technique.
No. It's not supposed to be intuitive. It's supposed to be useful.
There are quite a few really useful Windows short cuts that aren't exactly easy to find. They're there for power users more than they're there for "regular" users. Once you learn to use them, they're very useful. I'm sure someone can find Mac OS X shortcuts that aren't exactly easy to discover but make certain tasks far easier.
Unfortunately Windows makes it painfully difficult to discover these shortcuts (they're not listed as accelerators in the right-click menu or in the corresponding menu in the application menu) but that's a different complaint.
Adult Swim on Cartoon Network seems to do the reverse (starting five minutes early)
If they are doing it intentionally, they're idiots, because people using DVRs aren't the only people who change channels on the hour boundaries. Some people watch shows on other channels that run right up to the hour marker, and then change the channel to discover that the new show they were watching has already started. (Or in your example, be forced to choose between watching the end of one show and the start of another one.)
Comedy Central seems to have perfected the art of getting the Daily Show to start at 11:00 sharp, while allowing it to run slightly over 11:30 and then having the Colbert Report run a minute after 12:00, cutting off the end for DVR users like me.
TV ads never used to bother me until I got my TiVo and discovered just how long they are. I've learned that if I wait 20 minutes after an hour-long show starts, I can watch the entire thing without commercials. 20 minutes of commercials for an hour long show! (OK, to be fair, it's closer to 18 minutes of commercials, but still - that's a pretty lousy signal to noise ratio.)
Not quite. It's similar (gee?), but there are differences. The biggest difference is the way Firefox under Linux handles the middle mouse button (although you can change that through about:config), but there are other minor changes like the Tools -> Options being renamed Edit -> Preferences. And not so minor changes like the order of OK/Cancel being reversed under Linux (or at least under GNOME?), and of course the file chooser is different.
So while Firefox under Linux is very similar to Firefox under Windows, they're not quite the same. Which actually makes adjusting to using it under Linux far more annoying than it otherwise would have to be. (Especially since it follows GNOME's messed up notion that people read buttons right to left in left to right lanugages.)
There's Netbeans which has a GUI builder. (Which, IMHO, sucks. Or at least did the last time I used it.)
Eclipse also has plugins (the Visual Editor) to allow creating GUIs graphically. (Which is, IMHO, worse than Netbeans's.)
So, there are GUI building tools. They just suck. (IMHO, of course.)
Personally I'd like to see something like XUL where the GUI is specified using a markup language. Which is why I started writing one and then never released it.
The newest run of $20s are mixed green/peach. They're green on the edges with a peach color-ed center. The newest run of $10 are a straight yellow-ish color, and the newest run of $50s are kind of a mixed pink, yellow, and blue thing.
Unfortunately there's still way too much old money in circulation, but the US is slowly changing over to having the different denominations have different colors.
The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing has a webpage on the currency changes with low-res pictures.
However, while the latest batch of bills does indeed have low-vision features, the bills are all still exactly the same size and texture, making them totally inaccessible to the blind. But the latest bill designs do attempt to make it easier to tell the bills apart.
If only they were actually in wide circulation...
The thing is, Okami delivers on the violence and tits. (Although it's cartoony violence and tits, so I guess that might not count.) It's not exactly "high art." You defeat one of the early bosses by getting him drunk. One of the unlockable abilities is a "taunt" move where the main character (a white wolf) pees on her enemies. Not exactly high art, and definitely not things that "average Americans" wouldn't understand.
Unfortunately it is on the stylistic side, and some people find the cartoony graphics a put-off. Plus it deals heavily in Japanese mythology, so most American players (like me) will have no freaking clue about the mythology behind the plot elements. But it really doesn't matter, the game explains everything you need to know.
Because of this Japan-centric style, "average" Americans are probably less willing to play it than they should. It's a really good game. While the Japanese aspects make the story and setting unfamiliar, they don't prevent someone who knows absolutely nothing about Japanese mythology from enjoying the game.
Yes. Because Pong is the only example of a game that's a game.
Apparently the only part of FFXII that you're expected to play are the boss battles. Everything else is fluff between cutscenes and other boss battles. What's the point behind "playing" a game that you don't actually play?
If you're not actively doing anything, then it's not a game. There are plenty of examples of games that involve actually playing something and still having a story. Things like Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VI, Oblivion, and so on.
Apparently with FFXII they realized that forced random battles are boring. Instead of replacing them with something fun, they automated them. A nice thought, but I'd prefer they replace the boring parts with something not boring, rather than just making it so you don't have to play them.
Close. It's based on Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which was sort of like FFT with all the things that were fun about it removed.
No job points. A total of something like 8 jobs per race. Abilities were earned by equipping different weapons, exactly like FFIX. A plot that made little to no sense. (The main character was sucked into Ivalice from "the real world" or something like it.)
That's his point, though, they stress suspension of disbelief to the breaking point.
People are willing to suspend disbelief for fictional stories as long as they remain internally consistent. If you create a world which contains a "highly trained" army of soldiers, and some 17-year old street urchin can out-class them after fighting various creatures for a couple of weeks, you're severely stretching the suspension of disbelief.
When you have people wielding swords that are as tall as a person that are about as effective in combat as someone chucking some form of neutrally-buoyant sports ball, you're stretching the suspension of disbelief.
So, yes, a game can stress the willing suspension of disbelief past the breaking point. In video games, though, you generally have to add a willingness to ignore completely illogical things that are done to prevent the game from sucking. So people accept the medkit being able to magically heal a guy instantly because it would suck otherwise. People accept the idea that your characters can become immensely powerful just by beating up random monsters along the country side because being forced to grind at a training dojo for a month would suck.
The suspension of disbelief required for a fantasy story may not be enough to get over the completely illogical concepts a game has for gameplay reasons, but for the game to be fun, you have to accept some compromises for realism. I don't know how Solid Snake manages to carry 20 guns, three cardboard boxes he can hide in, and assorted equipment, on his person, but it's more fun that way.
Wait, WHAT?! Apparently I'm one of the unenlightened few who mistakes video games as, well, games. What do you mean "if you had to slog through the gameplay?" I understand not wanting to play boring gameplay, but that makes it sound more like you're talking about skipping the gameplay altogether, removing it from a "video game" and turning it into a video.
So you do mean you get to skip almost all of the gameplay. You don't actually have to do anything distracting like play the game to move through the story. So it's a what, 40+ hour movie? With truly mindless gameplay that was so boring they had to automate it to make it palatable?!
Oh, goody, so you can be pumping through menus in real-time now. Having played the demo, I know just how stupidly unwieldy the menus are. Having to select options is real-time is an effort in frustration, considering that most commands are at least three menus deep.
I think I'll stick with video games where the idea is to play the game and not watch an overly-long story. If I want to watch a 40-hour long story, I can always go out and get the first couple of seasons of the new Battlestar Galactica. Except if I did that, I wouldn't be shackled to a Sony console.
Hmm, let's see.
DualShock: Use two sticks and twelve buttons to control.
SixAxiS: Use two sticks, twelve buttons, and be very careful about how you hold the controller to avoid accidental input.
Also, for added fun, grab something in both hands as if you were holding a PlayStation controller. Anything solid will do. See how much motion you can get out of it, solely by moving your hands. Now imagine trying to do a sharp banking turn in a flying game. You'll have to start moving your arms to get useful motion out of it.
Presumably the intention is that people will only be holding the controller one-handed when using the tilt controls. Unfortunately, that'll leave it off-balance, since it continues the original DualShock shape which was designed to be held in two hands.
Ultimately, though, you'll probably be right: it won't be any more complicated than the PS2, because after the first batch of games that use the tilt feature, no one will be using it any more. How many games did you play that used the analog buttons on the PS2? How many of those were released early in the PS2's life?
Even worse are screensavers that waste energy. Whenever I'm running under Linux and XScreensaver pops up, the fan on my laptop slowly starts to ramp up to "jet aircraft" levels. I have a feeling if I SSHed in and pulled up top, XScreensaver would be using 100% CPU to pull off 100FPS of lines moving around.
Personally I prefer something like the default Windows 2000/XP screensaver, which is just the Windows logo being displayed at a random location that changes every couple of seconds. Very low CPU power needed, and here's the most important part, it gives you a chance to wake the computer up if you don't want the screensaver to become active. I can't remember if XScreensaver did this or not, but Windows has a 5-second (configurable) "grace" period after the screensaver activates that you can cancel it without having the PC lock. I think it does, but I can't remember.
So my tweak to your idea would be having a low-CPU usage screensaver come up after x minutes of activity, probably around 5 minutes, and then dropping to the various DPMS sleep modes after that. Overly complicated screensavers are a relic of monitors that didn't support DPMS, where since the monitor wouldn't turn off anyway it might as well show pretty pictures.
Oh, and also, I wish OSes would drop into DPMS mode something like a minute after I lock the workstation. If I manually lock it, chances are I'm locking it because I'm walking away for it for a while and won't be needing it too soon.
To be fair, it's BusinessWeek.com making the assertion that she's the "latest 'cewebrity'" - complete with the, uh, clever "cewebrity" joke. Slashdot is just reporting on BusinessWeek.com's story.
Although, based on the article over at BusinessWeek.com, simply replacing "/." with "BusinessWeek.com" provides a likely true statement.
Remind me to never sit next to you on a bus.
Depending on how far out the game is, they may be more in a "wait and see" mode, waiting to decide which console to release the game on prior to starting software development.
Square's jumped consoles before - everyone assumed FFVII would be for the N64 until it was announced it would be for the PlayStation.
Or you could, you know, wait until after Christmas and not fight in line for it. That's what I plan on doing for the Wii.
You don't have to get it OMG RIGHT NOW, you can wait. Given the massive production problems that Sony's having, you may have to wait anyway.
Who knows, if you're lucky, Sony will cut prices next year once they find the magical pixie dust required to fix their production problems. (Unfortunately it has a 0.5% drop rate on a rare spawn, so it may take a while.) Lord knows that if they don't get production up soon, they'll lose this generation solely due to lack of install base.
Assuming, of course, they ever hit their two million unit goal. After all, there aren't even one million consoles available at launch. The first million sales might be a bit hard to reach when they only have half that available right now...
Ah, MySQL. Where trying to insert a row with a column value larger than the column can actually store results in MySQL clipping it to the max value.
Fortunately, as of MySQL 5, you can fix this problem.
So, yes, early versions of MySQL had a brain-dead default SQL mode that simply "corrected" invalid column values, but MySQL 5 fixes this.
Now if only they would add column constraints...
Of course not. Not including meaningless battles would be better. Automating meaningless battles is one of the dumbest, laziest ways out of it. You still have to watch the pointless, meaningless battle play out. If there's no point to the fights - don't include them.
If the battles are meaningless to the point that they can be automated, maybe they shouldn't be in the game in the first place. One of the most annoying things in most console RPGs is traveling through an area you're far too powerful for and having to churn through the same stupid enemies, who even your healer can kill in a single hit, every ten steps. It's boring and slow.
Making it so that the battles are automatic and you don't have to mash X doesn't make the battles any less pointless. If the battle is so simple that the developers decide to automate it to prevent the game from being boring, the battle shouldn't be in the game in the first place.
There's absolutely no reason why a bot would have to actually display the browser. The browser engines themselves are designed to allow embedding into other applications. There's no reason why a bot application would ever have to bother actually displaying the window created to house the browser's control. It would still run in the background, never displaying any UI, simply hosting the browser's control in an invisible window. (Windows has a class of windows that do not appear in the task bar, so the bot wouldn't even have to worry about that.)
Most current bots work by infecting the machine using a small "stub." Then they later download the rest of the bot after connecting to a "control" system. So, yes, Firefox itself would be too large for the initial infection, but once infected, nothing's too large to download. And no UI need even be seen.
In any case, even if the bot writer couldn't figure out how to use the browser controls without displaying a window, the JavaScript engines themselves are also accessible.
It would amaze me if the bot writers weren't already using JavaScript-capable bots. Internet Explorer is an ActiveX control that bots can use. Firefox offers plenty of ways to access its browser programmatically. (Imagine a SpamBot extension.) Firefox's JavaScript engine is open source, and I think Internet Explorer exports their via the Windows Scripting... thingy. (You'll have to forgive me for being more knowledgeable of how Firefox works than Internet Explorer.) In any case, the JS engines can also be accessed programmatically without using the full browser.
The added benefit of using available browsers that allow programmatic access is that it becomes nearly impossible to tell a bot from a normal user. Not only are the user-agents the same, but all other performance characteristics are as well, since it's directly using the browser. Plus it removes the need to implement HTTP, an HTML parsers, an image renderer, and, as mentioned, a JavaScript engine. Most bots are run on hacked[1] machines. Wasting processor power and memory is not a concern to the bot writer - they're not running them on their machines, anyway.
So, in any case, I expect that most bots are already using a JavaScript interpretor. And I expect it won't be long until they adapt to the CSS hacks suggested. After all, they already have access to a CSS parser...
[1] Give it up. Cracked suggests someone dropped it on the floor. Language evolves.
Tools, Options, Preferences (tab), E-mail Options, change "When forwarding a message" to "Attach original message."
Note that I haven't actually checked to see if that really does attach the entire message, but it sure looks like it did. (Clicking Forward created a new email with the message attached, and opening the attachment I was able to get the full headers via the View, Options ("Options?" WTF?) menu item.
I noticed that when Best Buy recently sent me a catalog advertising all their "Holiday gift ideas."
The Wii had a full two page picture as the lead-in to the video game section, plus it's own half-page within the game section next to the rest of the Nintendo games.
The only mention of the PS3 was stuck on a quarter of the PlayStation page, split with the PSP and various games.
And I'll bet you're right. Best Buy knows that each store will get something on the order of 5-10 PS3s total in time for Christmas. (OK, that number was pulled out of my ass. But it's something ridiculously low, since it's 400,000 units spread out amongst all retailers.)
I don't know how many Wiis they expect to get, but I'll bet it's in the 50-100 unit range per store. Again, a made up number, but since Nintendo will be releasing 4 million units, it's at least the correct ratio compared to the PS3 numbers.