Heh. You're not the only one. Despite fears of being called a paranoiac, and despite assurances that the 'in use' LED would warn me, I have this nice little stuffed penguin, see...and when I place him atop my iMac, his beak fits just precisely over the camera lens.
Now all those unscrupulous bastards at DHS need to do is realize that my cat is a) home all day and b) bribable with kibbles and I'm *screwed*.
If your product is presently proprietary, what would the benefits be of opensourcing it? Seriously, Open Source != panacea. If you have a market which supports you, especially a small one, it's because nobody else as of yet has found it worth their time to come up with a solution and provide a common good. You say your boss 'likes open source' - but why? Philosophically? that's nice. Philosophy doesn't pay bills. Business models do. If it is becoming prohibitively expensive to find and attract coders who can maintain and develop for your application in this obscure language/environment, and you're attempting to leverage community talent, then perhaps you would benefit from simply porting the application to a less-obscure platform, if possible, so as to broaden your talent pool.
The problem of finding a business model which utilizes open source is presently confounding many companies, many of them very large ones. Open source is very, very useful at reducing the costs of doing business - it's not so clear-cut as to how it makes one money directly.
This question is somewhat incomplete. Why do you 'like' Open Source, and what motivates you to release your software? Unless we know that, there's no way to determine what sort of business model might be appropriate. What are you trying to get out of releasing it? Warm fuzzies? If so, then sorry, you're just going to be committing business suicide. If there are specific gains you're looking to make, then perhaps.
WARNING: Anecdotal reply.:-) On the WoW server I am on, two players that I am aware of (one from my guild) have had their accounts jacked by keyloggers in the past week. In the case of my guildmate, the keylogger was, as far as we can tell, installed by website malware and not by trojan. S/he logged on to find every possession of every 'toon gone, and even the hunter toons pets dismissed - a purely malicious touch, since there was no way for the intruder to make money off of that. However, I just wanted to point out the following - this player had ~5 level 60 toons on this account on one server alone. Those toons had perhaps a total of 2000 gold among them. That, according to recent articles on gold farming, is the equivalent of twenty goldfarmer 'shifts' output, *not counting* any gold received from selling their possessions. All this from a single downloaded piece of malware, as opposed to twenty shifts of manual labor. Given that we *know* goldfarming companies are willing to do the former, it seems a no-brainer that this method is quite obviously 'worth it.'
Blizzard, in response to the ticket filed, locked the account while they investigated, and have said they are attempting to trace the trades with an eye to restoring all items. If they can do this (and I don't see why they couldn't, if they decide to) then my guildmate and the others affected will only be out the lost gameplay time and the aggravation - but we don't know if that 'rollback' does, in fact, remove the items from the *recipients* of the transactions. I would bet it probably would, but I'm not Blizzard. If I was the person doing this, I'd have my realworld cash already, so even if the transaction got rolled back, there'd be nothing the buyer could do- so for minimal effort over the three weeks it took for Blizzard to deal with this I'd have made my profit.
Besides, there will always be those who don't find it worthwhile to complain to Blizzard and just quit in disgust, figuring they're just out the $15 of that month's game fee. None of the measures I've discussed above address the structural problem of preventing this sort of attack in any way, because it doesn't take place on Blizzard's infrastructure; in order to address it, Blizzard would have to change their authentication systems to incorporate more robust client code and more secure methods such as the PIN-clicking method described in another post. That means coding, testing and waiting for the patch cycle - so they have a window of vulnerability anyway.
It all comes down to - the effort expended by the malware attackers is minimal. The risk is somewhat higher, but not much higher than that of being goldfarmers anyway, so why not?
This is a common and regrettably still widespread misunderstanding. The term 'support' when applied to an enterprise product does not mean simply 'availability of assistance with and information regarding the product.' It means, specifically, the availability of a legal entity with whom a manager can sign a legal contract which specifically assigns certain responsibilities. In other words, companies use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell/Suse Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop because they can sign a contract with those organizations which makes those organizations (or their designated proxies) legally (ina contractual sense) responsible for providing security updates, technical assistance, and the like to their users. "Better support from the community" may be true in that there is 'cheaper' support available; it may be true in that there are more knowledgeable people available (if you can find them, and they're willing to talk to you, and...etc.). However, that's not what 'better' means in the enterprise world. 'Better', to an IT manager, means that their department has done everything possible to mitigate risk and can show that in quantifiable terms, with legally guaranteed response times and effort levels, along with predictable costs.
That's what 'Enterprise support' means. For the home user? Nope, not necessary. For someone who has to budget the cost of running a thousand user desktops on linux six to eight months before the year of run begins? Critical.
I'm unsure of what exactly it means to be advantaging themselves in the 'music jukebox software' space. Their music jukebox software is free. The question at hand is whether their owning the iPod and using that to encourage users to utilize a particular service for content (iTMS) is illegal/wrong. Let me state that if Apple owned any of the content in question, and it was hence impossible to utilize the content in any other format (i.e. un-DRMed), then that's a problem. Here's the thing, though - the stuff they're selling through the iTMS (music, video) is, by being defined as intellectual property, a 'monopoly.' It's owned by the IP rights holder, and can always at that rightsholder's whim be restricted to a single source. Apple is making it available through a particular channel, which the iPod makes it easy to use.
All of the anti-trust arguments rest on Apple's market share. In turn, in order for the iTMS to be relevant, it seems to me that you'd have to prove the availability of iTMS on the iPod and NOT on other players to be a factor in the purchasing decision of the iPod. However, that's backwards from reality. The iPod was a massive hit before iTMS was doing well, and iTMS is an effort to capitalize on a much bigger product - the sale of iPOD hardware. At that point, Apple had a better product than the competition, and is attempting to capitalize on that fact. They are not preventing anyone from selling other mp3/aac players. They're not preventing anyone from selling their content through iTMS. They're not preventing anyone from setting up competing digital distribution links - market choice, however, may make it difficult, and entities may be petitioning for relief from that. I say this because *unless* they have clauses in their distribution contracts with content providers saying that 'unless the iTMS is the ONLY digital distribution source you use, you can't distribute through iTMS' they're not preventing the sale of music through other digital download services. (CAVEAT: THEY MAY HAVE THESE CLAUSES, I DON'T KNOW! If they do, then I acknowledge a problem!) Rather, they're using their market position to encourage people to buy music through iTMS, because it's easier than ripping CDs. Making things easier is not monopolistic; making *other* things *harder* deliberately is. The former is innovation. The latter is anticompetitive.
Leveraging a market position to sell more of something is not illegal. Leveraging it to restrict *other* people selling things may indeed be illegal. However, given that the iPod (and iTunes) will accept non-DRMed tracks from non-Apple sources (online and off), I argue that they're not preventing anything - they're just refusing to do R&D work to make it easy for other people to sell stuff in their patch. I really don't have a problem with that.
And to those that note that Norway isn't capitalist - fair enough. Apple, however, certainly is. So my response: if Norway isn't capitalist, it sure should stop spending 'money' buying Apple's products in a 'market' and then using domestic law to tell Apple how to design those products to conform to its 'noncapitalist' system.
This is a common trend. I'm not a fan of zealous copyright wielding, and (full disclosure) I am an iPod owner. On the other hand, around 95% of the music on my iPod is there through having been ripped off a CD collection I've been accruing over the past 15 years. The Norwegian ombudsman's quote seems to me to miss the one critical point that other posters above me have had no trouble seeing: The fact that Apple is the sole source of the player but not the content. If they were the sole source of both, that would indeed be a problem. If there were no other way to get music onto an iPod, that would indeed be a problem. If there were no other way to get downloaded music from the internet legally onto an iPod, that would be a problem. However, those aren't true. You can buy music on CD. You can get it on vinyl. You can buy it from places like eMusic.com (no, I have no affiliation other than having paid them for a month of service) and download it as DRM-free MP3s, which can happily be loaded onto Apple's iTunes and iPod.
The only part of the Apple solution that is 'locked' is the iTunes Music Store. And as we can see, everything available through there (with the exception of a few 'exclusive tracks!') is also available *elsewhere* - and there's a great deal of content that *isn't* available there. Furthermore, Apple makes no attempt to lock the iPod down from handling this other, DRM-free content (and if anyone whines 'it won't play format xxx' I slap them).
At that point, the thing that their 'lock' is protecting is their 'ease of use' consumer flow. In other words, we built this thing in such a way that the only people who can extract rents from downloading music to it (i.e. use DRM to make people pay money to download music to it) is us. If people want to invest a little energy and time, they can put music on it to their heart's content without having to cope with anybody's DRM, but if they want to accept the DRM and pay the cash for ease-of-use, they have to pay it to us.
That's what capitalism is all about. There's a perfectly good way onto the iPod for music that isn't from ITMS. If you don't want to pay Apple, don't. Buy a CD and rip it. Hell, record it yourself and load it. Your iPod will play it just fine. These bills have zip to do with protecting consumers, they have to do with protecting other businesses who want to extract their own rents in the DRM download market and want to freeload off the iPod's popularity. Screw 'em.
I've owned two Creative mp3 players - the 'Jukebox' (original Discman form factor) and a Zen. The Jukebox stopped working after three months of *sitting on my desk*. Not because the hard drive failed - but because the headphone jack died. The headphones hadn't been unplugged in those three months, nor had the machine been moved. The Zen went through *three* hard drives in a 12-month period. Now, neither of these anecdotal stories means much of anything as far as Creative as a whole, other than as a single data point in any potential statistical examination of product quality for those particular products. However, they are as relevant as your story to your opinion that the Zen is 'infinitely more flexible' than the IPOD and I-Tunes line [sic].
This has very little to do with stealing ideas other than as a tactical legal point. This is entirely about two companies maneuvering to defend their business plans and their management teams from irate stockholders and oversight bodies. Creative came out with MP3 players long before Apple did. Their efforts looked and acted nothing like the iPod, other than that they were both handheld hard-drive based MP3 players with dubious build quality (I have two dead iPods adorning my shelf, as well). However, one company is in fiscal trouble and it (or its management) is in danger of repercussions for failing to capitalize on its first-mover advantage, and the other is eating its lunch.
For so long as this suit/countersuit goes on, Creative's management is somewhat safer, because sacking them entails financial risks to the company (it seems to my non-financial-professional self) and if they actually win, well, payoff.
Step one: Know what you need. 'Reliable' doesn't mean anything. *How* reliable? To what level? What is an acceptable risk level for the facility your data will be in, or must your data be multihomed? If the latter, failover or clustered? Etc. Make sure that the company can tell you how it will meet all these requirements, in writing, to you and your lawyer's satisfaction before signing a contract.
Step two: Referrals. Who else do they host? Check uptimes. Talk to their other customers. If they won't give you references, or if they can't give you companies you've either heard of or can verify have existed and are independent, walk.
Step three: Read the contract. Better yet, have your lawyers read the contract. Anything fuzzy? Push them on it. If they waffle at all, or look like they're trying to get you to sign terms they might give way on if you push (not the price, the *terms*) DANGER. Established hosting companies should have their risks well set out and know what it will cost them to assume whatever level of risk - at worst, they should simply change pricing if you try to reassign risk, or simply tell you they don't offer that service level.
Step four: GO LOOK AT THE FACILITY. No excuse for that. If your business is going to depend on this facility, you need to see it. No trusting web photos. This is your place of business and your physical plant. If your business depends on it being available, or worse yet on it being something that you describe to *your* customers, it's your responsibility to eyeball it. If you don't know what you're looking for (and if you're a business type, there's no shame in that) then find a technical person to eyeball it with you and pay them for their time.
Step five: If you're concerned about their available bandwidth, ask to see bandwidth reports. Ask for peers who can verify their connectivity. When you visit a facility, ask to see the external switching facilities and rough-count circuits if you have to. If you're still concerned, then tell them you want legal guarantees (with penalties) in the contract for available bandwidth - they shouldn't bat an eye at that, since the more bandwidth you (verifiably) use, the more they should be able to bill you, probably. If they balk at potential penalties for short bandwidth, there's likely a problem. Typically, they themselves will offer tight bandwidth monitoring just so they can bill you for those bits.
Step six, and final for me: HAVE A BACKUP PLAN. Things can and will go wrong. The best hosting provider out there might suffer incredibly bad luck and multilevel catastrophe. EVERY admin will have horror stories of 'the two things that would never go wrong together' going wrong. My favorite is a switching center in downtown Boston having *both* of its redundant data pipes being taken out by construction on the same day by the Big Dig, on opposite sides of the building. This might mean having a small backup system in another center on the smae provider. It might mean having a staging system in a home office that can be brought live on limited bandwidth. I don't know, that's *your* problem. It might just mean having a really good PR checklist. But HAVE A PLAN.
Sure, if you're not dependent on an uptime number, these steps may not be necessary. But if, as the question seems to imply, your success or failure will be tightly coupled to the reliability of your hosting provider, then there's no substitution for Doing The Work.
Re:Jealousy is a terrible thing. In the meantime..
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All I can tell you is that on my 20" intel iMac, with the ATI X1600, Battlefield 2 runs juuuuust fine. The only time I hit lag is when my network hiccups (it's Comcastic!) and I have essentially all the options midrange to high on the video. Yes, I got the 256MB VRAM option and 2GB of RAM, but whatever. And in OS X, WoW runs at 69 fps in Ironforge. Between those two, I'm a happy clam.
I will readily admit that the fact that it's an iMac means that upgrading the video in it will not be a viable option. However, meh. All of my friends who are "serious gamers" and have "serious gaming rigs" seem to end up upgrading at least their $300 video cards every 12 months at a minimum, and usually their whole PC every 18 months or less. For the approx. $2K it cost me to buy this thing, I figure I came out ahead - at least for the 3 years of warranty coverage.
Jealousy is a terrible thing. In the meantime...
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...those of us who have a reason to use it will reap the benefits. Yes, Virginia, there are some. Battlefield 2, for example. Annoyingly-single-platform hardware updaters, like cell phone flashers and the like. Those little one-off tasks that I used to have to go find a windows PC for? Not so much anymore. Whee! When I need to do real work? Yep, you're right, I turn back into a pod person.
You can use Mac OS X with proper drivers (i.e. written by Apple, as they intended) and now (if you want to) you can use any 'Windows Only' applications that may be foisted upon you by, say, your job. Come on, people, it's not rocket science. Plus, when Linux is fully up, you'll have a completely triple-boot machine. All of which makes it even harder for the beancounters in your enterprise job(tm) to say "No, you can't have one of those because it can't run Approved Software(tm)".
Asking "Why would you?" is aking to shoving your head in the sand and asking "Why would you run a Mac?" Sure, go ahead and limit your choices. I'll be taking one from *every* column, thanks.
One thing I've never understood (someone please edumicate me) is why Battlegrounds, as an entirely separate instanced system, couldn't be shared among server populations? It would make sense for non-world-consequence PvP to share player populations among servers. That would also tend to minimize server-local population or use pattern imbalances.
Of course, it's quite probable that the BG, being simply a server-tied instance, *can't* handle player integration from different servers...but still, it would seem that this would be an easier place than anywhere else to set it up.
Battlegrounds are not only problematic from a total server population PoV, but from the balance PoV as well. In order for a Battleground instance to spawn, if I understand the system correctly, there have to be enough players from both sides in the queue. Those players are only drawn from one server. As a result, on servers with imbalances in their population numbers, the lower-pop side of the fight often doesn't have enough players willing to fight. Consequence: lots of people sitting in queues for nothing.
Another issue which is exacerbated by these imbalances is that one side's PvP players are often highly practiced, coordinated, etc. whereas the other side has a much higher percentage of 'pickup' players. The higher-pop side with the 'pickup' players will typically get beat on - which is not a problem in and of itself, but it will tend to drive away the more 'casual' gamers from that side, which will eventually lower the BG demand even on the high-pop side.
It was a problem because the foam would outgas once in vacuum, making it impossible to do good science near it. Also, it would foul mechanisms and result in lots of little foam particles floating around the tank, eventually - so if you built a hab out of the tank, you'd have a hab sitting in the middle of a haze of foam 'dandruff' - suboptimal. If you had to mod the tank (cut holes in it, etc.) you'd have to go through the foam layer. To mount anything to the tank, you'd have to remove the foam first, and so on.
One proposal a friend and I had was to have astronauts visit the tank and drop a pair of small solar-powered bots onto the base of the tank, connected by tensioning cables. These bots would 'grind' the foam off the tank, and spiral their way up the tank slowly, on opposite sides. The cables would hold them onto the surface, and ensure neither lost purchase; they could 'reel' in and out as the tank circumference changed and they worked their way up. That way, the astronauts would only have to spacewalk to place the bots, minimizing human labor. Once the tank had been cleaned off, you would move the tank out of the resulting 'cloud' of foam bits into clean space and then use it for whatever project you had in mind.
Even if you weren't going to use the tank, there were probably going to be a few tons of LOx/H2 which would have been incredibly useful for on-orbit fuel-cells and thrusters...if only there was a way to transfer it. I don't know if there was any way to do that.
One question I have always had...I recall a NASA study which stated that the External Tank could be boosted to orbit rather than burnt on re-entry (I know, it didn't always burn). The point was that for no extra missions, an essentially airtight aircraft aluminum shell could have been placed into orbit with each mission - as a bonus, containing some leftover LOx and H2 for use there.
One of the biggest problems with using the tanks once they arrived was that they were, in fact, covered with insulating foam, and removing the foam was nontrivial, especially given that you couldn't add weight to the tank for removal systems and that labor in orbit was unbelievably expensive. There were a couple of proposals to get around that, however.
In any case, it seems to me that the new cargo lifter (the only one to use the external tank) wouldn't be able to do this trick, because the tank would be damaged during staging...plus, staging would occur too early for the tank to achieve orbit.
My question, though- was there ever any chance that the tanks could have been used in this fashion? Do any of the rocket scientists know that report, or what happened? Were those numbers wrong? Were the problems of utilizing the tanks judged too large to make the attempt worth it?
Babies have an instinctive understanding of 'real'
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...and parents/pain for what is 'correct.' I don't think the concept is gone, but there are problems that are buried in the question as posed which (I think) became clearer stumbling blocks as technology advanced. NOTE: I'm not an AI theorist, nor do I play one on TV; I just like the idea and read a lot. Hence, this is all pulled out of my fundament.
Cycorp is not a poorly funded idea in the wrong direction. Cycorp chose a different tack; they decided that rather than trying to build a reality and correctness filter, they'd rely on human brains to do it for them (like trusting your parents implictly) and instead concentrated on the connectivity of the 'facts' accrued by the 'baby.' CYC is still very much around, and is very much in demand by various parts of the government and industry - if you want to play with it yourself, you can download a truncated database of assertions called OpenCYC. Folks have even gone so far as to graft it onto an AIML engine, to produce a chatbot with the knowledge of OpenCYC behind it.
The problem: how does your baby learn what's real and what's REAL NINJA POWER? Or, pardon me, what's REAL NINJA POWER and what's just a poser? Someone's gotta teach it. Which means it has to learn not only facts, but how to evaluate facts. So it has to learn facts, and how to handle facts - which means it has to learn how to learn. Which means you need to know that answer from the git-go. Tortuous games with logic aside, the onus is now much more heavily on the designer to have a functioning base - whereas with the Cyc approach, the only 'correctness' that is required is that of information, and perhaps that of associativity or weight - which can be tweaked, dynamically. The actual structure of how that information is related, acquired, stored and related is not relevant once decided. Having said all this, Cyc is (from the limited demos I've seen) quite impressive at dealing with information handed to it. It just wouldn't do very well at deciding what do do with that information - that's the job of the humans that gave it the info. It can tell you about the information, but not what to do with it. That task requires volition, really.
Volition is a killer. What is it? How do you simulate it? How do you create it? Is it random action? Random weighted action? Path dependent action? Purely nature, purely nurture? When it comes down to it, the human is (as far as we know) not a purely reactive system, which CyC (AFAIK) is. Learning requires not only accepting information, but deciding what to do with it - deciding how it will be integrated into the whole. If the entity itself isn't making that decision, then the programmer/designer/builder has already made it in the design or code - and then it's not really learning, is it?
Sorry if this is confused. As I said, I don't do this for a living.
Yes and yes. I'd go. If NASA called and said they had a pre-Challenger O-Ring shuttle that had been sitting in freezing rain for two days and they needed a mission specialist, I'd be on the next plane. Would I live there? If it meant *either* that I could do so undamaged (zero-gee, radiation) by the day-to-day experience, barring accidents; *or* that my doing so would increase the chances others would get to do so, then yes, in a New York Minute, baby.
The single biggest block to my using Entourage for my email rather than Mail.app is the fact that Office X did not integrate at all with OS X's built in address book or calendaring functionality. While I can live without iCal integration (maybe) the plain fact is that I'm damn sick of massaging my address book data every time I need to use it somewhere else - usually because MS has stupid import/export options. Can anyone using the new version tell me if Office talks to the system Address Book, and if so, how well it does so? I like syncing my Palm directly to the System (iSync) and hence to.mac, rather than to a MS sandbox and then having to pry my data out of there with a crowbar.
Now, there may be very good reason(s) why the MacBU chose not to integrate with the system PIM services (and yes, I know Office X predated stable versions of those services!). If that's the case, an informed explanation of why this is so would also be much appreciated.
I have used the 7135 since it was first available. It does everything I ask of it, and does it well. My only complaint is that it is PalmOS 4 on a DragonBall processor (sleaux!) but that doesn't bother me much. There's no camera, but no Bluetooth either (which would be nice). I've had the same unit the whole time, and it has survived countless gravity-testings onto concrete. I use iSync on a Mac as well as sync to Evolution on Ximian Desktop; both work reasonably well once you get used to some foibles (the Palm sync protocol kinda-sorta-sucks, AFAICT). iSync is great.
Mine has crashed in the single-digit numbers of times since I got it. I have found that letting it run out of battery while roaming tends to drive it nuts, and that situation got me both my two data-loss crashes...since then, i've carried a live backup on the 256MB SD card I keep in the unit with my 'critical MP3s' and 64MB worth of files. I use it as a backup MP3 player as well. Battery life is presently around 2.5 days, but that's on the original battery - when new, it lasted around 4, with moderate talktime. This one is on Verizon, btw.
I'd recommend it wholeheartedly for one reason: I no longer need carry a Palm and a phone. This one does the job of both. It's a *slightly* compromised phone (big, battery hungry) and a more compromised Palm (OS4, lousy processor) but its advantages (for me) more than outweigh those issues. I like it quite a bit, and consider it the first real 'phone that science fiction promised me as a kid.'
Let me clarify. When I say 'too lazy to participate' I mean 'too lazy to role-play.' The mindless leveling-up is pretty much the lowest common denominator.
Ref. your points about UO being a large existing fanbase, sure it is. However, I know a great number of UO players who never played single-player Ultima (anecdotal evidence, ignore at whim).
In regards to the world GTA and its impact, I should have emphasized 'story.' Not in the sense of a gripping narrative, but in the sense of a continuous set of (sorta related) tasks. The problem is that as many games have found (Anarchy Online a big offender here) it's really hard to set up linear content in a MMORPG, because people (being lazy) will just share information and/or loot...reducing your fun-and-challenging-for-the-first-runner quest to a set of mindless button-clicks. While it's true that those who care could ignore the walkthroughs, more often than not either the quest has been made ridiculously hard to complete without help (ref. the Fixer Quests on AO) or gives out loot which, once in the hands of the buttonclickers, becomes not-so-fun to have. Or, worse, becomes a must-have and renders the quest more of an obstacle and work than a fun diversion.
I must disagree with your contention that 'players will make the content/storylines.' If anything is true across the board of the current crop of MMORPGs, it's that the players *won't* or *can't* make 'story' and 'content' - and the game runners are hard-pressed to come up with enough to make anything interesting happen. Most of the prerequisites for user-generated content - like the ability to change the world structure - are hard to implement in a way that doesn't screw up the basic parameters of the system. AO's biggest problem was that it was a concrete sandbox - players couldn't in any way affect the environment. As a result, it got boring real fast.
The problem with imagining online versions of games with cool worlds is that the online version will always suffer (and if history is any guide, usually fatally) from the fact that 95% of players are lazy and can't be bothered to participate in them. The fact that Ultima Online, the MMORPG with perhaps the lowest-tech engine, survives and thrives is because it demands more from its players than just appreciative ooh-ing and aah-ing at the eye candy and content that the dev team has slaved to put together. Players are actually required to interact, transact, form social arrangements and the like, and are 'encouraged' to do so 'in-character' if for no other reason than the game mechanics make it easier to do that than to sit around an l33t-ch4t with yer h0m13z. At least, they make that relatively boring.
One of the great things about GTA is the world that has been set up by the developers. Player behavior is guided much more subtlely and much more pervasively by the use of single-player storylines and rewards/penalties than it first seems. GTA Online would, in fact, make a decent game initially, but (IMNSHO) there would need to be some carefully thought out mechanisms that would provide for the formation of (and motivation for) player-to-player social structures, both dyadic and multiple-party (partners and gangs).
I would think GTA has an advantage in this arena in terms of immediate playability, because the game world is presented as pretty much an anarchy (well, with limited law). The problem, however, is that much of the 'fun' of GTA is the fact that you (and your immediate interactions) are stand-outs in the world, because everybody *else* is mostly law-abiding...which is what makes it so much fun to hear them scream in terror when you mow 'em down with the ambulance.:-) If everyone in the environment was behaving like you, it wouldn't be GTA anymore, it'd be a demolition derby with bystanders - a DeathRace 2000 with missions. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, I would tend to believe that it's going to pall a lot faster than the secret joy of running over that old lady while chasing down a hooker for a little of the old bouncy-bouncy life renewal.
Now, what *I* want is someone to extend the GTA system into vehicular weapons. Then we could FINALLY have a worthy online Car Wars environment. Heehee. Uncle Al's catalogs, here I come...
"I *LIVE!*"...guaranteed to make my fourteen-y/o self start sweating bullets at the machine. Followed by "I *HUNGER!*" a few seconds later as he came for you.
The awful, dying wrrrrrraaaaaaaarrrrrrrwwwww of your icon sinking down the funnel in Tempest.
On a more prosaic note, the continuous chika-chika-chika-chika of the frantic buying spree at the beginning of every round of Counter-Strike.
Hm. While I would *never* wish to disagree with an esteemed/. colleague, I might point out that while the above script is indeed effective at sucking up bandwidth, there's a more efficient answer! Perusing the website indicated shows that the front page is straight HTML, whereas - voila - the 'Benefits' page (http://www.thebulkclub.com/benefits.asp) is, as we can see, an ASP page. So why just look at a boring front page? Determine for yourself the BENEFITS of this organization, and give that poor IIS server a bit o' work to do.
bash-2.01 $ while [ true ] ; do wget -O - http://www.thebulkclub.com/benefits.asp >/dev/null ; done
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Now all those unscrupulous bastards at DHS need to do is realize that my cat is a) home all day and b) bribable with kibbles and I'm *screwed*.
The problem of finding a business model which utilizes open source is presently confounding many companies, many of them very large ones. Open source is very, very useful at reducing the costs of doing business - it's not so clear-cut as to how it makes one money directly.
This question is somewhat incomplete. Why do you 'like' Open Source, and what motivates you to release your software? Unless we know that, there's no way to determine what sort of business model might be appropriate. What are you trying to get out of releasing it? Warm fuzzies? If so, then sorry, you're just going to be committing business suicide. If there are specific gains you're looking to make, then perhaps.
Blizzard, in response to the ticket filed, locked the account while they investigated, and have said they are attempting to trace the trades with an eye to restoring all items. If they can do this (and I don't see why they couldn't, if they decide to) then my guildmate and the others affected will only be out the lost gameplay time and the aggravation - but we don't know if that 'rollback' does, in fact, remove the items from the *recipients* of the transactions. I would bet it probably would, but I'm not Blizzard. If I was the person doing this, I'd have my realworld cash already, so even if the transaction got rolled back, there'd be nothing the buyer could do- so for minimal effort over the three weeks it took for Blizzard to deal with this I'd have made my profit.
Besides, there will always be those who don't find it worthwhile to complain to Blizzard and just quit in disgust, figuring they're just out the $15 of that month's game fee. None of the measures I've discussed above address the structural problem of preventing this sort of attack in any way, because it doesn't take place on Blizzard's infrastructure; in order to address it, Blizzard would have to change their authentication systems to incorporate more robust client code and more secure methods such as the PIN-clicking method described in another post. That means coding, testing and waiting for the patch cycle - so they have a window of vulnerability anyway.
It all comes down to - the effort expended by the malware attackers is minimal. The risk is somewhat higher, but not much higher than that of being goldfarmers anyway, so why not?
This is a common and regrettably still widespread misunderstanding. The term 'support' when applied to an enterprise product does not mean simply 'availability of assistance with and information regarding the product.' It means, specifically, the availability of a legal entity with whom a manager can sign a legal contract which specifically assigns certain responsibilities. In other words, companies use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell/Suse Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop because they can sign a contract with those organizations which makes those organizations (or their designated proxies) legally (ina contractual sense) responsible for providing security updates, technical assistance, and the like to their users.
"Better support from the community" may be true in that there is 'cheaper' support available; it may be true in that there are more knowledgeable people available (if you can find them, and they're willing to talk to you, and...etc.). However, that's not what 'better' means in the enterprise world. 'Better', to an IT manager, means that their department has done everything possible to mitigate risk and can show that in quantifiable terms, with legally guaranteed response times and effort levels, along with predictable costs.
That's what 'Enterprise support' means. For the home user? Nope, not necessary. For someone who has to budget the cost of running a thousand user desktops on linux six to eight months before the year of run begins? Critical.
All of the anti-trust arguments rest on Apple's market share. In turn, in order for the iTMS to be relevant, it seems to me that you'd have to prove the availability of iTMS on the iPod and NOT on other players to be a factor in the purchasing decision of the iPod. However, that's backwards from reality. The iPod was a massive hit before iTMS was doing well, and iTMS is an effort to capitalize on a much bigger product - the sale of iPOD hardware. At that point, Apple had a better product than the competition, and is attempting to capitalize on that fact. They are not preventing anyone from selling other mp3/aac players. They're not preventing anyone from selling their content through iTMS. They're not preventing anyone from setting up competing digital distribution links - market choice, however, may make it difficult, and entities may be petitioning for relief from that. I say this because *unless* they have clauses in their distribution contracts with content providers saying that 'unless the iTMS is the ONLY digital distribution source you use, you can't distribute through iTMS' they're not preventing the sale of music through other digital download services. (CAVEAT: THEY MAY HAVE THESE CLAUSES, I DON'T KNOW! If they do, then I acknowledge a problem!) Rather, they're using their market position to encourage people to buy music through iTMS, because it's easier than ripping CDs. Making things easier is not monopolistic; making *other* things *harder* deliberately is. The former is innovation. The latter is anticompetitive.
Leveraging a market position to sell more of something is not illegal. Leveraging it to restrict *other* people selling things may indeed be illegal. However, given that the iPod (and iTunes) will accept non-DRMed tracks from non-Apple sources (online and off), I argue that they're not preventing anything - they're just refusing to do R&D work to make it easy for other people to sell stuff in their patch. I really don't have a problem with that.
And to those that note that Norway isn't capitalist - fair enough. Apple, however, certainly is. So my response: if Norway isn't capitalist, it sure should stop spending 'money' buying Apple's products in a 'market' and then using domestic law to tell Apple how to design those products to conform to its 'noncapitalist' system.
The only part of the Apple solution that is 'locked' is the iTunes Music Store. And as we can see, everything available through there (with the exception of a few 'exclusive tracks!') is also available *elsewhere* - and there's a great deal of content that *isn't* available there. Furthermore, Apple makes no attempt to lock the iPod down from handling this other, DRM-free content (and if anyone whines 'it won't play format xxx' I slap them).
At that point, the thing that their 'lock' is protecting is their 'ease of use' consumer flow. In other words, we built this thing in such a way that the only people who can extract rents from downloading music to it (i.e. use DRM to make people pay money to download music to it) is us. If people want to invest a little energy and time, they can put music on it to their heart's content without having to cope with anybody's DRM, but if they want to accept the DRM and pay the cash for ease-of-use, they have to pay it to us.
That's what capitalism is all about. There's a perfectly good way onto the iPod for music that isn't from ITMS. If you don't want to pay Apple, don't. Buy a CD and rip it. Hell, record it yourself and load it. Your iPod will play it just fine. These bills have zip to do with protecting consumers, they have to do with protecting other businesses who want to extract their own rents in the DRM download market and want to freeload off the iPod's popularity. Screw 'em.
This has very little to do with stealing ideas other than as a tactical legal point. This is entirely about two companies maneuvering to defend their business plans and their management teams from irate stockholders and oversight bodies. Creative came out with MP3 players long before Apple did. Their efforts looked and acted nothing like the iPod, other than that they were both handheld hard-drive based MP3 players with dubious build quality (I have two dead iPods adorning my shelf, as well). However, one company is in fiscal trouble and it (or its management) is in danger of repercussions for failing to capitalize on its first-mover advantage, and the other is eating its lunch.
For so long as this suit/countersuit goes on, Creative's management is somewhat safer, because sacking them entails financial risks to the company (it seems to my non-financial-professional self) and if they actually win, well, payoff.
Step one: Know what you need. 'Reliable' doesn't mean anything. *How* reliable? To what level? What is an acceptable risk level for the facility your data will be in, or must your data be multihomed? If the latter, failover or clustered? Etc. Make sure that the company can tell you how it will meet all these requirements, in writing, to you and your lawyer's satisfaction before signing a contract.
Step two: Referrals. Who else do they host? Check uptimes. Talk to their other customers. If they won't give you references, or if they can't give you companies you've either heard of or can verify have existed and are independent, walk.
Step three: Read the contract. Better yet, have your lawyers read the contract. Anything fuzzy? Push them on it. If they waffle at all, or look like they're trying to get you to sign terms they might give way on if you push (not the price, the *terms*) DANGER. Established hosting companies should have their risks well set out and know what it will cost them to assume whatever level of risk - at worst, they should simply change pricing if you try to reassign risk, or simply tell you they don't offer that service level.
Step four: GO LOOK AT THE FACILITY. No excuse for that. If your business is going to depend on this facility, you need to see it. No trusting web photos. This is your place of business and your physical plant. If your business depends on it being available, or worse yet on it being something that you describe to *your* customers, it's your responsibility to eyeball it. If you don't know what you're looking for (and if you're a business type, there's no shame in that) then find a technical person to eyeball it with you and pay them for their time.
Step five: If you're concerned about their available bandwidth, ask to see bandwidth reports. Ask for peers who can verify their connectivity. When you visit a facility, ask to see the external switching facilities and rough-count circuits if you have to. If you're still concerned, then tell them you want legal guarantees (with penalties) in the contract for available bandwidth - they shouldn't bat an eye at that, since the more bandwidth you (verifiably) use, the more they should be able to bill you, probably. If they balk at potential penalties for short bandwidth, there's likely a problem. Typically, they themselves will offer tight bandwidth monitoring just so they can bill you for those bits.
Step six, and final for me: HAVE A BACKUP PLAN. Things can and will go wrong. The best hosting provider out there might suffer incredibly bad luck and multilevel catastrophe. EVERY admin will have horror stories of 'the two things that would never go wrong together' going wrong. My favorite is a switching center in downtown Boston having *both* of its redundant data pipes being taken out by construction on the same day by the Big Dig, on opposite sides of the building. This might mean having a small backup system in another center on the smae provider. It might mean having a staging system in a home office that can be brought live on limited bandwidth. I don't know, that's *your* problem. It might just mean having a really good PR checklist. But HAVE A PLAN.
Sure, if you're not dependent on an uptime number, these steps may not be necessary. But if, as the question seems to imply, your success or failure will be tightly coupled to the reliability of your hosting provider, then there's no substitution for Doing The Work.
All I can tell you is that on my 20" intel iMac, with the ATI X1600, Battlefield 2 runs juuuuust fine. The only time I hit lag is when my network hiccups (it's Comcastic!) and I have essentially all the options midrange to high on the video. Yes, I got the 256MB VRAM option and 2GB of RAM, but whatever. And in OS X, WoW runs at 69 fps in Ironforge. Between those two, I'm a happy clam.
I will readily admit that the fact that it's an iMac means that upgrading the video in it will not be a viable option. However, meh. All of my friends who are "serious gamers" and have "serious gaming rigs" seem to end up upgrading at least their $300 video cards every 12 months at a minimum, and usually their whole PC every 18 months or less. For the approx. $2K it cost me to buy this thing, I figure I came out ahead - at least for the 3 years of warranty coverage.
...those of us who have a reason to use it will reap the benefits. Yes, Virginia, there are some. Battlefield 2, for example. Annoyingly-single-platform hardware updaters, like cell phone flashers and the like. Those little one-off tasks that I used to have to go find a windows PC for? Not so much anymore. Whee! When I need to do real work? Yep, you're right, I turn back into a pod person.
Seriously, why does this guy care so much?
You can use Mac OS X with proper drivers (i.e. written by Apple, as they intended) and now (if you want to) you can use any 'Windows Only' applications that may be foisted upon you by, say, your job. Come on, people, it's not rocket science. Plus, when Linux is fully up, you'll have a completely triple-boot machine. All of which makes it even harder for the beancounters in your enterprise job(tm) to say "No, you can't have one of those because it can't run Approved Software(tm)".
Asking "Why would you?" is aking to shoving your head in the sand and asking "Why would you run a Mac?" Sure, go ahead and limit your choices. I'll be taking one from *every* column, thanks.
Of course, it's quite probable that the BG, being simply a server-tied instance, *can't* handle player integration from different servers...but still, it would seem that this would be an easier place than anywhere else to set it up.
Another issue which is exacerbated by these imbalances is that one side's PvP players are often highly practiced, coordinated, etc. whereas the other side has a much higher percentage of 'pickup' players. The higher-pop side with the 'pickup' players will typically get beat on - which is not a problem in and of itself, but it will tend to drive away the more 'casual' gamers from that side, which will eventually lower the BG demand even on the high-pop side.
One proposal a friend and I had was to have astronauts visit the tank and drop a pair of small solar-powered bots onto the base of the tank, connected by tensioning cables. These bots would 'grind' the foam off the tank, and spiral their way up the tank slowly, on opposite sides. The cables would hold them onto the surface, and ensure neither lost purchase; they could 'reel' in and out as the tank circumference changed and they worked their way up. That way, the astronauts would only have to spacewalk to place the bots, minimizing human labor. Once the tank had been cleaned off, you would move the tank out of the resulting 'cloud' of foam bits into clean space and then use it for whatever project you had in mind.
Even if you weren't going to use the tank, there were probably going to be a few tons of LOx/H2 which would have been incredibly useful for on-orbit fuel-cells and thrusters...if only there was a way to transfer it. I don't know if there was any way to do that.
One of the biggest problems with using the tanks once they arrived was that they were, in fact, covered with insulating foam, and removing the foam was nontrivial, especially given that you couldn't add weight to the tank for removal systems and that labor in orbit was unbelievably expensive. There were a couple of proposals to get around that, however.
In any case, it seems to me that the new cargo lifter (the only one to use the external tank) wouldn't be able to do this trick, because the tank would be damaged during staging...plus, staging would occur too early for the tank to achieve orbit.
My question, though- was there ever any chance that the tanks could have been used in this fashion? Do any of the rocket scientists know that report, or what happened? Were those numbers wrong? Were the problems of utilizing the tanks judged too large to make the attempt worth it?
...and parents/pain for what is 'correct.' I don't think the concept is gone, but there are problems that are buried in the question as posed which (I think) became clearer stumbling blocks as technology advanced. NOTE: I'm not an AI theorist, nor do I play one on TV; I just like the idea and read a lot. Hence, this is all pulled out of my fundament.
Cycorp is not a poorly funded idea in the wrong direction. Cycorp chose a different tack; they decided that rather than trying to build a reality and correctness filter, they'd rely on human brains to do it for them (like trusting your parents implictly) and instead concentrated on the connectivity of the 'facts' accrued by the 'baby.' CYC is still very much around, and is very much in demand by various parts of the government and industry - if you want to play with it yourself, you can download a truncated database of assertions called OpenCYC. Folks have even gone so far as to graft it onto an AIML engine, to produce a chatbot with the knowledge of OpenCYC behind it.
The problem: how does your baby learn what's real and what's REAL NINJA POWER? Or, pardon me, what's REAL NINJA POWER and what's just a poser? Someone's gotta teach it. Which means it has to learn not only facts, but how to evaluate facts. So it has to learn facts, and how to handle facts - which means it has to learn how to learn. Which means you need to know that answer from the git-go. Tortuous games with logic aside, the onus is now much more heavily on the designer to have a functioning base - whereas with the Cyc approach, the only 'correctness' that is required is that of information, and perhaps that of associativity or weight - which can be tweaked, dynamically. The actual structure of how that information is related, acquired, stored and related is not relevant once decided. Having said all this, Cyc is (from the limited demos I've seen) quite impressive at dealing with information handed to it. It just wouldn't do very well at deciding what do do with that information - that's the job of the humans that gave it the info. It can tell you about the information, but not what to do with it. That task requires volition, really.
Volition is a killer. What is it? How do you simulate it? How do you create it? Is it random action? Random weighted action? Path dependent action? Purely nature, purely nurture? When it comes down to it, the human is (as far as we know) not a purely reactive system, which CyC (AFAIK) is. Learning requires not only accepting information, but deciding what to do with it - deciding how it will be integrated into the whole. If the entity itself isn't making that decision, then the programmer/designer/builder has already made it in the design or code - and then it's not really learning, is it?
Sorry if this is confused. As I said, I don't do this for a living.
Anything to put Diebold out of business, thank you. Auditable, open-source, tested. Please. Before the U.S. Midterms.
Yes and yes. I'd go. If NASA called and said they had a pre-Challenger O-Ring shuttle that had been sitting in freezing rain for two days and they needed a mission specialist, I'd be on the next plane. Would I live there? If it meant *either* that I could do so undamaged (zero-gee, radiation) by the day-to-day experience, barring accidents; *or* that my doing so would increase the chances others would get to do so, then yes, in a New York Minute, baby.
The single biggest block to my using Entourage for my email rather than Mail.app is the fact that Office X did not integrate at all with OS X's built in address book or calendaring functionality. While I can live without iCal integration (maybe) the plain fact is that I'm damn sick of massaging my address book data every time I need to use it somewhere else - usually because MS has stupid import/export options. Can anyone using the new version tell me if Office talks to the system Address Book, and if so, how well it does so? I like syncing my Palm directly to the System (iSync) and hence to .mac, rather than to a MS sandbox and then having to pry my data out of there with a crowbar.
Now, there may be very good reason(s) why the MacBU chose not to integrate with the system PIM services (and yes, I know Office X predated stable versions of those services!). If that's the case, an informed explanation of why this is so would also be much appreciated.
Thank you!
Mine has crashed in the single-digit numbers of times since I got it. I have found that letting it run out of battery while roaming tends to drive it nuts, and that situation got me both my two data-loss crashes...since then, i've carried a live backup on the 256MB SD card I keep in the unit with my 'critical MP3s' and 64MB worth of files. I use it as a backup MP3 player as well. Battery life is presently around 2.5 days, but that's on the original battery - when new, it lasted around 4, with moderate talktime. This one is on Verizon, btw.
I'd recommend it wholeheartedly for one reason: I no longer need carry a Palm and a phone. This one does the job of both. It's a *slightly* compromised phone (big, battery hungry) and a more compromised Palm (OS4, lousy processor) but its advantages (for me) more than outweigh those issues. I like it quite a bit, and consider it the first real 'phone that science fiction promised me as a kid.'
Fair enough. If GTA Online was done more in the mode of, say, Battlefield 1942, then sure. Absolutely.
:-)
I *still* want the Car Wars mod, though.
Let me clarify. When I say 'too lazy to participate' I mean 'too lazy to role-play.' The mindless leveling-up is pretty much the lowest common denominator.
Ref. your points about UO being a large existing fanbase, sure it is. However, I know a great number of UO players who never played single-player Ultima (anecdotal evidence, ignore at whim).
In regards to the world GTA and its impact, I should have emphasized 'story.' Not in the sense of a gripping narrative, but in the sense of a continuous set of (sorta related) tasks. The problem is that as many games have found (Anarchy Online a big offender here) it's really hard to set up linear content in a MMORPG, because people (being lazy) will just share information and/or loot...reducing your fun-and-challenging-for-the-first-runner quest to a set of mindless button-clicks. While it's true that those who care could ignore the walkthroughs, more often than not either the quest has been made ridiculously hard to complete without help (ref. the Fixer Quests on AO) or gives out loot which, once in the hands of the buttonclickers, becomes not-so-fun to have. Or, worse, becomes a must-have and renders the quest more of an obstacle and work than a fun diversion.
I must disagree with your contention that 'players will make the content/storylines.' If anything is true across the board of the current crop of MMORPGs, it's that the players *won't* or *can't* make 'story' and 'content' - and the game runners are hard-pressed to come up with enough to make anything interesting happen. Most of the prerequisites for user-generated content - like the ability to change the world structure - are hard to implement in a way that doesn't screw up the basic parameters of the system. AO's biggest problem was that it was a concrete sandbox - players couldn't in any way affect the environment. As a result, it got boring real fast.
The problem with imagining online versions of games with cool worlds is that the online version will always suffer (and if history is any guide, usually fatally) from the fact that 95% of players are lazy and can't be bothered to participate in them. The fact that Ultima Online, the MMORPG with perhaps the lowest-tech engine, survives and thrives is because it demands more from its players than just appreciative ooh-ing and aah-ing at the eye candy and content that the dev team has slaved to put together. Players are actually required to interact, transact, form social arrangements and the like, and are 'encouraged' to do so 'in-character' if for no other reason than the game mechanics make it easier to do that than to sit around an l33t-ch4t with yer h0m13z. At least, they make that relatively boring.
:-) If everyone in the environment was behaving like you, it wouldn't be GTA anymore, it'd be a demolition derby with bystanders - a DeathRace 2000 with missions. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, I would tend to believe that it's going to pall a lot faster than the secret joy of running over that old lady while chasing down a hooker for a little of the old bouncy-bouncy life renewal.
One of the great things about GTA is the world that has been set up by the developers. Player behavior is guided much more subtlely and much more pervasively by the use of single-player storylines and rewards/penalties than it first seems. GTA Online would, in fact, make a decent game initially, but (IMNSHO) there would need to be some carefully thought out mechanisms that would provide for the formation of (and motivation for) player-to-player social structures, both dyadic and multiple-party (partners and gangs).
I would think GTA has an advantage in this arena in terms of immediate playability, because the game world is presented as pretty much an anarchy (well, with limited law). The problem, however, is that much of the 'fun' of GTA is the fact that you (and your immediate interactions) are stand-outs in the world, because everybody *else* is mostly law-abiding...which is what makes it so much fun to hear them scream in terror when you mow 'em down with the ambulance.
Now, what *I* want is someone to extend the GTA system into vehicular weapons. Then we could FINALLY have a worthy online Car Wars environment. Heehee. Uncle Al's catalogs, here I come...
Sinistar.
...guaranteed to make my fourteen-y/o self start sweating bullets at the machine. Followed by "I *HUNGER!*" a few seconds later as he came for you.
"I *LIVE!*"
The awful, dying wrrrrrraaaaaaaarrrrrrrwwwww of your icon sinking down the funnel in Tempest.
On a more prosaic note, the continuous chika-chika-chika-chika of the frantic buying spree at the beginning of every round of Counter-Strike.
bash-2.01 $ while [ true ] ; do wget -O - http://www.thebulkclub.com/benefits.asp > /dev/null ; done