The difference is that the vortex cards and drivers were not clearly superior to the competition. (not that they were all that bad; I had one until it died a few months ago.) In contrast, there are very few companies that manufacture fast 3d cards (just nVidia and ATI, really), and the drivers for the nVidia cards are significantly better.
You can have your open specs, but I'll stick with high-quality drivers for my own system.
i think, and think, and keep on thinking, but i still can't figure out why
Microsoft is so popular other than momentum.. saying the quality is sub-par is a gross understatement.
See, now it's just the rantings of a good little slashdrone.
It probably is a violation of the DMCA -- since the "exploit" certainly involves getting around some built-in protection, which could easily be argued to be useful in copy protection.
I support standard copyright, but it's things like this that explain why the DMCA is a bad law.
Re:Yet another for the stack
on
Altered Carbon
·
· Score: 1
An adult should read such-and-such. Comics are for shallow minds. etc. etc.
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said, meant, or implied any such thing. All I said was that you'll get more sugar-coating in books targeted towards children; I don't see how you can possibly argue with that.
The books are not very well written. They are clunky, and full of cliches. Many of the books end with a "tell me everything that really happened" scene, because the author wasn't able to effectively convey some things through the actions of the characters. The characters, for the most very, are very stereotypical. This isn't that terrible of a thing: Tolkein's prose often had similar problems. Both the Hobbit and the Harry Potter books are good stories, regardless of how they're written.
As for your "roll naked in a pile of money" comment, what do you think Rowling is doing now? Harry Potter is one of the most commercialized books of all time. After reading the latest book, I couldn't help but think that its disjointedness came partly from trying to write a book that was easily adaptable to a movie. (Many scenes could be easily deleted without much of an effect on the plot.)
Finally, people have been trying to keep books out of schools forever. The one that has probably caused more controversy in that area than any other might be familiar to you, being written by an American -- "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." The people who fight to ban these books are a very small subset of the population, and your attempt to paint all "religious conservatives" as book-burners does nothing for your credibility.
Re:Yet another for the stack
on
Altered Carbon
·
· Score: 1
Hey, I enjoy a good yarn, and as non-US books tend not to sugar-coat stories to satisfy some conservative religious zealots (who probably never miss a Springer show...) it's OK.
Wait... you're saying that the Harry Potter books aren't sugar-coated? I think you need to start reading some real books. The Potter books are relatively entertaining (though rather poorly written), but they're still targeted at children.
Of course, you were probably just aching for an excuse to attack the "US conservatives," even though they really don't play much of a role in the books that are published.
You may be right... but say that half of those files were legal. (And I'm sure that everyone except for some of the looney apologists on/. will agree that there's no way that legal downloads make up anywhere near half of the files traded.) That means that there were 1.15 billion copyright violations in a month. The point really isn't the exact number, it's just the fact that 1,150,000,000 and 2,300,000,000 are both really big numbers.
Depends what you mean by worse. This guy seems pretty annoyed about what happened while his stuff was under GPL. I fail to see how it would be worse if he wasn't made aware that his code was being used.
More to the point, most people who put stuff under a BSD license know what that entails. (There are a few notable exceptions, the WINE fiasco coming to mind.) Anything I do is BSD-licensed, and I'm fine with the consequences.
Let this be a lesson to everyone -- you should consider the ramifications of the license you pick before choosing one. If you don't want people to use your code without making a monetary contribution, the GPL (or BSD license) is not for you.
Almost. But you converted your 200 feet into miles -- which you weren't supposed to do. Using the correct numbers, you get (733^2)/400 = 1344 = about 42 g's. Since air resistance is proportional to a (very large) velocity, that doesn't seem too farfetched.
To use your book example, who would buy (at full price, or even half off) a new book without the cover? Nobody would...
Huh? As a college kid, I disagree with you right here. I would be more than happy to buy an otherwise brand-new book missing the cover for half off. (Assuming, of course, that I didn't already know that doing so was ripping off the publisher.) Sure, having an undamaged book is nice -- but getting twice as many books is even nicer. After all, I often buy rather damaged used books anyway.
That's why I recommended e-mailing first. If they don't want their content mirrored, then it's their own fault when they get trounced. But just because some people might say no is no reason to not offer it at all.
Don't they think that if people were getting spam rather than the files they wanted, that some kind of countermeasure (lists of known good checksums, or something) would show up?
Of course, from what I understand, these networks are pretty spam-filled as it is... so maybe users really just don't care.
Well, most people I know are paying for a diploma, not an education. If we wanted an education, we'd hole up in a library for a few years. Cheaper and you'd get more out of it.
This has been Taco's excuse every time somebody suggests that Slashdot mirror the content. It's a pretty poor one. Unless you're really out of the loop,/. doesn't generally post much in the way of cutting-edge stuff -- things often hit google news a day or two before we see it here. Also, there's absolutely no reason why they can't fire off an e-mail that says, "We're going to trash your server in a couple hours -- if you'd like us to mirror the 100 MB movie files for you, let us know before such-and-such a time."
I'm rather convinced that either (1) the/. administrators enjoy the notoriety of the slashdot effect so much that they don't want to stop it, or (2) they're afraid of losing face, after years of claiming that mirrors are unneccesary, having to admit that they were wrong and a mirror is the way to go.
Check out why you're using a qwerty keyboard. It was meant to slow you down so that you don't jam the typewriter. But wait, you're not on a typewriter...
This is actually a myth. Check out this and this for a little more explanation. The short of it is, though, that: QWERTY was designed to combat the mechanics of typewriter jams; however, the solution was not to slow down the typist -- instead, it involved rearranging the letters so that keys pressed one after the other would be less likely to jam. In fact, the alternation of letters from one hand to each other led to increased typing speed. Good studies of Dvorak vs. qwerty are generally hard to find; it seems likely that a Dvorak typist is a little faster than a qwerty typist of the same skill; however, the 80 wpm number is certainly hyperbole. Many people end up typing slower when they switch to Dvorak. (How many people here even type 80 wpm? I know I don't.)
That said, Dvorak is generally acknowledged to be a little bit easier on the hands than the qwerty layout, and so is probably slightly superior, if all things were equal. Of course, given the entrenched position of qwerty, things aren't equal -- I tried Dvorak for a bit, but decided that it wasn't worth the effort and trouble.
I understand just fine. To quote myself: "Of course, that still won't spell the end of cheating. By the time we can do that, it will probably be easy to have a program that watches the screen and generates mouse movements accordingly."
I am perfectly well aware of the fact that you can't do server side rendering. That doesn't change the fact that it's the only way to solve the problem of the client getting too much information. Are you in a dark room? The other players should be nearly invisible, but with client-side rendering, it's trivial to light everything up nicely. Same thing if another player is hiding but not quite concealed. I'm sure veteran FPS'ers could add many more possible ways to cheat. Add to that the fact that, in order to not send data about characters behind walls or whatnot, the server will have to do all the visibility calculations -- something which is normally done by the graphics card. In order to only send what data is appropriate, the server must do the rendering calculations itself. Whether it then sends that data on to the client as a bitmap or a list of polygons and objects to render is rather irrelevant, at that point.
Your "trusted client" is still essentially security through obscurity -- it depends on keeping part of the code secret. Depending on how convoluted it is, it might take all of a few days or weeks to break it.
This is essentially how current games work. But instead of sending 30 bitmaps per second back in a video stream, they send 30 descriptions of the state of the game back per second, and allow the video card to render it.
Being able to see through walls are among the cheats that this allows, as well as radar cheats and so forth, depending on how much of the state you send. When you send the state back, you're giving more information to the client than the player should know. That aids in cheating.
I think you're not giving enough consideration to modded clients. There is *no* way to be sure that the client has not been modified. It can always lie about the checksum. The only way to prevent players from gaining extra information is to just have thin clients connected to the server. If your clients are doing physics and graphics calculations, they have been given too much information.
Oh, btw, your proxy bot is exactly what I alluded to in my post:)
The only way to prevent cheats is to encrypt all data packets between the client and server...
And that still doesn't solve the problem, because you still have to trust the client program. If the cheaters have access to the program, they can have it generate any encrypted packets they want anyway.
Better would be to not let the client know anything that it shouldn't know: transmit all keystrokes/mouse movements to the server, and then have the server send the screen to display back. Of course, that's quite impossible with current bandwidth and processor/graphics card limitations.
Of course, that still won't spell the end of cheating. By the time we can do that, it will probably be easy to have a program that watches the screen and generates mouse movements accordingly, or something of that nature. It's an arms race, and the cheaters will always win.
This is, of course, the reason why I usually don't play games online any more. (Well, one of the reasons. Foul-mouthed twelve-year-olds is another.) It's too bad that the single player game of ET didn't pan out.
Try looking up some of the "post of doom" threads. Dozens of comments going from +2 or higher to -1 within moments of each other. And, of course, the outright refusal to allow people to see whether a post was moderated down by an editor or other user practically screams that Taco's aware that his underlings abuse the unlimited moderation privelege.
They can run the site however they choose, of course, but I do think that people should at least be aware that the comments they read are censored by the/. crew.
I will say, however, that I'm sure that the majority of stupid moderation is done by regular users, and not the editors. It would be rather interesting to be able to see who does what.
For most people, an editor doing multiple downmods is essentially the same as removing the comment. It's not at all unusual for a story to have several hundred posts, a large percentage of which are at -1. Very few people read more than a few of them.
My comment was simply that/. isn't much of a free and open forum. It's been demonstrated multiple times that if the editors don't like a comment, they'll break the rules in order to get rid of it. Although they might not be actively censoring particular political views, I really wouldn't trust them not to at some point in the future.
Wait a second... I've read a good twenty posts so far claiming that "Windows doesn't cost anything, and thus what M$ is doing is evil." Now you tell me that "Windows costs a lot, and thus what M$ is doing is evil?"
Yeah, you would probably see a little traffic, but the primary drive for cheaters is to beat the other guy (and usually rub it in their face.) That doesn't work on a level playing field. Remember, those people who cheat are mostly (1) those who are hell-bent to run the fun of the legit players, and (2) those who want to win the game at any cost. This, unfortunately, caters to neither.
AOL and Earthlink have been very effective in suing the spammy bastards into the ground.
Very effective? My spam volume certainly hasn't gone down. Winning a few lawsuits, for which they probably won't even get back their court costs, could hardly be considered "effective" in the grand scheme of things.
Slashdot Mirror
can we just automod these "theft" posts down
Only if we get to mod the "copyright violation != stealing" posts down at the same time. Honestly, you guys sound like a broken record.
Sure. The Vortex Audio drivers used to work, too.
The difference is that the vortex cards and drivers were not clearly superior to the competition. (not that they were all that bad; I had one until it died a few months ago.) In contrast, there are very few companies that manufacture fast 3d cards (just nVidia and ATI, really), and the drivers for the nVidia cards are significantly better.
You can have your open specs, but I'll stick with high-quality drivers for my own system.
See, now it's just the rantings of a good little slashdrone.
It probably is a violation of the DMCA -- since the "exploit" certainly involves getting around some built-in protection, which could easily be argued to be useful in copy protection.
I support standard copyright, but it's things like this that explain why the DMCA is a bad law.
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said, meant, or implied any such thing. All I said was that you'll get more sugar-coating in books targeted towards children; I don't see how you can possibly argue with that.
The books are not very well written. They are clunky, and full of cliches. Many of the books end with a "tell me everything that really happened" scene, because the author wasn't able to effectively convey some things through the actions of the characters. The characters, for the most very, are very stereotypical. This isn't that terrible of a thing: Tolkein's prose often had similar problems. Both the Hobbit and the Harry Potter books are good stories, regardless of how they're written.
As for your "roll naked in a pile of money" comment, what do you think Rowling is doing now? Harry Potter is one of the most commercialized books of all time. After reading the latest book, I couldn't help but think that its disjointedness came partly from trying to write a book that was easily adaptable to a movie. (Many scenes could be easily deleted without much of an effect on the plot.)
Finally, people have been trying to keep books out of schools forever. The one that has probably caused more controversy in that area than any other might be familiar to you, being written by an American -- "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." The people who fight to ban these books are a very small subset of the population, and your attempt to paint all "religious conservatives" as book-burners does nothing for your credibility.
Hey, I enjoy a good yarn, and as non-US books tend not to sugar-coat stories to satisfy some conservative religious zealots (who probably never miss a Springer show...) it's OK.
... you're saying that the Harry Potter books aren't sugar-coated? I think you need to start reading some real books. The Potter books are relatively entertaining (though rather poorly written), but they're still targeted at children.
Wait
Of course, you were probably just aching for an excuse to attack the "US conservatives," even though they really don't play much of a role in the books that are published.
any day now folks
You misspelled "decade."
You may be right ... but say that half of those files were legal. (And I'm sure that everyone except for some of the looney apologists on /. will agree that there's no way that legal downloads make up anywhere near half of the files traded.) That means that there were 1.15 billion copyright violations in a month. The point really isn't the exact number, it's just the fact that 1,150,000,000 and 2,300,000,000 are both really big numbers.
Depends what you mean by worse. This guy seems pretty annoyed about what happened while his stuff was under GPL. I fail to see how it would be worse if he wasn't made aware that his code was being used.
More to the point, most people who put stuff under a BSD license know what that entails. (There are a few notable exceptions, the WINE fiasco coming to mind.) Anything I do is BSD-licensed, and I'm fine with the consequences.
Let this be a lesson to everyone -- you should consider the ramifications of the license you pick before choosing one. If you don't want people to use your code without making a monetary contribution, the GPL (or BSD license) is not for you.
Almost. But you converted your 200 feet into miles -- which you weren't supposed to do. Using the correct numbers, you get (733^2)/400 = 1344 = about 42 g's. Since air resistance is proportional to a (very large) velocity, that doesn't seem too farfetched.
To use your book example, who would buy (at full price, or even half off) a new book without the cover? Nobody would...
Huh? As a college kid, I disagree with you right here. I would be more than happy to buy an otherwise brand-new book missing the cover for half off. (Assuming, of course, that I didn't already know that doing so was ripping off the publisher.) Sure, having an undamaged book is nice -- but getting twice as many books is even nicer. After all, I often buy rather damaged used books anyway.
That's why I recommended e-mailing first. If they don't want their content mirrored, then it's their own fault when they get trounced. But just because some people might say no is no reason to not offer it at all.
Don't they think that if people were getting spam rather than the files they wanted, that some kind of countermeasure (lists of known good checksums, or something) would show up?
... so maybe users really just don't care.
Of course, from what I understand, these networks are pretty spam-filled as it is
Well, most people I know are paying for a diploma, not an education. If we wanted an education, we'd hole up in a library for a few years. Cheaper and you'd get more out of it.
This has been Taco's excuse every time somebody suggests that Slashdot mirror the content. It's a pretty poor one. Unless you're really out of the loop, /. doesn't generally post much in the way of cutting-edge stuff -- things often hit google news a day or two before we see it here. Also, there's absolutely no reason why they can't fire off an e-mail that says, "We're going to trash your server in a couple hours -- if you'd like us to mirror the 100 MB movie files for you, let us know before such-and-such a time."
/. administrators enjoy the notoriety of the slashdot effect so much that they don't want to stop it, or (2) they're afraid of losing face, after years of claiming that mirrors are unneccesary, having to admit that they were wrong and a mirror is the way to go.
I'm rather convinced that either (1) the
Check out why you're using a qwerty keyboard. It was meant to slow you down so that you don't jam the typewriter. But wait, you're not on a typewriter...
This is actually a myth. Check out this and this for a little more explanation. The short of it is, though, that: QWERTY was designed to combat the mechanics of typewriter jams; however, the solution was not to slow down the typist -- instead, it involved rearranging the letters so that keys pressed one after the other would be less likely to jam. In fact, the alternation of letters from one hand to each other led to increased typing speed. Good studies of Dvorak vs. qwerty are generally hard to find; it seems likely that a Dvorak typist is a little faster than a qwerty typist of the same skill; however, the 80 wpm number is certainly hyperbole. Many people end up typing slower when they switch to Dvorak. (How many people here even type 80 wpm? I know I don't.)
That said, Dvorak is generally acknowledged to be a little bit easier on the hands than the qwerty layout, and so is probably slightly superior, if all things were equal. Of course, given the entrenched position of qwerty, things aren't equal -- I tried Dvorak for a bit, but decided that it wasn't worth the effort and trouble.
I understand just fine. To quote myself: "Of course, that still won't spell the end of cheating. By the time we can do that, it will probably be easy to have a program that watches the screen and generates mouse movements accordingly."
I am perfectly well aware of the fact that you can't do server side rendering. That doesn't change the fact that it's the only way to solve the problem of the client getting too much information. Are you in a dark room? The other players should be nearly invisible, but with client-side rendering, it's trivial to light everything up nicely. Same thing if another player is hiding but not quite concealed. I'm sure veteran FPS'ers could add many more possible ways to cheat. Add to that the fact that, in order to not send data about characters behind walls or whatnot, the server will have to do all the visibility calculations -- something which is normally done by the graphics card. In order to only send what data is appropriate, the server must do the rendering calculations itself. Whether it then sends that data on to the client as a bitmap or a list of polygons and objects to render is rather irrelevant, at that point.
Your "trusted client" is still essentially security through obscurity -- it depends on keeping part of the code secret. Depending on how convoluted it is, it might take all of a few days or weeks to break it.
This is essentially how current games work. But instead of sending 30 bitmaps per second back in a video stream, they send 30 descriptions of the state of the game back per second, and allow the video card to render it.
:)
Being able to see through walls are among the cheats that this allows, as well as radar cheats and so forth, depending on how much of the state you send. When you send the state back, you're giving more information to the client than the player should know. That aids in cheating.
I think you're not giving enough consideration to modded clients. There is *no* way to be sure that the client has not been modified. It can always lie about the checksum. The only way to prevent players from gaining extra information is to just have thin clients connected to the server. If your clients are doing physics and graphics calculations, they have been given too much information.
Oh, btw, your proxy bot is exactly what I alluded to in my post
The only way to prevent cheats is to encrypt all data packets between the client and server...
And that still doesn't solve the problem, because you still have to trust the client program. If the cheaters have access to the program, they can have it generate any encrypted packets they want anyway.
Better would be to not let the client know anything that it shouldn't know: transmit all keystrokes/mouse movements to the server, and then have the server send the screen to display back. Of course, that's quite impossible with current bandwidth and processor/graphics card limitations.
Of course, that still won't spell the end of cheating. By the time we can do that, it will probably be easy to have a program that watches the screen and generates mouse movements accordingly, or something of that nature. It's an arms race, and the cheaters will always win.
This is, of course, the reason why I usually don't play games online any more. (Well, one of the reasons. Foul-mouthed twelve-year-olds is another.) It's too bad that the single player game of ET didn't pan out.
Try looking up some of the "post of doom" threads. Dozens of comments going from +2 or higher to -1 within moments of each other. And, of course, the outright refusal to allow people to see whether a post was moderated down by an editor or other user practically screams that Taco's aware that his underlings abuse the unlimited moderation privelege.
/. crew.
They can run the site however they choose, of course, but I do think that people should at least be aware that the comments they read are censored by the
I will say, however, that I'm sure that the majority of stupid moderation is done by regular users, and not the editors. It would be rather interesting to be able to see who does what.
For most people, an editor doing multiple downmods is essentially the same as removing the comment. It's not at all unusual for a story to have several hundred posts, a large percentage of which are at -1. Very few people read more than a few of them.
/. isn't much of a free and open forum. It's been demonstrated multiple times that if the editors don't like a comment, they'll break the rules in order to get rid of it. Although they might not be actively censoring particular political views, I really wouldn't trust them not to at some point in the future.
My comment was simply that
That's a laugh. Tell that to the people who get slapped down for badmouthing slashdot.
Your basic copy of Windows XP costs $99 - $299.
... I've read a good twenty posts so far claiming that "Windows doesn't cost anything, and thus what M$ is doing is evil." Now you tell me that "Windows costs a lot, and thus what M$ is doing is evil?"
Wait a second
Thanks for setting the record straight.
Cheaters don't want competition. That's why they're cheating.
Yeah, you would probably see a little traffic, but the primary drive for cheaters is to beat the other guy (and usually rub it in their face.) That doesn't work on a level playing field. Remember, those people who cheat are mostly (1) those who are hell-bent to run the fun of the legit players, and (2) those who want to win the game at any cost. This, unfortunately, caters to neither.
AOL and Earthlink have been very effective in suing the spammy bastards into the ground.
Very effective? My spam volume certainly hasn't gone down. Winning a few lawsuits, for which they probably won't even get back their court costs, could hardly be considered "effective" in the grand scheme of things.