Because getting Wifi to work over a full mile is pretty close to impossible. Hell, just within a building can be difficult.
I'm currently posting this over an unsecured Wifi network, because no ISP will return my calls about buying my own connection (probably because the apartment has contracted for "free" internet for everyone starting in a few weeks). It's within the same building, seemingly even on the same floor, and yet it's dodgy enough that I can't even watch Youtube videos most of the time, and my bandwidth is frequently displayed in kilobits per second.
Getting it to work throughout a neighborhood isn't going to happen, unless you can jack up the power to some absurd level. Or maybe outlaw microwaves (my connection is basically dead around 6:00PM when everyone nukes their supper.
Man, I haven't seen arguments like this since the Clinton impeachment.
What's that oath you always hear? "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"?
The question explicitly stated returned a boolean. This is true. However, anyone at all versed in human communication could have anticipated that a "yes" answer to the question would lead to two further questions, "How many?" (returns int) and "What were they?" (returns array). The juror obviously anticipated these questions (as anyone would), and he answered them incompletely (and thus falsely).
I have an old, first-gen Mac Pro (and no, I didn't pay for it - it was free, secondhand; I made it an explicit goal to get it back up and running without giving a cent to Apple, and I succeeded).
I recently looked into upgrading it. Xeon processors seem to *plummet* in price after a few years. Processors that once cost upward of $2000 now cost $40 on Newegg, with free shipping. Some go down to $20 if you count dodgy-looking Amazon prices.
Now yes, Xeons are only "desktop processors" for myself and a few others who use Mac Pros to browse Slashdot and play Minecraft.
Government private contractors combine the worst parts of the government-run systems with the worst parts of a corporate-run system, while bringing in few to none of the intended benefits of either.
The government side brings in ineffectiveness at designed purpose, and effective immunity from prosecution in event of error. The private side brings in a higher cost (gotta have a profit margin, after all) and an utter disregard for anything so trifling as "human rights". The combination of the two latters is particularly dangerous.
No, that entire block is allocated to satellite use. GPS uses one of those channels, but all the rest are used (or designated to be used) by satellites. Using any of them at terrestrial power levels would basically cause problems for *any* satellite communications in that range.
The whole "cheap GPS receivers" response is just more LightSquared PR bullshit. It would take an absurdly good design to filter out a signal that is a) only a few MHz away, b) is being pumped out far closer, and c) is being pumped out orders of magnitude higher than any satellite can manage.
Second verse, same as the first. LightSquared just doesn't want to pay for spectrum. First they tried muscling in on satellite frequencies, claiming to the FCC that they'd primarily be satellite-based while telling everyone else that they'd be terrestrial only. And of course, they got caught because pretty much *any* terrestrial-strength broadcast is going to swamp out any satellite-based stuff on the same frequencies.
So now they're trying it again, trying to squeeze in on some pre-established frequencies. I don't claim to know any technical details of weather-balloon communication, but I do know this: if it *were* possible to safely share those frequencies with LTE-like communications, it would likely have been done already. Given their prior track record, LS is going to have to argue pretty effectively to convince me.
Look, LightSquared. You should've just paid for actual spectrum you could use before. You acted like a cheap bastard and tried to use the wrong parts because it was cheaper, and then you cried when it didn't work.
It's not like this isn't what all the established media companies are thinking. They all want this. At least he has the (courage|stupidity|ego) to stand up and say "we're against anything new because it might stop us making money".
Plus, it makes it ridiculously easy to argue against his point. This is a man who just weakened his entire team's position, because he spoke, on the record and in an official capacity. We should make sure this guy never gets fired, because he's actually *helping* our side by being so blatantly wrong.
When you're BUYING a game online and DOWNLOADING a game online, having to ACTIVATE the game online is not an impossible burden.
Online activation, for any game using only Steam as DRM (many games use some other DRM as well, and this is noted on the store page), is necessary only one time after updating. Download a game, run it once, then permanently set Steam into offline mode. It will never try to authenticate again. It will also not automatically update, chat will be disabled, and last time I tried the server browser wouldn't work for non-LAN servers. But it will work for LAN games, and any achievements you get will be queued up for upload as soon as you go back online.
(And also, if you're exceptionally paranoid, there's a crack that basically runs a Steam authentication server that authorizes everything. Right now, the only reason to use it is piracy, but I find it comforting to know that, if Valve fails and Steam shuts down, I can still access all the games I have downloaded.
PS: I challenge you to find retail games that don't have similar requirements. You'd be surprised how hard this is.
They're doing the initial beta (and possibly initial release) only under Ubuntu, to limit the number of complications.
Why Ubuntu? There are a couple of reasons for that. First, we’re just starting development and working with a single distribution is critical when you are experimenting, as we are. It reduces the variability of the testing space and makes early iteration easier and faster. Secondly, Ubuntu is a popular distribution and has recognition with the general gaming and developer communities. This doesn’t mean that Ubuntu will be the only distribution we support. Based on the success of our efforts around Ubuntu, we will look at supporting other distributions in the future.
And all that means, really, is that they currently only "support" it on Ubuntu - it will quite likely run fine on other distros, although probably with some work involved. And, if it's a reasonable success, they may make it supported on other major distros.
Once the engines are ported, the games should be available with just a few commands on the part of the developers
Should be, but not always are.
For example: Valve's Source engine was ported over to OS X. Valve ported over all of their Source titles. But they have also licensed it to other developers, and to my knowledge not a single one of them actually ported their game (going off "Dark Messiah of Might and Magic", "SiN Episodes: Emergence", "Zeno Clash" and "Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines"). Now, some of them have excuses (the SiN Episodes series was canned after one episode, and VTMB nearly predates HL2 and would have to be ported to a much newer version of the engine), but that's still a pretty bad record.
And some games that have OS X ports, and have the Windows version on Steam, haven't released the OS X version on Steam yet. Example: UT2004. Or they pull bullshit like treating the two ports as separate games (see: Call of Duty: Black Ops).
Basically, while your optimistic predictions are fully possible, in theory, the practice is likely to let you down a bit.
Weird, my current laptop has a processor with integrated graphics, but to my knowledge it was never used. Even when I was reinstalling and had no drivers for either my integrated or discrete graphics, it seemed to use the default VGA drivers on the NVidia card.
I'd accuse you of being an AMD shill, but you sound more like you just honestly don't know how things work.
PS: When I finally get around to installing Linux on this thing (any day now, I swear!), I'm actually planning to just use the Intel drivers, for better battery life. If I wanted to do any real gaming, I'd reboot in Windows, and apparently the NVidia blob under Linux doesn't support power management well. Sometimes it's good to have options.
/dev/zero? I'd use/dev/urandom. Mainly in the hopes that some poor fool doing forensics tries to "decrypt" the data and wastes months trying to find a signal in pseudorandom noise.
I used to use AVG, but I found it gradually became slower and slower, and stopped actually catching viruses.
Microsoft Security Essentials has the downside of being made by Microsoft, but the plus side of being extremely low-footprint and actually catching things. I pair it with the occasional MBAM scan out of paranoia (MBAM is good at finding and removing infections, but terrible at actively stopping them).
Finally, yeah, throw some AdBlock on there. Almost all the viruses I've caught in the past few years (ie. both of them) have come from malicious ads. Adblock tends to stop a fair number - it's not solid protection alone, but it's good for defense-in-depth.
I take it you've not tried to install any major applications on Windows lately.
Let's take two examples I had to do recently.
The first required me to separately install SQL Server, IIS and a few other prerequisites, then install the application, then manually run a SQL script to initialize the tables AFTER manually creating a db instance and authentication parameters, log into the application and configure it to point at the SQL server instance. Not too complicated, but still hardly the simplest method.
The second required me to manually install several odd prerequisites (IIS (despite not being a web package), the IIS 6 compatibility plugin (despite requiring Windows 8/2008R2, which only use IIS 7), ASP (again, it doesn't run a web interface),.NET 4.0 runtime, and Acrobat Reader (no PDFs were included)). Then I could install the "prerequisites package", which mainly consisted of drivers for the security dongle. THEN I could install the actual application, which had thankfully managed to complex task of "initializing database tables". There's more that I still have to do, but I can't figure out what they are because they didn't include the installation manual anywhere.
These are both major, multi-billion-dollar applications (the first one has options for using SQL Server or Oracle), proprietary as fuck, shipped out on custom-printed DVDs, and yet they can't manage to make an installation that takes less than a full day.
So what we need are sensible, non-crazy members of $religion who act like crazy people to bring in ratings.
Maybe I should practice frothing while shouting about how while I disagree with your religion, I respect your right to practice it inasmuch as it does not harm others. And then I'll randomly reference long-dead politicians ("Charles W. Fairbanks would never have tolerated such buffoonery! The very concept of the thing would have driven Marcus Lepidus into fits! ALL MY OPPONENTS ARE PRACTICING BOLSHEVIKS!").
The project I'm working on has a username/password system. I, and the rest of my company, are doing the back-end; another company is doing the front-end, all for a third company. Naturally, we have to work pretty closely together, but one of the guys on the front end is not the best programmer.
I'm a stickler for password strength (I have a 20+ character root password, with enough symbols and numbers to keep anyone from ever breaking it), so I tested the system with insanely long and complex passwords (it breaks if you use characters outside the Unicode basic multilingual plane, but only because we're setting it as UTF-8). Hashed with some advanced algorithm, Twofsh I think (I wrote it months ago).
I tested the front-end, and it actually worked OK with long passwords. But the front-end guy had thrown in one of those Javascript "how strong is this password?" widgets, and guess what? If you enter more than 63 characters, it immediately shows it as "very weak". Doesn't break the site, and anyone using a 60-character password is smart enough to not listen to that crap, but it is a little bug.
I'd demand he fix it, but the poor guy's far enough behind as it is.
The first 0x20 characters, plus 0x7F, are "non-printable" or "control" characters, having no visual representation in any "standard" font, instead having some effect on the system - NUL, start-of-header, start-of-text, end-of-text, enquiry, acknowledge, bell, backspace, tab, line feed, vertical tab, form feed, carriage return, shift out, shift in, data link escape, device codes 1-4, and a few others I can't remember. The other 0x5F are "printable" - they actually show some character on the screen. That includes everything from space to ~, literally.
Those are official terms. ISO encodings and Unicode add more printing and non-printing characters, but they all have the same base. And I suppose EBCDIC has its own set of control characters, incompatible with ASCII et al (although if you're basing your password system on "what EBCIDIC allows", you fail on at least a dozen levels already).
Slashdot Mirror
The bad news is, they're rewriting it in Visual FoxPro.
Because getting Wifi to work over a full mile is pretty close to impossible. Hell, just within a building can be difficult.
I'm currently posting this over an unsecured Wifi network, because no ISP will return my calls about buying my own connection (probably because the apartment has contracted for "free" internet for everyone starting in a few weeks). It's within the same building, seemingly even on the same floor, and yet it's dodgy enough that I can't even watch Youtube videos most of the time, and my bandwidth is frequently displayed in kilobits per second.
Getting it to work throughout a neighborhood isn't going to happen, unless you can jack up the power to some absurd level. Or maybe outlaw microwaves (my connection is basically dead around 6:00PM when everyone nukes their supper.
My vote is on "exosyzygy", simply because of how many points that would get you in Scrabble.
Man, I haven't seen arguments like this since the Clinton impeachment.
What's that oath you always hear? "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"?
The question explicitly stated returned a boolean. This is true. However, anyone at all versed in human communication could have anticipated that a "yes" answer to the question would lead to two further questions, "How many?" (returns int) and "What were they?" (returns array). The juror obviously anticipated these questions (as anyone would), and he answered them incompletely (and thus falsely).
I have an old, first-gen Mac Pro (and no, I didn't pay for it - it was free, secondhand; I made it an explicit goal to get it back up and running without giving a cent to Apple, and I succeeded).
I recently looked into upgrading it. Xeon processors seem to *plummet* in price after a few years. Processors that once cost upward of $2000 now cost $40 on Newegg, with free shipping. Some go down to $20 if you count dodgy-looking Amazon prices.
Now yes, Xeons are only "desktop processors" for myself and a few others who use Mac Pros to browse Slashdot and play Minecraft.
More succinctly put:
Government private contractors combine the worst parts of the government-run systems with the worst parts of a corporate-run system, while bringing in few to none of the intended benefits of either.
The government side brings in ineffectiveness at designed purpose, and effective immunity from prosecution in event of error. The private side brings in a higher cost (gotta have a profit margin, after all) and an utter disregard for anything so trifling as "human rights". The combination of the two latters is particularly dangerous.
This is why Beck is so against socialized healthcare - because if we had it, he'd be institutionalized for being so completely fucking nuts.
No, that entire block is allocated to satellite use. GPS uses one of those channels, but all the rest are used (or designated to be used) by satellites. Using any of them at terrestrial power levels would basically cause problems for *any* satellite communications in that range.
The whole "cheap GPS receivers" response is just more LightSquared PR bullshit. It would take an absurdly good design to filter out a signal that is a) only a few MHz away, b) is being pumped out far closer, and c) is being pumped out orders of magnitude higher than any satellite can manage.
Second verse, same as the first. LightSquared just doesn't want to pay for spectrum. First they tried muscling in on satellite frequencies, claiming to the FCC that they'd primarily be satellite-based while telling everyone else that they'd be terrestrial only. And of course, they got caught because pretty much *any* terrestrial-strength broadcast is going to swamp out any satellite-based stuff on the same frequencies.
So now they're trying it again, trying to squeeze in on some pre-established frequencies. I don't claim to know any technical details of weather-balloon communication, but I do know this: if it *were* possible to safely share those frequencies with LTE-like communications, it would likely have been done already. Given their prior track record, LS is going to have to argue pretty effectively to convince me.
Look, LightSquared. You should've just paid for actual spectrum you could use before. You acted like a cheap bastard and tried to use the wrong parts because it was cheaper, and then you cried when it didn't work.
It's not like this isn't what all the established media companies are thinking. They all want this. At least he has the (courage|stupidity|ego) to stand up and say "we're against anything new because it might stop us making money".
Plus, it makes it ridiculously easy to argue against his point. This is a man who just weakened his entire team's position, because he spoke, on the record and in an official capacity. We should make sure this guy never gets fired, because he's actually *helping* our side by being so blatantly wrong.
One day they'll name cities after him. On the Moon, or perhaps on Mars. One day there will be an Armstrong City on a planet with a Gliese number.
One day. For now, though, it seems the best we can do is a ship.
When you're BUYING a game online and DOWNLOADING a game online, having to ACTIVATE the game online is not an impossible burden.
Online activation, for any game using only Steam as DRM (many games use some other DRM as well, and this is noted on the store page), is necessary only one time after updating. Download a game, run it once, then permanently set Steam into offline mode. It will never try to authenticate again. It will also not automatically update, chat will be disabled, and last time I tried the server browser wouldn't work for non-LAN servers. But it will work for LAN games, and any achievements you get will be queued up for upload as soon as you go back online.
(And also, if you're exceptionally paranoid, there's a crack that basically runs a Steam authentication server that authorizes everything. Right now, the only reason to use it is piracy, but I find it comforting to know that, if Valve fails and Steam shuts down, I can still access all the games I have downloaded.
PS: I challenge you to find retail games that don't have similar requirements. You'd be surprised how hard this is.
They're doing the initial beta (and possibly initial release) only under Ubuntu, to limit the number of complications.
Why Ubuntu? There are a couple of reasons for that. First, we’re just starting development and working with a single distribution is critical when you are experimenting, as we are. It reduces the variability of the testing space and makes early iteration easier and faster. Secondly, Ubuntu is a popular distribution and has recognition with the general gaming and developer communities. This doesn’t mean that Ubuntu will be the only distribution we support. Based on the success of our efforts around Ubuntu, we will look at supporting other distributions in the future.
Source: Valve Linux blog, entry "Steam'd Penguins", posted July 16 2012
And all that means, really, is that they currently only "support" it on Ubuntu - it will quite likely run fine on other distros, although probably with some work involved. And, if it's a reasonable success, they may make it supported on other major distros.
Once the engines are ported, the games should be available with just a few commands on the part of the developers
Should be, but not always are.
For example: Valve's Source engine was ported over to OS X. Valve ported over all of their Source titles. But they have also licensed it to other developers, and to my knowledge not a single one of them actually ported their game (going off "Dark Messiah of Might and Magic", "SiN Episodes: Emergence", "Zeno Clash" and "Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines"). Now, some of them have excuses (the SiN Episodes series was canned after one episode, and VTMB nearly predates HL2 and would have to be ported to a much newer version of the engine), but that's still a pretty bad record.
And some games that have OS X ports, and have the Windows version on Steam, haven't released the OS X version on Steam yet. Example: UT2004. Or they pull bullshit like treating the two ports as separate games (see: Call of Duty: Black Ops).
Basically, while your optimistic predictions are fully possible, in theory, the practice is likely to let you down a bit.
Weird, my current laptop has a processor with integrated graphics, but to my knowledge it was never used. Even when I was reinstalling and had no drivers for either my integrated or discrete graphics, it seemed to use the default VGA drivers on the NVidia card.
I'd accuse you of being an AMD shill, but you sound more like you just honestly don't know how things work.
PS: When I finally get around to installing Linux on this thing (any day now, I swear!), I'm actually planning to just use the Intel drivers, for better battery life. If I wanted to do any real gaming, I'd reboot in Windows, and apparently the NVidia blob under Linux doesn't support power management well. Sometimes it's good to have options.
Well, it can probably track in-flight ICBMs, but that's all I can think of (and those aren't exactly new).
Quite a bit, evidently, given how much power he's obtained.
Whether he knows anything about *governance*, though...
/dev/zero? I'd use /dev/urandom. Mainly in the hopes that some poor fool doing forensics tries to "decrypt" the data and wastes months trying to find a signal in pseudorandom noise.
Tires get low because the bead and valve aren't prefect
Valves aren't perfect. And neither is your spelling, it seems.
I used to use AVG, but I found it gradually became slower and slower, and stopped actually catching viruses.
Microsoft Security Essentials has the downside of being made by Microsoft, but the plus side of being extremely low-footprint and actually catching things. I pair it with the occasional MBAM scan out of paranoia (MBAM is good at finding and removing infections, but terrible at actively stopping them).
Finally, yeah, throw some AdBlock on there. Almost all the viruses I've caught in the past few years (ie. both of them) have come from malicious ads. Adblock tends to stop a fair number - it's not solid protection alone, but it's good for defense-in-depth.
I take it you've not tried to install any major applications on Windows lately.
Let's take two examples I had to do recently.
The first required me to separately install SQL Server, IIS and a few other prerequisites, then install the application, then manually run a SQL script to initialize the tables AFTER manually creating a db instance and authentication parameters, log into the application and configure it to point at the SQL server instance. Not too complicated, but still hardly the simplest method.
The second required me to manually install several odd prerequisites (IIS (despite not being a web package), the IIS 6 compatibility plugin (despite requiring Windows 8/2008R2, which only use IIS 7), ASP (again, it doesn't run a web interface), .NET 4.0 runtime, and Acrobat Reader (no PDFs were included)). Then I could install the "prerequisites package", which mainly consisted of drivers for the security dongle. THEN I could install the actual application, which had thankfully managed to complex task of "initializing database tables". There's more that I still have to do, but I can't figure out what they are because they didn't include the installation manual anywhere.
These are both major, multi-billion-dollar applications (the first one has options for using SQL Server or Oracle), proprietary as fuck, shipped out on custom-printed DVDs, and yet they can't manage to make an installation that takes less than a full day.
So what we need are sensible, non-crazy members of $religion who act like crazy people to bring in ratings.
Maybe I should practice frothing while shouting about how while I disagree with your religion, I respect your right to practice it inasmuch as it does not harm others. And then I'll randomly reference long-dead politicians ("Charles W. Fairbanks would never have tolerated such buffoonery! The very concept of the thing would have driven Marcus Lepidus into fits! ALL MY OPPONENTS ARE PRACTICING BOLSHEVIKS!").
This is the beginning of the end of the end.
Can we eject people for partial failure?
The project I'm working on has a username/password system. I, and the rest of my company, are doing the back-end; another company is doing the front-end, all for a third company. Naturally, we have to work pretty closely together, but one of the guys on the front end is not the best programmer.
I'm a stickler for password strength (I have a 20+ character root password, with enough symbols and numbers to keep anyone from ever breaking it), so I tested the system with insanely long and complex passwords (it breaks if you use characters outside the Unicode basic multilingual plane, but only because we're setting it as UTF-8). Hashed with some advanced algorithm, Twofsh I think (I wrote it months ago).
I tested the front-end, and it actually worked OK with long passwords. But the front-end guy had thrown in one of those Javascript "how strong is this password?" widgets, and guess what? If you enter more than 63 characters, it immediately shows it as "very weak". Doesn't break the site, and anyone using a 60-character password is smart enough to not listen to that crap, but it is a little bug.
I'd demand he fix it, but the poor guy's far enough behind as it is.
Look at an ASCII table sometime.
The first 0x20 characters, plus 0x7F, are "non-printable" or "control" characters, having no visual representation in any "standard" font, instead having some effect on the system - NUL, start-of-header, start-of-text, end-of-text, enquiry, acknowledge, bell, backspace, tab, line feed, vertical tab, form feed, carriage return, shift out, shift in, data link escape, device codes 1-4, and a few others I can't remember. The other 0x5F are "printable" - they actually show some character on the screen. That includes everything from space to ~, literally.
Those are official terms. ISO encodings and Unicode add more printing and non-printing characters, but they all have the same base. And I suppose EBCDIC has its own set of control characters, incompatible with ASCII et al (although if you're basing your password system on "what EBCIDIC allows", you fail on at least a dozen levels already).