The only message that sends to the developer is that they need to try harder to protect their games.
The better question is whether despite it all, this is a meaningful strategy. Like we've pretty much gathered up, there's three choices - buy, pirate or skip. Those that have skip is the first choice we might just forget about already. That leaves us with four preferences before we start adding DRM:
1. Pirate 2. Skip 3. Buy
1. Pirate 2. Buy 3. Skip
1. Buy 2. Pirate 3. Skip
1. Buy 2. Skip 3. Pirate
Those that belong to the first category is big, and will never be a sale. Yes, you can make pirating really hard and it'll give you a warm and fuzzy feeling but it won't do anything about the bottom line. The only ones that'll add to your bottom line are the second kind, so you throw on tons of DRM. If you did find great DRM (the same place as unicorns and fairies) you'd gain sales on #2 and hardly lose anyone on #3 and #4. Back in the real world, most DRM flops and is easily stripped from the pirated version - you gained nothing on #2 and lost customers both on #3 and #4. Pirates is this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and because they're busy chasing it they aren't collecting from the people that essentially wanted to pay. I do tend to pay for the games I find good, but every time I read a news story about how the sales - including my sale - was because of the new DRM I want to do a *facepalm*, ask for a refund and go pirate it.
The reason why they keep losing in court is because of strong privacy laws in Norway. In order to sue anyone for downloading copyrighted material, it would require the ISPs to identify users by IP addresses, something which is a very big no-no here.
Actually, they don't get that far. The biggest blocker for them right now is that their license to store private surveillance data from public networks has been refused by the Data Inspectorate, so they simply aren't getting started. The police is obviously not wasting their time investigating it. Right now the winds are blowing quite strongly in the direction of privacy, we may *crosses fingers* refuse EU's data storage directive, that'll be a first in 16 years.
In Sweden they know that any real anti-piracy crackdown would bring the Pirate Party into parliament, despite all the noise when the Pirate Party entered the EU parliament last year there's been essentially no legal activity and the file sharing is already at new heights, higher than before the FRA law, It's no wonder why they make their best offers like free Spotify in Scandinavia, they're trying desperately to hold the flood gates.
It's just like when Microsoft sees they could lose their dominance somewhere and offer a supergood deal to keep them on Windows. They know if copying for non-commercial use is legalized in one country, that country will become the center of all hubs and trackers and seedboxes and vpn services bringing the whole house of cards down. And technology keeps working against them all the time, if you have a 1 Mbit line letting someone leech from you really eats into your bandwidth but if you have 100 Mbit you barely notice. It's just borrowing away a little bit of what you're not using yourself.
The lower bound is 2x4.3 years = 8.6 years round trip and possibly much longer, so it won't ever be much of a conversation. But once you have it bootstrapped, you can say things like "tell us about the forms of life on your planet" and biologists would have year long orgasms looking at their version of National Geographic. Many, many hard sciences are like that and pretty much all the soft ones will want to know whether our behavior is universal or not. Not to mention that many scientific problems are hard and not solved in a day or two. Maybe one of their medical geniuses can say "Oh, uncontrolled cell growth like cancer? We figured that out, as a token of good faith and humanitarianism (or would that be alientarianism?) we will give this to you. You just..."
In fact, it's quite possibly better if interstellar travel is impossible or at least very, very hard so neither of us feels immediately threatened by the other. Everybody gets paranoid if they think alien ships could warp into orbit any time and blast us away. I hardly think that is limited to alien species, but doubt also work both ways. You don't want to try an assault only to piss off some very powerful races with weapons they casually forgot to mention or share.
2) Will NASA do the research on fundamentally new technologies? I suspect not here either, since that would require handing NASA money year after year with no real return. (when you're getting money to do research, you have a powerful incentive to never actually finish your research)
With your last remark this sounds like an attack on doing research in general, every researcher has that interest even in the private industry, unless they're stock holders rather than normal wage takers. The mechanism to solve that is exactly the same too, there's not an infinite amount of research money neither in the private nor public sector. Your program is a lackluster like Constellation? It gets axed. It's a huge success like the Mars Rovers? You can bet there'll be another round of grants for those. Oh there's a lot of pork and politics rather than science that decides what gets funded, but that's equally true everywhere. In fact, I'm fairly sure that this happens much more in the applied sciences where they claim the big profits are right around the next bend, only a little more research is necessary...
And some people believe in the flat earth and that holocaust didn't happen and the endless evidence that earth is older than 6000 years is God's practical joke (and I don't mean evolution, take a poll among geologists or astronomers or those studying cave paintings how many believe in the "young earth"). There's some people who'll live in their reality distortion bubble right up until reality smacks them over the head. Perhaps even all their life. But I would say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - if it's one telescope that caught something but there's no confirmation, I'd be inclined to think Earthly explanations - like someone playing the world's greatest prank by faking the data or a money/fame grab or something like that. If there's a candidate and we get multiple independent confirmations though, things will be different...
Why couldn't an advanced civilization try to ping us every 1000 years or so and see if anyone responds? It's not like it has to be stray TV signals. To me it seems a reasonable thing to do if we start discovering Earth-like exoplanets, sure we'll try more often at first but it's not like we're going to ask "Has intelligent life evolved now?" every five minutes. Narrow beam, high power, simple signal, the kind that should be easy for SETI to detect if there's a big enough antenna pointing in the right direction at the right time. But if they're run by people like you, I suppose nobody will be there to listen...
I just want to comment on that even if the bug isn't reproducible, it can be very real and very annoying. For example, an application I worked with had random cases of "things stop working". Restart services and the problem is gone - for a while. Increase memory and it's gone for a while longer. Turns out that finally, when they dug it out it was a issue with the caching system that'd not evict and insert properly under some race condition.
Another was a strange case of things going read only, but whenever an administrator tried to look at the problem it was gone. Well, finally we found out - through luck more than anything, that somebody was holding the wrong lock and it came from a completely different module. The only reason we caught it was because this particular lock was accidentally held for weeks rather than normally minutes so we could work it out with support.
P.S. I've found the usual MO is to ask for the impossible, like please provide an SQL trace of the problem - that happens randomly and you'll kill everything by trying to log everyone - then when you can't provide one close it because they have insufficient information from the customer. Still I can sort of understand - I have had mystery bugs that have come, gone and never come back. Don't worry too much unless the customer keeps reporting new incidents. If so, help me help you - if you got decent logging capability built in you should tell me what to turn on.
They offer a 'free trial' (...) and then persuade you to give them your credit card details
Stop. That's the only two facts you need to know: This is with 99% certainty some form of hidden subscription or renewal. Also here in Norway they can do the same with the cell phone. If they want your credit details and it sounds too good to be true, it's too good to be true.
Or more practically, when there's no value in the company the rest is sold off to some liquidation company that has liquidated all the asset (like down to furniture and office supplies) and don't know or/and don't care that they got any IP rights. I imagine someone would put up 1$ for the remaining assets and the bankruptcy board will "have to" take it rather than 0$, if not it might be a good business model. You don't need much of a hit rate to earn a little net.
I don't know if you're trying to be funny but what you describe is framework spaghetti. Everybody thinks they know how to do it better, so they keep reinventing the wheel - poorly. Producing frameworks that aren't stable aren't frameworks, it's just make as you go implementation with a nice name and likely to be thrown out and started all over again by the next guy who favors a different one because nothing is really standard or a convention. But I suppose it keeps web developers paid...
AMD actively supports the open driver and is working to make that the main driver.
They are working on an open driver yes, but they are not looking to replace the proprietary driver in the foreseeable future. For a number of reasons - not least of which is the tons of optimization work going into the main driver - they expect the open source 3D performance to top out at 60-70% of Catalyst by keeping a simple structure. That is much better than than the difference between accelerated and unaccelerated though which can be <1% of the performance.
Are you a parent? There's absolutely NOTHING they could do to the guy that would be worse than losing a child.
For the vast majority of parents, yes. Which intersects quite well with the vast majority that won't leave loaded, unsecured guns on a table in the vicinity of small children. What's to say he's not neglectful in gun handling and don't care much in any other way either? This reminds me of an old, old question from discussion groups: If you drink and drive with your best friend and you flip off the road and he dies and you live, is that punishment enough? Our table quite quickly agreed that no, it wasn't. Some other table came to the opposite conclusion, I never understood how. Heartache is really not enough, you can have your heartache in jail.
Well, I sorta agree but with the tie-in between religion and culture and gameplay it's rather rather annoying that religion is a must - if you don't use religion or religious buildings you lose out on things, even though for many societies it hasn't been a big driver either. Not to mention that when you min-max things often some religions turn out to be "better" and whatnot. It just doesn't feel much like real religion, it's more a power-up you take because it's convenient to use. I was never about to be offeneded by it, but I'm not really going to miss it either.
Everybody that makes money off the processing power of their computers? Not many hobbyists would spend 1000$ on a camera, but photographers spends thousands. Granted, that's really a workstation market more than a consumer market, but it's not special like ECC RAM, Quatro graphics cards, SAS hard drives or similar server/niche products. If you use the right apps and get a 50% speedup it'll pay for itself in many places. Overall, I don't think it's a really expensive hobby if you want to drive around in a car costing 2000$ less and blow it all on computers. I could afford this one if I wanted to, I just don't see the point. It's so much else I could spent it on and so little extra gain.
I know that it happens sometimes in Norway too on very critical systems or when fired for cause, but this whole idea that Americans seem to think is natural is really absurd to me. My resignation period is 3 months and I'm in the middle of it now. Still got my admin logins, all my server logins, the same intranet access I've always had. Two weeks is nowhere near enough to find a serious job, personally I spent about 1.5 months from application to contract going through interview rounds and negotiations. Now I did all that before I resigned, but if I was let go it'd be about the same, I'd likely have another job ready when I left my old job. I've already done quite a bit to transfer things to the rest of the team and on Monday someone new starts - I was even one of those interviewing her - that I'll be teach for the next month and a half.
The US system remains me of being clubbed in the head for both parties. So you come there, expecting just to finish up for the weekend and you get called into a short meeting - because Friday is the day you're least likely to come back and go postal and it hits you WHAM! in the back of your head. Guards to escort you out and before you know it you stand there on the street thinking "What the fuck? What the FUCK just happened?" like being struck by lightning from a clear blue sky. Unless you're one of the few who'd people hire on the spot, you most likely just took a financial WHAM! in the back of your head on top of the mental one too. So how exactly are you supposed to feel about your employer after being kicked to the curb? "Thank you sir, may I have another sir."?
I can't really imagine it being much better for the employer, particularly if they have to escort you off the premises the moment you hand in your resignation. I mean there's no job description that lists everything I do. There's no organized documentation that says "this is how to do my job" - and I'd be mighty suspicious is someone asked me to write one. There'd be no replacement, it'd all be like a sudden cave-in where you hope those around will fill in the gaps as best they can. Managers are hostile to workers on resignation exactly because it hits them WHAM! in the back of the head, throwing all those neat little plans they had into chaos. They have to deal with their bosses, annoyed clients or customers, try to reschedule allocations and because it happens so fast things always get lost in the process. Planning to do without me three months out is nowhere near the same issue.
Now, you might ask what's keeping me from slacking and just not doing my job now? Not really much more than my reputation and professionalism I guess, but it seems to be enough for almost everyone here right down to the retail clerks. Why then is it so different from the US? I think because of the references, in the US you can't normally get a company to do more than to confirm your employment dates and barely that. Here you can actually get people talking to you, and your reputation travels without the risk of a multi-million groundless lawsuit on your ass. It's expected that you provide charatcter references from people that have worked with you in the past or been your boss in the past or been your client in the past. Not to make it sound like we've gone to the other extreme and run on gossip, but the truth has a way of getting around I think is lacking in the US. It certainly seem to work well here.
P.S. Normally companies know long in advance they have to lay off people. It's very rare that they need to lay off people on two weeks notice because the market collapsed right here and now without warning.
(although why they bother turning up in the first place is a bit of a mystery - do you get marks just for attending lectures in the US or something?).
I haven't gone to school in the US, but I've been to lectures where there was a few points you'd really want to catch, and the rest of the class was basically slow torture to get through. Particularly one Russian with very poor English, the guy was no doubt brilliant but it was a giant pain in the ass and whenever he was going through things I've already understood - which was maybe 80% of the time - I'd zone out. One class I flunked because it was impossible without class notes, he knew I hadn't been there so wanted to see me fall on the oral exam. I got enough credits anyway, so luckily never had to retake it.
Re:New, Problematic Protocol Introduced
on
OpenSSH 5.4 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Please do tell what are the vital differences from version 1.4 made in 2008, because I think you're trolling. It looks like all RFCs normally look, either you haven't read many and don't have a clue what you're talking about or you are just trying to spread FUD.
Welcome to the new media, even worse than the old media. True, the tabloids have always been typesetting as if WWIII broke out every day, but at least inside the paper not every headline had to be this absurd brainteaser with extreme hyperbole or no relevance to the actual article. Now every article has to gain it's own ad clicks, and it doesn't matter if it's from "omg what a piece of shit, I can't believe I got suckered by it" or "wow, really great article. I got to bookmark this site" clicks.
since lisbon treaty last year, ANYthing that is done by Eu commission has to be approved by parliament to be valid.
Unfortunately the process is basically that the EC offers something slightly less unreasonable each round, until the worst possible bargain is struck just to get some of the good things done. Like in the US most the crap are in semi-related add-ons to the main directive. And while the balance of power is slightly shifted, it's not like the EP are the ones running the show.
...but it was BASIC. And the expectations were so low. "10 PRINT "Hello, World!", "20 GOTO 10" and it started doing something. The programming manual was well worn by the time I was 10, would that have happened with any other language? I doubt it. Things like lack of scoping makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder. The point isn't to learn everything from your first language, the point is to get started and interested at all. Moving to DOS was sorta ok, but moving to Windows killed my interest. C/C++ was just horribly complicated, I remember trying to get up a window in the Win32 API and it was like wtf, how hard can this be? MFC was even worse, Java (really early java, on hardware of the time) was slow and unresponsive as fuck, Javascript was a toy language for websites and never really like Pascal or VB much either. I didn't regain my interest in programming until I went with C++/Qt, or maybe more Qt than C++ really. QMainWindow *mw = new QMainWindow(), mw->show(). The hard stuff is still hard, but I very very rarely find I write "overhead" code that I shouldn't have to.
Well, the post I was replying to said brute force and that's pretty much the definition of brute force.
In conclusion, you need to run WELL under 10^18 thought operations to figure out the back door they put into your encryption algorithm and/or reverse engineer their top secret decryption technology. A wee bit less than your 10^70 operations required to brute force one message. Plus, when you crack the entire algorithm, you've cracked all messages ever sent with it, not just one message.
Uh, wtf kind of logic is that? Since the 1960s millions of people have thought of a "warp drive", that doesn't make it possible. For example, take the RSA algorithm. It depends on p*q = n being trivial to do just like you learned in elementary school, while factoring n to p*q is something mathematicians have spent 2200 years on and not found a really good way of doing. Symmetric encryption is probably even harder because you lack the key entirely. If you look at the list of symmetric ciphers, most of them have never been broken. For example DES published in 1977 *still* has no better published solution than brute force - it's just that 56 bits is way too little with today's computing power.
So how exactly would you deal with an illegal alien that says "I don't need a work permit, I'm a US citizen and no, you can't see my birth certificate or anything else that proves that I am." And even if the birth certificate is issued by the hospital and not the government, it's practically useless without some kind of credible identification which 99 times out of 100 means government issued. Denying you this card should be on equal level with the government denying your identity and denying your citizenship, and if so you're in deep shit one way or the other.
Here in Norway we have a national ID for all residents, not just permanent residents or citizens. If anything it's a help against ID theft and ID confusion. If some other person with my name has taken up a loan and is moving around, nobody will come knocking at my door because it's issued to person 456132123 and not 4561621650. Of course anyone can steal my id as well as one based on name but it'll mostly hurt just that person.
P.S. There's still quite a few people that in whole or part do black labor, usually it's either unemployment fraud, disabilities fraud, tax fraud (like people do their regular work but take cash and pretend they didn't work) or just getting extra income that isn't taxed by people with legal residence. And from what I understand illegal aliens work quite a bit in food shops, extra clerks, cleaning, various manual labor where's it's not so obvious where the money is going...
Heh yeah, DA:O isn't exactly the most computer-intensive game. From the system requirements on the wikipedia page:
Intel Core 2 (or equivalent) running at 1.4Ghz or greater, 1 Gb of RAM(XP) - Vista 1.5 Gb of RAM, Graphic card nvidia 6600 128 mb or better, 20 Gb HDD
Oblivion on the other hand required a high-end computer of 2006:
512 MB system RAM, 2.0 GHz processor, 128 MB video card, 8x DVD-ROM drive, 4.6 GB hard disk space. Supported nVidia cards (I cut the ATI cards for brevity): NVIDIA Geforce 7800 series NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series NVIDIA GeForce FX series
At some point people are going to ask what did you accomplish? If you're a mathematician especially, you'll have nothing to show for it
"I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you afterwards". And to be honest, I doubt anyone with "Mathematician, NSA" on their CV will ever have trouble finding work. Lots of others with science degrees work for private research, you'll just be another one of those.
Slashdot Mirror
The only message that sends to the developer is that they need to try harder to protect their games.
The better question is whether despite it all, this is a meaningful strategy. Like we've pretty much gathered up, there's three choices - buy, pirate or skip. Those that have skip is the first choice we might just forget about already. That leaves us with four preferences before we start adding DRM:
1. Pirate
2. Skip
3. Buy
1. Pirate
2. Buy
3. Skip
1. Buy
2. Pirate
3. Skip
1. Buy
2. Skip
3. Pirate
Those that belong to the first category is big, and will never be a sale. Yes, you can make pirating really hard and it'll give you a warm and fuzzy feeling but it won't do anything about the bottom line. The only ones that'll add to your bottom line are the second kind, so you throw on tons of DRM. If you did find great DRM (the same place as unicorns and fairies) you'd gain sales on #2 and hardly lose anyone on #3 and #4. Back in the real world, most DRM flops and is easily stripped from the pirated version - you gained nothing on #2 and lost customers both on #3 and #4. Pirates is this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and because they're busy chasing it they aren't collecting from the people that essentially wanted to pay. I do tend to pay for the games I find good, but every time I read a news story about how the sales - including my sale - was because of the new DRM I want to do a *facepalm*, ask for a refund and go pirate it.
The reason why they keep losing in court is because of strong privacy laws in Norway. In order to sue anyone for downloading copyrighted material, it would require the ISPs to identify users by IP addresses, something which is a very big no-no here.
Actually, they don't get that far. The biggest blocker for them right now is that their license to store private surveillance data from public networks has been refused by the Data Inspectorate, so they simply aren't getting started. The police is obviously not wasting their time investigating it. Right now the winds are blowing quite strongly in the direction of privacy, we may *crosses fingers* refuse EU's data storage directive, that'll be a first in 16 years.
In Sweden they know that any real anti-piracy crackdown would bring the Pirate Party into parliament, despite all the noise when the Pirate Party entered the EU parliament last year there's been essentially no legal activity and the file sharing is already at new heights, higher than before the FRA law, It's no wonder why they make their best offers like free Spotify in Scandinavia, they're trying desperately to hold the flood gates.
It's just like when Microsoft sees they could lose their dominance somewhere and offer a supergood deal to keep them on Windows. They know if copying for non-commercial use is legalized in one country, that country will become the center of all hubs and trackers and seedboxes and vpn services bringing the whole house of cards down. And technology keeps working against them all the time, if you have a 1 Mbit line letting someone leech from you really eats into your bandwidth but if you have 100 Mbit you barely notice. It's just borrowing away a little bit of what you're not using yourself.
The lower bound is 2x4.3 years = 8.6 years round trip and possibly much longer, so it won't ever be much of a conversation. But once you have it bootstrapped, you can say things like "tell us about the forms of life on your planet" and biologists would have year long orgasms looking at their version of National Geographic. Many, many hard sciences are like that and pretty much all the soft ones will want to know whether our behavior is universal or not. Not to mention that many scientific problems are hard and not solved in a day or two. Maybe one of their medical geniuses can say "Oh, uncontrolled cell growth like cancer? We figured that out, as a token of good faith and humanitarianism (or would that be alientarianism?) we will give this to you. You just..."
In fact, it's quite possibly better if interstellar travel is impossible or at least very, very hard so neither of us feels immediately threatened by the other. Everybody gets paranoid if they think alien ships could warp into orbit any time and blast us away. I hardly think that is limited to alien species, but doubt also work both ways. You don't want to try an assault only to piss off some very powerful races with weapons they casually forgot to mention or share.
2) Will NASA do the research on fundamentally new technologies? I suspect not here either, since that would require handing NASA money year after year with no real return. (when you're getting money to do research, you have a powerful incentive to never actually finish your research)
With your last remark this sounds like an attack on doing research in general, every researcher has that interest even in the private industry, unless they're stock holders rather than normal wage takers. The mechanism to solve that is exactly the same too, there's not an infinite amount of research money neither in the private nor public sector. Your program is a lackluster like Constellation? It gets axed. It's a huge success like the Mars Rovers? You can bet there'll be another round of grants for those. Oh there's a lot of pork and politics rather than science that decides what gets funded, but that's equally true everywhere. In fact, I'm fairly sure that this happens much more in the applied sciences where they claim the big profits are right around the next bend, only a little more research is necessary...
And some people believe in the flat earth and that holocaust didn't happen and the endless evidence that earth is older than 6000 years is God's practical joke (and I don't mean evolution, take a poll among geologists or astronomers or those studying cave paintings how many believe in the "young earth"). There's some people who'll live in their reality distortion bubble right up until reality smacks them over the head. Perhaps even all their life. But I would say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - if it's one telescope that caught something but there's no confirmation, I'd be inclined to think Earthly explanations - like someone playing the world's greatest prank by faking the data or a money/fame grab or something like that. If there's a candidate and we get multiple independent confirmations though, things will be different...
Why couldn't an advanced civilization try to ping us every 1000 years or so and see if anyone responds? It's not like it has to be stray TV signals. To me it seems a reasonable thing to do if we start discovering Earth-like exoplanets, sure we'll try more often at first but it's not like we're going to ask "Has intelligent life evolved now?" every five minutes. Narrow beam, high power, simple signal, the kind that should be easy for SETI to detect if there's a big enough antenna pointing in the right direction at the right time. But if they're run by people like you, I suppose nobody will be there to listen...
I just want to comment on that even if the bug isn't reproducible, it can be very real and very annoying. For example, an application I worked with had random cases of "things stop working". Restart services and the problem is gone - for a while. Increase memory and it's gone for a while longer. Turns out that finally, when they dug it out it was a issue with the caching system that'd not evict and insert properly under some race condition.
Another was a strange case of things going read only, but whenever an administrator tried to look at the problem it was gone. Well, finally we found out - through luck more than anything, that somebody was holding the wrong lock and it came from a completely different module. The only reason we caught it was because this particular lock was accidentally held for weeks rather than normally minutes so we could work it out with support.
P.S. I've found the usual MO is to ask for the impossible, like please provide an SQL trace of the problem - that happens randomly and you'll kill everything by trying to log everyone - then when you can't provide one close it because they have insufficient information from the customer. Still I can sort of understand - I have had mystery bugs that have come, gone and never come back. Don't worry too much unless the customer keeps reporting new incidents. If so, help me help you - if you got decent logging capability built in you should tell me what to turn on.
They offer a 'free trial' (...) and then persuade you to give them your credit card details
Stop. That's the only two facts you need to know: This is with 99% certainty some form of hidden subscription or renewal. Also here in Norway they can do the same with the cell phone. If they want your credit details and it sounds too good to be true, it's too good to be true.
Or more practically, when there's no value in the company the rest is sold off to some liquidation company that has liquidated all the asset (like down to furniture and office supplies) and don't know or/and don't care that they got any IP rights. I imagine someone would put up 1$ for the remaining assets and the bankruptcy board will "have to" take it rather than 0$, if not it might be a good business model. You don't need much of a hit rate to earn a little net.
I don't know if you're trying to be funny but what you describe is framework spaghetti. Everybody thinks they know how to do it better, so they keep reinventing the wheel - poorly. Producing frameworks that aren't stable aren't frameworks, it's just make as you go implementation with a nice name and likely to be thrown out and started all over again by the next guy who favors a different one because nothing is really standard or a convention. But I suppose it keeps web developers paid...
Don't worry, the bits take so long to get there they'll never notice.
AMD actively supports the open driver and is working to make that the main driver.
They are working on an open driver yes, but they are not looking to replace the proprietary driver in the foreseeable future. For a number of reasons - not least of which is the tons of optimization work going into the main driver - they expect the open source 3D performance to top out at 60-70% of Catalyst by keeping a simple structure. That is much better than than the difference between accelerated and unaccelerated though which can be <1% of the performance.
Are you a parent? There's absolutely NOTHING they could do to the guy that would be worse than losing a child.
For the vast majority of parents, yes. Which intersects quite well with the vast majority that won't leave loaded, unsecured guns on a table in the vicinity of small children. What's to say he's not neglectful in gun handling and don't care much in any other way either? This reminds me of an old, old question from discussion groups: If you drink and drive with your best friend and you flip off the road and he dies and you live, is that punishment enough? Our table quite quickly agreed that no, it wasn't. Some other table came to the opposite conclusion, I never understood how. Heartache is really not enough, you can have your heartache in jail.
Well, I sorta agree but with the tie-in between religion and culture and gameplay it's rather rather annoying that religion is a must - if you don't use religion or religious buildings you lose out on things, even though for many societies it hasn't been a big driver either. Not to mention that when you min-max things often some religions turn out to be "better" and whatnot. It just doesn't feel much like real religion, it's more a power-up you take because it's convenient to use. I was never about to be offeneded by it, but I'm not really going to miss it either.
Nice, but who has $1000 to pay on a CPU?
Everybody that makes money off the processing power of their computers? Not many hobbyists would spend 1000$ on a camera, but photographers spends thousands. Granted, that's really a workstation market more than a consumer market, but it's not special like ECC RAM, Quatro graphics cards, SAS hard drives or similar server/niche products. If you use the right apps and get a 50% speedup it'll pay for itself in many places. Overall, I don't think it's a really expensive hobby if you want to drive around in a car costing 2000$ less and blow it all on computers. I could afford this one if I wanted to, I just don't see the point. It's so much else I could spent it on and so little extra gain.
I know that it happens sometimes in Norway too on very critical systems or when fired for cause, but this whole idea that Americans seem to think is natural is really absurd to me. My resignation period is 3 months and I'm in the middle of it now. Still got my admin logins, all my server logins, the same intranet access I've always had. Two weeks is nowhere near enough to find a serious job, personally I spent about 1.5 months from application to contract going through interview rounds and negotiations. Now I did all that before I resigned, but if I was let go it'd be about the same, I'd likely have another job ready when I left my old job. I've already done quite a bit to transfer things to the rest of the team and on Monday someone new starts - I was even one of those interviewing her - that I'll be teach for the next month and a half.
The US system remains me of being clubbed in the head for both parties. So you come there, expecting just to finish up for the weekend and you get called into a short meeting - because Friday is the day you're least likely to come back and go postal and it hits you WHAM! in the back of your head. Guards to escort you out and before you know it you stand there on the street thinking "What the fuck? What the FUCK just happened?" like being struck by lightning from a clear blue sky. Unless you're one of the few who'd people hire on the spot, you most likely just took a financial WHAM! in the back of your head on top of the mental one too. So how exactly are you supposed to feel about your employer after being kicked to the curb? "Thank you sir, may I have another sir."?
I can't really imagine it being much better for the employer, particularly if they have to escort you off the premises the moment you hand in your resignation. I mean there's no job description that lists everything I do. There's no organized documentation that says "this is how to do my job" - and I'd be mighty suspicious is someone asked me to write one. There'd be no replacement, it'd all be like a sudden cave-in where you hope those around will fill in the gaps as best they can. Managers are hostile to workers on resignation exactly because it hits them WHAM! in the back of the head, throwing all those neat little plans they had into chaos. They have to deal with their bosses, annoyed clients or customers, try to reschedule allocations and because it happens so fast things always get lost in the process. Planning to do without me three months out is nowhere near the same issue.
Now, you might ask what's keeping me from slacking and just not doing my job now? Not really much more than my reputation and professionalism I guess, but it seems to be enough for almost everyone here right down to the retail clerks. Why then is it so different from the US? I think because of the references, in the US you can't normally get a company to do more than to confirm your employment dates and barely that. Here you can actually get people talking to you, and your reputation travels without the risk of a multi-million groundless lawsuit on your ass. It's expected that you provide charatcter references from people that have worked with you in the past or been your boss in the past or been your client in the past. Not to make it sound like we've gone to the other extreme and run on gossip, but the truth has a way of getting around I think is lacking in the US. It certainly seem to work well here.
P.S. Normally companies know long in advance they have to lay off people. It's very rare that they need to lay off people on two weeks notice because the market collapsed right here and now without warning.
(although why they bother turning up in the first place is a bit of a mystery - do you get marks just for attending lectures in the US or something?).
I haven't gone to school in the US, but I've been to lectures where there was a few points you'd really want to catch, and the rest of the class was basically slow torture to get through. Particularly one Russian with very poor English, the guy was no doubt brilliant but it was a giant pain in the ass and whenever he was going through things I've already understood - which was maybe 80% of the time - I'd zone out. One class I flunked because it was impossible without class notes, he knew I hadn't been there so wanted to see me fall on the oral exam. I got enough credits anyway, so luckily never had to retake it.
Please do tell what are the vital differences from version 1.4 made in 2008, because I think you're trolling. It looks like all RFCs normally look, either you haven't read many and don't have a clue what you're talking about or you are just trying to spread FUD.
Welcome to the new media, even worse than the old media. True, the tabloids have always been typesetting as if WWIII broke out every day, but at least inside the paper not every headline had to be this absurd brainteaser with extreme hyperbole or no relevance to the actual article. Now every article has to gain it's own ad clicks, and it doesn't matter if it's from "omg what a piece of shit, I can't believe I got suckered by it" or "wow, really great article. I got to bookmark this site" clicks.
since lisbon treaty last year, ANYthing that is done by Eu commission has to be approved by parliament to be valid.
Unfortunately the process is basically that the EC offers something slightly less unreasonable each round, until the worst possible bargain is struck just to get some of the good things done. Like in the US most the crap are in semi-related add-ons to the main directive. And while the balance of power is slightly shifted, it's not like the EP are the ones running the show.
...but it was BASIC. And the expectations were so low. "10 PRINT "Hello, World!", "20 GOTO 10" and it started doing something. The programming manual was well worn by the time I was 10, would that have happened with any other language? I doubt it. Things like lack of scoping makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder. The point isn't to learn everything from your first language, the point is to get started and interested at all. Moving to DOS was sorta ok, but moving to Windows killed my interest. C/C++ was just horribly complicated, I remember trying to get up a window in the Win32 API and it was like wtf, how hard can this be? MFC was even worse, Java (really early java, on hardware of the time) was slow and unresponsive as fuck, Javascript was a toy language for websites and never really like Pascal or VB much either. I didn't regain my interest in programming until I went with C++/Qt, or maybe more Qt than C++ really. QMainWindow *mw = new QMainWindow(), mw->show(). The hard stuff is still hard, but I very very rarely find I write "overhead" code that I shouldn't have to.
Well, if your strategy is guess and check, sure,
Well, the post I was replying to said brute force and that's pretty much the definition of brute force.
In conclusion, you need to run WELL under 10^18 thought operations to figure out the back door they put into your encryption algorithm and/or reverse engineer their top secret decryption technology. A wee bit less than your 10^70 operations required to brute force one message. Plus, when you crack the entire algorithm, you've cracked all messages ever sent with it, not just one message.
Uh, wtf kind of logic is that? Since the 1960s millions of people have thought of a "warp drive", that doesn't make it possible. For example, take the RSA algorithm. It depends on p*q = n being trivial to do just like you learned in elementary school, while factoring n to p*q is something mathematicians have spent 2200 years on and not found a really good way of doing. Symmetric encryption is probably even harder because you lack the key entirely. If you look at the list of symmetric ciphers, most of them have never been broken. For example DES published in 1977 *still* has no better published solution than brute force - it's just that 56 bits is way too little with today's computing power.
So how exactly would you deal with an illegal alien that says "I don't need a work permit, I'm a US citizen and no, you can't see my birth certificate or anything else that proves that I am." And even if the birth certificate is issued by the hospital and not the government, it's practically useless without some kind of credible identification which 99 times out of 100 means government issued. Denying you this card should be on equal level with the government denying your identity and denying your citizenship, and if so you're in deep shit one way or the other.
Here in Norway we have a national ID for all residents, not just permanent residents or citizens. If anything it's a help against ID theft and ID confusion. If some other person with my name has taken up a loan and is moving around, nobody will come knocking at my door because it's issued to person 456132123 and not 4561621650. Of course anyone can steal my id as well as one based on name but it'll mostly hurt just that person.
P.S. There's still quite a few people that in whole or part do black labor, usually it's either unemployment fraud, disabilities fraud, tax fraud (like people do their regular work but take cash and pretend they didn't work) or just getting extra income that isn't taxed by people with legal residence. And from what I understand illegal aliens work quite a bit in food shops, extra clerks, cleaning, various manual labor where's it's not so obvious where the money is going...
Heh yeah, DA:O isn't exactly the most computer-intensive game. From the system requirements on the wikipedia page:
Intel Core 2 (or equivalent) running at 1.4Ghz or greater, 1 Gb of RAM(XP) - Vista 1.5 Gb of RAM, Graphic card nvidia 6600 128 mb or better, 20 Gb HDD
Oblivion on the other hand required a high-end computer of 2006:
512 MB system RAM, 2.0 GHz processor, 128 MB video card, 8x DVD-ROM drive, 4.6 GB hard disk space.
Supported nVidia cards (I cut the ATI cards for brevity):
NVIDIA Geforce 7800 series
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series
NVIDIA GeForce FX series
At some point people are going to ask what did you accomplish?
If you're a mathematician especially, you'll have nothing to show for it
"I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you afterwards". And to be honest, I doubt anyone with "Mathematician, NSA" on their CV will ever have trouble finding work. Lots of others with science degrees work for private research, you'll just be another one of those.