...some PHB who can't stop these marks from appearing gets scared of having their files stolen by little geeks with butterfly nets outside the building, but who's too cheap to hire the talent or buy the hardware to secure their wireless network, starts telling his cronies to go out on their lunch break and draw these symbols up everywhere, thus negating their effectiveness.
Sort of a chaff-defence, but i'm pretty sure it would work...
Your understanding of the term is spot on. The trick here is that the camera captures at 640x480, but has a built in scale&dither which will put out 1.3 megapixel resolution. The person who wrote the article properly calls the 1.3 megapixel claim an advertising fib in this case. He suggests using the camera in 640x480 mode and scaling in a photo-editor. i suggest the same. something like photoshop will do a much better job of preserving image quality while scaling than the built in function on a tiny device like this will.
-------QUOTE------- The fact that people feel the need to mod the game to make it more enjoyable means that Nintendo hasn't done their job. -------END QUOTE----
In this case, yes. the mod is something that everyone can appreciate. it is something that if it's cost had been integrated at Nintendo rather than having to be produced independently and installed haphazardlly would probably have only added about five dollars to the unit price(i'm talking about the Afterburner here, not the PSOne screen). I can't think of anyone(not a single person) who has seen a gameboy with and without the afterburner that wouldn't have been willing to pony up the extra five for that feature when they bought it.
That hardly applies to all mods though. Ever since the video game generation grew up into hackers and consoles started to appeal to adults, there have been techies that will take any excuse to poke around inside the machines.
If somebody takes the trouble to install a burner and a larger hard-drive in their X-Box, that doesn't mean that microsoft hasn't done their job, even if every other X-Box owner thinks it's pretty cool. The cost and other issues of making that mod standard(or even an official option) would simply outweigh the benefit to the users(and the company).
Even if a system is ever "perfect"(is the exact balance of what most people want and what they're willing to spend), there will be countless geeks who mod it just on principle.
Sega was never planning to market a beowulf cluster of Linux Dreamcasts, nor should they have.
---Quote--- Generally however we've found that the cost of open sourcing code for a proprietary product is non-trivial. I know it seems counter-intuitive but consider this: the reality is you can't just toss code over the fence. You have to first scrub it to make sure you have the rights to release it (your question acknowledges this difficulty). You also have to provide resources to answer questions and generally support those who are trying to pick up the code. Typically you have to develop additional documentation as well. Lastly there's the issue of ongoing liability. Large companies have deep pockets. When a company releases a product it at times comes with a warranty which the company is willing to offer because the risk is offset by revenue. There has to be some significant value to the licensor to justify the risk. Make no mistake, whenever a large company converts a product to Open Source it's because that strategy has in some way been positively tied to the bottom line. ---EndQuote---
I'm a strong supporter of the Open Source movement, but I find Danese's comments here very interesting. The things that he says are unquestionably true and point to a large part of the likely reason why even companies which are firendly towards the Free Software movement are often reluctant to open their code.
Hackers need to remember this. Too many times I have heard people attacking companies for not "putting their money where their mouth is" because they support Open Source in their statements and press releases, but continue to produce closed products. It's good to see such a considered view on why you can't always just "throw code over the fence".
Anyone who hasn't read Neal Stephenson's essay In the Beginning... Was the Command Line should do so now. He treats this subject in his trademark enjoyable style. This essay can also be purchased as a thin little paperback. I love the car-lot analogy(although it harks back to the glory days of Be).
---QUOTE--- "The attack doesn't happen through the chat client, so as long as you have MSN Messenger installed, if I send you a special URL, I can own you," said Marc Maiffret, Eeye's "chief hacking officer." ---ENDQUOTE---
This kind of paraphrasing is a disgrace to journalistic integrity. I present to slahdot an exclusive direct transcription of this statement, before the WashPost mangled it.
"M4RX M4IFFR3T d03Z n0t R007 j00 7hru 14M3 cl3n7 h4x. M4RX M4IFFR3T iz 31337-h4x0r. H3 wiLL *0WNZ* j00 W/ 1337 j00-R-3ll iF j00 hav m3$$3ng3r 0N j0r 14m3 b0x0r 47 4LL!!!!!!!!!11111111," said M4RX M4IFFR3T, Eeye's K1N6Z0r of 31337.
hmmm... i'm think i'm going to write a book. and then, on page 156, I'm going to include my IP address and root password. And then, I'm going to make sure that every copy of the book has it's covers bound together tightly together so that it can not be opened without extreme difficulty. Then I'm going to sell the book for $50 dollars a copy(aw hell, why not make it a hundred). And then, If anyone who buys my book actually tries to open it, I'm just going to have to sue them for every penny they have because, goddammit my root password's in their(didn't they read the EULA that came on the complimentary bookmark?).
(c) NONSENSITIVE PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION REQUIRES ROBUST NOTICE AND OPT-OUT CONSENT- An internet service provider, online service provider, or operator of a commercial website may not--
(1) collect personally identifiable information not described in subsection (b) online, or (2) disclose or otherwise use such information collected online, from a user of that service or website.
---end quote
Salon's article does sem a bit overly critical. This bill is a necessary piece of legislation. Sure some would like to see it even stricter(prohibiting any spyware style market research), but as it is it prohibits companies from collecting sensitive information and also from collecting information which is non-sensitve but could potentially be used to identify you.
The Salon article implies that the bill will allow companies to collect all sorts of non-sensitive personal information and use it to build a complete profile of you, including the stuff that can't be directly collected due to it's sensitivity. This just isn't true.
how am i supposed to serve MP3s off of my nano-computer with all those strobe lights going all the time?
dammit!
Ohhh...
upon actually reading the article(something i sometimes do before i post...) i see that they are considering taking advantage of this for the construction of uber-cool nono-circuits....
so maybe my strobe lights can be PART of my MP3 disco computer... cool. it's a great time to be alive!
''These type of people perceive the risk of getting caught as being nonexistent. It's like a hacker mentality. If there's a way you can hack it, then you should just be entitled to it. It goes with the hacker ethic.''
Interesting. If the parked domains can be hacked and defaced so easily, one has to wonder just how secure the rest of their system is, which is responsible not just for domain name serving, but must handle massive credit card traffic.
yes, both are excellent browsers, but I was pretty sure that Opera has at least as large of a share as Konqueror on *n*x desktops.
Sure, the free version has ads, but it's still free, and it seems to render sloppily coded IE-compatible/W3C-incompatible pages with more flair than either of the other two. Opera recently released the TP3 of their version 6, and it is excellent.
just a note.
Re:The most important thing developers must note:
on
The Future of MMORPGs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I would of agreed with this until the Sims came around. It seems that if gameplay is challenging/rewarding enough, poeple will be quite happy to play a member of the mob. For many people the escapism/fantasy element is still there(the desire to be Aragorn) but for others, being a productive happy hobbit is escapism enough. Particularly if(as the Entropia people are trying to do) a system gets developed which fully supports gamecash==realcash, rather than just really-cool-game-stuff==cash/fraud-from-EBay. I can imagine a lot of people who might think that spending a lot of time doing challenging and rewarding but unspectacular game tasks and making real world coin for it was as worthwhile as spending a lot of time trying to be a hero and maybe just ending up with a character who dies a lot(with a possible gamecash/realcash cost for resurrection). Of course you would still want a healthy helping of heroes, or else the game might get boring(only might mind you, there are No heroes in the Sims), but still... someone might just be able to pull off a game world which actually supported a heroic framework, adoring mobs and all.
prophesizing on the Matrix(ala Gibson, not Keanu)
on
The Future of MMORPGs
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This article is excellent, and I particularly enjoyed the intelligent focus on copyright and intellectual property issues as MMOGs slide towards greater and greater online content. Admittedly, I haven't played an MMOG since the Tradewars days, but the idea still fascinates me. The most thrilling idea surrounding this topic as far as I am concerned however, is that of inter-game compatability. It seems only a short matter of time before, at first multiple games by the same company, but eventually games by competing companies, support the transfer of characters and wealth between game worlds.
From that point I can imagine very easily that the drive towards standards and cross-compatability would result in the creation of a standardized "meta-game" in which characters could interact devoid of any rules or constructions aside from user created content and the "laws of physics" of the virtual world. Some users, of course, would become massive creators of original content in effect turning their corners of the meta-game into games in their own right(whether free or requiring an admission fee). Of course the commercial games would still exist and could be easily entered at any time from the meta-game, but the meta-game itself would provide the perfect level for many types of interactions and for encouraging a seamless gaming experience.
There is only one small step left from there to envision this meta-game expanding to include near-infinite non-game content and eventually replacing what is now WWW-space with an avatar driven virtual world such as that envisioned in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
Of course, everything i have just said is speculation and supposition, but my real point is that what is going on in the world of MMOGs may be something that warrants attention even from those who aren't gamers themselves. People may one day talk about EverQuest the way people to day talk about an old DoD project called ARPANet...
An internal gravitation model would be theorizing far more than is necesarry to account for the data. In cognitive science, there has long been an understanding of encoding specificity. This simply means that data, including skill knowledge, is best retrieved from human memory under the same conditions which it was learned.
An example from the real world is underwater welding. When underwater welders were first being trained, the companies tried to simply train professional welders in all the ways that underwater welding was different from normal welding. But, in diong this, they found that when they were underwater, the welders had serious trouble calling on those skills which supposedly transferred over unchanged. As a result, they had to be entirely retrained in skills they had apparently already learned.
Similarly, if you lose your keys while you're stoned and then can't find them the next day. Psychological evidence shows that your best chance to find them is to get stoned again and then look for them.
Any number of other controlled psychological experiments have been performed to domonstrate this same effect(memorizing words under different lighting conditions, etc.). I don't see why gravitation would be any different.
Does anyone have any more information on the two entertainment robots that Mitsubishi sold to a museum according to the article?
I would be very interesting in seeing how they react in an uncontrolled environment, particularly one with six or seven screaming children trying to get the robots attention.
The demonstrations of this style of robot have been extremely impressive, but i've been waiting to see how they perform in a environment with more visual and aural noise.
Also I found the use of the terminology "bed-shaped robot" rather than "robotic bed" or even "computerized bed" interesting. I know it's FOX, but it seemed kind of science-fictiony.
I don't suppose AOL will make a big deal of it when they do actually change over, eh?
I have to admit that i'm pretty keyed up on the IBM/Linux publicity. It would be pretty cool if AOL with throw a Linux shout-out in a couple of their infernal TV ads.
Slashdot Mirror
...some PHB who can't stop these marks from appearing gets scared of having their files stolen by little geeks with butterfly nets outside the building, but who's too cheap to hire the talent or buy the hardware to secure their wireless network, starts telling his cronies to go out on their lunch break and draw these symbols up everywhere, thus negating their effectiveness.
Sort of a chaff-defence, but i'm pretty sure it would work...
> What are PDA's?
Permanent Devil Attachment
Your understanding of the term is spot on. The trick here is that the camera captures at 640x480, but has a built in scale&dither which will put out 1.3 megapixel resolution. The person who wrote the article properly calls the 1.3 megapixel claim an advertising fib in this case. He suggests using the camera in 640x480 mode and scaling in a photo-editor. i suggest the same. something like photoshop will do a much better job of preserving image quality while scaling than the built in function on a tiny device like this will.
-------QUOTE-------
The fact that people feel the need to mod the game to make it more enjoyable means that Nintendo hasn't done their job.
-------END QUOTE----
In this case, yes. the mod is something that everyone can appreciate. it is something that if it's cost had been integrated at Nintendo rather than having to be produced independently and installed haphazardlly would probably have only added about five dollars to the unit price(i'm talking about the Afterburner here, not the PSOne screen). I can't think of anyone(not a single person) who has seen a gameboy with and without the afterburner that wouldn't have been willing to pony up the extra five for that feature when they bought it.
That hardly applies to all mods though. Ever since the video game generation grew up into hackers and consoles started to appeal to adults, there have been techies that will take any excuse to poke around inside the machines.
If somebody takes the trouble to install a burner and a larger hard-drive in their X-Box, that doesn't mean that microsoft hasn't done their job, even if every other X-Box owner thinks it's pretty cool. The cost and other issues of making that mod standard(or even an official option) would simply outweigh the benefit to the users(and the company).
Even if a system is ever "perfect"(is the exact balance of what most people want and what they're willing to spend), there will be countless geeks who mod it just on principle.
Sega was never planning to market a beowulf cluster of Linux Dreamcasts, nor should they have.
sorry.
the things she said.
my mistake.
---Quote---
Generally however we've found that the cost of open sourcing code for a
proprietary product is non-trivial. I know it seems counter-intuitive
but consider this: the reality is you can't just toss code over the
fence. You have to first scrub it to make sure you have the rights to
release it (your question acknowledges this difficulty). You also have
to provide resources to answer questions and generally support those who
are trying to pick up the code. Typically you have to develop
additional documentation as well. Lastly there's the issue of ongoing
liability. Large companies have deep pockets. When a company releases
a product it at times comes with a warranty which the company is willing
to offer because the risk is offset by revenue. There has to be some
significant value to the licensor to justify the risk. Make no mistake,
whenever a large company converts a product to Open Source it's because
that strategy has in some way been positively tied to the bottom line.
---EndQuote---
I'm a strong supporter of the Open Source movement, but I find Danese's comments here very interesting. The things that he says are unquestionably true and point to a large part of the likely reason why even companies which are firendly towards the Free Software movement are often reluctant to open their code.
Hackers need to remember this. Too many times I have heard people attacking companies for not "putting their money where their mouth is" because they support Open Source in their statements and press releases, but continue to produce closed products. It's good to see such a considered view on why you can't always just "throw code over the fence".
was the command line.
Anyone who hasn't read Neal Stephenson's essay
In the Beginning... Was the Command Line should do so now. He treats this subject in his trademark enjoyable style. This essay can also be purchased as a thin little paperback. I love the car-lot analogy(although it harks back to the glory days of Be).
---QUOTE---
"The attack doesn't happen through the chat client, so as long as you
have MSN Messenger installed, if I send you a special URL, I can own
you," said Marc Maiffret, Eeye's "chief hacking officer."
---ENDQUOTE---
This kind of paraphrasing is a disgrace to journalistic integrity. I present to slahdot an exclusive direct transcription of this statement, before the WashPost mangled it.
"M4RX M4IFFR3T d03Z n0t R007 j00 7hru 14M3 cl3n7 h4x. M4RX M4IFFR3T iz 31337-h4x0r. H3 wiLL *0WNZ* j00 W/ 1337 j00-R-3ll iF j00 hav m3$$3ng3r 0N j0r 14m3 b0x0r 47 4LL!!!!!!!!!11111111," said M4RX M4IFFR3T, Eeye's K1N6Z0r of 31337.
hmmm... i'm think i'm going to write a book. and then, on page 156, I'm going to include my IP address and root password. And then, I'm going to make sure that every copy of the book has it's covers bound together tightly together so that it can not be opened without extreme difficulty. Then I'm going to sell the book for $50 dollars a copy(aw hell, why not make it a hundred). And then, If anyone who buys my book actually tries to open it, I'm just going to have to sue them for every penny they have because, goddammit my root password's in their(didn't they read the EULA that came on the complimentary bookmark?).
how appropriate that the banner ad was for Nerf weapons when I viewed this story...
And not a single mention of Steve Mann.
Understood that his electronics are non-invasive, but still his projects are the cutting edge in human/machine amalgamation.
---direct quote from bill
(c) NONSENSITIVE PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION REQUIRES ROBUST NOTICE AND OPT-OUT CONSENT- An internet service provider, online service provider, or operator of a commercial website may not--
(1) collect personally identifiable information not described in subsection (b) online, or
(2) disclose or otherwise use such information collected online, from a user of that service or website.
---end quote
Salon's article does sem a bit overly critical. This bill is a necessary piece of legislation. Sure some would like to see it even stricter(prohibiting any spyware style market research), but as it is it prohibits companies from collecting sensitive information and also from collecting information which is non-sensitve but could potentially be used to identify you.
The Salon article implies that the bill will allow companies to collect all sorts of non-sensitive personal information and use it to build a complete profile of you, including the stuff that can't be directly collected due to it's sensitivity. This just isn't true.
how am i supposed to serve MP3s off of my nano-computer with all those strobe lights going all the time?
dammit!
Ohhh...
upon actually reading the article(something i sometimes do before i post...) i see that they are considering taking advantage of this for the construction of uber-cool nono-circuits....
so maybe my strobe lights can be PART of my MP3 disco computer... cool. it's a great time to be alive!
''These type of people perceive the risk of getting caught as being nonexistent. It's like a hacker mentality. If there's a way you can hack it, then you should just be entitled to it. It goes with the hacker ethic.''
the "hacker ethic".
hehe... it's been a while since i heard that one.
ah well...
Interesting.
If the parked domains can be hacked and defaced so easily, one has to wonder just how secure the rest of their system is, which is responsible not just for domain name serving, but must handle massive credit card traffic.
Mozilla may have closed their tree, but the Slashdot effect closed Mozilla-Zine's site.
anyone have a mirror?
browser war between Mozilla and Konqueror?
yes, both are excellent browsers, but I was pretty sure that Opera has at least as large of a share as Konqueror on *n*x desktops.
Sure, the free version has ads, but it's still free, and it seems to render sloppily coded IE-compatible/W3C-incompatible pages with more flair than either of the other two. Opera recently released the TP3 of their version 6, and it is excellent.
just a note.
I would of agreed with this until the Sims came around. It seems that if gameplay is challenging/rewarding enough, poeple will be quite happy to play a member of the mob. For many people the escapism/fantasy element is still there(the desire to be Aragorn) but for others, being a productive happy hobbit is escapism enough. Particularly if(as the Entropia people are trying to do) a system gets developed which fully supports gamecash==realcash, rather than just really-cool-game-stuff==cash/fraud-from-EBay. I can imagine a lot of people who might think that spending a lot of time doing challenging and rewarding but unspectacular game tasks and making real world coin for it was as worthwhile as spending a lot of time trying to be a hero and maybe just ending up with a character who dies a lot(with a possible gamecash/realcash cost for resurrection). Of course you would still want a healthy helping of heroes, or else the game might get boring(only might mind you, there are No heroes in the Sims), but still... someone might just be able to pull off a game world which actually supported a heroic framework, adoring mobs and all.
This article is excellent, and I particularly enjoyed the intelligent focus on copyright and intellectual property issues as MMOGs slide towards greater and greater online content. Admittedly, I haven't played an MMOG since the Tradewars days, but the idea still fascinates me. The most thrilling idea surrounding this topic as far as I am concerned however, is that of inter-game compatability. It seems only a short matter of time before, at first multiple games by the same company, but eventually games by competing companies, support the transfer of characters and wealth between game worlds.
From that point I can imagine very easily that the drive towards standards and cross-compatability would result in the creation of a standardized "meta-game" in which characters could interact devoid of any rules or constructions aside from user created content and the "laws of physics" of the virtual world. Some users, of course, would become massive creators of original content in effect turning their corners of the meta-game into games in their own right(whether free or requiring an admission fee). Of course the commercial games would still exist and could be easily entered at any time from the meta-game, but the meta-game itself would provide the perfect level for many types of interactions and for encouraging a seamless gaming experience.
There is only one small step left from there to envision this meta-game expanding to include near-infinite non-game content and eventually replacing what is now WWW-space with an avatar driven virtual world such as that envisioned in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
Of course, everything i have just said is speculation and supposition, but my real point is that what is going on in the world of MMOGs may be something that warrants attention even from those who aren't gamers themselves. People may one day talk about EverQuest the way people to day talk about an old DoD project called ARPANet...
... or does it only tell you the location of other Rinos, not rhinos?
An internal gravitation model would be theorizing far more than is necesarry to account for the data. In cognitive science, there has long been an understanding of encoding specificity. This simply means that data, including skill knowledge, is best retrieved from human memory under the same conditions which it was learned.
An example from the real world is underwater welding. When underwater welders were first being trained, the companies tried to simply train professional welders in all the ways that underwater welding was different from normal welding. But, in diong this, they found that when they were underwater, the welders had serious trouble calling on those skills which supposedly transferred over unchanged. As a result, they had to be entirely retrained in skills they had apparently already learned.
Similarly, if you lose your keys while you're stoned and then can't find them the next day. Psychological evidence shows that your best chance to find them is to get stoned again and then look for them.
Any number of other controlled psychological experiments have been performed to domonstrate this same effect(memorizing words under different lighting conditions, etc.). I don't see why gravitation would be any different.
any word on whether the fifth gen services will work with an etch-a-sketch, a tin can and a piece of rope?
Does anyone have any more information on the two entertainment robots that Mitsubishi sold to a museum according to the article?
I would be very interesting in seeing how they react in an uncontrolled environment, particularly one with six or seven screaming children trying to get the robots attention.
The demonstrations of this style of robot have been extremely impressive, but i've been waiting to see how they perform in a environment with more visual and aural noise.
Also I found the use of the terminology "bed-shaped robot" rather than "robotic bed" or even "computerized bed" interesting. I know it's FOX, but it seemed kind of science-fictiony.
I don't suppose AOL will make a big deal of it when they do actually change over, eh?
I have to admit that i'm pretty keyed up on the IBM/Linux publicity. It would be pretty cool if AOL with throw a Linux shout-out in a couple of their infernal TV ads.
Oh! I just discovered that a NES emulator that can live on a GBA flash card already exists, the link is here.
But my challenge still stands regarding the SNES emulator.