Both for it's DVD features, and for it's quality games being produced for it.
One thing to keep in mind is that the DVD player on the PS2 could use some work. I haven't run into compatibility problems, but the user interface is painful. You either need one of the add-on DVD remotes or lots of patience. So I'd be tempted to consider the DVD-playing capabilites a bonus, rather than a selling point. If a significant part of your buying decision revolves around the DVD playback, I'd recommend at least trying it at a friend's house or in the store, first.
That being said, I do use my PS2 as my only DVD player, and it does fulfill my needs. But it's quirky enough that I strongly suggest that you check out what you're getting first. (Which may not be an issue in your case, as you also mentioned the games as a reason you're buying it.)
Er, 99.99999% of the sources are zombies. Dumbass.
Oh nos! You've called me a dumbass. My penis will now shrink, and I'll forever be a hollow shell of a man.
And assuming I'm understanding you correctly, by zombies you're referring to just an arbitrary exploited machine, running the DDoS on behalf of a third party. I was aware of this fact when I posted my comment. I certainly was under no misapprehension that a given DDoS machine was being run by the person who created the worm.
But that doesn't change the fact that, under the conditions I stated, the person on the receiving end of the attack could hypothetically reexploit each machine to (if they're nice) disable the worm or (if they're mean) wipe the system altogether. Besides, the owners of the machines in question share some culpability in their failure to properly administer and secure their systems.
There are tons of N's (can you say buffer overflow?)
If the DDoS doesn't bother spoofing the source address (and I didn't see anything to indicate that it did) and if it doesn't bother closing the hole, I find it interesting that the target of the attack could hypothetically "hack back".
(20 hits for default.ida in the logs at one job, 26 at the other. I (heart) Apache.)
New features are still being added, but they are few and far in between. Eg old warhorse like tar now has support for.bz2 files (tar -zI).
Since the support is external (stuff is just piped through the bzip2 command), one could argue that tar could've been properly designed from the start to handle an arbitrary compression program (just as 'tin' works with arbitrary text editors and 'rsync' works with an arbitrary rsh-like program [though in the rsync case, I'm not sure when that was added -- but should ssh ever get supplanted by a new rsh-like program, rsync's already ready to support it]).
Furthermore, one could argue that the existence of both 'compress' and 'gzip' should've clued the tar developers in on the idea of supporting arbitrary compression programs.
However, I don't think the people who make tar particularly dropped the ball or anything. It's just that the software could've been made flexible enough before-hand.
Most of those sites are flashy, ugly and slow loading. The notable exceptions are, as michael says, the ones that don't exist any more.
Let's not forget the other notable exception. Their "best practices" winner is (deservedly so, IMO) Google. Among other things, the front page of Google is only 1918 bytes (lynx -dump -source http://google.com/ | wc --bytes), contains a single 305x118 GIF (with the appropriate height and width tags so that the page renders even before its started loading), and advanced search features are immediately on-hand when necessary but not required to get meaningful results.
If someone takes your stereo, you are deprived of a stereo and must spend money to get a new one. If someone copies your prize essay, you still have your essay. You do not need to rewrite it. The only thing is you have lost a potenital revenue stream.
In the end, it all boils down to money. If you steal a $10 book from me, that's $10 out of my pocket. If you pirate some software with a $10 profit, that's $10 out of my pocket. Just because it's free to duplicate IP doesn't mean there's no cost associated with producing it. The producer is entitled to attempt to recover that cost, plus a profit. Without IP protection, he has to get all that money from his very first customer, creating a system that would discourage many commercially-funded creative pursuits.
I suggest you re-read the last paragraph of the post you replied to. You both said the same thing. He said it isn't justice to arrest someone for saying, "You can use a bulldozer to break into a house," just as you said "It isn't a crime to point out that the emperor has no clothes."
As I understand it, his breaking-and-entering analogy was directly related to actively breaking encryption (such as decrypting DVDs and then posting the results on the web), rather than Skylarov's talk.
I don't know about actual spying, but KaZaA comes bundled with a SmartTag-like advertising system called "Hot Text". Random keywords get linked to other sites that have (presumably) paid KaZaA money for the privilege. For example, I went to google and the 'jobs' part of 'Cool jobs' had an extra marking on it. Clicking on it give me a small pop-up menu that asked if I wanted to go to either the original hyperlink location or to the hot text link. Selecting the hot text link took me to one of those "find a job"-type sites (Hotjobs, I think. But it was awhile ago.).
Maybe five people have ever used Netscape or MSN search on purpose, but those are things one accidentally uses by clicking the wrong button in her browser.
Not everyone's a computer geek. If you take J. Random User who barely knows how to surf the web, and there's a handy, dandy button at the top that says, "SEARCH", I'd be willing to bet that that's what's going to get clicked when it's search time. He's not necessarily going to even know about something like Google.
Also, Lycos has been running television ads, which will presumably get them more users who are less technically savvy. These are exactly the people who do need the protection -- in a perfect world everyone would know everything, in reality we've all get areas where our expertise is lacking.
The article is about a court decision. All the examples of abuse cited in this thread are arguments for having the courts judge cops by the same standards as you and me.
In some cases, the courts place a cop in a better category than average citizens, as well. For example, if I were to engage in the same activities as a police officer (stopping random people on the road, handcuffing them with threat of physical force as a backup, and then transporting them to a detainment facility), I'd be put in jail for a long, long, long time.
Cops are given additional powers with which to execute their jobs. As such, I don't think it's unreasonable for those powers to be balanced by public scrutiny, especially given the potential for abuse.
I have no objection to a cop being treated, while doing his job, exactly the same as I would while doing mine. However, in exchange, he should give up his ability to arrest people, use his lights and siren, and so forth.
And besides, even if Napster did increase CD sales, what relevance does that have ? It's the copyright holders' right to enforce their copyright however they choose.
Personally, I agree with you. However, legally, I seems like it could theoretically help protect Napster. A ways back, Slashdot had a really nice, detailed legal article discussing contributory and vicarious liability (I believe those were the terms) and how they related to the P2P situation. I may be misremembering, but "showing harm" may have been on the laundry list of criteria necessary for the appropriate liability to be invoked. If that's the case, then it is something that could help Napster's legal standing. Of course there's still the issue of proving that it helps CD sales.
the incredible variety of issues that came out with release has allowed them to pinpoint errors that would have taken months of beta testing, even open beta testing, to uncover.
What I've heard from beta-testers seems to indicate numerous bugs that were discovered during the beta were left unfixed for the product launch.
While it does disturb me that Funcom is requesting people hold off on reviewing it, I seem to recall a comment made in earlier Slashdot game review article where, due to time pressure, reviewers are often forced to review (and work around) the bugs in a late beta version, rather than having the luxury of the finished product. If that's the case, then I can't see reviewers actually holding off on a review until some indefinite point that could be months after the product has already been in stores.
Out of curiousity, is anyone aware of any reviewers who've actually said they're going to wait to review it?
Granted, the company is not currently charging the monthly fee until the game is complete
As was mentioned in the second SA review (I believe it was there -- I read the review back when it was originally posted to SA), Funcom has started the meter, so to speak. Around July 9th or so, everyone's regular free month (as opposed to the indefinite "We're not charging until bugs are fixed" period) has started.
While MySQL is relatively distinctive, there are a number of cases where the mass-registration serves to make the entire domain system more of a mess. For example, the trademarked named for the company where I work happens to also be a not uncommon surname. I don't think there would be any object or confusion if someone with that surname were to register the corresponding.org and use it as their family vanity domain. If, on the other hand, one of our competitors were to register it and point it at their own site, it'd be an entirely different matter -- they'd be attempting to actively exploit confusion with our name in order to make a profit.
Similarly, I got screwed out of a vanity domain that I wanted. I had decided SSMH (for Syrian State Mental Hospital, something mentioned once in the H2G2 series) would make a nice, short, memorable domain. Unfortunately, the South Shore Mental Health Center wasn't content with just ssmhc.org. Instead, they felt compelled to grab ssmh.com, ssmh.net, and ssmh.org, as well. I suppose I could've always gone with a registration in one of the ccTLDs, but the.us domain (which corresponds to where I live) is a mess, and I refuse to help subsidize countries that've decided to whore out their domain space. Given a choice, I would vote to declare war on the Cocos Islands.
With the worst beginnings of a regular slashdot post, or something.
Let's not forget such cult favorites as: "I know I'll get moderated down for this, but..." and: "CmdrTaco misspelled words in the story all three times that he posted it."
What hash are they using? If this is a cryptographically strong one-way hash, then there's no way for them to figure out what has changed, by analyzing the hash value.
It's in the paper. Each individual field gets hashed down to an (IIRC) 8-bit value. So even though they can't reverse the hash to get the hardware string, they do know that your CDROM identifier went from 0x55 to 0x7A. If four such fields change, it's reactivation time.
If we agree that traffic laws should be enforced, shouldn't it be done in the most efficient way possible?
However, a founding principle of our country is that sometimes personal liberty and rights take precedence over enforcement of the law. Some otherwise open-and-shut criminal convictions for much more serious offenses have been overturned as part of a system that attempts (and sometimes fails) to maximize the protection of both the accused and the victims.
In the article, it refers to the anonymizing the cell phone that the data came from as a means of ensuring privacy. While that make work for something like television viewership (the fact that 500 people in my area watched "Barney" isn't going to reveal my secret purple dinosaur fetish), it doesn't necessarily work for traffic. Imagine the following anonymized traffic data:
Data for I-95, mile marker 88: Average speed -- 70 mph Lowest speed -- 46 mph Highest speed -- 98 mph
So, even though it's anonymized, it's more than sufficient for a police officer to go out and clock someone speeding. Even though the speed data isn't used to directly issue the ticket (unlike a certain car rental company), it still provides critical information that leads to the ticket being issued. So it still could be used as a sort of defacto Big Brother system.
Your full time job involves posting 20 stories per day and you're telling me you're too busy to verify them?
Let's not forget the time they spend doing important stuff, like deciding whether or not CowboyNeal should be an answer in the latest poll.
Seriously, I seem to recall CmdrTaco mentioning that he spends something like half of each day just responding to all the email he gets. While he probably gets the most, being the most prominent figure on the site, it does seem that there's more to being a Slashdot editor than just posting front-page stories. There's also the stories on the other pages, the numerous rejected submissions (how many times have we seen a story posted with the comment that it's being posted primarily to stop the flood of submissions?), finding people for interviews, and deciding when and which stories to run (which requires coordination between different people, resulting in some overhead). Short of a "day in the life of a Slashdot editor" series, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with what else they do, but I don't think they sit around at the office all day getting drunk. Then again, maybe they do, and they've discovered a really sweet gig where they put in a minimal amount of effort and get paid for it.
But overall, I'm not denying that they had a hand in the matter. It's kind of like when you see a troll post moderated up to +5. It's the fault of both the poster and the moderators. But under these circumstances, I've never seen anyone complain about the submitters' incompetence.
Do the editors even look at the articles to make sure that they pertain to what they person was talking about?
Let's not forget the submitter's culpability in all this. Slashdot editors have a multitude of stories to deal with. This submitter had only one submission to worry about, but managed to still completely fuck it up. The only thing I can think of is that the submitter was desperately watching news sites for Slashdot-themed news, and didn't want to miss out on the chance of being first submitter by wasting the time necessary to actually read the article.
LAZINESS: Unless there's something really, really, REALLY good on a site, it's not worth the hassle of getting up, finding my wallet, getting out the credit card, going through the charge form, and so on. One could theoretically cook up a quick-and-easy micropayment system (on the order of 1 or 2 clicks and no typing easy), but then you're running into security concerns.
PERMANENCE: If I'm working over cash for content, especially for "free" content where I'm just paying bandwidth charges, I'd prefer an easy way to save a copy of the content locally. (This may or may not be the same as what you meant by 'ACCESS' in your list.)
Slashdot Mirror
One thing to keep in mind is that the DVD player on the PS2 could use some work. I haven't run into compatibility problems, but the user interface is painful. You either need one of the add-on DVD remotes or lots of patience. So I'd be tempted to consider the DVD-playing capabilites a bonus, rather than a selling point. If a significant part of your buying decision revolves around the DVD playback, I'd recommend at least trying it at a friend's house or in the store, first.
That being said, I do use my PS2 as my only DVD player, and it does fulfill my needs. But it's quirky enough that I strongly suggest that you check out what you're getting first. (Which may not be an issue in your case, as you also mentioned the games as a reason you're buying it.)
Oh nos! You've called me a dumbass. My penis will now shrink, and I'll forever be a hollow shell of a man.
And assuming I'm understanding you correctly, by zombies you're referring to just an arbitrary exploited machine, running the DDoS on behalf of a third party. I was aware of this fact when I posted my comment. I certainly was under no misapprehension that a given DDoS machine was being run by the person who created the worm.
But that doesn't change the fact that, under the conditions I stated, the person on the receiving end of the attack could hypothetically reexploit each machine to (if they're nice) disable the worm or (if they're mean) wipe the system altogether. Besides, the owners of the machines in question share some culpability in their failure to properly administer and secure their systems.
It's been done.
(It's a link to information on RTM's worm, for those who don't feel like clicking the link.)
If the DDoS doesn't bother spoofing the source address (and I didn't see anything to indicate that it did) and if it doesn't bother closing the hole, I find it interesting that the target of the attack could hypothetically "hack back".
(20 hits for default.ida in the logs at one job, 26 at the other. I (heart) Apache.)
nVidia, for one.
Besides, what mainstream advertisers would want their names associated with South Park, Howard Stern, or The Man Show?
Since the support is external (stuff is just piped through the bzip2 command), one could argue that tar could've been properly designed from the start to handle an arbitrary compression program (just as 'tin' works with arbitrary text editors and 'rsync' works with an arbitrary rsh-like program [though in the rsync case, I'm not sure when that was added -- but should ssh ever get supplanted by a new rsh-like program, rsync's already ready to support it]).
Furthermore, one could argue that the existence of both 'compress' and 'gzip' should've clued the tar developers in on the idea of supporting arbitrary compression programs.
However, I don't think the people who make tar particularly dropped the ball or anything. It's just that the software could've been made flexible enough before-hand.
Let's not forget the other notable exception. Their "best practices" winner is (deservedly so, IMO) Google. Among other things, the front page of Google is only 1918 bytes (lynx -dump -source http://google.com/ | wc --bytes), contains a single 305x118 GIF (with the appropriate height and width tags so that the page renders even before its started loading), and advanced search features are immediately on-hand when necessary but not required to get meaningful results.
In the end, it all boils down to money. If you steal a $10 book from me, that's $10 out of my pocket. If you pirate some software with a $10 profit, that's $10 out of my pocket. Just because it's free to duplicate IP doesn't mean there's no cost associated with producing it. The producer is entitled to attempt to recover that cost, plus a profit. Without IP protection, he has to get all that money from his very first customer, creating a system that would discourage many commercially-funded creative pursuits.
I suggest you re-read the last paragraph of the post you replied to. You both said the same thing. He said it isn't justice to arrest someone for saying, "You can use a bulldozer to break into a house," just as you said "It isn't a crime to point out that the emperor has no clothes."
As I understand it, his breaking-and-entering analogy was directly related to actively breaking encryption (such as decrypting DVDs and then posting the results on the web), rather than Skylarov's talk.
I don't know about actual spying, but KaZaA comes bundled with a SmartTag-like advertising system called "Hot Text". Random keywords get linked to other sites that have (presumably) paid KaZaA money for the privilege. For example, I went to google and the 'jobs' part of 'Cool jobs' had an extra marking on it. Clicking on it give me a small pop-up menu that asked if I wanted to go to either the original hyperlink location or to the hot text link. Selecting the hot text link took me to one of those "find a job"-type sites (Hotjobs, I think. But it was awhile ago.).
(third paragraph) "persuit" should be spelled "pursuit"
(last sentence) "yout" should be "your"
Not everyone's a computer geek. If you take J. Random User who barely knows how to surf the web, and there's a handy, dandy button at the top that says, "SEARCH", I'd be willing to bet that that's what's going to get clicked when it's search time. He's not necessarily going to even know about something like Google.
Also, Lycos has been running television ads, which will presumably get them more users who are less technically savvy. These are exactly the people who do need the protection -- in a perfect world everyone would know everything, in reality we've all get areas where our expertise is lacking.
In some cases, the courts place a cop in a better category than average citizens, as well. For example, if I were to engage in the same activities as a police officer (stopping random people on the road, handcuffing them with threat of physical force as a backup, and then transporting them to a detainment facility), I'd be put in jail for a long, long, long time.
Cops are given additional powers with which to execute their jobs. As such, I don't think it's unreasonable for those powers to be balanced by public scrutiny, especially given the potential for abuse.
I have no objection to a cop being treated, while doing his job, exactly the same as I would while doing mine. However, in exchange, he should give up his ability to arrest people, use his lights and siren, and so forth.
Personally, I agree with you. However, legally, I seems like it could theoretically help protect Napster. A ways back, Slashdot had a really nice, detailed legal article discussing contributory and vicarious liability (I believe those were the terms) and how they related to the P2P situation. I may be misremembering, but "showing harm" may have been on the laundry list of criteria necessary for the appropriate liability to be invoked. If that's the case, then it is something that could help Napster's legal standing. Of course there's still the issue of proving that it helps CD sales.
What I've heard from beta-testers seems to indicate numerous bugs that were discovered during the beta were left unfixed for the product launch.
Out of curiousity, is anyone aware of any reviewers who've actually said they're going to wait to review it?
As was mentioned in the second SA review (I believe it was there -- I read the review back when it was originally posted to SA), Funcom has started the meter, so to speak. Around July 9th or so, everyone's regular free month (as opposed to the indefinite "We're not charging until bugs are fixed" period) has started.
While MySQL is relatively distinctive, there are a number of cases where the mass-registration serves to make the entire domain system more of a mess. For example, the trademarked named for the company where I work happens to also be a not uncommon surname. I don't think there would be any object or confusion if someone with that surname were to register the corresponding .org and use it as their family vanity domain. If, on the other hand, one of our competitors were to register it and point it at their own site, it'd be an entirely different matter -- they'd be attempting to actively exploit confusion with our name in order to make a profit.
Similarly, I got screwed out of a vanity domain that I wanted. I had decided SSMH (for Syrian State Mental Hospital, something mentioned once in the H2G2 series) would make a nice, short, memorable domain. Unfortunately, the South Shore Mental Health Center wasn't content with just ssmhc.org. Instead, they felt compelled to grab ssmh.com, ssmh.net, and ssmh.org, as well. I suppose I could've always gone with a registration in one of the ccTLDs, but the .us domain (which corresponds to where I live) is a mess, and I refuse to help subsidize countries that've decided to whore out their domain space. Given a choice, I would vote to declare war on the Cocos Islands.
Let's not forget such cult favorites as:
"I know I'll get moderated down for this, but..."
and:
"CmdrTaco misspelled words in the story all three times that he posted it."
It's in the paper. Each individual field gets hashed down to an (IIRC) 8-bit value. So even though they can't reverse the hash to get the hardware string, they do know that your CDROM identifier went from 0x55 to 0x7A. If four such fields change, it's reactivation time.
However, a founding principle of our country is that sometimes personal liberty and rights take precedence over enforcement of the law. Some otherwise open-and-shut criminal convictions for much more serious offenses have been overturned as part of a system that attempts (and sometimes fails) to maximize the protection of both the accused and the victims.
Data for I-95, mile marker 88:
Average speed -- 70 mph
Lowest speed -- 46 mph
Highest speed -- 98 mph
So, even though it's anonymized, it's more than sufficient for a police officer to go out and clock someone speeding. Even though the speed data isn't used to directly issue the ticket (unlike a certain car rental company), it still provides critical information that leads to the ticket being issued. So it still could be used as a sort of defacto Big Brother system.
Let's not forget the time they spend doing important stuff, like deciding whether or not CowboyNeal should be an answer in the latest poll.
Seriously, I seem to recall CmdrTaco mentioning that he spends something like half of each day just responding to all the email he gets. While he probably gets the most, being the most prominent figure on the site, it does seem that there's more to being a Slashdot editor than just posting front-page stories. There's also the stories on the other pages, the numerous rejected submissions (how many times have we seen a story posted with the comment that it's being posted primarily to stop the flood of submissions?), finding people for interviews, and deciding when and which stories to run (which requires coordination between different people, resulting in some overhead). Short of a "day in the life of a Slashdot editor" series, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with what else they do, but I don't think they sit around at the office all day getting drunk. Then again, maybe they do, and they've discovered a really sweet gig where they put in a minimal amount of effort and get paid for it.
But overall, I'm not denying that they had a hand in the matter. It's kind of like when you see a troll post moderated up to +5. It's the fault of both the poster and the moderators. But under these circumstances, I've never seen anyone complain about the submitters' incompetence.
Let's not forget the submitter's culpability in all this. Slashdot editors have a multitude of stories to deal with. This submitter had only one submission to worry about, but managed to still completely fuck it up. The only thing I can think of is that the submitter was desperately watching news sites for Slashdot-themed news, and didn't want to miss out on the chance of being first submitter by wasting the time necessary to actually read the article.
LAZINESS: Unless there's something really, really, REALLY good on a site, it's not worth the hassle of getting up, finding my wallet, getting out the credit card, going through the charge form, and so on. One could theoretically cook up a quick-and-easy micropayment system (on the order of 1 or 2 clicks and no typing easy), but then you're running into security concerns.
PERMANENCE: If I'm working over cash for content, especially for "free" content where I'm just paying bandwidth charges, I'd prefer an easy way to save a copy of the content locally. (This may or may not be the same as what you meant by 'ACCESS' in your list.)