However, it isn't clear how much this matters. This isn't CSS, where the system was set in stone, millions of un-patchable, non-internet-connected hardware units were already in the wild, and team DRM pretty much just had to suck it up. Those were the good old days.
Sony controls the Playstation Network, and can enforce minimum software versions for access, or punitively lock out units. Even for offline users, individual game disks can mandate, and include, upgrades to a higher version. Sony has, certainly, lost the game against anyone content to just pick up an old PS3 fat on ebay and enjoy a pirated copy of every PS3 game to date, all for ~$200. You'll have to stay offline, and avoid games with mandatory upgrades; but not a bad deal on the whole, I can certainly see a fair few takers.
Agreed. Unless we can get a free and open parallel Playstation Network for hacked consoles to make use of, it'll continue to be a arms race and Sony will ultimately have the upper hand due to owning and controlling the network. And it's a much taller order, both legally and technically, to provide such a network. And likely prohibitively expensive even if there weren't legal obstacles.
What is the origin of the law of gravity? This is a fine question to ask. A very fine question. An important question, which calls for a real answer.
If we are unable to come up with an answer, we should not simply make one up.
Saying "God created gravity" doesn't answer:
How God created gravity
How did God originate, or why God should be exempt from needing origination
How can we test the answer to the above questions?
How can the information provided by the answers to the above questions be applied?
Saying God did it is a cop-out answer. It explains nothing. It quiets the mind of a small child, and turns off his power to imagine and to inquire. It provides a hook through which those in power may attach levers in order control him to do irrational things with no justification.
This is a fine question. A very important one to try to know.
The thing is, if we can't know, then we should not simply make up an answer just so we can be satisfied with ourselves. We must demand a real answer.
If God be the answer, then what created God? How did God create gravity? And so on. Can we test these answers? Can we show how they might be proven false? Can we use the information provided by the answers for practical applications?
Saying that God did it is a cop out that doesn't really explain anything. It shuts a small child up, and quiets his curiosity, and gives those in power a lever to control him with. To my way of thinking, that is an inexcusable evil.
So basically, he's suing for 3 million dollars over 5 years because he's addicted to a video game?
If he won, that would make him the first person to make $600,000 a year playing video games.
At 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, that averages out to $288.46 cents an hour for playing Lineage 2.
Be fair, I'm sure he put in way over the mandatory work week. For ease of math, we'll assume that due to his addiction he worked closer to 120 hours/week. At that rate, he would only have been making a paltry $96.15/hr, which without a healthcare plan probably just barely covers his addiction treatment. And you have to consider what rank he must have earned in game for all that work, too. He's probably the equivalent of a President or CEO in his game; $600,000 a year isn't very much when you compare to how much CEO's make in the real world.
Clearly this is unjust, and he needs to be compensated.
Award the judgement to be paid to him in in-game money.
Maybe they do fix these 7000-9000/day attacks. Maybe there are yet more attacks that the developers are smart enough not to tip off MS about, and those are the ones that they are not patching.
I'm not saying this is the case, but it's a possibility.
HAL isn't a good example of hard sci fi. Nor is the monolith for that matter. HAL was conceivable, not proven, but seemed plausible given what we knew at the time. You're right, though, Clarke and Kubrick didn't bother explaining in detail how HAl's AI was possible. The monolith was truly beyond comprehension, and is pure fantasy.
The depiction of weightlessness and motion in space, the silence in vacuum, and other aspects of 2001 are good examples of hard sci fi. Those were done to be as scientifically accurate as could be given our excellent understanding of newtonian physics.
In conclusion, I guess a story doesn't have to be all or nothing.
The way I've always liked to see it put is that hard SF is an attempt to write plausible fiction that uses scientific knowledge that is as accurate as it can be at the time of writing to extrapolate into the future of what could be.
Fantasy doesn't let plausibility get in the way of telling a good story, and doesn't worry about explaining how stuff works, or worry about whether it even could.
If you want to have control over your production code, you need to have assurance that it is not changing in an uncontrolled fashion. Allowing developers to have access to production locations makes it all too easy for this to happen. Read-only access allows developers to see the running code and perform file comparisons which can be useful in troubleshooting. They should never need more than this.
And in some cases, even read access can be risky -- I've seen production web sites with resources linking back to development server URIs. It's a good idea to firewall your production servers in such a way that it is not possible for them to reach resources on development servers. This shouldn't prevent developers from being able to read the files on the production server, though.
I like Indy games because I perceive that they find it easier to take more risks with design and concept. Rather than release "Sports Again 2011" and "3D FPS WarSim: The Reiteration", they can release games that offer some novelty.
Not all their ideas work, not all of their ideas are well executed. But there's a zillion of them, so there's bound to be a lot of bad releases.
But also, guess what: there's a lot of bad releases among big studios, too:
Half-baked games released to target a price point and a deadline, rather than be good games
giant sprawling titles that I'll never have time for
boring rehashes of the same old thing
Incremental genre iteration with more polygons and sprites for more realistic models that don't directly correlate to more fun
sequels with bells and whistles tacked on to what was once fresh and exciting gameplay, and the bells and whistles don't enhance or add to the experience.
Truly great games are rare from both major studios and indy developers.
But the odds that an indy developer is going to release a small, fun game that offers something new and doesn't cost $50+ seems higher than the odds that a large studio would. I enjoy games from both sources. But I honestly get more excitement from seeing what indy developers come up with.
At the end of the day, I'm driving home and hear on the radio that Assange is no longer a suspect and that the case has been dropped. I find this even more incredible than the initial news. To be exhonerated in less than 24 hours is incredibly dramatic. I couldn't believe what I was hearing once again.
There's pretty much only one way to read into these events. There must have been a conspiracy to destroy Wikileaks through the character assassination of Assange. There can be only one suspect for who was behind it: the U.S. government.
If there were anyone left in the world who could reasonably doubt that the U.S. government wasn't corrupt, didn't play dirty, didn't abuse its power, didn't lie as it suited them, and wasn't what Orwell warned us about in 1984 and Animal Farm, if they were within the reach of the mainstream media yesterday, that should have been their wake-up call.
Amazingly, they fucked up so badly that they couldn't get things to stick for even a day. How did that happen?
There will be enough links that you'll still be traceable back to your old identity... facial recognition, social security number, address history, and so on.
I don't really think so, but perhaps he was referring to the tendency of Facebook to disregard boundaries with regard to sensitive information. That would make some sense...
I think more likely he's talking about their corporate culture -- lack of hierarchy, just getting things done, not needing or asking for authorization before you do something cool that you thought of 5 minutes ago, that kind of thing.
Disagree; Graham has some useful insights if you bother to RTFA.
There's no insights or understanding in saying "Google happened". Understanding what was going on inside Yahoo! and Google at this time does provide useful insights.
My only fault for Graham's analysis of Yahoo!'s downfall is he fails to mention how poorly Yahoo treated end users of their services, and the end users of services that were acquired by Yahoo! I think this figures into it as well.
It's not just that Yahoo! had poor strategy and didn't hire the best programmers and were blinded by their business model at the time; Yahoo! also treated its users like cattle, screwed them repeatedly by changing not only ToS, but default profile preferences. They bought many really promising, cool web services and ruined them this way.
No. If you could put $1200 in quarters into Street Fighter II, and your opponent drops you and you lose all $1200 on one play, that's what it's like. That sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
However, it isn't clear how much this matters. This isn't CSS, where the system was set in stone, millions of un-patchable, non-internet-connected hardware units were already in the wild, and team DRM pretty much just had to suck it up. Those were the good old days.
Sony controls the Playstation Network, and can enforce minimum software versions for access, or punitively lock out units. Even for offline users, individual game disks can mandate, and include, upgrades to a higher version. Sony has, certainly, lost the game against anyone content to just pick up an old PS3 fat on ebay and enjoy a pirated copy of every PS3 game to date, all for ~$200. You'll have to stay offline, and avoid games with mandatory upgrades; but not a bad deal on the whole, I can certainly see a fair few takers.
Agreed. Unless we can get a free and open parallel Playstation Network for hacked consoles to make use of, it'll continue to be a arms race and Sony will ultimately have the upper hand due to owning and controlling the network. And it's a much taller order, both legally and technically, to provide such a network. And likely prohibitively expensive even if there weren't legal obstacles.
In the real world, I think the politicians belief is: if we make something illegal, we can make a lot of money off of it.
The .gif image of a shield SAID SO!
Kindof like they did with Mac OS X. They should have no problem doing this with iTunes.
Seems more like discretion to me.
Disagree. Clearly, they've been tali-banned.
It had better not need to be capped. All these wells are supposed to have functional blow-out preventers.
What is the origin of the law of gravity? This is a fine question to ask. A very fine question. An important question, which calls for a real answer.
If we are unable to come up with an answer, we should not simply make one up.
Saying "God created gravity" doesn't answer:
Saying God did it is a cop-out answer. It explains nothing. It quiets the mind of a small child, and turns off his power to imagine and to inquire. It provides a hook through which those in power may attach levers in order control him to do irrational things with no justification.
It is, therefore, an inexcusable evil.
This is a fine question. A very important one to try to know.
The thing is, if we can't know, then we should not simply make up an answer just so we can be satisfied with ourselves. We must demand a real answer.
If God be the answer, then what created God? How did God create gravity? And so on. Can we test these answers? Can we show how they might be proven false? Can we use the information provided by the answers for practical applications?
Saying that God did it is a cop out that doesn't really explain anything. It shuts a small child up, and quiets his curiosity, and gives those in power a lever to control him with. To my way of thinking, that is an inexcusable evil.
So basically, he's suing for 3 million dollars over 5 years because he's addicted to a video game?
If he won, that would make him the first person to make $600,000 a year playing video games.
At 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, that averages out to $288.46 cents an hour for playing Lineage 2.
Be fair, I'm sure he put in way over the mandatory work week. For ease of math, we'll assume that due to his addiction he worked closer to 120 hours/week. At that rate, he would only have been making a paltry $96.15/hr, which without a healthcare plan probably just barely covers his addiction treatment. And you have to consider what rank he must have earned in game for all that work, too. He's probably the equivalent of a President or CEO in his game; $600,000 a year isn't very much when you compare to how much CEO's make in the real world.
Clearly this is unjust, and he needs to be compensated.
Award the judgement to be paid to him in in-game money.
There should be absolutely no confusion about this, since iFconfig and ifconfig are clearly not the same. Any unix user knows this!
Maybe they do fix these 7000-9000/day attacks. Maybe there are yet more attacks that the developers are smart enough not to tip off MS about, and those are the ones that they are not patching.
I'm not saying this is the case, but it's a possibility.
HAL isn't a good example of hard sci fi. Nor is the monolith for that matter. HAL was conceivable, not proven, but seemed plausible given what we knew at the time. You're right, though, Clarke and Kubrick didn't bother explaining in detail how HAl's AI was possible. The monolith was truly beyond comprehension, and is pure fantasy.
The depiction of weightlessness and motion in space, the silence in vacuum, and other aspects of 2001 are good examples of hard sci fi. Those were done to be as scientifically accurate as could be given our excellent understanding of newtonian physics.
In conclusion, I guess a story doesn't have to be all or nothing.
The way I've always liked to see it put is that hard SF is an attempt to write plausible fiction that uses scientific knowledge that is as accurate as it can be at the time of writing to extrapolate into the future of what could be.
Fantasy doesn't let plausibility get in the way of telling a good story, and doesn't worry about explaining how stuff works, or worry about whether it even could.
I thought Apple employees stopped doing coke in the 80's... now they're doing it in Starbucks?
If you want to have control over your production code, you need to have assurance that it is not changing in an uncontrolled fashion. Allowing developers to have access to production locations makes it all too easy for this to happen. Read-only access allows developers to see the running code and perform file comparisons which can be useful in troubleshooting. They should never need more than this.
And in some cases, even read access can be risky -- I've seen production web sites with resources linking back to development server URIs. It's a good idea to firewall your production servers in such a way that it is not possible for them to reach resources on development servers. This shouldn't prevent developers from being able to read the files on the production server, though.
I like Indy games because I perceive that they find it easier to take more risks with design and concept. Rather than release "Sports Again 2011" and "3D FPS WarSim: The Reiteration", they can release games that offer some novelty.
Not all their ideas work, not all of their ideas are well executed. But there's a zillion of them, so there's bound to be a lot of bad releases.
But also, guess what: there's a lot of bad releases among big studios, too:
Truly great games are rare from both major studios and indy developers.
But the odds that an indy developer is going to release a small, fun game that offers something new and doesn't cost $50+ seems higher than the odds that a large studio would. I enjoy games from both sources. But I honestly get more excitement from seeing what indy developers come up with.
At the end of the day, I'm driving home and hear on the radio that Assange is no longer a suspect and that the case has been dropped. I find this even more incredible than the initial news. To be exhonerated in less than 24 hours is incredibly dramatic. I couldn't believe what I was hearing once again.
There's pretty much only one way to read into these events. There must have been a conspiracy to destroy Wikileaks through the character assassination of Assange. There can be only one suspect for who was behind it: the U.S. government.
If there were anyone left in the world who could reasonably doubt that the U.S. government wasn't corrupt, didn't play dirty, didn't abuse its power, didn't lie as it suited them, and wasn't what Orwell warned us about in 1984 and Animal Farm, if they were within the reach of the mainstream media yesterday, that should have been their wake-up call.
Amazingly, they fucked up so badly that they couldn't get things to stick for even a day. How did that happen?
You gotta do it, or they'll still be able to figure out who you are based on the prints. Don't skimp, remove the whole finger.
There will be enough links that you'll still be traceable back to your old identity... facial recognition, social security number, address history, and so on.
No, it's still stupid, because thieves with any brains will steal data while they can, and well before they get fired.
This sounds like an episode out of the GI Joe cartoon series.
I don't really think so, but perhaps he was referring to the tendency of Facebook to disregard boundaries with regard to sensitive information. That would make some sense...
I think more likely he's talking about their corporate culture -- lack of hierarchy, just getting things done, not needing or asking for authorization before you do something cool that you thought of 5 minutes ago, that kind of thing.
Disagree; Graham has some useful insights if you bother to RTFA.
There's no insights or understanding in saying "Google happened". Understanding what was going on inside Yahoo! and Google at this time does provide useful insights.
My only fault for Graham's analysis of Yahoo!'s downfall is he fails to mention how poorly Yahoo treated end users of their services, and the end users of services that were acquired by Yahoo! I think this figures into it as well.
It's not just that Yahoo! had poor strategy and didn't hire the best programmers and were blinded by their business model at the time; Yahoo! also treated its users like cattle, screwed them repeatedly by changing not only ToS, but default profile preferences. They bought many really promising, cool web services and ruined them this way.
Awesome, I'm doing even better than the average iPhone user. I love my Symbian:)
No. If you could put $1200 in quarters into Street Fighter II, and your opponent drops you and you lose all $1200 on one play, that's what it's like. That sucks.