Would it be possible for an app to defeat the blacklist somehow, perhaps by hijacking DNS or otherwise intercepting the network stream ? I could even see customer demand for this sort of thing, so people could continue using blacklisted apps. This is all assuming that Apple would use it for censorship, which is always very tempting for a big company with many big friend$ in the media industry.
NVidia stumbles in the chipset arena because they just have too god-damn many of them. The process goes like this:
Q. How many video cards do you want to SLI ? A. 0 -> get a 610/630 board
1 -> get a 650 or 750
2 -> get a 650 Ultra or 680
3 -> get a 780 or 790
Beyond the SLI madness, they all support the same processors - at least on the Intel side, I'm not up to date on AMD. I realize the "need" for segmentation, but that inevitably leads to much duplication of work in maintaining all these similar yet distinct chipsets, when a single master chipset could handle them all. This would possibly leads to better prices as well, as most nForce boards cost between $150 and $300, except for the low-end 610i. Considering they're almost guaranteed one or two NVidia GPU sales, the price is a bit gougey..
Said satellite contains expensive, highly-classefied equipment
When will the world learn that open source is the way to go ? Security through obscurity really means you don't know exactly how much the enemy knows about you, which of course means you're that much more worried and uptight about it all. If all your cards are out in the open, you might not have the intel advantage, but you also don't have to worry about how much China or Russia knows. You can safely assume they know everything, and you can concentrate on beating them with pure skill and ingenuity. If you can't, then you deserve to fail.
Agreed. Maybe I'm an asshole (no wait, that's a guaranteed fact), but I have no pity for anyone still running PHP4... if they wanted to switch, they had all the time in the world to do so. PHP5 has been out for what, 4 or 5 years now ? Anyone still running on the old stuff is either happy with it and shouldn't bother upgrading, or hopelessly incompetent.
That said, I'm very eager to see PHP6... I don't really want to switch over to Ruby / Python, largely for performance reasons, so I'm curious to see what new ghetto tools PHP6 will provide me. Even though it's a shit language, I always thought it had a certain charm in its crudeness and the fact that there's a (redundant) function for everything imaginable. I write all manner of scripts in PHP, even non-web stuff, as it lets me do stuff in a fraction of the time.
Gee, I dunno, the kind of hackers that foolishly draw attention to themselves by performing mindless attention-whoring activities at Defcon ?
Defcon itself is a big pathetic joke. It's really just a bunch of overgrown kids talking about various acts of fraud and abuse, while launching cowardly attacks at anyone not in the in-crowd. They make the 2600 con look like a goddamned Mensa party.
Cliff (and others), hear me out. Don't see pirates as a problem. Pirates get your product out there, it's free promotion! They are organized (somewhat), they have loyal followers, they are all over the net. How else can you reach a million eyeballs with $0.00 investment ?
The kids that pirate your game, if they end up liking it, they will tell their friends. Those friends might tell others, and you suddenly have 10-15 more people who like your product. Eventually one of those will convert into a paying customer, either because they're against piracy, or because you've released an expansion or sequel and they got hooked on the original.
Another thing to keep in mind is why you got in the business in the first place. If you're doing it for the money, you're screwed. If you're doing it because you love making games and channeling your creativity, then keep doing it! The warez scene has made celebrities from relative unknowns... do you really think Sid Meier would have been so successful if it weren't for students copying Civ floppies back in the day ?
Price is another point of contention. I personally don't think the $50-70 price range is reasonable for any game. They should aim for $20-35, with "budget" titles under $10. I don't care what MBAs say; everything they know, they learned from other, failed MBAs:P Make the game so inexpensive it becomes an easy impulse buy, and plan your development budget accordingly. Some of the biggest hits have been simple, cheap-to-make games, sold at a low price point to broad markets.
More random advice: stay the hell away from DRM / copy protection. You will waste your money buying those "solutions", and some teenager will crack it anyway. More importantly, the copy protection will annoy your paid users, precisely the ones you should be worshipping.
One fantastic way to fight piracy is to offer added value for paid users. The most common example is online play, but there are numerous other opportunities like members-only leader boards, contests, random giveaways... anything to entice people to get legit. As a small developer, you have the complete freedom to do whatever it takes to please your users. I suggest you take advantage of this agility to its fullest potential.
power outages (I lost power for 6 days in a windstorm and ran my laptop sans internet on a generator)
I think, if a massive storm has taken down the power grid, you have more important things to worry about besides Evercrack. Like driving into the next town for food and shelter, and they probably electricity there too!
Sure, Adobe doesn't want to port CS3 to Linux, because they suck at coding... just look at the Mac crowd, it took forever to get a native Intel build!
But the real reason is it just doesn't make business sense. If you're paying $1000+ for Adobe apps, you can afford a $99 Windows license. People buy expensive macs all the time to work with Adobe apps, so why should they pay any attention to the folks with a free OS ?
I don't think any serious Adobe clients are concerned with Linux support, certainly not to a degree where it impacts their purchasing. Adobe isn't losing money over it, and at the end of the day that's all that matters to them.
If you really want Photoshop on Linux, build one! Seriously, most people don't need a third of Photoshop's functionality (all the print / prepress stuff for example). The Gimp is pretty handy, but its big shortfall is the interface... it's too hacker-centric. Art school dropouts don't want Script-Fu, they want clicky-Fu with instant preview and unlimited undo.
If by mistake you mean buyer remorse, you're absolutely right.
I hate the fact that credit cards don't bother to distinguish between buyer remorse and buyer fraud. Sure, in this case it's semi-plausible, but it pales in comparison to the millions of fraudulent chargebacks issued every month by random morons.
There's a big difference: the majority of problems with the US auto industry come from unionized workers. The bigger the union, the greater the abuses.
The irony is that Asian and European automakers build their cars in the US, and make a nice profit while local gigs like Ford and GM can barely survive while peddling overpriced vehicles that can't compete. At least Tata death carts are dirt-cheap.
Hey, be nice to the Basic Programming cartridge. If it weren't for that lovely piece of history, you wouldn't be reading my inflammatory rants because I'd have found something better to do:)
Seriously, the fact that I taught myself Basic by age 4 is proof that these things could indeed be educational. At the very least, it taught me that interpreted languages are horribly slow, and by that virtue coaxed me into learning the nitty gritty of assembly language.
That said, the early 80's were boring times. I highly doubt any kid today would have the total boredom required to sit down in front of a computer and actually learn something, when mind-numbing items like Neopets are just a click away.
We should ask that brain-damaged Youtube kid what he thinks of these $12 NESputers.
I do find it very dumb that someone would take the NES, which is a specialized chipset built around the good old 6502, and add things to de-specialize it. Why not just build a proper platform from scratch, using equally cheap but better suited components ? Getting ethernet or WiFi to work on a NES will be an exercise in futility, the bus simply can't handle it... they will end up needing a dedicated chip for it anyway, so why bother ?
Build a real SoC, with any of the freely available core designs. That's what MIT kids should be doing, not posting photo galleries of chinese NES ripoffs.
I've never really cared for the Olympics, probably because I don't see the value in practicing a judged sport as a career, but I'm freakin' WEIRD!
So you're from an unfavored part of the world and you can run real fast in a circle... hmm, no other saleable skills, eh ? Great, just great! *BLAM*
So you're a short little girl who couldn't pass grade school, but you can do twirly jumps on ice skates to dead old music... hmm, couldn't even cut it as a stripper, eh ? *BLAM*
I don't even think too highly of TV sports like hockey and ThatGayLittleGameWithStewiesHead, but I still consider most olympic sports beneath them. After all, it takes at least some brains to outplay a team of drunken 250lb stick-wielding lummoxes, which is more than I can say about the olympics.
How could anybody abandon the steady paychecks, access to the best tools and engines, large teams of skilled colleagues and the glory of working on one of next holiday season's blockbusters for a chance to labor in relative obscurity on tiny, niche titles?
Maybe it's because the paychecks are NOT steady, the tools are NOT so great, the colleagues are fresh out of college and kiss too much ass, and their is no glory in being credited on the latest bug-fest of a movie license sellout. I'm looking at you, ElectronicArctivision.
It's often the niche titles that yield the biggest successes. After all, if you're a highly skilled developer or designer, and you're forced to work within the mold of a big-name company, you're probably watching that skill go to waste. Only the freedom of a small, indie shop will give you the room to stretch your imagination and flex your hacking muscle.
Disclaimer: From a very young age (grade-school), I realized the insurance industry was a huge scam. I'm as biased as can be!
First, why do people seek medical insurance ? To cover high and/or unpredictable medical costs ? No, it's to ensure one's health. If you don't have insurance, one accident could ruin your life. That's fucked up!
If the insurance companies do everything possible to deny coverage to those who need it most, then from a consumer's perspective, the industry has failed to accomplished its expected duty.
The big problem with insurance is the company's goal is directly opposite to the customer's goal. Customers want to save money, insurance companies have to pay money... it's not a healthy relationship, hence the abuses from both sides.
The funny thing is insurance companies started out (waaaaaaay back) as cooperative funds. People got together, pooled their money and used it to help each other out of untimely situations. The commercialization of that activity is what has led to these widespread abuses.
You shouldn't be so pissed about your privacy with regards to medical history. So what if you have herpes ? Deal with it! What you _should_ be pissed about is that your insurance company is paying small fortunes for this data, fortunes that should have been paid out to beneficiaries instead.
I'd rather see the fraudsters and every incompetent up the chain, be forced to work the customer service call center, dealing with fraud complaints 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for the duration of their sentence. Watch them get yelled at by psychotic soccer moms for hours on end, dealing with the aftermath of their own crooked acts.
Jail ain't worth shit. It doesn't reform, it doesn't produce any results. Make these fuckers pay, just like we suffer every day for the bullshit that goes on in the world.
Maybe I'm just the king of cheap, but I find $300/TB rather excessive, considering I could rent out a massive file server for less. There's a certain charm to the S3 solutions since you can use a turnkey service to do the actual backup grunt-work, but the big problem with Amazon's services is they're only cost-effective for small or short-run projects.
I just ran the numbers for one of my existing web servers, and the same service delivered via Amazon's S3 would cost me over $1500, largely because of their $0.15/gb bandwidth price. My bandwidth costs me a tenth of that... now if Amazon could sanitize their per-gb price, and offset it with a fixed "base cost" kinda deal, it would level the playing field and make their service more attractive to bulk users like myself.
Ditto, a live clone is perhaps the easiest solution for online backup. I've been doing this for quite some time now. My servers have cyclical rsync setups, each one is backed up to the next in the chain (geographically dispersed too!). They're ready to failover if that's ever needed (cross fingers). Considering one can lease a (puny) dedicated server for $30-40, it's pretty darned easy. You could even go with a VPS if you don't care about the CPU resources.
No, you're dumb. Par2 IS Reed-Solomon. Silly me to expect an AC to fact-check the most trivial subjects of a post.
The procedure explained in TFA is basically adapting a different tool to behave more or less like single-file par2. That makes it redundant (in the/. sense, not the data-recovery sense).
There is one thing I would love to see, and that's local disk checksumming. That's right, take a 500gb disk, chop it into slices and do RAID-5 on them as if they were individual spindles. It's been years since I've had a hard drive actually die on me, but I've seen bit-errors more often than I'd like. Having self-checking built into the filesystem (or low-level disk access) would help ensure 100% data integrity, and you could still do RAID-1 on top of it for safety.
Rule #1: You do not talk about Apple flaws Rule #2: You DO NOT talk about Apple flaws Rule #3: If someone says "stop" or goes limp, taps out we make him the CEO Rule #4: Only two sentences to an argument Rule #5: One argument at a time Rule #6: No punch, no daiquiris Rule #7: Cover-ups will go on as long as they have to Rule #8: If this is your first night at Apple flaws, you HAVE to swallow
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: IANA iPhone developer
Would it be possible for an app to defeat the blacklist somehow, perhaps by hijacking DNS or otherwise intercepting the network stream ? I could even see customer demand for this sort of thing, so people could continue using blacklisted apps. This is all assuming that Apple would use it for censorship, which is always very tempting for a big company with many big friend$ in the media industry.
NVidia stumbles in the chipset arena because they just have too god-damn many of them. The process goes like this:
Q. How many video cards do you want to SLI ?
A. 0 -> get a 610/630 board
1 -> get a 650 or 750
2 -> get a 650 Ultra or 680
3 -> get a 780 or 790
Beyond the SLI madness, they all support the same processors - at least on the Intel side, I'm not up to date on AMD. I realize the "need" for segmentation, but that inevitably leads to much duplication of work in maintaining all these similar yet distinct chipsets, when a single master chipset could handle them all. This would possibly leads to better prices as well, as most nForce boards cost between $150 and $300, except for the low-end 610i. Considering they're almost guaranteed one or two NVidia GPU sales, the price is a bit gougey..
Said satellite contains expensive, highly-classefied equipment
When will the world learn that open source is the way to go ? Security through obscurity really means you don't know exactly how much the enemy knows about you, which of course means you're that much more worried and uptight about it all. If all your cards are out in the open, you might not have the intel advantage, but you also don't have to worry about how much China or Russia knows. You can safely assume they know everything, and you can concentrate on beating them with pure skill and ingenuity. If you can't, then you deserve to fail.
Agreed. Maybe I'm an asshole (no wait, that's a guaranteed fact), but I have no pity for anyone still running PHP4... if they wanted to switch, they had all the time in the world to do so. PHP5 has been out for what, 4 or 5 years now ? Anyone still running on the old stuff is either happy with it and shouldn't bother upgrading, or hopelessly incompetent.
That said, I'm very eager to see PHP6... I don't really want to switch over to Ruby / Python, largely for performance reasons, so I'm curious to see what new ghetto tools PHP6 will provide me. Even though it's a shit language, I always thought it had a certain charm in its crudeness and the fact that there's a (redundant) function for everything imaginable. I write all manner of scripts in PHP, even non-web stuff, as it lets me do stuff in a fraction of the time.
What kind of hackers are they
Gee, I dunno, the kind of hackers that foolishly draw attention to themselves by performing mindless attention-whoring activities at Defcon ?
Defcon itself is a big pathetic joke. It's really just a bunch of overgrown kids talking about various acts of fraud and abuse, while launching cowardly attacks at anyone not in the in-crowd. They make the 2600 con look like a goddamned Mensa party.
Cliff (and others), hear me out. Don't see pirates as a problem. Pirates get your product out there, it's free promotion! They are organized (somewhat), they have loyal followers, they are all over the net. How else can you reach a million eyeballs with $0.00 investment ?
The kids that pirate your game, if they end up liking it, they will tell their friends. Those friends might tell others, and you suddenly have 10-15 more people who like your product. Eventually one of those will convert into a paying customer, either because they're against piracy, or because you've released an expansion or sequel and they got hooked on the original.
Another thing to keep in mind is why you got in the business in the first place. If you're doing it for the money, you're screwed. If you're doing it because you love making games and channeling your creativity, then keep doing it! The warez scene has made celebrities from relative unknowns... do you really think Sid Meier would have been so successful if it weren't for students copying Civ floppies back in the day ?
Price is another point of contention. I personally don't think the $50-70 price range is reasonable for any game. They should aim for $20-35, with "budget" titles under $10. I don't care what MBAs say; everything they know, they learned from other, failed MBAs :P Make the game so inexpensive it becomes an easy impulse buy, and plan your development budget accordingly. Some of the biggest hits have been simple, cheap-to-make games, sold at a low price point to broad markets.
More random advice: stay the hell away from DRM / copy protection. You will waste your money buying those "solutions", and some teenager will crack it anyway. More importantly, the copy protection will annoy your paid users, precisely the ones you should be worshipping.
One fantastic way to fight piracy is to offer added value for paid users. The most common example is online play, but there are numerous other opportunities like members-only leader boards, contests, random giveaways... anything to entice people to get legit. As a small developer, you have the complete freedom to do whatever it takes to please your users. I suggest you take advantage of this agility to its fullest potential.
power outages (I lost power for 6 days in a windstorm and ran my laptop sans internet on a generator)
I think, if a massive storm has taken down the power grid, you have more important things to worry about besides Evercrack. Like driving into the next town for food and shelter, and they probably electricity there too!
some backward compatible toolkits are made now to convert code developed for Win95/2k/XP to run on Vista
Yep it's called a Windows 2000 boot disk.
Sure, Adobe doesn't want to port CS3 to Linux, because they suck at coding... just look at the Mac crowd, it took forever to get a native Intel build!
But the real reason is it just doesn't make business sense. If you're paying $1000+ for Adobe apps, you can afford a $99 Windows license. People buy expensive macs all the time to work with Adobe apps, so why should they pay any attention to the folks with a free OS ?
I don't think any serious Adobe clients are concerned with Linux support, certainly not to a degree where it impacts their purchasing. Adobe isn't losing money over it, and at the end of the day that's all that matters to them.
If you really want Photoshop on Linux, build one! Seriously, most people don't need a third of Photoshop's functionality (all the print / prepress stuff for example). The Gimp is pretty handy, but its big shortfall is the interface... it's too hacker-centric. Art school dropouts don't want Script-Fu, they want clicky-Fu with instant preview and unlimited undo.
If by mistake you mean buyer remorse, you're absolutely right.
I hate the fact that credit cards don't bother to distinguish between buyer remorse and buyer fraud. Sure, in this case it's semi-plausible, but it pales in comparison to the millions of fraudulent chargebacks issued every month by random morons.
There's a big difference: the majority of problems with the US auto industry come from unionized workers. The bigger the union, the greater the abuses.
The irony is that Asian and European automakers build their cars in the US, and make a nice profit while local gigs like Ford and GM can barely survive while peddling overpriced vehicles that can't compete. At least Tata death carts are dirt-cheap.
Hey, be nice to the Basic Programming cartridge. If it weren't for that lovely piece of history, you wouldn't be reading my inflammatory rants because I'd have found something better to do :)
Seriously, the fact that I taught myself Basic by age 4 is proof that these things could indeed be educational. At the very least, it taught me that interpreted languages are horribly slow, and by that virtue coaxed me into learning the nitty gritty of assembly language.
That said, the early 80's were boring times. I highly doubt any kid today would have the total boredom required to sit down in front of a computer and actually learn something, when mind-numbing items like Neopets are just a click away.
Not until MIT invents a suicide bomb controller.
Is there a 'missingthepoint' tag available?
Yes, it's spelled MIT.
Seriously, way to fail! Can someone please dig up the real engineering students, not these stoner kids...
We should ask that brain-damaged Youtube kid what he thinks of these $12 NESputers.
I do find it very dumb that someone would take the NES, which is a specialized chipset built around the good old 6502, and add things to de-specialize it. Why not just build a proper platform from scratch, using equally cheap but better suited components ? Getting ethernet or WiFi to work on a NES will be an exercise in futility, the bus simply can't handle it... they will end up needing a dedicated chip for it anyway, so why bother ?
Build a real SoC, with any of the freely available core designs. That's what MIT kids should be doing, not posting photo galleries of chinese NES ripoffs.
I've never really cared for the Olympics, probably because I don't see the value in practicing a judged sport as a career, but I'm freakin' WEIRD!
So you're from an unfavored part of the world and you can run real fast in a circle... hmm, no other saleable skills, eh ? Great, just great! *BLAM*
So you're a short little girl who couldn't pass grade school, but you can do twirly jumps on ice skates to dead old music... hmm, couldn't even cut it as a stripper, eh ? *BLAM*
I don't even think too highly of TV sports like hockey and ThatGayLittleGameWithStewiesHead, but I still consider most olympic sports beneath them. After all, it takes at least some brains to outplay a team of drunken 250lb stick-wielding lummoxes, which is more than I can say about the olympics.
Luge, anyone ?
How could anybody abandon the steady paychecks, access to the best tools and engines, large teams of skilled colleagues and the glory of working on one of next holiday season's blockbusters for a chance to labor in relative obscurity on tiny, niche titles?
Maybe it's because the paychecks are NOT steady, the tools are NOT so great, the colleagues are fresh out of college and kiss too much ass, and their is no glory in being credited on the latest bug-fest of a movie license sellout. I'm looking at you, ElectronicArctivision.
It's often the niche titles that yield the biggest successes. After all, if you're a highly skilled developer or designer, and you're forced to work within the mold of a big-name company, you're probably watching that skill go to waste. Only the freedom of a small, indie shop will give you the room to stretch your imagination and flex your hacking muscle.
Disclaimer: From a very young age (grade-school), I realized the insurance industry was a huge scam. I'm as biased as can be!
First, why do people seek medical insurance ? To cover high and/or unpredictable medical costs ? No, it's to ensure one's health. If you don't have insurance, one accident could ruin your life. That's fucked up!
If the insurance companies do everything possible to deny coverage to those who need it most, then from a consumer's perspective, the industry has failed to accomplished its expected duty.
The big problem with insurance is the company's goal is directly opposite to the customer's goal. Customers want to save money, insurance companies have to pay money... it's not a healthy relationship, hence the abuses from both sides.
The funny thing is insurance companies started out (waaaaaaay back) as cooperative funds. People got together, pooled their money and used it to help each other out of untimely situations. The commercialization of that activity is what has led to these widespread abuses.
You shouldn't be so pissed about your privacy with regards to medical history. So what if you have herpes ? Deal with it! What you _should_ be pissed about is that your insurance company is paying small fortunes for this data, fortunes that should have been paid out to beneficiaries instead.
I'd rather see the fraudsters and every incompetent up the chain, be forced to work the customer service call center, dealing with fraud complaints 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for the duration of their sentence. Watch them get yelled at by psychotic soccer moms for hours on end, dealing with the aftermath of their own crooked acts.
Jail ain't worth shit. It doesn't reform, it doesn't produce any results. Make these fuckers pay, just like we suffer every day for the bullshit that goes on in the world.
They have different words for snow too.
What does cocaine have to do with any of this ? :P
A new project to create a $12 computer is underway at MIT, the same University that spawned the Warcart
There, fixed it for yall.
Maybe I'm just the king of cheap, but I find $300/TB rather excessive, considering I could rent out a massive file server for less. There's a certain charm to the S3 solutions since you can use a turnkey service to do the actual backup grunt-work, but the big problem with Amazon's services is they're only cost-effective for small or short-run projects.
I just ran the numbers for one of my existing web servers, and the same service delivered via Amazon's S3 would cost me over $1500, largely because of their $0.15/gb bandwidth price. My bandwidth costs me a tenth of that... now if Amazon could sanitize their per-gb price, and offset it with a fixed "base cost" kinda deal, it would level the playing field and make their service more attractive to bulk users like myself.
Ditto, a live clone is perhaps the easiest solution for online backup. I've been doing this for quite some time now. My servers have cyclical rsync setups, each one is backed up to the next in the chain (geographically dispersed too!). They're ready to failover if that's ever needed (cross fingers). Considering one can lease a (puny) dedicated server for $30-40, it's pretty darned easy. You could even go with a VPS if you don't care about the CPU resources.
Reed-Solomon is ancient compared to par2.
No, you're dumb. Par2 IS Reed-Solomon. Silly me to expect an AC to fact-check the most trivial subjects of a post.
The procedure explained in TFA is basically adapting a different tool to behave more or less like single-file par2. That makes it redundant (in the /. sense, not the data-recovery sense).
There is one thing I would love to see, and that's local disk checksumming. That's right, take a 500gb disk, chop it into slices and do RAID-5 on them as if they were individual spindles. It's been years since I've had a hard drive actually die on me, but I've seen bit-errors more often than I'd like. Having self-checking built into the filesystem (or low-level disk access) would help ensure 100% data integrity, and you could still do RAID-1 on top of it for safety.
Rule #1: You do not talk about Apple flaws
Rule #2: You DO NOT talk about Apple flaws
Rule #3: If someone says "stop" or goes limp, taps out we make him the CEO
Rule #4: Only two sentences to an argument
Rule #5: One argument at a time
Rule #6: No punch, no daiquiris
Rule #7: Cover-ups will go on as long as they have to
Rule #8: If this is your first night at Apple flaws, you HAVE to swallow