Sorry, I wasn't aware that the Xbox was actually doing well in some places. I live in Japan, where the Xbox is selling about as well as, say, cowpies. The most recent sales data I found was here; the PS2 and GBA are running about neck-and-neck, both beating the Xbox by about a factor of 100 (yes, one hundred). In recent weeks the Xbox is facing a serious challenge from the PSOne.
So maybe Microsoft can establish an American standard, but no way are they in shape to take on Sony here.
Online games are huge but usually equire enormous time commitment. [...] If you play occasionally you either get your butt kicked all the time or you can't keep up with your friends.
I'm having exactly that experience in FFXI (which, FWIW, isn't as bad as others since it doesn't have general PvP). To be honest, most of the reason I still play at all is because of friends who also play--even if I can't play with them, I can pretend the game doubles as an IRC client and chat with them while I play with others. And as long as the monthly fee is low enough, it's ignorable, at least for those of us with stable incomes.
Which is why I think there's still room for at least a few more online games. Certainly, any one player will only play a couple of online games at most, but just like there are gazillions of IRC networks and multiple IM networks, different people will be interested in different games.
(That said, I still don't think online games are the ultimate form of gaming--though I have to admit getting kids to interact with other people through online games is probably better than having them playing alone . ..)
J Allard: [...] Fast forward four or five years when every game is online
Maybe it's just me and my 20some-year gaming history, but I don't see single-player games going away anytime soon. Online games are fine if you have a few (or several) hours to blow, but if you just want something to relax with for 15 or 30 minutes I doubt that's what you're looking for.
Plus, of course, there's the entire commuting/riding/etc contingent. This may not be such a big deal in the US, where if you're moving, you're usually driving, but here in Japan, it's typical to have 1-2 hours of "dead time" a day on trains, buses and the like. Plenty of people play games during this time (one of the latest rages is "Gyakuten Saiban"--"Turnaround Court Case", I guess--and I can't decide whether that's a bad thing, but that's a different story); but who's going to go to all the bother of logging into an online service when they'll have to drop out as soon as they leave the train?
Code segments are already read-only (unless you're doing self-modifying code, which is a separate issue entirely). The problem is that data segments, which must be writable for obvious reasons, can't be marked non-executable. At least, I don't see anything in the document you linked to saying code in data segments can't be executed, and I suspect if it was possible to prevent execution then someone would have done it long ago.
Incidentally, at least some common compilers (GCC, for instance--I just checked) scatter constants throughout the code segment, so there's no such thing as a "constants pool". You need read access to the code segment, period.
To clarify--what the parent is saying is that x86 doesn't have an execute protection bit (at least up until this "NX" thing). Therefore, you can't mark pages execute-only; your only choices are read (and execute) only, write only, read (and execute) and write, or nothing at all.
In any case, you're missing the point of the original discussion, which is that being able to write to executable pages is what's bad, and the x86, lacking an execute protection bit, can't prevent overflowed buffers in data and stack areas from being executed. I'm not sure what you'd gain from marking executable areas unreadable, and you'd undoubtedly break lots of programs that keep constant data (strings, etc.) in code space.
One doesn't have to go back in history to see how worlds that collide have one side winning while the other side becomes victims of genocide.
Then again, we (as a whole) are now marginally more aware of the potential for such destruction, intentional or otherwise, than in the past, and I like to think that as we (and by analogy any life form that might encounter us) would continue learning restraint as we advanced, to the point at which such first encounters would not necessarily have such a bad ending.
I'm also fluent in Japanese (according to many native Japanese acquaintances), and I say your wife is out of touch. (: Probably 80% of the "ei" in "keitai" I hear is the weakened variety, which as far as I'm concerned makes it the "standard" pronunciation. Though granted, that could have more to do with the fact that "ke-tai" (think in katakana here) is the "in" spelling these days.
(And yes, I should have been clearer that that was a long Japanese "e", not an English one.)
Actually, no; "ei" is pronounced as a long "e", not as two separate vowels. So the first syllable is actually "softer" than e.g. the "ay" in English "kay".
Is it so much to ask for a cellular phone that functions as an efficient communications tool? I don't want to take pictures on it--I have a camera for that. I don't want to listen to MP3s on it--I have an iPod for that.
On the other hand, some of us don't feel like carrying lots of separate devices around. If I want really nice pictures I'll take my camera--but if I just want to grab a quick snapshot of something I can use my keitai. If I'm going to listen to music for hours on end I'll use my MD player--but if I'm just trying to pass time on the train I can use my keitai. I don't see these "multi-function phones" as entire replacements for other devices, but simply as added conveniences; don't worry, the manufacturers haven't forgotten about call quality. (Well, most of them . . . *cough*Panasonic*cough*)
. . . in a way, at least. The Japanese term for "cell [mobile] phone" is technically keitai-denwa, but in reality, everyone except NHK news announcers just says "keitai" (pronounced KAY-tie). While the origin of the word is obvious, I think it's fair to say that "keitai" represents the conglomeration of features that have been squeezed into these devices more accurately than "cell phone" does.
Wait, so the cop was using Winny when the files were leaked? That's somewhat embarrassing.
Yeah, and given that the police department that arrested the guy is the same one where this problem heppened, a number of people on/.J and 2ch are suggesting that the arrest is mostly the police trying to save what face they have left. (I wouldn't be surprised myself if that was at least part of the reason.)
Stating out loud and in public that law X is bad because of A, B and C, and proceeding to violate law X in order to accomplish A, B, and C, is certainly a good thing, if a dangerous one, to do. Simply saying "HAHA UR LAWZ R PWN3D" or "I don't like this law so I'm going to ignore it", on the other hand, accomplishes nothing but making yourself look like a fool to the population in general. I'm not quite clear yet which side this "Mr. 47" (as the author of Winny is known) is coming down on, hence my comment. (In fairness, there's no telling how much spin the police are putting on their reports, since in Japan you don't get a lawyer until you're actually charged with a crime.)
Just for the record, the files that got spread seem to be the result of a virus sent over the Winny network that puts everything on the victim's computer up for sharing, so I doubt the author would get directly in trouble for that.
Or is it just because he made it difficult for them to crack the network he`d created that they wanted even more to "crack him", as an example?
That's the major theory currently doing the rounds in the media, but it's also been reported that when he released Winny, he gave as his reason for developing it "to demonstrate why current copyright laws are wrong and help to change them". While I think he has a valid point about copyright [uh oh, are they going to come after me now?], openly showing disrespect for the law isn't calculated to put you in law enforcement's good graces.
It also seems [Japanese] he's telling police that he "created Winny to foster copyright violations and destroy content companies who are bent only on legal action and don't try to find new business models to protect their copyrights". Take that as you will . . .
I've lived in Japan since 1999, in the technology community (such as it is...), and I have never heard of this site until now, never even heard it referenced on TV or in print.
Either you're lying, or you're so focused on maintaining your little bubble of American-ness that you might as well not be in Japan at all. 2ch is all over the place, and was even mentioned in national newspapers multipletimesrecently.
that the Japanese government is as much under the thumbs of Japanese content companies as the US government is a tool of the RIAA/MPAA.
No, I'm not bitter about this coming up after having decided to move to Japan. sigh...
(Well, to be fair, Japan's copyright law does have a clause allowing personal copies, which is recognized as valid by pretty much everybody, and which even the local press is mentioning in their articles on this, like this one. But they also have a DMCA-like clause that pretty much negates its effect for encrypted stuff.)
And now the question becomes, can you pump out the data that fast? My system at home can only do about 14MB/s from the (encrypted) hard drive, so there wouldn't be much point in getting a 16MB/s DVD writer . . .
Avg. media uses: greater than 30,000
Media archival: greater than 30 years
Average head life: minimum 50,000 recording head contact hours
Media drum wraps: 100,000 times
Tape repositioning: 1,000,000 cycles
Sound of your tape getting mangled in the drive as you try to recover from a hard disk failure: Timeless
- Burn them at low speed (the lowest my current burner allows with my SW is 8x)
This is actually false, at least pertaining to newer faster drives.
You're correct to the extent that you use the disc in the same (or an equivalent-spec) drive. However, CDs intended for use in audio players or old (=12x) drives should be burned at no more than 12x; burning at higher speeds is done using CAV (constant angular velocity), which tends to confuse low-speed drives.
The typcial keyframe rate in MPEG4 stuff is around 8-10 seconds. In MPEG2 it tends to be around 2-5 ms
Seeing as how one frame is 1/25 (0.04) or 1.001/30 (0.03) seconds depending on which part of the world you live in, 0.005 is just plain impossible. At least as far as DVDs go, MPEG2 keyframe intervals are usually 12-18 frames, which works out to 0.4-0.6 seconds for NTSC--still a lot less than MPEG4.
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Sorry, I wasn't aware that the Xbox was actually doing well in some places. I live in Japan, where the Xbox is selling about as well as, say, cowpies. The most recent sales data I found was here; the PS2 and GBA are running about neck-and-neck, both beating the Xbox by about a factor of 100 (yes, one hundred). In recent weeks the Xbox is facing a serious challenge from the PSOne.
So maybe Microsoft can establish an American standard, but no way are they in shape to take on Sony here.
Online games are huge but usually equire enormous time commitment. [...] If you play occasionally you either get your butt kicked all the time or you can't keep up with your friends.
I'm having exactly that experience in FFXI (which, FWIW, isn't as bad as others since it doesn't have general PvP). To be honest, most of the reason I still play at all is because of friends who also play--even if I can't play with them, I can pretend the game doubles as an IRC client and chat with them while I play with others. And as long as the monthly fee is low enough, it's ignorable, at least for those of us with stable incomes.
Which is why I think there's still room for at least a few more online games. Certainly, any one player will only play a couple of online games at most, but just like there are gazillions of IRC networks and multiple IM networks, different people will be interested in different games.
(That said, I still don't think online games are the ultimate form of gaming--though I have to admit getting kids to interact with other people through online games is probably better than having them playing alone . . .)
Quoting the article:
J Allard: [...] Fast forward four or five years when every game is online
Maybe it's just me and my 20some-year gaming history, but I don't see single-player games going away anytime soon. Online games are fine if you have a few (or several) hours to blow, but if you just want something to relax with for 15 or 30 minutes I doubt that's what you're looking for.
Plus, of course, there's the entire commuting/riding/etc contingent. This may not be such a big deal in the US, where if you're moving, you're usually driving, but here in Japan, it's typical to have 1-2 hours of "dead time" a day on trains, buses and the like. Plenty of people play games during this time (one of the latest rages is "Gyakuten Saiban"--"Turnaround Court Case", I guess--and I can't decide whether that's a bad thing, but that's a different story); but who's going to go to all the bother of logging into an online service when they'll have to drop out as soon as they leave the train?
Is that anything like a mosquito making a "full-on assault" on a human foot?
Code segments are already read-only (unless you're doing self-modifying code, which is a separate issue entirely). The problem is that data segments, which must be writable for obvious reasons, can't be marked non-executable. At least, I don't see anything in the document you linked to saying code in data segments can't be executed, and I suspect if it was possible to prevent execution then someone would have done it long ago.
Incidentally, at least some common compilers (GCC, for instance--I just checked) scatter constants throughout the code segment, so there's no such thing as a "constants pool". You need read access to the code segment, period.
Maybe I'm just being dense here. :-/
To clarify--what the parent is saying is that x86 doesn't have an execute protection bit (at least up until this "NX" thing). Therefore, you can't mark pages execute-only; your only choices are read (and execute) only, write only, read (and execute) and write, or nothing at all.
In any case, you're missing the point of the original discussion, which is that being able to write to executable pages is what's bad, and the x86, lacking an execute protection bit, can't prevent overflowed buffers in data and stack areas from being executed. I'm not sure what you'd gain from marking executable areas unreadable, and you'd undoubtedly break lots of programs that keep constant data (strings, etc.) in code space.
One doesn't have to go back in history to see how worlds that collide have one side winning while the other side becomes victims of genocide.
Then again, we (as a whole) are now marginally more aware of the potential for such destruction, intentional or otherwise, than in the past, and I like to think that as we (and by analogy any life form that might encounter us) would continue learning restraint as we advanced, to the point at which such first encounters would not necessarily have such a bad ending.
Nah, they'll just rename themselves to Plex.
I'm also fluent in Japanese (according to many native Japanese acquaintances), and I say your wife is out of touch. (: Probably 80% of the "ei" in "keitai" I hear is the weakened variety, which as far as I'm concerned makes it the "standard" pronunciation. Though granted, that could have more to do with the fact that "ke-tai" (think in katakana here) is the "in" spelling these days.
(And yes, I should have been clearer that that was a long Japanese "e", not an English one.)
Well, more like keh-ee-tah-ee
Actually, no; "ei" is pronounced as a long "e", not as two separate vowels. So the first syllable is actually "softer" than e.g. the "ay" in English "kay".
I was just referring to how "keitai" comes from "keitai-denwa" ("mobile phone"). Hopefully that's clear enough. (:
Is it so much to ask for a cellular phone that functions as an efficient communications tool? I don't want to take pictures on it--I have a camera for that. I don't want to listen to MP3s on it--I have an iPod for that.
On the other hand, some of us don't feel like carrying lots of separate devices around. If I want really nice pictures I'll take my camera--but if I just want to grab a quick snapshot of something I can use my keitai. If I'm going to listen to music for hours on end I'll use my MD player--but if I'm just trying to pass time on the train I can use my keitai. I don't see these "multi-function phones" as entire replacements for other devices, but simply as added conveniences; don't worry, the manufacturers haven't forgotten about call quality. (Well, most of them . . . *cough*Panasonic*cough*)
. . . in a way, at least. The Japanese term for "cell [mobile] phone" is technically keitai-denwa, but in reality, everyone except NHK news announcers just says "keitai" (pronounced KAY-tie). While the origin of the word is obvious, I think it's fair to say that "keitai" represents the conglomeration of features that have been squeezed into these devices more accurately than "cell phone" does.
Wait, so the cop was using Winny when the files were leaked? That's somewhat embarrassing.
Yeah, and given that the police department that arrested the guy is the same one where this problem heppened, a number of people on /.J and 2ch are suggesting that the arrest is mostly the police trying to save what face they have left. (I wouldn't be surprised myself if that was at least part of the reason.)
IIRC, you can't even resell used video games in Japan.
There was a lower-court decision like this at one point, but IIRC it was overruled on appeal. Used game stores are all over the place.
Stating out loud and in public that law X is bad because of A, B and C, and proceeding to violate law X in order to accomplish A, B, and C, is certainly a good thing, if a dangerous one, to do. Simply saying "HAHA UR LAWZ R PWN3D" or "I don't like this law so I'm going to ignore it", on the other hand, accomplishes nothing but making yourself look like a fool to the population in general. I'm not quite clear yet which side this "Mr. 47" (as the author of Winny is known) is coming down on, hence my comment. (In fairness, there's no telling how much spin the police are putting on their reports, since in Japan you don't get a lawyer until you're actually charged with a crime.)
Just for the record, the files that got spread seem to be the result of a virus sent over the Winny network that puts everything on the victim's computer up for sharing, so I doubt the author would get directly in trouble for that.
Was this software built soley and intentionally for sharing copyrighted works?
It seems so from what the author's saying about it.
Or is it just because he made it difficult for them to crack the network he`d created that they wanted even more to "crack him", as an example?
That's the major theory currently doing the rounds in the media, but it's also been reported that when he released Winny, he gave as his reason for developing it "to demonstrate why current copyright laws are wrong and help to change them". While I think he has a valid point about copyright [uh oh, are they going to come after me now?], openly showing disrespect for the law isn't calculated to put you in law enforcement's good graces.
It also seems [Japanese] he's telling police that he "created Winny to foster copyright violations and destroy content companies who are bent only on legal action and don't try to find new business models to protect their copyrights". Take that as you will . . .
I've lived in Japan since 1999, in the technology community (such as it is...), and I have never heard of this site until now, never even heard it referenced on TV or in print.
Either you're lying, or you're so focused on maintaining your little bubble of American-ness that you might as well not be in Japan at all. 2ch is all over the place, and was even mentioned in national newspapers multiple times recently.
Thanks for playing, better luck next time.
No, I'm not bitter about this coming up after having decided to move to Japan. sigh...
(Well, to be fair, Japan's copyright law does have a clause allowing personal copies, which is recognized as valid by pretty much everybody, and which even the local press is mentioning in their articles on this, like this one. But they also have a DMCA-like clause that pretty much negates its effect for encrypted stuff.)
1385KB/s * 12 = 16620KB/s
And now the question becomes, can you pump out the data that fast? My system at home can only do about 14MB/s from the (encrypted) hard drive, so there wouldn't be much point in getting a 16MB/s DVD writer . . .
Avg. media uses: greater than 30,000
Media archival: greater than 30 years
Average head life: minimum 50,000 recording head contact hours
Media drum wraps: 100,000 times
Tape repositioning: 1,000,000 cycles
Sound of your tape getting mangled in the drive as you try to recover from a hard disk failure: Timeless
This is actually false, at least pertaining to newer faster drives.
You're correct to the extent that you use the disc in the same (or an equivalent-spec) drive. However, CDs intended for use in audio players or old (=12x) drives should be burned at no more than 12x; burning at higher speeds is done using CAV (constant angular velocity), which tends to confuse low-speed drives.
The typcial keyframe rate in MPEG4 stuff is around 8-10 seconds. In MPEG2 it tends to be around 2-5 ms
Seeing as how one frame is 1/25 (0.04) or 1.001/30 (0.03) seconds depending on which part of the world you live in, 0.005 is just plain impossible. At least as far as DVDs go, MPEG2 keyframe intervals are usually 12-18 frames, which works out to 0.4-0.6 seconds for NTSC--still a lot less than MPEG4.