Jak II is ludicrously difficult in places. That would be excusable, but unfortunately it's ludicrously difficult in very boring and arbitrary ways.
For example, the "shoot your way out of the boardwalk" mission, where the computer will simply drop limitless quantities of Crimzon Guards at you until you shoot a few thousand and get out, or die. VERY VERY BORING.
Then towards the end of the game (last two or three missions) the game designers felt it would be a good idea to stop giving you save points. Dum dum dum dum dum.
Also, whoever thought that random traffic jams to prevent progress would liven up missions needs to be killed as a warning to others.
Hopefully they'll get the design right for Jak III, and it'll be the masterpiece Jak II could have been.
Three years of using and administrating Windows 2000 every day, and I was lost with XP. That is, until someone showed me how to put it in "2000 mode"...
It's quite possible that XP is an improvement over 2000. However, once you've learned the sequence of ever-deeper dialogs you need to go to to alter the TCP/IP settings, it's a bit of a bugger to have them move everything around.
TCO isn't about purchase price of software or hardware. It's about how quickly you can get your job done, how many tech support staff are needed to support the desktop users at your company, how much time is wasted fixing virus problems, and so on.
Particularly since both suggested mutations can be done without changing the size of the relevant piece of data. Just program in a table of common names, and words of the same length to substitute.
Funny, I build systems precisely to ensure that I get high quality components. It's the PC boxshifters like Dell, Compaq and HP who build their systems out of crappy components, to shave a few pennies off the price.
I want a silent Seagate hard drive, a better-than-Plextor CD-RW, a motherboard that has open source drivers for all the hardware, and so on. The only way to get parts of that quality is to build the machine yourself. Even Apple use some pretty crappy components.
Yeah, imagine the fun of a virus that quietly swapped names around in documents, or replaced first names with obscene nicknames. ("Smith, explain to me again why our bid for the contract referred to their CEO as 'Pin-dick' on page 6?")
For spreadsheets, the optimum in evil would probably be to pick a random numeric cell and swap two adjacent digits. Hard to spot and correct even if you know what you're looking for.
I would be interested in getting episodes of "The Office" this way, if they were available in their native 16:9 format (encoded in 16:9, not letterboxed), and in a quality comparable to DVD.
Why don't you just buy the DVD? The show has finished now, it's all out on DVD.
OS X has a full X server that integrates X applications into its desktop, so I guess it isn't proprietary.
Almost all Mac applications can be scripted, and you can call scripts from the command line. I have scripts which fire up a graphical web browser, connect to BBC radio, pull the audio down as AIFF files, run those through normalize and then encode them via LAME.
OS X has pretty much a complete UNIX toolset under the hood, and you can script with AppleScript, Perl, Python, and so on.
In fact, something that hasn't been getting enough attention is that it's impossible to run Windows on a computer with a dial-up connection, unless you are prepared to run without the latest patches.
Reason being, to download the latest service pack and patch load is an 8+ hour task, and good luck getting Windows to hold a reliable dialup connection for that long via a WinModem. Plus in most countries, you're paying for the phone call...
I realized this when my parents asked me to reinstall their system after it was wiped out by a worm (again). They had install CDs... but there was no way to install the necessary patches, so they'd just get infected again. Microsoft has now started offering update CDs, but that'll only get you up to date as of October last year.
My parents are now running Linux. Over a year without a single crash, worm or virus. I think they're believers now.
Microsoft should be required to put a sticker on Windows boxes saying "WARNING: This software cannot be used safely on Internet-connected computers unless you have a broadband connection."
Just as a minor point, the bandwidth used by rejecting spam during the SMTP handshake or part-way through the header is pretty minimal. Most sensible ISPs are already doing rate limiting on incoming SMTP connections to prevent DoS.
These people are not being charged with spamming. They are being charged with spamming in a manner not in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act.
So what? Any spammer who complies with the CAN-SPAM act has to put "ADV" in the subject line, so they will find that my mail server bounces their crap immediately when they attempt to deliver it. So "merely" getting spammers to comply with the act is perfectly fine by me.
The authentication doesn't just prevent DRM-removal. It also cripples iTunes' ability to connect to non-iTunes music shares.
I have my entire music library--which, incidentally, is 100% legal and paid for--on a Linux server running daapd. iTunes 4.5 broke iTunes so I could no longer pay my legally purchased music on my Macintosh.
Fortunately, the maintainer of daapd worked out the fix about as quickly as the maintainer of libopendaap did, and I've been able to upgrade iTunes after all.
Make no mistake, Apple's screwing around does have a negative impact on their customers, even the ones who haven't infringed copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
windowsupdate.microsoft.com
I bought my own modem 'cause I didn't like the crappy ones Comcast was using at the time. I got a US Robotics, it has been rock solid.
Jak II is ludicrously difficult in places. That would be excusable, but unfortunately it's ludicrously difficult in very boring and arbitrary ways.
For example, the "shoot your way out of the boardwalk" mission, where the computer will simply drop limitless quantities of Crimzon Guards at you until you shoot a few thousand and get out, or die. VERY VERY BORING.
Then towards the end of the game (last two or three missions) the game designers felt it would be a good idea to stop giving you save points. Dum dum dum dum dum.
Also, whoever thought that random traffic jams to prevent progress would liven up missions needs to be killed as a warning to others.
Hopefully they'll get the design right for Jak III, and it'll be the masterpiece Jak II could have been.
The exploding capacitors affected lots of big name manufacturers, including IBM. So much for that theory.
KDE has a kiosk mode? What's it called, ki-Oh, wait.
How convenient.
Three years of using and administrating Windows 2000 every day, and I was lost with XP. That is, until someone showed me how to put it in "2000 mode"...
It's quite possible that XP is an improvement over 2000. However, once you've learned the sequence of ever-deeper dialogs you need to go to to alter the TCP/IP settings, it's a bit of a bugger to have them move everything around.
Yes, I feel my cultural life is enriched by "Manhunt".
TCO isn't about purchase price of software or hardware. It's about how quickly you can get your job done, how many tech support staff are needed to support the desktop users at your company, how much time is wasted fixing virus problems, and so on.
Particularly since both suggested mutations can be done without changing the size of the relevant piece of data. Just program in a table of common names, and words of the same length to substitute.
Funny, I build systems precisely to ensure that I get high quality components. It's the PC boxshifters like Dell, Compaq and HP who build their systems out of crappy components, to shave a few pennies off the price.
I want a silent Seagate hard drive, a better-than-Plextor CD-RW, a motherboard that has open source drivers for all the hardware, and so on. The only way to get parts of that quality is to build the machine yourself. Even Apple use some pretty crappy components.
Yeah, imagine the fun of a virus that quietly swapped names around in documents, or replaced first names with obscene nicknames. ("Smith, explain to me again why our bid for the contract referred to their CEO as 'Pin-dick' on page 6?")
For spreadsheets, the optimum in evil would probably be to pick a random numeric cell and swap two adjacent digits. Hard to spot and correct even if you know what you're looking for.
Both would be pretty easy to program.
I didn't have to talk my mother through anything, because her computer's running Linux.
Naah, the VPN was down, so the fact that I don't run Windows didn't help.
No CFO worth his salt would base a decision on up-front cost without considering TCO.
Why don't you just buy the DVD? The show has finished now, it's all out on DVD.
OS X has a full X server that integrates X applications into its desktop, so I guess it isn't proprietary.
Almost all Mac applications can be scripted, and you can call scripts from the command line. I have scripts which fire up a graphical web browser, connect to BBC radio, pull the audio down as AIFF files, run those through normalize and then encode them via LAME.
OS X has pretty much a complete UNIX toolset under the hood, and you can script with AppleScript, Perl, Python, and so on.
Let's see... Proprietary GUI, proprietary programs (C compiler etc)... sounds like Solaris. So I guess Solaris isn't UNIX?
"all the programs on the OS are proprietary...none of the Unix system configuration programs.."? You haven't even used OS X, have you? Ignorant fool.
That's only true if you think "UNIX" is the trademark and the license--in which case, which UNIX do you run?
Presumably because they're unaware that it's a network where some of the servers are run by crooks.
Either that or they don't care...
In fact, something that hasn't been getting enough attention is that it's impossible to run Windows on a computer with a dial-up connection, unless you are prepared to run without the latest patches.
Reason being, to download the latest service pack and patch load is an 8+ hour task, and good luck getting Windows to hold a reliable dialup connection for that long via a WinModem. Plus in most countries, you're paying for the phone call...
I realized this when my parents asked me to reinstall their system after it was wiped out by a worm (again). They had install CDs... but there was no way to install the necessary patches, so they'd just get infected again. Microsoft has now started offering update CDs, but that'll only get you up to date as of October last year.
My parents are now running Linux. Over a year without a single crash, worm or virus. I think they're believers now.
Microsoft should be required to put a sticker on Windows boxes saying "WARNING: This software cannot be used safely on Internet-connected computers unless you have a broadband connection."
There is. QuickTime on Mac OS X.
Just as a minor point, the bandwidth used by rejecting spam during the SMTP handshake or part-way through the header is pretty minimal. Most sensible ISPs are already doing rate limiting on incoming SMTP connections to prevent DoS.
So what? Any spammer who complies with the CAN-SPAM act has to put "ADV" in the subject line, so they will find that my mail server bounces their crap immediately when they attempt to deliver it. So "merely" getting spammers to comply with the act is perfectly fine by me.
The authentication doesn't just prevent DRM-removal. It also cripples iTunes' ability to connect to non-iTunes music shares.
I have my entire music library--which, incidentally, is 100% legal and paid for--on a Linux server running daapd. iTunes 4.5 broke iTunes so I could no longer pay my legally purchased music on my Macintosh.
Fortunately, the maintainer of daapd worked out the fix about as quickly as the maintainer of libopendaap did, and I've been able to upgrade iTunes after all.
Make no mistake, Apple's screwing around does have a negative impact on their customers, even the ones who haven't infringed copyright.
What does PSYC gain me over XMPP? Given that XMPP is an RFC, I need a compelling end-user reason to use something else.