Because official Android builds only run on ARM hardware, unofficial builds are crippled because they aren't allowed access to the Android Market, and ARM processors are all geared to low power consumption and therefore don't have the raw horsepower a console needs to be successful. Sure, you could probably put together a 4-core 1.2GHz Android system, but its performance would be pretty poor in comparison to your PS3.
World of Goo was made by two people and is sold as WiiWare.
OK. The multi-award-winning first project of a small company founded by two well-known former employees of one of the largest games developers in the world was available. Any other examples of small and previously-unknown indy developers releasing completely new games (not derivitive of existing popular titles) on a Nintendo console?
Nintendo doesn't generally have a problem competing on value for money, that why the Wii can compete with the PS3 and XBox
Meh. The Wii doesn't offer value for money compared to the competition; it costs about the same as an XBox 360, and somewhat less than a PS3, but is clearly inferior to these devices in many respects (e.g. doesn't double as a blu-ray player, doesn't support HD video output, is severly lacking in graphics processing power meaning that many popular modern games simply cannot be ported to it). What it does offer is a unique experience that's different to what the competition provides, which is a different way of competing than providing value for money. We'll see how popular it stays when more XBox/Kinect games start to become available, as they are likely to be more competitive with it.
and why the DS is the market leader
Other than the fact that, again, it's an innovative product that doesn't really have any competition. The PSP, lacking touchscreen input and therefore being unsuitable for a whole class of games that make the DS popular, can't be considered a true competitor. So the DS is on its won, just like the Wii. Except, of course, for the forecasts that have been published recently that seem to suggest that it'll lose its dominance to the iPhone this year.
It's hard to compete with value for money, isn't it Nintendo?
Not really. You just have to not be greedy.
Listen, if I have a 4-man development team that takes a year to write a game, and expect to sell 250,000 copies of that game, why would I not sell the game for $2 a copy, which is enough to cover my development costs and provide a small profit?
Wow, good thing you went with the open platform otherwise you might have had to compile your own hacked third party OS update together when the manufacturer bailed on you. Just think of the hours you could have not spent searching through forums and triple checking instructions. Good thing you didn't fall into Apple's trap./sarcasm
You do realise installing one of these community builds is pretty-much just a case of download, hook up via USB, and tell the installer to upload it, right? OK, it may be a multi-step process (you have to root the device first), but you don't have to compile yourself; there are other people who will do that for you. Typical instructions here.
Only if the manufacturer has obeyed the GPL. HTC hasn't, I'm still waiting for the kernel source they're supposed to provide on request for the phone I bought nearly a year ago.
Really? I see quite a few available here. Are you sure your phone isn't on the list?
BoingBoing does the same thing with Creative Commons photos all the fucking time, and nobody ever calls them on it.
Actually, I've seen them called on it, and I've seen them apologise for it. And as one of their biggest posters (and the one responsible for the mistake I saw) is a major contributor to CC, I'm inclined to give him a free pass on that one.
Now that the last IPv4 address blocks have been allocated
Last article I read on this subject, only a couple of weeks ago, suggested the final blocks were still to be allocated and weren't expected to be handed over until March at the earliest. Has something happened I haven't heard about?
There is a trivial mapping between IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, very similar to the one you propose. Bernstein's attack is against a strawman version of IPv6 that doesn't contain this feature.
But what if you're using their address for something, like tracking repeat visits, or security, or using geolocation to serve them targeted ads? Do you mind if 80% of your customer visits are now arriving from one of ten big consumer ISP NAT blocks instead of their individual IPv4 or IPv6 addresses?
As the only suggested alternatives to large-scale IPv6 adoption are effectively either (1) putting all consumers behind huge ISP NAT blocks with IPv4 between them and the NAT routers rather than IPv6 and (2) abandoning the 1-1 allocation of addresses to users and performing routing using some of the bits in the port number, you're going to get these problems anyway. At least IPv6 allows a solution (switch to a pure IPv6 implementation, rather than staying on IPv4); the alternative just make such schemes impossible.
I've replied in detail to this article before, but my main point remains: Bernstein's attacking a strawman version of IPv6. Real IPv6 implementations have gateways that allow IPv6 clients to contact IPv4 servers. This removes most of the problems he discusses.
You mean or using internet based services, right? Sure you can do dual stack, but as services move to IPv6 you're going to have to start worrying about whether a key service that you use is going to be going IPv6 only.
No, he means offering. Nobody's going to be providing important IPv6 only services for the foreseeable future. Hosting providers who don't offer IPv4 hosting will be sidelined for those who have a reserve of IPv4 addresses they can give to customers. ISPs will start shifting end users onto IPv6 networks so they can reclaim those valuable IPv4 addresses for their hosting branches. Only once somewhere around half of all end users are on IPv6 will significant proportions of hosting providers start failing to find IPv4 addresses they can use, and at that point we'll start seeing IPv6-only services.
So, right now, as an end user you don't need to worry. IPv4 is still around, and for pretty much everything you care about is going to stay around. Anyone willing to spend cash putting a service online will still be available via IPv4. Nothing important will change.
As a service provider, you need to worry. Ever-increasing proportions of your customer base will be accessing you via IPv6. If you only offer an IPv4 service, their connections will be forwarded through a huge NAT gateway, which will likely become slow and unreliable as a larger and larger proportion of users use it. You will be forced to implement IPv6 to maintain quality of service.
The only other demographic who needs to care is one the media doesn't like to talk about, at least not in this context: P2P users. Most current P2P systems assume their users are being allocated IPv4 addresses on which they can open ports to accept incoming connections. This will be less and less likely to be the case in future. Existing P2P systems will break, and will need to be replaces with IPv6-compatible ones.
Dunno. It's totally idiotic, and it applies to all links to posts, including the one when you've just posted a comment via a new window rather than the embedded form.
Currently, the kindle app is one of the the only reasons I ever pick up the iPad anymore. Apple shouldn't mess with it. I have no qualms about ditching the iPad if they do...
Good point. A Kindle 3 will cost you a lot less than the second hand value of your iPad, has substantially better battery life and is much more portable. Apple had really better tread carefully before they piss off too many of their users.
So the really easy solution is to not have these types of tickets, and only sell "blind" lottery tickets - where it's all scratchable area.
You're assuming that (1) the lottery organisers care -- they don't, they're spending the same on prizes whichever way the prizes are won -- and (2) that the partial information tickets don't sell significantly better than blind ones (I don't know whether this is the case or not, but I suspect they actually do). So that may be an easy solution but as it solves a problem that they don't care about, probably at a significant expense, it isn't going to happen. They'll carry on churning out these tickets, and gullible schmucks will keep buying them randomly, while people who know will watch for ones that are guaranteed wins.
I don't know what state you are in, but here in California, they can scan the barcode on the back to find out if the tickets are winners or not. You don't even have to do any math.
WTF? Is that not a problem for people? Surely the guys in the shop keep all the winners?
No problem because you can't use the system for this purpose: it logs the queries, and triggers a fraud investigation if somebody's scanning too many tickets (they should only be scanning winners that customers bring back).
Which is why it's not hugely profitable. At least where I am, the rolls are normally stored with about 3 tickets visible at the end. Most vendors stock about 5 or 6 different types, giving around 15 cards on display. You'd crack the visible cards, and have to buy up to 3 of the same kind of card whenever you saw a winner. If there were no winners, move on to the next store.
The simple solution from the lottery vendor's POV is to prevent the tickets from being visible before they're purchased. But I suspect this would result in a decrease in sales, so maybe they won't bother.
And why exactly do you not want to filter outbound traffic?
1. Because outbound filtering achieves nothing that I would consider useful. Once an attacker has compromised your system, there are trivial ways of getting around an outbound filter in order to download data, etc. My system needs to be able to make http requests, so outbound filtering isn't going to prevent an httpd worm from spreading (the only kind I'm vulnerable to). 2. Because it would require stateful inspection of connections to know which outbound packets are in reply to incoming connections that have been allowed, and would hence put a substantially higher load on my firewall, requiring a more expensive firewall in order to be sure it could cope with all the connections.
You mock, but if you are careful (only bind services that require public access to eth0, use tcp wrappers, harden things, etc), a firewall is mostly unnecessary.
Exactly. I have a firewall on my web server, but only because I'm required to contractually. The firewall passes traffic on ports 80 & 443 inbound and anything outbound. But as ports 80 and 443 are the only ones bound to services at the OS level (admin is through a virtual console accessed via an entirely different network, not publicly addressable) the firewall actually has no effect at all on the behaviour of the system. I could switch it off and be just as secure.
I really doubt this is based on alcohol on your hands.
So how do you think it works? The only plausible way I can think of would be detecting the alcohol content of your sweat. I suppose you could also attempt to detect one of the substances alcohol metabolises to, but there are serious disadvantages with that (it would probably not provide a positive reading until an hour or so after you started drinking, and would likely still provide positives four or five hours after you were no longer over the limit; plus the most obvious one to detect, acetic acid, can easily end up being present for plenty of other reasons).
I have no idea where the privacy argument comes from, as nobody's suggesting the car should report failed attempts to start it, or anything like that. The fact of the matter is that such devices are inconveniences. How's it going to distinguish between alcohol accumulating in my sweat because I have a high blood alcohol content and alcohol on my hands because I just used a product like this one?
Or, it's an emergency and I need to get someone to a hospital, but the damn mechanism is refusing to allow me to start the vehicle. Or I'm driving on the freeway and it's malfunctioning and shutting the engine down. Or I never drink alcohol and do not want to pay extra for this bullshit.
Or it reacts with a false positive because of the alcohol-based hand cleaner I use.
But, from TFA:
The systems would not be employed unless they are "seamless, unobtrusive and unfailingly accurate," [head of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] Strickland said.
Which is as close as a bureaucrat ever gets to saying "this isn't going to happen".
Don't know about your car, but mine tends to take at least 5 minutes before it starts to get warm, at least if I don't get in and drive it. Also, the heater won't work until the engine is started, so if this device won't let you start it without running a test, you're clearly going to have to take your gloves off in the cold in order to make it work.
I had a room mate who was obsessed with downloading everything and burning it to DVD. He literally had hundreds of burned DVDs in his closet on spindles. There's absolutely no way he had time to consume that much media, but he seeded it back while he slept and worked before burning it to dvd.
Since I started using bittorrent to get movies & tv shows, I've written 430 DVDs of miscellaneous stuff (typically 2 movies per DVD), plus somewhere in the region of 150 DVDs of TV series that I've put in separate spindles and not indexed in my main index. I've probably watched over 75% of this content. I think this collection has taken somewhere in the region of 6 years to amass. Another 6 months to a year would be enough time to watch everything I haven't watched yet.
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Because official Android builds only run on ARM hardware, unofficial builds are crippled because they aren't allowed access to the Android Market, and ARM processors are all geared to low power consumption and therefore don't have the raw horsepower a console needs to be successful. Sure, you could probably put together a 4-core 1.2GHz Android system, but its performance would be pretty poor in comparison to your PS3.
World of Goo was made by two people and is sold as WiiWare.
OK. The multi-award-winning first project of a small company founded by two well-known former employees of one of the largest games developers in the world was available. Any other examples of small and previously-unknown indy developers releasing completely new games (not derivitive of existing popular titles) on a Nintendo console?
Nintendo doesn't generally have a problem competing on value for money, that why the Wii can compete with the PS3 and XBox
Meh. The Wii doesn't offer value for money compared to the competition; it costs about the same as an XBox 360, and somewhat less than a PS3, but is clearly inferior to these devices in many respects (e.g. doesn't double as a blu-ray player, doesn't support HD video output, is severly lacking in graphics processing power meaning that many popular modern games simply cannot be ported to it). What it does offer is a unique experience that's different to what the competition provides, which is a different way of competing than providing value for money. We'll see how popular it stays when more XBox/Kinect games start to become available, as they are likely to be more competitive with it.
and why the DS is the market leader
Other than the fact that, again, it's an innovative product that doesn't really have any competition. The PSP, lacking touchscreen input and therefore being unsuitable for a whole class of games that make the DS popular, can't be considered a true competitor. So the DS is on its won, just like the Wii. Except, of course, for the forecasts that have been published recently that seem to suggest that it'll lose its dominance to the iPhone this year.
It's hard to compete with value for money, isn't it Nintendo?
Not really. You just have to not be greedy.
Listen, if I have a 4-man development team that takes a year to write a game, and expect to sell 250,000 copies of that game, why would I not sell the game for $2 a copy, which is enough to cover my development costs and provide a small profit?
Wow, good thing you went with the open platform otherwise you might have had to compile your own hacked third party OS update together when the manufacturer bailed on you. Just think of the hours you could have not spent searching through forums and triple checking instructions. Good thing you didn't fall into Apple's trap. /sarcasm
You do realise installing one of these community builds is pretty-much just a case of download, hook up via USB, and tell the installer to upload it, right? OK, it may be a multi-step process (you have to root the device first), but you don't have to compile yourself; there are other people who will do that for you. Typical instructions here.
Only if the manufacturer has obeyed the GPL. HTC hasn't, I'm still waiting for the kernel source they're supposed to provide on request for the phone I bought nearly a year ago.
Really? I see quite a few available here. Are you sure your phone isn't on the list?
BoingBoing does the same thing with Creative Commons photos all the fucking time, and nobody ever calls them on it.
Actually, I've seen them called on it, and I've seen them apologise for it. And as one of their biggest posters (and the one responsible for the mistake I saw) is a major contributor to CC, I'm inclined to give him a free pass on that one.
Now that the last IPv4 address blocks have been allocated
Last article I read on this subject, only a couple of weeks ago, suggested the final blocks were still to be allocated and weren't expected to be handed over until March at the earliest. Has something happened I haven't heard about?
There is a trivial mapping between IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, very similar to the one you propose. Bernstein's attack is against a strawman version of IPv6 that doesn't contain this feature.
But what if you're using their address for something, like tracking repeat visits, or security, or using geolocation to serve them targeted ads? Do you mind if 80% of your customer visits are now arriving from one of ten big consumer ISP NAT blocks instead of their individual IPv4 or IPv6 addresses?
As the only suggested alternatives to large-scale IPv6 adoption are effectively either (1) putting all consumers behind huge ISP NAT blocks with IPv4 between them and the NAT routers rather than IPv6 and (2) abandoning the 1-1 allocation of addresses to users and performing routing using some of the bits in the port number, you're going to get these problems anyway. At least IPv6 allows a solution (switch to a pure IPv6 implementation, rather than staying on IPv4); the alternative just make such schemes impossible.
Not so fast:
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
I've replied in detail to this article before, but my main point remains: Bernstein's attacking a strawman version of IPv6. Real IPv6 implementations have gateways that allow IPv6 clients to contact IPv4 servers. This removes most of the problems he discusses.
http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=128822984018595&w=2
While these are interesting objections, and appear to be objects to real problems in IPv6 rather than imagined ones, none seem like showstoppers.
You mean or using internet based services, right? Sure you can do dual stack, but as services move to IPv6 you're going to have to start worrying about whether a key service that you use is going to be going IPv6 only.
No, he means offering. Nobody's going to be providing important IPv6 only services for the foreseeable future. Hosting providers who don't offer IPv4 hosting will be sidelined for those who have a reserve of IPv4 addresses they can give to customers. ISPs will start shifting end users onto IPv6 networks so they can reclaim those valuable IPv4 addresses for their hosting branches. Only once somewhere around half of all end users are on IPv6 will significant proportions of hosting providers start failing to find IPv4 addresses they can use, and at that point we'll start seeing IPv6-only services.
So, right now, as an end user you don't need to worry. IPv4 is still around, and for pretty much everything you care about is going to stay around. Anyone willing to spend cash putting a service online will still be available via IPv4. Nothing important will change.
As a service provider, you need to worry. Ever-increasing proportions of your customer base will be accessing you via IPv6. If you only offer an IPv4 service, their connections will be forwarded through a huge NAT gateway, which will likely become slow and unreliable as a larger and larger proportion of users use it. You will be forced to implement IPv6 to maintain quality of service.
The only other demographic who needs to care is one the media doesn't like to talk about, at least not in this context: P2P users. Most current P2P systems assume their users are being allocated IPv4 addresses on which they can open ports to accept incoming connections. This will be less and less likely to be the case in future. Existing P2P systems will break, and will need to be replaces with IPv6-compatible ones.
Dunno. It's totally idiotic, and it applies to all links to posts, including the one when you've just posted a comment via a new window rather than the embedded form.
Currently, the kindle app is one of the the only reasons I ever pick up the iPad anymore. Apple shouldn't mess with it. I have no qualms about ditching the iPad if they do...
Good point. A Kindle 3 will cost you a lot less than the second hand value of your iPad, has substantially better battery life and is much more portable. Apple had really better tread carefully before they piss off too many of their users.
So the really easy solution is to not have these types of tickets, and only sell "blind" lottery tickets - where it's all scratchable area.
You're assuming that (1) the lottery organisers care -- they don't, they're spending the same on prizes whichever way the prizes are won -- and (2) that the partial information tickets don't sell significantly better than blind ones (I don't know whether this is the case or not, but I suspect they actually do). So that may be an easy solution but as it solves a problem that they don't care about, probably at a significant expense, it isn't going to happen. They'll carry on churning out these tickets, and gullible schmucks will keep buying them randomly, while people who know will watch for ones that are guaranteed wins.
I don't know what state you are in, but here in California, they can scan the barcode on the back to find out if the tickets are winners or not. You don't even have to do any math.
WTF? Is that not a problem for people? Surely the guys in the shop keep all the winners?
No problem because you can't use the system for this purpose: it logs the queries, and triggers a fraud investigation if somebody's scanning too many tickets (they should only be scanning winners that customers bring back).
Which is why it's not hugely profitable. At least where I am, the rolls are normally stored with about 3 tickets visible at the end. Most vendors stock about 5 or 6 different types, giving around 15 cards on display. You'd crack the visible cards, and have to buy up to 3 of the same kind of card whenever you saw a winner. If there were no winners, move on to the next store.
The simple solution from the lottery vendor's POV is to prevent the tickets from being visible before they're purchased. But I suspect this would result in a decrease in sales, so maybe they won't bother.
And why exactly do you not want to filter outbound traffic?
1. Because outbound filtering achieves nothing that I would consider useful. Once an attacker has compromised your system, there are trivial ways of getting around an outbound filter in order to download data, etc. My system needs to be able to make http requests, so outbound filtering isn't going to prevent an httpd worm from spreading (the only kind I'm vulnerable to).
2. Because it would require stateful inspection of connections to know which outbound packets are in reply to incoming connections that have been allowed, and would hence put a substantially higher load on my firewall, requiring a more expensive firewall in order to be sure it could cope with all the connections.
You mock, but if you are careful (only bind services that require public access to eth0, use tcp wrappers, harden things, etc), a firewall is mostly unnecessary.
Exactly. I have a firewall on my web server, but only because I'm required to contractually. The firewall passes traffic on ports 80 & 443 inbound and anything outbound. But as ports 80 and 443 are the only ones bound to services at the OS level (admin is through a virtual console accessed via an entirely different network, not publicly addressable) the firewall actually has no effect at all on the behaviour of the system. I could switch it off and be just as secure.
I really doubt this is based on alcohol on your hands.
So how do you think it works? The only plausible way I can think of would be detecting the alcohol content of your sweat. I suppose you could also attempt to detect one of the substances alcohol metabolises to, but there are serious disadvantages with that (it would probably not provide a positive reading until an hour or so after you started drinking, and would likely still provide positives four or five hours after you were no longer over the limit; plus the most obvious one to detect, acetic acid, can easily end up being present for plenty of other reasons).
I have no idea where the privacy argument comes from, as nobody's suggesting the car should report failed attempts to start it, or anything like that. The fact of the matter is that such devices are inconveniences. How's it going to distinguish between alcohol accumulating in my sweat because I have a high blood alcohol content and alcohol on my hands because I just used a product like this one?
Or, it's an emergency and I need to get someone to a hospital, but the damn mechanism is refusing to allow me to start the vehicle. Or I'm driving on the freeway and it's malfunctioning and shutting the engine down. Or I never drink alcohol and do not want to pay extra for this bullshit.
Or it reacts with a false positive because of the alcohol-based hand cleaner I use.
But, from TFA:
The systems would not be employed unless they are "seamless, unobtrusive and unfailingly accurate," [head of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] Strickland said.
Which is as close as a bureaucrat ever gets to saying "this isn't going to happen".
You know cars have heat nowadays right?
Don't know about your car, but mine tends to take at least 5 minutes before it starts to get warm, at least if I don't get in and drive it. Also, the heater won't work until the engine is started, so if this device won't let you start it without running a test, you're clearly going to have to take your gloves off in the cold in order to make it work.
I've never gotten a fake or malware-infected file; oh wait, I actually pay for the software, music, and movies that I want to watch. Maybe that's why.
I haven't either. I read the comments before I download and only download content released by trusted release groups.
I had a room mate who was obsessed with downloading everything and burning it to DVD. He literally had hundreds of burned DVDs in his closet on spindles. There's absolutely no way he had time to consume that much media, but he seeded it back while he slept and worked before burning it to dvd.
Since I started using bittorrent to get movies & tv shows, I've written 430 DVDs of miscellaneous stuff (typically 2 movies per DVD), plus somewhere in the region of 150 DVDs of TV series that I've put in separate spindles and not indexed in my main index. I've probably watched over 75% of this content. I think this collection has taken somewhere in the region of 6 years to amass. Another 6 months to a year would be enough time to watch everything I haven't watched yet.