How on earth did someone end up with a box still in the land of 1.3?
The only way I can think of is that they don't have TiVo service at all. Or are making comments based on a TiVo they once used but sold (heretic! Burn him!).
And yes, the GUI can be slow at times. It's run as a lower priority process, since TiVo wanted to make sure the encoding got the CPU time needed.
Why isn't there more open support for this? You'd think that Dishnetwork would promote this type of thing.
Yes, they are very much interested in putting their receivers on a totally open box which is easily hackable.
Don't expect this anytime soon. There's too much for the broadcasters to lose, and both they and the community know it. They have enough problems with people buying hacked equipment from Canada (where it's legal - neither Dish nor DirecTV have the right to broadcast in Canada, so it's not illegal to make hacked boxes/cards/etc that receive it), much less someone just running a program to open up every single pay channel or ppv movies/events.
Certainly. But are you going to do this on a DSL link? I mean, really? Particularly a residential class one?
Companies pay big bucks for links for this kind of thing because they need the reliability, the right-to-scream, and the bandwidth (roughly in that order).
The original poster was pretty off kilter, that's for sure. If he's using his DSL for primarily business purposes it makes sense that the ISP should charge him for a business class service.
There have been many other good points brought up as well. Namely that if you are going to pay a premium for business class service, you should get something for that other than a larger bill. Namely, static IP, the right to run servers/VPN/etc, improved reliability and support, and maybe better bandwidth upstream.
Frankly, I'd get business class DSL if some of the above was offered. But right now my only real options for DSL are Earthlink (who we use) and Bellsouth. Earthlink doesn't offer an improved DSL package. Bellsouth offers "business grade" DSL - but it's still dynamic IP, multiple boxes behind a single NAT'd IP, no additional reliability guarantee, etc. Essentially you pay them more for no reason. No thanks.
I have to use IE at work. There is absolutely no alternative.
The proxy software that was recently put in place uses Windows Authentication to let you through. Basically this entails logging into the proxy using your NT userid/password - all of which is sent automagically by IE. Without this the proxy won't let you through, not even for DNS.
So no, I don't have a choice.
What really sucks is that because of this proxy, there's no ways out of the network either. If I want to telnet to a box out on the net, I can't do it - even if the box has sshd listening on port 80, 119, etc. putty can't connect because it can't get through the proxy.
There were such huge issues that this should not have ever gone gold. And these were not unknown issues. They were reported by beta testers (one of whom I know and is actually credited in the back of the book) a week or more prior to release.
Bards were broken. They didn't work at all. Again.
All group buffs were broken - which seriously screws the high level game.
Crashing due to numerous reasons, resources being sucked dry by several different aspects of the game (heck, the patcher eats all your CPU when it starts. Why? Because it's standard Verant coding - broken).
The requirements aren't just high. They're ridiculous. The graphics are nice, but they're not as good as DAoC IMO, and DAoC has far lower requirements. Not to mention that requiring DX8.1 (ok, technically 8.0a, but you can't get that easily anymore) breaks Win95 and makes the game mostly broken on 3dfx cards (already replaced my fiancee's Voodoo3 - that cost $200). You can play with 256MB, but I don't recommend it. At least memory is cheap. Too bad Win9x can't properly deal with >512MB on most PCs. The recommended CPU is 1 GHz, which is considerably higher than the average level right now - well over half my guild, which is one of the top guilds in the entire game - doesn't really have the CPU to upgrade. Myself included (Athlon 700).
It broke EQW, which allowed people to actually use their computers for other things while playing EQ, and/or allowed them to play multiple accounts on one PC (no, this isn't Verant's responsibility. No, it doesn't break the EULA technically. Yes, Verant are nitwits for continuing to refuse windowed functionality. No, I don't think anyone could realistically play more than one account on a single PC with the new minimum req's).
It's pretty, I'll play it some after a 4 month hiatus (mainly because my fiancee, who I met through the game, wants to), but this is by far the worst release Verant has done yet. I was there for both the Kunark and Velious releases. They were clean by comparison.
ROFL. DAoC is far easier to PL in than EQ. Get in a group no more than n levels above you (I don't recall the formula right now, but it was posted by the DAoC peeps), have them kill purples and reds, and you'll fly up in XP. My fiancee and I got well over an entire level in one night doing this, and I have friends who have gotten 2-3 levels/night this way.
Of course, you'll catch up to the higher level people in short time, but that's the idea anyway.
I suspect that once DAoC has more time under its belt you'll hear of people leveling to 50 in short order. I think the EQ record is slightly under 3 played days.
In general, however, I agree that DAoC has fewer stupidities than EQ does, yet still has enough challenge to it for long term survival. Mystic seems to have a clue and is treating their customer base with respect - something that Verant has never done.
Just look at the Tivo -- what benefit does a Tivo owner have because the kernel is GPL'ed -- has anyone rebuilt their Tivo linux kernel to fix a bug in it? I doubt it.
Actually, yes. Back when the first HD hacks were being performed on the TiVo someone hacked the kernel to fix a bug that prevented support of >40 GB drives. I believe the kernel in the current software release on the TiVo (2.5) already has this fixed, or they've found a different workaround, since you can now create 225+ hour TiVo's (previously the 40GB issue limited you to ~80 hour ones (2 40G drives)).
Sorry, can't provide the links or verify that the above numbers are dead on since my employer blocks AVS Forum.
That said, I'll abstain from commenting on the real issue of the thread. I'm not sufficiently familiar with the ins and outs of MPL/LGPL/BSD licenses. The BSD license is more real world friendly, and many other posters have good points about the downsides of a company deciding to privately fork development off.
Yes, because clearly someone buying a $20k system is going to fret about another $15 for a CD.
No, it's because you can have improved access (instant switch times), improved database access for searching, and (hopefully) a far better output bitstream than nearly any CD player on the market - consumer or hi end. (Note that the system does not use any internal DAC for audio playback - the bitstream is sent out and converted by the Kivor Oktal or by an external DAC of your choosing). Oh, and it can serve 16 different songs at the same time (or so it appears).
Stupidly, however, the internet access is only a 56k modem. Hello? Ethernet? I'm really tired of all these "internet appliances" that want to dial up their very own connection.
Actually those various identifiers are used commonly in the projection screen market. Not with CRT projectors (which are analog), but with the various digital projection/display techs (LCD, DLP, DILA, plasma, etc).
It's really weird to be reading SGHT and see them refer to a flat panel LCD TV with "UXGA" resolution or a DLP projector with "XGA" resolution.
I don't see anything particularly vile or reprehensible in the MS memo. It looked like some fairly standard marketing diatribe and the kind of thing that any agressive company would promote.
What's to be learned from this? That if you want Linux out there instead of MS, then you're going to have to market it. Whoever is selling Linux based solutions will need to be just as tenacious and aggressive as a MS marketer can be. No laying down just because Solaris/AIX/HP-UX/etc to Linux is a "natural" migration -- it's clear that MS will make it seem unnatural, slow, error prone, etc. After all, if they can sell IIS over Apache (and web service is one of Linux's strengths), they can certainly do it in other areas as well.
IBM's marketing department has been aggressive for decades. And I know most small firms don't roll over and play dead easily either (or else they wouldn't be in business long), but this is a good reminder that there's competition out there.
The idea is not for you to be able to identify what station you're watching - by looking at an onscreen guide - but it's to ENSURE you know what station you're watching.
Once people stopped watching TV when the networks wanted them to watch it this became important. Tape something to a VCR, play it back when you want, and you may very well not care what station it came from; but the broadcaster certainly does want you to know.
With TiVo and other digital recording devices it's even more endemic. You may not have even told it to record the program. It just did because it fit some set of criteria. And you're going to be skipping commercials! All YOU care about is the program name and content. This doesn't give the broadcaster much sell room.
A lot of pundits and PDR users know that commercials are ineffective now -- the only time I "watch" them is when I'm not paying attention to the show much anyway and don't pick up the remote to FF through them. I suspect that eventually TV networks will move to banner ads or something similar, with side-band information available to those with "interactive" digital TV sets.
Would I love to see the logos go poof? Sure. Do I think they will? No way. Not unless you want to pay for the right to have a TV (ala the UK) or pay for every channel you receive.
Uh... the AI is _vastly_ improved. Did you consider that the reason the AI is sending mass amounts of troops through your territory is because it wants to attack? When they send only one unit they'll certainly claim to be leaving in short order (but I will say that there's no way to immediately foist them out of your borders like there was in Civ1/2 -- and like they can to you). I don't see how you think this is unrealistic anyway - I don't think many modern countries would let another countries forces wander around their country without raising a stink.
The computer doesn't throw one or two units against you either. It amasses troops and then attacks with all of them at once - just like a human would. It will also avoid well fortified points and go after weaker ones, again like a human. It expands very fast, will grab onto any point of land it can find, and will willfully corner you so you can't expand. They'll control strategic resources like iron and saltpepper.
Thus far I've only played on Chieftan, but Firaxis has stated that the "intelligence" of the AI doesn't change regardless of level. There's only a slight difference in aggression and huge differences in "cheating" (for or against the player) between the different levels.
The biggest complaint to date is the overbearing corruption. Firaxis has posted on this some as well, but I still suspect that they'll eventually patch the game to lower the corruption effects somewhat. (Or you can just change it in the editor if you want).
...it's still worse than just about any other window manager out there.
The common thread I've seen among the people who liked CDE is that "it's better than OpenWindows". Well, sure. screen is better than OpenWindows, and more intuitive too. But I don't get why you didn't install/use a more reasonably window manager over both. When I was in college nobody used OpenWindows for longer than it took them to poke the guy next to them and say "how'd you get your Sun to look like that?" (or alternately they'd ask how to actually use the damned thing and the adjacent geek would just foist a new window manager upon them to make life easier).
twm, tvtwm, and fvwm were all far more useful to me. I found them all far easier (on a relative basis) to configure and maintain, vastly easier to work with, and much less cluttered. They were also rock solid as far as stability, fast, and had a relatively small footprint. I still have my fvwm 1.24r config laying around somewhere.
Funny thing... I was actually talking about this kind of thing on IRC with some friends this morning. Well before I knew about this.
There really aren't many alternatives to Exchange right now. There's Notes, which is massive bloatware for most people - yes, it does more than just email/scheduling/calendaring, but most companies aren't interested in the "and more!" bit. Notes is pretty platform neutral though. There's also the Netscape/Sun iPlanet, which I'm unimpressed with from what I've seen.
Until there is a viable alternative to Exchange a lot of companies won't even bother looking at non-MS solutions. Because they're going to need the Exchange servers in place for what they currently use them for. Which means that you're stuck on an MS desktop. And a lot of CEO's and CIO's will question the value of moving servers off Windows as long as you still have to have some Windows servers.
Yes, these are all issues that can be worked around, but no matter what advocates might think, the reality is that this kind of thought process occurs daily and it's what keeps entrenhed companies entrenched. I know a lot of people will just say "well then they're stupid! Let them suffer for their own stupidity!" but realize that there are FAR more of "them" then there are of "us". You're living in the world of the unwashed masses, not vica versa.
It's not going to delay 1.0, it's going to bring something vitally needed to the table (eventually). It should be properly segmented out so as to avoid code bloat. This is a Good Thing.
Hills are +50% defense, Mountains are +100%. Various other terrain (forests, swamp, jungle) also has a modifier, although I don't recall them off hand.
The terrain in Civ3 looks more realistic, but it has the same "granularity" as before. But it seems that there are some pretty significant differences - units with no defense can be captured by opposing civs (workers and cannons are mentioned in the interview, I'd guess that settlers and other artillary count as well. Caravans no longer exist).
I'm hoping Civ3 will be more like Civ2 and less like SMAC. I hated SMAC, but I love Civ1 and 2 and still play Civ2 to this day on occasion.
Offtopic, but frankly MMORPGers do care about bandwidth. Many uber guilds in Everquest require at least ISDN, and often more because while it's a nice concept that the game is tuned for 56k, at the high end of the game it's not. I regularly saw bandwidths well over what 56k allowed, and watched anyone with a modem go link dead.
Also latency isn't a huge issue for MMORPGs as it is for FPS or even RTS. Unless you're doing PvP, in which case you're matched against someone else instead of some computer generated monster. For most MMORPGs you have a fairly lax required reaction speed - measured in seconds, not milliseconds.
Oh, and it's only Asheron's Call that is so lame to auto-teleport you away. EQ will allow any number of players in one place at a time. Witness the zones that are often used as bazaars, or the early GM events where you'd see several hundred people at a single location. Not that the game handled it well, but it at least tried.
There's a reason that people who are actually INTO projection only use line doubled (or better) images. It takes a lot of the ugliness out of the NTSC standard. Most HDTV sets are sold with built in line doublers now, of varying degrees of competence.
There's no way in hell you could put one on this kind of thing though. The electronics can't handle the increased scan rate that would be required.
It's not an issue of resolution - you're going to get the same resolution no matter what - it's an issue of quality. The real projection manufacturers work to control things like bloom, distortion, convergence, etc. on this scale. The requirements for a 32" TV are far less. And the vast majority of consumer TVs do a piss poor job even at their designed size. You have colors that don't even vaguely approximate reality because sets with more red sell better on a showroom floor. The contrast and brightness (aka white balance) are way off the scale because of the same reason.
And brightness on these suckers is gonna suck. CRT projectors have low brightness anyway, and they're designed to be projected up to large sizes. Digital projectors (LCD, DLP, DILA) have 2-5x the brightness of a CRT and are still made for darkened rooms.
Will some people be happy with it? Sure. Same people that download 100MB VCD's of some 2 hour movie and think it looks and sounds great, or listens to lowest quality MP3's (or hell, FM radio) and thinks they've never heard anything better.
The only thing that makes me hope that the average consumer can indeed choose VASTLY improved quality over price is the success of DVD.
Kind of. If one of your spacing limitations is due to I/O, and the limitation on the I/O is due to the necessity of placing huge (relatively) gobs of solder between the output lines and the package pins, then removing the solder may allow you to space I/O lines closer together, giving you more die space for logic.
But, yes, merely removing the solder doesn't change anything as far as the photolithography, deposition, or etching steps are concerned, and photo will still be one of the primary limitations in feature size (which then dictates just how many transisters you can pack into a square centimeter).
Intel is merely expecting some reduced power consumption (and thus heat production), and that this is "step in our march toward making processors with 1 billion transistors" not that this will itself allow such.
You seem to have forgotten the way the US legal sytem works. There are three branches - the legislative (Congress) which passes the laws, the Executive (President, Cabinets) which enforces the laws, and the Judicial (courts) which decides the legality of the laws.
Very often the courts will wind up with an issue for which there is no clear cut law. Then it's up to the judge(s) to make a rational decision based not only on case law, but also on what makes sense in modern society and to themselves. Sometimes these rulings wind up with the legislature passing a new law to either reaffirm the ruling or to invalidate it (whether or not the new law is legal is another question).
That's all that's really happened here.
And as for the flames of "the Internet has no boundaries!" - yeah. That's nice. When you want to get back to the Real World, let us know because the Real World still has boundaries and so legal precedent of what laws apply to cyberspace make a huge difference. How would you like to get deported to China for breaking a law there on the Internet because the industrialized countries had agreed to respect each others legal systems when it came to viewers inside their country? Or get deported to the US because the NSA decided you were a threat?
As it happens, this ruling could make such a thing impossible, since Cyberspace is in a different legal jurisdiction... the question becomes, who's jurisdiction is it? And no, anarchy is not a viable solution. Go read some Niven if you think otherwise.
No, they're doing it because with an analog copy (read: tape) you degrade the copy everytime you make a downstream copy. The copy of the original is not as high quality as the original. The copy of the copy is less so. And it doesn't take many generations of copying before it really starts sounding crappy.
Digital copying is perfect though. It doesn't matter if the copy is 1st generation or 100th generation - it sounds EXACTLY the same. So as far as the music and film execs are concerned this is a FAR, FAR bigger threat.
This is why Disney didn't release on DVD at first (and instead tried to support DivX). This is part of the reason that HDTV is going nowhere fast. It's why talks of HD DVD are going nowhere and why DVD-Audio and SACD only have analog outputs on the players. The RIAA and MPAA are all totally and utterly freaked by the idea that they will lose control of distribution. And distribution is something the two groups have a pretty ironclad grasp over right now.
Funny though... most of the artists don't seem quite so freaked. At least for musicians. Actors, directors, etc. seem more concerned though, but they generally make more money off films than musicians do off albums.
Actually, that tactic is often used to serve warrants. Not sure if it's ever been used to arrest people.
On topic, however, note that they don't appear to ask you to "come forward", they just ask you to not screw up the Net in retalitory attacks.
Oh, and finally, do you know that the bank in question has accounts owned by Osama bin Laden, or merely by the bin Laden family? The bin Laden family disowned Osama nearly a decade ago, froze most of his funds, and have done a great deal of good work, both in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Including a Israeli-Palestinian student exchange program to try and reduce misunderstandings and violence in Israel.
Yes, it's trivially simple to protect against buffer overflows. But it takes some regimented coding to do it properly instead of taking the easy way out.
Instead of using gets(), you use fgets(). Use strncpy() instead of strcpy(). And so forth. The only real difference between these calls is that the "safer" one lets you specify a maximum number of bytes to copy. So you know you can't copy a string that's larger than your destination buffer (and you use sizeof() or #define's to ensure you have the proper buffer size) and thus start overwriting executable code.
This is all high school level programming. Anyone that does it deserves to be strung up for professional negligence. As many others point out, one of the first large distributed cases of a buffer overrun exploit was 13 years ago. So it's not like this is a new thing.
And yes, there are probably some Unix programs running around with buffer overrun exploits in them. They've been largely weeded out over time though and, to some extent, Unix's permission scheme avoids most serious issues, at least when services are installed properly.
The real key difference between Unix and Windows though is very, very deep assumptions. Unix assumes that the user cannot be trusted (thou shalt not run as root), nor can any external input. Windows assumes that everyone will play nice. Since the reality of the world is that there is a significant fraction of people who will NOT "play nice" it invalidates coding under that assumption. Thus the repeated security exploits using Microsoft tools and services - which weren't designed from the ground up to distrust the input given to them.
The plus side of "play nice" is that it's faster to code and you can put in features which would never, ever fly otherwise, like automagic remote installation of software. Or executing email attachments automatically. All that stuff that users think is "wow cool nifty" until someone does something they don't like.
Yes, this happened to Unix. Thirteen (13) years ago.
Sorry, but coding with buffer overrun exploits possible is not merely a mark of shoddy work, it's outright negligent. I was taught not to do this kind of thing in a high school Pascal class. Where do you dredge up programmers that don't realize this kind of thing needs to be protected against?
And yes, always programming in a paranoid "what can go wrong here" mindset can be dragging. It adds tons of lines of code that may never be executed since it's all "just in case" stuff.
Know what? It all pays off the first time one of those "it'll never happen" situations happens and instead of your code blowing up, or creating a security hole, or trashing the data it throws up an error and halts. It doesn't even have to halt nicely (bonus points for that), but halting is a helluva lot better than the alternatives. Do you have any idea how long it takes to debug one of these issues if you don't have proper error handling in?
So no, Unix isn't invulnerable, and yes, those stating otherwise are being somewhat hypocritical. But Microsoft has outright deceived the consumer and practiced gross professional negligence. The patch doesn't make it better. There should never have been a need for this particular patch in the first place.
And I'm not even going to get into the stupidities behind automagically executing files from untrusted sources.
... is that at least one of the planes was an American Airlines 757 flying from Boston to Los Angelos. It was hijacked, although they haven't released any information on who did it.
Haven't heard anything on the second jet yet except that it was also allegedly hijacked.
We're looking at several hundred deaths here, minimum. Possibly several thousand. Think about that.
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How on earth did someone end up with a box still in the land of 1.3?
The only way I can think of is that they don't have TiVo service at all. Or are making comments based on a TiVo they once used but sold (heretic! Burn him!).
And yes, the GUI can be slow at times. It's run as a lower priority process, since TiVo wanted to make sure the encoding got the CPU time needed.
As I recall, one of the biggest issues that TiVo had pre-release was synching the video and audio streams. But they finally got it right.
To add on top of that a 10% speedup would require reworking a large portion of that code.
Why isn't there more open support for this? You'd think that Dishnetwork would promote this type of thing.
Yes, they are very much interested in putting their receivers on a totally open box which is easily hackable.
Don't expect this anytime soon. There's too much for the broadcasters to lose, and both they and the community know it. They have enough problems with people buying hacked equipment from Canada (where it's legal - neither Dish nor DirecTV have the right to broadcast in Canada, so it's not illegal to make hacked boxes/cards/etc that receive it), much less someone just running a program to open up every single pay channel or ppv movies/events.
Certainly. But are you going to do this on a DSL link? I mean, really? Particularly a residential class one?
Companies pay big bucks for links for this kind of thing because they need the reliability, the right-to-scream, and the bandwidth (roughly in that order).
The original poster was pretty off kilter, that's for sure. If he's using his DSL for primarily business purposes it makes sense that the ISP should charge him for a business class service.
There have been many other good points brought up as well. Namely that if you are going to pay a premium for business class service, you should get something for that other than a larger bill. Namely, static IP, the right to run servers/VPN/etc, improved reliability and support, and maybe better bandwidth upstream.
Frankly, I'd get business class DSL if some of the above was offered. But right now my only real options for DSL are Earthlink (who we use) and Bellsouth. Earthlink doesn't offer an improved DSL package. Bellsouth offers "business grade" DSL - but it's still dynamic IP, multiple boxes behind a single NAT'd IP, no additional reliability guarantee, etc. Essentially you pay them more for no reason. No thanks.
I have to use IE at work. There is absolutely no alternative.
The proxy software that was recently put in place uses Windows Authentication to let you through. Basically this entails logging into the proxy using your NT userid/password - all of which is sent automagically by IE. Without this the proxy won't let you through, not even for DNS.
So no, I don't have a choice.
What really sucks is that because of this proxy, there's no ways out of the network either. If I want to telnet to a box out on the net, I can't do it - even if the box has sshd listening on port 80, 119, etc. putty can't connect because it can't get through the proxy.
There were such huge issues that this should not have ever gone gold. And these were not unknown issues. They were reported by beta testers (one of whom I know and is actually credited in the back of the book) a week or more prior to release.
Bards were broken. They didn't work at all. Again.
All group buffs were broken - which seriously screws the high level game.
Crashing due to numerous reasons, resources being sucked dry by several different aspects of the game (heck, the patcher eats all your CPU when it starts. Why? Because it's standard Verant coding - broken).
The requirements aren't just high. They're ridiculous. The graphics are nice, but they're not as good as DAoC IMO, and DAoC has far lower requirements. Not to mention that requiring DX8.1 (ok, technically 8.0a, but you can't get that easily anymore) breaks Win95 and makes the game mostly broken on 3dfx cards (already replaced my fiancee's Voodoo3 - that cost $200). You can play with 256MB, but I don't recommend it. At least memory is cheap. Too bad Win9x can't properly deal with >512MB on most PCs. The recommended CPU is 1 GHz, which is considerably higher than the average level right now - well over half my guild, which is one of the top guilds in the entire game - doesn't really have the CPU to upgrade. Myself included (Athlon 700).
It broke EQW, which allowed people to actually use their computers for other things while playing EQ, and/or allowed them to play multiple accounts on one PC (no, this isn't Verant's responsibility. No, it doesn't break the EULA technically. Yes, Verant are nitwits for continuing to refuse windowed functionality. No, I don't think anyone could realistically play more than one account on a single PC with the new minimum req's).
It's pretty, I'll play it some after a 4 month hiatus (mainly because my fiancee, who I met through the game, wants to), but this is by far the worst release Verant has done yet. I was there for both the Kunark and Velious releases. They were clean by comparison.
ROFL. DAoC is far easier to PL in than EQ. Get in a group no more than n levels above you (I don't recall the formula right now, but it was posted by the DAoC peeps), have them kill purples and reds, and you'll fly up in XP. My fiancee and I got well over an entire level in one night doing this, and I have friends who have gotten 2-3 levels/night this way.
Of course, you'll catch up to the higher level people in short time, but that's the idea anyway.
I suspect that once DAoC has more time under its belt you'll hear of people leveling to 50 in short order. I think the EQ record is slightly under 3 played days.
In general, however, I agree that DAoC has fewer stupidities than EQ does, yet still has enough challenge to it for long term survival. Mystic seems to have a clue and is treating their customer base with respect - something that Verant has never done.
Actually, yes. Back when the first HD hacks were being performed on the TiVo someone hacked the kernel to fix a bug that prevented support of >40 GB drives. I believe the kernel in the current software release on the TiVo (2.5) already has this fixed, or they've found a different workaround, since you can now create 225+ hour TiVo's (previously the 40GB issue limited you to ~80 hour ones (2 40G drives)).
Sorry, can't provide the links or verify that the above numbers are dead on since my employer blocks AVS Forum.
That said, I'll abstain from commenting on the real issue of the thread. I'm not sufficiently familiar with the ins and outs of MPL/LGPL/BSD licenses. The BSD license is more real world friendly, and many other posters have good points about the downsides of a company deciding to privately fork development off.
Yes, because clearly someone buying a $20k system is going to fret about another $15 for a CD.
No, it's because you can have improved access (instant switch times), improved database access for searching, and (hopefully) a far better output bitstream than nearly any CD player on the market - consumer or hi end. (Note that the system does not use any internal DAC for audio playback - the bitstream is sent out and converted by the Kivor Oktal or by an external DAC of your choosing). Oh, and it can serve 16 different songs at the same time (or so it appears).
Stupidly, however, the internet access is only a 56k modem. Hello? Ethernet? I'm really tired of all these "internet appliances" that want to dial up their very own connection.
Actually those various identifiers are used commonly in the projection screen market. Not with CRT projectors (which are analog), but with the various digital projection/display techs (LCD, DLP, DILA, plasma, etc).
It's really weird to be reading SGHT and see them refer to a flat panel LCD TV with "UXGA" resolution or a DLP projector with "XGA" resolution.
I don't see anything particularly vile or reprehensible in the MS memo. It looked like some fairly standard marketing diatribe and the kind of thing that any agressive company would promote.
What's to be learned from this? That if you want Linux out there instead of MS, then you're going to have to market it. Whoever is selling Linux based solutions will need to be just as tenacious and aggressive as a MS marketer can be. No laying down just because Solaris/AIX/HP-UX/etc to Linux is a "natural" migration -- it's clear that MS will make it seem unnatural, slow, error prone, etc. After all, if they can sell IIS over Apache (and web service is one of Linux's strengths), they can certainly do it in other areas as well.
IBM's marketing department has been aggressive for decades. And I know most small firms don't roll over and play dead easily either (or else they wouldn't be in business long), but this is a good reminder that there's competition out there.
Actually, I'd say it's the other way around.
The idea is not for you to be able to identify what station you're watching - by looking at an onscreen guide - but it's to ENSURE you know what station you're watching.
Once people stopped watching TV when the networks wanted them to watch it this became important. Tape something to a VCR, play it back when you want, and you may very well not care what station it came from; but the broadcaster certainly does want you to know.
With TiVo and other digital recording devices it's even more endemic. You may not have even told it to record the program. It just did because it fit some set of criteria. And you're going to be skipping commercials! All YOU care about is the program name and content. This doesn't give the broadcaster much sell room.
A lot of pundits and PDR users know that commercials are ineffective now -- the only time I "watch" them is when I'm not paying attention to the show much anyway and don't pick up the remote to FF through them. I suspect that eventually TV networks will move to banner ads or something similar, with side-band information available to those with "interactive" digital TV sets.
Would I love to see the logos go poof? Sure. Do I think they will? No way. Not unless you want to pay for the right to have a TV (ala the UK) or pay for every channel you receive.
Uh... the AI is _vastly_ improved. Did you consider that the reason the AI is sending mass amounts of troops through your territory is because it wants to attack? When they send only one unit they'll certainly claim to be leaving in short order (but I will say that there's no way to immediately foist them out of your borders like there was in Civ1/2 -- and like they can to you). I don't see how you think this is unrealistic anyway - I don't think many modern countries would let another countries forces wander around their country without raising a stink.
The computer doesn't throw one or two units against you either. It amasses troops and then attacks with all of them at once - just like a human would. It will also avoid well fortified points and go after weaker ones, again like a human. It expands very fast, will grab onto any point of land it can find, and will willfully corner you so you can't expand. They'll control strategic resources like iron and saltpepper.
Thus far I've only played on Chieftan, but Firaxis has stated that the "intelligence" of the AI doesn't change regardless of level. There's only a slight difference in aggression and huge differences in "cheating" (for or against the player) between the different levels.
The biggest complaint to date is the overbearing corruption. Firaxis has posted on this some as well, but I still suspect that they'll eventually patch the game to lower the corruption effects somewhat. (Or you can just change it in the editor if you want).
...it's still worse than just about any other window manager out there.
The common thread I've seen among the people who liked CDE is that "it's better than OpenWindows". Well, sure. screen is better than OpenWindows, and more intuitive too. But I don't get why you didn't install/use a more reasonably window manager over both. When I was in college nobody used OpenWindows for longer than it took them to poke the guy next to them and say "how'd you get your Sun to look like that?" (or alternately they'd ask how to actually use the damned thing and the adjacent geek would just foist a new window manager upon them to make life easier).
twm, tvtwm, and fvwm were all far more useful to me. I found them all far easier (on a relative basis) to configure and maintain, vastly easier to work with, and much less cluttered. They were also rock solid as far as stability, fast, and had a relatively small footprint. I still have my fvwm 1.24r config laying around somewhere.
Funny thing... I was actually talking about this kind of thing on IRC with some friends this morning. Well before I knew about this.
There really aren't many alternatives to Exchange right now. There's Notes, which is massive bloatware for most people - yes, it does more than just email/scheduling/calendaring, but most companies aren't interested in the "and more!" bit. Notes is pretty platform neutral though. There's also the Netscape/Sun iPlanet, which I'm unimpressed with from what I've seen.
Until there is a viable alternative to Exchange a lot of companies won't even bother looking at non-MS solutions. Because they're going to need the Exchange servers in place for what they currently use them for. Which means that you're stuck on an MS desktop. And a lot of CEO's and CIO's will question the value of moving servers off Windows as long as you still have to have some Windows servers.
Yes, these are all issues that can be worked around, but no matter what advocates might think, the reality is that this kind of thought process occurs daily and it's what keeps entrenhed companies entrenched. I know a lot of people will just say "well then they're stupid! Let them suffer for their own stupidity!" but realize that there are FAR more of "them" then there are of "us". You're living in the world of the unwashed masses, not vica versa.
It's not going to delay 1.0, it's going to bring something vitally needed to the table (eventually). It should be properly segmented out so as to avoid code bloat. This is a Good Thing.
Hills are +50% defense, Mountains are +100%. Various other terrain (forests, swamp, jungle) also has a modifier, although I don't recall them off hand.
The terrain in Civ3 looks more realistic, but it has the same "granularity" as before. But it seems that there are some pretty significant differences - units with no defense can be captured by opposing civs (workers and cannons are mentioned in the interview, I'd guess that settlers and other artillary count as well. Caravans no longer exist).
I'm hoping Civ3 will be more like Civ2 and less like SMAC. I hated SMAC, but I love Civ1 and 2 and still play Civ2 to this day on occasion.
Offtopic, but frankly MMORPGers do care about bandwidth. Many uber guilds in Everquest require at least ISDN, and often more because while it's a nice concept that the game is tuned for 56k, at the high end of the game it's not. I regularly saw bandwidths well over what 56k allowed, and watched anyone with a modem go link dead.
Also latency isn't a huge issue for MMORPGs as it is for FPS or even RTS. Unless you're doing PvP, in which case you're matched against someone else instead of some computer generated monster. For most MMORPGs you have a fairly lax required reaction speed - measured in seconds, not milliseconds.
Oh, and it's only Asheron's Call that is so lame to auto-teleport you away. EQ will allow any number of players in one place at a time. Witness the zones that are often used as bazaars, or the early GM events where you'd see several hundred people at a single location. Not that the game handled it well, but it at least tried.
There's a reason that people who are actually INTO projection only use line doubled (or better) images. It takes a lot of the ugliness out of the NTSC standard. Most HDTV sets are sold with built in line doublers now, of varying degrees of competence.
There's no way in hell you could put one on this kind of thing though. The electronics can't handle the increased scan rate that would be required.
It's not an issue of resolution - you're going to get the same resolution no matter what - it's an issue of quality. The real projection manufacturers work to control things like bloom, distortion, convergence, etc. on this scale. The requirements for a 32" TV are far less. And the vast majority of consumer TVs do a piss poor job even at their designed size. You have colors that don't even vaguely approximate reality because sets with more red sell better on a showroom floor. The contrast and brightness (aka white balance) are way off the scale because of the same reason.
And brightness on these suckers is gonna suck. CRT projectors have low brightness anyway, and they're designed to be projected up to large sizes. Digital projectors (LCD, DLP, DILA) have 2-5x the brightness of a CRT and are still made for darkened rooms.
Will some people be happy with it? Sure. Same people that download 100MB VCD's of some 2 hour movie and think it looks and sounds great, or listens to lowest quality MP3's (or hell, FM radio) and thinks they've never heard anything better.
The only thing that makes me hope that the average consumer can indeed choose VASTLY improved quality over price is the success of DVD.
Kind of. If one of your spacing limitations is due to I/O, and the limitation on the I/O is due to the necessity of placing huge (relatively) gobs of solder between the output lines and the package pins, then removing the solder may allow you to space I/O lines closer together, giving you more die space for logic.
But, yes, merely removing the solder doesn't change anything as far as the photolithography, deposition, or etching steps are concerned, and photo will still be one of the primary limitations in feature size (which then dictates just how many transisters you can pack into a square centimeter).
Intel is merely expecting some reduced power consumption (and thus heat production), and that this is "step in our march toward making processors with 1 billion transistors" not that this will itself allow such.
You seem to have forgotten the way the US legal sytem works. There are three branches - the legislative (Congress) which passes the laws, the Executive (President, Cabinets) which enforces the laws, and the Judicial (courts) which decides the legality of the laws.
Very often the courts will wind up with an issue for which there is no clear cut law. Then it's up to the judge(s) to make a rational decision based not only on case law, but also on what makes sense in modern society and to themselves. Sometimes these rulings wind up with the legislature passing a new law to either reaffirm the ruling or to invalidate it (whether or not the new law is legal is another question).
That's all that's really happened here.
And as for the flames of "the Internet has no boundaries!" - yeah. That's nice. When you want to get back to the Real World, let us know because the Real World still has boundaries and so legal precedent of what laws apply to cyberspace make a huge difference. How would you like to get deported to China for breaking a law there on the Internet because the industrialized countries had agreed to respect each others legal systems when it came to viewers inside their country? Or get deported to the US because the NSA decided you were a threat?
As it happens, this ruling could make such a thing impossible, since Cyberspace is in a different legal jurisdiction... the question becomes, who's jurisdiction is it? And no, anarchy is not a viable solution. Go read some Niven if you think otherwise.
No, they're doing it because with an analog copy (read: tape) you degrade the copy everytime you make a downstream copy. The copy of the original is not as high quality as the original. The copy of the copy is less so. And it doesn't take many generations of copying before it really starts sounding crappy.
Digital copying is perfect though. It doesn't matter if the copy is 1st generation or 100th generation - it sounds EXACTLY the same. So as far as the music and film execs are concerned this is a FAR, FAR bigger threat.
This is why Disney didn't release on DVD at first (and instead tried to support DivX). This is part of the reason that HDTV is going nowhere fast. It's why talks of HD DVD are going nowhere and why DVD-Audio and SACD only have analog outputs on the players. The RIAA and MPAA are all totally and utterly freaked by the idea that they will lose control of distribution. And distribution is something the two groups have a pretty ironclad grasp over right now.
Funny though... most of the artists don't seem quite so freaked. At least for musicians. Actors, directors, etc. seem more concerned though, but they generally make more money off films than musicians do off albums.
Actually, that tactic is often used to serve warrants. Not sure if it's ever been used to arrest people.
On topic, however, note that they don't appear to ask you to "come forward", they just ask you to not screw up the Net in retalitory attacks.
Oh, and finally, do you know that the bank in question has accounts owned by Osama bin Laden, or merely by the bin Laden family? The bin Laden family disowned Osama nearly a decade ago, froze most of his funds, and have done a great deal of good work, both in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Including a Israeli-Palestinian student exchange program to try and reduce misunderstandings and violence in Israel.
Yes, it's trivially simple to protect against buffer overflows. But it takes some regimented coding to do it properly instead of taking the easy way out.
Instead of using gets(), you use fgets(). Use strncpy() instead of strcpy(). And so forth. The only real difference between these calls is that the "safer" one lets you specify a maximum number of bytes to copy. So you know you can't copy a string that's larger than your destination buffer (and you use sizeof() or #define's to ensure you have the proper buffer size) and thus start overwriting executable code.
This is all high school level programming. Anyone that does it deserves to be strung up for professional negligence. As many others point out, one of the first large distributed cases of a buffer overrun exploit was 13 years ago. So it's not like this is a new thing.
And yes, there are probably some Unix programs running around with buffer overrun exploits in them. They've been largely weeded out over time though and, to some extent, Unix's permission scheme avoids most serious issues, at least when services are installed properly.
The real key difference between Unix and Windows though is very, very deep assumptions. Unix assumes that the user cannot be trusted (thou shalt not run as root), nor can any external input. Windows assumes that everyone will play nice. Since the reality of the world is that there is a significant fraction of people who will NOT "play nice" it invalidates coding under that assumption. Thus the repeated security exploits using Microsoft tools and services - which weren't designed from the ground up to distrust the input given to them.
The plus side of "play nice" is that it's faster to code and you can put in features which would never, ever fly otherwise, like automagic remote installation of software. Or executing email attachments automatically. All that stuff that users think is "wow cool nifty" until someone does something they don't like.
Yes, this happened to Unix. Thirteen (13) years ago.
Sorry, but coding with buffer overrun exploits possible is not merely a mark of shoddy work, it's outright negligent. I was taught not to do this kind of thing in a high school Pascal class. Where do you dredge up programmers that don't realize this kind of thing needs to be protected against?
And yes, always programming in a paranoid "what can go wrong here" mindset can be dragging. It adds tons of lines of code that may never be executed since it's all "just in case" stuff.
Know what? It all pays off the first time one of those "it'll never happen" situations happens and instead of your code blowing up, or creating a security hole, or trashing the data it throws up an error and halts. It doesn't even have to halt nicely (bonus points for that), but halting is a helluva lot better than the alternatives. Do you have any idea how long it takes to debug one of these issues if you don't have proper error handling in?
So no, Unix isn't invulnerable, and yes, those stating otherwise are being somewhat hypocritical. But Microsoft has outright deceived the consumer and practiced gross professional negligence. The patch doesn't make it better. There should never have been a need for this particular patch in the first place.
And I'm not even going to get into the stupidities behind automagically executing files from untrusted sources.
... is that at least one of the planes was an American Airlines 757 flying from Boston to Los Angelos. It was hijacked, although they haven't released any information on who did it.
Haven't heard anything on the second jet yet except that it was also allegedly hijacked.
We're looking at several hundred deaths here, minimum. Possibly several thousand. Think about that.