Alas, it seems to be yet another act of entirely pointless legislation (sadly all to common all over the world) and a waste of tax payers money and parliamentary time.
All the law says is that they are NOT allowed to turn a blind eye when someone complains about child porn hosted on or transmitted through their facilities. Then all they have to do is forward the complaint on to the police for action.
I would assume it is illegal for them not to report it to the police in Australia, although I don't know what the legal situation is there I'd wager they already legally bound to report all criminal activity (and I'm sure possession of child pornography falls into that category).
What is it with politicians and trying to push through redundant legislation for causes in the public eye?
Surely it's more efficent and appropriate to ensure we are enforcing the appropriate laws we do have - and if they are unenforceable, amend them appropriately rather than create an unfathomable myriad of narrow 'crime specific' laws (especially ones like this which will almost never be used, and merely serve to justify bureaucracy).
That's the first time I've seen that suggested, I think it would be worth trying out.
While some people disagree I maintain that it's not hard to spot sellers automatically (with decent transaction tracking - I'm sure/I/ could impliment it and I'm not rocket scientist) and this would remove the incentive for them to muscle in.
While I think it's all well and good to try and design a game that avoids this sort of thing it's not always possible unless you simply decided to drastically change the game you are going to offer.
Seperate PvP/RP servers certainly work for the most part, so this could work, inflation would be *really* interesting to see though!
Oh you heard of the Tsunami a couple of months ago which killed just under three hundred thousand people and you are all clued up on the state of the world?
Talk about being insular....o0(Bloody yanks, *rolls eyes*.)
17 million people die of starvation and easily preventible diseases every year.
3 billion people have to live on on less than 1.50 UKP a day.
That is not fucking entertainment mate, and it's not a one off event.
And no, even with all the tourism and development money they are going to get, the victims of the Tsunami are still not going to 'win'.
I suppose the 11 million children that die every year of starvation and trival diseases are just too stupid to know the rules.
Maybe you should get off your ass, travel to Africa and enlighten them, I'm sure they would all appreciate your marvelous wisdom.
Get ready for more grief loser, Sony is about to 'get lucky' all over again with the PS3.
Okay, I'll go over this again just for your benifit (as you don't get it):
The point is not that I have greif - I'm not stupid enough to believe the marketing BS that surrounded the PS2 and I'm not stupid enough to belive it about the PS3 (If you believe the cell chip will make possible cinema CGI quality graphics in real time thats your problem).
So, to recap I'm not dumb enough to buy one, ergo I don't get greif.
I agree completely, the Dreamcast controller and the XBox controller are vastly superior.
It might seem neat to have a small controller because it looks cooler, but in reality you cramp your hands (and I have small hands).
The reason that the XBox controller is so large is that it was designed by people who had a clue what they were doing (just look at the cable quality, and the break points it, that shows attention to detail). The 'Dreamcast' style of controller simply a more appropraite design for extended playing on a home console, as you say the PS2 analog sticks are a kludge.
I'm no XBox fanboy, the PS One was a great console, but I was very sad to see people not adopt the excellent quality Dreamcast and instead by into the stupid PS2 marketing BS. The DC still plays titles like Dead or Alive better than the PS2, at higher detail w/ more pologons, and of course is much easier to develop for. The PS2 was actually pretty piss poor by the time it eventually arrived.
Sure, the Cube is pretty limited in many ways compared to the XBox, but still has some great abilties and of course some fantstic games.
I really hope Sony are buried over this. They got lucky with one console by having the smarts to include half decent pologon shifting support when Sega dropped the ball by not having it in the Saturn. And Sony only did that by shafting Nintendo over the CD deal.
Dispite being a fan of other Sony products, I would be quite happy to see Sony shafted over this one.
Doom 3: Don't Bother Playing If You're A Soppy, Wet Pussy
Is that because only tough jar heads enjoy playing it?
(I agree, you have to be pretty 'special' to put up with the repetitive, cramped and linear level design, repetitive gameplay, poor AI and spawning/animation trigger bugs.)
I think a licensed copy of the Serious Sam engine (which has shown it can cope perfectly with modern Doom style environments and scale of enemies) with some superb ID artwork and modelling would have made a much more worthy sequel.
Reading the The US State Dept travel advisories is like reading the mind of a paranoid person. Basically every country in the world is described in pretty negative remarks in these travel advisories. Check out the description of the crime situation in Canada:
Okay point taken, some of entires in there are pretty crazy I'll admit (and I agree it is pretty Fox like), though the issues specifically acknowledged which was my only intent.
I don't wan't to imply it's a place where thar be dragons. However, I don't see why it's not exactly the same proportion of the population as in many of the neighbouring countries, or other east European states, because as I see it the problem is entirely economic. That said would agree that Romania is responsible for a huge proportion of online fraud I've seen from European destinations.
i.e. The people are not very wealthy by the standard of western countries not that far away. In truth, the difference is quite dissproporitonate (due of course to government mismanagement that lasted for many decades, not just specifically in Latvia but in the region as a whole, which obviously hurts Latvia too). And of course, where there is such a gross disparity in wealth, there is inevitably crime (as there in between poor and wealthly neighbour hoods in towns and cities).
But, they are well informed know how wealthly they could be. They also have the equipment and the knowledge to commit the online crime. I'd imagine that fraud, especially online fraud, is a much easier type of crime to fall into than others too.
PS: Just out of curiosity -- are you from the UK?
I am yes. It's probably much more noticeable here as we do so much more business than even France or Germany online and more than most European states put together. Though it is hard to see that remaining the case much beyond the next decade or so, by then I think integration between the EU countries will resolve problems of internal instances of fraud (both by increasing the spread of wealth, and through tighter integration of law enforcement bodies).
There is a lot more to it than saying you can get 99% profit on an OS. Even Microsoft doesn't get that, I think their Windows division is a little over 80% profit. Remember, Microsoft operating systems are on about 90% of PCs.
Apple would have to start (nearly) from scratch to get native support for all devices on the main board of every x86 system, and make it easy to add support for nearly every other device out there, even if it was designed to be Windows-specific. In short, you'd have to sign on every device maker to make drivers. Darwin for x86 is being maintained and apparently does work but there is more to it than just putting the Aqua UI on it and shipping it.
It's only fair to point out the early versions of Mac OS X were released to certain developers and parties on x86 *first* (saying this as one of them), owning to it's NeXT heritage.
I recall it ran out of the box on stock x86 hardware in the past (on random non-brand desktop systems I installed it on). This is helped by a remarkable number of devices being very standardised to the extent that supporting common configurations is actually not that hard (this is true of graphics cards, sound cards and DVD/CD ROM drives). The same was true for BeOS too (in that it ran 'out of the box' on generic PC's and gave great performance with out a huge number of device specific drivers), so it's certainly possible.
From a technical perspective, it really would be essentially as simple as putting Aqua on Darwin and shipping it, they'd want to do some decent testing and fill in any missing gaps, but the architecture is really well suited to making that a straightforward processes. In part, I see Darwin as just the act of keeping the old x86 code current rather than them creating something from scratch - something I fully expect Apple would do anyway, even if it were not public.
I also don't see that not able able to run existing Windows software would be a huge problem for users - hey it's not a problem for them on the Mac and if anything it's a feature (the alternative approach being part of the whole imperative to switch).
I can understand the economic arguments for not releasing an x86 release of OS X (comparisons with the the unfortunate failure of the perfectly good alternative BeOS seem relevant), but I don't see any technical hurdles standing in the way.
On the whole, east European countries, including Latvia, are notoriously dodgy and a common source of online scams. I've worked with online transaction systems here in Europe that regularly block transactions of any kind to IP's or addreses in these destinations. It's actually quite common (and often used on a 'rating' system to detemine the likelyhood a transaction is fraudulent, much in the same way spam assain works to rate emails as potential SPAM).
Again, that's even here in Europe, because it's quite clear to companies here how much of a problem it is, even if those states are EU members now (a status they were only granted less than a year ago I might add, and they still do not yet have equal status as I recall, in a move to prevent 'brain drain' from people flooding for poorer ex-soviet countries to west block countries).
Searching for 'crime' and 'Latvia' (something I did to help illustrate the point) shows on the first page of results from Google that the US Departement of State has even issued a travel notice for all US citizens going to Latvia. The state.gov web site says amoung other things:
"Internet crime is a growing concern in Latvia. Common fraudulent schemes involve both Internet auction sites and Internet job search sites. In the first scam, criminals offer valuable items for sale at low prices on Internet auctions and request that payment be sent by wire transfer to a bank in Latvia or though a fraudulent escrow site that they have created themselves. In this scheme the money passes through a bank in Latvia and is quickly withdrawn by ATM or transferred to a bank in another country. It is very difficult in these cases to discover the identities of the account holders or recover the funds.
The second common scam involves identity theft through false job offers. In this scheme, a company claiming to be located in Latvia, but which has a non-existent address, offers the victim employment as a U.S.-based agent or freight forwarder. When the victim responds to the job offer, commonly posted on one of several popular internet job sites, a Social Security number and other identifying information - needed for the identity theft - is required under the guise of conducting a background check. ".
Just because it's a small nation, doesn't mean it's not notiously dodgy - it is, and it is known for online fraud as well as quite a few other tyes of crime (people trafficing being another that springs to mind). So as a European I'd have to say I agree with the article and think it's accurate in it's assertion.
I think you want Mecca Cola. Of course you should beware of cheap imitations, because you wouldn't want to accidentally get some regular half-decent rebadged as naff crappy cola.
I think it's cool, but there are significant caveats acknowledged in the linked story not mentioned in the article above.
The Nano-ITX motherboard used is not commercially avalible - and it will not be avalible for general sale for some months yet. The author points outs that even using this yet-to-be released motherboard, there was no room for a CD/DVD drive. It also does not feature a built in modem or a 'Firewire' port (but I don't think that's a big deal). It doesn't appear to feature WiFi or Bluetooth either, but there certainly seems room to fit them easily.
It features a 1 Ghz Via C3 CPU (and either a Via or S3 graphics card), so performance could be a problem if you wish to use this as a 'home entertainment' device (or well, pretty much anything other than a low traffic headless sever or simple web browsing/email device IMO, YMMV).
On the plus side it appears to have S-Video, Composite and VGA output (no DVI, but a lot more useful to most people I'd think), additional input and output audio interfaces and two SODIMM slots (which I think is better than than the single DIMM on the Mac Mini, but again YMMV).
I think this guy likes the sound of his own voice and that he doesn't know much relevent history (and that he hasn't been bothered to use Google either).
As I get a bit sick of explaning to muppets like him who are arrogant enough to think they have uncovered some crucial legal precident or frame work that no-one else has noticed (including teams of lawyers working for firms like Sony), the issue of emulation has been delt with in court in the US many times, even specifically in the area of emulating video games consoles.
A good example is the Connectix vs. Sony case. Connectix of course were responsible for the the leading quality PlayStation emulator 'Virtual Game Station' for Windows and Macintosh.
Sony tried multiple legal angles to stop distribution of this program (and similar emulators), including 11 claims of patent violation. They lost, and in the end just bought the technology from Connectix to keep it from being avalible.
The same issue had already come up years ago in case involving Sony and Accolade (and it had bearing on the Connectix vs. Sony case). That 'Emulation is illegal' was a bogus assertion then, a bogus assertion in the Connectix vs. Sony case, and a bogus assertion now.
In the Connectix vs. Sony case, the court ruled that it was perfectly legal for developers to make dumps of the firmware for the purposes of building an emulator (even if it's a commercial competing product). You may not, however, distribute them or include patent code in your code (no surpise there).
Of course this still doesn't mean it's okay to obtain ROM's from the internet (obviously) but some people inextricably link "emulation" with "OMGWTFBQQ free gamez0rs 11!!11" and get confused when you try to treat the issue of emulation as a seperate topic from software piracy.
I've been using Linux since '96 and I could care less about OSX, besides adopting a couple of its neat GUI ideas into the Free desktop. I can understand Windows users wanting to switch -- for them it's a huge leap forward in all aspects. But for us long time Linux users, it's just another mildly interesting member of the Unix family tree.
Speak for yourself!:P
I've been running Linux on Macintosh hardware since 1996 and I use Mac OS X as my primary system (even though I develop solutions/software on Debian, FreeBSD and Solaris systems for a living).
May of us see the virtue in having a system which 'just works', and as good as it Debian and GNOME don't quite do that for me (and KDE doesn't delivery the funtionality I'm looking for, I prefer the GNOME style of implimentation). I'd much rather have Debian as a server, but I can't say the same about a desktop.
I agree that KDE/GNOME and x.org will catch up within a couple of years and with the better performance of an accellerated window manager and an even better (but already very impressive) GNOME/nautilus driven environment I'll be tempted to switch back.
Yes yes, "You can't fight city hall!", "You can't change the world!", "Life is unfair!", I'll stop you -we've heard it.
The unreasonable man knows that there are other options, like strong labour laws, social healthcare systems and welfare for the poor.
We have really strong labour laws in Europe, and we still have lower unemployment and a stronger economy here in the UK than in the US, dispite this. We also have a strong support system (free healthcare, welfare for the unemployed) too.
Sure the high taxation may mean those of us who earn more have less money to spend on Precious Things, but that's not much of a comparison when compared to to improving the quality of human life for all our citizens.
These are all tragedies. But short of moving everyone, everywhere inland 10 miles, disbanding the military, and eliminating all railway/traffic crossings everywhere, this stuff will happen. There's nothing we can do about it
Apart from the obvious:
o) Build early warning systems and better infrastructure o) Don't approach going to war in the same manner the US forces did recently (or vote the induhvidual responsible in, twice). o) Build better traffic crossings.
Those don't make the problems disappear, but it sure as hell beats doing nothing.
If you can't handle unfairness now, how are you going to react when an innocent family member gets terminal cancer?
Well here we get free health care, because we care enough to make it fair.
My (American) stepfather died of cancer the year before last, unfortunately he'd already had it for years before they were aware of it as it had rapped itself round his spine and because of it's position and it's spread they were unable to operate. He was told he had one year at the most.
In the end he had 5 years of top notch treatment with hundreds of USD worth of drugs every day, which there is no way they would been able to afford in the US. My mother would have had to remortgage (and eventually sell) the house if they'd had to pay for it themselves, even with good insurance.
In the rest of the western world you'll find really strong labour laws - it helps ensure a stable economy. There is a reason why the leading economies in the world (bar the US) have the best labour laws, it really is good for employers and employees (though I'm sure certain global corporations feel otherwise, they are not all entirely good for business themselves).
Life is not unfair as life is neither capeable of being fair or unfair - it's just something that happens to all living things.
People, however, can be unfair, and the practices of people can be unfair - and people and practices are definately subject to change and influence.
First of all, a MAC address does not uniquely identify a computer - it uniquely identifies a network interface. I have several computers which have more than one Ethernet controller in them, and so they have several MAC addresses associated with them.
In this sort of instance doesn't matter one jot that they have multiple MAC addresses though (especially when it's using an internal interface, where it's not as if you can remove it and put it in another machine, nor was it used as the complete unique identifier, just as part of a longer string).
So, that argument really has no bearing.
These two items alone should be sufficient to convince people that using the MAC address as anything other than the physical layer address of a specific Ethernet card is a BAD IDEA.
It's used as part of the unique identifer, which is perfectly reasonable and sensible given the level of uniqueness, it's actually common way of generating UUID's specifically because when it's been combined the date & time and a random string it's superior to a mere random string on it's own.
Though you honestly think debian is a better desktop system than mac os x
It's a better server - it's much easier to manage updates and installs of new server software, has many more applications ported to packages, has a full package managment system, a much more powerful firewall (in the form of iptables) and it will perfom far better than Mac OS X.
It's pretty silly to run Mac OS X as a server in most instances. As a home or small office web/file server? Sure, it's easy and saves time configuring - that makes sense. But if you need to because you don't know how to use another form of UNIX you almost certainly should not be running a server on a public network. If you intend to run PHP/CGI's on a public web server your far better off with Debian as you'll get much better performance and have many more options easily avalible in terms of useable software.
You'll note that's what's being discussed not a desktop (as you'll note from the opening statement in your your reply: 'FWIW, you don't have to run the Quartz Window Manager either BTW').
FWIW, I have Linux dual booting on my current 1.5 Ghz/1GB RAM PowerBook and on my older TiBook, and it's order of magnitude faster than Mac OS X as a Desktop as well.
If I had native 3D graphics card support (including support for dual head display) with my current 128 MB ATI mobility card I'd seriously consider switching back to Debian - dispite being a long time Mac user - especially once we have more sophisticated X builds. For now, I still feel OS X is best though, but they will need to work hard to keep me hooked in the next few years. GNOME, X and applications like Gnumeric, Abiword, Evolution, GIMP and Nautilus just keep getting better and better IMO.
Once you've seen and really used Linux on a G4, it's apaprent how criminally slow Mac OS X is at so many things (especially the appauling Finder). It makes up for lots of it with a very slick accelerated GUI, but in part that's just a clever distraction from some more serious underlying slowless which impacts usability significantly.
OS X is essentially FreeBSD with a pretty GUI on top.
Mac OS X is based on Rhapsody (with a new Window Manager theme and the core display technology being display PDF rather than being display PostScript), which is based on OPENSTEP, which is based on NeXTSTEP which is based on mach and UNIX from Berkeley.
There are BITS of FreeBSD in Mac OS X, but there also BITS of FreeBSD in multiple releases of Windows.
Like FreeBSD, it's a UNIX implimentation, but it's a very different style of UNIX implimentation from FreeBSD and it's not based on FreeBSD.
FWIW, you don't have to run the Quartz Window Manager either BTW, you can just choose to not start it. I'm tempted to say your better off with Debian on a lower end G4 PowerPC system like the mini though.
This is the winning combo of 2005. The MiniMac and Xbox2 are light on power, skimpy on playable formats, and not ready to serve as dumb-terminals. They discourage bigger drives, don't burnCDs/DVDs, and don't come with wireless.
Of course, Mac Mini does allow you to connect Firewire and USB hard disks, and even chain them ('Quiet, cute external hard-drives could be added and daisy-chained.'.), burn CD's and DVD's and comes with 802.11g and BlueTooth if desired and supports all the formats you could reasonably want thanks to Mplayer, the VLAN client and QuickTime.
And with reference to Sell a quiet, stylish set-top computer with TV and stereo out, remote control, and wireless. both a cheap TV out (S-Video) and Remote Control are suggested as options when you buy one via the US Online Apple Store. Oh and it has a 'bootable network card' too, FWIW.
Some of these are avalible on all models (like CD/VCD burning) and some are options (like 802.11g and DVD burning) but your asked to specify each option when your order online so it's not as if you can 'miss' them when ordering.
Another good option that meets the description for a thin client (with video, stereo and 100 Mb Ethernet, but not native wireless) is the Sun Ray platform (which I have two), which now supports Linux x86 as well as Solaris SPARC as server platform, but it's somewhat complex to configure and has heft price tag for for multiple clients (not for the hardware, which is very cheap, but for the software licences, though technically it runs fine with out the little bits of paper *cough*).
A slew of cheap thin client devices (DVD support, wireless access to multiple video formats from a PC over a network share) are actually in development now, performance is not all that great and they have a lot of issues though (like poor quality video playback over wireless as they play the entire MPEG 2/4 file from hard disk file share, rather than as truley streamed video).
He suggests you can't throw in an off the shelf PC DIMM in there while in fact you can.
Ah sorry that's certainly true and possibly what I'll do (though I'm not sure yet, given the hassle I've had in the past). Though you'll want to get something suitably compatible (rather than just a generic off the shelf DIMM from a generic store, which is unlikely to be the right specifications and liable to induce problems - even on x86 getting the right DIMM's can be a pain these days) and it does void your 1 Year Apple Care warranty, which on a new model I have a horrible suspicion will end up being useful...
Also, good luck finding an USB keyboard connected to a PC
The last time I bought a Personal Computer (x86 with Windows, or PPC Macintosh or otherwise) with anything other than a USB keyboard was 1996 as I recall - it a new Twinhead laptop, my first laptop - though if it had been a desktop I would certainly have gotten a system with USB then too, but I was on a limited budget and this was a very special offer.
The next time I bought a new computer (and keyboard) was in early 1997 and it was USB (I remember specificaly because I got fed up of the laptop and swapped it for a tricked out games machine including a brand new Voodoo graphics card and snazzy new keyboard).
Even new PS2 keyboards in 1997 were coming with PS2 adapters, as I recall Apple haven't even sold a new computer with anything OTHER than USB since *1998* (7 years ago!).
It's not uncommon for people to have unrealistic expections about what is really very dated equipment, but it's been 2 years since I've even bought a USB keyboard (and even then, it was with a Sun Ray thin client). For example, my Apple Pro keyboard (and my Mac mouse) is BlueTooth, as is my Logitec DiNovo keyboard+mouse+media pad combo on my Windows XP system.
and good luck finding a PC keyboard port on this iMac.
USB is a port for keyboards on 'PCs' (including x86/Windows based systems since Windows 95), it has two (and the generic USB keyboards I still have - from Logitech and Sun Microsystems - work fine with any 1998+ Macintosh). If you use a PS2 keyboard with the supplied USB adapter you even use that on your USB equiped Mac (or Sun workstation for that matter).
A line has to be drawn somewhere as far as legacy support goes, especially when the likes of PS2 isn't even hot swappable and really was in need of being replaced. Given it's been 9 years since Windows supported USB (and 7 years since Apple stopped supporting legacy ADB entirely) and ALL the major vendors now ship USB exclusively it's not exactly unreasonable to expect USB, especially given you can buy a combined keyboard and mouse PS2 adapter for only 0.99 USD (froogle.google.com) if you're really stuck.
The previous responded did a good job with the specs and I'd 100 % agree about the RAM (at least 512 MB, preferably 1 GB).
The CPU should be fine I would think (it's not a problem on my 1.5 Ghz / 1 GB RAM PowerBook, Radeon 9700 128 MB). I can see the 32 MB texture memory being a bit of an issue though (that's one reason I went with the 128 MB VRAM on the PowerBook), not sure how 32 MB VRAM performs on a Mac with WoW.
I find the varying landscapes and outfits in MMOG's tend to use a lot of unique textures, so more VRAM helps quite a bit IME.
Slashdot Mirror
Alas, it seems to be yet another act of entirely pointless legislation (sadly all to common all over the world) and a waste of tax payers money and parliamentary time.
All the law says is that they are NOT allowed to turn a blind eye when someone complains about child porn hosted on or transmitted through their facilities. Then all they have to do is forward the complaint on to the police for action.
I would assume it is illegal for them not to report it to the police in Australia, although I don't know what the legal situation is there I'd wager they already legally bound to report all criminal activity (and I'm sure possession of child pornography falls into that category).
What is it with politicians and trying to push through redundant legislation for causes in the public eye?
Surely it's more efficent and appropriate to ensure we are enforcing the appropriate laws we do have - and if they are unenforceable, amend them appropriately rather than create an unfathomable myriad of narrow 'crime specific' laws (especially ones like this which will almost never be used, and merely serve to justify bureaucracy).
That's the first time I've seen that suggested, I think it would be worth trying out.
/I/ could impliment it and I'm not rocket scientist) and this would remove the incentive for them to muscle in.
While some people disagree I maintain that it's not hard to spot sellers automatically (with decent transaction tracking - I'm sure
While I think it's all well and good to try and design a game that avoids this sort of thing it's not always possible unless you simply decided to drastically change the game you are going to offer.
Seperate PvP/RP servers certainly work for the most part, so this could work, inflation would be *really* interesting to see though!
Slashdot *is* News For Nerds, (that's why it says "News For Nerds" underneath the logo) so no translation required.
:P
If they norms, don't like it, they can take a leap.
Oh you heard of the Tsunami a couple of months ago which killed just under three hundred thousand people and you are all clued up on the state of the world?
.o0(Bloody yanks, *rolls eyes*.)
Talk about being insular...
17 million people die of starvation and easily preventible diseases every year.
3 billion people have to live on on less than 1.50 UKP a day.
That is not fucking entertainment mate, and it's not a one off event.
And no, even with all the tourism and development money they are going to get, the victims of the Tsunami are still not going to 'win'.
I suppose the 11 million children that die every year of starvation and trival diseases are just too stupid to know the rules.
Maybe you should get off your ass, travel to Africa and enlighten them, I'm sure they would all appreciate your marvelous wisdom.
What a sad, fucked up world you live in.
Surrounded by losers like you? Guess so!
Get ready for more grief loser, Sony is about to 'get lucky' all over again with the PS3.
Okay, I'll go over this again just for your benifit (as you don't get it):
The point is not that I have greif - I'm not stupid enough to believe the marketing BS that surrounded the PS2 and I'm not stupid enough to belive it about the PS3 (If you believe the cell chip will make possible cinema CGI quality graphics in real time thats your problem).
So, to recap I'm not dumb enough to buy one, ergo I don't get greif.
I'm sure muppets like you will love it though.
I don't see how you can look at a quarter billion going to Pay-Rod and think life is anything but a game.
Because maybe some of us realise how shitty life is for others less fortunate than us, and that it's definately not a game for them.
You know, people who don't have Slashdot, or err eletricity, or err water, or a home...
Well this "loser" is laughing all the way to the bank.
That doesn't mean he's not being an asshole.
In a case like this it's really not that hard to understand the difference between 'right' and 'wrong'.
You appear to have a tenious grasp of what constitutes ethical behaviour.
I agree completely, the Dreamcast controller and the XBox controller are vastly superior.
It might seem neat to have a small controller because it looks cooler, but in reality you cramp your hands (and I have small hands).
The reason that the XBox controller is so large is that it was designed by people who had a clue what they were doing (just look at the cable quality, and the break points it, that shows attention to detail). The 'Dreamcast' style of controller simply a more appropraite design for extended playing on a home console, as you say the PS2 analog sticks are a kludge.
I'm no XBox fanboy, the PS One was a great console, but I was very sad to see people not adopt the excellent quality Dreamcast and instead by into the stupid PS2 marketing BS. The DC still plays titles like Dead or Alive better than the PS2, at higher detail w/ more pologons, and of course is much easier to develop for. The PS2 was actually pretty piss poor by the time it eventually arrived.
Sure, the Cube is pretty limited in many ways compared to the XBox, but still has some great abilties and of course some fantstic games.
I really hope Sony are buried over this. They got lucky with one console by having the smarts to include half decent pologon shifting support when Sega dropped the ball by not having it in the Saturn. And Sony only did that by shafting Nintendo over the CD deal.
Dispite being a fan of other Sony products, I would be quite happy to see Sony shafted over this one.
Er, that *is* cheating though.
Doom 3: Don't Bother Playing If You're A Soppy, Wet Pussy
Is that because only tough jar heads enjoy playing it?
(I agree, you have to be pretty 'special' to put up with the repetitive, cramped and linear level design, repetitive gameplay, poor AI and spawning/animation trigger bugs.)
I think a licensed copy of the Serious Sam engine (which has shown it can cope perfectly with modern Doom style environments and scale of enemies) with some superb ID artwork and modelling would have made a much more worthy sequel.
Reading the The US State Dept travel advisories is like reading the mind of a paranoid person. Basically every country in the world is described in pretty negative remarks in these travel advisories. Check out the description of the crime situation in Canada:
Okay point taken, some of entires in there are pretty crazy I'll admit (and I agree it is pretty Fox like), though the issues specifically acknowledged which was my only intent.
I don't wan't to imply it's a place where thar be dragons. However, I don't see why it's not exactly the same proportion of the population as in many of the neighbouring countries, or other east European states, because as I see it the problem is entirely economic. That said would agree that Romania is responsible for a huge proportion of online fraud I've seen from European destinations.
i.e. The people are not very wealthy by the standard of western countries not that far away. In truth, the difference is quite dissproporitonate (due of course to government mismanagement that lasted for many decades, not just specifically in Latvia but in the region as a whole, which obviously hurts Latvia too). And of course, where there is such a gross disparity in wealth, there is inevitably crime (as there in between poor and wealthly neighbour hoods in towns and cities).
But, they are well informed know how wealthly they could be. They also have the equipment and the knowledge to commit the online crime. I'd imagine that fraud, especially online fraud, is a much easier type of crime to fall into than others too.
PS: Just out of curiosity -- are you from the UK?
I am yes. It's probably much more noticeable here as we do so much more business than even France or Germany online and more than most European states put together. Though it is hard to see that remaining the case much beyond the next decade or so, by then I think integration between the EU countries will resolve problems of internal instances of fraud (both by increasing the spread of wealth, and through tighter integration of law enforcement bodies).
There is a lot more to it than saying you can get 99% profit on an OS. Even Microsoft doesn't get that, I think their Windows division is a little over 80% profit. Remember, Microsoft operating systems are on about 90% of PCs.
Apple would have to start (nearly) from scratch to get native support for all devices on the main board of every x86 system, and make it easy to add support for nearly every other device out there, even if it was designed to be Windows-specific. In short, you'd have to sign on every device maker to make drivers. Darwin for x86 is being maintained and apparently does work but there is more to it than just putting the Aqua UI on it and shipping it.
It's only fair to point out the early versions of Mac OS X were released to certain developers and parties on x86 *first* (saying this as one of them), owning to it's NeXT heritage.
I recall it ran out of the box on stock x86 hardware in the past (on random non-brand desktop systems I installed it on). This is helped by a remarkable number of devices being very standardised to the extent that supporting common configurations is actually not that hard (this is true of graphics cards, sound cards and DVD/CD ROM drives). The same was true for BeOS too (in that it ran 'out of the box' on generic PC's and gave great performance with out a huge number of device specific drivers), so it's certainly possible.
From a technical perspective, it really would be essentially as simple as putting Aqua on Darwin and shipping it, they'd want to do some decent testing and fill in any missing gaps, but the architecture is really well suited to making that a straightforward processes. In part, I see Darwin as just the act of keeping the old x86 code current rather than them creating something from scratch - something I fully expect Apple would do anyway, even if it were not public.
I also don't see that not able able to run existing Windows software would be a huge problem for users - hey it's not a problem for them on the Mac and if anything it's a feature (the alternative approach being part of the whole imperative to switch).
I can understand the economic arguments for not releasing an x86 release of OS X (comparisons with the the unfortunate failure of the perfectly good alternative BeOS seem relevant), but I don't see any technical hurdles standing in the way.
On the whole, east European countries, including Latvia, are notoriously dodgy and a common source of online scams. I've worked with online transaction systems here in Europe that regularly block transactions of any kind to IP's or addreses in these destinations. It's actually quite common (and often used on a 'rating' system to detemine the likelyhood a transaction is fraudulent, much in the same way spam assain works to rate emails as potential SPAM).
Again, that's even here in Europe, because it's quite clear to companies here how much of a problem it is, even if those states are EU members now (a status they were only granted less than a year ago I might add, and they still do not yet have equal status as I recall, in a move to prevent 'brain drain' from people flooding for poorer ex-soviet countries to west block countries).
Searching for 'crime' and 'Latvia' (something I did to help illustrate the point) shows on the first page of results from Google that the US Departement of State has even issued a travel notice for all US citizens going to Latvia. The state.gov web site says amoung other things:
"Internet crime is a growing concern in Latvia. Common fraudulent schemes involve both Internet auction sites and Internet job search sites. In the first scam, criminals offer valuable items for sale at low prices on Internet auctions and request that payment be sent by wire transfer to a bank in Latvia or though a fraudulent escrow site that they have created themselves. In this scheme the money passes through a bank in Latvia and is quickly withdrawn by ATM or transferred to a bank in another country. It is very difficult in these cases to discover the identities of the account holders or recover the funds.
The second common scam involves identity theft through false job offers. In this scheme, a company claiming to be located in Latvia, but which has a non-existent address, offers the victim employment as a U.S.-based agent or freight forwarder. When the victim responds to the job offer, commonly posted on one of several popular internet job sites, a Social Security number and other identifying information - needed for the identity theft - is required under the guise of conducting a background check. ".
Just because it's a small nation, doesn't mean it's not notiously dodgy - it is, and it is known for online fraud as well as quite a few other tyes of crime (people trafficing being another that springs to mind). So as a European I'd have to say I agree with the article and think it's accurate in it's assertion.
I think you want Mecca Cola. Of course you should beware of cheap imitations, because you wouldn't want to accidentally get some regular half-decent rebadged as naff crappy cola.
I think it's cool, but there are significant caveats acknowledged in the linked story not mentioned in the article above.
The Nano-ITX motherboard used is not commercially avalible - and it will not be avalible for general sale for some months yet. The author points outs that even using this yet-to-be released motherboard, there was no room for a CD/DVD drive. It also does not feature a built in modem or a 'Firewire' port (but I don't think that's a big deal). It doesn't appear to feature WiFi or Bluetooth either, but there certainly seems room to fit them easily.
It features a 1 Ghz Via C3 CPU (and either a Via or S3 graphics card), so performance could be a problem if you wish to use this as a 'home entertainment' device (or well, pretty much anything other than a low traffic headless sever or simple web browsing/email device IMO, YMMV).
On the plus side it appears to have S-Video, Composite and VGA output (no DVI, but a lot more useful to most people I'd think), additional input and output audio interfaces and two SODIMM slots (which I think is better than than the single DIMM on the Mac Mini, but again YMMV).
I think this guy likes the sound of his own voice and that he doesn't know much relevent history (and that he hasn't been bothered to use Google either).
As I get a bit sick of explaning to muppets like him who are arrogant enough to think they have uncovered some crucial legal precident or frame work that no-one else has noticed (including teams of lawyers working for firms like Sony), the issue of emulation has been delt with in court in the US many times, even specifically in the area of emulating video games consoles.
A good example is the Connectix vs. Sony case. Connectix of course were responsible for the the leading quality PlayStation emulator 'Virtual Game Station' for Windows and Macintosh.
Sony tried multiple legal angles to stop distribution of this program (and similar emulators), including 11 claims of patent violation. They lost, and in the end just bought the technology from Connectix to keep it from being avalible.
The same issue had already come up years ago in case involving Sony and Accolade (and it had bearing on the Connectix vs. Sony case). That 'Emulation is illegal' was a bogus assertion then, a bogus assertion in the Connectix vs. Sony case, and a bogus assertion now.
In the Connectix vs. Sony case, the court ruled that it was perfectly legal for developers to make dumps of the firmware for the purposes of building an emulator (even if it's a commercial competing product). You may not, however, distribute them or include patent code in your code (no surpise there).
There is quite a good summary here.
Of course this still doesn't mean it's okay to obtain ROM's from the internet (obviously) but some people inextricably link "emulation" with "OMGWTFBQQ free gamez0rs 11!!11" and get confused when you try to treat the issue of emulation as a seperate topic from software piracy.
I've been using Linux since '96 and I could care less about OSX, besides adopting a couple of its neat GUI ideas into the Free desktop. I can understand Windows users wanting to switch -- for them it's a huge leap forward in all aspects. But for us long time Linux users, it's just another mildly interesting member of the Unix family tree.
:P
Speak for yourself!
I've been running Linux on Macintosh hardware since 1996 and I use Mac OS X as my primary system (even though I develop solutions/software on Debian, FreeBSD and Solaris systems for a living).
May of us see the virtue in having a system which 'just works', and as good as it Debian and GNOME don't quite do that for me (and KDE doesn't delivery the funtionality I'm looking for, I prefer the GNOME style of implimentation). I'd much rather have Debian as a server, but I can't say the same about a desktop.
I agree that KDE/GNOME and x.org will catch up within a couple of years and with the better performance of an accellerated window manager and an even better (but already very impressive) GNOME/nautilus driven environment I'll be tempted to switch back.
I think you need to read this:
Snip
Yes yes, "You can't fight city hall!", "You can't change the world!", "Life is unfair!", I'll stop you -we've heard it.
The unreasonable man knows that there are other options, like strong labour laws, social healthcare systems and welfare for the poor.
We have really strong labour laws in Europe, and we still have lower unemployment and a stronger economy here in the UK than in the US, dispite this. We also have a strong support system (free healthcare, welfare for the unemployed) too.
Sure the high taxation may mean those of us who earn more have less money to spend on Precious Things, but that's not much of a comparison when compared to to improving the quality of human life for all our citizens.
These are all tragedies. But short of moving everyone, everywhere inland 10 miles, disbanding the military, and eliminating all railway/traffic crossings everywhere, this stuff will happen. There's nothing we can do about it
Apart from the obvious:
o) Build early warning systems and better infrastructure
o) Don't approach going to war in the same manner the US forces did recently (or vote the induhvidual responsible in, twice).
o) Build better traffic crossings.
Those don't make the problems disappear, but it sure as hell beats doing nothing.
If you can't handle unfairness now, how are you going to react when an innocent family member gets terminal cancer?
Well here we get free health care, because we care enough to make it fair.
My (American) stepfather died of cancer the year before last, unfortunately he'd already had it for years before they were aware of it as it had rapped itself round his spine and because of it's position and it's spread they were unable to operate. He was told he had one year at the most.
In the end he had 5 years of top notch treatment with hundreds of USD worth of drugs every day, which there is no way they would been able to afford in the US. My mother would have had to remortgage (and eventually sell) the house if they'd had to pay for it themselves, even with good insurance.
In the rest of the western world you'll find really strong labour laws - it helps ensure a stable economy. There is a reason why the leading economies in the world (bar the US) have the best labour laws, it really is good for employers and employees (though I'm sure certain global corporations feel otherwise, they are not all entirely good for business themselves).
Life is not unfair as life is neither capeable of being fair or unfair - it's just something that happens to all living things.
People, however, can be unfair, and the practices of people can be unfair - and people and practices are definately subject to change and influence.
First of all, a MAC address does not uniquely identify a computer - it uniquely identifies a network interface. I have several computers which have more than one Ethernet controller in them, and so they have several MAC addresses associated with them.
In this sort of instance doesn't matter one jot that they have multiple MAC addresses though (especially when it's using an internal interface, where it's not as if you can remove it and put it in another machine, nor was it used as the complete unique identifier, just as part of a longer string).
So, that argument really has no bearing.
These two items alone should be sufficient to convince people that using the MAC address as anything other than the physical layer address of a specific Ethernet card is a BAD IDEA.
It's used as part of the unique identifer, which is perfectly reasonable and sensible given the level of uniqueness, it's actually common way of generating UUID's specifically because when it's been combined the date & time and a random string it's superior to a mere random string on it's own.
Though you honestly think debian is a better desktop system than mac os x
It's a better server - it's much easier to manage updates and installs of new server software, has many more applications ported to packages, has a full package managment system, a much more powerful firewall (in the form of iptables) and it will perfom far better than Mac OS X.
It's pretty silly to run Mac OS X as a server in most instances. As a home or small office web/file server? Sure, it's easy and saves time configuring - that makes sense. But if you need to because you don't know how to use another form of UNIX you almost certainly should not be running a server on a public network. If you intend to run PHP/CGI's on a public web server your far better off with Debian as you'll get much better performance and have many more options easily avalible in terms of useable software.
You'll note that's what's being discussed not a desktop (as you'll note from the opening statement in your your reply: 'FWIW, you don't have to run the Quartz Window Manager either BTW').
FWIW, I have Linux dual booting on my current 1.5 Ghz/1GB RAM PowerBook and on my older TiBook, and it's order of magnitude faster than Mac OS X as a Desktop as well.
If I had native 3D graphics card support (including support for dual head display) with my current 128 MB ATI mobility card I'd seriously consider switching back to Debian - dispite being a long time Mac user - especially once we have more sophisticated X builds. For now, I still feel OS X is best though, but they will need to work hard to keep me hooked in the next few years. GNOME, X and applications like Gnumeric, Abiword, Evolution, GIMP and Nautilus just keep getting better and better IMO.
Once you've seen and really used Linux on a G4, it's apaprent how criminally slow Mac OS X is at so many things (especially the appauling Finder). It makes up for lots of it with a very slick accelerated GUI, but in part that's just a clever distraction from some more serious underlying slowless which impacts usability significantly.
OS X is essentially FreeBSD with a pretty GUI on top.
Mac OS X is based on Rhapsody (with a new Window Manager theme and the core display technology being display PDF rather than being display PostScript), which is based on OPENSTEP, which is based on NeXTSTEP which is based on mach and UNIX from Berkeley.
There are BITS of FreeBSD in Mac OS X, but there also BITS of FreeBSD in multiple releases of Windows.
Like FreeBSD, it's a UNIX implimentation, but it's a very different style of UNIX implimentation from FreeBSD and it's not based on FreeBSD.
FWIW, you don't have to run the Quartz Window Manager either BTW, you can just choose to not start it. I'm tempted to say your better off with Debian on a lower end G4 PowerPC system like the mini though.
miss is clicking the scroll wheel and moving up or down to quickly scroll through documents and such
;-)
You might be interested to know about the Microsoft Intellimouse software for mac - it does all this and more and is freely downloadable as I recall.
I shouldn't think it's Microsoft mouse specific either...
This is the winning combo of 2005. The MiniMac and Xbox2 are light on power, skimpy on playable formats, and not ready to serve as dumb-terminals. They discourage bigger drives, don't burnCDs/DVDs, and don't come with wireless.
Of course, Mac Mini does allow you to connect Firewire and USB hard disks, and even chain them ('Quiet, cute external hard-drives could be added and daisy-chained.'.), burn CD's and DVD's and comes with 802.11g and BlueTooth if desired and supports all the formats you could reasonably want thanks to Mplayer, the VLAN client and QuickTime.
And with reference to Sell a quiet, stylish set-top computer with TV and stereo out, remote control, and wireless. both a cheap TV out (S-Video) and Remote Control are suggested as options when you buy one via the US Online Apple Store. Oh and it has a 'bootable network card' too, FWIW.
Some of these are avalible on all models (like CD/VCD burning) and some are options (like 802.11g and DVD burning) but your asked to specify each option when your order online so it's not as if you can 'miss' them when ordering.
Another good option that meets the description for a thin client (with video, stereo and 100 Mb Ethernet, but not native wireless) is the Sun Ray platform (which I have two), which now supports Linux x86 as well as Solaris SPARC as server platform, but it's somewhat complex to configure and has heft price tag for for multiple clients (not for the hardware, which is very cheap, but for the software licences, though technically it runs fine with out the little bits of paper *cough*).
A slew of cheap thin client devices (DVD support, wireless access to multiple video formats from a PC over a network share) are actually in development now, performance is not all that great and they have a lot of issues though (like poor quality video playback over wireless as they play the entire MPEG 2/4 file from hard disk file share, rather than as truley streamed video).
The angry young luser ranted:
Read the post you were replying to you dense motherfucker!! READ! ("omg!!11! +more swearing cuz its k00lzors", etc)
You'd do well to take your own advice, specifically followup ID 11329740, apparently you didn't read that before your ranted.
Additionally, learning the phat skillz of 'typing' might also be of some use to you.
So no cigar, but thanks for playing though.
He suggests you can't throw in an off the shelf PC DIMM in there while in fact you can.
Ah sorry that's certainly true and possibly what I'll do (though I'm not sure yet, given the hassle I've had in the past). Though you'll want to get something suitably compatible (rather than just a generic off the shelf DIMM from a generic store, which is unlikely to be the right specifications and liable to induce problems - even on x86 getting the right DIMM's can be a pain these days) and it does void your 1 Year Apple Care warranty, which on a new model I have a horrible suspicion will end up being useful...
Also, good luck finding an USB keyboard connected to a PC
The last time I bought a Personal Computer (x86 with Windows, or PPC Macintosh or otherwise) with anything other than a USB keyboard was 1996 as I recall - it a new Twinhead laptop, my first laptop - though if it had been a desktop I would certainly have gotten a system with USB then too, but I was on a limited budget and this was a very special offer.
The next time I bought a new computer (and keyboard) was in early 1997 and it was USB (I remember specificaly because I got fed up of the laptop and swapped it for a tricked out games machine including a brand new Voodoo graphics card and snazzy new keyboard).
Even new PS2 keyboards in 1997 were coming with PS2 adapters, as I recall Apple haven't even sold a new computer with anything OTHER than USB since *1998* (7 years ago!).
It's not uncommon for people to have unrealistic expections about what is really very dated equipment, but it's been 2 years since I've even bought a USB keyboard (and even then, it was with a Sun Ray thin client). For example, my Apple Pro keyboard (and my Mac mouse) is BlueTooth, as is my Logitec DiNovo keyboard+mouse+media pad combo on my Windows XP system.
and good luck finding a PC keyboard port on this iMac.
USB is a port for keyboards on 'PCs' (including x86/Windows based systems since Windows 95), it has two (and the generic USB keyboards I still have - from Logitech and Sun Microsystems - work fine with any 1998+ Macintosh). If you use a PS2 keyboard with the supplied USB adapter you even use that on your USB equiped Mac (or Sun workstation for that matter).
A line has to be drawn somewhere as far as legacy support goes, especially when the likes of PS2 isn't even hot swappable and really was in need of being replaced. Given it's been 9 years since Windows supported USB (and 7 years since Apple stopped supporting legacy ADB entirely) and ALL the major vendors now ship USB exclusively it's not exactly unreasonable to expect USB, especially given you can buy a combined keyboard and mouse PS2 adapter for only 0.99 USD (froogle.google.com) if you're really stuck.
The previous responded did a good job with the specs and I'd 100 % agree about the RAM (at least 512 MB, preferably 1 GB).
The CPU should be fine I would think (it's not a problem on my 1.5 Ghz / 1 GB RAM PowerBook, Radeon 9700 128 MB). I can see the 32 MB texture memory being a bit of an issue though (that's one reason I went with the 128 MB VRAM on the PowerBook), not sure how 32 MB VRAM performs on a Mac with WoW.
I find the varying landscapes and outfits in MMOG's tend to use a lot of unique textures, so more VRAM helps quite a bit IME.