Sounds like fun. I think someone made a mod for one of the Quake games which turned it into a "2D" side scroller. But IIRC it didn't have any neat lighting effects or anything like that.
I'll try to give my view on why "the problms with Linux/OSS" articles like this are completely irrelevant.
The most important thing to remember about OSS and the open source way of developing is that it doesn't need market shares. Not really anyways.
A closed source company may have a brilliant product which fails due to lack of advertising, misunderstandings or poor alignment of the planets. Why it fails isn't important for this example. What happens when that company closes their doors is that this product is lost until someone who remembers it takes it upon themselves to reinvent it. And this can take a lot of time and they'll have to fight the same battles all over again.
With OSS the product never dies. If the original coder(s) get bored and drop it the source is still there. If someone else comes along a year or so later they can pick up and continue the work.
That is (IMHO) the most fundamental difference between CSS and OSS.
The point of all this is that Linux (the platform) doesn't/have/ to grow. It doesn't/have/ to cater to users. It doesn't/have/ to make people understand.
A CSS however/has/ to do all these things. Because if it fails to grow and get more money it dies. Well, it doesn't really have to grow, it just has to make people pay up every year or so in order to keep people around.
Linux/OSS however will simply exists and continue to grow until people start paying attention. It may be that Linux isn't ready for the desktop (at least not at every company), but that's fine. It will just have to continue to mature over the years and before you know it there you have it. World domination!;-)
I doubt they used this attack against mobile phones as it's completely useless against them.
AFAIK most other attacks depend on "bloopers" in the Bluetooth spec. which allow you to pull data from the phone without authenticating. (It's fundamentally a problem that AFAIK no mobile phones have implemented a proper security manager, all just use the static "all on or all off" security which is mandatory.)
I would imagine that SE phones are "more vunerable" since they actually implement a lot of Bluetooth profiles.
I think his point is that while Ruby is nice and all it doesn't seem to offer that much more than eg Python. They are both scripting languages. And while Ruby on Rails is good for hacking together a simple WWW site it may not pay off to learn the language just to solve a one off problem. In that case you'd be better off solving it in a language you know.
So I think you are overthinking this "problem" waaaaay too much. Besides I'm quite convinced that someone who uses Python is already competent in multiple languages. Personally I know Python, C/C++, Java, Haskell, Lisp, Perl, some extinct languages like Basic, Fortran and Pascal as well as hardware languages like VHDL and Verilog. I know these to different degrees of competence, as a rule I have made at least a couple of bigger projects in each and have gotten a "feel" for the languge.
Is it a big problem that my feeling towards Ruby is more of "Meh, perhaps I'll look into it in the future" than that I spend a lot of time learning it? For me the question isn't if I can learn a new language or not. It's more of a question of "Why Ruby?". And to be honest, I have heard a lot of good things about Ruby, but very little as far as specifics are concerned.
we use USB sticks for transferring data all over the place, including non-company machines (during demos, etc...). Sometimes a USB stick may be placed on a machine connected to a non-company network (e.g. a laptop). We want to avoid accidental disclosure in such cases. Perhaps it would be a better idea to invest in a couple of portable HDDs. That way you could run the program from the HDD and that way it's easier to ensure that you actually take it with you.
Furthermore you should (of course) establish routines and inform people exactly what they can run on a clients machine. Eg it makes a lot of sense to only give them (clients) access to executables. No code should EVER be allowed on media that you want to give to clients.
Another alterative could be to use CDRs which you destroy after the demonstration.
Of course all of this assumes that the client doesn't have a program running which downloads everything. It's hard to protect against that. (Hence the no-code policy.)
Oh, and make sure that all laptops you use have VPN installed and configured so that you can connect to your office network safely while on the road.
One of the first charts demonstrates that in pure benchmarking the solid state disk is indeed 6 times faster. It is NOT a hypothetical limit of the reading speed or anything like this, but it is a benchmark.
Now what the load times show is that apparently games spend a lot of time doing other things while loading than just waiting for disk. That disk load times aren't 6 times faster only mean that loading a new level isn't disk limited.
BTW modern SATA drives don't "easily" get 80MB/s, looking at StorageReview it seems like even the fastest SATA drives max out at sequencial reading at about 70MB/s. In the slower parts of the disk it's more like 50MB/s, and this is all for sequencial reading (ie best case).
But the PCI slot won't provide power if the system is really turned off...
They should use HDD power connectors and you can use it as a one-to-one substitute for a HDD. As it is, it's a STUPID implementation.
No, it's not a stupid implementation. And the PCI slot WILL give the card power as long as the computer is plugged in and the PSU is not turned off.
If you are one of the people that remove the power cord from you computer you are clearly not in the market group for this device. (Note that it's only made in a 1000 unit version now.)
The benefits you get from this solution compared to a normal HDD is 1) Speed, limited by interface and not device. 2) Latency, really - really low 3) Silent. If you want a silent computer this device may well be worth it. 4) Low power consumption
And just to point out how inane the rest of your argument is, you'll likely spend more on those 4 HDDs and S-ATA controller than on on this card + 4 GB of DDR2 memory. (At least here in Sweden the price of 1GB DDR2 RAM is pretty much the same as a cheap SATA drive.)
There's a pretty neat PCI card that's going to be released soon by Gigabyte (IIRC). It has room for 4 RAM modules and has a SATA connector. Put up to 8 GB on it and you can use it as a bootable HDD. (The PCI connector supplies it with power when the computer is switched off.)
It's supposed to be released soon now (July-August) and cost ~$60 (without RAM).
The licensing I refer to are the provisions that require you to surrender your name, address, and home phone numbers to GameSpy, and the provision that requires you to surrender IP rights to all "content" which touches an EA or GameSpy server.
I have only used the demo so far but there I didn't have to give anything but an email. They didn't even bounce an email to me to verify that it was a valid adress.
And when sites absolutely require that I give my home adress I typically just give them a faked adress to the King of Sweden or something like that. It's a lot more fun to poison their data than to not give them anything.
At worst they'd delete my account, but it's not much there. Just some statistics. I'm not sure what "IP" it is they would require me to surrender. My kill ratio and ingame comments?
I wrote my own review of BF2 on my offline-gaming centered website, which I named "The Lone Gamer". In addition to the experience I wrote down there, I also had the opportunity to try and get a co-op mode running at a LAN party last weekend.
From your quite negative review and these comments I take it that you don't play the game online. My own experience with the demo is that unless you play online you're not really playing the game.
Your issues with AI and tactics become pretty much moot when playing online. Who needs a retarded AI squadmate when you can have a real human squadmate running around like a be-headed chicken? But when you get into a good squad (I've had both good and bad experiences) the game becomes brilliant. Nothing quite like riding gunner in a Blackhawk gunning down people holding a flag and jumping out to take control of it.
Or climbing up on the roof of a building and gunning down the sniper that's picked you off 3 times.
Really, if you are "reviewing" the offline, single-player experience then you're not really reviewing the game. It makes as much sense as complaining that World of Warcraft is boring on your own.
All in all, you are paying much more than $50 for this game. It is a reasonably enjoyable experience, if you play by EA's rules. If not, it is going to be a giant mound of frustration.
In what way are you paying more than $50 for the game?
And if you don't like the rated servers you can play on your own.
Simulations that have more than 8 buttons worth of control.... mechwarrior
You may want to look at Steel Battalion (XBox). I haven't been able to try it out, but it looks to be pretty much the ultimate mech game.
The controller has an eject button, and if you get shot down and fail to eject then you have to restart the game. Pretty hard core if you ask me. BTW the controller is probably the only that can compete with a Thrustmaster HOTAS setup in pure coolness.
Ah yes, didn't consider that you could dynamically build strings and eval them. Oh well, different contexts is the solution which should be used in any case so I guess it's all for the best in the end.
I'm not sure I have ever read anything by him that has struck me as insightful. Typically it seems like his just taking some phenomenon that pretty much everyone (in the business) already knows about and then complains about it. It becomes painfully obvious to anyone reading that knows something about the topic (which is typically everyone by the time Dvorak gets to it) that he just doesn't understand it. Not only is he ignorant but he seems proud of his ignorance and climbs to the highest of soap-boxes to shout it out.
All this for a couple of ad hits...
Has-beens are sad. Particularly when they don't understand it.
And I yes, there are many of clueless people in media positions. That's no excuse for Dvorak to be one though.
The problem as I understand it, is that the page creator can insert code that will later be run client side as if it was a user side script.
Easy fix: Strip the loaded page from any GreaseMonkey function calls before adding the user side scripts and executing.
Of course, a good solution would put the user side scripts and server supplied (ie in the original HTML) in different context so that this can't happen.
As far as I know there are no server supplied JS pages which interact with the user side GM scripts (for good purposes, not exploits). That would be quite useless as it would require that the user had GM installed as well as had a specific user side script installed.
So I bet the next version of GM (that doesn't just shut everything off as a quick "fix") will strip any GM calls from the original page before starting the GM scripts.
That way you can't insert GM code on a page in order to harvest info.
She has tight jeans on but is still able to put her hand in there? No way...
Of course, she could have specially tailored jeans with really tight legs and the belt size of a 200 pund guy. I guess that would make the picture possible.
1) Most DVDs are not filled to 9GB. 2) The codecs used for HDTV are a lot more efficient. (A normal MPEG4 can typically reduce a normal DVD movie to 1.5 or 2 GB.) 3) I got my numbers from a source at least somewhat related to BluRay. 4) It doesn't matter that BluRay has a lot more space. The topic was if it will fit a movie or not. Once it fits a movie all else is bonus, but not requirement.
My point here wasn't that HD-DVD was better than BluRay. It's quite obvious that BluRay can fit more data. The point was that HD-DVD is sufficient at least for the time being. Personally I don't care what we use, I'll just get a dual play which plays both formats.
I got that number from blu-raydisc.com who claim that 1080i is 40Mbit/s. I assume they know that they are talking about and used a "standard" defenition of compression. (Just like you can use different bitrates for MPEG2, but some are standard for normal DVDs.)
Triple layer HD-DVD is 45GB and Blu-Ray (double layer) is 50GB. I think both of them will be able to cover HD-Video just fine.
According to blu-raydisc.com 1080i is 40Mbit/s. That works out to 36G for a 2 hour movie. Drawback is naturally that this will mean that monster movies like LOTR will still be multi disc (if they are at 1080i) but that goes for both formats.
Personally I think this discussion is a bit pointless. We all know that it will end up another DVD(+|-)R[W] thing were we end up with all if them in one box in the end.
Yes I know a lot of kids get what they want (same here). My points was that:
1) They are not the people that spend most on consoles so naturally the game makers are not going to put most of the effort there.
2) If they throw it in the wall and destroy it then see my comment about "fuck the spoiled brats". Or let the parents buy a new toy for their children, preferrably not one they can destroy before they learn to control themselves.
As an adult who can throw a lot of money on stuff I like I think it's great that Sony cater to me and people like me. That they should make the unit 3 times the size just in case a toddler tries to eat it doesn't make sense to me. (The grandparent was claiming that the PSP was subpar since it was easy to damage.)
A major character in the books. Hell, a WHOLE book was about him...and in my opinion the best book so far.
Yes, that was my point. He was in the previous books as well but hardly a "main character". Then the entire book is spent on building up the character just to kill him off.
I was a bit annoyed that it wasn't one of the mayor players. It also seemed (IIRC) that he was killed off just to kill of a character. IMHO that's a bit cheap.
But I did think it was a pretty good book in the series. Can't remember if I liked it more than the 4th or not though.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like fun. I think someone made a mod for one of the Quake games which turned it into a "2D" side scroller. But IIRC it didn't have any neat lighting effects or anything like that.
I'll try to give my view on why "the problms with Linux/OSS" articles like this are completely irrelevant.
/have/ to grow. It doesn't /have/ to cater to users. It doesn't /have/ to make people understand.
/has/ to do all these things. Because if it fails to grow and get more money it dies. Well, it doesn't really have to grow, it just has to make people pay up every year or so in order to keep people around.
;-)
The most important thing to remember about OSS and the open source way of developing is that it doesn't need market shares. Not really anyways.
A closed source company may have a brilliant product which fails due to lack of advertising, misunderstandings or poor alignment of the planets. Why it fails isn't important for this example. What happens when that company closes their doors is that this product is lost until someone who remembers it takes it upon themselves to reinvent it. And this can take a lot of time and they'll have to fight the same battles all over again.
With OSS the product never dies. If the original coder(s) get bored and drop it the source is still there. If someone else comes along a year or so later they can pick up and continue the work.
That is (IMHO) the most fundamental difference between CSS and OSS.
The point of all this is that Linux (the platform) doesn't
A CSS however
Linux/OSS however will simply exists and continue to grow until people start paying attention. It may be that Linux isn't ready for the desktop (at least not at every company), but that's fine. It will just have to continue to mature over the years and before you know it there you have it. World domination!
I doubt they used this attack against mobile phones as it's completely useless against them.
AFAIK most other attacks depend on "bloopers" in the Bluetooth spec. which allow you to pull data from the phone without authenticating. (It's fundamentally a problem that AFAIK no mobile phones have implemented a proper security manager, all just use the static "all on or all off" security which is mandatory.)
I would imagine that SE phones are "more vunerable" since they actually implement a lot of Bluetooth profiles.
I think his point is that while Ruby is nice and all it doesn't seem to offer that much more than eg Python. They are both scripting languages. And while Ruby on Rails is good for hacking together a simple WWW site it may not pay off to learn the language just to solve a one off problem. In that case you'd be better off solving it in a language you know.
So I think you are overthinking this "problem" waaaaay too much. Besides I'm quite convinced that someone who uses Python is already competent in multiple languages. Personally I know Python, C/C++, Java, Haskell, Lisp, Perl, some extinct languages like Basic, Fortran and Pascal as well as hardware languages like VHDL and Verilog. I know these to different degrees of competence, as a rule I have made at least a couple of bigger projects in each and have gotten a "feel" for the languge.
Is it a big problem that my feeling towards Ruby is more of "Meh, perhaps I'll look into it in the future" than that I spend a lot of time learning it? For me the question isn't if I can learn a new language or not. It's more of a question of "Why Ruby?". And to be honest, I have heard a lot of good things about Ruby, but very little as far as specifics are concerned.
we use USB sticks for transferring data all over the place, including non-company machines (during demos, etc...). Sometimes a USB stick may be placed on a machine connected to a non-company network (e.g. a laptop). We want to avoid accidental disclosure in such cases.
Perhaps it would be a better idea to invest in a couple of portable HDDs. That way you could run the program from the HDD and that way it's easier to ensure that you actually take it with you.
Furthermore you should (of course) establish routines and inform people exactly what they can run on a clients machine. Eg it makes a lot of sense to only give them (clients) access to executables. No code should EVER be allowed on media that you want to give to clients.
Another alterative could be to use CDRs which you destroy after the demonstration.
Of course all of this assumes that the client doesn't have a program running which downloads everything. It's hard to protect against that. (Hence the no-code policy.)
Oh, and make sure that all laptops you use have VPN installed and configured so that you can connect to your office network safely while on the road.
Calm down and look at the charts again.
One of the first charts demonstrates that in pure benchmarking the solid state disk is indeed 6 times faster. It is NOT a hypothetical limit of the reading speed or anything like this, but it is a benchmark.
Now what the load times show is that apparently games spend a lot of time doing other things while loading than just waiting for disk. That disk load times aren't 6 times faster only mean that loading a new level isn't disk limited.
BTW modern SATA drives don't "easily" get 80MB/s, looking at StorageReview it seems like even the fastest SATA drives max out at sequencial reading at about 70MB/s. In the slower parts of the disk it's more like 50MB/s, and this is all for sequencial reading (ie best case).
If you want really fast boot in Linux look into Make based bootsctipts (which you mention) and also LinuxBIOS.
If you combine them you'll have a really fast boot.
No, it's not a stupid implementation. And the PCI slot WILL give the card power as long as the computer is plugged in and the PSU is not turned off.
If you are one of the people that remove the power cord from you computer you are clearly not in the market group for this device. (Note that it's only made in a 1000 unit version now.)
The benefits you get from this solution compared to a normal HDD is
1) Speed, limited by interface and not device.
2) Latency, really - really low
3) Silent. If you want a silent computer this device may well be worth it.
4) Low power consumption
And just to point out how inane the rest of your argument is, you'll likely spend more on those 4 HDDs and S-ATA controller than on on this card + 4 GB of DDR2 memory. (At least here in Sweden the price of 1GB DDR2 RAM is pretty much the same as a cheap SATA drive.)
There's a pretty neat PCI card that's going to be released soon by Gigabyte (IIRC). It has room for 4 RAM modules and has a SATA connector. Put up to 8 GB on it and you can use it as a bootable HDD. (The PCI connector supplies it with power when the computer is switched off.)
It's supposed to be released soon now (July-August) and cost ~$60 (without RAM).
I have only used the demo so far but there I didn't have to give anything but an email. They didn't even bounce an email to me to verify that it was a valid adress.
And when sites absolutely require that I give my home adress I typically just give them a faked adress to the King of Sweden or something like that. It's a lot more fun to poison their data than to not give them anything.
At worst they'd delete my account, but it's not much there. Just some statistics. I'm not sure what "IP" it is they would require me to surrender. My kill ratio and ingame comments?
From your quite negative review and these comments I take it that you don't play the game online. My own experience with the demo is that unless you play online you're not really playing the game.
Your issues with AI and tactics become pretty much moot when playing online. Who needs a retarded AI squadmate when you can have a real human squadmate running around like a be-headed chicken? But when you get into a good squad (I've had both good and bad experiences) the game becomes brilliant. Nothing quite like riding gunner in a Blackhawk gunning down people holding a flag and jumping out to take control of it.
Or climbing up on the roof of a building and gunning down the sniper that's picked you off 3 times.
Really, if you are "reviewing" the offline, single-player experience then you're not really reviewing the game. It makes as much sense as complaining that World of Warcraft is boring on your own.
In what way are you paying more than $50 for the game?
And if you don't like the rated servers you can play on your own.
You may want to look at Steel Battalion (XBox). I haven't been able to try it out, but it looks to be pretty much the ultimate mech game.
The controller has an eject button, and if you get shot down and fail to eject then you have to restart the game. Pretty hard core if you ask me. BTW the controller is probably the only that can compete with a Thrustmaster HOTAS setup in pure coolness.
Ah yes, didn't consider that you could dynamically build strings and eval them. Oh well, different contexts is the solution which should be used in any case so I guess it's all for the best in the end.
I'm not sure I have ever read anything by him that has struck me as insightful. Typically it seems like his just taking some phenomenon that pretty much everyone (in the business) already knows about and then complains about it. It becomes painfully obvious to anyone reading that knows something about the topic (which is typically everyone by the time Dvorak gets to it) that he just doesn't understand it. Not only is he ignorant but he seems proud of his ignorance and climbs to the highest of soap-boxes to shout it out.
All this for a couple of ad hits...
Has-beens are sad. Particularly when they don't understand it.
And I yes, there are many of clueless people in media positions. That's no excuse for Dvorak to be one though.
The problem as I understand it, is that the page creator can insert code that will later be run client side as if it was a user side script.
Easy fix: Strip the loaded page from any GreaseMonkey function calls before adding the user side scripts and executing.
Of course, a good solution would put the user side scripts and server supplied (ie in the original HTML) in different context so that this can't happen.
As far as I know there are no server supplied JS pages which interact with the user side GM scripts (for good purposes, not exploits). That would be quite useless as it would require that the user had GM installed as well as had a specific user side script installed.
So I bet the next version of GM (that doesn't just shut everything off as a quick "fix") will strip any GM calls from the original page before starting the GM scripts.
That way you can't insert GM code on a page in order to harvest info.
I'm confused, wouldn't that require the US branch to change name to FTV?
I think the point was to have games that are safe for kids to play. I don't think I'd let a 10 year old play with soft air guns or paintball.
Looks like a fake to me.
She has tight jeans on but is still able to put her hand in there? No way...
Of course, she could have specially tailored jeans with really tight legs and the belt size of a 200 pund guy. I guess that would make the picture possible.
1) Most DVDs are not filled to 9GB.
2) The codecs used for HDTV are a lot more efficient. (A normal MPEG4 can typically reduce a normal DVD movie to 1.5 or 2 GB.)
3) I got my numbers from a source at least somewhat related to BluRay.
4) It doesn't matter that BluRay has a lot more space. The topic was if it will fit a movie or not. Once it fits a movie all else is bonus, but not requirement.
My point here wasn't that HD-DVD was better than BluRay. It's quite obvious that BluRay can fit more data. The point was that HD-DVD is sufficient at least for the time being. Personally I don't care what we use, I'll just get a dual play which plays both formats.
I got that number from blu-raydisc.com who claim that 1080i is 40Mbit/s. I assume they know that they are talking about and used a "standard" defenition of compression. (Just like you can use different bitrates for MPEG2, but some are standard for normal DVDs.)
Considering that a 1080i movie is about 15GB per hour it doesn't really make much sense with 200GB discs.
While BluRay has the upper hand in capacity triple layer HD-DVD will last for a while at the very least.
Triple layer HD-DVD is 45GB and Blu-Ray (double layer) is 50GB. I think both of them will be able to cover HD-Video just fine.
According to blu-raydisc.com 1080i is 40Mbit/s. That works out to 36G for a 2 hour movie. Drawback is naturally that this will mean that monster movies like LOTR will still be multi disc (if they are at 1080i) but that goes for both formats.
Personally I think this discussion is a bit pointless. We all know that it will end up another DVD(+|-)R[W] thing were we end up with all if them in one box in the end.
Yes I know a lot of kids get what they want (same here). My points was that:
1) They are not the people that spend most on consoles so naturally the game makers are not going to put most of the effort there.
2) If they throw it in the wall and destroy it then see my comment about "fuck the spoiled brats". Or let the parents buy a new toy for their children, preferrably not one they can destroy before they learn to control themselves.
As an adult who can throw a lot of money on stuff I like I think it's great that Sony cater to me and people like me. That they should make the unit 3 times the size just in case a toddler tries to eat it doesn't make sense to me. (The grandparent was claiming that the PSP was subpar since it was easy to damage.)
A major character in the books. Hell, a WHOLE book was about him...and in my opinion the best book so far.
Yes, that was my point. He was in the previous books as well but hardly a "main character". Then the entire book is spent on building up the character just to kill him off.
I was a bit annoyed that it wasn't one of the mayor players. It also seemed (IIRC) that he was killed off just to kill of a character. IMHO that's a bit cheap.
But I did think it was a pretty good book in the series. Can't remember if I liked it more than the 4th or not though.