Shouldn't the movie studios/recording industry pour all their efforts into finding the source of these leaked files rather than blaming everyone else on the 'net for their lack of basic security?
You know, simply NOT allowing their staff to send emails full of huge mpg files, or carry out CDRWs full of company assets would seem to be a good idea, would it not? It'd certainly be easier to stop this sort of thing at the source.
Imagine if the mints (places that "make" money - not the sweets) had security this lax? Everyone in the country would be a potential criminal. Mind you, the RIAA already think this, so...
Hmm, baseball? Baseball.... Ah yes, now I remember, it's that game where you hit a ball with a stick and run around in a circle. We have that over in the UK too - it's only played by girls though, and called "rounders".
So they actually pay people to do that over in the US?;-)
...was that too much of the focus went into using the latest AI and graphic techniques, but the game itself just wasn't all that much fun. Well, that's my view anyway - I'm quite happy to play a mindless splatterfest like RTCW for 6 hours at a stretch, but I felt wierd about tickling some pixelated beast's stomach to make in "nice". It was a play once, and never darken my DVD drive ever again type of game...
Let's hope they don't make the same mistake again if they do implement this new AI... Pacman, Tetris and Galaga are great games with almost 0 AI.
True, I remember splashing out to upgrade my 486dx33 to a staggering 8MB of RAM (not the video card, the actual main memory) just so I could play Doom without it crawling and thrashing the hard drive (170MB HD, BTW...)
Flash movies can already request more data after they've started, they can use sockets and recieve streaming audio. The reason people tend to hate it is because it's so often abused with the "Skip intro" type rubbish. Since content is streamed down in a compressed binary format, and most competent designers uses vector graphics wherever possible, it's a far more efficient method for transferring data than HTML/XML/CSS pages.
I bought this game way back when. Just dusted off my copy from the attic and wondered how to go about installing in on WinXP or Linux. I'm guessing the files are compressed and the installer would usually go about unpacking them, so how do I do it without DOS (no, I'm not about to blow away my HD to install DOS6;-)
I have to agree - I used to find it a little annoying that I had to pay the TV tax for a couple of channels no matter whether I watched them or not. But recently I've worked out that the BBC channels are pretty good value for money.
It works out that you pay just over 10 quid a month for the BBC, with zero adverts and mostly original programming. Contrast this with Sky which is almost 100% repeats, and 30% adverts (there's roughly 5 minutes of adverts every 10-12 minutes it seems) for the same price.
Plus, unless it's a mere coincidence, most of the satelite channels switch to adverts within seconds of each other, probably to stop channel switching, but I always flip to one of the BBC channels when the ads start for 5 minutes while they're on.
If the beeb can make it pay with no ads, why can't the other satelite channels?
Another useful link here. GeekPac are attempting to use the same tactic as the big corps by trying to raise funds to push some less corporate "influenced" candidates (read sock-puppets) into the parties.
I disagree. The clincher will be in OS' favour and is called "money". Exchange aint free, office ain't free, and neither is any other MS product. The real reason so many home users use Word, Excel and so on is because it's usually simple to find a friend who has a copy and just slap it on your machine. If people stopped doing this, as they will have to once MS finally has full control and knowledge about all Windows desktop OS', then the OS solution will look a lot more attractive.
I recently put together a machine from old spare parts I had laying around for some friends. This was for free, as a favour. They asked me to "just put a copy of Windows XP on there for them, since you've got it already". I loved being able to tell them they would have to register it, and if it was found to be an unlicensed copy when MS audited their machine, it would be disabled, and they would face prosecution. The machine was free, but I could get a copy of XP for about 100 quid...
I installed Linux - since they only wanted to surf the web and email, KDE does it all, and the machine should never get an email virus. They have all the office type software they'll need and no root access to screw it up (the machine only has a 2.5GB HD, so it's not like anything much else could be installed anyway!)
Huh, kids these days bragging about their 2400 baud modems, and their keyboards, chairs, monitors and other fangled stuff.
I remember watching prestel and BBS' crawl across the screen of my Sinclair Spectrum at 300 baud via my old acoustic coupler (still got it - it'll be worth something one day). Funny thing is, the little Spectrum could only fit 32 characters in a row, (32 bytes across for 256 pixels), so the characters were drawn by the terminal app which slowed things down even more - and it looked crap with the block graphics - and my back ached from hunching over the little machine on the floor by the phone for hours on end;-)
Apache on the web tier and I'm no big fan of Apache (or its configuration nightmare specifically).
What "Configuration nightmare"?! Out of the box it'll run on a *nix machine (maybe Windows, but I've never tried it on a desktop OS). Really, there's just one well commented text file to edit, unless you intend to add user authentication to directories (which itself isn't difficult) - it's hardly brain surgery.
It's pretty good; I was very pleased when I managed to get the 3D acceleration working on my Vaio with its Radeon card!
If you're a gamer and using Linux though (if that's not a contradiction in terms) then NVidea is the way to go at the moment. It's true their drivers are closed source, but they are very very fast! Even the old Geforce2MX I have in one of my headless servers (dual 800MHZ P3) managed to run RTCW beautifully last time it had a monitor!
Maybe you should have read the article? The point is that the slow transfer rate from the card TO the PC's RAM means that capturing video (or recording a gaming session for playback later) is severely hampered.
To be honest though, most people buy a GF4 to play games, not capture video.
It'd be interesting if slashdot had a few stats concerning OS and browser usage available to view. Here's the analog stats for OS use amongst visitors to my web server here at home on my ADSL line - it's only advertised on slashdot, so it's a pretty good measure of the OS slashdotters use (at least the ones that visit my server):
no. reqs pages OS
1: 272024: 110492: Windows
: 115335: 46976: Windows XP
: 64394: 26984: Windows 2000
: 55761: 25105: Unknown Windows
: 27537: 8576: Windows 98
: 3458: 1344: Windows ME
: 2828: 1317: Windows NT
: 2697: 187: Windows 95
: 5: 3: Windows 3.1
: 9: 0: Windows 32-bit
2: 66184: 31302: Unix
: 61669: 28955: Linux
: 3542: 1828: BSD
: 654: 356: SunOS
: 231: 115: Other Unix
: 28: 22: IRIX
: 46: 17: OSF1
: 14: 9: AIX
3: 25198: 12846: Macintosh
: 24955: 12666: Macintosh PowerPC
: 155: 97: Macintosh 68k
: 88: 83: Unknown Macintosh
4: 20107: 4163: OS unknown
5: 39: 26: Amiga
6: 35: 25: RISC OS
7: 20: 15: Known robots
8: 29: 15: BeOS
9: 10: 5: WebTV
What's really scary is that Win3.1 is still in use - although I'm guessing it's a robot/joke. Nice to see there's almost as my Linux users as Win2K! The WinXP stats are exagerated as I use it on my desktop, and I've been testing new scripts on the server lately...
Does this mean that JC (John Carmack, not the other one) has caved in and will be using Direct3D, or can he use OpenGL without Microsoft throwing a fit?
Er, this is John Carmack - he can do whatever the hell he likes! Really, even Redmond know how much money he can make (or cost) them. If there ever was a case of the tail wagging the dog, it's him. Likewise, I'm guessing Sony offered him the Earth to get a PS2 version of Doom III...
Sigh, you see, this is why I don't usually bother reading below "1" - too many brainless ACs.
Now, looking at the pictures (which I assume you haven't), what do we have here then? Hmm? Why it's a palette trolley. Moving right along we can see the three strong men pulling a... why it's a palette trolley. Well I'll be gosh darned.
Next time, try looking before arguing, idiot./me changes threshhold back to +1...
If you bothered looking at the pictures, you'd notice they were using a pallet trolley. The crate couldn't "fall over", and could have been moved with 1 finger...
From the photos: Each crate weighed around 400 lbs, which is why you'll see three people moving one box.
Now I know that geeks aren't exactly renowned for their great physical strength, but does it really take 3 of them to move a 400lb box on a pallet trolley?
In my local supermarket I've seen young girls moving pallets full of new stuff for the shelves on these trolleys where the load is up to 1 tonne! (that's one girl moving the trolley, BTW).
There's a big difference with spam versus the illegal drugs trade and child porn: SPAMMERS WANT YOU TO SEE IT! This is their anchovies heel, there's clear evidence of the origin of the spam (or at least the incompetently administered mail server) - so that's where the fault lies.
I agree that there should be more effort on the part of the US government to remove these bags of sh*t from the 'net. Where available, the ISPs should be forced to diveulge the customer account used to post the spam. Any companies advertising via spam should be fined per item of spam. This last would remove a lot, since the spammers wouldn't have much to do without companies paying them. Lastly, if a mail relay is used repeatedly, either force it to close, sue the company responsible for it, or blacklist it all mail from it for at least a year (kind of like a prison sentence for the server host).
I waste far too much of my time scraping up the crap these parasites spew into my mail server - they deserve the harshest of penalties - at least equal to child porn swappers.
Well, I suppose if you wrote something like: Hi, my sexy naked Russian teen lolita! I've increased my penis size to 45 inches by phoning for sex along with other like-minded people who I click with!!!!!!!!!!
I'll be around later, unless you want to opt-out, but it's not an idea I'd subscribe to!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
After all, in the US, football is also played mostly by girls
;-)
Well, they do call it the "beautiful game", and if our teams were all female I might actually watch it
Shouldn't the movie studios/recording industry pour all their efforts into finding the source of these leaked files rather than blaming everyone else on the 'net for their lack of basic security?
You know, simply NOT allowing their staff to send emails full of huge mpg files, or carry out CDRWs full of company assets would seem to be a good idea, would it not? It'd certainly be easier to stop this sort of thing at the source.
Imagine if the mints (places that "make" money - not the sweets) had security this lax? Everyone in the country would be a potential criminal. Mind you, the RIAA already think this, so...
Hmm, baseball? Baseball.... Ah yes, now I remember, it's that game where you hit a ball with a stick and run around in a circle. We have that over in the UK too - it's only played by girls though, and called "rounders".
;-)
So they actually pay people to do that over in the US?
...was that too much of the focus went into using the latest AI and graphic techniques, but the game itself just wasn't all that much fun. Well, that's my view anyway - I'm quite happy to play a mindless splatterfest like RTCW for 6 hours at a stretch, but I felt wierd about tickling some pixelated beast's stomach to make in "nice". It was a play once, and never darken my DVD drive ever again type of game...
Let's hope they don't make the same mistake again if they do implement this new AI... Pacman, Tetris and Galaga are great games with almost 0 AI.
True, I remember splashing out to upgrade my 486dx33 to a staggering 8MB of RAM (not the video card, the actual main memory) just so I could play Doom without it crawling and thrashing the hard drive (170MB HD, BTW...)
You mean like the Flash player?
Flash movies can already request more data after they've started, they can use sockets and recieve streaming audio. The reason people tend to hate it is because it's so often abused with the "Skip intro" type rubbish. Since content is streamed down in a compressed binary format, and most competent designers uses vector graphics wherever possible, it's a far more efficient method for transferring data than HTML/XML/CSS pages.
Never mind, I got a clue and looked at the files. Just a case of copying them off the floppy disks into a directory...
I bought this game way back when. Just dusted off my copy from the attic and wondered how to go about installing in on WinXP or Linux. I'm guessing the files are compressed and the installer would usually go about unpacking them, so how do I do it without DOS (no, I'm not about to blow away my HD to install DOS6 ;-)
I have to agree - I used to find it a little annoying that I had to pay the TV tax for a couple of channels no matter whether I watched them or not. But recently I've worked out that the BBC channels are pretty good value for money.
It works out that you pay just over 10 quid a month for the BBC, with zero adverts and mostly original programming. Contrast this with Sky which is almost 100% repeats, and 30% adverts (there's roughly 5 minutes of adverts every 10-12 minutes it seems) for the same price.
Plus, unless it's a mere coincidence, most of the satelite channels switch to adverts within seconds of each other, probably to stop channel switching, but I always flip to one of the BBC channels when the ads start for 5 minutes while they're on.
If the beeb can make it pay with no ads, why can't the other satelite channels?
"your" right! ;-)
Another useful link here. GeekPac are attempting to use the same tactic as the big corps by trying to raise funds to push some less corporate "influenced" candidates (read sock-puppets) into the parties.
I disagree. The clincher will be in OS' favour and is called "money". Exchange aint free, office ain't free, and neither is any other MS product. The real reason so many home users use Word, Excel and so on is because it's usually simple to find a friend who has a copy and just slap it on your machine. If people stopped doing this, as they will have to once MS finally has full control and knowledge about all Windows desktop OS', then the OS solution will look a lot more attractive.
I recently put together a machine from old spare parts I had laying around for some friends. This was for free, as a favour. They asked me to "just put a copy of Windows XP on there for them, since you've got it already". I loved being able to tell them they would have to register it, and if it was found to be an unlicensed copy when MS audited their machine, it would be disabled, and they would face prosecution. The machine was free, but I could get a copy of XP for about 100 quid...
I installed Linux - since they only wanted to surf the web and email, KDE does it all, and the machine should never get an email virus. They have all the office type software they'll need and no root access to screw it up (the machine only has a 2.5GB HD, so it's not like anything much else could be installed anyway!)
Huh, kids these days bragging about their 2400 baud modems, and their keyboards, chairs, monitors and other fangled stuff.
;-)
I remember watching prestel and BBS' crawl across the screen of my Sinclair Spectrum at 300 baud via my old acoustic coupler (still got it - it'll be worth something one day). Funny thing is, the little Spectrum could only fit 32 characters in a row, (32 bytes across for 256 pixels), so the characters were drawn by the terminal app which slowed things down even more - and it looked crap with the block graphics - and my back ached from hunching over the little machine on the floor by the phone for hours on end
Good days though...
Apache on the web tier and I'm no big fan of Apache (or its configuration nightmare specifically).
What "Configuration nightmare"?! Out of the box it'll run on a *nix machine (maybe Windows, but I've never tried it on a desktop OS). Really, there's just one well commented text file to edit, unless you intend to add user authentication to directories (which itself isn't difficult) - it's hardly brain surgery.
Now sendmail.cf on the other hand....
It's pretty good; I was very pleased when I managed to get the 3D acceleration working on my Vaio with its Radeon card!
If you're a gamer and using Linux though (if that's not a contradiction in terms) then NVidea is the way to go at the moment. It's true their drivers are closed source, but they are very very fast! Even the old Geforce2MX I have in one of my headless servers (dual 800MHZ P3) managed to run RTCW beautifully last time it had a monitor!
Why on earth have the BBC put a picture of a Sky digibox remote control on a story about DVD??!
Maybe you should have read the article? The point is that the slow transfer rate from the card TO the PC's RAM means that capturing video (or recording a gaming session for playback later) is severely hampered.
To be honest though, most people buy a GF4 to play games, not capture video.
What's really scary is that Win3.1 is still in use - although I'm guessing it's a robot/joke. Nice to see there's almost as my Linux users as Win2K! The WinXP stats are exagerated as I use it on my desktop, and I've been testing new scripts on the server lately...
Does this mean that JC (John Carmack, not the other one) has caved in and will be using Direct3D, or can he use OpenGL without Microsoft throwing a fit?
Er, this is John Carmack - he can do whatever the hell he likes! Really, even Redmond know how much money he can make (or cost) them. If there ever was a case of the tail wagging the dog, it's him. Likewise, I'm guessing Sony offered him the Earth to get a PS2 version of Doom III...
Sigh, you see, this is why I don't usually bother reading below "1" - too many brainless ACs.
/me changes threshhold back to +1...
Now, looking at the pictures (which I assume you haven't), what do we have here then? Hmm? Why it's a palette trolley. Moving right along we can see the three strong men pulling a... why it's a palette trolley. Well I'll be gosh darned.
Next time, try looking before arguing, idiot.
If you bothered looking at the pictures, you'd notice they were using a pallet trolley. The crate couldn't "fall over", and could have been moved with 1 finger...
From the photos:
Each crate weighed around 400 lbs, which is why you'll see three people moving one box.
Now I know that geeks aren't exactly renowned for their great physical strength, but does it really take 3 of them to move a 400lb box on a pallet trolley?
In my local supermarket I've seen young girls moving pallets full of new stuff for the shelves on these trolleys where the load is up to 1 tonne! (that's one girl moving the trolley, BTW).
;-) Yeah, I was going to write some clever note about it at the bottom, but I forgot...
There's a big difference with spam versus the illegal drugs trade and child porn: SPAMMERS WANT YOU TO SEE IT! This is their anchovies heel, there's clear evidence of the origin of the spam (or at least the incompetently administered mail server) - so that's where the fault lies.
I agree that there should be more effort on the part of the US government to remove these bags of sh*t from the 'net. Where available, the ISPs should be forced to diveulge the customer account used to post the spam. Any companies advertising via spam should be fined per item of spam. This last would remove a lot, since the spammers wouldn't have much to do without companies paying them. Lastly, if a mail relay is used repeatedly, either force it to close, sue the company responsible for it, or blacklist it all mail from it for at least a year (kind of like a prison sentence for the server host).
I waste far too much of my time scraping up the crap these parasites spew into my mail server - they deserve the harshest of penalties - at least equal to child porn swappers.
Well, I suppose if you wrote something like:
Hi, my sexy naked Russian teen lolita! I've increased my penis size to 45 inches by phoning for sex along with other like-minded people who I click with!!!!!!!!!!
I'll be around later, unless you want to opt-out, but it's not an idea I'd subscribe to!!!!
Then you might just generate a false-positive...