I think this is what he's taking objection to... generating a sequence that is random enough to provide a secure one-time pad on a computer is not a non-trivial task in itself.
ya, i feel much better about a company that has only released one game about 5 years ago and has repackaged and resold it in about 5 different packages. is there any more milk in halflife to milk?
<sarcasm>Yes! Yes! Who cares about gameplay anyways? It's old, so it must be crap... give me my new buzzword-laden engine! I don't care if it's space invaders, as long as it's got pixel-shaded, alpha-channel-blended, motion-captured spherically rendered space invaders! </sarcasm>
The interesting thin is file size. I run a firewall on my xp box (only zone alarm but it works) and it shows i donwloaded 80.1 mb. The size of the Cache directory is 565 mb. Thats some very interesting compression.
If you read the forums/FAQ's on the Valve STEAM beta support site, you'll see that the cache file is much larger than it needs to be, during beta... the cache file is created locally and up-front by the STEAM client, and doesn't have much to do with how much you actually transfer. I'm assuming they'll lower the cache file size before they do a commercial release...
As for the payment options, Valve has said they'll continue to offer updates to existing customers free via STEAM... but as a distribution system it supports much more variable payment methods, such as a flat rate subscription fee (game-of-the-month club, or an EverQuest/UO/AC/DAoC type game), one-time fee (buy online, no shipping fees), possibly even a pay-per-play system (online video arcades!)
Add to this the fact that it will address some of the update distribution systems... no more waiting for five hours on FilePlanet because Popular Game X released 80MB patch Y!
I'll be interested in seeing if it works as promised, but this is fairly a fairly progressive system... I'll be interested to see what results from this.
The ship also has access to email (and consiquently attachments) at sea via Immersat satellite software + (uhh-ohh) Microsoft Outlook. If a member of the ships crew were to open an email attachment apparently from the office, which was in fact a virus, and the network security was not up to scratch, it may have the capacity to shut down not only the ships main course plotting software (sending them to backup paper charts), but to disturb the monitoring of oil/balast on & off the ship in the dock.
Don't worry! I'm sure that Crash Override, Acid Burn and Cereal Killer will save us all by hacking into a Gibson with their iBooks!
Yes... Socrates was given hemlock to drink after being found guilty of corrupting the youth of the day. Not that I'd liken Greene to Socrates myself, mind you...
yeah and then what happens when the guys from the LA bank robbery with the AK-47's and full body armor come at you???? Yeah I thought so, you will be kissing the cop who has an m-16's ass thanking him with praise.
Uhh yeah... because every officer I see carries an M16 for a sidearm. Uh huh.
Hello? Katz "article" here? Remember, in the world according to Katz, it's the Jocks and Cheerleaders that fought the tribes of Nerd in High School? And those that weren't gunned down by the Columbine Freedom Fighters will go on to run the evil (corporations, government, WTO, Starbucks, copyright-enforcing agencies, censoriship factories, take your pick) and give the collective population of Slashdot wedgies just like in high school (on a hellmouth).
You see, Katz likes to generalize... they're not people, they're all Cheerleaders, and all perfect stereotypes... blonde, ditzy, and spending more time on their back than Michelangelo while he was paining the Sistine Chapel. That way, we can all feel so much more superior to them as we laugh our Professor Frinkel laughs...
For the record, I'm not a flamer, not a troll... I even like *some* of his articles, but I am getting more and more disillusioned with the buzzword-laden nerd media soup he's spoon feeding us. Ahh well... enough ranting.
Offtopic, posting from the UK - was the musical Buffy episode that bad?
I'm just getting into buffy, I've seen 'bout half the first season, some of the "best" episodes, (Hush etc...) and most of the latest season. If you're into the story this season at all, for gods' sake watch the musical episode.
The hackers have monitored their OWN boxes data streams... they haven't broken into TiVo's collected data.
Yes, because TiVo certainly doesn't collect data from the data streams of home users... noooo... they beam it straight out of your brain with orbiting mind-control lasers!
Umm... isn't that where Rhialto gets sent back in time to fetch those AUM stones? If so, you must have missed the part where the gods (who warned them about the cataclysm in the first place) got bored of watching over their preserved flock of handsome, intelligent creative youthful people and went away, leaving them to be eaten by a bunch of crippled begging lying squinty-eyed cannibals who happened to be living near by.:-)
Butt-end it might be... alas, those of us spent our newbie years in the Qeynos area way back when didn't have to put up with the constant barrage of people shouting for binds at the gates, people shouting for sow's at the gates, people shouting for ports at the gates, people shouting for spare pp at the gates, people auctioning off their orc picks at the gates, people shouting about who KS'd who, who's a n00b and who is uber... Qeynos might have been the butt-end of Norrath (Anyone in the know knows that Tox Forest is the butt end of norrath:) ) but it was a simpler, place, less filled with spam and uber-monkeys, and only the occasional KS'ing farmer there for Pyzjin and/or Hadden... Anyways... enough ranting:)
From the gist of this message, that is correct... the email messages that are unreadable in outlook are in fact RFC821/822 compliant (I believe those are the RFC's that lay out the syntax for email messages) and are quite readable in most mail readers.. but due to some bugs in OE, such as not handling uuencoding correctly, it mis-translates the content of the messages and transforms it into something truly illegible.
BigBlickMopar wrote: I would imagine that there is a burgeoning market for audiophile sound cards; solid engineering and impeccable quality are more important to me than "3D Simulation" or "32 voices" or any of the other crap that the marketing department invents. I'd like to disagree. An audiophile-class soundcard just doesn't justify the cost which hardware manufacturers would put on it, and doesn't really find much of a practical application for most end-users. The mainstream can't tell the difference between an mp3 sampled at 128kb/s and one sampled at 196 or 256, and the marginal increase in quality doesn't really justify the space and expense of a better card.
However, as an avid gamer, I can attest that positional 3d sound, especially in first-person style games, adds a great deal to the experience and can improve gameplay, especially in games like counter-strike, where one overly loud footstep can mean sudden death.
I'm not knocking your hardware hacking skills, I'm just saying that high-end audio cards would, like most other audiophile equipment, be a niche market at best, and the stuff you dismiss casually as marketing crap appeals to a wider market than audiophile would, which means more dollars for the card manufactuers.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh* I don't know if I'm a bigger dork for recognizing that quote, or having to immediately google it to remember where it's from :-/
In other news, a recent Microsoft study has proved that Microsoft is not in fact a monopoly...
You act like this is a democracy, as if every voice counts, surprise this is a republic
I hate to be a grammar nazi, but you misspelled 'plutocracy' =P
If the sequence is truely random
I think this is what he's taking objection to... generating a sequence that is random enough to provide a secure one-time pad on a computer is not a non-trivial task in itself.
You should check out Shadowbane... they've paid alot of attention to the economy, learning from the mistakes of other MMOG's...
<sarcasm>Yes! Yes! Who cares about gameplay anyways? It's old, so it must be crap... give me my new buzzword-laden engine! I don't care if it's space invaders, as long as it's got pixel-shaded, alpha-channel-blended, motion-captured spherically rendered space invaders! </sarcasm>
If you read the forums/FAQ's on the Valve STEAM beta support site, you'll see that the cache file is much larger than it needs to be, during beta... the cache file is created locally and up-front by the STEAM client, and doesn't have much to do with how much you actually transfer. I'm assuming they'll lower the cache file size before they do a commercial release...
As for the payment options, Valve has said they'll continue to offer updates to existing customers free via STEAM... but as a distribution system it supports much more variable payment methods, such as a flat rate subscription fee (game-of-the-month club, or an EverQuest/UO/AC/DAoC type game), one-time fee (buy online, no shipping fees), possibly even a pay-per-play system (online video arcades!)
Add to this the fact that it will address some of the update distribution systems... no more waiting for five hours on FilePlanet because Popular Game X released 80MB patch Y! I'll be interested in seeing if it works as promised, but this is fairly a fairly progressive system... I'll be interested to see what results from this.
The ship also has access to email (and consiquently attachments) at sea via Immersat satellite software + (uhh-ohh) Microsoft Outlook. If a member of the ships crew were to open an email attachment apparently from the office, which was in fact a virus, and the network security was not up to scratch, it may have the capacity to shut down not only the ships main course plotting software (sending them to backup paper charts), but to disturb the monitoring of oil/balast on & off the ship in the dock.
Don't worry! I'm sure that Crash Override, Acid Burn and Cereal Killer will save us all by hacking into a Gibson with their iBooks!
Real baby back ribs! Dripping with sauce! Tee hee!
Quoth gad_zuki!
:-)
Imagine what newcomers think, "The grammer is terrible and the interface isn't so hot."
Well, if the newcomers can't even spell grammar correctly, I seriously doubt they'll spot any of CmdrTaco's other little typos.
Yes... Socrates was given hemlock to drink after being found guilty of corrupting the youth of the day. Not that I'd liken Greene to Socrates myself, mind you...
yeah and then what happens when the guys from the LA bank robbery with the AK-47's and full body armor come at you???? Yeah I thought so, you will be kissing the cop who has an m-16's ass thanking him with praise.
Uhh yeah... because every officer I see carries an M16 for a sidearm. Uh huh.
It's budweiser... not like there was any real beer in the tent to start with ;)
Is it somehow morally necessary for a certain fraction of the population to have severe dandruff?
Morally necessary? Probably not... but what do we do with all those former Head & Shoulders employees in our new, dandruff-free society?
Hey, what's wrong with cheerleaders?
Hello? Katz "article" here? Remember, in the world according to Katz, it's the Jocks and Cheerleaders that fought the tribes of Nerd in High School? And those that weren't gunned down by the Columbine Freedom Fighters will go on to run the evil (corporations, government, WTO, Starbucks, copyright-enforcing agencies, censoriship factories, take your pick) and give the collective population of Slashdot wedgies just like in high school (on a hellmouth).
You see, Katz likes to generalize... they're not people, they're all Cheerleaders, and all perfect stereotypes... blonde, ditzy, and spending more time on their back than Michelangelo while he was paining the Sistine Chapel. That way, we can all feel so much more superior to them as we laugh our Professor Frinkel laughs...
For the record, I'm not a flamer, not a troll... I even like *some* of his articles, but I am getting more and more disillusioned with the buzzword-laden nerd media soup he's spoon feeding us. Ahh well... enough ranting.
Offtopic, posting from the UK - was the musical Buffy episode that bad?
I'm just getting into buffy, I've seen 'bout half the first season, some of the "best" episodes, (Hush etc...) and most of the latest season. If you're into the story this season at all, for gods' sake watch the musical episode.
The hackers have monitored their OWN boxes data streams... they haven't broken into TiVo's collected data.
Yes, because TiVo certainly doesn't collect data from the data streams of home users... noooo... they beam it straight out of your brain with orbiting mind-control lasers!
Umm... isn't that where Rhialto gets sent back in time to fetch those AUM stones? If so, you must have missed the part where the gods (who warned them about the cataclysm in the first place) got bored of watching over their preserved flock of handsome, intelligent creative youthful people and went away, leaving them to be eaten by a bunch of crippled begging lying squinty-eyed cannibals who happened to be living near by. :-)
Actually, my Panasonic television set has exactly that feature... volume normalization. It's pretty nifty.
Great? I'd even say brie-liant! :-P
Qeynos is at the butt end of Norrath
:) ) but it was a simpler, place, less filled with spam and uber-monkeys, and only the occasional KS'ing farmer there for Pyzjin and/or Hadden... Anyways... enough ranting :)
Butt-end it might be... alas, those of us spent our newbie years in the Qeynos area way back when didn't have to put up with the constant barrage of people shouting for binds at the gates, people shouting for sow's at the gates, people shouting for ports at the gates, people shouting for spare pp at the gates, people auctioning off their orc picks at the gates, people shouting about who KS'd who, who's a n00b and who is uber... Qeynos might have been the butt-end of Norrath (Anyone in the know knows that Tox Forest is the butt end of norrath
From the gist of this message, that is correct... the email messages that are unreadable in outlook are in fact RFC821/822 compliant (I believe those are the RFC's that lay out the syntax for email messages) and are quite readable in most mail readers.. but due to some bugs in OE, such as not handling uuencoding correctly, it mis-translates the content of the messages and transforms it into something truly illegible.
You mean computers with lots of flashing lights and unlabeled buttons that people just seem to know what to push? We already have those in casinos.
AHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, if only I had mod points... give the man some +1 FUNNY!
BigBlickMopar wrote:
I would imagine that there is a burgeoning market for audiophile sound cards; solid engineering and impeccable quality are more important to me than "3D Simulation" or "32 voices" or any of the other crap that the marketing department invents.
I'd like to disagree. An audiophile-class soundcard just doesn't justify the cost which hardware manufacturers would put on it, and doesn't really find much of a practical application for most end-users. The mainstream can't tell the difference between an mp3 sampled at 128kb/s and one sampled at 196 or 256, and the marginal increase in quality doesn't really justify the space and expense of a better card.
However, as an avid gamer, I can attest that positional 3d sound, especially in first-person style games, adds a great deal to the experience and can improve gameplay, especially in games like counter-strike, where one overly loud footstep can mean sudden death.
I'm not knocking your hardware hacking skills, I'm just saying that high-end audio cards would, like most other audiophile equipment, be a niche market at best, and the stuff you dismiss casually as marketing crap appeals to a wider market than audiophile would, which means more dollars for the card manufactuers.
Please dear [deity] let this be a sarcastic post.