I bet the patched files are being overwritten after a network configuration change. This used to be a problem with WinNT and its service packs; if the networking was changed after the service pack was installed it reloaded the files from the original cache and odd things would happen until the service pack was applied again. I thought MS had got this versioning problem sorted since Win2K, but it seems not.
This looks great for securing data in the event of theft of the drive or the system but that's about all this is good for. I really don't think it's a desirable solution to securing data from law enforcement though.
Think about it for a moment; let's say you've got data on the drive that will land you in trouble if it's found, the drive is taken as evidence, but charges are dropped because it can't be unencrypted. How long will it be secure? It may take weeks for a supercomputer to crack the encryption but how long would it take a workstation manufactured in 2010 to do it?
It would definately take all the fun and excitement out of following tech news; each advance leads closer to the day that someone dusts off the drive and cracks it. Waiting perhaps years for the inevitable knock on the door as computer power catches up with you would be horrible.
The RIAA seem to be playing a very dangerous game and we have to make sure that they can't back out if things don't go their way. What I mean by that is that they are picking IP addresses at random and starting legal procedings against the people these IPs belong to without knowing who they are. We should really be making sure that every IP that is listed is followed up on. We can't let them discover that one of the IPs belongs to someone with power and money and let them quiety drop that case while still prosecuting people who are unable to defend themselves.
If they want to play Russian roulette like this we have to make them suffer the consequences if they pick the wrong IP. We can't let them find out who these IPs belong to and then cherry pick cases to fight - it should be all or nothing.
IANAL, but how will the RIAA prove that any copyright infringemnt has taken place? I've had a few files available for download on Kazaa for a while now but no-one has downloaded any of them - I think my upload speed is too slow for people to bother. If I'm accused of copyright infingement, how can I be guilty if no-one has downloaded anything from me? I assume the RIAA have downloaded at least one track from the people they are taking action against and will use that as evidence against them, but what offence has taken place? The RIAA are legally entitled to own a copy of the music, and it isn't an offense to allow them to take a copy. They would have to prove that people who aren't allowed to take copies had actually done so, and I don't think they can do that with the information they have.
It's well known that Wild Tangent games made for the PC are shipped with spyware, but what about their mobile phone games? Is installing spyware on a mobile phone covered by different laws than installing spyware on a PC? Could calls made on an infected mobile phone be recorded?
Speaking as someone who has had to rebuild lots of PCs because they've been broken by spyware, I can't wait for the first court-cases accusing companies like Wild Tangent of installing illegal phone-taps.
These would be the IBM Thinkpads that had the foldout keyboard? There's a reason IBM stopped selling these - they were so fragile and broke so easily that they were a nightmare to support. I hope the lessons have been learned from this and the screens are more sturdy.
I work for local government school IT support in the UK and I know just how this will be viewed by the rest of the department when I show it to them tomorrow morning - "not a chance of us supporting this" will be the mantra. I probably have the most Linux experience of anyone in the department and that is just because I've played around with the Knoppix bootable cd.
I can only speak for my county (in the top three for IT support in the country according to government figures released recently - we all have an extra day's leave this year as a performance bonus), but it is Windows all the way. I know of only one school in the county that has a Linux server and they are going to swap it for a Windows server because they can't get any support for it - it was installed by a parent of a child who has now left the school).
Using Linux on an admin system is just out of the question - most UK schools run SIMS: 'School Information Management System' and won't even consider buying a system that won't run this software.
The curriculum software market is dominated by RM. Their SchoolShare and StoreBox" systems are very popular with primary schools due to the large amount of pre-installed educational software that is strongly tied into the National Curriculum and their Community Connect 3 systems are common in larger schools.
I can't see many schools choosing to go with Linux when Windows is so ubiquitous - it would mean giving up just about all local government IT support other than hardware repairs and going it alone and I just can't see that happening in more than a handful of schools.
Actually, and not that I agree with even this, the data to be retained was simply the logs. ie where you are visiting, who you are mailing, who you were phoning and for how long. They would not have been required (or even allowed) to keep the actual data of any transmission (ie what was said).
I think this is possibly worse than keeping everything. I used to make a point of replying to all spam with a fake error message. I don't think it helped reduce the volume by very much but now I'm on record as sending lots of emails to some very dodgy addresses.
This is quite worrying.
I think it must be the first Mario game that they're talking about; the one with the turtles that had to be kicked off platforms. This game appeared on just about every home computer format - I have at least three different versions of it (Spectrum, Atari 8bit, and Commodore 64).
While the intentions may not be all that honest, it's not a horrible idea. I've noticed numerous times when running Windows Update that it's offered to upgrade my Cisco Wireless LAN software as well as my Epson print drivers. Kind of nifty and not all that bad, if you ask me.
I disagree that this is a good idea. In principle it's a good idea but in practice Microsoft have messed it up big time by recommending older, non-working certified drivers rather than your actual, non-certified, but working ones.
Every time I connect to Windows Update it insists that my wireless network drivers aren't certified and should be replaced by certified ones. I figured that this is quite reasonable and let it do it. When I rebooted I had lost the network and the client software was complaining that I was running obsolete drivers. As I knew what I was doing it only took a couple of minutes to get the network back up but Windows Update still tries to mess up my network with their drivers each time I use it.
The whole point of Windows Update is that it makes keeping system software up to date as easy as possible for people who aren't proficient enough to do it themselves but Microsoft's fixation on only using their certified drivers, even if they don't work with your hardware, negates any real benefit it might have had; If I didn't know how to roll back the driver to a working state I would have had to pay someone to fix it and it's people that don't know how to do this that are Windows Update's entire reason for existing.
Anyways, I saw an incredulous comment above that the system requirements are Pentium II @ 300 MHz... the game has been in development for so long, that the game engine is not based on modern 3D-accellerated engines. Instead, the engine is voxel-based, which has angered some in the past because the game's "smoothness" is software speed based, not add-on hardware or slickness of video card.
I don't know where you get the idea that the reason this game isn't using a modern 3D accelerated engine is because it's been in development for so long. The reason this game isn't using a modern 3D engine is because it's a strategy game, not a 3D shooter. I will be very surprised if this game has a single 3D element to the graphics anywhere and is anything other than sprite-based. This game's appeal is in the complex mechanics and strategic depth - the graphics are nice but functional.
As for the game running on a 300MHz Pentium II; what's so bad about this? It's not as if frame-rate is going to be an issue here. The only limiting factor to the game's playability is the time it takes the AI to make its moves. I would bet that some patience would be required to play the largest galaxy sizes on a minimum spec machine but it would probably be playable on lower systems than the minimum spec with a small map.
Iain M Banks
The Culture series
Consider Phlebas
Player of Games
Use of Weapons ---best SF book I've ever read
Excession
Look to Windward
Other SF
Against a Dark background
Feersum Enjin
His non-SF books written as just Iain Banks (no M) are also strange, thought-provoking, and very well written.
Peter F. Hamilton
The Night's Dawn trilogy
The Reality Dysfunction
The Neutronium Alchemist
The Naked God
Not really a series but with recurring characters
Mindstar Rising
A Quantam Murder
The Nano Flower
Other
A second Chance at Eden
Fallen Dragon
If either of the above have passed you by then you're in for a treat
Iain M Banks
The Culture series
Consider Phlebas
Player of Games
Use of Weapons ---best SF book I've ever read
Excession
Look to Windward
Other SF
Against a Dark background
Feersum Enjin
His non-SF books written as just Iain Banks (no M) are also strange, thought-provoking, and very well written.
Peter F. Hamilton
The Night's Dawn trilogy
The Reality Dysfunction
The Neutronium Alchemist
The Naked God
Not really a series but with recurring characters
Mindstar Rising
A Quantam Murder
The Nano Flower
Other
A second Chance at Eden
Fallen Dragon
If either of the above have passed you by then you're in for a treat -- Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
Iain M Banks
The Culture series
Consider Phlebas
Player of Games
Use of Weapons ---best SF book I've ever read
Excession
Look to Windward
Other SF
Against a Dark background
Feersum Enjin
His non-SF books written as just Iain Banks (no M) are also strange, thought-provoking, and very well written.
Peter F. Hamilton
The Night's Dawn trilogy
The Reality Dysfunction
The Neutronium Alchemist
The Naked God
Not really a series but with recurring characters
Mindstar Rising
A Quantam Murder
The Nano Flower
Other
A second Chance at Eden
Fallen Dragon
If either of the above have passed you by then you're in for a treat
I won't comment on the game itself other than to say that it brought back some great memories of playing the original but they really need to pack these files. It took longer to install than it did to download.
Considering I got my first computer in 1980 (A 4Mhz Z80-based TRS-80), I think I can say with some credibility that there would not have been a delay computing that, even using interpreted Basic.
Yes well, those of us using more modest and affordable kit rather than the veritable supercomputer you were using can verify the delay and prove it.
I was using a Sinclair ZX80 in 1981 and it was painfully slow. I don't know of any ZX80 emulators out there, but here are some ZX81 emulators for various systems, so you can see for yourself:
I'm not too impressed with the screenshots they've provided. Each of the four pages they show has a quite basic tabular layout anyway so it's fairly trivial to change the table dimensions from 4x6 to 1x24, for instance. I'd much rather have seen how it handles some more challenging sites.
1. If you can't use the monitor, then first look into local schools. I know that in Ontario, Canada, you can get a tax credit for donating used computer equipment to schools. My high school (according to my brother who still goes there) has about 4 computer labs for ~P100-266 machines from this program which still word process and surf fairly nicely.
I work for local government IT support and I'd like to add that, while schools will welcome decent old kit, please don't use them as a dumping ground for old junk.
I constantly have to remind schools that old, barely working, equipment will often cost more to repair than it would to replace. I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked whether a donated computer can be made to run their CDs only to find that it's a 486 or worse. As for the number of flickering, faint 14" monitors that are stacked in classroom cupboards the less said the better.
The bottom line is that, while schools can use old equipment, they really need stuff that can at least run their software. What they don't need is the cost of disposing of other people's junk garnered because they don't want to say 'no' to someone who means well.
Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference.
You're must be joking. Here's a test for you using this very page:
Change the filter to show all messages and wait for the page to load, then hit the 'Back' button, then the 'Forward' button. Opera does this instantly but IE will reload everything again, taking ages.
You probably face this situation all the time - search from Google, try the links, press 'Back' to go back to Google. Opera may not render pages noticeably quicker than IE but it's much faster to use in other ways.
From the article: "There is still a way to get these licenses back and it is pretty easy using our Personal License Migration Service (PLMS), [which] was designed to address the exact situation you outline. The customer just has to be connected to the internet, then they can automatically restore their licenses just by playing the music files in question."
So this means that every time I play or create a file using WMP it sends off details of it to Microsoft? This is worrying; how do I remove WMP?
I think I bought most of those games when they were released and they didn't have 'smooth' scrolling; they had jerky, horrible scrolling.
Sorry, but the ST just couldn't do very good horizontal scrolling no matter how many tricks were used. It was the system's Achiles heel.
Doom II was put in a cabinet and turned into an arcade machine. I remember seeing a review of one in gaming magazine years ago. The worst thing about it wasn't the controls - most people, myself included, didn't start using a mouse for FPS games until quake made it mandatory. The worst thing about the arcade port was that you got 100 health for every coin inserted, but your health was always slowly dropping.
If they hadn't done this then there would be nothing to stop someone from just standing still and preventing other paying customers from playing.
I'm sure that the Atari ST couldn't do this. Its 16-colour mode consisted of 4 bit planes that made horizontal scrolling by anything other than multiples of 16 pixels slow and awkward - lots of shifts involved to move bit planes from one block to the next. I can't recall any ST games that managed smooth horizontal scrolling; most resorted to jumping the display as the player approached the edge of the screen.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet the patched files are being overwritten after a network configuration change. This used to be a problem with WinNT and its service packs; if the networking was changed after the service pack was installed it reloaded the files from the original cache and odd things would happen until the service pack was applied again. I thought MS had got this versioning problem sorted since Win2K, but it seems not.
This looks great for securing data in the event of theft of the drive or the system but that's about all this is good for. I really don't think it's a desirable solution to securing data from law enforcement though.
Think about it for a moment; let's say you've got data on the drive that will land you in trouble if it's found, the drive is taken as evidence, but charges are dropped because it can't be unencrypted. How long will it be secure? It may take weeks for a supercomputer to crack the encryption but how long would it take a workstation manufactured in 2010 to do it?
It would definately take all the fun and excitement out of following tech news; each advance leads closer to the day that someone dusts off the drive and cracks it. Waiting perhaps years for the inevitable knock on the door as computer power catches up with you would be horrible.
The RIAA seem to be playing a very dangerous game and we have to make sure that they can't back out if things don't go their way.
What I mean by that is that they are picking IP addresses at random and starting legal procedings against the people these IPs belong to without knowing who they are.
We should really be making sure that every IP that is listed is followed up on. We can't let them discover that one of the IPs belongs to someone with power and money and let them quiety drop that case while still prosecuting people who are unable to defend themselves.
If they want to play Russian roulette like this we have to make them suffer the consequences if they pick the wrong IP. We can't let them find out who these IPs belong to and then cherry pick cases to fight - it should be all or nothing.
IANAL, but how will the RIAA prove that any copyright infringemnt has taken place?
I've had a few files available for download on Kazaa for a while now but no-one has downloaded any of them - I think my upload speed is too slow for people to bother. If I'm accused of copyright infingement, how can I be guilty if no-one has downloaded anything from me?
I assume the RIAA have downloaded at least one track from the people they are taking action against and will use that as evidence against them, but what offence has taken place? The RIAA are legally entitled to own a copy of the music, and it isn't an offense to allow them to take a copy. They would have to prove that people who aren't allowed to take copies had actually done so, and I don't think they can do that with the information they have.
Speaking as someone who has had to rebuild lots of PCs because they've been broken by spyware, I can't wait for the first court-cases accusing companies like Wild Tangent of installing illegal phone-taps.
These would be the IBM Thinkpads that had the foldout keyboard? There's a reason IBM stopped selling these - they were so fragile and broke so easily that they were a nightmare to support. I hope the lessons have been learned from this and the screens are more sturdy.
I can only speak for my county (in the top three for IT support in the country according to government figures released recently - we all have an extra day's leave this year as a performance bonus), but it is Windows all the way. I know of only one school in the county that has a Linux server and they are going to swap it for a Windows server because they can't get any support for it - it was installed by a parent of a child who has now left the school).
Using Linux on an admin system is just out of the question - most UK schools run SIMS: 'School Information Management System' and won't even consider buying a system that won't run this software. The curriculum software market is dominated by RM. Their SchoolShare and StoreBox" systems are very popular with primary schools due to the large amount of pre-installed educational software that is strongly tied into the National Curriculum and their Community Connect 3 systems are common in larger schools.
I can't see many schools choosing to go with Linux when Windows is so ubiquitous - it would mean giving up just about all local government IT support other than hardware repairs and going it alone and I just can't see that happening in more than a handful of schools.
I think this is possibly worse than keeping everything. I used to make a point of replying to all spam with a fake error message. I don't think it helped reduce the volume by very much but now I'm on record as sending lots of emails to some very dodgy addresses.
This is quite worrying.
I think it must be the first Mario game that they're talking about; the one with the turtles that had to be kicked off platforms. This game appeared on just about every home computer format - I have at least three different versions of it (Spectrum, Atari 8bit, and Commodore 64).
I disagree that this is a good idea. In principle it's a good idea but in practice Microsoft have messed it up big time by recommending older, non-working certified drivers rather than your actual, non-certified, but working ones.
Every time I connect to Windows Update it insists that my wireless network drivers aren't certified and should be replaced by certified ones. I figured that this is quite reasonable and let it do it. When I rebooted I had lost the network and the client software was complaining that I was running obsolete drivers. As I knew what I was doing it only took a couple of minutes to get the network back up but Windows Update still tries to mess up my network with their drivers each time I use it.
The whole point of Windows Update is that it makes keeping system software up to date as easy as possible for people who aren't proficient enough to do it themselves but Microsoft's fixation on only using their certified drivers, even if they don't work with your hardware, negates any real benefit it might have had; If I didn't know how to roll back the driver to a working state I would have had to pay someone to fix it and it's people that don't know how to do this that are Windows Update's entire reason for existing.
I don't know where you get the idea that the reason this game isn't using a modern 3D accelerated engine is because it's been in development for so long. The reason this game isn't using a modern 3D engine is because it's a strategy game, not a 3D shooter. I will be very surprised if this game has a single 3D element to the graphics anywhere and is anything other than sprite-based. This game's appeal is in the complex mechanics and strategic depth - the graphics are nice but functional.
As for the game running on a 300MHz Pentium II; what's so bad about this? It's not as if frame-rate is going to be an issue here. The only limiting factor to the game's playability is the time it takes the AI to make its moves. I would bet that some patience would be required to play the largest galaxy sizes on a minimum spec machine but it would probably be playable on lower systems than the minimum spec with a small map.
Iain M Banks
The Culture series
Consider Phlebas
Player of Games
Use of Weapons ---best SF book I've ever read
Excession
Look to Windward
Other SF
Against a Dark background
Feersum Enjin
His non-SF books written as just Iain Banks (no M) are also strange, thought-provoking, and very well written.
Peter F. Hamilton
The Night's Dawn trilogy
The Reality Dysfunction
The Neutronium Alchemist
The Naked God
Not really a series but with recurring characters
Mindstar Rising
A Quantam Murder
The Nano Flower
Other
A second Chance at Eden
Fallen Dragon
If either of the above have passed you by then you're in for a treat
Iain M Banks
The Culture series
Consider Phlebas
Player of Games
Use of Weapons ---best SF book I've ever read
Excession
Look to Windward
Other SF
Against a Dark background
Feersum Enjin
His non-SF books written as just Iain Banks (no M) are also strange, thought-provoking, and very well written.
Peter F. Hamilton
The Night's Dawn trilogy
The Reality Dysfunction
The Neutronium Alchemist
The Naked God
Not really a series but with recurring characters
Mindstar Rising
A Quantam Murder
The Nano Flower
Other
A second Chance at Eden
Fallen Dragon
If either of the above have passed you by then you're in for a treat
--
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
Iain M Banks The Culture series Consider Phlebas Player of Games Use of Weapons ---best SF book I've ever read Excession Look to Windward Other SF Against a Dark background Feersum Enjin His non-SF books written as just Iain Banks (no M) are also strange, thought-provoking, and very well written. Peter F. Hamilton The Night's Dawn trilogy The Reality Dysfunction The Neutronium Alchemist The Naked God Not really a series but with recurring characters Mindstar Rising A Quantam Murder The Nano Flower Other A second Chance at Eden Fallen Dragon If either of the above have passed you by then you're in for a treat
I won't comment on the game itself other than to say that it brought back some great memories of playing the original but they really need to pack these files. It took longer to install than it did to download.
Rather than living in a sewer pipe, I'd much rather live in this underground house.
Yes well, those of us using more modest and affordable kit rather than the veritable supercomputer you were using can verify the delay and prove it.
I was using a Sinclair ZX80 in 1981 and it was painfully slow. I don't know of any ZX80 emulators out there, but here are some ZX81 emulators for various systems, so you can see for yourself:
Palm Pilot
Dos/Windows
Java
I'm not too impressed with the screenshots they've provided. Each of the four pages they show has a quite basic tabular layout anyway so it's fairly trivial to change the table dimensions from 4x6 to 1x24, for instance. I'd much rather have seen how it handles some more challenging sites.
Washington Post
Why post only a link to a page that requires registration for such a well reported story?
I work for local government IT support and I'd like to add that, while schools will welcome decent old kit, please don't use them as a dumping ground for old junk.
I constantly have to remind schools that old, barely working, equipment will often cost more to repair than it would to replace. I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked whether a donated computer can be made to run their CDs only to find that it's a 486 or worse. As for the number of flickering, faint 14" monitors that are stacked in classroom cupboards the less said the better.
The bottom line is that, while schools can use old equipment, they really need stuff that can at least run their software. What they don't need is the cost of disposing of other people's junk garnered because they don't want to say 'no' to someone who means well.
You're must be joking. Here's a test for you using this very page: Change the filter to show all messages and wait for the page to load, then hit the 'Back' button, then the 'Forward' button. Opera does this instantly but IE will reload everything again, taking ages.
You probably face this situation all the time - search from Google, try the links, press 'Back' to go back to Google. Opera may not render pages noticeably quicker than IE but it's much faster to use in other ways.
So this means that every time I play or create a file using WMP it sends off details of it to Microsoft? This is worrying; how do I remove WMP?
I think I bought most of those games when they were released and they didn't have 'smooth' scrolling; they had jerky, horrible scrolling. Sorry, but the ST just couldn't do very good horizontal scrolling no matter how many tricks were used. It was the system's Achiles heel.
Doom II was put in a cabinet and turned into an arcade machine. I remember seeing a review of one in gaming magazine years ago. The worst thing about it wasn't the controls - most people, myself included, didn't start using a mouse for FPS games until quake made it mandatory. The worst thing about the arcade port was that you got 100 health for every coin inserted, but your health was always slowly dropping. If they hadn't done this then there would be nothing to stop someone from just standing still and preventing other paying customers from playing.
I'm sure that the Atari ST couldn't do this. Its 16-colour mode consisted of 4 bit planes that made horizontal scrolling by anything other than multiples of 16 pixels slow and awkward - lots of shifts involved to move bit planes from one block to the next. I can't recall any ST games that managed smooth horizontal scrolling; most resorted to jumping the display as the player approached the edge of the screen.