Er... by that logic, the WinZIP installer (or NSIS installer, or X, Y, Z installer) is "open source" if I use it to install a GPL game. Not true.
The GPL only applies to the source code and binaries produced therein, and wrappers, compressors and installers are fine so long as they don't form almost the complete binary itself (and it's not as simple as a bit-count, but by functionality).
Also, by your logic, any application that bundles or uses GPL executables would subject it to the GPL - also not true - so 99.9% of those "video convertor" utilities that use things like ffmpeg.exe would also be GPL (and things like the iPlayer downloader).
Please don't spread GPL bullshit. They are perfectly entitled to do this, and we're all perfectly entitled to never touch it with a bargepole.
My ZX Spectrum booted in under a second. My Gameboy would boot instantaneously unless it was for the enforced 2-3 second Nintendo logo. My Super Nintendo booted instantaneously.
A boot time can, quite literally, be zero and there are a myriad systems available where that's true, and have been for decades. Saying that a tablet can boot "in under 10 seconds" a few decades ago would have you laughed at. Yeah, sure it's doing more but it's also taking longer than it should.
Modern boot times are really application initialisation times, not "boot" times. The more crap you let run at startup, the longer it will take.
The problem is that plain "OS" boot times now incorporate so much crap before they are usable (e.g. the Adobe Reader Speed Launcher) it's unbelievable, which is nothing to do with the system or architecture but the OS, the applications and the user. When you can literally just use the OS and have these things load in the background WITHOUT noticing a speed drop, then you have a decreased boot time.
The actual metric is from power-on to being able to execute a application particular application and having it loaded, ready and responding to input in real-time. Anything else is a load of crap.
There's nothing at all stopping me from writing an app that draws a mouse cursor immediately with in the first few hundred opcodes of execution. It doesn't mean your "boot" time is that fraction of a second because the OS isn't "usable" at that point.
So boot times are the most useless metric since BogoMIPS - but at least that had the decency to indicate its "bogosity" in the name.
Roll on the day when nothing loads until its needed, loads quickly when it is needed, and virtually nothing but a mouse interface and graphics initialisation happens before the user can interact with a fully responsive desktop.
However you look at it, it will produce the electrical power enough to run a car many times over. A simple short would be enough to create quite a large explosion, given the right condition.
Ever short-circuited a lead-acid battery of large power? You can easily maim lots of people, if that's your objective. My dad did it once in a warehouse (pre-health-and-fecking-safety) by putting a spanner on a fork-truck battery. You can literally blow the fork truck to pieces and they were scraping acid off the walls and ceiling for weeks.
Anything that's powerful enough to run your car is powerful enough to be misused to car lots of damage. Lithium batteries, hydrogen tanks, LPG bottles, you name it. If you can push a ton of metal a couple of hundred miles with it, and you can release that power almost instantaneously, you have an explosive and deadly device.
So there will NEVER be a "safe" car until we work out how to not carry that much energy about, or never be able to ever possibly release the energy it that quickly.
But it's not at all far-fetched to imagine (or even FIND) millions of people without any of those things in their house, even in the first-world countries. I can probably name half a dozen close friends for whom it's true, and I'm only in my thirties.
I have only CRT (because I'm too cheap to buy an LCD when I have something that works, and like my 4:3 ratio on my TV, and use my laptop for more than my TV), and incandescent lightbulbs (slowly being replaced as they blow with energy-savers because a) I'm not going to replace them UNTIL they blow, b) energy-savers are cheap and c) they light enough for my purposes so I don't notice any functional difference).
I have NEVER owned a vinyl record in my life. Not once. I barely used cassette tapes outside of computer games. I was brought up on CD's. Even the only tapes I have in my possession are for the ZX Spectrum - I've not used them in the last 20 years at least.
I have typed on a typewriter and find it painful and inconvenient and can't name a single other person who actually USES one (my father-in-law is a professional children's author and he's used Word for the past decade at least). A couple of people I know have one in the attic but that's about it.
I only know vacuum tubes from one that a worker at Bletchley Park gave my brother (that was part of their reconstruction of the famous machines there). I've never used one, don't own one (except hidden in other more modern devices where the definition is REALLY stretched to include them), never made a circuit with one, and only know of one electronics supplier that can actually sell them to you in anything less than 1000's.
And PC's are in the same sort of categories - few people have a desktop PC nowadays. Everyone has laptops or smartphones or netbooks. The desktops that are about are either specialist (gamers, overclockers, research), business (where space and portability aren't an issue), or just plain old.
The article is right - the only thing it misses is that a laptop IS a PC - just what the PC would have been if we could have afforded it from the start ("Hmm, shall I design a small personal computer that everyone has one of, or a huge thing that can't be moved that are shared one to a family because of their expense/size").
It's a personal computer (you can't get more personal than sitting on someone's lap). It has full compatibility with "PC" software and quite a lot of hardware, has the same external ports, has the same keyboard and video standards, and has the same kind of display. It's just that someone shrunk it and stuck a hinge in the middle.
The standalone desktop - sure, that might be on the way out, but what do you think all those SOHO servers are sitting in? A laptop? A 19" rack? Nope. But a laptop IS a PC - it's the PC we would have had 50 years ago if the technology allowed it. If you'd asked someone in the 60's to design a "personal computer", it would have been portable, and come with all the added extras (screen, keyboard, disks) built in - and it would connect wirelessly and run for hours off a battery without needing to be plugged in. That's sitting on most people's desks and in most student's bags nowadays.
Though they'd probably add "all the computers work the same", "they all use the same standards" and "the contents of world libraries and textbooks would be free". You can't have everything though, in a corporate world.
I hate smartphones. They are underpowered computers slapped into a device that has a single primary purpose. I like my general purpose computers for 99.9% of things I want to do and if I want to phone, I Skype or use the cheapest, most basic mobile phone available. The point of the PC (and a laptop) is that is a general purpose machine. The other gadgets AREN'T. I can't word-process on a touch-screen. I can't play 3D FPS on a smartphone. I can't play a DVD on a 2" screen. I can't compile my code on something that doesn't let me run any program I like. I can't even view most damn web-pages/streams properly without having a "full" PC. But on a laptop, you can do all those things and have touchscreen/3G/Skype/a headset etc. if you want.
Sure, it's not practical in every application but the point of a PC (especially a laptop) is that it's general purpose. I can literally do everything a computer can do, without having to juggle compromises.
The PC isn't dead - it's just that one old definition of it has ceased to be relevant, while another newer definition has taken over because it does everything the same, but better.
"In a Bizarro universe way, I wish they WOULD forego DRM, get hugely pirated, lose tons of money, and fold up shop, just to prove once and for all that it's not THEIR fault, it's the PIRATE'S fault."
And here you have the damning evidence that piracy is nothing to do with it. I have absolutely no doubt that they "lose" money through piracy. But I equally have absolutely no doubt that the proportion they lose is vastly less than the amount they spend on "DRM measures".
Just how much do you think it costs to keep an always-on suite of servers in a datacentre up to respond to potentially millions of copies of this game having to check in every five minutes (or more often), even if the game is sitting on a menu, not to mention programming and securing the thing in the first place?
Combating piracy is about increasing revenue - not recouping lost revenue - by taking out the second-hand market. They want to steal the second-hand market's revenue for themselves - game shops go out of existence and publishers suck up the slack because there are NO second-hand copies of recent games which people can purchase instead - they HAVE to give their money to the publisher, or pirate the game.
It doesn't matter which path the user chooses because it works in the publisher's favour whichever way - the pirates "prove" their need for DRM (and you wouldn't have bought the game anyway) and the direct sales they'd never normally get give them income they would never have had before.
They wouldn't do the hardware dongle - unless it was restricted to X amount of computers too. There's no way it would be profitable because it wouldn't stop piracy (the software has to check for the dongle) but you COULD sell the dongle + game on to someone else and cut the publisher out of the deal again.
Why do you think they have those schemes now where you can "activate" a second-hand game for a additional fee? Because they want the second-hand market to die, and to take the income that industry previously enjoyed for themselves.
The damning fact is that most games publishers are actually doing extremely well considering the fiscal climate of the last few years. I can't name a big software house that's gone out of business whereas in the 80's they were up and down like yo-yo's. PopCap make cheap, simple, casual games that sells millions with no DRM and were just snapped up by EA for a cool $1.3 BILLION. Obviously, EA's games must be a complete loss for them to have that sort of money laying about, and PopCap must have been really struggling with a company valued at that sort of price.
These measures aren't about piracy because there has NEVER been an effective copy-protection measure and the best ones only work to protect the first few weeks of sales. Some software houses actually remove their DRM after the first year from existing games because it stops doing what it was designed to do - protect the initial production run from mass casual copying.
Don't be fooled - this is about destroying the second-hand market and making money from it. Valve do it with Steam, OnLive's business model is reliant on it, and now ordinary games publishers want in on the act. The only difference is that Valve, etc. are *honest* about their intentions. Blaming such measures on piracy is just a weak argument that's only partially true and can't be directly verified (or disproved) by anyone and it sounds a lot better than "We want more of your money".
Hey, at least it IS keyed so you can't mess it up.
I don't see it as much of a problem, to be honest (and Mini-USB fixed it). Most USB devices have the USB logo on the top part of the USB adaptor. More stupid are those manufacturer's that fit USB sockets upside-down in their computers.
It's like complaining that the PS/2 adaptor were round and could be put in any orientation (I have sat with paperclip and straightened god-knows-how-many PS/2 device's connector pins)... yeah, if you don't bother to check the pins, or the big "this way up" indicator on them.
Because PoE gives you about 25W (up to 50W if you don't care about specs, standards and safety) at, usually, 47V. Converting that down to 19V probably takes quite a bit of efficiency so you'll be lucky to get 10W.
Which *ISN'T* enough to power most modern laptops even just to run, let alone run while charging the battery. So, yeah, you could probably charge a laptop from a PoE port, which requires expensive switches, expensive efficient convertors, specialised circuity for the niche case you specify (i.e. a PoE negotiation and conversion down to 19V DC), if you had the laptop switched off (turning it on probably = blown/fused PoE port) and were prepared to wait 5 times as long as normal... (or you'd need to find 5 PoE ports that were nearby and cable them together with some kind of power-matching, PoE negotiating device).
or you could just plug it into the wallsocket like normal.
PoE is fabulous for low-power stuff, but primarily to save on (electrical) cabling. There's not a lot of "power" in it, and it's at telecoms levels (47V), not some nice IT standard. I've deployed PoE VOIP phones and wireless points and it's very nice to just be able to change the patch cable at one end (onto the PoE-capable switch) and then just plug in a device that's self-powered at the other. But in terms of powering general-purpose, moving, changing hardware that needs lots of power, it's just a complete waste of money and/or impossible. Even the home-brew PoE where you basically DC-bias all the pins of an Ethernet cable can't do much better in terms of (safe) power.
Hell, we only bought into PoE because the price of the adaptors for the Samsung VoIP phones we used was ludicrous and we could buy one PoE switch to handle 24 phones for the price of two "official" wall-power adaptors. We've not even bothered to extend it to all our cabinets because it's cheaper to just use 2 or 4-port PoE switches for just the ports that need it rather than change all our switches over to PoE.
And PoE is still quite "exotic" and bloody expensive. Try finding a cheap PoE tester, for instance. I managed but it really is the most simple device imaginable and I could only find one supplier in the UK. Anything that's PoE capable can be literally double the price of it's non-PoE equivalent.
Research is all well and good, but this is a press release that basically say "we're nearly able to let you buy this", which means more scrutiny.
And my general point, in the line you quoted, is that you don't trust any form of encryption whatsoever until it's been under attack for several years by experienced cryptographers. And even then, it won't last the decade.
So claiming that you can do work on fully encrypted data safely is nothing more than a pipedream until you put out a product, and have it attacked for about a decade. Any claim of "security" before that is worthless and actually works against you (literally - the more someone insists something is "secure" before it's tested properly, the more chance it will be broken, and vice versa).
If this is research, where's the peer review? If this is a product, where's the testing by established cryptographers? If this is merely an idea, where's the document that lists potential weaknesses and exploits? The fact is, they are pushing it as a done deal - they've "achieved" this. Until dozens of people can replicate this and confirm it, it is neither computer science, nor a practical product. It is, in fact, a Microsoft claim to have a secure product. Which is worth about as much as a car salesman's promise.
None of which changes the fact that for 99% of what a gamer does, a gamer's laptop is perfectly sufficient and for others it's virtually 100% sufficient.
I don't even KNOW the model number of my particular chipset off-by-heart (nor it's desktop equivalent) but, TBH, I don't care - it runs everything I throw at it.
Life *may* have been bootstrapped from a meteorite directly. We've always said it's possible. This is not "proof" either way, it just adds data (to both sides).
Such compounds aren't necessarily common in the universe. Parts of those compounds are nothing more than a handful of molecules that likes to stick to other types in certain combinations. All those molecules/atoms are (as far as we can guess) present in just about any place you can study in that kind of detail. It's the "diamonds are a type of carbon" kind of thing. Any idiot can find carbon, but you don't get a diamond in every handful. Except we don't actually know how much "carbon" (atoms) in the universe are naturally occurring as "diamonds" (these compounds).
Life isn't any more or less common than we believed before this "discovery". It's just confirmation that one of the avenues we posited is *possible*.
(Basically, you have a crap cryptosystem that lets you do it - nobody's yet figured out how to do this without possibly compromising the encryption and you have to start all your maths from scratch - which in encryption security terms is a bit of a nightmare)
I used to think this. Then, by chance, my workplace bought me one. I'd specified nothing more than "Must have Intel chip, more than one core, and an nVidia graphics card" - for convenience, compatibility with my existing disk images, etc. and to suit all the tasks I do during the average work day.
I ended up with an MSI gaming laptop - my workplace didn't even realise that the rucksack and mouse it came with were anything more than "freebies" even though the mouse was one of those stupidly expensive ones that has multiple DPI modes, weights for balance and all sorts of other shite (but, hell, it's a very good mouse).
They didn't even care that the WASD keys were highlighted or that it had all sorts of gaming features like a touch-button to overclock both processor and graphics (2 year warranty not applicable...). Apparently it was a super-cheap deal and even now I can't get the same laptop or any equivalent for even half the price they paid for it.
I have to say - it's been wonderful. I've always had a dedicated "games" machine in the past and never had the money for this sort of laptop and probably would never have bought it for myself. I threw 300 Steam games at it and it laughed at every single one (I've always played the defaults that games offer but now I can actually ramp up to maximum easily).
It has a huge screen that, even as up close as being laptop-range, you can really appreciate every pixel. It does HD video like I was asking it to add 2+2. The processor laughs at my Eclipse platform and compiles take no time at all. I've never NEEDED to press the overclock button for any reason, ever, at all. It has all the usual gadgets (webcam, bluetooth, wifi, even an "eco" button) and some more unusual (e.g. an external wifi antenna port!).
It has a huge (full) keyboard that's ideal for typing AND gaming. It has a solid aluminium construction that has so far suffered more and survived better than any other laptop I've ever seen in my life (and has a custom-designed backpack to carry it in that holds more weight that I ever thought a backpack like that could). The sound is amazing and the first full 7.1 setup I've ever owned (hell, I've never bothered to have anything but stereo before - and this is WITHOUT having to plug any speakers in) and it's the LOUDEST laptop I've ever heard (you can easily watch a DVD on a crowded noisy airplane, or in a room with the TV on, and hear every word - and the positional audio does still work in those circumstances.
I would never have touched this laptop in a million years, much preferring two or three more ordinary ones instead. But now I'm trying to find this EXACT laptop again for myself at a decent price. It's really changed the way I used my computer and I use the laptop exclusively now. There's nothing better than having a machine that you can use all day at work for menial tasks and then have that same machine at home to play anything you throw at it, and take the same machine with you on holiday and have it do everything you need/want while you're away too.
Plus, gaming laptops have huge advantages in terms of some basic specifications - big GPU's that you just don't get on business laptops, great for video encoding - large amounts of RAM, big screens, every port imaginable, full keyboards that you can get to every key easily, and a lot of money spent on making it feel "right" and solid. I can type on this laptop all day long, go home and type on it for hours, and then take it on the road and type on it for even longer and not fatigue. Even the mouse is the most comfortable that I've ever used.
I would never pay what I see as the gaming premium (similar to the wedding premium - a £5 cake suddenly costs £50) but a single gaming laptop changed it for me. It's not like this is even a model that *pretends* to be gaming while actually being general purpose - the WASD are marked and everything about it says "gaming laptop". But it laughs at everything you throw at it because, compared to a to
Hate to rain on your parade but the GDP of China is only just less than one half of that of the USA. And, collectively, the EU beats even the US for a similar land area / population (if you take into account populations, for instance, they are about equal depending on the measure you take).
And, more damning for your post, the second you raise tax, that second number starts to dwindle - economic numbers aren't static and isolated - play with one and ten others drop which makes you overall worse off. Raise taxes in the US, companies move to cheaper countries, or offshore more, or get rid of US staff, all of which destroy the amount of tax you have coming in.
And even if you DOUBLED tax, it would still take approximately 5 years to fix ASSUMING NOTHING ELSE CHANGED and everyone just accepted doubled-tax without so much as raising an eyebrow. In reality, the knock-on effect would be to cripple the economy entirely because it almost works on a kind of exponential scale - double tax and you lose three-quarters of your income.
But then, armchair economics is much more fun than reality, isn't it? Especially when you convince yourself that your armchair in the best because it was "Made in the USA"...
Basically what I use too, without the webmail components because webmail just isn't that important when you have authenticated SMTP / POP / IMAP using your secure certificates. Buy yourself a VPS with Ubuntu on it and follow the Ubuntu tutorials for those software if you aren't confident doing it (they do exactly all this config we're talking about for you).
I collect all my mail in Opera and if I really wanted something like squirrelmail, I'd make it only available to localhost and SSH/VPN into the server rather than make it worldwide available (BTW: You can re-use your SSL certificates to not only provide pop3s etc. but also provide the same cert for SSH and OpenVPN quite easily). I don't bother with spamd because the Opera mail client is more than good enough, but I do have the Spamhaus XBL plugged into my postfix server which rejects about 90% of spam anyway.
The beauty of "doing it yourself" is that it's extensible - bought another domain? Slap it in the postfix configs and you're away. Bought a better certificate? Slap it in and you're done (I bought a 5-year cert from GoDaddy for about $5 a few months ago).
I have managed DNS with my host (because that's not something I want to take downtime-responsibility for - though I can add any A, AAAA, TXT, SRV, etc. records that I like through an interface) so things like SPF filtering are also easy to do, but DNSSEC is a pain in the arse and I can't be bothered.
IPv6 is a ten-minute project and still pretty pointless and the rest is just "pet-project" stuff.
I'm not worried about Google myself but if nothing else, it's good to have a hands-on feel for how this stuff plugs together and exactly what you need. It's amazing how often you can hand off a lot of these tasks to your host and being able to say you've done it yourself helps when it comes to diagnosis, and putting up emergency backup servers, etc.
All I need is for someone to sort out DNSSEC so that someone else can take the burden of all those stupid updates for me, and for someone to actually even send me a single packet of IPv6 traffic.
I don't see that wifi run from a cable companies street-side boxes is all that good as a backup. First, your signal is likely to be appalling (run something like inSSIDer and see how many networks you can pick up from indoors - you'll get you, your immediate neighbours, maybe a couple of others - now where's the nearest street cabinet to you?), second it's likely to be busy and overcrowded in any populated area (even if by accident of homeowner's laptops defaulting to it by mistake, or people sitting in cafes using it instead of the cafe's connection), third it's only going to be as reliable as a cable service, but you have zero recourse if it's worse or is off all the time - so you might as well have just bought a cable package and done it yourself. And fourth - you really think they are going to let you do a lot of the things household do over it (e.g. video, skype, iplayer, Steam, torrents etc.). Also, how do you *know* that you're connecting to the free network and not someone's look-alike proxy that just reads and passes on your packets to the real station?
The school I work for have multiple, redundant Internet connections. We're not talking huge, expensive, leased lines but a couple of bog-standard business ADSL2 lines load-shared via a Linux router. There's nothing special about the setup - any network device (including PPP devices) can be tucked into the routing and automatically handles 1/nth of the routes (when you have "n" devices). With dead-route detection and a couple of little scripts, it handles failover perfectly.
Our "emergency" backup for when everything landline-based goes up the creek is a 3G stick. Seriously. I plug it in, we do a couple of gig a day on it for £2 per day, it routes into the network perfectly using the same routing/sharing on the Linux router (so users aren't even aware anything is different - except once when I forgot to click the "pay for today" button and everyone's websites were redirected to the T-Mobile "pay for today" page), it's more than fast enough (150 machines here and with adequate firewalling/proxying, it copes fine for an emergency measure.
And if you hit traffic limits, you *cough* change the SIM to another pre-pay SIM from another 3G dongle (i.e. those multiple redundant 3G dongles you bought when you first had the idea - maybe even from different carriers) and carry on. We actually use it as an SMS line too - a bit of gammu and you have your own "text in" line for parents/customers/own use to do anything you like (one of our text commands is used to cut all power to the ADSL connections for 30 seconds - perfect when there's a temporary ADSL outage just before the off-site Internet backup starts and you need to kick-start the connections again remotely!).
We had the whole school on 3G for a month when our previous ISP cut us off without warning or recourse for "using more than the average household" (despite clearing being a school - by name and by their own installation - and having a business line). Nobody really cared or noticed we were on 3G, and we're inside the M25, within a main town, so it wasn't like we were the only ones using that cell-tower.
That experience got me buying my own 3G dongle which I take everywhere. Using 3G abroad is a pain that I won't endure, but as an emergency backup in your own country it works wonders and you can easily forget that you're using it. I take it away with me on weekends and all sorts - I've broken down and then Googled the numbers of local services, and my girlfriend has it in the car on long journeys to keep up with Facebook, etc. (we hate smartphones, but love 3G dongles).
I bought my parents one as their "main" Internet connection when my brother left home and they started to go on Facebook to catch up with us. They're still on it, use it for everything they do on the net (including iPlayer and Steam), pay for the entire month every month, and won't even consider paying the same or less than that for the inconvenience of a fixed-line installation with cab
A post-apocalyptic world caused by an asteroid strike powerful enough to wipe out 80% of the population (as culled from the "plot" section of the game on Wikipedia)? Yes. It's what we think killed the dinosaurs, for instance, dust-clouds that blocked the sun and covered the planet for millennia.
And, failing that, just because there might be some place that's colourful in real life, it doesn't mean that every fecking game has to use it's HDR to the full and represent every colour "just because" when they are going for a particular look / feel. Hell, no game should use a feature "just because we can". Do you complain that Aliens was dark (because LV426, you know, "would have had" discos and bars and neon lights and strip joints, etc.) or that Predator was "green" (because jungles have coloured plants, and the alien could be multi-coloured....)? It's a ridiculous assertion to make.
It's *still* the point that you expect it "just because", whereas the game is designed from the ground up to represent one particular kind of atmospheric surrounding. Hell, even on the trailers it's no more bland than any other game (and Quake had lava, doncherknow, and stained glass). Putting something colourful in just because you haven't seen a lot of colour yet is not the way to design a game - that's called crowbarring in things that people think "should" be in a game when, actually, if you weren't looking for them NOBODY would have noticed.
Really? That's like complaining that horror movies take place mostly at night, or cartoons aimed at young girls are mostly pink.
Even since the original Quake, I never understood the concern - those who were playing it at the time never complained about the palette until much later, if at all - and still don't know. It's a post-apocalyptic, dust-track racer. What colour did you *EXPECT* to see? Even if you had the ruins of something-or-other-colourful, it would be dust-covered and aged by the time the game is set.
If the biggest complaint you have is a steampunk colour scheme (because that's exactly what it is), then I really pity you for not seeing through atmospheric environments like that.
What, exactly, would you suggest you see in a post-apocalyptic world that would be colourful? Who's got time to paint the fence-posts when you're being shot at and chasing food / energy and NOBODY is making paint?
Because those people who have solar, generator backup, etc. are all blowing the grid 24 hours a day, aren't they?
You install a breaker (mandated by law in some places, for exactly this reason). That breaker cuts off the grid supply and powers the house from the car instead. Power comes back up, you switch it back over. You could probably even design a "smart" breaker that will do just that for you automatically.
At no point has anyone ever suggested that you pump power back to the grid (but that, also, is feasible - see how solar panels feed back to the grid), or join the two at the same time (because even if it's same voltage, it most certainly won't be the same AC phase and will blow the crap out of the street transformer's fuses).
And, from a commercial perspective, the exact opposite is always much better. Why outsource to a third-party that is ALWAYS making profit on top of their operating costs, when you could do it yourself if you have enough to buy the equipment/personnel in the first place?
Take a school. Why bother hiring a cleaning company when you could just hire cleaners? Why bother to hire an IT company when you could just buy and manage the computers yourself? Why bother to pay an external caterer when you could just build a kitchen/canteen and do it yourself?
Every third-party you use is sucking profit from the price you pay - by definition, you are paying more for the base services than strictly necessary. Now sometimes economies of scale mean it's not practical to, say, buy your own PCB manufacturing plant to make your own computers to put in your offices, but a lot of things can easily be done in-house and thus you "consume" an external third-party and get what would be their profit, albeit indirectly.
I know that if I owned a large company, I'd try to keep as much as possible in-house and expand the company rather than use third-parties. Greater control, greater profit, and other services you can offer other companies. If I were Google, I *would* own a motherboard manufacturer by now, and be churning out my own custom-built PC's. I probably wouldn't own a processor manufacturer (economies of scale again), but I'd almost certainly be doing lots of things in-house by expanding the scope of the company, to the point where I'd be making my own racking, basic datacentre equipment, etc. What better advert than "Google only uses Google motherboards/UPS/rack/cables/switches/etc. - which will be available for sale next year"?
Every time you employ a third party, you are paying the amount that they have to charge to a) do the job you want, b) do lots of other jobs for other people, c) hiring people to do all those jobs permanently, pay pensions, h&s, etc. and d) make a profit and expand their own business. Do it yourself, and you save all of d) and quite a bit of the others to get exactly what you want.
And, sensibly, it's not a monopoly if you do that either - because you're not necessarily taking over the entire market for that job - you're just no longer using it yourself and are doing it in-house instead.
Google *might* be buying in their own sandwiches, but I imagine they have their own catering departments. Same for big oil - they *might* be using third-parties for exploration, research, refining, etc. but chances are they are all doing it in-house and making a tidy profit against the alternative. Breaking up those functions into separate companies just causes the bills and finger-pointing to rise - and that's assuming that some of those functions are profitable AT ALL.
Any form of public key encryption (the UK got it first, via Turing, but didn't bother to tell anyone else - read: we used it only for our own secure messages - until US "researchers" found it again later).
Satellites in general (GPS is only one particular use of them).
Radar (you probably have on one the back of your car to help you reverse)
Night vision.
Digital cameras (first used on spy satellites)
The list goes on. It's like those people who say "Yeah, but what actual science/technology came out of the space program?"
The "end-to-end" nature of the Internet ended with the first firewall. Not to mention NAT, proxies, etc. To get to the point where I have a transparent squid proxy protecting my workplace (a school) is only a teensy, tiny step.
"End-to-end" is a pipedream and can't possibly work because of the sheer security and scale of such a network (i.e. there would be nobody on the path able to stop a DDoS against you!). It wouldn't work, and that's why other solutions exist.
Hell, virtually every device ever sold that handles IP traffic modifies it in some way that defeats this "end-to-end" crap. They have firewalls. They may offer NAT. They might offer ping-blocking. Hell, the first thing any decent firewall does is turn off most of the unsolicited packet access that it receives, whether that be ICMP messages, or packets with fake origin. Without that, you'd have chaos.
So that means 100,000 times more work to make everything that detailed?
Or else everyone who makes games uses a standard library of objects to cut/paste and so the games end up looking the same anyway?
This is voxels all over again, in a modern iteration. Yeah, it looks cool, but it increases your development time and isn't anywhere near as fast as other techniques and all those graphical "shortcuts" that standard 3D cards do are done for a reason - nobody *really* notices or cares so long as the game runs smoothly and there's time enough for AI, pathfinding, physics etc.
I see this as the equivalent of FLAC vs MP3 - yeah, sure it's definitely contains more information but at the cost of storage size and, in the end, 99% of people won't actually care.
More crap in the graphics pipeline isn't what I've been looking for for the past 10 years in PC gaming, though. Actually the opposite. I was just looking for something more approaching a game than a 3D sculpture to walk around inside of.
Not to mention, this sort of tech demo has been possible for decades. Maybe not this exact thing as those exact resolutions and those exact framerates, but the result is practically identical to several things I've seen in the past. Now, tell me, which of those actually resulted in a commercial game that used that technology? None. And until it does, it's like telling me that someone has made an "uncrashable" computer, or "compression of most data down to just 20% size". Lovely theory, but until the utility / OS / game that does it can actually land on my computer, it is nothing more than a piece of trivia.
If that's true then the software patents are null and void anyway, because software patents aren't recognised in the EU. However the UK sometimes does things the EU doesn't like. And sometimes the patent might have expired, sometimes the patent might have been added to and renewed under a different number, and some of those patents are still valid.
Stop fecking about and if you want to "steal" this code, either get a lawyer or start negotiating with the patent holder. Why on earth is this an Ask Slashdot? What next? "I think I might infringe copyrights on the Beatles albums - where do I stand?" If you want to know, ASK someone who knows - the owner or a lawyer.
As an Opera user: It doesn't. But then, I have all flash off by default and I have to click a flash-less "play" button before the flash plugin even loads for that one plugin (and hence I don't get noisy ads at all because I never click the play button to even load them, just the one that plays the video/flash I actually WANT to see).
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Er... by that logic, the WinZIP installer (or NSIS installer, or X, Y, Z installer) is "open source" if I use it to install a GPL game. Not true.
The GPL only applies to the source code and binaries produced therein, and wrappers, compressors and installers are fine so long as they don't form almost the complete binary itself (and it's not as simple as a bit-count, but by functionality).
Also, by your logic, any application that bundles or uses GPL executables would subject it to the GPL - also not true - so 99.9% of those "video convertor" utilities that use things like ffmpeg.exe would also be GPL (and things like the iPlayer downloader).
Please don't spread GPL bullshit. They are perfectly entitled to do this, and we're all perfectly entitled to never touch it with a bargepole.
Boot times are meaningless.
My ZX Spectrum booted in under a second.
My Gameboy would boot instantaneously unless it was for the enforced 2-3 second Nintendo logo.
My Super Nintendo booted instantaneously.
A boot time can, quite literally, be zero and there are a myriad systems available where that's true, and have been for decades. Saying that a tablet can boot "in under 10 seconds" a few decades ago would have you laughed at. Yeah, sure it's doing more but it's also taking longer than it should.
Modern boot times are really application initialisation times, not "boot" times. The more crap you let run at startup, the longer it will take.
The problem is that plain "OS" boot times now incorporate so much crap before they are usable (e.g. the Adobe Reader Speed Launcher) it's unbelievable, which is nothing to do with the system or architecture but the OS, the applications and the user. When you can literally just use the OS and have these things load in the background WITHOUT noticing a speed drop, then you have a decreased boot time.
The actual metric is from power-on to being able to execute a application particular application and having it loaded, ready and responding to input in real-time. Anything else is a load of crap.
There's nothing at all stopping me from writing an app that draws a mouse cursor immediately with in the first few hundred opcodes of execution. It doesn't mean your "boot" time is that fraction of a second because the OS isn't "usable" at that point.
So boot times are the most useless metric since BogoMIPS - but at least that had the decency to indicate its "bogosity" in the name.
Roll on the day when nothing loads until its needed, loads quickly when it is needed, and virtually nothing but a mouse interface and graphics initialisation happens before the user can interact with a fully responsive desktop.
However you look at it, it will produce the electrical power enough to run a car many times over. A simple short would be enough to create quite a large explosion, given the right condition.
Ever short-circuited a lead-acid battery of large power? You can easily maim lots of people, if that's your objective. My dad did it once in a warehouse (pre-health-and-fecking-safety) by putting a spanner on a fork-truck battery. You can literally blow the fork truck to pieces and they were scraping acid off the walls and ceiling for weeks.
Anything that's powerful enough to run your car is powerful enough to be misused to car lots of damage. Lithium batteries, hydrogen tanks, LPG bottles, you name it. If you can push a ton of metal a couple of hundred miles with it, and you can release that power almost instantaneously, you have an explosive and deadly device.
So there will NEVER be a "safe" car until we work out how to not carry that much energy about, or never be able to ever possibly release the energy it that quickly.
But it's not at all far-fetched to imagine (or even FIND) millions of people without any of those things in their house, even in the first-world countries. I can probably name half a dozen close friends for whom it's true, and I'm only in my thirties.
I have only CRT (because I'm too cheap to buy an LCD when I have something that works, and like my 4:3 ratio on my TV, and use my laptop for more than my TV), and incandescent lightbulbs (slowly being replaced as they blow with energy-savers because a) I'm not going to replace them UNTIL they blow, b) energy-savers are cheap and c) they light enough for my purposes so I don't notice any functional difference).
I have NEVER owned a vinyl record in my life. Not once. I barely used cassette tapes outside of computer games. I was brought up on CD's. Even the only tapes I have in my possession are for the ZX Spectrum - I've not used them in the last 20 years at least.
I have typed on a typewriter and find it painful and inconvenient and can't name a single other person who actually USES one (my father-in-law is a professional children's author and he's used Word for the past decade at least). A couple of people I know have one in the attic but that's about it.
I only know vacuum tubes from one that a worker at Bletchley Park gave my brother (that was part of their reconstruction of the famous machines there). I've never used one, don't own one (except hidden in other more modern devices where the definition is REALLY stretched to include them), never made a circuit with one, and only know of one electronics supplier that can actually sell them to you in anything less than 1000's.
And PC's are in the same sort of categories - few people have a desktop PC nowadays. Everyone has laptops or smartphones or netbooks. The desktops that are about are either specialist (gamers, overclockers, research), business (where space and portability aren't an issue), or just plain old.
The article is right - the only thing it misses is that a laptop IS a PC - just what the PC would have been if we could have afforded it from the start ("Hmm, shall I design a small personal computer that everyone has one of, or a huge thing that can't be moved that are shared one to a family because of their expense/size").
Why is a laptop not a PC?
It's a personal computer (you can't get more personal than sitting on someone's lap). It has full compatibility with "PC" software and quite a lot of hardware, has the same external ports, has the same keyboard and video standards, and has the same kind of display. It's just that someone shrunk it and stuck a hinge in the middle.
The standalone desktop - sure, that might be on the way out, but what do you think all those SOHO servers are sitting in? A laptop? A 19" rack? Nope. But a laptop IS a PC - it's the PC we would have had 50 years ago if the technology allowed it. If you'd asked someone in the 60's to design a "personal computer", it would have been portable, and come with all the added extras (screen, keyboard, disks) built in - and it would connect wirelessly and run for hours off a battery without needing to be plugged in. That's sitting on most people's desks and in most student's bags nowadays.
Though they'd probably add "all the computers work the same", "they all use the same standards" and "the contents of world libraries and textbooks would be free". You can't have everything though, in a corporate world.
I hate smartphones. They are underpowered computers slapped into a device that has a single primary purpose. I like my general purpose computers for 99.9% of things I want to do and if I want to phone, I Skype or use the cheapest, most basic mobile phone available. The point of the PC (and a laptop) is that is a general purpose machine. The other gadgets AREN'T. I can't word-process on a touch-screen. I can't play 3D FPS on a smartphone. I can't play a DVD on a 2" screen. I can't compile my code on something that doesn't let me run any program I like. I can't even view most damn web-pages/streams properly without having a "full" PC. But on a laptop, you can do all those things and have touchscreen/3G/Skype/a headset etc. if you want.
Sure, it's not practical in every application but the point of a PC (especially a laptop) is that it's general purpose. I can literally do everything a computer can do, without having to juggle compromises.
The PC isn't dead - it's just that one old definition of it has ceased to be relevant, while another newer definition has taken over because it does everything the same, but better.
"In a Bizarro universe way, I wish they WOULD forego DRM, get hugely pirated, lose tons of money, and fold up shop, just to prove once and for all that it's not THEIR fault, it's the PIRATE'S fault."
And here you have the damning evidence that piracy is nothing to do with it. I have absolutely no doubt that they "lose" money through piracy. But I equally have absolutely no doubt that the proportion they lose is vastly less than the amount they spend on "DRM measures".
Just how much do you think it costs to keep an always-on suite of servers in a datacentre up to respond to potentially millions of copies of this game having to check in every five minutes (or more often), even if the game is sitting on a menu, not to mention programming and securing the thing in the first place?
Combating piracy is about increasing revenue - not recouping lost revenue - by taking out the second-hand market. They want to steal the second-hand market's revenue for themselves - game shops go out of existence and publishers suck up the slack because there are NO second-hand copies of recent games which people can purchase instead - they HAVE to give their money to the publisher, or pirate the game.
It doesn't matter which path the user chooses because it works in the publisher's favour whichever way - the pirates "prove" their need for DRM (and you wouldn't have bought the game anyway) and the direct sales they'd never normally get give them income they would never have had before.
They wouldn't do the hardware dongle - unless it was restricted to X amount of computers too. There's no way it would be profitable because it wouldn't stop piracy (the software has to check for the dongle) but you COULD sell the dongle + game on to someone else and cut the publisher out of the deal again.
Why do you think they have those schemes now where you can "activate" a second-hand game for a additional fee? Because they want the second-hand market to die, and to take the income that industry previously enjoyed for themselves.
The damning fact is that most games publishers are actually doing extremely well considering the fiscal climate of the last few years. I can't name a big software house that's gone out of business whereas in the 80's they were up and down like yo-yo's. PopCap make cheap, simple, casual games that sells millions with no DRM and were just snapped up by EA for a cool $1.3 BILLION. Obviously, EA's games must be a complete loss for them to have that sort of money laying about, and PopCap must have been really struggling with a company valued at that sort of price.
These measures aren't about piracy because there has NEVER been an effective copy-protection measure and the best ones only work to protect the first few weeks of sales. Some software houses actually remove their DRM after the first year from existing games because it stops doing what it was designed to do - protect the initial production run from mass casual copying.
Don't be fooled - this is about destroying the second-hand market and making money from it. Valve do it with Steam, OnLive's business model is reliant on it, and now ordinary games publishers want in on the act. The only difference is that Valve, etc. are *honest* about their intentions. Blaming such measures on piracy is just a weak argument that's only partially true and can't be directly verified (or disproved) by anyone and it sounds a lot better than "We want more of your money".
Hey, at least it IS keyed so you can't mess it up.
I don't see it as much of a problem, to be honest (and Mini-USB fixed it). Most USB devices have the USB logo on the top part of the USB adaptor. More stupid are those manufacturer's that fit USB sockets upside-down in their computers.
It's like complaining that the PS/2 adaptor were round and could be put in any orientation (I have sat with paperclip and straightened god-knows-how-many PS/2 device's connector pins)... yeah, if you don't bother to check the pins, or the big "this way up" indicator on them.
Because PoE gives you about 25W (up to 50W if you don't care about specs, standards and safety) at, usually, 47V. Converting that down to 19V probably takes quite a bit of efficiency so you'll be lucky to get 10W.
Which *ISN'T* enough to power most modern laptops even just to run, let alone run while charging the battery. So, yeah, you could probably charge a laptop from a PoE port, which requires expensive switches, expensive efficient convertors, specialised circuity for the niche case you specify (i.e. a PoE negotiation and conversion down to 19V DC), if you had the laptop switched off (turning it on probably = blown/fused PoE port) and were prepared to wait 5 times as long as normal... (or you'd need to find 5 PoE ports that were nearby and cable them together with some kind of power-matching, PoE negotiating device).
or you could just plug it into the wallsocket like normal.
PoE is fabulous for low-power stuff, but primarily to save on (electrical) cabling. There's not a lot of "power" in it, and it's at telecoms levels (47V), not some nice IT standard. I've deployed PoE VOIP phones and wireless points and it's very nice to just be able to change the patch cable at one end (onto the PoE-capable switch) and then just plug in a device that's self-powered at the other. But in terms of powering general-purpose, moving, changing hardware that needs lots of power, it's just a complete waste of money and/or impossible. Even the home-brew PoE where you basically DC-bias all the pins of an Ethernet cable can't do much better in terms of (safe) power.
Hell, we only bought into PoE because the price of the adaptors for the Samsung VoIP phones we used was ludicrous and we could buy one PoE switch to handle 24 phones for the price of two "official" wall-power adaptors. We've not even bothered to extend it to all our cabinets because it's cheaper to just use 2 or 4-port PoE switches for just the ports that need it rather than change all our switches over to PoE.
And PoE is still quite "exotic" and bloody expensive. Try finding a cheap PoE tester, for instance. I managed but it really is the most simple device imaginable and I could only find one supplier in the UK. Anything that's PoE capable can be literally double the price of it's non-PoE equivalent.
Research is all well and good, but this is a press release that basically say "we're nearly able to let you buy this", which means more scrutiny.
And my general point, in the line you quoted, is that you don't trust any form of encryption whatsoever until it's been under attack for several years by experienced cryptographers. And even then, it won't last the decade.
So claiming that you can do work on fully encrypted data safely is nothing more than a pipedream until you put out a product, and have it attacked for about a decade. Any claim of "security" before that is worthless and actually works against you (literally - the more someone insists something is "secure" before it's tested properly, the more chance it will be broken, and vice versa).
If this is research, where's the peer review? If this is a product, where's the testing by established cryptographers? If this is merely an idea, where's the document that lists potential weaknesses and exploits? The fact is, they are pushing it as a done deal - they've "achieved" this. Until dozens of people can replicate this and confirm it, it is neither computer science, nor a practical product. It is, in fact, a Microsoft claim to have a secure product. Which is worth about as much as a car salesman's promise.
None of which changes the fact that for 99% of what a gamer does, a gamer's laptop is perfectly sufficient and for others it's virtually 100% sufficient.
I don't even KNOW the model number of my particular chipset off-by-heart (nor it's desktop equivalent) but, TBH, I don't care - it runs everything I throw at it.
Life *may* have been bootstrapped from a meteorite directly. We've always said it's possible. This is not "proof" either way, it just adds data (to both sides).
Such compounds aren't necessarily common in the universe. Parts of those compounds are nothing more than a handful of molecules that likes to stick to other types in certain combinations. All those molecules/atoms are (as far as we can guess) present in just about any place you can study in that kind of detail. It's the "diamonds are a type of carbon" kind of thing. Any idiot can find carbon, but you don't get a diamond in every handful. Except we don't actually know how much "carbon" (atoms) in the universe are naturally occurring as "diamonds" (these compounds).
Life isn't any more or less common than we believed before this "discovery". It's just confirmation that one of the avenues we posited is *possible*.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
You're welcome.
(Basically, you have a crap cryptosystem that lets you do it - nobody's yet figured out how to do this without possibly compromising the encryption and you have to start all your maths from scratch - which in encryption security terms is a bit of a nightmare)
I used to think this. Then, by chance, my workplace bought me one. I'd specified nothing more than "Must have Intel chip, more than one core, and an nVidia graphics card" - for convenience, compatibility with my existing disk images, etc. and to suit all the tasks I do during the average work day.
I ended up with an MSI gaming laptop - my workplace didn't even realise that the rucksack and mouse it came with were anything more than "freebies" even though the mouse was one of those stupidly expensive ones that has multiple DPI modes, weights for balance and all sorts of other shite (but, hell, it's a very good mouse).
They didn't even care that the WASD keys were highlighted or that it had all sorts of gaming features like a touch-button to overclock both processor and graphics (2 year warranty not applicable...). Apparently it was a super-cheap deal and even now I can't get the same laptop or any equivalent for even half the price they paid for it.
I have to say - it's been wonderful. I've always had a dedicated "games" machine in the past and never had the money for this sort of laptop and probably would never have bought it for myself. I threw 300 Steam games at it and it laughed at every single one (I've always played the defaults that games offer but now I can actually ramp up to maximum easily).
It has a huge screen that, even as up close as being laptop-range, you can really appreciate every pixel. It does HD video like I was asking it to add 2+2. The processor laughs at my Eclipse platform and compiles take no time at all. I've never NEEDED to press the overclock button for any reason, ever, at all. It has all the usual gadgets (webcam, bluetooth, wifi, even an "eco" button) and some more unusual (e.g. an external wifi antenna port!).
It has a huge (full) keyboard that's ideal for typing AND gaming. It has a solid aluminium construction that has so far suffered more and survived better than any other laptop I've ever seen in my life (and has a custom-designed backpack to carry it in that holds more weight that I ever thought a backpack like that could). The sound is amazing and the first full 7.1 setup I've ever owned (hell, I've never bothered to have anything but stereo before - and this is WITHOUT having to plug any speakers in) and it's the LOUDEST laptop I've ever heard (you can easily watch a DVD on a crowded noisy airplane, or in a room with the TV on, and hear every word - and the positional audio does still work in those circumstances.
I would never have touched this laptop in a million years, much preferring two or three more ordinary ones instead. But now I'm trying to find this EXACT laptop again for myself at a decent price. It's really changed the way I used my computer and I use the laptop exclusively now. There's nothing better than having a machine that you can use all day at work for menial tasks and then have that same machine at home to play anything you throw at it, and take the same machine with you on holiday and have it do everything you need/want while you're away too.
Plus, gaming laptops have huge advantages in terms of some basic specifications - big GPU's that you just don't get on business laptops, great for video encoding - large amounts of RAM, big screens, every port imaginable, full keyboards that you can get to every key easily, and a lot of money spent on making it feel "right" and solid. I can type on this laptop all day long, go home and type on it for hours, and then take it on the road and type on it for even longer and not fatigue. Even the mouse is the most comfortable that I've ever used.
I would never pay what I see as the gaming premium (similar to the wedding premium - a £5 cake suddenly costs £50) but a single gaming laptop changed it for me. It's not like this is even a model that *pretends* to be gaming while actually being general purpose - the WASD are marked and everything about it says "gaming laptop". But it laughs at everything you throw at it because, compared to a to
Hate to rain on your parade but the GDP of China is only just less than one half of that of the USA. And, collectively, the EU beats even the US for a similar land area / population (if you take into account populations, for instance, they are about equal depending on the measure you take).
And, more damning for your post, the second you raise tax, that second number starts to dwindle - economic numbers aren't static and isolated - play with one and ten others drop which makes you overall worse off. Raise taxes in the US, companies move to cheaper countries, or offshore more, or get rid of US staff, all of which destroy the amount of tax you have coming in.
And even if you DOUBLED tax, it would still take approximately 5 years to fix ASSUMING NOTHING ELSE CHANGED and everyone just accepted doubled-tax without so much as raising an eyebrow. In reality, the knock-on effect would be to cripple the economy entirely because it almost works on a kind of exponential scale - double tax and you lose three-quarters of your income.
But then, armchair economics is much more fun than reality, isn't it? Especially when you convince yourself that your armchair in the best because it was "Made in the USA"...
Basically what I use too, without the webmail components because webmail just isn't that important when you have authenticated SMTP / POP / IMAP using your secure certificates. Buy yourself a VPS with Ubuntu on it and follow the Ubuntu tutorials for those software if you aren't confident doing it (they do exactly all this config we're talking about for you).
I collect all my mail in Opera and if I really wanted something like squirrelmail, I'd make it only available to localhost and SSH/VPN into the server rather than make it worldwide available (BTW: You can re-use your SSL certificates to not only provide pop3s etc. but also provide the same cert for SSH and OpenVPN quite easily). I don't bother with spamd because the Opera mail client is more than good enough, but I do have the Spamhaus XBL plugged into my postfix server which rejects about 90% of spam anyway.
The beauty of "doing it yourself" is that it's extensible - bought another domain? Slap it in the postfix configs and you're away. Bought a better certificate? Slap it in and you're done (I bought a 5-year cert from GoDaddy for about $5 a few months ago).
I have managed DNS with my host (because that's not something I want to take downtime-responsibility for - though I can add any A, AAAA, TXT, SRV, etc. records that I like through an interface) so things like SPF filtering are also easy to do, but DNSSEC is a pain in the arse and I can't be bothered.
IPv6 is a ten-minute project and still pretty pointless and the rest is just "pet-project" stuff.
I'm not worried about Google myself but if nothing else, it's good to have a hands-on feel for how this stuff plugs together and exactly what you need. It's amazing how often you can hand off a lot of these tasks to your host and being able to say you've done it yourself helps when it comes to diagnosis, and putting up emergency backup servers, etc.
All I need is for someone to sort out DNSSEC so that someone else can take the burden of all those stupid updates for me, and for someone to actually even send me a single packet of IPv6 traffic.
I don't see that wifi run from a cable companies street-side boxes is all that good as a backup. First, your signal is likely to be appalling (run something like inSSIDer and see how many networks you can pick up from indoors - you'll get you, your immediate neighbours, maybe a couple of others - now where's the nearest street cabinet to you?), second it's likely to be busy and overcrowded in any populated area (even if by accident of homeowner's laptops defaulting to it by mistake, or people sitting in cafes using it instead of the cafe's connection), third it's only going to be as reliable as a cable service, but you have zero recourse if it's worse or is off all the time - so you might as well have just bought a cable package and done it yourself. And fourth - you really think they are going to let you do a lot of the things household do over it (e.g. video, skype, iplayer, Steam, torrents etc.). Also, how do you *know* that you're connecting to the free network and not someone's look-alike proxy that just reads and passes on your packets to the real station?
The school I work for have multiple, redundant Internet connections. We're not talking huge, expensive, leased lines but a couple of bog-standard business ADSL2 lines load-shared via a Linux router. There's nothing special about the setup - any network device (including PPP devices) can be tucked into the routing and automatically handles 1/nth of the routes (when you have "n" devices). With dead-route detection and a couple of little scripts, it handles failover perfectly.
Our "emergency" backup for when everything landline-based goes up the creek is a 3G stick. Seriously. I plug it in, we do a couple of gig a day on it for £2 per day, it routes into the network perfectly using the same routing/sharing on the Linux router (so users aren't even aware anything is different - except once when I forgot to click the "pay for today" button and everyone's websites were redirected to the T-Mobile "pay for today" page), it's more than fast enough (150 machines here and with adequate firewalling/proxying, it copes fine for an emergency measure.
And if you hit traffic limits, you *cough* change the SIM to another pre-pay SIM from another 3G dongle (i.e. those multiple redundant 3G dongles you bought when you first had the idea - maybe even from different carriers) and carry on. We actually use it as an SMS line too - a bit of gammu and you have your own "text in" line for parents/customers/own use to do anything you like (one of our text commands is used to cut all power to the ADSL connections for 30 seconds - perfect when there's a temporary ADSL outage just before the off-site Internet backup starts and you need to kick-start the connections again remotely!).
We had the whole school on 3G for a month when our previous ISP cut us off without warning or recourse for "using more than the average household" (despite clearing being a school - by name and by their own installation - and having a business line). Nobody really cared or noticed we were on 3G, and we're inside the M25, within a main town, so it wasn't like we were the only ones using that cell-tower.
That experience got me buying my own 3G dongle which I take everywhere. Using 3G abroad is a pain that I won't endure, but as an emergency backup in your own country it works wonders and you can easily forget that you're using it. I take it away with me on weekends and all sorts - I've broken down and then Googled the numbers of local services, and my girlfriend has it in the car on long journeys to keep up with Facebook, etc. (we hate smartphones, but love 3G dongles).
I bought my parents one as their "main" Internet connection when my brother left home and they started to go on Facebook to catch up with us. They're still on it, use it for everything they do on the net (including iPlayer and Steam), pay for the entire month every month, and won't even consider paying the same or less than that for the inconvenience of a fixed-line installation with cab
A post-apocalyptic world caused by an asteroid strike powerful enough to wipe out 80% of the population (as culled from the "plot" section of the game on Wikipedia)? Yes. It's what we think killed the dinosaurs, for instance, dust-clouds that blocked the sun and covered the planet for millennia.
And, failing that, just because there might be some place that's colourful in real life, it doesn't mean that every fecking game has to use it's HDR to the full and represent every colour "just because" when they are going for a particular look / feel. Hell, no game should use a feature "just because we can". Do you complain that Aliens was dark (because LV426, you know, "would have had" discos and bars and neon lights and strip joints, etc.) or that Predator was "green" (because jungles have coloured plants, and the alien could be multi-coloured....)? It's a ridiculous assertion to make.
It's *still* the point that you expect it "just because", whereas the game is designed from the ground up to represent one particular kind of atmospheric surrounding. Hell, even on the trailers it's no more bland than any other game (and Quake had lava, doncherknow, and stained glass). Putting something colourful in just because you haven't seen a lot of colour yet is not the way to design a game - that's called crowbarring in things that people think "should" be in a game when, actually, if you weren't looking for them NOBODY would have noticed.
Really? That's like complaining that horror movies take place mostly at night, or cartoons aimed at young girls are mostly pink.
Even since the original Quake, I never understood the concern - those who were playing it at the time never complained about the palette until much later, if at all - and still don't know. It's a post-apocalyptic, dust-track racer. What colour did you *EXPECT* to see? Even if you had the ruins of something-or-other-colourful, it would be dust-covered and aged by the time the game is set.
If the biggest complaint you have is a steampunk colour scheme (because that's exactly what it is), then I really pity you for not seeing through atmospheric environments like that.
What, exactly, would you suggest you see in a post-apocalyptic world that would be colourful? Who's got time to paint the fence-posts when you're being shot at and chasing food / energy and NOBODY is making paint?
Because those people who have solar, generator backup, etc. are all blowing the grid 24 hours a day, aren't they?
You install a breaker (mandated by law in some places, for exactly this reason). That breaker cuts off the grid supply and powers the house from the car instead. Power comes back up, you switch it back over. You could probably even design a "smart" breaker that will do just that for you automatically.
At no point has anyone ever suggested that you pump power back to the grid (but that, also, is feasible - see how solar panels feed back to the grid), or join the two at the same time (because even if it's same voltage, it most certainly won't be the same AC phase and will blow the crap out of the street transformer's fuses).
And, from a commercial perspective, the exact opposite is always much better. Why outsource to a third-party that is ALWAYS making profit on top of their operating costs, when you could do it yourself if you have enough to buy the equipment/personnel in the first place?
Take a school. Why bother hiring a cleaning company when you could just hire cleaners? Why bother to hire an IT company when you could just buy and manage the computers yourself? Why bother to pay an external caterer when you could just build a kitchen/canteen and do it yourself?
Every third-party you use is sucking profit from the price you pay - by definition, you are paying more for the base services than strictly necessary. Now sometimes economies of scale mean it's not practical to, say, buy your own PCB manufacturing plant to make your own computers to put in your offices, but a lot of things can easily be done in-house and thus you "consume" an external third-party and get what would be their profit, albeit indirectly.
I know that if I owned a large company, I'd try to keep as much as possible in-house and expand the company rather than use third-parties. Greater control, greater profit, and other services you can offer other companies. If I were Google, I *would* own a motherboard manufacturer by now, and be churning out my own custom-built PC's. I probably wouldn't own a processor manufacturer (economies of scale again), but I'd almost certainly be doing lots of things in-house by expanding the scope of the company, to the point where I'd be making my own racking, basic datacentre equipment, etc. What better advert than "Google only uses Google motherboards/UPS/rack/cables/switches/etc. - which will be available for sale next year"?
Every time you employ a third party, you are paying the amount that they have to charge to a) do the job you want, b) do lots of other jobs for other people, c) hiring people to do all those jobs permanently, pay pensions, h&s, etc. and d) make a profit and expand their own business. Do it yourself, and you save all of d) and quite a bit of the others to get exactly what you want.
And, sensibly, it's not a monopoly if you do that either - because you're not necessarily taking over the entire market for that job - you're just no longer using it yourself and are doing it in-house instead.
Google *might* be buying in their own sandwiches, but I imagine they have their own catering departments. Same for big oil - they *might* be using third-parties for exploration, research, refining, etc. but chances are they are all doing it in-house and making a tidy profit against the alternative. Breaking up those functions into separate companies just causes the bills and finger-pointing to rise - and that's assuming that some of those functions are profitable AT ALL.
The Internet.
Your computer (Turing!).
Any form of public key encryption (the UK got it first, via Turing, but didn't bother to tell anyone else - read: we used it only for our own secure messages - until US "researchers" found it again later).
Satellites in general (GPS is only one particular use of them).
Radar (you probably have on one the back of your car to help you reverse)
Night vision.
Digital cameras (first used on spy satellites)
The list goes on. It's like those people who say "Yeah, but what actual science/technology came out of the space program?"
What have the Romans ever done for us?
The "end-to-end" nature of the Internet ended with the first firewall. Not to mention NAT, proxies, etc. To get to the point where I have a transparent squid proxy protecting my workplace (a school) is only a teensy, tiny step.
"End-to-end" is a pipedream and can't possibly work because of the sheer security and scale of such a network (i.e. there would be nobody on the path able to stop a DDoS against you!). It wouldn't work, and that's why other solutions exist.
Hell, virtually every device ever sold that handles IP traffic modifies it in some way that defeats this "end-to-end" crap. They have firewalls. They may offer NAT. They might offer ping-blocking. Hell, the first thing any decent firewall does is turn off most of the unsolicited packet access that it receives, whether that be ICMP messages, or packets with fake origin. Without that, you'd have chaos.
So that means 100,000 times more work to make everything that detailed?
Or else everyone who makes games uses a standard library of objects to cut/paste and so the games end up looking the same anyway?
This is voxels all over again, in a modern iteration. Yeah, it looks cool, but it increases your development time and isn't anywhere near as fast as other techniques and all those graphical "shortcuts" that standard 3D cards do are done for a reason - nobody *really* notices or cares so long as the game runs smoothly and there's time enough for AI, pathfinding, physics etc.
I see this as the equivalent of FLAC vs MP3 - yeah, sure it's definitely contains more information but at the cost of storage size and, in the end, 99% of people won't actually care.
More crap in the graphics pipeline isn't what I've been looking for for the past 10 years in PC gaming, though. Actually the opposite. I was just looking for something more approaching a game than a 3D sculpture to walk around inside of.
Not to mention, this sort of tech demo has been possible for decades. Maybe not this exact thing as those exact resolutions and those exact framerates, but the result is practically identical to several things I've seen in the past. Now, tell me, which of those actually resulted in a commercial game that used that technology? None. And until it does, it's like telling me that someone has made an "uncrashable" computer, or "compression of most data down to just 20% size". Lovely theory, but until the utility / OS / game that does it can actually land on my computer, it is nothing more than a piece of trivia.
If that's true then the software patents are null and void anyway, because software patents aren't recognised in the EU. However the UK sometimes does things the EU doesn't like. And sometimes the patent might have expired, sometimes the patent might have been added to and renewed under a different number, and some of those patents are still valid.
Stop fecking about and if you want to "steal" this code, either get a lawyer or start negotiating with the patent holder. Why on earth is this an Ask Slashdot? What next? "I think I might infringe copyrights on the Beatles albums - where do I stand?" If you want to know, ASK someone who knows - the owner or a lawyer.
As an Opera user: It doesn't. But then, I have all flash off by default and I have to click a flash-less "play" button before the flash plugin even loads for that one plugin (and hence I don't get noisy ads at all because I never click the play button to even load them, just the one that plays the video/flash I actually WANT to see).