Worse - some of the old buildings are actually better. I have lost count of how many buildings I've been in that didn't have a single right-angle in them, where most of the "walls" were made of plasterboard, where the exterior was breeze-block that you couldn't drill into without destroying it, where the ceilings was polystyrene, where the outside walls had no double-brick construction to combat damp in countries like the UK, where there aren't enough plug-sockets, where the poorly-planned double-glazed windows caused lots of damp inside (and half the time don't open or don't open fully), where the gardens were concreted over (or, worse, that horrible wooden decking), where everything has to have an "extension" built on to make the rooms big enough, where there's no parking, where there are shared boundaries, drains and gutters all over the place, where there's horrible piping running on the surface of the walls rather than hidden away, where radiators feature prominently in every room, where the central focus is the TV in every damn room (and usually some hulking great thing to show off), etc. etc. etc.
I could go on for hours. And then everyone says that what they *really* want to live in is a thatched cottage, while secretly planning to rip everything out and make it like the above (conversion of bungalows to add another floor is a pet hate, once I realised that it makes housing provision for disabled people more and more expensive and hard to find).
It's like a washer-tumble-dryer. Twice as much to break, twice the cost when it does, little advantage (except space) over having two the separate things.
Laptops have a high screen-damage rate - about 50% of the ones that I see die do so because of:
- Broken plastics on the screen corners making it vulnerable - Broken hinges - Broken screens - Broken backlights.
They've managed to take the most vulnerable, power-hungry and costly part of the laptop and double its vulnerability, power needs and cost so that people can save themselves a window resize or an Alt-Tab.
And they are laptops - if you're using one, it's because you need to move it a lot, use it away from power sources and desks and spaces you can unfold stuff in, or a pretentious ponce who thinks they look better on your desk than the one-quarter-of-the-price desktop that out-specs it.
Now, if you'd have said two hard drives, there would be people tearing your arms off to get it. Two displays? Hell, I don't even use dual displays at home or in the office, why would I bother on a laptop where it's the most expensive and ridiculously dangerous device on which to try to juggle two screens?
I once spent several days playing through Nonterraqueous on the Spectrum, with brother and father on standby to take over, as we tried to a) complete it for the first time and b) map it as we went. No reloads, no checkpoints, no "saves".
It took forever, and the largest piece of graph paper you've ever seen in your life, and still we only just managed to complete it and huge areas of the map were blank. The next week, someone else published the first ever map of the game in a games magazine, so it took them just as long to do so, if not longer.
10 hours? It's okay. A bit short. It means a "new" game would last me about a week or so of casual play. I can get 100's of hours out of games that cost far less. As far as I'm concerned, it's the money/time ratio that's important and AAA titles always fail on that (e.g. £50 for 10 hours is £5 per hour - some people don't even earn that, let alone can blow it on entertainment). I'd expect the ratio to be less than 1 for any title, and a lot less than half for anything decent.
Which probably explains why I haven't bought a full-price game in years, don't pre-order and don't pay more than about £10 for anything any more (but will happily spend £50 in the Steam summer sale, etc.). Back in the Spectrum days, I completed exactly ONE video game and exactly ONE arcade game (Final Fight). My Steam list? 350 games, and pretty much anything I installed that lasted an hour without getting deleted has been completed.
Are we really counting things like "get all the achievements" or "do it on stupidly-impossibly-unfair difficulty" in order to "complete" a game, because even some huge AAA titles only took me a handful of hours to complete.
When HL2:Ep3 comes out, I will be setting aside 5 hours and £30. If it's worse value than that, I will really have to consider whether it's worth completing my "set" of HL games just to recognise good game authorship. And that's my most eagerly anticipated title yet.
P.S. we infer most of the mass of the universe through the movement of things we can observe (because all mass bends space-time) - and we get a pretty god-damn accurate picture of what MUST be in it's local neighbourhood for it to act like it does. The fact we can't see the mass itself is neither here nor there - we're literally looking at how a galaxy (BILLIONS OF STARS!) behaves and inferring how much it and it's surroundings must weigh in order to act like that. There's about 170 billion galaxies to look at.
On those scales, extra planets and a few missing stars don't even factor into the error ranges because they are so inconsequential. Hell a couple of extra galaxies doesn't even register.
Tut! Oh God! Why didn't we think of this! It's so obvious! That's where all our research money has gone to waste, assuming that we are omnipotent in our calculations and not including error ranges!
Hell, let's just assume that that 83% (or thereabouts) of all matter in the universe being "missing" is just us overlooking that there might be planets on every star (and the fact that the biggest planet in our own Solar System weighs less than 0.1% that of the Sun).
God, it's so obvious. Why did we never take this into account in any of our billion-dollar-funded research programs filled with (quite literally) rocket-scientists?
Just because they were "open" doesn't mean you could actually do anything with them.
I used to have a wireless network where all the clients were software-firewalled and the only traffic accepted over the wireless interfaces was VPN traffic to a server also on the wireless network (and that interface similarly firewalled). Hell, you didn't even have DHCP service on that interface.
So a million people could "join" my wireless network but:
1) None of them could talk to each other. 2) None of them could talk to the Internet. 3) None of them could talk to my computers. 4) None of the traffic they could potentially sniff with a "promiscuous" sniff of the network was at all useful or revealing to them.
But it meant that the wireless negotiation was quick and easy (I've had no end of problems with WPA2 gear just dropping off the network when a WPA, WEP, or open network on the same hardware works just fine all the time), nobody had to remember silly passwords, I could use client-keys long before WPA allowed you to do such things and it was impossible to make me join an "alternate" network with the same SSID and pretend to be my home network.
Just because there was no WEP/WPA password doesn't mean there was no security, or that it wasn't intentional (e.g. public wifi access points), or that it even connected to another computer at all - let alone the Internet. I'm not saying that there weren't people with stupidly insecure connections but a scary number means nothing without justification:
How many of the "secure" stations actually had quite a weak password (e.g. same as the SSID?)?
How many of the insecure stations would route to the unmodified Internet at all (upside-down-ternet actually gives you scripts to mess with people who access your wifi without the right credentials - like turning web images upside down, or redirecting them to pictures of kittens)?
How many of them would let you connect but would only allow access to a single MAC (which isn't "secure" as such, but a damn sight better than nothing)?
How many of them were actually fake honeypots deployed to catch people's details because they were stupid enough to log in on unknown, insecure networks?
Scary numbers sell headlines. I'd want facts, considering that for many years I didn't trust WEP or WPA with my networks and so only deployed them as a hindrance to eavesdroppers, not an actual security layer - because everything was VPN and treated as an "unsecured" connection. People who came to my house could never work out why, when they connected with the advertised password (if any), they couldn't actually do anything even once connected.
And, bear in mind, that paper is from 2008. It's also linked to from several major security lists from around the same time. Though it can have countermeasures deployed against it, that attack is 3 years old and thus not state-of-the-art - things have moved on.
Now how much longer do you think WPA is going to last, and how long have you been trusting ARP packets that are sent over WPA?
Nothing more than could go wrong with natural evolution over the the same course of time.
See, we have these things called DNA, that occurs naturally, and these things that happen to it called mutations, that occur naturally, and every time we wipe something out or solve a problem, we "force" the organism (indirectly) to move to a mutation that survives. In doing so, nature does the same things as we would do, except more efficiently, more quickly, more randomly and under far less control.
Wait 50 years. AIDS will be back, in a slightly different form. Bird flu will be back. Swine flu will be back (it is already, in various mutated forms that we can't treat). MRSA will be back (because MRSA is basically nothing more than an evolved bacteria).
30 years ago we hadn't even heard of MRSA or AIDS and today they are present most of the world. Guess what'll happen 30 years from now, especially if we eradicate either of those and leave lots more potential human hosts living for longer with freedom to copulate more than previously?
Nothing we do in genetics, or even huge tracts of biology, isn't happening too, now, around you, this second, under far, far less control. And guess what? If we don't tinker with it ourselves, we have no way to detect, understand, treat and cope with any of those natural changes that have a devastating effect on people (i.e. we'd be able to do fuck-all about AIDS, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, even just simple cancer). Cancer is a naturally-occurring mutation that makes a single cell out of billions in your body go ape-shit and not stop reproducing.
Despite all that, statistics show that people have NEVER lived as long as they do now (and cancer survival rates are phenomenal compared to even 10 years ago). All that's because of people tinkering.
Basically, your argument would make more sense reversed - why aren't we tinkering more? Tinkering helps, yet nature destroys and keeps coming back and back and back and attacking us with new things all the time that we take DECADES to understand.
I think it's no accident that the allegiance to the constitution and domestic enemies comes first. Just because the President orders you to bomb a friendly country, or Washington, for no reason doesn't mean you have to.
The problem, as always, is proving it and having others give you a fair trial at which to do so. Apparently the US doesn't believe in those yet.
The musician James Blunt used to be an army officer for the UK. While in Kosovo, he was ordered by an American superior at NATO command to retake an airport held by Russian forces. He deliberately and directly disobeyed that perfectly valid order, and was later backed by his UK superiors in doing so.
It's just a matter of context, and who backs you up, and why, and what chances you're given to explain yourself. If you're not given the chance to explain yourself, in an unbiased environment, it's pointless to pretend the system is fair.
Not unless you consider abritrary small packet injection (including ARP packet-sizes) within 18 minutes of monitoring a network, and/or decrypting all the traffic towards the client in TKIP PSK mode, etc. to be an expected feature of a security measure.
I'm not saying it's as open as WEP, but it's no longer secure in a number of configurations and you can't make a "WPA-only" device any more - and call it WiFi - because of it. Weak user-supplied keys are neither here nor there and apply to anything that can be accessed.
Every single game for the last 20 years has claimed "destructible environments" (some of them erroneously, with the word "fully" as a prefix). It's the same thing, in essence.
It's been a want of gamers for decades, since voxels were around at least, and it's never really happened how we expect, despite being promised with every big hit.
Even Minecraft doesn't have a fully destructible environment - some blocks can't be moved or changed, and there are depth and height limits, not to mention width wrap-arounds through the use on fixed-length int's on map indexes.
Unfortunately, such a thing would fundamentally change a game. Imagine a 3D FPS. You want to take out the enemy base. Hell, with enough time, you can just move the local mountain across on top of it, or tunnel up into it, or punch a window through the local mountain to make an inaccesible sniper-spot, or literally just flatten the whole place with artillery so you can walk through the ashes and collect all the pickups. It doesn't make for a fun game, necessarily, but it just one of many features that a good games developer can add to a game to make it more interesting. It's the same category as realistic physics, proper ballistics, or better AI teammates. Useful in the right hands, game-ruining in the wrong ones.
Yes, it would be really cool to have zombie/aliens game where you arrange the furniture to build barricades, but in playability terms it can create a nightmare, especially multiplayer. Hell, people whine that they (or the AI) get stuck on map objects that took years to position in the ideal place - what makes you think a billion random objects that can all move everywhere, combined with overpowered abilities to move the earth, will make it easier to get from A to B?
The only way to do it is realistically, which is gameplay-hell. If you want a tunnel into the enemy camp, you'll run out of food and die before you get anywhere, the sounds of digging will be heard, you'll kill yourself through exhaustion and you'll have to put the soil somewhere (which will draw attention). And if you don't get caught by the enemy, it'll still take MONTHS to get there.
(Offtopic: How cool would a well-made free-form Great Escape game be, though?)
No, I pay UP TO £10 ($15-ish) to own only the movies that I intend to watch a lot (and thereby gets my money's worth) and everything else is from the "bargain bucket" when it goes out of fashion and becomes cheap and costs less than a single rental would cost.
Hours per cost, it's very simple to work out. My games are generally in the 5-10 hours per pound range (10-20 hours per dollar) but certain examples are in the 1000's of hours per pound, my movies are in the 5-10 hours per pound range (certain examples are possibly in the hundreds by now).
Cinema? 0.2 hours per pound, whether the film is shite or not (not counting popcorn, drinks, parking, etc.).
The last three full-price pre-release games that I *could* have bought on release day? 0.1 hours per pound.
It's a very simple ratio to work out. Rented movies? Maybe 1 hour per pound, depending on rental costs (new films generally cost more), but *never* changing. Or I can buy ex-rental DVD's for less than the price of a single rental about a year after the movie comes out and also know whether it's shit or not.
I can get Lovefilm for £10 a month, sometimes less on promotions. Or I can just buy a DVD a month (or two or three if I'm buying old movies) and own it forever. I've actually built up my DVD collection twice in the past by that method (boot sales - like a garage sale/flea market - help immensely in that way).
With the amount of shite that I discover is shite before I see it (because I let other people beta-test it at the cinema for me), I don't end up buying enough to make it worth it. And I'd honestly rather spend twice as much to own it forever than some amount that I might not use at all that month, or won't be able to show my friends the next month because I've sent the disc back.
I have never subscribed to anything but magazines (and that was a long time ago) because whenever I subscribed to, say, computer magazines, I realised that half the time I wanted a different magazine that month for the article/cover CD they had, and had "wasted" my money on a magazine that I didn't really read because it had nothing interesting that month.
I have basic TV - no add-ons. I have no game subscriptions at all and no games that *have* subscriptions. I've never been a member of a video rental store in my life. And yet anyone who talks to me wouldn't notice - I have a good movie knowledge and know quite a lot of TV comedy. It's like computer games - a TV series or movie doesn't magically get crap just because you watch it a year later than everyone else, but it does get immensely cheaper and on a format you can keep.
I skip the cinema part and wait for the DVD. If you don't know by the time the DVD comes out whether it's a steaming pile of crap, you never will know. And at least then you can have it in a DRM-free (pretty much) standardised format that you *can* backup and play just about anywhere.
I work in IT within a school, that means I spend a lot of my time doing licensing compliance. I also program for a living and a hobby, and am an open-source advocate (pushing LibreOffice into schools). Nobody who works with OS should be able to look people straight in the face and say they use/copy/distribute copyrighted content against its usage license.
In a country that lets telcos CHARGE the receiver for receiving every SMS (solicited or not), anything's possible. Hell, sometimes they charge the person for receiving a phone call as well, even if it's an ordinary, domestic phone call and they never asked to be rung.
The US, collectively, are a bunch of people who do what corporations tell them to.
Sorry, but I don't really see the distinction between the two. The developer in a subscription model is there to make you continue to spend (because why would you continue to subscribe to a non-evolving world once everyone hit a certain level?), and the only difference is that the player is committed to spend only X amount per month for as long as it is worthwhile.
But then, I'm just a long-term gamer that has never played subscription games, never purchased anything in a microtransaction, and either buys games without any DLC (because they justify the purchase without it) or waits until they are stupidly cheap on special deals that include all the DLC in one hit (usually with all the "unique" DLC that pre-orderers got as well) - DLC that doesn't add longevity to a game is considered worthless.
I don't see the point in "renting" any game over an extended period of time (it's the most incredibly stupid idea I've ever heard but apparently quite popular now - would you *really* rent Office? Then why games?) or "having to" bump the value of a game you already have a perpetual right to. My gaming budget is limited, and such long-term, regular transactions would suck the life out of it in place of permanently owning a certain number of brand new games each month and being able to play however I want with them for life.
Note to software developers:
- I will not rent your OS. - I will not rent your applications. - I will not rent your games. - Hell, I wouldn't even rent a PC/laptop/gadget. - I don't rent movies (nor do I subscribe to movie channels, which is the same thing) - I don't rent audio.
Of *COURSE* you want me to, because it's an ever-renewing income to yourself for zero extra work, but I won't do it and if you try to make me, or devalue my games pushing it, then I'll not buy anything at all from you.
Don't tell me you can't make money. PopCap sell tetris-like games under that premise and makes more money than most of the big software houses, the entire Wii catalogue is like that, and the whole "serious" gaming industry up until about 5 years ago was entirely pay-for-permanent-licence. If you can't make money, it's because you're churning out regurgitated shite (e.g. DNF) rather than giving people something they actually want to play (e.g. Half-life Ep 3).
Renting is for things that you need but can't afford to immediately own outright (e.g. houses, possibly cars for some people) and generates substantial profit for the owner of the thing being rented, which is why they do it. For everything else, I'll buy a permanent right or not at all.
The more you try to make me rent your game, the more you'll end up in the "not at all" category. Are you listening OnLive?
I measure my gaming value in hours enjoyed per money spent. Quite a few of the games I have are literally in the region of 400+ (a couple over 1000+) in that ratio (using UK pounds), and it grows every time I play them. Even the crappiest I've bought are in 1-2 at minimum.
Online games? The longer I pay a monthly subscription, the lower your ratio goes and the second I stop paying, that ratio stays still forever. After, say, a year the cost has already surpassed more than I've *ever* paid for a game in my life, so I'd expect the experience and hours of enjoyment to do the same, which is an *EXTREMELY* tough target for an online grind-fest.
If you really want me to pay a regular subscription you have to be able to convince me that I'll be guaranteed that I will be voluntarily drawn to enjoy hundreds of hours a month, every month, in order to come close to competing. If you want me to do microtransactions, the base games has to be so cheap, or so entertaining that it's worth it and every transaction has to add hours of replay value with the same ratio. Anything else, and I'm literally just pissing my money away.
Go look at TV subscriptions, etc. The fanatics get their money's worth in terms of hours / cost. Everyone else sees it as a bit of a con and ends up on f
A hole in the ground. Dig a large one, poop in it, cover it (with anything that will cover a hole). Throw anything organic (including dead animals) in there and keep it covered. Once a year, dig a new one next to the old and fill the old with the soil from the new. People have been doing this for centuries. A way to poop without water is not the problem here, it's teaching people not to poop in their water supply even if it "seems" alright.
The British Army basically took over a third of the world because we figured out sanitation and everyone else's troops were suffering with stomach problems which stopped 50% of them fighting. We basically learned to not put latrines near your food preparation area, and to wash your hands in *something* (sand will do - it's the abrasive action of drying them that actually cleans them) and instantly cut out quite a lot of disease.
How do you think people coped for the thousands of years prior to running water into every home, even in the most crowded of places? The only difference is that you have to learn not to throw your waste into the streets and just leave it there.
Seeing as I've never had a graphics driver crash in the last four updates of the nVidia driver that I'm using (going back - what - five years on this particular chip) - and haven't witnessed (or had reported) one in work either on several hundred machines - that's not a big selling point.
"Hey, when random programs crash we can carry on!" is pretty much what I expect of an OS, anyway, and the damn things shouldn't be crashing in the first place.
If you're that accustomed to complete driver crashes that you just treat it like a screen mode change, you really are setting yourself up for trouble. Something prompted that crash, and you have *zero* idea what because Windows just carried on like nothing was wrong. Could be bad programming, could be some exploit in your graphics drivers being taken advantage of, could be overheating, or bad electrical contact, or failing motherboard, or failing graphics card, or....
Seriously, it's a "nice" feature that I would hope never, ever, ever go activated, ever. And if it did, I'd much rather know about it before it corrupts data on the bus or breaks my hardware longterm. It's not a selling point - an OS doing it's only single bloody job in protecting the hardware from faultily-interfacing applications - it's a warning.
MS cares more about hiding hardware failure from you than it does about your data. Because at the end of the day, it has no idea what junk that failing, crashing driver spewed out to your graphics card to stop it responding and/or what the graphics card did about it before being reset. And graphics cards have DMA access to just about anything in main memory.
Sounds like a pretty usual hotfix scenario to me. Then they'll hotfix the hotfix, and hotfix the hotfix to the hotfix, then they'll service pack it and bundle it with a dozen other things that fix that problem and introduce ten more.
As always - don't have Windows Update turned on by default unless you really do have proper (byte-level) backups of the computer that are up-to-date.
I've yet to take a batch of computers through a Service Pack without at least one of them hitting blue-screens or reboot loops and having to restore it from a clean backup (or better, a backup of a computer that already had the hotfix applied successfully).
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, it worked (for a certain definition of "worked") for OpenOffice...
Worse - some of the old buildings are actually better. I have lost count of how many buildings I've been in that didn't have a single right-angle in them, where most of the "walls" were made of plasterboard, where the exterior was breeze-block that you couldn't drill into without destroying it, where the ceilings was polystyrene, where the outside walls had no double-brick construction to combat damp in countries like the UK, where there aren't enough plug-sockets, where the poorly-planned double-glazed windows caused lots of damp inside (and half the time don't open or don't open fully), where the gardens were concreted over (or, worse, that horrible wooden decking), where everything has to have an "extension" built on to make the rooms big enough, where there's no parking, where there are shared boundaries, drains and gutters all over the place, where there's horrible piping running on the surface of the walls rather than hidden away, where radiators feature prominently in every room, where the central focus is the TV in every damn room (and usually some hulking great thing to show off), etc. etc. etc.
I could go on for hours. And then everyone says that what they *really* want to live in is a thatched cottage, while secretly planning to rip everything out and make it like the above (conversion of bungalows to add another floor is a pet hate, once I realised that it makes housing provision for disabled people more and more expensive and hard to find).
Most changes != best contribution.
In fact, they were rounded on a bit because the changes were mostly crap and later reverted and all sorts.
It's like a washer-tumble-dryer. Twice as much to break, twice the cost when it does, little advantage (except space) over having two the separate things.
Laptops have a high screen-damage rate - about 50% of the ones that I see die do so because of:
- Broken plastics on the screen corners making it vulnerable
- Broken hinges
- Broken screens
- Broken backlights.
They've managed to take the most vulnerable, power-hungry and costly part of the laptop and double its vulnerability, power needs and cost so that people can save themselves a window resize or an Alt-Tab.
And they are laptops - if you're using one, it's because you need to move it a lot, use it away from power sources and desks and spaces you can unfold stuff in, or a pretentious ponce who thinks they look better on your desk than the one-quarter-of-the-price desktop that out-specs it.
Now, if you'd have said two hard drives, there would be people tearing your arms off to get it. Two displays? Hell, I don't even use dual displays at home or in the office, why would I bother on a laptop where it's the most expensive and ridiculously dangerous device on which to try to juggle two screens?
I once spent several days playing through Nonterraqueous on the Spectrum, with brother and father on standby to take over, as we tried to a) complete it for the first time and b) map it as we went. No reloads, no checkpoints, no "saves".
It took forever, and the largest piece of graph paper you've ever seen in your life, and still we only just managed to complete it and huge areas of the map were blank. The next week, someone else published the first ever map of the game in a games magazine, so it took them just as long to do so, if not longer.
10 hours? It's okay. A bit short. It means a "new" game would last me about a week or so of casual play. I can get 100's of hours out of games that cost far less. As far as I'm concerned, it's the money/time ratio that's important and AAA titles always fail on that (e.g. £50 for 10 hours is £5 per hour - some people don't even earn that, let alone can blow it on entertainment). I'd expect the ratio to be less than 1 for any title, and a lot less than half for anything decent.
Which probably explains why I haven't bought a full-price game in years, don't pre-order and don't pay more than about £10 for anything any more (but will happily spend £50 in the Steam summer sale, etc.). Back in the Spectrum days, I completed exactly ONE video game and exactly ONE arcade game (Final Fight). My Steam list? 350 games, and pretty much anything I installed that lasted an hour without getting deleted has been completed.
Are we really counting things like "get all the achievements" or "do it on stupidly-impossibly-unfair difficulty" in order to "complete" a game, because even some huge AAA titles only took me a handful of hours to complete.
When HL2:Ep3 comes out, I will be setting aside 5 hours and £30. If it's worse value than that, I will really have to consider whether it's worth completing my "set" of HL games just to recognise good game authorship. And that's my most eagerly anticipated title yet.
P.S. we infer most of the mass of the universe through the movement of things we can observe (because all mass bends space-time) - and we get a pretty god-damn accurate picture of what MUST be in it's local neighbourhood for it to act like it does. The fact we can't see the mass itself is neither here nor there - we're literally looking at how a galaxy (BILLIONS OF STARS!) behaves and inferring how much it and it's surroundings must weigh in order to act like that. There's about 170 billion galaxies to look at.
On those scales, extra planets and a few missing stars don't even factor into the error ranges because they are so inconsequential. Hell a couple of extra galaxies doesn't even register.
Tut! Oh God! Why didn't we think of this! It's so obvious! That's where all our research money has gone to waste, assuming that we are omnipotent in our calculations and not including error ranges!
Hell, let's just assume that that 83% (or thereabouts) of all matter in the universe being "missing" is just us overlooking that there might be planets on every star (and the fact that the biggest planet in our own Solar System weighs less than 0.1% that of the Sun).
God, it's so obvious. Why did we never take this into account in any of our billion-dollar-funded research programs filled with (quite literally) rocket-scientists?
Or maybe we did, you pillock...
Just because they were "open" doesn't mean you could actually do anything with them.
I used to have a wireless network where all the clients were software-firewalled and the only traffic accepted over the wireless interfaces was VPN traffic to a server also on the wireless network (and that interface similarly firewalled). Hell, you didn't even have DHCP service on that interface.
So a million people could "join" my wireless network but:
1) None of them could talk to each other.
2) None of them could talk to the Internet.
3) None of them could talk to my computers.
4) None of the traffic they could potentially sniff with a "promiscuous" sniff of the network was at all useful or revealing to them.
But it meant that the wireless negotiation was quick and easy (I've had no end of problems with WPA2 gear just dropping off the network when a WPA, WEP, or open network on the same hardware works just fine all the time), nobody had to remember silly passwords, I could use client-keys long before WPA allowed you to do such things and it was impossible to make me join an "alternate" network with the same SSID and pretend to be my home network.
Just because there was no WEP/WPA password doesn't mean there was no security, or that it wasn't intentional (e.g. public wifi access points), or that it even connected to another computer at all - let alone the Internet. I'm not saying that there weren't people with stupidly insecure connections but a scary number means nothing without justification:
How many of the "secure" stations actually had quite a weak password (e.g. same as the SSID?)?
How many of the insecure stations would route to the unmodified Internet at all (upside-down-ternet actually gives you scripts to mess with people who access your wifi without the right credentials - like turning web images upside down, or redirecting them to pictures of kittens)?
How many of them would let you connect but would only allow access to a single MAC (which isn't "secure" as such, but a damn sight better than nothing)?
How many of them were actually fake honeypots deployed to catch people's details because they were stupid enough to log in on unknown, insecure networks?
Scary numbers sell headlines. I'd want facts, considering that for many years I didn't trust WEP or WPA with my networks and so only deployed them as a hindrance to eavesdroppers, not an actual security layer - because everything was VPN and treated as an "unsecured" connection. People who came to my house could never work out why, when they connected with the advertised password (if any), they couldn't actually do anything even once connected.
http://dl.aircrack-ng.org/breakingwepandwpa.pdf
And, bear in mind, that paper is from 2008. It's also linked to from several major security lists from around the same time. Though it can have countermeasures deployed against it, that attack is 3 years old and thus not state-of-the-art - things have moved on.
Now how much longer do you think WPA is going to last, and how long have you been trusting ARP packets that are sent over WPA?
Nothing more than could go wrong with natural evolution over the the same course of time.
See, we have these things called DNA, that occurs naturally, and these things that happen to it called mutations, that occur naturally, and every time we wipe something out or solve a problem, we "force" the organism (indirectly) to move to a mutation that survives. In doing so, nature does the same things as we would do, except more efficiently, more quickly, more randomly and under far less control.
Wait 50 years. AIDS will be back, in a slightly different form. Bird flu will be back. Swine flu will be back (it is already, in various mutated forms that we can't treat). MRSA will be back (because MRSA is basically nothing more than an evolved bacteria).
30 years ago we hadn't even heard of MRSA or AIDS and today they are present most of the world. Guess what'll happen 30 years from now, especially if we eradicate either of those and leave lots more potential human hosts living for longer with freedom to copulate more than previously?
Nothing we do in genetics, or even huge tracts of biology, isn't happening too, now, around you, this second, under far, far less control. And guess what? If we don't tinker with it ourselves, we have no way to detect, understand, treat and cope with any of those natural changes that have a devastating effect on people (i.e. we'd be able to do fuck-all about AIDS, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, even just simple cancer). Cancer is a naturally-occurring mutation that makes a single cell out of billions in your body go ape-shit and not stop reproducing.
Despite all that, statistics show that people have NEVER lived as long as they do now (and cancer survival rates are phenomenal compared to even 10 years ago). All that's because of people tinkering.
Basically, your argument would make more sense reversed - why aren't we tinkering more? Tinkering helps, yet nature destroys and keeps coming back and back and back and attacking us with new things all the time that we take DECADES to understand.
MIDI.
By definition, it's not fully destructible if you have non-destructible blocks, wherever they are :-)
I think it's no accident that the allegiance to the constitution and domestic enemies comes first. Just because the President orders you to bomb a friendly country, or Washington, for no reason doesn't mean you have to.
The problem, as always, is proving it and having others give you a fair trial at which to do so. Apparently the US doesn't believe in those yet.
The musician James Blunt used to be an army officer for the UK. While in Kosovo, he was ordered by an American superior at NATO command to retake an airport held by Russian forces. He deliberately and directly disobeyed that perfectly valid order, and was later backed by his UK superiors in doing so.
It's just a matter of context, and who backs you up, and why, and what chances you're given to explain yourself. If you're not given the chance to explain yourself, in an unbiased environment, it's pointless to pretend the system is fair.
Not unless you consider abritrary small packet injection (including ARP packet-sizes) within 18 minutes of monitoring a network, and/or decrypting all the traffic towards the client in TKIP PSK mode, etc. to be an expected feature of a security measure.
I'm not saying it's as open as WEP, but it's no longer secure in a number of configurations and you can't make a "WPA-only" device any more - and call it WiFi - because of it. Weak user-supplied keys are neither here nor there and apply to anything that can be accessed.
Every single game for the last 20 years has claimed "destructible environments" (some of them erroneously, with the word "fully" as a prefix). It's the same thing, in essence.
It's been a want of gamers for decades, since voxels were around at least, and it's never really happened how we expect, despite being promised with every big hit.
Even Minecraft doesn't have a fully destructible environment - some blocks can't be moved or changed, and there are depth and height limits, not to mention width wrap-arounds through the use on fixed-length int's on map indexes.
Unfortunately, such a thing would fundamentally change a game. Imagine a 3D FPS. You want to take out the enemy base. Hell, with enough time, you can just move the local mountain across on top of it, or tunnel up into it, or punch a window through the local mountain to make an inaccesible sniper-spot, or literally just flatten the whole place with artillery so you can walk through the ashes and collect all the pickups. It doesn't make for a fun game, necessarily, but it just one of many features that a good games developer can add to a game to make it more interesting. It's the same category as realistic physics, proper ballistics, or better AI teammates. Useful in the right hands, game-ruining in the wrong ones.
Yes, it would be really cool to have zombie/aliens game where you arrange the furniture to build barricades, but in playability terms it can create a nightmare, especially multiplayer. Hell, people whine that they (or the AI) get stuck on map objects that took years to position in the ideal place - what makes you think a billion random objects that can all move everywhere, combined with overpowered abilities to move the earth, will make it easier to get from A to B?
The only way to do it is realistically, which is gameplay-hell. If you want a tunnel into the enemy camp, you'll run out of food and die before you get anywhere, the sounds of digging will be heard, you'll kill yourself through exhaustion and you'll have to put the soil somewhere (which will draw attention). And if you don't get caught by the enemy, it'll still take MONTHS to get there.
(Offtopic: How cool would a well-made free-form Great Escape game be, though?)
No, I pay UP TO £10 ($15-ish) to own only the movies that I intend to watch a lot (and thereby gets my money's worth) and everything else is from the "bargain bucket" when it goes out of fashion and becomes cheap and costs less than a single rental would cost.
Hours per cost, it's very simple to work out. My games are generally in the 5-10 hours per pound range (10-20 hours per dollar) but certain examples are in the 1000's of hours per pound, my movies are in the 5-10 hours per pound range (certain examples are possibly in the hundreds by now).
Cinema? 0.2 hours per pound, whether the film is shite or not (not counting popcorn, drinks, parking, etc.).
The last three full-price pre-release games that I *could* have bought on release day? 0.1 hours per pound.
It's a very simple ratio to work out. Rented movies? Maybe 1 hour per pound, depending on rental costs (new films generally cost more), but *never* changing. Or I can buy ex-rental DVD's for less than the price of a single rental about a year after the movie comes out and also know whether it's shit or not.
I can get Lovefilm for £10 a month, sometimes less on promotions. Or I can just buy a DVD a month (or two or three if I'm buying old movies) and own it forever. I've actually built up my DVD collection twice in the past by that method (boot sales - like a garage sale/flea market - help immensely in that way).
With the amount of shite that I discover is shite before I see it (because I let other people beta-test it at the cinema for me), I don't end up buying enough to make it worth it. And I'd honestly rather spend twice as much to own it forever than some amount that I might not use at all that month, or won't be able to show my friends the next month because I've sent the disc back.
I have never subscribed to anything but magazines (and that was a long time ago) because whenever I subscribed to, say, computer magazines, I realised that half the time I wanted a different magazine that month for the article/cover CD they had, and had "wasted" my money on a magazine that I didn't really read because it had nothing interesting that month.
I have basic TV - no add-ons. I have no game subscriptions at all and no games that *have* subscriptions. I've never been a member of a video rental store in my life. And yet anyone who talks to me wouldn't notice - I have a good movie knowledge and know quite a lot of TV comedy. It's like computer games - a TV series or movie doesn't magically get crap just because you watch it a year later than everyone else, but it does get immensely cheaper and on a format you can keep.
I've pretty much bought them all or had them as gifts. In a lot of cases, twice (split up with my wife, so had to rebuy the stuff she wanted to keep).
I don't buy *new* very often, and Amazon if your friend too, but yeah - even comedies from the 70's that I've seen a million times etc.
I skip the cinema part and wait for the DVD. If you don't know by the time the DVD comes out whether it's a steaming pile of crap, you never will know. And at least then you can have it in a DRM-free (pretty much) standardised format that you *can* backup and play just about anywhere.
I work in IT within a school, that means I spend a lot of my time doing licensing compliance. I also program for a living and a hobby, and am an open-source advocate (pushing LibreOffice into schools). Nobody who works with OS should be able to look people straight in the face and say they use/copy/distribute copyrighted content against its usage license.
In a country that lets telcos CHARGE the receiver for receiving every SMS (solicited or not), anything's possible. Hell, sometimes they charge the person for receiving a phone call as well, even if it's an ordinary, domestic phone call and they never asked to be rung.
The US, collectively, are a bunch of people who do what corporations tell them to.
Sorry, but I don't really see the distinction between the two. The developer in a subscription model is there to make you continue to spend (because why would you continue to subscribe to a non-evolving world once everyone hit a certain level?), and the only difference is that the player is committed to spend only X amount per month for as long as it is worthwhile.
But then, I'm just a long-term gamer that has never played subscription games, never purchased anything in a microtransaction, and either buys games without any DLC (because they justify the purchase without it) or waits until they are stupidly cheap on special deals that include all the DLC in one hit (usually with all the "unique" DLC that pre-orderers got as well) - DLC that doesn't add longevity to a game is considered worthless.
I don't see the point in "renting" any game over an extended period of time (it's the most incredibly stupid idea I've ever heard but apparently quite popular now - would you *really* rent Office? Then why games?) or "having to" bump the value of a game you already have a perpetual right to. My gaming budget is limited, and such long-term, regular transactions would suck the life out of it in place of permanently owning a certain number of brand new games each month and being able to play however I want with them for life.
Note to software developers:
- I will not rent your OS.
- I will not rent your applications.
- I will not rent your games.
- Hell, I wouldn't even rent a PC/laptop/gadget.
- I don't rent movies (nor do I subscribe to movie channels, which is the same thing)
- I don't rent audio.
Of *COURSE* you want me to, because it's an ever-renewing income to yourself for zero extra work, but I won't do it and if you try to make me, or devalue my games pushing it, then I'll not buy anything at all from you.
Don't tell me you can't make money. PopCap sell tetris-like games under that premise and makes more money than most of the big software houses, the entire Wii catalogue is like that, and the whole "serious" gaming industry up until about 5 years ago was entirely pay-for-permanent-licence. If you can't make money, it's because you're churning out regurgitated shite (e.g. DNF) rather than giving people something they actually want to play (e.g. Half-life Ep 3).
Renting is for things that you need but can't afford to immediately own outright (e.g. houses, possibly cars for some people) and generates substantial profit for the owner of the thing being rented, which is why they do it. For everything else, I'll buy a permanent right or not at all.
The more you try to make me rent your game, the more you'll end up in the "not at all" category. Are you listening OnLive?
I measure my gaming value in hours enjoyed per money spent. Quite a few of the games I have are literally in the region of 400+ (a couple over 1000+) in that ratio (using UK pounds), and it grows every time I play them. Even the crappiest I've bought are in 1-2 at minimum.
Online games? The longer I pay a monthly subscription, the lower your ratio goes and the second I stop paying, that ratio stays still forever. After, say, a year the cost has already surpassed more than I've *ever* paid for a game in my life, so I'd expect the experience and hours of enjoyment to do the same, which is an *EXTREMELY* tough target for an online grind-fest.
If you really want me to pay a regular subscription you have to be able to convince me that I'll be guaranteed that I will be voluntarily drawn to enjoy hundreds of hours a month, every month, in order to come close to competing. If you want me to do microtransactions, the base games has to be so cheap, or so entertaining that it's worth it and every transaction has to add hours of replay value with the same ratio. Anything else, and I'm literally just pissing my money away.
Go look at TV subscriptions, etc. The fanatics get their money's worth in terms of hours / cost. Everyone else sees it as a bit of a con and ends up on f
A hole in the ground. Dig a large one, poop in it, cover it (with anything that will cover a hole). Throw anything organic (including dead animals) in there and keep it covered. Once a year, dig a new one next to the old and fill the old with the soil from the new. People have been doing this for centuries. A way to poop without water is not the problem here, it's teaching people not to poop in their water supply even if it "seems" alright.
The British Army basically took over a third of the world because we figured out sanitation and everyone else's troops were suffering with stomach problems which stopped 50% of them fighting. We basically learned to not put latrines near your food preparation area, and to wash your hands in *something* (sand will do - it's the abrasive action of drying them that actually cleans them) and instantly cut out quite a lot of disease.
How do you think people coped for the thousands of years prior to running water into every home, even in the most crowded of places? The only difference is that you have to learn not to throw your waste into the streets and just leave it there.
That, I'll give you.
That's gotta be worth at least 50p of anyone's money, being all of a few thousand lines of code at best. Now - how much is a Windows 7 license again?
Seeing as I've never had a graphics driver crash in the last four updates of the nVidia driver that I'm using (going back - what - five years on this particular chip) - and haven't witnessed (or had reported) one in work either on several hundred machines - that's not a big selling point.
"Hey, when random programs crash we can carry on!" is pretty much what I expect of an OS, anyway, and the damn things shouldn't be crashing in the first place.
If you're that accustomed to complete driver crashes that you just treat it like a screen mode change, you really are setting yourself up for trouble. Something prompted that crash, and you have *zero* idea what because Windows just carried on like nothing was wrong. Could be bad programming, could be some exploit in your graphics drivers being taken advantage of, could be overheating, or bad electrical contact, or failing motherboard, or failing graphics card, or....
Seriously, it's a "nice" feature that I would hope never, ever, ever go activated, ever. And if it did, I'd much rather know about it before it corrupts data on the bus or breaks my hardware longterm. It's not a selling point - an OS doing it's only single bloody job in protecting the hardware from faultily-interfacing applications - it's a warning.
MS cares more about hiding hardware failure from you than it does about your data. Because at the end of the day, it has no idea what junk that failing, crashing driver spewed out to your graphics card to stop it responding and/or what the graphics card did about it before being reset. And graphics cards have DMA access to just about anything in main memory.
Sounds like a pretty usual hotfix scenario to me. Then they'll hotfix the hotfix, and hotfix the hotfix to the hotfix, then they'll service pack it and bundle it with a dozen other things that fix that problem and introduce ten more.
As always - don't have Windows Update turned on by default unless you really do have proper (byte-level) backups of the computer that are up-to-date.
I've yet to take a batch of computers through a Service Pack without at least one of them hitting blue-screens or reboot loops and having to restore it from a clean backup (or better, a backup of a computer that already had the hotfix applied successfully).