I never figured out why, past the era of broadband introduction, ISP's ever bothered with their own Usenet servers anyway.
Surely Usenet is an application - yes, it's useful to cache the content if it's sucking up a serious portion of your external bandwidth, which is what I expect to happen with HTTP at any ISP, but once it's not taking up that huge amount of bandwidth any more (read: since broadband introduction, given that most people who bought broadband would have no idea what Usenet was and/or were too busy swamping their ISP with Kazaa / Bittorrent to care). Why ISP's still have local newsservers in this day and age I have no idea... my ISP only ever has trouble with them because of the huge amount of storage and bandwidth necessary to keep them up to date and they wouldn't consume 1% of the same data as your average Bittorrent user.
Thus, why is it on any one particular ISP, or university, to host such newsgroups? It's an external application, powered by external servers. If it always relied on a particular university to host it, then that was always a weak point. If it doesn't, what's the big deal? Change settings, move on with life. It's like saying that it's sad that the very first web host has gone down - yes, if you use that web host yourself, but there are plenty of others about if you really need to use them. Except with newsgroups, pretty much the same newsgroups could be made available from pretty much anywhere in the world. If people don't bother, then that's because there's no demand.
I know my ISP gives out newsgroup server details if you ask for it, I can't imagine that even 1% of their users ever ask nowadays. But I do know that they can take *DAYS* to resync if they've had a problem and their newsgroup servers were offline even for a little while. If you want newsgroups, type in the address of a publicly available newsgroup server into your news client. Considering most ISP's don't even *have* their own newsgroup server any more, this has barely changed in the last 10 years. If you don't, why would you care?
If I'm honest, I wasn't around at the start of newsgroups, but they were still "popular" when I started university. ISP's would give you the details as part of their sign-up packs and newsgroup access could add real value to a particular ISP's offering. I never ever used them because the signal-to-noise ratio was always ridiculous, there was no way to practically search through for relevant things (and things like FAQ's were not only posted on the web too but often spammed to the relevant groups at ridiculous intervals).
Newsgroups (along with mailing lists) have been dead for quite a long time, active only within the hardcore geek sections of society. They rely on etiquette and heavy filtering to work properly but said etiquette is *ALWAYS* having to be reiterated to everyone because it's just too easy to spam everyone with nonsense. Nobody will really mourn the last gopher server going offline (except out of nostalgia), and the same goes for newsgroups. They have been superseded, by other media with better defined intentions, control, and access. Don't mourn them - learn by their mistakes and move on.
Now, which groups should I cross-post this to in order to get the quickest answer possible?
A currency, by definition, exists only in the mind of the users anyway. The £10 note I have in my pocket is only worth £10 because people will happily exchange it for goods / services / other notes to a value of £10. If there's a nuclear war, it'll be worth ABSOLUTELY NOTHING if I survive that. A few tons of food, a working car, or a nugget of gold, on the other hand... and even the last one is questionable that it would have value until civilisaton was rebuilt.
When Zimbabwe's currency became almost valueless and therefore useless because nobody wanted to accept Zimbabwe dollars (or whatever they were called), the currency was abandoned and people used dollars because other people would *happily* accept dollars. It was still a legal tender, but it was useless because nobody was willing to accept it for the value it purported to hold.
My £10 note also holds a peculiar legal status as it is only a promisary note to the value of £10. It says on it "I promise to pay the bearer, on demand, the sum of £10", and it's signed by the "Governor and Company of the Bank of England". Other notes in other countries have similar legal status. If I go to Scotland (technically the same country, because they are both in the UK), I stand a good chance of being given a similar note by the Bank of Scotland in my change. Both are legal, have identical "values" as they have agreed to track the Bank of England values - but try getting a London cabbie to take one. It's still just a piece of paper, at the end of the day, that costs WAY less than £10 for the government to fabricate. The same for coins.
A cheque has similar legal status. It's "virtual" in that the currency doesn't actually exist in a tangible form. But each time I write one, that's a binding legal contract to give someone something of that value. In the past, cheques have been deemed legal when they were written on a cow. The Bank had a legal requirement to accept it as a binding contract at the time.
Historically, when coins actually started to be worth more than their face value, they were melted down and sold to people for more money than they represented. Any currency is only a representation, or a promise, of the value written on it. Sometimes that promise means nothing.
With a "digital" currency, the situation is no different. No "money" changes hands when I buy something from Amazon, just a number goes from one box to another on some computer somewhere. So credit cards and bank accounts are no different to a virtual currency at all, because they only exist as a number... the plastic card is merely a convenient security device / container for that number. If my country dive-bombs economically, it might well be the case that international sellers refuse to acknowledge that my money transfer is worth as much as I say it is. It's all based on a perception of value.
Thus, all currencies are by definition "virtual".
Therefore, if I choose to exchange my "real" money for some "virtual" money, it's no worse than putting it into my bank account. In fact, I do this every day - I buy petrol and I'm given "loyalty points" which I can cash in to claim, say, a cut-glass goblet or a breakfast bowl at a later date. And people buy entirely "virtual" products every day - the games on my Steam list, the account for my mobile phone, the subscriptions to websites, I don't see any "tangible" product at the end of a day, just the result of a bit flipping somewhere on some distant server, but it still has value to me.
Facebook's plans are no different at all, nor are some MMORPG's "gold", or an LWN.net subscription, etc. - they're the same as every other "virtual" currency / purchase out there (which is why Beenz and Paypal were often under investigation under various banking laws - they were, in effect, banks).
If people *want* to pay "real" currency for some game tokens of some kind, then they believe they are going to get value from those tokens. It's no different to going to
The spacecraft is in an incredibly hostile environment. Who's to say that there *wasn't* ECC and it's just that it's Hamming code wasn't enough to compensate for the error - it would make sense: as the hardware ages, the device leaves the solar system, the errors start getting closer and closer to the limits of error correction until one day - bam, even with error correction it slips through the net and ends up as a bad bit in memory.
Technically, this is possible (but incredibly rare) on even the greatest error correction in the world. Error correction is a statistical function, that says that the *chances* of an error occuring are 2^8, or 2^16 or whatever.
And, from my coding theory class, Voyager's signal was originally something ludicrous like a (24,12,8) code even when it was nearby. (This presentation, especially the final slide, appears to confirm that: http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~wcherowi/courses/m6409/mariner9talk.pdf).
ECC is a probability function - the probability of a bit error going undetected is significantly reduced compared to, say, just sending the data and hoping for the best. But reduced does not mean eliminated. Not all errors can be detected and only a small portion of those can be corrected. But that still leaves room for an error that goes uncorrected, undetected and ends up in RAM without anyone noticing until they do a full bit-by-bit check - the same as your 25+ years newer technology harddrive, Ethernet connection, computer bus, etc. There's no such thing as guaranteed data delivery - but we make the chances of an error slipping through so infinitesimally small that it doesn't affect normal, everyday operation. For instance, a corrupt download with an SHA-1 checksum would be seen as valid approximately one in every 2^160 transactions. Small, but not impossible by a long stretch considering how many downloads occur each day.
Voyager didn't have the luxury of Megabytes of RAM to hold extraneous checksum data, Megahertz of CPU to check everything that came in at line speed, or a broadcast technology that could keep a Gbit data rate going all the time. They made compromises and, later, changed the ECC algorithms as more and more errors could theoretically creep in. We just had a run of bad luck that meant a single bit was out, that's all. And that's even assuming it's not a hardware failure anyway. I think Voyager did pretty damn well, running for decades after it's supposed operational time. And a one-bit error on a random chance is pretty damn minor - let's just hope it wasn't inside anything too critical, like the communications routines.
Erm... okay... let's not get too into the hyperbole until we establish, say, what the US / UK have been doing in China too. I think it's unfair to paint China as some sort of evil enemy because they did a bit of espionage unless we always tar every country that does the same with the same brush. I'm *pretty* sure, certain in fact, that the UK and US are doing exactly the same over in China / Russia / Afghanistan etc. and probably a LOT worse. It's just that we don't hear about it all over on this side of the world... somewhere in China is an article about the "horrible" Americans hacking all their equipment.
Hell, taking it to extremes you could say that the US has even been photographing every inch of Germany and collecting information on their wireless networks to identify the ones that are easy to hack. It was Google, but that's still "the US" in the same way that "China" is expanded to mean Chinese companies, people who sell duck-eggs and everything else.
I have absolutely no doubt that the Chinese government are trying to hack the US right this second. But I also have ABSOLUTELY no doubt that the US are doing the opposite too, probably worse given the amount of satellites and hardware that run through American supply lines.
What interests me more is the recent (last 5 years or so) attempts to paint China as some combatant "spying" illicitly on everything, always stated in the tone that a real-world attack is imminent. The British were spying on the Russians, the Chinese, hell probably even the US for decades - everybody knew, nobody really cared. Damn, for most of the war our own spies WERE Russian spies. That's how espionage works - in peacetime (and we ARE at peace with China at the moment) you spy on even your friends and certainly want to know if someone is selling nukes to your neighbours, or is designing a new type of weapon.
I would be shocked, appalled and disgusted if my government WEREN'T spying on every credible threat out there, whether at peace with them or not. I'm British and I would damn well want an explanation if it turned out that we *WEREN'T* watching the US, or France, or other members of the UN. They sure as hell are watching us from the inside too. I don't see why the hyperbole or picking on the Chinese is necessary.
If James Bond did it, he would be a hero. Because Xing Cheng does it, it's percieved as a hideous act, a gross intrusion, a build-up to a war?
"A Boeing engineer was sentenced to 15 years for espionage, selling rocket technology to the PRC"
BOEING are the culprits then. You don't state if the engineer was Chinese or not. He might well be American, probably was to get past security, but of Chinese family origin - still means he was an *American*. And if credible Chinese rocket technology was on sale on the black market, do you think for a SECOND that the US wouldn't lap it up?
"The FBI caught an American with very high security clearance and a Taiwanese-American selling classified information about weapon-sales to Taiwan to the PRC."
An American and a Taiwanese-American. So even the Taiwanese were "infiltrated" and selling their secrets. Strange that considering that "Since the end of World War II in 1945, the island group has been under the government of the Republic of China.". You're either talking ancient history, or crap. And even historically, it would be of great interest to the Chinese anyway, whoever the seller was. If someone in China was selling information about weapon-sales to Mexico, or Canada, do you really think that the US wouldn't be interested in buying them? Actually, in this case, because you haven't stated the time/date of the incident, it could well be more fitting to suggest Hawaii's purchase of weapons wouldn't be of interest to the US. Ludicrous.
"The British MI5 released a report detailing all kinds of Chinese espionage."
And you're seriously telling me that MI5 have *never* spied on the Chinese? That they aren't doing it *THIS SECOND*? Damn, what the hell do I pa
It's been done before, in various guises. The BBC Domesday project springs to mind, and numerous digital timecapsules.
It seems to me that such projects have a lot in common with SETI searches - somehow providing information to someone who may not have the capability to decode it until they understand the entire message anyway. It always gets me that in such projects they don't do simple things before they lock stuff away, or send a message, like: give a bunch of (non-computing) students the devices / data and don't tell them what it is, how it works. Make sure they've never heard of the project you're working on, then lock them in a room with the data / devices and see what they do. If they can't decode it completely, your project is too elaborate and will not meet its aims. If they only decode it because of their knowledge of the area, then get someone else. Until an average mathematician / physicist / whatever can decode it, it's too complicated to be decoded by a post-nuclear generation and / or ET considering their inherent communication problems in some circumstances anyway.
I have a good feeling that the Voyager golden records would never be completely decoded in such circumstances.
Your analogy is poor. For a start, their entire position is that the search results (i.e. "the gun selling") isn't illegal. So it's like saying that *LEGAL* gun selling doesn't increase the number of gunshot victims.
Despite being anti-gun and living in a low-gun country, I'd have to say that's not such a bold assertion. Yes, LEGAL arms are sometimes used to kill people, but a vastly more significant portion of gun-crime happens with ILLEGAL guns. Especially in my country where legal arms are incredibly rare... I know one person who has a specialist gun collector's license out of all my friends and acquaintances.
A better analogy would be that it's like saying that people who mention a bootsale (yard sale) where they know pirate DVD's are for sale are somehow complicit if you then decide to go to that sale and buy some.
I'm not saying this is the solution, nor how it should be done, but you could conceivably run a "remote" X-Windows session on a virtual buffer on the laptop - connecting to it with another X-Windows client on the same machine - and then, when you "switch" GPU's, the restart of X-Windows will only affect the "client" viewing the real X-session but be transparent to the user because they'll reconnect to their original session.
It's not a huge stretch of the imagination that the virtual buffer can pass off necessary acceleration / state to the client, whatever that happens to be. However, it's more likely that in a month's time every X Server on the planet will start supporting some sort of underlying client refresh whenever it detects a switch and will be seamless. It's *JUST* made it into a kernel, for goodness sake, don't expect client support until the authors actually have something to program against.
ABS is a function that I covered in my original rant. If the computer goes bang, the worst that happens on my car, most cars and ideally *all* cars with ABS is that a warning light comes on and it takes slightly longer to brake (no worse than *not* having ABS at all). There is *no* need to be able to disable and/or enable that feature, or any feature of the braking, through any interface at all. If ABS messes up, you can still brake and warning lights appear to let you know you should get it fixed. That's all that's required. And all the mechanic needs is a way to put out that warning light when they've fixed the problem (but the car is welcome to engage it again if it detects a problem, even immediately after it's been "fixed"). Why on Earth do you need a "disable brakes" function to even EXIST, no matter what the emergency? We're not talking about turning off ABS, the researchers were able to turn off THE BRAKES.
Regenerative braking systems that "ruin the car" if you brake while throttling need a complete redesign. How stupid to have to have a device that cuts one in order to allow the other? Of course, they are mutually-exclusive functions but, as with the Prius, the failure mode is inherently dangerous because it will fail to counteract if one "sticks open" because it's trying to enforce mutual-exclusion. And when your pedal jams down, you can't brake, which is the only vital function of a car. The opposite isn't true that if the brake jams down, you need to be able to accelerate away.
So where in that mess is it necessary to have any sort of enable/disable function of any of the braking system at all or be able to play with any of its parameters? And where is it necessary for that to be accessible over a cable AT ALL or be modifiable at all by the user, or even a third-party garage? It's crap. And the braking signal can run through whatever computers it wants - I damn well want flashy lights and warnings when something is wrong and, like ABS, a computer can check things a lot faster and more accurately than I can. But when that braking signal CONTROLS the brakes, rather than assists them, you have to go find the designer and shoot them.
Duh - and all the storage locations for that particular piece of information are destroyable. None, however, are *changeable* without trace except for possibly, in the future, some stupid ECU that allows write access to places it shouldn't. Like the devices mentioned in the article, which let you do stupid crap that you shouldn't be allowed to. The article doesn't mention VIN's at all, I was just providing another example of an inflated, possible, future direction that idiotic car manufacturers might make ("But the ECU VIN is XXXXXXXXXXXXX, so it must be the car!").
P.S. Stamping a new VIN plate on metal isn't that difficult, nor is fabricating those stupid plastic dashboard plates. Making modern car's electronics return a different VIN has, up until now, been almost impossible. My old car radio knew the VIN / Number plate of the car it was in, and refused to turn on in any other car. Writable VIN's on the ECU just made that worthless.
I'm not saying it's possible, or can't be countered by other, more practical means, by modifying a VIN via software is something that should never be possible - like changing the unique serial number on any security chip. I now wouldn't like to bet that it *WASN'T* possible on the car these researcher's tested.
Sorry, but I think we'd all much rather have a car where the ABS (or, indeed, the brake-pedal) can't be disabled entirely, where brakes can't be activate entirely by software, where you can't play with mileometer just by sticking a box on the OBD port, or where the car cannot lock everybody inside if it crashes (the software, not the car!).
It's not a question of software freedom - it's a question of not having that capability automated in the first damn place. In every car I've ever owned, when I press the brake the wheels are slowed by huge hydraulic pressure whether or not the ECU / ABS is working. Sure, I wouldn't do without the ABS either but if it stops working, I can still bring the car safely to a halt. What we're discussing here are cars with computers that *DO* have control over what the brake pedal does - from nothing no matter how hard you press it, to full brakes no matter how you release it - and not the driver.
Some of the other things mentioned on the researcher's FAQ include the bonnet(hood)-latch behind software controlled. One software crash = one real crash. That's a sort of DRM you *don't* want anyway - where your entire ability to use the product is under the control of a computer that could crash at any minute, with serious consequences. Especially not when you're doing 70 mph.
It's the design that's stupid, not OBD, ECU's or being able to tune your car using it if you really want to. They are separate issues. Why, why, why on earth would anyone *EVER* want to legitimately activate a mode on their car where the brake function no longer corresponds to the brake pedal position?
People have physical access to the outside of my car, it doesn't mean they can change my speedo, mileometer, fuel mixture, etc. quickly and without me realising that something has happened. They certainly can't do it just by plugging a box into the port even if they *do* break into my car... because my car is mechanical and doesn't run with this sort of shit (Note: I can and have removed the entire ECU box from a car in the past - it runs, but slowly and less efficiently and may not pass an emissions test, but it still works in a driveable condition - very modern cars literally do not work without them so they are "essential" and thus should work as bloody advertised).
All of these things were done over an ODB cable to a standardised port on every car. On every decent model of car, they should be read-only information about the car's engine. The port is standardised, commonplace, accessible from the driver's seat (by law in the EU), hidden, and (with these models) accepts almost any device / commands without question. It's standard practice to connect an OBD box to modern cars if they have an indicator light up (in fact, it's usually the ONLY way to clear such a light). My car has one. I'm pretty damn sure that you can't modify my mileage or speedo via that route, though, or my fuel mixture, or stop my brakes working. About the worst you might be able to do is clear a warning light. This is because the OBD is designed properly, doesn't allow things it doesn't and it helped by the fact that my speedo is a needle connected to a magnetic induction coil produce by a spinning cable spun at a ratio of the speed of the wheels, and my mileometer is a tick-over-style mechanical one. The Prius-scare should have shown people what happens when you take away control of a vehicle from a driver and put it in the hand of a computer - it was discussed that virtual-ignition-systems, virtual-gearing-systems, etc. are just dangerous and provide no advantage to anyone.
Nobody is saying these things are not do-able on any car with physical work, we're asking why the hell they are modifiable over such a cable in such a "simple" way that someone could literally sell a box on eBay that, when connected to a car, can fraudulently adjust mileage, turn on hot air vents, TURN OFF THE BRAKES (FFS!), and basically cause it to crash and explode whenever you want. That's *NOT* what the OBD standard is for - it's for diagnostics and diagnostic indicators. Why the hell can I adjust the hot air vent through that cable?
The problem is that there is absolutely no NEED for the speedo to be "writable" over a diagnostics cable, or anything else for that matter. The only "writable" things should be to clear diagnostic lights, which will inevitably pop up again if the problem is "real". So you can't just switch off the ABS light on a car and then sell it as having working ABS... OBD logs and records such actions in the car itself and will redisplay those indicators if there is a real problem still.
Why the hell would you *ever* want to be able to modify information like that? Why should a mechanic ever be able to adjust the mileage on the car? It's stupid, not-thought-through and terrible design. Next up is being able to open the doors of any car that has Bluetooth OBD, or changing the VIN numbers or whatever. It's just ridiculous. Even if the car is computer controlled, there are some places where access control of sorts should prevent certain actions.
First, your argument is crap. Case in point: I've been using Windows desktop since Windows 3.1 and I've never had a virus on my personal Windows machines. That means *nothing*. It's like saying "I haven't died yet, so I must be immortal". Please don't spread bollocks about viruses and operating systems - I'm a Linux nut but that's just a way to lie to people about Linux's real security - the design. You can still get Linux or MacOS viruses the same as anyone else if you do the same stupid things on any OS (execute unknown programs, use programs with known security flaws, etc.).
Next - security does *not* imply anti-virus... by definition an anti-virus program can only do its job *after* security has already been breached and requires full administrator-level access to the machine in order to do so (and so becomes its own security problem).
Sony aren't concerned about "security"... it's a dumb line to use. They are concerned about piracy and people hacking their systems to run games that they have or have not paid for. Although that's "security" in one sense, it's not the type of computer security that you're discussing. Sony think they are combating game piracy, theoretical or actual, and thus there's no reason why their corporate/government/education customers should suffer. But they didn't bother to think about that and just "switched it off" without any real choice (not updating to the latest firmware isn't a "choice" - it's enforced obsolescence).
I don't really care whether the US military can do things using PS3 or not - it's a niche use, outside the scope of the product, unwarrantied and unsupported, by an organisation more than capable of working around such problems. And they *wouldn't* (or at least *shouldn't*) be shouting in the press if this was actually a real issue... US military supercomputing efforts hampered / hacked / controlled / dictated to by a Japanese company? Then you really deserve everything that you get. However, I do care (despite never owning one and never intending to own one) about the PS3's that were already sold not being "broken" or having functionality removed outside of the scope of various trade acts. That's just stupid, illegal and harming to the company. But then, I don't think I've ever bought anything from Sony in my life, and I've never even played on a PS3. If you were reliant on Sony to continue to "co-operate" in terms of support, then you should have had a contract with them. If they failed to abide by any contract you have with them (including implied contracts under trade laws), and they continue to fail to abide by them, then you sue them.
And next time you buy *anything*, briefly research the historical behaviour of the companies involved. If they act like a company you don't want to support, don't buy their products.
I think the biggest problem with your last comment is that it should be a good thing... if you are with someone "significant" who calls the whole thing off because of things like that, then you're much, much better off without them, surely? More dangerous would be something like you sending off a workmate's saliva to see if they have HIV and then using that information to force them out of a job, etc. That's the sort of casual mis-use that we *don't* need.
Games used to be games, now they are expensive, licensed, fabricated, single-play-through, mindless "entertainment" which consist of level-grind, or impossible-achievement-hunting in order to stretch out gameplay, where they should be focused on making the game so that the player *wants* to come back for more and set their own targets. Half-life 2 was the last released game that I consider worth my money.
In the meantime, as you say, DOSBox, emulators, GOG.com and some old Steam titles (yes, I don't mind Steam - at least it works and I have backups I can play offline should the worst happen) are the way forward. I just bought Master of Magic and Master of Orion for about the fourth time, yet my Steam list is full of "new" games that I haven't even bothered to download or, when I did, played them for a few hours and got bored / completed them. Hell, most of them weren't even worth the disk space, let alone the time downloading, or the original cost price (I never pay full-price any more but at one point those games were going for £50 or more - now they get thrown in with about 10 other famous games, 5 of which I do want, for about £20).
Start making games again, I'll start paying you for them again (currently my money goes elsewhere instead, and no, I don't pirate). Carry on making difficult-to-install, difficult-to-uninstall, resource-heavy, pretty piles of crap and I'll just blow my cash on 10 times more indie games and old games instead (and, strangely, not end up spending a penny more!). In the same way that everyone has a list of books that they "should read", I have a list of games that I "should play" but never have. I'm quite happy to spend my money on those instead, if you really force me to by not giving me any decent games worth my money.
Hell, I have 50+ hours notched up on my Altitude account already and I've only owned it a couple of months. I don't claim the gameplay is "deep" but it's a hell of a lot more exciting than waiting for a expensive 10Gb game to download and install only to be confronted with crap-but-pretty gameplay.
I buy games to play games, which means they are entertainment. Every second I spend downloading, installing, configuring, diagnosing, watching cutscenes / credits, waiting for it to load / login, is a second of wasted gameplay - and my free time has a value too. £10 for 4-5+ hours of gameplay is what I consider reasonable - provided it's simple to install and get it running quickly. The more you want me to pay, the more exciting / interesting / deep you have to make the gameplay, the easier it has to be to install and the more worthwhile it still is in a year's time not just a few days around release. I have 25+ year old games that I STILL would rather load up than some of the stuff that I have ready to download at the click of a button. That's what you're competing with. I don't expect you to match that but some modern games are barely touched just a year after release, let alone 25. Judge by the length of your online communities if you have to - if your community is dead within a year, it was a "one-off" game and nothing special. If people are *still* talking about / playing your game after 5 years and then scream because you want to take the servers offline, that's the sort of game you want to make more of.
It's always the same "This is slowly killing my child / making them stupid, I want it banned." or something along those lines... just stop your kids doing it. Especially, in this case, because it would be reliant on an enormously expensive piece of hardware in order to operate - they are not going to be sneaking into the bookshops on the way home and picking up an eBook reader illicitly to stop you knowing. If you have doubts about it, stop them doing it and do, I don't know, parent-y things like... erm... encouraging them to read books, praising them when they learn a new word, switching OFF the TV when they've had too much (and no, TV itself isn't bad - don't bring up children who when they hit adulthood are *DYING* to watch TV to see what all their friends are talking about - banning TV outright is just delaying their inevitable obsession with the "forbidden") and saying No to them.
My child is 18 months. She *does* get transfixed to the television when her favourite program is on. That's why she gets a few hours a week and that's that. Then we switch it off and she doesn't burst into tears because she's not addicted to it. If you have a long car journey, you take two or three books with you - she will spend the *entire* trip engrossed in them, looking at every page, pointing out all the objects that she knows, learning the words for the ones she doesn't and she won't feel "deprived" or "bored" just because she only has books. When she learns to read, though, a habit of deliberately *choosing* a book to take out on a trip with her (as she currently does) will make the transition all that much easier.
Reading, picture books, comics, TV, radio, interactive software, things scrawled in crayon on the back of scrap paper, they are all just media. If you use them correctly, and proportionally, they all have a role to play in a child's development. If you don't, and just let the kid have completely free choice, of course they will ALWAYS choose the thing that's least effort - TV or some book that "reads to them" so they don't have to do this complicated pattern-recognition thing that dad wants them to do. That's fine occasionally and, yes, occasionally you do have to let them just be kids and have a day off of making them all the "horrible" stuff like learning to read, or tidying their room and so those times they can do things like interactive books and software or just veg out in front of the TV (we all do it, in moderation for the majority of us, so we can't be martyrs here and claim to be perfect and always do everything that we would want our children to see us do).
Let them have a life, and stop bloody micro-managing their exposure to the world. So long as they are doing the stuff you want them to do elsewhere, let them have their time off. To a child, learning to read is hard work on an enormously difficult but boring task, so after they've had a few hours of doing that give them some time off with whatever they want to do that's not hurting anyone else - video games (the age for violent ones is up to the individual parents, but you will not *turn* them into mass-murderers once they have acquired a sense of right and wrong), building Lego castles, scribbling on bits of paper, making a frame for the TV with tinsel and glue (with your permission), stamping on ants in the garden, whatever, it doesn't really matter. That's their time off, the same way that even university students, or 80-hour-week workers have time off. Just make sure that if you're worried they aren't reading enough, that you give them that TOO, at some other time, and by *your* rules.
I have recently deinstalled and reinstalled from backup about 7-8 games, totalling Gigabytes of data with 1000's of files and it never took more than a handful of minutes (and most of that was churning to load the setup program into memory before it actually did anything). This is not a top-of-the-range laptop by any means, bog-standard cheap 320Gb hard drive. Its filesystems were made two years ago and haven't been defragged etc. *EVER* and it was going from one partition to another on the same drive.
I'd say that was more a "Wii Plus Package" sort of thing - the kinda thing that you pay £50 extra on top of a normal Wii bundle to get. It's *not* Wii 2, a complete successor, which is what this guy is crowing about. Extra RAM, etc. are the sort of things that games can provide themselves or Nintendo can provide through some sort of add-on or "enhanced version" like the N64 memory packs, or the SuperFX chips, etc.
There is no need for a Wii 2. Wii is doing perfectly fine and in some secret Nintendo lab somewhere, there's already a games console being designed that's yet-another-generation-evolution over the Wii and won't "ride" on its good name. It'll probably have backwards compatibility through emulation or whatever, but in about 3-4 years something WAY, WAY, WAY more than a Wii 2 will come out and become its own household name. Yeah, maybe Nintendo won't sell many Wiis by that time but they won't care - the money they've made on them so far will more than tide them over comfortably for another decade or so if they're careful.
Dolts that think that "good" games need huge CPU's and GPU's are the problem here. How many units do the indie games sell now? How many of them *need* DX11 with PS3.0 etc.? Hardly any. Yet they are still good, sometimes excellent, games that shift millions of units. World of Goo made several hundred thousand dollars in a few days, a long time after its initial release, by letting people pay "what they want" for it (i.e. 1c or $100). Casual games and even non-violent games like Nintendo prefers used to be niche markets - now they are outselling everything else. Nintendo knew this would happen when they put a *fun*, *easy to play* (even if you've never picked up a PC) console in every home.
Nintendo have been around for over 120 years - they know how to do business. Some idiot telling them that they should make a better console which is just a faster version of their last best-selling console is not only a) stating the easiest thing he can think of but b) doesn't understand that Nintendo wins by innovation and gameplay, not graphics. Never has, probably never will. They just like to let their customers have fun.
Offline mode. You have to be online on Steam to download the damn thing in the first place, but once it's installed you just set it to offline mode and play away. It won't stay like that forever, but are you seriously telling me that you won't be online with Steam running in the background (even if just for a minute) for more than about 30/60/90 days?
I don't buy games that have stupid DRM because I do play offline, but I've spend hundreds of pounds on Steam lately because their system is the only one that works how it should. And I've had Steam since long before WON went offline, so nearly day one.
Avoid the stuff that has *other* DRM on top of Steam (e.g. GTA4) because that's just stupid anyway, layering DRM schemes, but 99% of what's on Steam is fine and it's the best system that makes the most sensible compromises for user happiness.
If you don't already know this, it means you've never used Steam yourself. It's damn addictive once you realise that you can search for, buy, download, install and play a game in minutes and then take that game everywhere you go, online or off, onto multiple computers without having to do anything more complicated than click "Install" on the right icon. Or backup those games to your external drive when you realise you've filled up your entire disk with games and need some quick space back. It takes literally minutes to reinstall 9Gb of game from a Steam Backup if you suddenly get the urge to play it again, or you can redownload it if you lose your backup.
1) Keep your keys on you at all times. The last time my keys left me when I left the house was because my brother was getting married and I needed to wear a nice suit, which showed every bulge, in front of lots of people - my parents minded them for the hour or so I needed them to and I got them straight back afterwards. Don't put them down when you've unlocked something (e.g. on the office table while you get coffee) and have a "place" for them at home... that you can always find them once you're indoors (my gf uses this as an indicator for whether I'm home or not, because the keys *do not* leave my side if I go out for even a second - literally, when I put the bins out, my keys go with me because otherwise the one night that I do it and my gf isn't home, I know that I *will* end up locking myself out accidentally).
2) Don't strap them to your trousers (pants)... it makes them visible and awkward to handle - you find yourself unclipping the damn things all the time or buying one of those stupid "keys-on-a-elastic-string" things that just break. Plus, if someone steals them (unlikely, I know) or they fall off (cheap pants), you won't feel it but you *may* hear it depending on where you are. My gf is quite amazed how I can tell what's in my pockets and whether I've forgotten something before I've even got out the door - I have a *terrible* memory but I know when I can *feel* all the things I should. It also helps because living in London, I often get bumped into on the Tube etc. and it takes seconds to pat my pocket and make sure I haven't been robbed. I've never managed to get more than about 6 feet from where I was sitting without realising that something must have fallen out.
3) Get a solid key-ring. Not some 50p thing from the local shops. Especially if they occasionally hang off your noisy motorcycle while you're travelling at motorway speeds - you do *not* want them coming off then because you probably *won't* notice. I use a mountaineering carabina on which hang good strong keyrings. How strong? Well, my laptop bag's shoulder strap broke both it's original metal clips because of the sheer weight and abuse that bag gets - so I threaded two of those keyrings through the loops and hook the shoulder strap onto them - two years later, they aren't even out of shape in any way yet that bag recently came back from Italy with 18kgs of stuff in as "hand baggage" (carry-on to Americans).
I also have a metal belt clip that I put on the carabina. The carabina allows me to take rings on and off very easily and individually, let me feel secure that it's not going to let the keys fall off without deliberate manual effort on my part, attach it to anything in such a way it's not just going to fall off/break *and* keep it loose in my pocket without extra pointy things poking into me. I tend towards the latter, personally. I have broken no end of keyrings, belt-hooks, and other gadgets by getting my keys caught in my pocket / on something / wear and tear / carrying heavy boxes and "snapping" anything plastic around my belt. It also means that it's now almost impossible to do what I'd previously done several times which was pull out my keys from my pocket and have them spray themselves across the street while I'm left holding an empty keyring / belt clip.
4) I'm forgetful so this might not apply - I take *every* key with me wherever I go. Otherwise I *would* end up just getting out of the house and then going back for my car keys, or locking myself out, or travelling across town to my parents and then finding out I don't have my keys when I get there. Currently that's about 10 keys. I have a separate set of keys for work with a similar arrangement. I have never actually been locked out, or lost my keys, but that's probably more by luck than judgement. However, I've *never* had them stolen, left them behind in the pub, etc. and that's not so reliant on luck.
5) Your keys can be minimised. You don't need to carry your roof key. Keep that indoors. I can understand about keeping the r
Seriously, I have a humungous bunch of keys that *does* weigh me down and I can't even *imagine* the extra weight I'd need to actually do any damage to the pieces of *solid metal* inside the ignition lock just by gravity + a bit of rocking back and forth with the motion of the car. I'm infinitely more likely to actually break the key than the lock. It's a tightly-enclosed, solid piece of metal in a tightly-enclosed metal barrel mounted (with any luck) in a metal frame of a steering wheel (not renowned for their ability to fall apart when you put weight / strain on them, considering they turn anything up to 8 tons of van directly, and historically weren't even power-assisted). I'm sure there is a weight that they would cause damage but other things will break first (your keyring, your pockets, your *key*) and to say it's likely to damage means you are either carrying about a huge lead block on your keyring and/or your car is made of shitty cheap plastic that was going to fall apart at the first touch anyway..
Besides, a lot of modern cars don't even *have* an ignition cylinder any more. My dad has been fixing cars/lorries professionally for about 30 years - I've never *once* seen or heard him talk about having to fix a damaged cylinder like that unless the damage had been caused by a local youth with a large screwdriver. And guess what, he carries a *humungous* set of keys with him.
From my experience in the UK educational sector, the answer would be something like "Be a cousin of the person who gets to decide what software to use, and hope that the committee that he's supposed to answer to are all his golf-buddies and/or in constant fear of their jobs if they question authority." You'd be amazed what can be done when that's true.
Speaking as someone who once saw an entire multi-million pound IT project given to a team of Army personnel because they had a gap in their schedule, needed money, were friends of friends of someone high up, and could do the job cheaply. Ever seen someone fold up optic fibre like it was shredded paper in order to stuff it through a gap in a wall?
Can't get over the cheapy-ten-dollar shareware that is the program they use to look for infringing material. I've probably written better software that does the same job *accidentally* while working on other projects.
Slashdot Mirror
I never figured out why, past the era of broadband introduction, ISP's ever bothered with their own Usenet servers anyway.
Surely Usenet is an application - yes, it's useful to cache the content if it's sucking up a serious portion of your external bandwidth, which is what I expect to happen with HTTP at any ISP, but once it's not taking up that huge amount of bandwidth any more (read: since broadband introduction, given that most people who bought broadband would have no idea what Usenet was and/or were too busy swamping their ISP with Kazaa / Bittorrent to care). Why ISP's still have local newsservers in this day and age I have no idea... my ISP only ever has trouble with them because of the huge amount of storage and bandwidth necessary to keep them up to date and they wouldn't consume 1% of the same data as your average Bittorrent user.
Thus, why is it on any one particular ISP, or university, to host such newsgroups? It's an external application, powered by external servers. If it always relied on a particular university to host it, then that was always a weak point. If it doesn't, what's the big deal? Change settings, move on with life. It's like saying that it's sad that the very first web host has gone down - yes, if you use that web host yourself, but there are plenty of others about if you really need to use them. Except with newsgroups, pretty much the same newsgroups could be made available from pretty much anywhere in the world. If people don't bother, then that's because there's no demand.
I know my ISP gives out newsgroup server details if you ask for it, I can't imagine that even 1% of their users ever ask nowadays. But I do know that they can take *DAYS* to resync if they've had a problem and their newsgroup servers were offline even for a little while. If you want newsgroups, type in the address of a publicly available newsgroup server into your news client. Considering most ISP's don't even *have* their own newsgroup server any more, this has barely changed in the last 10 years. If you don't, why would you care?
If I'm honest, I wasn't around at the start of newsgroups, but they were still "popular" when I started university. ISP's would give you the details as part of their sign-up packs and newsgroup access could add real value to a particular ISP's offering. I never ever used them because the signal-to-noise ratio was always ridiculous, there was no way to practically search through for relevant things (and things like FAQ's were not only posted on the web too but often spammed to the relevant groups at ridiculous intervals).
Newsgroups (along with mailing lists) have been dead for quite a long time, active only within the hardcore geek sections of society. They rely on etiquette and heavy filtering to work properly but said etiquette is *ALWAYS* having to be reiterated to everyone because it's just too easy to spam everyone with nonsense. Nobody will really mourn the last gopher server going offline (except out of nostalgia), and the same goes for newsgroups. They have been superseded, by other media with better defined intentions, control, and access. Don't mourn them - learn by their mistakes and move on.
Now, which groups should I cross-post this to in order to get the quickest answer possible?
A currency, by definition, exists only in the mind of the users anyway. The £10 note I have in my pocket is only worth £10 because people will happily exchange it for goods / services / other notes to a value of £10. If there's a nuclear war, it'll be worth ABSOLUTELY NOTHING if I survive that. A few tons of food, a working car, or a nugget of gold, on the other hand... and even the last one is questionable that it would have value until civilisaton was rebuilt.
When Zimbabwe's currency became almost valueless and therefore useless because nobody wanted to accept Zimbabwe dollars (or whatever they were called), the currency was abandoned and people used dollars because other people would *happily* accept dollars. It was still a legal tender, but it was useless because nobody was willing to accept it for the value it purported to hold.
My £10 note also holds a peculiar legal status as it is only a promisary note to the value of £10. It says on it "I promise to pay the bearer, on demand, the sum of £10", and it's signed by the "Governor and Company of the Bank of England". Other notes in other countries have similar legal status. If I go to Scotland (technically the same country, because they are both in the UK), I stand a good chance of being given a similar note by the Bank of Scotland in my change. Both are legal, have identical "values" as they have agreed to track the Bank of England values - but try getting a London cabbie to take one. It's still just a piece of paper, at the end of the day, that costs WAY less than £10 for the government to fabricate. The same for coins.
A cheque has similar legal status. It's "virtual" in that the currency doesn't actually exist in a tangible form. But each time I write one, that's a binding legal contract to give someone something of that value. In the past, cheques have been deemed legal when they were written on a cow. The Bank had a legal requirement to accept it as a binding contract at the time.
Historically, when coins actually started to be worth more than their face value, they were melted down and sold to people for more money than they represented. Any currency is only a representation, or a promise, of the value written on it. Sometimes that promise means nothing.
With a "digital" currency, the situation is no different. No "money" changes hands when I buy something from Amazon, just a number goes from one box to another on some computer somewhere. So credit cards and bank accounts are no different to a virtual currency at all, because they only exist as a number... the plastic card is merely a convenient security device / container for that number. If my country dive-bombs economically, it might well be the case that international sellers refuse to acknowledge that my money transfer is worth as much as I say it is. It's all based on a perception of value.
Thus, all currencies are by definition "virtual".
Therefore, if I choose to exchange my "real" money for some "virtual" money, it's no worse than putting it into my bank account. In fact, I do this every day - I buy petrol and I'm given "loyalty points" which I can cash in to claim, say, a cut-glass goblet or a breakfast bowl at a later date. And people buy entirely "virtual" products every day - the games on my Steam list, the account for my mobile phone, the subscriptions to websites, I don't see any "tangible" product at the end of a day, just the result of a bit flipping somewhere on some distant server, but it still has value to me.
Facebook's plans are no different at all, nor are some MMORPG's "gold", or an LWN.net subscription, etc. - they're the same as every other "virtual" currency / purchase out there (which is why Beenz and Paypal were often under investigation under various banking laws - they were, in effect, banks).
If people *want* to pay "real" currency for some game tokens of some kind, then they believe they are going to get value from those tokens. It's no different to going to
The spacecraft is in an incredibly hostile environment. Who's to say that there *wasn't* ECC and it's just that it's Hamming code wasn't enough to compensate for the error - it would make sense: as the hardware ages, the device leaves the solar system, the errors start getting closer and closer to the limits of error correction until one day - bam, even with error correction it slips through the net and ends up as a bad bit in memory.
Technically, this is possible (but incredibly rare) on even the greatest error correction in the world. Error correction is a statistical function, that says that the *chances* of an error occuring are 2^8, or 2^16 or whatever.
And, from my coding theory class, Voyager's signal was originally something ludicrous like a (24,12,8) code even when it was nearby. (This presentation, especially the final slide, appears to confirm that: http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~wcherowi/courses/m6409/mariner9talk.pdf).
ECC is a probability function - the probability of a bit error going undetected is significantly reduced compared to, say, just sending the data and hoping for the best. But reduced does not mean eliminated. Not all errors can be detected and only a small portion of those can be corrected. But that still leaves room for an error that goes uncorrected, undetected and ends up in RAM without anyone noticing until they do a full bit-by-bit check - the same as your 25+ years newer technology harddrive, Ethernet connection, computer bus, etc. There's no such thing as guaranteed data delivery - but we make the chances of an error slipping through so infinitesimally small that it doesn't affect normal, everyday operation. For instance, a corrupt download with an SHA-1 checksum would be seen as valid approximately one in every 2^160 transactions. Small, but not impossible by a long stretch considering how many downloads occur each day.
Voyager didn't have the luxury of Megabytes of RAM to hold extraneous checksum data, Megahertz of CPU to check everything that came in at line speed, or a broadcast technology that could keep a Gbit data rate going all the time. They made compromises and, later, changed the ECC algorithms as more and more errors could theoretically creep in. We just had a run of bad luck that meant a single bit was out, that's all. And that's even assuming it's not a hardware failure anyway. I think Voyager did pretty damn well, running for decades after it's supposed operational time. And a one-bit error on a random chance is pretty damn minor - let's just hope it wasn't inside anything too critical, like the communications routines.
Erm... okay... let's not get too into the hyperbole until we establish, say, what the US / UK have been doing in China too. I think it's unfair to paint China as some sort of evil enemy because they did a bit of espionage unless we always tar every country that does the same with the same brush. I'm *pretty* sure, certain in fact, that the UK and US are doing exactly the same over in China / Russia / Afghanistan etc. and probably a LOT worse. It's just that we don't hear about it all over on this side of the world... somewhere in China is an article about the "horrible" Americans hacking all their equipment.
Hell, taking it to extremes you could say that the US has even been photographing every inch of Germany and collecting information on their wireless networks to identify the ones that are easy to hack. It was Google, but that's still "the US" in the same way that "China" is expanded to mean Chinese companies, people who sell duck-eggs and everything else.
I have absolutely no doubt that the Chinese government are trying to hack the US right this second. But I also have ABSOLUTELY no doubt that the US are doing the opposite too, probably worse given the amount of satellites and hardware that run through American supply lines.
What interests me more is the recent (last 5 years or so) attempts to paint China as some combatant "spying" illicitly on everything, always stated in the tone that a real-world attack is imminent. The British were spying on the Russians, the Chinese, hell probably even the US for decades - everybody knew, nobody really cared. Damn, for most of the war our own spies WERE Russian spies. That's how espionage works - in peacetime (and we ARE at peace with China at the moment) you spy on even your friends and certainly want to know if someone is selling nukes to your neighbours, or is designing a new type of weapon.
I would be shocked, appalled and disgusted if my government WEREN'T spying on every credible threat out there, whether at peace with them or not. I'm British and I would damn well want an explanation if it turned out that we *WEREN'T* watching the US, or France, or other members of the UN. They sure as hell are watching us from the inside too. I don't see why the hyperbole or picking on the Chinese is necessary.
If James Bond did it, he would be a hero. Because Xing Cheng does it, it's percieved as a hideous act, a gross intrusion, a build-up to a war?
"A Boeing engineer was sentenced to 15 years for espionage, selling rocket technology to the PRC"
BOEING are the culprits then. You don't state if the engineer was Chinese or not. He might well be American, probably was to get past security, but of Chinese family origin - still means he was an *American*. And if credible Chinese rocket technology was on sale on the black market, do you think for a SECOND that the US wouldn't lap it up?
"The FBI caught an American with very high security clearance and a Taiwanese-American selling classified information about weapon-sales to Taiwan to the PRC."
An American and a Taiwanese-American. So even the Taiwanese were "infiltrated" and selling their secrets. Strange that considering that "Since the end of World War II in 1945, the island group has been under the government of the Republic of China.". You're either talking ancient history, or crap. And even historically, it would be of great interest to the Chinese anyway, whoever the seller was. If someone in China was selling information about weapon-sales to Mexico, or Canada, do you really think that the US wouldn't be interested in buying them? Actually, in this case, because you haven't stated the time/date of the incident, it could well be more fitting to suggest Hawaii's purchase of weapons wouldn't be of interest to the US. Ludicrous.
"The British MI5 released a report detailing all kinds of Chinese espionage."
And you're seriously telling me that MI5 have *never* spied on the Chinese? That they aren't doing it *THIS SECOND*? Damn, what the hell do I pa
It's been done before, in various guises. The BBC Domesday project springs to mind, and numerous digital timecapsules.
It seems to me that such projects have a lot in common with SETI searches - somehow providing information to someone who may not have the capability to decode it until they understand the entire message anyway. It always gets me that in such projects they don't do simple things before they lock stuff away, or send a message, like: give a bunch of (non-computing) students the devices / data and don't tell them what it is, how it works. Make sure they've never heard of the project you're working on, then lock them in a room with the data / devices and see what they do. If they can't decode it completely, your project is too elaborate and will not meet its aims. If they only decode it because of their knowledge of the area, then get someone else. Until an average mathematician / physicist / whatever can decode it, it's too complicated to be decoded by a post-nuclear generation and / or ET considering their inherent communication problems in some circumstances anyway.
I have a good feeling that the Voyager golden records would never be completely decoded in such circumstances.
Your analogy is poor. For a start, their entire position is that the search results (i.e. "the gun selling") isn't illegal. So it's like saying that *LEGAL* gun selling doesn't increase the number of gunshot victims.
Despite being anti-gun and living in a low-gun country, I'd have to say that's not such a bold assertion. Yes, LEGAL arms are sometimes used to kill people, but a vastly more significant portion of gun-crime happens with ILLEGAL guns. Especially in my country where legal arms are incredibly rare... I know one person who has a specialist gun collector's license out of all my friends and acquaintances.
A better analogy would be that it's like saying that people who mention a bootsale (yard sale) where they know pirate DVD's are for sale are somehow complicit if you then decide to go to that sale and buy some.
I'm not saying this is the solution, nor how it should be done, but you could conceivably run a "remote" X-Windows session on a virtual buffer on the laptop - connecting to it with another X-Windows client on the same machine - and then, when you "switch" GPU's, the restart of X-Windows will only affect the "client" viewing the real X-session but be transparent to the user because they'll reconnect to their original session.
It's not a huge stretch of the imagination that the virtual buffer can pass off necessary acceleration / state to the client, whatever that happens to be. However, it's more likely that in a month's time every X Server on the planet will start supporting some sort of underlying client refresh whenever it detects a switch and will be seamless. It's *JUST* made it into a kernel, for goodness sake, don't expect client support until the authors actually have something to program against.
ABS is a function that I covered in my original rant. If the computer goes bang, the worst that happens on my car, most cars and ideally *all* cars with ABS is that a warning light comes on and it takes slightly longer to brake (no worse than *not* having ABS at all). There is *no* need to be able to disable and/or enable that feature, or any feature of the braking, through any interface at all. If ABS messes up, you can still brake and warning lights appear to let you know you should get it fixed. That's all that's required. And all the mechanic needs is a way to put out that warning light when they've fixed the problem (but the car is welcome to engage it again if it detects a problem, even immediately after it's been "fixed"). Why on Earth do you need a "disable brakes" function to even EXIST, no matter what the emergency? We're not talking about turning off ABS, the researchers were able to turn off THE BRAKES.
Regenerative braking systems that "ruin the car" if you brake while throttling need a complete redesign. How stupid to have to have a device that cuts one in order to allow the other? Of course, they are mutually-exclusive functions but, as with the Prius, the failure mode is inherently dangerous because it will fail to counteract if one "sticks open" because it's trying to enforce mutual-exclusion. And when your pedal jams down, you can't brake, which is the only vital function of a car. The opposite isn't true that if the brake jams down, you need to be able to accelerate away.
So where in that mess is it necessary to have any sort of enable/disable function of any of the braking system at all or be able to play with any of its parameters? And where is it necessary for that to be accessible over a cable AT ALL or be modifiable at all by the user, or even a third-party garage? It's crap. And the braking signal can run through whatever computers it wants - I damn well want flashy lights and warnings when something is wrong and, like ABS, a computer can check things a lot faster and more accurately than I can. But when that braking signal CONTROLS the brakes, rather than assists them, you have to go find the designer and shoot them.
Duh - and all the storage locations for that particular piece of information are destroyable. None, however, are *changeable* without trace except for possibly, in the future, some stupid ECU that allows write access to places it shouldn't. Like the devices mentioned in the article, which let you do stupid crap that you shouldn't be allowed to. The article doesn't mention VIN's at all, I was just providing another example of an inflated, possible, future direction that idiotic car manufacturers might make ("But the ECU VIN is XXXXXXXXXXXXX, so it must be the car!").
P.S. Stamping a new VIN plate on metal isn't that difficult, nor is fabricating those stupid plastic dashboard plates. Making modern car's electronics return a different VIN has, up until now, been almost impossible. My old car radio knew the VIN / Number plate of the car it was in, and refused to turn on in any other car. Writable VIN's on the ECU just made that worthless.
I'm not saying it's possible, or can't be countered by other, more practical means, by modifying a VIN via software is something that should never be possible - like changing the unique serial number on any security chip. I now wouldn't like to bet that it *WASN'T* possible on the car these researcher's tested.
Sorry, but I think we'd all much rather have a car where the ABS (or, indeed, the brake-pedal) can't be disabled entirely, where brakes can't be activate entirely by software, where you can't play with mileometer just by sticking a box on the OBD port, or where the car cannot lock everybody inside if it crashes (the software, not the car!).
It's not a question of software freedom - it's a question of not having that capability automated in the first damn place. In every car I've ever owned, when I press the brake the wheels are slowed by huge hydraulic pressure whether or not the ECU / ABS is working. Sure, I wouldn't do without the ABS either but if it stops working, I can still bring the car safely to a halt. What we're discussing here are cars with computers that *DO* have control over what the brake pedal does - from nothing no matter how hard you press it, to full brakes no matter how you release it - and not the driver.
Some of the other things mentioned on the researcher's FAQ include the bonnet(hood)-latch behind software controlled. One software crash = one real crash. That's a sort of DRM you *don't* want anyway - where your entire ability to use the product is under the control of a computer that could crash at any minute, with serious consequences. Especially not when you're doing 70 mph.
It's the design that's stupid, not OBD, ECU's or being able to tune your car using it if you really want to. They are separate issues. Why, why, why on earth would anyone *EVER* want to legitimately activate a mode on their car where the brake function no longer corresponds to the brake pedal position?
People have physical access to the outside of my car, it doesn't mean they can change my speedo, mileometer, fuel mixture, etc. quickly and without me realising that something has happened. They certainly can't do it just by plugging a box into the port even if they *do* break into my car... because my car is mechanical and doesn't run with this sort of shit (Note: I can and have removed the entire ECU box from a car in the past - it runs, but slowly and less efficiently and may not pass an emissions test, but it still works in a driveable condition - very modern cars literally do not work without them so they are "essential" and thus should work as bloody advertised).
All of these things were done over an ODB cable to a standardised port on every car. On every decent model of car, they should be read-only information about the car's engine. The port is standardised, commonplace, accessible from the driver's seat (by law in the EU), hidden, and (with these models) accepts almost any device / commands without question. It's standard practice to connect an OBD box to modern cars if they have an indicator light up (in fact, it's usually the ONLY way to clear such a light). My car has one. I'm pretty damn sure that you can't modify my mileage or speedo via that route, though, or my fuel mixture, or stop my brakes working. About the worst you might be able to do is clear a warning light. This is because the OBD is designed properly, doesn't allow things it doesn't and it helped by the fact that my speedo is a needle connected to a magnetic induction coil produce by a spinning cable spun at a ratio of the speed of the wheels, and my mileometer is a tick-over-style mechanical one. The Prius-scare should have shown people what happens when you take away control of a vehicle from a driver and put it in the hand of a computer - it was discussed that virtual-ignition-systems, virtual-gearing-systems, etc. are just dangerous and provide no advantage to anyone.
Nobody is saying these things are not do-able on any car with physical work, we're asking why the hell they are modifiable over such a cable in such a "simple" way that someone could literally sell a box on eBay that, when connected to a car, can fraudulently adjust mileage, turn on hot air vents, TURN OFF THE BRAKES (FFS!), and basically cause it to crash and explode whenever you want. That's *NOT* what the OBD standard is for - it's for diagnostics and diagnostic indicators. Why the hell can I adjust the hot air vent through that cable?
The problem is that there is absolutely no NEED for the speedo to be "writable" over a diagnostics cable, or anything else for that matter. The only "writable" things should be to clear diagnostic lights, which will inevitably pop up again if the problem is "real". So you can't just switch off the ABS light on a car and then sell it as having working ABS... OBD logs and records such actions in the car itself and will redisplay those indicators if there is a real problem still.
Why the hell would you *ever* want to be able to modify information like that? Why should a mechanic ever be able to adjust the mileage on the car? It's stupid, not-thought-through and terrible design. Next up is being able to open the doors of any car that has Bluetooth OBD, or changing the VIN numbers or whatever. It's just ridiculous. Even if the car is computer controlled, there are some places where access control of sorts should prevent certain actions.
First, your argument is crap. Case in point: I've been using Windows desktop since Windows 3.1 and I've never had a virus on my personal Windows machines. That means *nothing*. It's like saying "I haven't died yet, so I must be immortal". Please don't spread bollocks about viruses and operating systems - I'm a Linux nut but that's just a way to lie to people about Linux's real security - the design. You can still get Linux or MacOS viruses the same as anyone else if you do the same stupid things on any OS (execute unknown programs, use programs with known security flaws, etc.).
Next - security does *not* imply anti-virus... by definition an anti-virus program can only do its job *after* security has already been breached and requires full administrator-level access to the machine in order to do so (and so becomes its own security problem).
Sony aren't concerned about "security"... it's a dumb line to use. They are concerned about piracy and people hacking their systems to run games that they have or have not paid for. Although that's "security" in one sense, it's not the type of computer security that you're discussing. Sony think they are combating game piracy, theoretical or actual, and thus there's no reason why their corporate/government/education customers should suffer. But they didn't bother to think about that and just "switched it off" without any real choice (not updating to the latest firmware isn't a "choice" - it's enforced obsolescence).
I don't really care whether the US military can do things using PS3 or not - it's a niche use, outside the scope of the product, unwarrantied and unsupported, by an organisation more than capable of working around such problems. And they *wouldn't* (or at least *shouldn't*) be shouting in the press if this was actually a real issue... US military supercomputing efforts hampered / hacked / controlled / dictated to by a Japanese company? Then you really deserve everything that you get. However, I do care (despite never owning one and never intending to own one) about the PS3's that were already sold not being "broken" or having functionality removed outside of the scope of various trade acts. That's just stupid, illegal and harming to the company. But then, I don't think I've ever bought anything from Sony in my life, and I've never even played on a PS3. If you were reliant on Sony to continue to "co-operate" in terms of support, then you should have had a contract with them. If they failed to abide by any contract you have with them (including implied contracts under trade laws), and they continue to fail to abide by them, then you sue them.
And next time you buy *anything*, briefly research the historical behaviour of the companies involved. If they act like a company you don't want to support, don't buy their products.
I think the biggest problem with your last comment is that it should be a good thing... if you are with someone "significant" who calls the whole thing off because of things like that, then you're much, much better off without them, surely? More dangerous would be something like you sending off a workmate's saliva to see if they have HIV and then using that information to force them out of a job, etc. That's the sort of casual mis-use that we *don't* need.
Amen brother... and sub-posters.
Games used to be games, now they are expensive, licensed, fabricated, single-play-through, mindless "entertainment" which consist of level-grind, or impossible-achievement-hunting in order to stretch out gameplay, where they should be focused on making the game so that the player *wants* to come back for more and set their own targets. Half-life 2 was the last released game that I consider worth my money.
In the meantime, as you say, DOSBox, emulators, GOG.com and some old Steam titles (yes, I don't mind Steam - at least it works and I have backups I can play offline should the worst happen) are the way forward. I just bought Master of Magic and Master of Orion for about the fourth time, yet my Steam list is full of "new" games that I haven't even bothered to download or, when I did, played them for a few hours and got bored / completed them. Hell, most of them weren't even worth the disk space, let alone the time downloading, or the original cost price (I never pay full-price any more but at one point those games were going for £50 or more - now they get thrown in with about 10 other famous games, 5 of which I do want, for about £20).
Start making games again, I'll start paying you for them again (currently my money goes elsewhere instead, and no, I don't pirate). Carry on making difficult-to-install, difficult-to-uninstall, resource-heavy, pretty piles of crap and I'll just blow my cash on 10 times more indie games and old games instead (and, strangely, not end up spending a penny more!). In the same way that everyone has a list of books that they "should read", I have a list of games that I "should play" but never have. I'm quite happy to spend my money on those instead, if you really force me to by not giving me any decent games worth my money.
Hell, I have 50+ hours notched up on my Altitude account already and I've only owned it a couple of months. I don't claim the gameplay is "deep" but it's a hell of a lot more exciting than waiting for a expensive 10Gb game to download and install only to be confronted with crap-but-pretty gameplay.
I buy games to play games, which means they are entertainment. Every second I spend downloading, installing, configuring, diagnosing, watching cutscenes / credits, waiting for it to load / login, is a second of wasted gameplay - and my free time has a value too. £10 for 4-5+ hours of gameplay is what I consider reasonable - provided it's simple to install and get it running quickly. The more you want me to pay, the more exciting / interesting / deep you have to make the gameplay, the easier it has to be to install and the more worthwhile it still is in a year's time not just a few days around release. I have 25+ year old games that I STILL would rather load up than some of the stuff that I have ready to download at the click of a button. That's what you're competing with. I don't expect you to match that but some modern games are barely touched just a year after release, let alone 25. Judge by the length of your online communities if you have to - if your community is dead within a year, it was a "one-off" game and nothing special. If people are *still* talking about / playing your game after 5 years and then scream because you want to take the servers offline, that's the sort of game you want to make more of.
It's always the same "This is slowly killing my child / making them stupid, I want it banned." or something along those lines... just stop your kids doing it. Especially, in this case, because it would be reliant on an enormously expensive piece of hardware in order to operate - they are not going to be sneaking into the bookshops on the way home and picking up an eBook reader illicitly to stop you knowing. If you have doubts about it, stop them doing it and do, I don't know, parent-y things like... erm... encouraging them to read books, praising them when they learn a new word, switching OFF the TV when they've had too much (and no, TV itself isn't bad - don't bring up children who when they hit adulthood are *DYING* to watch TV to see what all their friends are talking about - banning TV outright is just delaying their inevitable obsession with the "forbidden") and saying No to them.
My child is 18 months. She *does* get transfixed to the television when her favourite program is on. That's why she gets a few hours a week and that's that. Then we switch it off and she doesn't burst into tears because she's not addicted to it. If you have a long car journey, you take two or three books with you - she will spend the *entire* trip engrossed in them, looking at every page, pointing out all the objects that she knows, learning the words for the ones she doesn't and she won't feel "deprived" or "bored" just because she only has books. When she learns to read, though, a habit of deliberately *choosing* a book to take out on a trip with her (as she currently does) will make the transition all that much easier.
Reading, picture books, comics, TV, radio, interactive software, things scrawled in crayon on the back of scrap paper, they are all just media. If you use them correctly, and proportionally, they all have a role to play in a child's development. If you don't, and just let the kid have completely free choice, of course they will ALWAYS choose the thing that's least effort - TV or some book that "reads to them" so they don't have to do this complicated pattern-recognition thing that dad wants them to do. That's fine occasionally and, yes, occasionally you do have to let them just be kids and have a day off of making them all the "horrible" stuff like learning to read, or tidying their room and so those times they can do things like interactive books and software or just veg out in front of the TV (we all do it, in moderation for the majority of us, so we can't be martyrs here and claim to be perfect and always do everything that we would want our children to see us do).
Let them have a life, and stop bloody micro-managing their exposure to the world. So long as they are doing the stuff you want them to do elsewhere, let them have their time off. To a child, learning to read is hard work on an enormously difficult but boring task, so after they've had a few hours of doing that give them some time off with whatever they want to do that's not hurting anyone else - video games (the age for violent ones is up to the individual parents, but you will not *turn* them into mass-murderers once they have acquired a sense of right and wrong), building Lego castles, scribbling on bits of paper, making a frame for the TV with tinsel and glue (with your permission), stamping on ants in the garden, whatever, it doesn't really matter. That's their time off, the same way that even university students, or 80-hour-week workers have time off. Just make sure that if you're worried they aren't reading enough, that you give them that TOO, at some other time, and by *your* rules.
3 days in a row, three slashvertisements for this Humble/Indie Bundle... who's getting their percentage?
I call bullshit of the highest order.
I have recently deinstalled and reinstalled from backup about 7-8 games, totalling Gigabytes of data with 1000's of files and it never took more than a handful of minutes (and most of that was churning to load the setup program into memory before it actually did anything). This is not a top-of-the-range laptop by any means, bog-standard cheap 320Gb hard drive. Its filesystems were made two years ago and haven't been defragged etc. *EVER* and it was going from one partition to another on the same drive.
I'd say that was more a "Wii Plus Package" sort of thing - the kinda thing that you pay £50 extra on top of a normal Wii bundle to get. It's *not* Wii 2, a complete successor, which is what this guy is crowing about. Extra RAM, etc. are the sort of things that games can provide themselves or Nintendo can provide through some sort of add-on or "enhanced version" like the N64 memory packs, or the SuperFX chips, etc.
There is no need for a Wii 2. Wii is doing perfectly fine and in some secret Nintendo lab somewhere, there's already a games console being designed that's yet-another-generation-evolution over the Wii and won't "ride" on its good name. It'll probably have backwards compatibility through emulation or whatever, but in about 3-4 years something WAY, WAY, WAY more than a Wii 2 will come out and become its own household name. Yeah, maybe Nintendo won't sell many Wiis by that time but they won't care - the money they've made on them so far will more than tide them over comfortably for another decade or so if they're careful.
Dolts that think that "good" games need huge CPU's and GPU's are the problem here. How many units do the indie games sell now? How many of them *need* DX11 with PS3.0 etc.? Hardly any. Yet they are still good, sometimes excellent, games that shift millions of units. World of Goo made several hundred thousand dollars in a few days, a long time after its initial release, by letting people pay "what they want" for it (i.e. 1c or $100). Casual games and even non-violent games like Nintendo prefers used to be niche markets - now they are outselling everything else. Nintendo knew this would happen when they put a *fun*, *easy to play* (even if you've never picked up a PC) console in every home.
Nintendo have been around for over 120 years - they know how to do business. Some idiot telling them that they should make a better console which is just a faster version of their last best-selling console is not only a) stating the easiest thing he can think of but b) doesn't understand that Nintendo wins by innovation and gameplay, not graphics. Never has, probably never will. They just like to let their customers have fun.
Offline mode. You have to be online on Steam to download the damn thing in the first place, but once it's installed you just set it to offline mode and play away. It won't stay like that forever, but are you seriously telling me that you won't be online with Steam running in the background (even if just for a minute) for more than about 30/60/90 days?
I don't buy games that have stupid DRM because I do play offline, but I've spend hundreds of pounds on Steam lately because their system is the only one that works how it should. And I've had Steam since long before WON went offline, so nearly day one.
Avoid the stuff that has *other* DRM on top of Steam (e.g. GTA4) because that's just stupid anyway, layering DRM schemes, but 99% of what's on Steam is fine and it's the best system that makes the most sensible compromises for user happiness.
If you don't already know this, it means you've never used Steam yourself. It's damn addictive once you realise that you can search for, buy, download, install and play a game in minutes and then take that game everywhere you go, online or off, onto multiple computers without having to do anything more complicated than click "Install" on the right icon. Or backup those games to your external drive when you realise you've filled up your entire disk with games and need some quick space back. It takes literally minutes to reinstall 9Gb of game from a Steam Backup if you suddenly get the urge to play it again, or you can redownload it if you lose your backup.
1) Keep your keys on you at all times. The last time my keys left me when I left the house was because my brother was getting married and I needed to wear a nice suit, which showed every bulge, in front of lots of people - my parents minded them for the hour or so I needed them to and I got them straight back afterwards. Don't put them down when you've unlocked something (e.g. on the office table while you get coffee) and have a "place" for them at home... that you can always find them once you're indoors (my gf uses this as an indicator for whether I'm home or not, because the keys *do not* leave my side if I go out for even a second - literally, when I put the bins out, my keys go with me because otherwise the one night that I do it and my gf isn't home, I know that I *will* end up locking myself out accidentally).
2) Don't strap them to your trousers (pants)... it makes them visible and awkward to handle - you find yourself unclipping the damn things all the time or buying one of those stupid "keys-on-a-elastic-string" things that just break. Plus, if someone steals them (unlikely, I know) or they fall off (cheap pants), you won't feel it but you *may* hear it depending on where you are. My gf is quite amazed how I can tell what's in my pockets and whether I've forgotten something before I've even got out the door - I have a *terrible* memory but I know when I can *feel* all the things I should. It also helps because living in London, I often get bumped into on the Tube etc. and it takes seconds to pat my pocket and make sure I haven't been robbed. I've never managed to get more than about 6 feet from where I was sitting without realising that something must have fallen out.
3) Get a solid key-ring. Not some 50p thing from the local shops. Especially if they occasionally hang off your noisy motorcycle while you're travelling at motorway speeds - you do *not* want them coming off then because you probably *won't* notice. I use a mountaineering carabina on which hang good strong keyrings. How strong? Well, my laptop bag's shoulder strap broke both it's original metal clips because of the sheer weight and abuse that bag gets - so I threaded two of those keyrings through the loops and hook the shoulder strap onto them - two years later, they aren't even out of shape in any way yet that bag recently came back from Italy with 18kgs of stuff in as "hand baggage" (carry-on to Americans).
I also have a metal belt clip that I put on the carabina. The carabina allows me to take rings on and off very easily and individually, let me feel secure that it's not going to let the keys fall off without deliberate manual effort on my part, attach it to anything in such a way it's not just going to fall off/break *and* keep it loose in my pocket without extra pointy things poking into me. I tend towards the latter, personally. I have broken no end of keyrings, belt-hooks, and other gadgets by getting my keys caught in my pocket / on something / wear and tear / carrying heavy boxes and "snapping" anything plastic around my belt. It also means that it's now almost impossible to do what I'd previously done several times which was pull out my keys from my pocket and have them spray themselves across the street while I'm left holding an empty keyring / belt clip.
4) I'm forgetful so this might not apply - I take *every* key with me wherever I go. Otherwise I *would* end up just getting out of the house and then going back for my car keys, or locking myself out, or travelling across town to my parents and then finding out I don't have my keys when I get there. Currently that's about 10 keys. I have a separate set of keys for work with a similar arrangement. I have never actually been locked out, or lost my keys, but that's probably more by luck than judgement. However, I've *never* had them stolen, left them behind in the pub, etc. and that's not so reliant on luck.
5) Your keys can be minimised. You don't need to carry your roof key. Keep that indoors. I can understand about keeping the r
Er... 'king hell... how many keys do YOU use?
Seriously, I have a humungous bunch of keys that *does* weigh me down and I can't even *imagine* the extra weight I'd need to actually do any damage to the pieces of *solid metal* inside the ignition lock just by gravity + a bit of rocking back and forth with the motion of the car. I'm infinitely more likely to actually break the key than the lock. It's a tightly-enclosed, solid piece of metal in a tightly-enclosed metal barrel mounted (with any luck) in a metal frame of a steering wheel (not renowned for their ability to fall apart when you put weight / strain on them, considering they turn anything up to 8 tons of van directly, and historically weren't even power-assisted). I'm sure there is a weight that they would cause damage but other things will break first (your keyring, your pockets, your *key*) and to say it's likely to damage means you are either carrying about a huge lead block on your keyring and/or your car is made of shitty cheap plastic that was going to fall apart at the first touch anyway..
Besides, a lot of modern cars don't even *have* an ignition cylinder any more. My dad has been fixing cars/lorries professionally for about 30 years - I've never *once* seen or heard him talk about having to fix a damaged cylinder like that unless the damage had been caused by a local youth with a large screwdriver. And guess what, he carries a *humungous* set of keys with him.
http://media.ryzom.com/?query=ball&start=320&asset=96ad7f2ea3fb55b77c0e6ba849717ea7
Some things are just begging to be modded into TuxRacer... :-)
That's the second post from that blog in as many days - they were the ones that did the Humble Indie Games Bundle, weren't they?
Slashvertisement?
From my experience in the UK educational sector, the answer would be something like "Be a cousin of the person who gets to decide what software to use, and hope that the committee that he's supposed to answer to are all his golf-buddies and/or in constant fear of their jobs if they question authority." You'd be amazed what can be done when that's true.
Speaking as someone who once saw an entire multi-million pound IT project given to a team of Army personnel because they had a gap in their schedule, needed money, were friends of friends of someone high up, and could do the job cheaply. Ever seen someone fold up optic fibre like it was shredded paper in order to stuff it through a gap in a wall?
Can't get over the cheapy-ten-dollar shareware that is the program they use to look for infringing material. I've probably written better software that does the same job *accidentally* while working on other projects.