So using AMD processors can cause more crashes than using Intel processors. It may be the fault of third party drivers, but that still means systems with AMD processors are more unstable than system with Intel processors, which is a bad thing. You may be willing to blow this off but the average user isn't. Just like people blame Windows for crahses caused by programs, spyware, viruses, and third party drivers, they blame AMD when a system with their processors crashes because it has the processor in it. Sure, it's Joe Blow Companies fault for the bad drivers, but they don't crash in an Intel machine.
I've been using AMD's for a few years now, and I've found them to be pretty darned stable. I haven't had any driver conflicts, or other major issues crop up. I don't overclock, but I do undervolt my fans, and the stability per volume of the AMDs are better than Intel's current crop (though the P3 line was great). I also change hardware configurations frequently, have multiple HDD's, etc.
I do have a pretty good MOBO, though. Cheap motherboards are criminally unstable, and many people who go to AMD do so to shave money off their system, leading them to buy substandard motherboards. The same is true of cheap Intel motherboards, however, with the same results. It's amazing how much better a 90 dollar motherboard is than a 50 dollar one. That's not true about many or even most things in computing, but it's very true in Motherboards.
Overall, I'd pay the same for an AMD processor as an Intel one. The AMD's are just as strong but run quieter. That they're a little cheaper is just icing on the cake.
And the best response to Myth 3: Your job is never safe. Get over it. You can do the right thing and get replaced by the Boss's nephew, or you can kiss up and get replaced by the Boss's nephew. Either way you might as well do the job as best you can so at least you can sleep with yourself at night.
On the one hand, I always thought that multi-user stuff was trouble for most first-hand computer users, and wouldn't mind seeing it gone.
On the other hand, only three applications simultaneously? Opening up the process manager, I see 54 running processes, from basics like TaskSwitch.exe to my e-mail filter K9.exe to this browser. How can one say what is an app and what isn't? A folder window is open. Is it an app? Is Mozilla an app when it is preloaded into the tray? Is I.E. an app? Is I.E. an app when coming from a folder?
Maximum 40GB HDD? Can you even get drives that small anymore? Maximum 128 MB of RAM? That maxes out on one of the chips in a modern piece of RAM.
Geez, the only thing this looks like it will be good for is shuttle missions.
Ballmer keeps running around insisting everyone call it GNUNWNTD/Spam.
Their Anti Spam system will reduce your Total Cost of E-mail. Or raise it a little. Or possibly keep it the same.
Their (K)illSpam system will be promply forked into five apps known as GnoMoreSpam, OpenSP, Xithergy, WAGIJIG, and Betty.
It will accept, filter, parse, and sort incoming mail, while additionally precaching any keywords you are likely to look up on google, but it will take twenty minutes to open an ASCII based letter. It will use the function keys for essential behaviors that aren't documented anywhere.
If it was developed it can be reversed engineered. Sorry to say but spam is here to stay unless of course someday the internet becomes regulated somehow.
That's silly. Encryption has been thoroughly reverse-engineered, but it's still completely secure. The Linux source code is widely available, but it is still considered relatively secure.
There are several competing proposals for how e-mail could be re-done to take into account the possibility of spamming. Preventing false headers and return addresses would be a great step towards that. Having some form of human verification system might as well. Using large, distributed networks collecting wild spam would be a third. Any of these would help. Some of the other proposals may very well solve the great majority of the problem.
Game over. Far above par for a show about videogames.
The reviewer failed to point out the best part of Captain N: he could pause time. Yes, by pressing start on that controller of his, Captain N could pause the world around him. He could run to the bus on time, he could pause (though not rewind) live TV, and he could take the super mega weapon of death from the bad guy's hand. Thus the controller was Captain N's Voltron Sword, rendering entire episodes (and arguably, the series) pointless.
Most NCAA games allows you to edit your player names and stats for this very reason. It lets you recreate your home team (or the whole bloody league) unencumbered by the restriction against "students" having conflicts of interest.
While I would like to see a swing towards more fantasy-based and original takes on sports, like Cyberball, I'm not holding my breath. It's very difficulty to sell fantasy sports games to publishers, because even if an accurate sports game is junk it will still sell ok, but the next Cyberball may sell as well as, well, Cyberball. Certainly some pseudo super games have had success more recently than that, like NFL blitz and NBA Jams, but both had official licenses. But the more creative you are, the less likely you are to get the broad market of people who like a sport and who want to play a game that is exactly like that sport.
I agree, though, that exclusivity contracts are likely to run your sport into the ground. Madden has stayed good over the years because of the constant competition. If that were over, the series would stagnate and fail like it almost did at the beginning of the PS1 era. Exclusivity just reduces the value of the property.
I don't know that is enough to make or brake any console, but it certainly doesn't help MS or Nintendo or Sony's position.
There are a lot of ways to encrypt a disk, either using disk virtualization or on an OS level. This ensures that your data is useless to pretty much anyone short of the NSA. If someone swipes a disk from the lab and wants to take a "peek," or finds a laptop your contractor accidentally left in the park, you're safe. The performance hit these days on desktops is negligable and on servers seems acceptable. And good luck decrypting a disk that's been degaussed or otherwise had data overwrites / losses.
Encrypting disks these days is pretty painless and automatic, and ensures one more way that your private data is going to stay private. Highly recommended.
[they] will be required to use state-of-the-art technology as soon as it is available.
In Argentina right now, that could be a while.
State-of-the-art technology doesn't usually become available in Argentina until cousin Mariano comes back from Miami with a suitcase full of laptops and electric toothbrushes.
Still, it sounds like there is a lot of room for abuse in this. I'd love to see an Argentine ISP send over data on a holographic cube, formatted for BeOS. Or even better, as a DRM encumbered WMV 9 file. Or a DVD movie with 60 minutes of unskippable commercials.
"Can you e-mail me the file?" "Sorry, we've moved on to more state-of-the-art networking technologies. You can get a torrent of the file over a freenet network on an IPv6 Internet 2 network, or we can podcast you the file from a PSP on the subway to work." "Can you skype it to me?" "Sorry, Skype is so last week. But you can get a copy of this conversation through a skypecasting network."
Heck, maybe they can provide the "cutting edge" hardware and software that the government needs so that they can understand the transmissions. For a small fee, of course.
Oh, and to respond to the place in the article where he said Zaphod's motivations were always money, in the Radio Scripts he's searching for the man who controls the universe. He doesn't know why, as he's seared off that part of his own brain, but that's the cat he wants to meet.
Mr. Davis said the publishers could eventually get ad revenue of $1 to $2 on each game sold. Ms. Madrid, however, said it was far too soon to know whether the partnership would lead to significant revenues.
Interesting estimates for a company who "will be in 40 games by year's end." Anyone know if these estimates are reasonable?
You have to know that the original person attached to the script was "Mr Ghostbusters" Ivan Reitman. Douglas Adams hated this choice, as he felt Reitman lacked any of the subtleties or wit necessary to do the film (see also Meatballs, Kindergarden Cop, and Evolution). But the studio refused to back down. However, while Douglas was under contractual obligation to deliver a script, the contract didn't specify when. So Douglas sat on it. and sat on it. and sat on it. and basically refused to finish it unless another person was attached to the project. I believe that is where it stood when he died... material he had started writing twenty years prior and had intentionally never finished got finished by someone else and squished into a movie.
They're all very good, but The Last Chance to See has to be at the top of the list, if for no other reason than the idea of Mr. Hitchhiker's Guide getting paid to write a travelogue is so engaging, and the subject matter so brilliant. The Dirk Gently series is spot on as well. While the character archetypes are quite recognizable from the HHGTG, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Also, many people don't know this but the radio scripts diverge pretty far from the books, with entire planets and escapades not present in the texts. They're also worth a read. And the companion book to both gives insight and humor into the whole process, and is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what the heck went on. It includes little DA gems like a sketch about a veteran kamikazee pilot.
The HHGTG videogame also contains a wealth of amazing material not available elsewhere, though you will need to cheat like mad to get through it. Starship Titanic the book wasn't wirtten by DA, but the game was. The game, sadly, isn't very good, though if you're desperate it was better than this movie sounds like it will be. The Parrot in that game was also a gem.
Oh come one. The Aliens vs Predator movie changed the setting from an overrun hellish planet in space to an Aztec temple in Antarctica, and look how well that turned out.
"The robots will be remote controlled," said the South Korean ministry of defense. "Thus allowing for operational efficiencies far beyond what is possible today."
A reporter raises his hand. "You mean, you're setting up remote call centers?"
"Yes, we're outsourcing to China. There, thousands of workers costing us just pennies a day will patrol our borders with giant armed robots, thus fulfilling our defense needs and the needs of the Chinese population as expressed through their arts and animation."
"Any word on the North Korean Reaction?"
"Yes, and this brings better news." interjects the Ministry of Finance. "North Korea has decided to setup their own robot army and, being years behind everyone else, has decided to outsource to us for their remote defense needs. Now we could simply take their billions of pounds of rice and make a tidy profit," said the Ministry of Finance, "but South Korea is the most advanced nation in the world. We have decided to setup an online community of people willing to pay for the priviledge of protecting a theoretical Kingdom from invading barbarians, inside of a communial, multiplayer environment."
"A Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game?"
"Yes, a MMPORPG. A MMPORPG so grand it will make Lineage look like Everquest."
Everyone in the room laughs, except for the American who looks confused.
"And you too for just 15 dollars a month can be the last line of defense against a rampaging horde of demons. They're very expensive demons, funded by Satan himself. Demons who want to ravage your women, kill your pets, and give you low-paying jobs without benefits while preventing unionization.
"As border skirmishes are rare, won't this game be incredibly boring?"
"People pay to play Star Wars Galaxies, don't they?"
A few years back on a friend's mac, I embedded two extensions together. One flipped all of the text left / right, the other caused the mouse to drop a little turd on his screen. I put this, along with another copy of the text-flipping extension into his extensions folder, causing the text to be flipped l/r twice.
He was happily using his computer, until after a few minutes the mouse made a squeaking noise and dropped a little turd. After the second time he figured it out, made a mental note to tell me off when I got back, and removed the "mouse turds" extension (actually the double-extension). Upon reboot, his text was now flipped L / R, making his computer totally unusable.
By the time I got back he had all sorts of theories about the extension installing things before removing itself, other dependency checks, etc. He had been taking out and putting back that mouse turds for hours. It didn't occur to him that if you want straight text you can just flip it twice, and that there was probably another extension in there.
On the one hand, I can see how that would be scary.
On the other hand, I really want to know what that data is showing. What resolution are most people playing at? Does everyone use inverted mouselook or not? What difficulty level does the average person play on? Does expert even get touched? Did the average player furiously pound the space bar every time a cinematic came up? Did they spend longer than they probably should have in one section or another? Did players just drive around in the dune buggy or stay up in that magnetic crane throwing crates at people? Did they just play the mods? Are half-hour long playsessions the norm, or are most people playing in 4-hour chunks?
Maybe it's the sociologist in me, or the game developer, but I'd really like to know the answers to those questions. Sometimes you feel like you've got nothing more to go on than a guess and a couple of magazine reviews.
When I install a piece of software on my machine, I accept that I'm giving them control. My virus scanner has admin priviledges, and it auto-updates. They could send anything they liked down that pipe. My firewall is set to accept that the virus scanner changes itself every now and then, and to download and install updates to itself automatically too. What stops these things from taking over the computer? What stops that bittorrent client from being a trojan, or that copy of Dekart Private Disk?
Any software installed to your machine gives your machine to that company. BOINC auto updates, auto downloads new data, auto-allocates resources. And for what? Because I trust them, and I'd like to help out with einstein@home. Steam is finally stable, convienient, and always there. I believe it's not uploading my porn collection to uncle sam because I know that Valve has a bigger reputation and bigger goals to uphold than that. I trust that if Valve's servers go black forever, they will make good on their word to make the last update unlock everyone's machines. And if they don't, I can just download an unencumbered version from Kazaa. What did Anarchy Online install to my machine? Nothing that Ad Aware and Spybot think is nasty, but it's definitely sending stats back home when I connect. But I trust them.
I'm not particularly happy with the whole activate-online if you bought a box-scheme, but I can understand that they didn't want to fork their development time, and they needed an autoupdater for online play. Quite frankly, if all it requires is online sign in that's a lot less painful than requiring a physical Disk.
Bullshit. Again, what evidence do you have that sequential numbers are suspicious? How "smudged" was the ink?
Actually, I've seen new bills smudge quite often. I'm guessing that like new clothes there is excess ink that usually wears off / washes out. Combine some greasy french fries for lunch and never-before-touched 20 from the bank, and you're pretty much guarenteed a smudge. It happened all the time while I was on bike tours and pulling cash out of the bank with sweaty hands that hadn't seen a shower in days.
The giveaway on all of the fake bills I've seen has been the paper. Ink smudges, numbers fade, people wash their wallet with their reds. But the feel of the paper of a bill never changes. Anyone who is going to go through the trouble to fake the paper of a bill properly is probably using better than an inkjet printer to make them, so the look seems to be on. And those antifraud UV scanners are kind of rude to use routinely in front of a customer at a bike shop. But the feel doesn't change in a real bill, it's hard to fake, and it's something you interact with every time you accept a customer's money.
I'm not saying that the police were wrong to detain him. I understand that they have to wait for the appropriate specialist to make an assessment when someone makes a serious claim. But the cashier's cash experience seems to be pretty... questionable.
The extreme of this problem is that eventually, the internet becomes so fast and clients become so dumb that software is never "distributed" at all. I take an open source office suite and then modify it. According to the GPL, if I then sell that software on CD, or by download, so that people can actually run it on their computers, I must provide the source to it as well. But what if I'd rather just make money off of the GPL'd software I've taken without giving anything back to the community?
Networked appliances will save the world, eigh? There are a few major shortcomings. For one, no matter how fat your pipe is, your latency and response time will be bad. For another, there are tons of security issues WRT real code running on real servers remotely. If you thought buffer overflows were a problem before, just wait until a remote user is running a copy of Office XP on your machine.
I'm not saying it isn't possible that the network will become the machine. I'm saying let's wait until that's more than a dream to respond to it.
As for networked appliances serving HTML... there has to be a limit somewhere between spreading the joy and practical life. If you make Google share their improvements (which wouldn't be unfounded), you would make everyone who runs a copy of Apache on Linux also have copies of Apache and Linux available for download. That's a little overboard. I'd rather err on the side of making the GPL too generous than too restrictive.
Well, for one Best Buy deserves to be sued, badly. Not only does he deserve a refund for the service, he deserves payment for the value of his time that he spent in jail. I'd add punative to that too, just because of the sheer incompetence / gall of the cashier to have someone arrested for using $2 bills. It's also illegal to threaten police action without legal backing, something that Best Buy couldn't have actually originally done as in most states a 110 dollars debt is small enough to fall under the jurisdiction of small claims court.
The police acted pretty rationally considering they had a complaint from a trained cashier that someone was passing off funny money, a complaint they had to take seriously. And police officers aren't trained fake bill detectors, that's the job of the other agency, which they called in.
I've had a police officer point a gun at me because somebody up the street freaked out about the kids "menacing people with a huge knife." The huge knife in question was a white plastic samurai sword from a halloween costume with a large crack in that we had found by the side of the road and one of us was using as a walking stick. But the officer had to take the possibility seriously. Quite frankly the baffled look on his face when we slid it over to him and it sounded like a plastic tube was worth the whole loaded-gun-pointed-at-your-head thing. It's the job of the police to take any possibility seriously.
On the other hand, it is the job of the cashier to be able to recognize US currency. And that nobody at the store could recognize the bill is just plain pathetic. Police officers catch criminals and attempt to make the world a little safer. The cashiers at Best Buy recognize and handle money. They have no excuse.
By my estimation, I'd guess this guy should get about 2 grand from Best Buy in compensation for time, humiliation, and that car stereo install he shouldn't have paid for anyway.
They've got the source code, right? What keeps them from altering it a little bit and using it to track people who might be buying bomb-making material? Or people who might be running prostitution rings? Or drugs? Or anarchists?
The software doesn't search for images. From the article, it's essentially a groupware law-enforcement collaboration tool. Why stop at child porn?
If we didn't have a "big eye" before, we will shortly.
Considering his other comments, I'm guessing Microsoft.
JK.
On the other hand, do be careful with Google. If you google me, I've apparently built bike frames, been a tax attorney, am Colorado's premier one-legged skiier, made several games, founded a birdwatching society, and am several computer consultants. One or two of these people is actually me. I'm one of 9 or 10 of me online. Unfortunately, according to the phone book there are over 50 of me in the US alone, meaning that if you google my name you only have a 1 in 5 chance that I have anything online at all, and then a 1 in 10 chance of guessing which one I am. And I don't have a very common name. If your candidate is named "Tom Jones" or "Hong Li" or "Sanjay Singh", you're pretty much firing at random.
As a side note, I've always wondered if someone with your name could sue you for defamation for doing dumb things under your own name online...
Also, if Apple's DRM codec and encryption has to be opened up, then wouldn't that be an argument to open up the Windows source code to competitors?
This falls down because DRM is not a layer of encryption, where you have some critical piece of data that you must know before you can decrypt a file, but ofuscation, where all critical data is present but the operation of the application is not clear and therefore safe from prying eyes. The application has all of the information needed to download it, it just wants to make darned sure you're sending that audio stream to a hardware sound card and not directly back to the hard disk.
If you remove the mystery of what is happening with the the DRM you have removed the DRM. That's why there isn't open-source DRM. It doesn't work that way.
And what would prevent Napster from negotiating exclusive agreements with labels now? or the iTunes exclusives that have been going around.
Or, for that matter, what would stop independent labels from selling iPod compatible songs in AAC directly, using nothing more than a catalog of indies, a Perl script, and PayPal? What would stop you from buying music for immediate download at Amazon?
This is nothing like it was before. The single-source model of iTunes is more of a hinderance than a help. If everyone had the ability to sell DRM encumbered junk, I could probably get my weird Happy Hardcore fix legally directly from the freaky moonshine.com people. All distributers could sell, directly online, cutting out the middlemen. I wouldn't be surprised if iTunes and the like disappeared in favor of GoogleGrooves.
This would not be like it was before. This would still be a brave new world. Instead of the mega music malls, you would have millions of mom-and-pop shops again, probably with umbrella "shopping.yahoo.com" style structures around them.
Sounds good to me. I don't know if I would want congress forcing the DRM open, though. After all, DRM is inherently insecure. Opening it for everyone is probably the equivalent of breaking it for everyone. But certainly if there was an open standard for DRM, pretty much everyone would benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
So using AMD processors can cause more crashes than using Intel processors. It may be the fault of third party drivers, but that still means systems with AMD processors are more unstable than system with Intel processors, which is a bad thing. You may be willing to blow this off but the average user isn't. Just like people blame Windows for crahses caused by programs, spyware, viruses, and third party drivers, they blame AMD when a system with their processors crashes because it has the processor in it. Sure, it's Joe Blow Companies fault for the bad drivers, but they don't crash in an Intel machine.
I've been using AMD's for a few years now, and I've found them to be pretty darned stable. I haven't had any driver conflicts, or other major issues crop up. I don't overclock, but I do undervolt my fans, and the stability per volume of the AMDs are better than Intel's current crop (though the P3 line was great). I also change hardware configurations frequently, have multiple HDD's, etc.
I do have a pretty good MOBO, though. Cheap motherboards are criminally unstable, and many people who go to AMD do so to shave money off their system, leading them to buy substandard motherboards. The same is true of cheap Intel motherboards, however, with the same results. It's amazing how much better a 90 dollar motherboard is than a 50 dollar one. That's not true about many or even most things in computing, but it's very true in Motherboards.
Overall, I'd pay the same for an AMD processor as an Intel one. The AMD's are just as strong but run quieter. That they're a little cheaper is just icing on the cake.
And the best response to Myth 3: Your job is never safe. Get over it. You can do the right thing and get replaced by the Boss's nephew, or you can kiss up and get replaced by the Boss's nephew. Either way you might as well do the job as best you can so at least you can sleep with yourself at night.
On the one hand, I always thought that multi-user stuff was trouble for most first-hand computer users, and wouldn't mind seeing it gone.
On the other hand, only three applications simultaneously? Opening up the process manager, I see 54 running processes, from basics like TaskSwitch.exe to my e-mail filter K9.exe to this browser. How can one say what is an app and what isn't? A folder window is open. Is it an app? Is Mozilla an app when it is preloaded into the tray? Is I.E. an app? Is I.E. an app when coming from a folder?
Maximum 40GB HDD? Can you even get drives that small anymore? Maximum 128 MB of RAM? That maxes out on one of the chips in a modern piece of RAM.
Geez, the only thing this looks like it will be good for is shuttle missions.
VG Cats did a great strip about this recently.
Worth the read, if for no other reason than to watch Sonic cry.
And because they're sort of relevant and funny, their strip about Black and White, Metroid, and Zelda.
Ballmer keeps running around insisting everyone call it GNUNWNTD/Spam.
Their Anti Spam system will reduce your Total Cost of E-mail. Or raise it a little. Or possibly keep it the same.
Their (K)illSpam system will be promply forked into five apps known as GnoMoreSpam, OpenSP, Xithergy, WAGIJIG, and Betty.
It will accept, filter, parse, and sort incoming mail, while additionally precaching any keywords you are likely to look up on google, but it will take twenty minutes to open an ASCII based letter.
It will use the function keys for essential behaviors that aren't documented anywhere.
If it was developed it can be reversed engineered. Sorry to say but spam is here to stay unless of course someday the internet becomes regulated somehow.
That's silly. Encryption has been thoroughly reverse-engineered, but it's still completely secure. The Linux source code is widely available, but it is still considered relatively secure.
There are several competing proposals for how e-mail could be re-done to take into account the possibility of spamming. Preventing false headers and return addresses would be a great step towards that. Having some form of human verification system might as well. Using large, distributed networks collecting wild spam would be a third. Any of these would help. Some of the other proposals may very well solve the great majority of the problem.
Game over. Far above par for a show about videogames.
The reviewer failed to point out the best part of Captain N: he could pause time. Yes, by pressing start on that controller of his, Captain N could pause the world around him. He could run to the bus on time, he could pause (though not rewind) live TV, and he could take the super mega weapon of death from the bad guy's hand. Thus the controller was Captain N's Voltron Sword, rendering entire episodes (and arguably, the series) pointless.
Most NCAA games allows you to edit your player names and stats for this very reason. It lets you recreate your home team (or the whole bloody league) unencumbered by the restriction against "students" having conflicts of interest.
While I would like to see a swing towards more fantasy-based and original takes on sports, like Cyberball, I'm not holding my breath. It's very difficulty to sell fantasy sports games to publishers, because even if an accurate sports game is junk it will still sell ok, but the next Cyberball may sell as well as, well, Cyberball. Certainly some pseudo super games have had success more recently than that, like NFL blitz and NBA Jams, but both had official licenses. But the more creative you are, the less likely you are to get the broad market of people who like a sport and who want to play a game that is exactly like that sport.
I agree, though, that exclusivity contracts are likely to run your sport into the ground. Madden has stayed good over the years because of the constant competition. If that were over, the series would stagnate and fail like it almost did at the beginning of the PS1 era. Exclusivity just reduces the value of the property.
I don't know that is enough to make or brake any console, but it certainly doesn't help MS or Nintendo or Sony's position.
There are a lot of ways to encrypt a disk, either using disk virtualization or on an OS level. This ensures that your data is useless to pretty much anyone short of the NSA. If someone swipes a disk from the lab and wants to take a "peek," or finds a laptop your contractor accidentally left in the park, you're safe. The performance hit these days on desktops is negligable and on servers seems acceptable. And good luck decrypting a disk that's been degaussed or otherwise had data overwrites / losses.
Encrypting disks these days is pretty painless and automatic, and ensures one more way that your private data is going to stay private. Highly recommended.
[they] will be required to use state-of-the-art technology as soon as it is available.
In Argentina right now, that could be a while.
State-of-the-art technology doesn't usually become available in Argentina until cousin Mariano comes back from Miami with a suitcase full of laptops and electric toothbrushes.
Still, it sounds like there is a lot of room for abuse in this. I'd love to see an Argentine ISP send over data on a holographic cube, formatted for BeOS. Or even better, as a DRM encumbered WMV 9 file. Or a DVD movie with 60 minutes of unskippable commercials.
"Can you e-mail me the file?"
"Sorry, we've moved on to more state-of-the-art networking technologies. You can get a torrent of the file over a freenet network on an IPv6 Internet 2 network, or we can podcast you the file from a PSP on the subway to work."
"Can you skype it to me?"
"Sorry, Skype is so last week. But you can get a copy of this conversation through a skypecasting network."
Heck, maybe they can provide the "cutting edge" hardware and software that the government needs so that they can understand the transmissions. For a small fee, of course.
Oh, and to respond to the place in the article where he said Zaphod's motivations were always money, in the Radio Scripts he's searching for the man who controls the universe. He doesn't know why, as he's seared off that part of his own brain, but that's the cat he wants to meet.
Mr. Davis said the publishers could eventually get ad revenue of $1 to $2 on each game sold. Ms. Madrid, however, said it was far too soon to know whether the partnership would lead to significant revenues.
Interesting estimates for a company who "will be in 40 games by year's end." Anyone know if these estimates are reasonable?
You have to know that the original person attached to the script was "Mr Ghostbusters" Ivan Reitman. Douglas Adams hated this choice, as he felt Reitman lacked any of the subtleties or wit necessary to do the film (see also Meatballs, Kindergarden Cop, and Evolution). But the studio refused to back down. However, while Douglas was under contractual obligation to deliver a script, the contract didn't specify when. So Douglas sat on it. and sat on it. and sat on it. and basically refused to finish it unless another person was attached to the project. I believe that is where it stood when he died... material he had started writing twenty years prior and had intentionally never finished got finished by someone else and squished into a movie.
If you're desperate for more of that genuine Douglas Adams wit, check out
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency,
The Long Dark Tea time of the Soul,
The Deeper Meaning of Liff, and
The Last Chance to See.
They're all very good, but The Last Chance to See has to be at the top of the list, if for no other reason than the idea of Mr. Hitchhiker's Guide getting paid to write a travelogue is so engaging, and the subject matter so brilliant. The Dirk Gently series is spot on as well. While the character archetypes are quite recognizable from the HHGTG, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Also, many people don't know this but the radio scripts diverge pretty far from the books, with entire planets and escapades not present in the texts. They're also worth a read. And the companion book to both gives insight and humor into the whole process, and is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what the heck went on. It includes little DA gems like a sketch about a veteran kamikazee pilot.
The HHGTG videogame also contains a wealth of amazing material not available elsewhere, though you will need to cheat like mad to get through it. Starship Titanic the book wasn't wirtten by DA, but the game was. The game, sadly, isn't very good, though if you're desperate it was better than this movie sounds like it will be. The Parrot in that game was also a gem.
Actually, if you get the "more than complete hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" you get 4 and 1/2 books in the 5 1/2 book trilogy.
Oh come one. The Aliens vs Predator movie changed the setting from an overrun hellish planet in space to an Aztec temple in Antarctica, and look how well that turned out.
Ok, I see your point.
"The robots will be remote controlled," said the South Korean ministry of defense. "Thus allowing for operational efficiencies far beyond what is possible today."
A reporter raises his hand. "You mean, you're setting up remote call centers?"
"Yes, we're outsourcing to China. There, thousands of workers costing us just pennies a day will patrol our borders with giant armed robots, thus fulfilling our defense needs and the needs of the Chinese population as expressed through their arts and animation."
"Any word on the North Korean Reaction?"
"Yes, and this brings better news." interjects the Ministry of Finance. "North Korea has decided to setup their own robot army and, being years behind everyone else, has decided to outsource to us for their remote defense needs. Now we could simply take their billions of pounds of rice and make a tidy profit," said the Ministry of Finance, "but South Korea is the most advanced nation in the world. We have decided to setup an online community of people willing to pay for the priviledge of protecting a theoretical Kingdom from invading barbarians, inside of a communial, multiplayer environment."
"A Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game?"
"Yes, a MMPORPG. A MMPORPG so grand it will make Lineage look like Everquest."
Everyone in the room laughs, except for the American who looks confused.
"And you too for just 15 dollars a month can be the last line of defense against a rampaging horde of demons. They're very expensive demons, funded by Satan himself. Demons who want to ravage your women, kill your pets, and give you low-paying jobs without benefits while preventing unionization.
"As border skirmishes are rare, won't this game be incredibly boring?"
"People pay to play Star Wars Galaxies, don't they?"
A few years back on a friend's mac, I embedded two extensions together. One flipped all of the text left / right, the other caused the mouse to drop a little turd on his screen. I put this, along with another copy of the text-flipping extension into his extensions folder, causing the text to be flipped l/r twice.
He was happily using his computer, until after a few minutes the mouse made a squeaking noise and dropped a little turd. After the second time he figured it out, made a mental note to tell me off when I got back, and removed the "mouse turds" extension (actually the double-extension). Upon reboot, his text was now flipped L / R, making his computer totally unusable.
By the time I got back he had all sorts of theories about the extension installing things before removing itself, other dependency checks, etc. He had been taking out and putting back that mouse turds for hours. It didn't occur to him that if you want straight text you can just flip it twice, and that there was probably another extension in there.
On the one hand, I can see how that would be scary.
On the other hand, I really want to know what that data is showing. What resolution are most people playing at? Does everyone use inverted mouselook or not? What difficulty level does the average person play on? Does expert even get touched? Did the average player furiously pound the space bar every time a cinematic came up? Did they spend longer than they probably should have in one section or another? Did players just drive around in the dune buggy or stay up in that magnetic crane throwing crates at people? Did they just play the mods? Are half-hour long playsessions the norm, or are most people playing in 4-hour chunks?
Maybe it's the sociologist in me, or the game developer, but I'd really like to know the answers to those questions. Sometimes you feel like you've got nothing more to go on than a guess and a couple of magazine reviews.
When I install a piece of software on my machine, I accept that I'm giving them control. My virus scanner has admin priviledges, and it auto-updates. They could send anything they liked down that pipe. My firewall is set to accept that the virus scanner changes itself every now and then, and to download and install updates to itself automatically too. What stops these things from taking over the computer? What stops that bittorrent client from being a trojan, or that copy of Dekart Private Disk?
Any software installed to your machine gives your machine to that company. BOINC auto updates, auto downloads new data, auto-allocates resources. And for what? Because I trust them, and I'd like to help out with einstein@home. Steam is finally stable, convienient, and always there. I believe it's not uploading my porn collection to uncle sam because I know that Valve has a bigger reputation and bigger goals to uphold than that. I trust that if Valve's servers go black forever, they will make good on their word to make the last update unlock everyone's machines. And if they don't, I can just download an unencumbered version from Kazaa. What did Anarchy Online install to my machine? Nothing that Ad Aware and Spybot think is nasty, but it's definitely sending stats back home when I connect. But I trust them.
I'm not particularly happy with the whole activate-online if you bought a box-scheme, but I can understand that they didn't want to fork their development time, and they needed an autoupdater for online play. Quite frankly, if all it requires is online sign in that's a lot less painful than requiring a physical Disk.
Bullshit. Again, what evidence do you have that sequential numbers are suspicious? How "smudged" was the ink?
Actually, I've seen new bills smudge quite often. I'm guessing that like new clothes there is excess ink that usually wears off / washes out. Combine some greasy french fries for lunch and never-before-touched 20 from the bank, and you're pretty much guarenteed a smudge. It happened all the time while I was on bike tours and pulling cash out of the bank with sweaty hands that hadn't seen a shower in days.
The giveaway on all of the fake bills I've seen has been the paper. Ink smudges, numbers fade, people wash their wallet with their reds. But the feel of the paper of a bill never changes. Anyone who is going to go through the trouble to fake the paper of a bill properly is probably using better than an inkjet printer to make them, so the look seems to be on. And those antifraud UV scanners are kind of rude to use routinely in front of a customer at a bike shop. But the feel doesn't change in a real bill, it's hard to fake, and it's something you interact with every time you accept a customer's money.
I'm not saying that the police were wrong to detain him. I understand that they have to wait for the appropriate specialist to make an assessment when someone makes a serious claim. But the cashier's cash experience seems to be pretty... questionable.
The extreme of this problem is that eventually, the internet becomes so fast and clients become so dumb that software is never "distributed" at all. I take an open source office suite and then modify it. According to the GPL, if I then sell that software on CD, or by download, so that people can actually run it on their computers, I must provide the source to it as well. But what if I'd rather just make money off of the GPL'd software I've taken without giving anything back to the community?
Networked appliances will save the world, eigh? There are a few major shortcomings. For one, no matter how fat your pipe is, your latency and response time will be bad. For another, there are tons of security issues WRT real code running on real servers remotely. If you thought buffer overflows were a problem before, just wait until a remote user is running a copy of Office XP on your machine.
I'm not saying it isn't possible that the network will become the machine. I'm saying let's wait until that's more than a dream to respond to it.
As for networked appliances serving HTML... there has to be a limit somewhere between spreading the joy and practical life. If you make Google share their improvements (which wouldn't be unfounded), you would make everyone who runs a copy of Apache on Linux also have copies of Apache and Linux available for download. That's a little overboard. I'd rather err on the side of making the GPL too generous than too restrictive.
Well, for one Best Buy deserves to be sued, badly. Not only does he deserve a refund for the service, he deserves payment for the value of his time that he spent in jail. I'd add punative to that too, just because of the sheer incompetence / gall of the cashier to have someone arrested for using $2 bills. It's also illegal to threaten police action without legal backing, something that Best Buy couldn't have actually originally done as in most states a 110 dollars debt is small enough to fall under the jurisdiction of small claims court.
The police acted pretty rationally considering they had a complaint from a trained cashier that someone was passing off funny money, a complaint they had to take seriously. And police officers aren't trained fake bill detectors, that's the job of the other agency, which they called in.
I've had a police officer point a gun at me because somebody up the street freaked out about the kids "menacing people with a huge knife." The huge knife in question was a white plastic samurai sword from a halloween costume with a large crack in that we had found by the side of the road and one of us was using as a walking stick. But the officer had to take the possibility seriously. Quite frankly the baffled look on his face when we slid it over to him and it sounded like a plastic tube was worth the whole loaded-gun-pointed-at-your-head thing. It's the job of the police to take any possibility seriously.
On the other hand, it is the job of the cashier to be able to recognize US currency. And that nobody at the store could recognize the bill is just plain pathetic. Police officers catch criminals and attempt to make the world a little safer. The cashiers at Best Buy recognize and handle money. They have no excuse.
By my estimation, I'd guess this guy should get about 2 grand from Best Buy in compensation for time, humiliation, and that car stereo install he shouldn't have paid for anyway.
They've got the source code, right? What keeps them from altering it a little bit and using it to track people who might be buying bomb-making material? Or people who might be running prostitution rings? Or drugs? Or anarchists?
The software doesn't search for images. From the article, it's essentially a groupware law-enforcement collaboration tool. Why stop at child porn?
If we didn't have a "big eye" before, we will shortly.
Considering his other comments, I'm guessing Microsoft.
JK.
On the other hand, do be careful with Google. If you google me, I've apparently built bike frames, been a tax attorney, am Colorado's premier one-legged skiier, made several games, founded a birdwatching society, and am several computer consultants. One or two of these people is actually me. I'm one of 9 or 10 of me online. Unfortunately, according to the phone book there are over 50 of me in the US alone, meaning that if you google my name you only have a 1 in 5 chance that I have anything online at all, and then a 1 in 10 chance of guessing which one I am. And I don't have a very common name. If your candidate is named "Tom Jones" or "Hong Li" or "Sanjay Singh", you're pretty much firing at random.
As a side note, I've always wondered if someone with your name could sue you for defamation for doing dumb things under your own name online...
Also, if Apple's DRM codec and encryption has to be opened up, then wouldn't that be an argument to open up the Windows source code to competitors?
This falls down because DRM is not a layer of encryption, where you have some critical piece of data that you must know before you can decrypt a file, but ofuscation, where all critical data is present but the operation of the application is not clear and therefore safe from prying eyes. The application has all of the information needed to download it, it just wants to make darned sure you're sending that audio stream to a hardware sound card and not directly back to the hard disk.
If you remove the mystery of what is happening with the the DRM you have removed the DRM. That's why there isn't open-source DRM. It doesn't work that way.
And what would prevent Napster from negotiating exclusive agreements with labels now? or the iTunes exclusives that have been going around.
Or, for that matter, what would stop independent labels from selling iPod compatible songs in AAC directly, using nothing more than a catalog of indies, a Perl script, and PayPal? What would stop you from buying music for immediate download at Amazon?
This is nothing like it was before. The single-source model of iTunes is more of a hinderance than a help. If everyone had the ability to sell DRM encumbered junk, I could probably get my weird Happy Hardcore fix legally directly from the freaky moonshine.com people. All distributers could sell, directly online, cutting out the middlemen. I wouldn't be surprised if iTunes and the like disappeared in favor of GoogleGrooves.
This would not be like it was before. This would still be a brave new world. Instead of the mega music malls, you would have millions of mom-and-pop shops again, probably with umbrella "shopping.yahoo.com" style structures around them.
Sounds good to me. I don't know if I would want congress forcing the DRM open, though. After all, DRM is inherently insecure. Opening it for everyone is probably the equivalent of breaking it for everyone. But certainly if there was an open standard for DRM, pretty much everyone would benefit.
games.yahoo.com is pretty good, and unless things have changed significantly in the past year most of the site is free.
I've heard things about zone.msn.com also, though I haven't tried it.
Orisinal doesn't have multiple players at once, but they have some of the most original, relaxing games I've ever played.
And, of course, for the hardcore there is the Kiseido Go Server.
There are a lot of game collection sites out there. What is it you're looking for?