To be honest, there really isn't the chance of a used game being unplayable due to scratches if you're going through official channels. EB games, etc, all warranty against scratched-to-hell used copies, and the time it has been an issue they didn't bat an eye. Even when it is a major problem, disk resurfacing is easy and cheap. With digital media, other than booklets there isn't a downside to the secondary market.
They should setup a system that will allow you to re-sell your game for ever decreasing value, but the publisher takes a fixed cut. Say you buy a download game for $50. You could then re-sell the game through 3rd party interfaces, but the publisher takes a fixed $30 cut. It would maintain a price floor, and a publisher incentive, but still give used game owners a reason to get out there and push the titles.
Quite frankly, we're going to have DRM, resource usage, and potential spyware pushed on us anyway. At least with Steam, it's usually just one layer of DRM and spyware. I had an old computer that was brought to it's poor little knees by always-on spy DRM fighting with other versions of always-on spy DRM. It was this poor thousand-dollar computer that lost at least half of its cycles at any given moment to DRM making sure that other DRM wasn't secretly breaking its DRM. And yes, Steam games sometimes do install an additional layer of DRM (which is to be avoided), but at least all of the games that use Steam's DRM won't be competing with eachother, or older versions of itself.
Oh, and download anywhere you're logged in is nice. When my laptop eats its next hard drive, I know all of my Steam titles are a download away.
There are baseline courses that require watching movies, listening to music live, playing games, or other forms of consuming culture.
And If you want to be broadly culturally literate, you do have to do everything. Having people play Portal seems akin to having them read good recent books. I don't know how many titles I'd put on that list, but Portal is definitely one of them. Portal seems like a good choice as it is A: short, B: more puzzle than twitch, C: incredibly rich, D: not a resource hog.
They disabled the lost iPhone 4's functionality remotely. Adding a camera photo is a nice touch, but this isn't anything that hasn't been done on PC's for years.
You can still take pictures of everything in public view, and so can Google. And Google is being nice and taking down their own photos if you ask them to. Maybe they got the photo when your son had his car up on blocks. Maybe they happened to photograph you just as you were doing something embarrassing. Maybe you're being stalked, and don't want someone to recognize your car in the driveway. Maybe you're just paranoid.
Either way, Google is being nice by taking down photographs upon request. This is not a legal requirement, or censorship, or anything like that. Raging against people who ask to have buildings excluded from a commercial map application seems... misplaced somehow.
8. To survive as a species, each zombie has to kill one person before becoming disabled. A person in an average car should be able to disable a dozen zombies before they succumb to hood damage. The zombie numbers dwindle.
What you're describing is true if you have raw access to the metal. On traditional PC systems, DRM is like trying to hide an elephant in the middle of a field of potato chips. You can't hide the elephant, and the potato chips just make a mess. You can see everything. And once you have a solution, it's a little piece of software that anyone can download and run for free. It's dumb.
But on consoles the situation is different. The hacker needs to get to the point of running unsigned code on the system. Once that is in place, hacking is likely. But to do that, they have to probe, and push, and break through in a very time consuming fashion in the dark. It is possible to make chips that resist physical attacks well enough that few people are skilled enough to crack them. And you can setup a system such that once well understood, it takes a significant hardware change to make it work. The goal is not to make it uncrackable, which is impossible, but to make it take much longer to crack and keep fewer people pirating things, so as to keep the ecosystem healthy.
PC game DRM time-to-hacks are measured in hours. Console time-to-hacks for the 360 and PS3 is measured in years. Both of their hacks require some sort of difficult physical thing, that serves as a barrier to piracy for lots of users.
Is it perfect? No. But it can work well enough to prevent PS1 / PC / PSP levels of piracy, and help keep your console ecosystem healthy.
There are twelve 2-party states out there, and some of them are big ones like California and Florida. And calling a two-party state from a one-party state does mean you need to follow the laws of both states.
Check your local rules before you start recording.
Exactly. Cash, in this case, is compared to a stock swap or borrowed money. It just means that they paid out of pocket with their own real money. Ridiculously large stock swaps for acquisitions are normal when a stock is overvalued... it's difficult to "sell high" without falling afoul of insider trading rules, or killing the value of your stock. Stock-based acquisitions are one way to take advantage of the periods when your stock is overvalued. Paying with real money, on the other hand, usually means people are more serious about the valuation of the acquisition.
Re:What to do, oh what to do...
on
Intel Buys McAfee
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
5. Buy Nvidia, and have an on-board graphics card that isn't terrible.
6. Buy AMD. Twice. Getting ATI in the process. Twice.
7. Buy Analog Devices and make a play for the low-powered market.
They offer a name and a suite of companies that is on profitable corporate servers, including SafeBoot and others. Intel is probably betting that they can offer "business CPU" chips for the more intensive "protection" that the suite offers. That way they lock in hardware and software, and can dominate a high-end security market. They also buy a shed full of people who already work with each other, and theoretically understand security.
Intel didn't pay 48 per share for their value. They paid 48 per share for the combined potential. That, or someone on Intel's board owns a lot of McAfee stock.
What? I'm failing to see how some of this is Security through Obscurity. There was a security hole in the other OS that they couldn't think of a way of patching without removing the core functionality, so they removed it. That makes sense from a security standpoint.
They're going through security through security. They patch holes, make improvements, and get better at this whole thing. The PS1 was hackable in 1 wire. The PS2 required an additional circuit board for a mod chip. The PS3 isn't pragmatically hackable in that way, because they improved their security. Now someone found a hole in the USB stack. This will probably be patched too.
When you say security through obscurity, you usually mean "nobody is going to type in 'website.com/passwords' into the server!" The way you're using it, it makes it sound like any DRM even on a closed platform is doomed. And while that is possible, the pragmatic advantages of avoiding PS1-levels of piracy mean that the program has basically been a success.
I'm not convinced all of those people are wallhacking and aimbotting. I've seen some ridiculous playing in-person... People able to see your rate of speed, where you're likely to go, and able to lob a grenade over a wall into your head. There have definitely been people that I would have sworn were botting, but in fact were just wasting their lives.
I feel like FPS games get ruined once people get good enough to just dominate the competition. That's harder to do on consoles due to aiming with the sticks and a generally hightened awareness of newbie friendly gameplay.
As for wallhacks and aimbots: it's possible, but less likely. Consoles are not as easily abstracted or modified as PCs. Running unsigned code is one thing. Decompiling a game compiled for as strange an architecture as the cell, changing certain values, and rebuilding successfully is quite difficult. Doing that in a way that is undetectable when connecting to the network is very, very hard. It's that last step which has foiled people time and time again.
It's 6.5 hours between New York and LA on air. I've made that red-eye about sixty times. That's enough time to finish work at 7, go home, have dinner, go to the airport, have an underpowered nap, arrive at your destination in the morning, have breakfast and lots of coffee, and get to where you're going by 9am. This includes the 3 hour time difference. On a 15 hour journey, to actually have meals on both ends, you'd probably need to leave work early at 3, get dinner and get on the train at 5, depart in New York at 11 (remember, time difference) have lunch and get to your destination at 1 in the afternoon.
I don't know. It still seems like it should be more efficient from a technological standpoint for long distances to ramp up speeds and take to the air. And while we have a wonderfully quaint view of train cars with full restaurants and sleeping amenities, most trains around the world have the same services as airliners. Of course, most of the rest of the world has better airliners than we do too. But soggy sandwiches and chips from the train's freezer isn't exactly James Bond levels of service.
The Acela line, at least between New York and Boston, is about the same speed as taking the bus and ten times more expensive. You do get wifi and no animals. But the technology behind the Acela Express in many ways isn't that different than high-speed trains in the 60's. And we don't really have the infrastructure to support it properly.
The San Francisco bay area, Chicago, and many other cities are the right structure for trains that really cut down on road congestion.
Personally, I feel like the problem is needing that seed... a perfect A-to-B transportation line that allows you to branch out organically. People move in California to be near the BART lines, which allows the BART to grow, which allows people to move to be near the lines, etc. BART cannot cover anywhere near everyone. But the people whose endpoints can be serviced by BART tend to move close to the lines, which allows them to extend, which allows them to reach more endpoints, etc. The LA train tried to service a route... that terrible pass between the valley and the city. But they didn't have enough of specific endpoints for there to be people drawn towards the rail. And without being extensive enough to get people within a mile of their destination, they can't grow organically.
Personally, a high-speed rail (that could compete with the busses) between Boston and New York would be brilliant. As would Boston to Chicago. But of course, there is the rub: being squashed between the cheapness of busses and the speed of airplanes. The Acela between Boston and New York costs ten times a comparable chinatown-to-chinatown bus, but takes just as long. It's just as expensive as flying, yet takes hours more. And, of course, it is currently the only "High-Speed" railway in the US... an embarrassing joke when "high speed" here means 70 miles per hour.
But yes, rail as a solution in the west can work. It's really just a question of identifying if your city has the right intersection of specific destinations, and potential startup ridership (working poor, college students, the elderly, etc). Once you have a genuine seed going, it's much easier to grow it out.
Here's the chunnel's loading procedure. It might be more difficult when you don't have completely pre-determined endpoints, but that doesn't seem insurmountable.
Roadways are entirely paid for through taxes. While I feel that healthy transportation systems take into account many factors (directness, routine travel, occasional travel, one-way and multiway journeys, etc), the subsidy for roadways is simply miles ahead of the subsidy for rail. The Big Dig alone would have run Boston's subway, light-rail, and bus system for 10 years. The Massachusetts Highway Division spent over a billion dollars last year. While numbers for local road maintenance are hard to come by, clearly that number should be even higher.
If land costs are high, a well-thought-out rail system is a better use of those resources. Can you imagine New York traffic if all of those rail-riders were in cars? Even getting into Boston is a nightmare if you're not on the rail. Funds spent on getting commuters onto rail traffic reduces the need to buy more land for road-based commuters at exhorbitant Boston land rate costs. Of course, LA's rail system just goes to prove that you need a well-thought-out rail system, or it will sit by uselessly. It seems like the people there forgot why cars do so well in non-deterministic destination scenarios.
Please, snipe away between urban and rural dwellings. I've lived in both, and can see why people love both (I have no idea why people love the suburbs, though). But the rail-vs-road argument always seems to forget that we entirely subsidize road construction and maintenance, yet we expect rail lines to be entirely self-funding. A more fair comparison would be to have the physical tracks, land, and stations paid for through taxes, and the trains covered by fares. Or take the expected riderships, the cost of road construction and maintenance those people would represent, and apply that towards the cost of the rail system. Is the rail cheaper overall as than people buying cars on loans and their share of road construction?
Chrome has actually had quite a bit of movement on the plug-in front since December. AdBlock, for example, is now on Chrome. The functionality of NoScript, further, can be enabled / disabled / exceptions added under Options -> Under The Hood -> Content Settings -> Javascript.
Personally, I've been surprised. A lot of major Firefox extensions have been ported over to Chrome recently. While it seems like the target platform for most is still Firefox, with Chrome getting the port, lots of people seem to be porting a lot of things.
Most people on Slashdot are in the US or Europe. Fixing Russia's educational system or culture is not our problem. People in the US and Europe who genuinely believe that hurricanes are caused by god's hatred of gay people, or that 9-11 was a conservative conspiracy to kill liberals, is our problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget "and reduce collateral damages."
Because, of course "lives" only refers to our lives. "Their" lives are "collateral damages."
To be honest, there really isn't the chance of a used game being unplayable due to scratches if you're going through official channels. EB games, etc, all warranty against scratched-to-hell used copies, and the time it has been an issue they didn't bat an eye. Even when it is a major problem, disk resurfacing is easy and cheap. With digital media, other than booklets there isn't a downside to the secondary market.
They should setup a system that will allow you to re-sell your game for ever decreasing value, but the publisher takes a fixed cut. Say you buy a download game for $50. You could then re-sell the game through 3rd party interfaces, but the publisher takes a fixed $30 cut. It would maintain a price floor, and a publisher incentive, but still give used game owners a reason to get out there and push the titles.
Quite frankly, we're going to have DRM, resource usage, and potential spyware pushed on us anyway. At least with Steam, it's usually just one layer of DRM and spyware. I had an old computer that was brought to it's poor little knees by always-on spy DRM fighting with other versions of always-on spy DRM. It was this poor thousand-dollar computer that lost at least half of its cycles at any given moment to DRM making sure that other DRM wasn't secretly breaking its DRM. And yes, Steam games sometimes do install an additional layer of DRM (which is to be avoided), but at least all of the games that use Steam's DRM won't be competing with eachother, or older versions of itself.
Oh, and download anywhere you're logged in is nice. When my laptop eats its next hard drive, I know all of my Steam titles are a download away.
There are baseline courses that require watching movies, listening to music live, playing games, or other forms of consuming culture.
And If you want to be broadly culturally literate, you do have to do everything. Having people play Portal seems akin to having them read good recent books. I don't know how many titles I'd put on that list, but Portal is definitely one of them. Portal seems like a good choice as it is A: short, B: more puzzle than twitch, C: incredibly rich, D: not a resource hog.
They disabled the lost iPhone 4's functionality remotely. Adding a camera photo is a nice touch, but this isn't anything that hasn't been done on PC's for years.
You can still take pictures of everything in public view, and so can Google. And Google is being nice and taking down their own photos if you ask them to. Maybe they got the photo when your son had his car up on blocks. Maybe they happened to photograph you just as you were doing something embarrassing. Maybe you're being stalked, and don't want someone to recognize your car in the driveway. Maybe you're just paranoid.
Either way, Google is being nice by taking down photographs upon request. This is not a legal requirement, or censorship, or anything like that. Raging against people who ask to have buildings excluded from a commercial map application seems... misplaced somehow.
8. To survive as a species, each zombie has to kill one person before becoming disabled. A person in an average car should be able to disable a dozen zombies before they succumb to hood damage. The zombie numbers dwindle.
What you're describing is true if you have raw access to the metal. On traditional PC systems, DRM is like trying to hide an elephant in the middle of a field of potato chips. You can't hide the elephant, and the potato chips just make a mess. You can see everything. And once you have a solution, it's a little piece of software that anyone can download and run for free. It's dumb.
But on consoles the situation is different. The hacker needs to get to the point of running unsigned code on the system. Once that is in place, hacking is likely. But to do that, they have to probe, and push, and break through in a very time consuming fashion in the dark. It is possible to make chips that resist physical attacks well enough that few people are skilled enough to crack them. And you can setup a system such that once well understood, it takes a significant hardware change to make it work. The goal is not to make it uncrackable, which is impossible, but to make it take much longer to crack and keep fewer people pirating things, so as to keep the ecosystem healthy.
PC game DRM time-to-hacks are measured in hours. Console time-to-hacks for the 360 and PS3 is measured in years. Both of their hacks require some sort of difficult physical thing, that serves as a barrier to piracy for lots of users.
Is it perfect? No. But it can work well enough to prevent PS1 / PC / PSP levels of piracy, and help keep your console ecosystem healthy.
There are twelve 2-party states out there, and some of them are big ones like California and Florida. And calling a two-party state from a one-party state does mean you need to follow the laws of both states.
Check your local rules before you start recording.
Exactly. Cash, in this case, is compared to a stock swap or borrowed money. It just means that they paid out of pocket with their own real money. Ridiculously large stock swaps for acquisitions are normal when a stock is overvalued... it's difficult to "sell high" without falling afoul of insider trading rules, or killing the value of your stock. Stock-based acquisitions are one way to take advantage of the periods when your stock is overvalued. Paying with real money, on the other hand, usually means people are more serious about the valuation of the acquisition.
5. Buy Nvidia, and have an on-board graphics card that isn't terrible.
6. Buy AMD. Twice. Getting ATI in the process. Twice.
7. Buy Analog Devices and make a play for the low-powered market.
8. Actually bring Canoe Lake to market.
9. Send everyone in the United States two stuffed Intel Bunnies.
They offer a name and a suite of companies that is on profitable corporate servers, including SafeBoot and others. Intel is probably betting that they can offer "business CPU" chips for the more intensive "protection" that the suite offers. That way they lock in hardware and software, and can dominate a high-end security market. They also buy a shed full of people who already work with each other, and theoretically understand security.
Intel didn't pay 48 per share for their value. They paid 48 per share for the combined potential. That, or someone on Intel's board owns a lot of McAfee stock.
But McAfee has given so many people so much incentive to upgrade to faster processors.
What? I'm failing to see how some of this is Security through Obscurity. There was a security hole in the other OS that they couldn't think of a way of patching without removing the core functionality, so they removed it. That makes sense from a security standpoint.
They're going through security through security. They patch holes, make improvements, and get better at this whole thing. The PS1 was hackable in 1 wire. The PS2 required an additional circuit board for a mod chip. The PS3 isn't pragmatically hackable in that way, because they improved their security. Now someone found a hole in the USB stack. This will probably be patched too.
When you say security through obscurity, you usually mean "nobody is going to type in 'website.com/passwords' into the server!" The way you're using it, it makes it sound like any DRM even on a closed platform is doomed. And while that is possible, the pragmatic advantages of avoiding PS1-levels of piracy mean that the program has basically been a success.
I'm not convinced all of those people are wallhacking and aimbotting. I've seen some ridiculous playing in-person... People able to see your rate of speed, where you're likely to go, and able to lob a grenade over a wall into your head. There have definitely been people that I would have sworn were botting, but in fact were just wasting their lives.
I feel like FPS games get ruined once people get good enough to just dominate the competition. That's harder to do on consoles due to aiming with the sticks and a generally hightened awareness of newbie friendly gameplay.
As for wallhacks and aimbots: it's possible, but less likely. Consoles are not as easily abstracted or modified as PCs. Running unsigned code is one thing. Decompiling a game compiled for as strange an architecture as the cell, changing certain values, and rebuilding successfully is quite difficult. Doing that in a way that is undetectable when connecting to the network is very, very hard. It's that last step which has foiled people time and time again.
It's 6.5 hours between New York and LA on air. I've made that red-eye about sixty times. That's enough time to finish work at 7, go home, have dinner, go to the airport, have an underpowered nap, arrive at your destination in the morning, have breakfast and lots of coffee, and get to where you're going by 9am. This includes the 3 hour time difference. On a 15 hour journey, to actually have meals on both ends, you'd probably need to leave work early at 3, get dinner and get on the train at 5, depart in New York at 11 (remember, time difference) have lunch and get to your destination at 1 in the afternoon.
I don't know. It still seems like it should be more efficient from a technological standpoint for long distances to ramp up speeds and take to the air. And while we have a wonderfully quaint view of train cars with full restaurants and sleeping amenities, most trains around the world have the same services as airliners. Of course, most of the rest of the world has better airliners than we do too. But soggy sandwiches and chips from the train's freezer isn't exactly James Bond levels of service.
The Acela line, at least between New York and Boston, is about the same speed as taking the bus and ten times more expensive. You do get wifi and no animals. But the technology behind the Acela Express in many ways isn't that different than high-speed trains in the 60's. And we don't really have the infrastructure to support it properly.
We can do better.
Do you honestly think 'b..b..but terrorists' is any sort of intellectually valid answer to questions of national transport projects?
Within which country is the question being asked?
The San Francisco bay area, Chicago, and many other cities are the right structure for trains that really cut down on road congestion.
Personally, I feel like the problem is needing that seed... a perfect A-to-B transportation line that allows you to branch out organically. People move in California to be near the BART lines, which allows the BART to grow, which allows people to move to be near the lines, etc. BART cannot cover anywhere near everyone. But the people whose endpoints can be serviced by BART tend to move close to the lines, which allows them to extend, which allows them to reach more endpoints, etc. The LA train tried to service a route... that terrible pass between the valley and the city. But they didn't have enough of specific endpoints for there to be people drawn towards the rail. And without being extensive enough to get people within a mile of their destination, they can't grow organically.
Personally, a high-speed rail (that could compete with the busses) between Boston and New York would be brilliant. As would Boston to Chicago. But of course, there is the rub: being squashed between the cheapness of busses and the speed of airplanes. The Acela between Boston and New York costs ten times a comparable chinatown-to-chinatown bus, but takes just as long. It's just as expensive as flying, yet takes hours more. And, of course, it is currently the only "High-Speed" railway in the US... an embarrassing joke when "high speed" here means 70 miles per hour.
But yes, rail as a solution in the west can work. It's really just a question of identifying if your city has the right intersection of specific destinations, and potential startup ridership (working poor, college students, the elderly, etc). Once you have a genuine seed going, it's much easier to grow it out.
Here's the chunnel's loading procedure. It might be more difficult when you don't have completely pre-determined endpoints, but that doesn't seem insurmountable.
Roadways are entirely paid for through taxes. While I feel that healthy transportation systems take into account many factors (directness, routine travel, occasional travel, one-way and multiway journeys, etc), the subsidy for roadways is simply miles ahead of the subsidy for rail. The Big Dig alone would have run Boston's subway, light-rail, and bus system for 10 years. The Massachusetts Highway Division spent over a billion dollars last year. While numbers for local road maintenance are hard to come by, clearly that number should be even higher.
If land costs are high, a well-thought-out rail system is a better use of those resources. Can you imagine New York traffic if all of those rail-riders were in cars? Even getting into Boston is a nightmare if you're not on the rail. Funds spent on getting commuters onto rail traffic reduces the need to buy more land for road-based commuters at exhorbitant Boston land rate costs. Of course, LA's rail system just goes to prove that you need a well-thought-out rail system, or it will sit by uselessly. It seems like the people there forgot why cars do so well in non-deterministic destination scenarios.
Please, snipe away between urban and rural dwellings. I've lived in both, and can see why people love both (I have no idea why people love the suburbs, though). But the rail-vs-road argument always seems to forget that we entirely subsidize road construction and maintenance, yet we expect rail lines to be entirely self-funding. A more fair comparison would be to have the physical tracks, land, and stations paid for through taxes, and the trains covered by fares. Or take the expected riderships, the cost of road construction and maintenance those people would represent, and apply that towards the cost of the rail system. Is the rail cheaper overall as than people buying cars on loans and their share of road construction?
Sorry. I didn't call out California either, and they have more people than you.
Also, Canada hasn't done much that's really, really stupid since the tax on blank CD's. Your education system seems to be mostly working.
Chrome has actually had quite a bit of movement on the plug-in front since December. AdBlock, for example, is now on Chrome. The functionality of NoScript, further, can be enabled / disabled / exceptions added under Options -> Under The Hood -> Content Settings -> Javascript.
Personally, I've been surprised. A lot of major Firefox extensions have been ported over to Chrome recently. While it seems like the target platform for most is still Firefox, with Chrome getting the port, lots of people seem to be porting a lot of things.
"So, Conspiracy Theories are /. Worthy Now?"
Have you been reading the same Slashdot as the rest of us? I'm just glad when the article links don't go to YouTube videos of drunk squirrels.
Most people on Slashdot are in the US or Europe. Fixing Russia's educational system or culture is not our problem. People in the US and Europe who genuinely believe that hurricanes are caused by god's hatred of gay people, or that 9-11 was a conservative conspiracy to kill liberals, is our problem.