The era of the geek driving computer development is dead: people want easy to use features, and Apple is giving it to them. The era of clock speed, bus speed and VRAM capacity being important for selling computers is over as well.
You're cra [no I don't want to update Java] zy. The modern des [Fine, update Acrobat] ktop and laptop computer is basically per [shuddap Norton] fect for users. There [Yes, allow Acrobat to change this computer] really isn't any way th [What? So what if the HP driver crashed? I'm not printing] e modern computer system could [What do you mean the system needs to restart in 10 seconds?] be any
The Gizmodo article on the wrong ways to make a tablet makes me sad. Most of the complaints about downsizing laptop OS's to work as tablets stem from all of the awful problems that are inherent in modern computing UI's. Norton antivirus popping up every 5 seconds and asking to update. Background applications constantly demanding attention. Crashing processes. Slow and clunky boot-up and shutdown. All of these things are huge limitations of modern desktops that we shouldn't have to put up with by now.
Courier wasn't just going to be the iPad killer. It was going to be a computing OS that wasn't the hideous bloatware that we've come to know and hate.
As a gopher user in the early 90's, my impression was that the web behaved like gopher, but with a working mouse and actual visuals. Gopher was essentially a way of networking old BBS's together. The web was like that too, but with actual visuals, real page layout, and ugly backgrounds.
I seriously doubt Gopher would have caught on to the same degree, any more than command-line interfaces being prevented from reaching their full potential by crafty GUI licensing. Gopher just didn't go far enough for the average person to find it usable. The web did. Any extensions to the gopher standard to make it achieve the same degree of usability would have to effectively re-write the whole thing to be HTTP.
Not to defend a nanny law or anything, but they're not banning *selling* toys in fast food resturants. What they're doing is decoupling sales of unhealthy food from sales of toys and other attractants. Let's say your happy meal costs 3 dollars. Some of that cost is coming from the food, and some is coming from the toy. The fast food restaurant puts them together because they know kids really want the toy, and while the parents won't randomly buy them a toy they do have to buy them dinner. The toy is a tool to manipulate parents to buying their kids this food.
The county says that within their borders, they don't want that toy to be used as a lever to get parents to buy the whole package. Sell them separately. Or just sell the happy meal without the toy. If the parent wants to get them the food, that's fine. If the parent wants to get them the toy, that's fine. But no forcing the parent to buy their kid unhealthy food just to get them to shut up about a toy. The parent can choose what parts they want to buy. Or the restaurants will decide they don't really want to be in the market of selling toys. That is their choice.
There are other areas where it is in the public interest to decouple unrelated services or products from eachother. Toys and Food are not related to eachother, and doing so in this way is a form of heavy handed market manipulation. I hate nanny rules, and California has made me face plant more and more often these days. But forcing restaurants to sell food on the value of the food, and toys on the value of the toy, actually kind of makes sense. I'm glad someone is experimenting in this area, and I look forward to seeing (from the east coast) how it turns out.
Implemented right, it should be possible to detach the Xbox 360 users from the original Xbox 1 group, with a few problems about the Xbox 1 users that connect through Xbox 360s. There might be issues around maintaining user accounts, banning accounts for bad behavior, etc.
I suspect the Live servers were not built with that in mind, which increases the technological complications significantly. One of the reasons why you do major upgrade versions that remove backwards compatibility is because the old version was lacking in things that would support compatibility.
Xbox Live is huge. There are game rankings databases, gamer score databases, matchmaking servers. Players have friends lists, gamer cards, dynamic updates of status based upon what they're doing in game. Voice chat. An e-mail system. Downloadable content, and DLC signing. Player avatars, gamerpictures, and other persistent online identifications. Game invites. Downloadable and streaming videos. Sign-on persistence. There is tracking for how people rate other people, and whether to pair them up or not. Game patch management. There are chat and voice parties. And that's before you get to whatever they hacked in to support Neflix, the Zune store, their advertising, 100 vs 1, last.fm, EA's proprietary sports system, etc. It's a giant system, and with enough parts that branching it might be a huge PITA. It would probably be cheaper to just rewrite Halo 2 to work on the 360. And it would be much less risky to the security of the system and stability of the rest of the library of the titles.
Considering Microsoft has talked about this change for over 2 years now, and specifically talked about holding off on it for the Halo 2 players out there, I can't imagine this is to push people to buy more games. In all of their communications and actions, Microsoft has held the Halo community as one of their golden, shining successes. And remember, this is Microsoft Games, which for all intents and purposes is a completely separate entity from the monopolistic software giant. If they were specifically trying to force people to buy newer versions of the game, they would have shut off the PC multiplayer servers too (which use a different system). This seems very targeted.
I don't know. Games I've worked on have had their online servers cut off because nobody was playing them. Servers go dark for a variety of reasons. Removing the Xbox 1 servers for upgrades that users have been screaming for (More than 50 friends!) after years of talking about it seems completely reasonable. There are other ways that people can get their Halo 2 online fix.
Good Memory! There is Phantasmagoria (early 90's) and Custer's Last Stand (early 80's). There is also a rather disturbing underground MMO called SocialoTron, that makes me fear for humanity.
The messed-up asian Hentai games like RapeLay haven't really seen a US release, certainly not a retail one, so they don't really count. The aforementioned MMO also isn't retail, though it has a US release.
In games in the west, any sex at all is considered controversial. Mass Effect's sex scene was probably the most visceral sex scene in modern gaming. Which is to say, it didn't show any bits, or any penetration, or really anything that couldn't be shown on post 9PM television. It was also incredibly controversial, and drew out a media firestorm. God of War, a game where you attempt to evicerate gods one at a time with giant claw-hooks of death, had their one sex scene off-camera. Grand Theft Auto, famed poster boy for how gaming is destroying all societal values, had their sex off camera. Source-of-all-evil posterboy Pyramid Head from Silent Hill gets as far as dry humping some mannequins through his clothes. Heck, Gologo 13 the NES title contained the incredibly controversial cut scene where two people hugged, then a curtain in their apartment closed.
There were a couple of bad sex-based games that pornographers experimented with in the financial boom at the end of the 90's. None of them went anywhere, as they were considered poison.
Sex really doesn't exist in games. There is some underdressed female protagonists, and some games have mechanics where people have children. But sex proper is basically verboten. Rape? In games? You'd have to admit that people have sex first, and that is still taboo.
Why would you bother setting up a firewall server when you have two routers that act as firewalls and the firewall on your local computer?
For that matter, what advantage is there to a caching DNS server over another provider? Windows seems to cache DNS requests locally, and I'm guessing OSX is the same.
I have my primary DNS set to my ISP's dns so that they can interrupt surfing to provide updates on service. In other words, when I'm getting cut off for being late with the check, I'd rather they tell me that's why it's going down, rather than wondering if it is just another system outage.
According to MS, the reason why certain upgrades to Xbox Live have not been possible was the continued support for Xbox 1 online titles, as they all live within the same server system. They learned a lot about flexible implementations after the original xbox, and put most of the live features within the console's system HUD. But Xbox 1 titles all have the code within the game itself, that limits their options.
Walling off a separate Xbox 1 doesn't seem like a viable solution if everything is hardwired (and probably cobbled together with string).
6 years and two sequels after it launched... that doesn't sound too short.
Please investigate the situations of individual titles before suggesting blanket solutions.
Halo 2 is being end-of-lifed in no small part because it relies on an outmoded Xbox 1 Live server ecosystem. This has limited the Xbox 360 to a specific number of friends on their friends list, older types of interactions with people online, etc. There are a lot of people asking for upgrades to the Xbox that have been blocked for this one particular game, which Microsoft has kept alive for 4 years after the original console (that didn't sell that well anyway) went away.
All of this relies upon Xbox Live. The game expects friend requests, chat requests, server pings, score update connections, DLC purchases, etc. All of these things are signed and protected to prevent A: online cheating, B: griefers, C: penis spam. Further, they have legal commitments to their partners to keep Xbox Live a secure system. This doesn't apply to most individual PC titles, as they are essentially standalone.
For Microsoft to release official software that allowed people to play Xbox 1 games like Halo 2 online, they'd have to release large chunks of Xbox Live. Then they'd need to do things like strip out any dedicated IP's, Oracle database calls, other copyrighted code, etc that might be floating around in there. What would people get? An impenetrable mess that, at best, would still require a fake NAT and a server farm to work.
Halo 2 fans, currently by comparison, can use SSH tunneling to create a fake LAN, and enjoy the game that way. This is a much more sane solution.
Tangent: Hardly any retail games in the US contain passing references to rape at all. I challenge you to list even 3. Illicit drug use is somewhat more heavily referenced, but hard to pull off in terms of actual player usage. See Heavy Rain's excellent and horrifying withdrawal sequences.
On topic: The name of the app is "puff puff pass" and features "phat beats." That's no more relating to legal substances than "The Little Black Book" app was about celibacy. This is clear glorification of smoking pot. Even taken at full face value, glorifying an age-locked activity the causes cancer runs directly counter to the "family safe" rulings at the core of this mess.
None of this is to say that I personally believe the app should be banned. But rather, this being approved is a symptom of how broken the app store approval process has become. And how desperately in need of revision the whole process is.
Apple just banned wifi-searching and network tools apps from the app store. They approved a large number of non-nude adult apps before turning around and banning them later. They ban political parody apps, including one where you could have Obama jumping on a trampoline to collect votes. They ban apps that "duplicate functionality" of stuff that Apple hasn't announced or released, and that the app creator has no way of knowing exists. They just banned 3rd party code translation frameworks. This was intended to ban Flash-based applications. It accidentally also bans all unity-based games, as well as many, many others. Apple appears to be giving those a wink and a nudge at the moment, but who knows. Apple has simply not responded to applications submitted to the app store, keeping them in limbo indefinitely with no comment as to why. The app store approval process itself is prone to random and embarassing gaffes, including denying a particular Tweetie update because a trending topic that day happened to be a dirty one. They denied a bookreading frontend that hooked up to Project Gutenberg because Project Gutenberg (amongst hundreds of thousands of books) includes the Kama Sutra. They banned a Nine Inch Nails app because it linked to an adult Nine Inch Nails song in iTunes. And unlike console (or other sane) development, there is no way to contact Apple ahead of time and get concept approval or a list of what might be wrong. You have to go ahead and invest the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in development, then pray that Apple doesn't decide to reject the app or leave it hanging in limbo.
They banned wifi-stumbling apps. They banned an LCD buyer's guide. They banned Leisure Suit Larry. They banned Seikai-Camera, a GPS photography tool. They banned a Pulitzer prize-winning satyrist, then caved to public pressure and approved him but remain continue banning everyone else. They banned 3G video streaming, which wasn't against their rules at all. They banned the South Park app, for having exactly the sort of content that they give valuable promotional space in iTunes to South Park episodes. They banned a British newspaper app for the sort of nudity you find in British newspapers.
The last few games I've worked on have had budgets of 10 - 20 million dollars. Can you imagine how terrible it would be if we developed all of that for the iPhone, only to be told by Apple on the whims of change that zombies are no longer allowed in the app store? Or having the iPhone be a lynchpin of a radical new form of telephony, only to be told that AT&T doesn't like it? This is not consistent enforcement of unpopular rules. This is random enforcement of random and ever-changing rules.
Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and all of the other platform holders that I've worked with have had their approval rules. But they've also been responsive to developer queries. They work closely with developers before, during, and after development to make sure nobody is wasting their time or money. Their rules are locked months before final approval, so that you're not aiming for a moving target. Apple seems to want that level of financial reward for controlling the gateway, but none of the responsibility that a gateway holder needs to take towards their developers.
They need to either open up completely and trust their users to know what an "Adult" rating is, or they need to take some of that 30% they're absconding with and invest it into much better developer feedback systems.
Apple has been taking the "moral high ground" by banning apps with jiggly women, excessive violence, and political satire. They have said that they want to be a family safe zone, and have hurt many developers to become that.
Also, developers are particularly upset about the inconsistent interpretation of Apple's ever-shifting rules. For a while, slightly dirty apps were OK so long as they were wearing underwear, then they were mass banned. Apps have been banned for "duplicating functionality" of Apple applications that hadn't been released or announced at the time of the rejection. They recently banned 3rd party code interpretation tools, due to their years-long war with flash, which has thrown into doubt the state of thousands of popular applications.
At this point, basically everyone except Steve Jobs would like to see Apple stop babysitting their users and actually utilize the ratings system that they implemented. Short of that, they need a degree of consistency that they are nowhere near achieving.
Why not? Say that virgin records produces 2 batches of records. They're both produced side-by-side in the same factory, with the same proper authorization from the same people. Batch 1 is sold in the US for 15 dollars a copy. Batch 2 is sold in Brazil for 5 dollars a copy.
The chain of authority is completely traceable, and perfectly clean. The only difference is whether or not virgin records earmarked a particular piece for sale in one country or another. And that falls to the interpretation of the law, as to whether or not it is illegal to import a legitimately purchased copyrighted work for non-personal use.
Personally I love how the law says it is illegal, then that it isn't, then that if it is isn't legal, it's illegal. I'm sure a lawyer can point to a specific ruling on this point.
I distinctly remember being promised a show-up between 8 - 12 in the morning, so I took half of a day off of work. At 6 PM I got a call saying that they were busy, and would be there tomorrow. I took two full days off work for that damned install.
Another fun day I had my service cut off due to missing a bill. It was only one bill, but it was legitimately my fault (I was out of work and dreading opening the mail). I paid the rate they quoted over the phone, plus a ridiculous re-connection fee, and they sent someone out promptly to reconnect it. Wonder of wonders, 5 days later it is cut off again. Apparently, the rate they quoted me over the phone was just the first bill that had been missed, and didn't include the bill that had been sent out before the phone call. Because I was still "late," they cut me off just days after paying the bill and re-connecting. Wonder of wonders, they charged me another ridiculous re-connection fee again.
Needless to say, I have zero sympathy for Comcast anymore. After a few more episodes like this, we finally canceled our service in disgust....And they forgot to actually shut off the line. For most any other company I would have done the right thing. Comcast? Not a chance.
If FIOS is ostensibly available in our "area," but according to your system not available to our unit, does that mean we should push the owner of the house? Or is it likely a neighborhood by neighborhood buildout question?
It's transparently obvious that real issue here is the abuse scandals. You'll note that they did in fact keep a lid on the whole thing for decades - many current alleged cases of priesthood pedophilia date from the 80's and 90's.
I remember growing up in the 80's and 90's, when pedophile priests were common jokes in everything from sketch comedies to role playing games. Ingrained in my belief system is that priests are potential child abusers.
I think what has changed in a lot of ways isn't the public belief persay, but the ability to have public outcry about it. The internet lets the abused (and simply outraged) organize and get heard.
Or, you could be living a dynamic life with a lot of people, who genuinely have a lot of announcements and things to say. My twitter feed involves the usual blather. But it also has a lot of announcements about gatherings, major life changes, friends looking for apartments or help moving, articles relevant to game developers and fire performers, local police and city alerts, and other interesting nuggets. It's similar to what RSS feeds were supposed to be, but short enough to read and relevant to my local circle of friends and colleagues.
Sure, there is something to be said for privacy. But sometimes that social connectedness is more helpful than independence.
How many animals do we hang by their ankles and slaughter every day?* We have horror movies about treating people the way that we treat other animals. Dolphins and Whales talk to each other. Monkeys have entire societies and tribal warfare. What is to say that a sufficiently advanced civilization won't just dismiss us like we poison prairie dogs, or dispatch us like we killed the wolves?
I'm definitely not vegetarian. If the situation were reversed, I'd bet the cows would be chewing the hell out of us. And if we encounter an alien civilization, it may be.
The phrase "Security through obscurity" implies that you happen to know the weakness of your defenses. This can be in a specific sense ("if the person does X, we're screwed") or a general sense ("well, that code is probably 90% holes"). Stationing a group of 10 well-trained, totally loyal soldiers around an artifact to protect it is not security through obscurity. It is security through more guns. On the other hand, putting the highly valuable artifact in a nondescript box and hiding it in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere is security through obscurity.
The sad thing is that security through obscurity frequently does work in the real-world. See also the transport of the Cullinan Diamond. Heck, the exact formula for specific bits of mass-produced food is considered a trade secret, despite being sold to millions of people every day. This really doesn't translate to the digital realm, though. But executives from other industries have yet to figure this out, and keep putzing along as if it were a viable strategy.
No security method is "secure." The goal of a security method is to make it more dangerous or resource-intensive to break the security than the payoff for doing it would be. An old Subaru Outback locked up in your driveway is probably secure. A new Ferrari locked up in an underground garage with a constant attendant is probably secure. A new Ferrari sitting in your driveway is an awful theft risk.
Say that our society went out and discovered that Mars was an earth-like, habitable planet with primitive life upon it. How would we interact with them?
Chances are, we would see them long before we could actually get there en-masse. Maybe in the 1700's, we would have sensitive enough instruments to see the earth-like surface of the planet. Fast forward 300 years to the year 2K, we can expend a tremendous amount of resources and send a single scouting party over. For 20 or 30 years, the scouting party lives on Mars, gathering data and learning to live on the local climate / floura and fauna. They discover a particular plant that secretes a specific chemical very similar to a highly-expensive cancer drug currently in production on the Earth. A few production ships arrive to harvest the plant and launch the chemical back. A small private science team piggybacks, and finds moe financially rewarding chemicals on the planet. Humanity spreads its fingers, and native life is simply pushed back to the margins. A small shack becomes a 1 mile settlement, becomes a country of it's own. The native plants and animals go from being the dominant form of life on the planet, to living in an ever-shrinking reserve.
And the more sentient animals might wonder why we didn't just make giant tin cans in the sky and live in those. The fact is, though, that making giant tin-cans in the sky is more expensive than finding viable hunks of rock with usable resourses already present. And if those sentient animals fought back, we'd probably just stop them as easily as we'd stop a groundhog invasion of New York City. Technological superiority doesn't mean winning a fight, it means sweeping unwanted elements off of a table. The natives only win in movies.
It really all comes down to value. The value of a cylinder, more or less, is just habitable space. The value of a planet includes large volumes of otherwise rare elements or chemicals, biological materials, etc... all conveniently sitting there for the taking, and all of which would be needed to make cylinders anyway.
Yes, but Dragon's Lair provided an experience that wasn't possible any other way. These days, there is very little that you could do on a server and stream to a computer that you couldn't just do on the local computer. Arguably, On Live could have better graphics than the average machine, but so far they have failed that test. Remember that whatever super-powerful graphics cards OnLive has pretty much has to be devoted 1-to-1 to users playing at peak. Add in servers, streaming, support, administrative overhead, technology tweaks for individual games, negotiations with gaming companies, etc, and the cost savings are probably in favor of the users just buying a graphics card.
See, IPv4 is like a 1/2" tube, and IPv6 is like a 3/4" tube. IPv4 is smaller with a higher pressure, and so works faster, but moves less internet overall. IPv6 is better if you have a higher pressure internet, as it can move a greater volume but only if you support it. Lots of people are trying to squeeze their devices onto the intertubes, so the pressure of all of those electrons is really high. This clogs IPv4, freezes the electrons, and causes the web to burst.
So support IPv6! And don't forget to winterize your internets.
Slashdot Mirror
The era of the geek driving computer development is dead: people want easy to use features, and Apple is giving it to them. The era of clock speed, bus speed and VRAM capacity being important for selling computers is over as well.
You're cra
[no I don't want to update Java]
zy. The modern des
[Fine, update Acrobat]
ktop and laptop computer is basically per
[shuddap Norton]
fect for users. There
[Yes, allow Acrobat to change this computer]
really isn't any way th
[What? So what if the HP driver crashed? I'm not printing]
e modern computer system could
[What do you mean the system needs to restart in 10 seconds?]
be any
The Gizmodo article on the wrong ways to make a tablet makes me sad. Most of the complaints about downsizing laptop OS's to work as tablets stem from all of the awful problems that are inherent in modern computing UI's. Norton antivirus popping up every 5 seconds and asking to update. Background applications constantly demanding attention. Crashing processes. Slow and clunky boot-up and shutdown. All of these things are huge limitations of modern desktops that we shouldn't have to put up with by now.
Courier wasn't just going to be the iPad killer. It was going to be a computing OS that wasn't the hideous bloatware that we've come to know and hate.
As a gopher user in the early 90's, my impression was that the web behaved like gopher, but with a working mouse and actual visuals. Gopher was essentially a way of networking old BBS's together. The web was like that too, but with actual visuals, real page layout, and ugly backgrounds.
I seriously doubt Gopher would have caught on to the same degree, any more than command-line interfaces being prevented from reaching their full potential by crafty GUI licensing. Gopher just didn't go far enough for the average person to find it usable. The web did. Any extensions to the gopher standard to make it achieve the same degree of usability would have to effectively re-write the whole thing to be HTTP.
Domestic roaming is included in most 3G plans.
International roaming, of course, is a complete racket.
Not to defend a nanny law or anything, but they're not banning *selling* toys in fast food resturants. What they're doing is decoupling sales of unhealthy food from sales of toys and other attractants. Let's say your happy meal costs 3 dollars. Some of that cost is coming from the food, and some is coming from the toy. The fast food restaurant puts them together because they know kids really want the toy, and while the parents won't randomly buy them a toy they do have to buy them dinner. The toy is a tool to manipulate parents to buying their kids this food.
The county says that within their borders, they don't want that toy to be used as a lever to get parents to buy the whole package. Sell them separately. Or just sell the happy meal without the toy. If the parent wants to get them the food, that's fine. If the parent wants to get them the toy, that's fine. But no forcing the parent to buy their kid unhealthy food just to get them to shut up about a toy. The parent can choose what parts they want to buy. Or the restaurants will decide they don't really want to be in the market of selling toys. That is their choice.
There are other areas where it is in the public interest to decouple unrelated services or products from eachother. Toys and Food are not related to eachother, and doing so in this way is a form of heavy handed market manipulation. I hate nanny rules, and California has made me face plant more and more often these days. But forcing restaurants to sell food on the value of the food, and toys on the value of the toy, actually kind of makes sense. I'm glad someone is experimenting in this area, and I look forward to seeing (from the east coast) how it turns out.
Implemented right, it should be possible to detach the Xbox 360 users from the original Xbox 1 group, with a few problems about the Xbox 1 users that connect through Xbox 360s. There might be issues around maintaining user accounts, banning accounts for bad behavior, etc.
I suspect the Live servers were not built with that in mind, which increases the technological complications significantly. One of the reasons why you do major upgrade versions that remove backwards compatibility is because the old version was lacking in things that would support compatibility.
Xbox Live is huge. There are game rankings databases, gamer score databases, matchmaking servers. Players have friends lists, gamer cards, dynamic updates of status based upon what they're doing in game. Voice chat. An e-mail system. Downloadable content, and DLC signing. Player avatars, gamerpictures, and other persistent online identifications. Game invites. Downloadable and streaming videos. Sign-on persistence. There is tracking for how people rate other people, and whether to pair them up or not. Game patch management. There are chat and voice parties. And that's before you get to whatever they hacked in to support Neflix, the Zune store, their advertising, 100 vs 1, last.fm, EA's proprietary sports system, etc. It's a giant system, and with enough parts that branching it might be a huge PITA. It would probably be cheaper to just rewrite Halo 2 to work on the 360. And it would be much less risky to the security of the system and stability of the rest of the library of the titles.
Considering Microsoft has talked about this change for over 2 years now, and specifically talked about holding off on it for the Halo 2 players out there, I can't imagine this is to push people to buy more games. In all of their communications and actions, Microsoft has held the Halo community as one of their golden, shining successes. And remember, this is Microsoft Games, which for all intents and purposes is a completely separate entity from the monopolistic software giant. If they were specifically trying to force people to buy newer versions of the game, they would have shut off the PC multiplayer servers too (which use a different system). This seems very targeted.
I don't know. Games I've worked on have had their online servers cut off because nobody was playing them. Servers go dark for a variety of reasons. Removing the Xbox 1 servers for upgrades that users have been screaming for (More than 50 friends!) after years of talking about it seems completely reasonable. There are other ways that people can get their Halo 2 online fix.
Good Memory! There is Phantasmagoria (early 90's) and Custer's Last Stand (early 80's). There is also a rather disturbing underground MMO called SocialoTron, that makes me fear for humanity.
The messed-up asian Hentai games like RapeLay haven't really seen a US release, certainly not a retail one, so they don't really count. The aforementioned MMO also isn't retail, though it has a US release.
In games in the west, any sex at all is considered controversial. Mass Effect's sex scene was probably the most visceral sex scene in modern gaming. Which is to say, it didn't show any bits, or any penetration, or really anything that couldn't be shown on post 9PM television. It was also incredibly controversial, and drew out a media firestorm. God of War, a game where you attempt to evicerate gods one at a time with giant claw-hooks of death, had their one sex scene off-camera. Grand Theft Auto, famed poster boy for how gaming is destroying all societal values, had their sex off camera. Source-of-all-evil posterboy Pyramid Head from Silent Hill gets as far as dry humping some mannequins through his clothes. Heck, Gologo 13 the NES title contained the incredibly controversial cut scene where two people hugged, then a curtain in their apartment closed.
There were a couple of bad sex-based games that pornographers experimented with in the financial boom at the end of the 90's. None of them went anywhere, as they were considered poison.
Sex really doesn't exist in games. There is some underdressed female protagonists, and some games have mechanics where people have children. But sex proper is basically verboten. Rape? In games? You'd have to admit that people have sex first, and that is still taboo.
Why would you bother setting up a firewall server when you have two routers that act as firewalls and the firewall on your local computer?
For that matter, what advantage is there to a caching DNS server over another provider? Windows seems to cache DNS requests locally, and I'm guessing OSX is the same.
I have my primary DNS set to my ISP's dns so that they can interrupt surfing to provide updates on service. In other words, when I'm getting cut off for being late with the check, I'd rather they tell me that's why it's going down, rather than wondering if it is just another system outage.
According to MS, the reason why certain upgrades to Xbox Live have not been possible was the continued support for Xbox 1 online titles, as they all live within the same server system. They learned a lot about flexible implementations after the original xbox, and put most of the live features within the console's system HUD. But Xbox 1 titles all have the code within the game itself, that limits their options.
Walling off a separate Xbox 1 doesn't seem like a viable solution if everything is hardwired (and probably cobbled together with string).
6 years and two sequels after it launched... that doesn't sound too short.
Please investigate the situations of individual titles before suggesting blanket solutions.
Halo 2 is being end-of-lifed in no small part because it relies on an outmoded Xbox 1 Live server ecosystem. This has limited the Xbox 360 to a specific number of friends on their friends list, older types of interactions with people online, etc. There are a lot of people asking for upgrades to the Xbox that have been blocked for this one particular game, which Microsoft has kept alive for 4 years after the original console (that didn't sell that well anyway) went away.
All of this relies upon Xbox Live. The game expects friend requests, chat requests, server pings, score update connections, DLC purchases, etc. All of these things are signed and protected to prevent A: online cheating, B: griefers, C: penis spam. Further, they have legal commitments to their partners to keep Xbox Live a secure system. This doesn't apply to most individual PC titles, as they are essentially standalone.
For Microsoft to release official software that allowed people to play Xbox 1 games like Halo 2 online, they'd have to release large chunks of Xbox Live. Then they'd need to do things like strip out any dedicated IP's, Oracle database calls, other copyrighted code, etc that might be floating around in there. What would people get? An impenetrable mess that, at best, would still require a fake NAT and a server farm to work.
Halo 2 fans, currently by comparison, can use SSH tunneling to create a fake LAN, and enjoy the game that way. This is a much more sane solution.
Tangent: Hardly any retail games in the US contain passing references to rape at all. I challenge you to list even 3. Illicit drug use is somewhat more heavily referenced, but hard to pull off in terms of actual player usage. See Heavy Rain's excellent and horrifying withdrawal sequences.
On topic: The name of the app is "puff puff pass" and features "phat beats." That's no more relating to legal substances than "The Little Black Book" app was about celibacy. This is clear glorification of smoking pot. Even taken at full face value, glorifying an age-locked activity the causes cancer runs directly counter to the "family safe" rulings at the core of this mess.
None of this is to say that I personally believe the app should be banned. But rather, this being approved is a symptom of how broken the app store approval process has become. And how desperately in need of revision the whole process is.
Apple just banned wifi-searching and network tools apps from the app store.
They approved a large number of non-nude adult apps before turning around and banning them later.
They ban political parody apps, including one where you could have Obama jumping on a trampoline to collect votes.
They ban apps that "duplicate functionality" of stuff that Apple hasn't announced or released, and that the app creator has no way of knowing exists.
They just banned 3rd party code translation frameworks. This was intended to ban Flash-based applications. It accidentally also bans all unity-based games, as well as many, many others. Apple appears to be giving those a wink and a nudge at the moment, but who knows.
Apple has simply not responded to applications submitted to the app store, keeping them in limbo indefinitely with no comment as to why.
The app store approval process itself is prone to random and embarassing gaffes, including denying a particular Tweetie update because a trending topic that day happened to be a dirty one. They denied a bookreading frontend that hooked up to Project Gutenberg because Project Gutenberg (amongst hundreds of thousands of books) includes the Kama Sutra. They banned a Nine Inch Nails app because it linked to an adult Nine Inch Nails song in iTunes.
And unlike console (or other sane) development, there is no way to contact Apple ahead of time and get concept approval or a list of what might be wrong. You have to go ahead and invest the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in development, then pray that Apple doesn't decide to reject the app or leave it hanging in limbo.
They banned wifi-stumbling apps. They banned an LCD buyer's guide. They banned Leisure Suit Larry. They banned Seikai-Camera, a GPS photography tool. They banned a Pulitzer prize-winning satyrist, then caved to public pressure and approved him but remain continue banning everyone else. They banned 3G video streaming, which wasn't against their rules at all. They banned the South Park app, for having exactly the sort of content that they give valuable promotional space in iTunes to South Park episodes. They banned a British newspaper app for the sort of nudity you find in British newspapers.
The last few games I've worked on have had budgets of 10 - 20 million dollars. Can you imagine how terrible it would be if we developed all of that for the iPhone, only to be told by Apple on the whims of change that zombies are no longer allowed in the app store? Or having the iPhone be a lynchpin of a radical new form of telephony, only to be told that AT&T doesn't like it? This is not consistent enforcement of unpopular rules. This is random enforcement of random and ever-changing rules.
Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and all of the other platform holders that I've worked with have had their approval rules. But they've also been responsive to developer queries. They work closely with developers before, during, and after development to make sure nobody is wasting their time or money. Their rules are locked months before final approval, so that you're not aiming for a moving target. Apple seems to want that level of financial reward for controlling the gateway, but none of the responsibility that a gateway holder needs to take towards their developers.
They need to either open up completely and trust their users to know what an "Adult" rating is, or they need to take some of that 30% they're absconding with and invest it into much better developer feedback systems.
Apple has been taking the "moral high ground" by banning apps with jiggly women, excessive violence, and political satire. They have said that they want to be a family safe zone, and have hurt many developers to become that.
Also, developers are particularly upset about the inconsistent interpretation of Apple's ever-shifting rules. For a while, slightly dirty apps were OK so long as they were wearing underwear, then they were mass banned. Apps have been banned for "duplicating functionality" of Apple applications that hadn't been released or announced at the time of the rejection. They recently banned 3rd party code interpretation tools, due to their years-long war with flash, which has thrown into doubt the state of thousands of popular applications.
At this point, basically everyone except Steve Jobs would like to see Apple stop babysitting their users and actually utilize the ratings system that they implemented. Short of that, they need a degree of consistency that they are nowhere near achieving.
Why not? Say that virgin records produces 2 batches of records. They're both produced side-by-side in the same factory, with the same proper authorization from the same people. Batch 1 is sold in the US for 15 dollars a copy. Batch 2 is sold in Brazil for 5 dollars a copy.
The chain of authority is completely traceable, and perfectly clean. The only difference is whether or not virgin records earmarked a particular piece for sale in one country or another. And that falls to the interpretation of the law, as to whether or not it is illegal to import a legitimately purchased copyrighted work for non-personal use.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000602----000-.html
Personally I love how the law says it is illegal, then that it isn't, then that if it is isn't legal, it's illegal. I'm sure a lawyer can point to a specific ruling on this point.
I distinctly remember being promised a show-up between 8 - 12 in the morning, so I took half of a day off of work. At 6 PM I got a call saying that they were busy, and would be there tomorrow. I took two full days off work for that damned install.
Another fun day I had my service cut off due to missing a bill. It was only one bill, but it was legitimately my fault (I was out of work and dreading opening the mail). I paid the rate they quoted over the phone, plus a ridiculous re-connection fee, and they sent someone out promptly to reconnect it. Wonder of wonders, 5 days later it is cut off again. Apparently, the rate they quoted me over the phone was just the first bill that had been missed, and didn't include the bill that had been sent out before the phone call. Because I was still "late," they cut me off just days after paying the bill and re-connecting. Wonder of wonders, they charged me another ridiculous re-connection fee again.
Needless to say, I have zero sympathy for Comcast anymore. After a few more episodes like this, we finally canceled our service in disgust. ...And they forgot to actually shut off the line. For most any other company I would have done the right thing. Comcast? Not a chance.
If FIOS is ostensibly available in our "area," but according to your system not available to our unit, does that mean we should push the owner of the house? Or is it likely a neighborhood by neighborhood buildout question?
It's transparently obvious that real issue here is the abuse scandals. You'll note that they did in fact keep a lid on the whole thing for decades - many current alleged cases of priesthood pedophilia date from the 80's and 90's.
I remember growing up in the 80's and 90's, when pedophile priests were common jokes in everything from sketch comedies to role playing games. Ingrained in my belief system is that priests are potential child abusers.
I think what has changed in a lot of ways isn't the public belief persay, but the ability to have public outcry about it. The internet lets the abused (and simply outraged) organize and get heard.
I'm glad we heard this important and highly relevant message... though the internet.
Or, you could be living a dynamic life with a lot of people, who genuinely have a lot of announcements and things to say. My twitter feed involves the usual blather. But it also has a lot of announcements about gatherings, major life changes, friends looking for apartments or help moving, articles relevant to game developers and fire performers, local police and city alerts, and other interesting nuggets. It's similar to what RSS feeds were supposed to be, but short enough to read and relevant to my local circle of friends and colleagues.
Sure, there is something to be said for privacy. But sometimes that social connectedness is more helpful than independence.
How many animals do we hang by their ankles and slaughter every day?* We have horror movies about treating people the way that we treat other animals. Dolphins and Whales talk to each other. Monkeys have entire societies and tribal warfare. What is to say that a sufficiently advanced civilization won't just dismiss us like we poison prairie dogs, or dispatch us like we killed the wolves?
I'm definitely not vegetarian. If the situation were reversed, I'd bet the cows would be chewing the hell out of us. And if we encounter an alien civilization, it may be.
The phrase "Security through obscurity" implies that you happen to know the weakness of your defenses. This can be in a specific sense ("if the person does X, we're screwed") or a general sense ("well, that code is probably 90% holes"). Stationing a group of 10 well-trained, totally loyal soldiers around an artifact to protect it is not security through obscurity. It is security through more guns. On the other hand, putting the highly valuable artifact in a nondescript box and hiding it in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere is security through obscurity.
The sad thing is that security through obscurity frequently does work in the real-world. See also the transport of the Cullinan Diamond. Heck, the exact formula for specific bits of mass-produced food is considered a trade secret, despite being sold to millions of people every day. This really doesn't translate to the digital realm, though. But executives from other industries have yet to figure this out, and keep putzing along as if it were a viable strategy.
No security method is "secure." The goal of a security method is to make it more dangerous or resource-intensive to break the security than the payoff for doing it would be. An old Subaru Outback locked up in your driveway is probably secure. A new Ferrari locked up in an underground garage with a constant attendant is probably secure. A new Ferrari sitting in your driveway is an awful theft risk.
Say that our society went out and discovered that Mars was an earth-like, habitable planet with primitive life upon it. How would we interact with them?
Chances are, we would see them long before we could actually get there en-masse. Maybe in the 1700's, we would have sensitive enough instruments to see the earth-like surface of the planet. Fast forward 300 years to the year 2K, we can expend a tremendous amount of resources and send a single scouting party over. For 20 or 30 years, the scouting party lives on Mars, gathering data and learning to live on the local climate / floura and fauna. They discover a particular plant that secretes a specific chemical very similar to a highly-expensive cancer drug currently in production on the Earth. A few production ships arrive to harvest the plant and launch the chemical back. A small private science team piggybacks, and finds moe financially rewarding chemicals on the planet. Humanity spreads its fingers, and native life is simply pushed back to the margins. A small shack becomes a 1 mile settlement, becomes a country of it's own. The native plants and animals go from being the dominant form of life on the planet, to living in an ever-shrinking reserve.
And the more sentient animals might wonder why we didn't just make giant tin cans in the sky and live in those. The fact is, though, that making giant tin-cans in the sky is more expensive than finding viable hunks of rock with usable resourses already present. And if those sentient animals fought back, we'd probably just stop them as easily as we'd stop a groundhog invasion of New York City. Technological superiority doesn't mean winning a fight, it means sweeping unwanted elements off of a table. The natives only win in movies.
It really all comes down to value. The value of a cylinder, more or less, is just habitable space. The value of a planet includes large volumes of otherwise rare elements or chemicals, biological materials, etc... all conveniently sitting there for the taking, and all of which would be needed to make cylinders anyway.
Yes, but Dragon's Lair provided an experience that wasn't possible any other way. These days, there is very little that you could do on a server and stream to a computer that you couldn't just do on the local computer. Arguably, On Live could have better graphics than the average machine, but so far they have failed that test. Remember that whatever super-powerful graphics cards OnLive has pretty much has to be devoted 1-to-1 to users playing at peak. Add in servers, streaming, support, administrative overhead, technology tweaks for individual games, negotiations with gaming companies, etc, and the cost savings are probably in favor of the users just buying a graphics card.
Somebody clogged the tubes.
See, IPv4 is like a 1/2" tube, and IPv6 is like a 3/4" tube. IPv4 is smaller with a higher pressure, and so works faster, but moves less internet overall. IPv6 is better if you have a higher pressure internet, as it can move a greater volume but only if you support it. Lots of people are trying to squeeze their devices onto the intertubes, so the pressure of all of those electrons is really high. This clogs IPv4, freezes the electrons, and causes the web to burst.
So support IPv6! And don't forget to winterize your internets.
Yes.
And while we're at it, you should visit my other sites, HasYourPasswordBeenCompromised.com and DoesAnyoneHaveThisHotPictureOfMeNaked.com.