Some of the quotes are awesome, if you start reading the article in depth...
"So I polled six old friends who ARE cybersecurity experts and they kinda-sorta agreed with me." - so, they didn't agree, is what you mean?
"I'm pretty sure they don't know each other." - So we're talking a group that is apparently terrible at knowing about each other, to estimate how many there are?
"I was an expert in AV, IDS, and other areas. But I was not the all knowing security guru." - So, the press release says "security expert" and Cringely decides to interpret this as "omniscient about computer security". Governments tend not to announce specific areas where they feel their security is lacking, in press releases. They like vague terms like "security expert", which give the reassurance they're doing something, without exposing too much real information.
Forget Windows, in security terms if someone has the hardware, you can fairly much consider it merely a matter of time. There are some hardware systems that are essentially unhackable, but... not in this price range. Consider that "unhackable" smart cards cost $100+ a piece, and infer from there...
> And the user experience is usually a lot nicer, you can easily buy it without walking to store.
I have to disagree. For any recent game, it's just too big. I picked up FEAR 2 on Steam yesterday (it's half price this weekend), and rapidly discovered that actually downloading it will involve tying up my Internet connection for a significant number of hours. Given I sleep in the same room as the computer (and therefore am not leaving it on overnight), what this amounts to is that it will take me significantly longer to download, than if I'd just had it posted to me.
The iPhone developer program distribution page talks about ad hoc and enterprise distribution. Neither is ideal; ad hoc is limited to 100 users, enterprise is expensive and for companies with at least 500 employees, but they do exist as distribution paths.
> You're correct that an SSN is not required, but assuming you are employed, your employer IS required to file taxes in your name and that requires an SSN.
They're primarily for people who need to tell the US IRS how much they earnt, but are not eligible for an SSN. I was looking at getting one because I do currency trading with a broker in the US, but am UK based (it mostly just makes it easier for them to find the paperwork showing you don't owe them anything because you're not a US resident).
From my understanding of these things, 30% isn't out of the ordinary for "limited edition" gold coins (y'know, the ones they make 5,000 of because they don't think there's 6,000 people stupid enough to buy them), or other sources of non-investment gold.
That means your average fool on the street will probably see it as about what they'd expect to pay...
> The GFX on the Wii look pretty poor on a decent sized 1080p capable panel.
They look like a smeared mess, IMHO.
What bothers me isn't that it can't do HD, but that it doesn't even do an on-board upscale. If it did the upscale as graphics were written into the image buffer, it could get a MUCH better upscaling than any TV could do to the content, by understanding it better.
I'm damn sure there was a warning in the giant pages of stuff I had to read before I was given the W7 RC. Certainly, I read this and went "Erm, yeah..."
On top of which, it's always been very clearly "Do NOT install on a production system, this is for testing only". If it wiped my drive wholesale, it wouldn't be a catastrophe, because it's not on a system I can't trivially re-install. Methinks he didn't really read all the details...
I mean, in theory yes, however common sense should make it rapidly apparent that having a variety of diferent devices in use reduces the risk of a critical failure in one type bringing the whole system to its knees...
There were a variety of different plants producing Deskstars, and only one of them had the issue if I remember correctly. I _think_ it came down to them re-using components from a slightly different drive model, or something, but can't remember exactly...
I think you have to take each game on its own merit. I think DLC is frequently content that hit the cutting room floor to make it to launch, yes, but I don't think we're exactly being short-changed on Fallout 3. There's always going to be content like that (Deus Ex 1 lacked a bunch of content, including a moon base level, apparently).
For a game like say Spore, I think there's a lot more evidence that it was chopped up to sell more expansions. As people have pointed out, there were stages with more content shown at a variety of gaming conventions.
Copying work data onto a personal machine is all sorts of dubious. I certainly would not admit to the fact that I regularly take an encrypted dump of our database and SVN repository off-site, for example.
I mean, if I did such a thing. Which clearly I don't.
There's something SERIOUSLY wrong with your Vista install. I was dabbling with my server box and WoW a while back; at 720p on onboard graphics, it runs smoothly on medium settings. It's a quad core, but again 2GB RAM.
Run msconfig.exe, see what's running on startup. I'd put money on Acrobat update, Java update, OpenOffice.org quick launch and a bucket of other things are clogging your system down.
> Linux would be great for gaming, since the OS itself uses so little memory, it means there's a good chance that games are going to run faster than on Windows (XP) with explorer.exe taking up a large chunk of memory.
Linux is terrible for gaming; the driver support makes Vista look like heaven. As a result, assuming you can even get drivers for your card, and you can get them to run with the distro you use, and you can get the accelerated mode to work, they're still probably going to be slower than the Windows drivers.
Not to mention, just being credited with coming up with Google's next big thing is enough to almost certainly land you a well paid job for life somewhere.
Yikes they must be horrifically expensive in the US. Okay, for my iPhone I had to sell my soul to O2, and for the giant lump they take out of my bank balance I get 600 free texts/month, which is a bit mad, but many of my friends get a some free texts with their pay as you go phones, and in the worst cases it's about equivalent to 10 seconds of phone conversation here.
Hell, as a non-citizen considering trying to move to the US (to be with a US citizen), I don't have a serious problem with this. Moving country is an exceptional event, and even before the whole terrorism scare it would be quite reasonable to check things like you're not letting in foreign spies.
I would look for them to say they'll get rid of the data if you become a citizen, but beyond that this isn't any more unreasonable than anything else you're asked to do to get a green card.
Re:Users are branching out - game companies are no
on
Is the Gaming PC Dead?
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· Score: 1
As a Mac user, I'm seeing progressively more games wrapped up in Cedega by their own developers. It's not as good as direct port, but frankly it's still fairly good stuff and a start.
Apple's not taking games seriously though. Having had a conference about a year ago where they wheeled out EA and Id Software people to talk about how they were going to do games for the Mac, they then have epically failed to get sorted on the hardware.
My Mac Pro has a Nvidia 8800 in it. If I'd gone with an iMac, I'd have an older card and it wouldn't be upgradable. Even as it stands, I cannot buy any of the two generations of cards since the 8800, for my Mac. The Mac _needs_ to have upgradable cards in the high-end iMacs, and it needs to have cards out within 3 months of PC equivalents.
... and I'm still buying the vast majority of my music on CDs. Internet music is nice for instant access, but having to manage by own backups is a pain.
For movies/games, it may well be faster for me to walk into town and buy it, than wait for it to download. They're not appreciably cheaper, plus I have to fork out for my own media if I want to do backups, assuming I even _can_ do backups. Oh, and they take a chunk out of my bandwidth allowance for the month.
One of the things that always amused was when people claimed Bram Cohen was "selling out" by working with the movie/music industry. BitTorrent was never intended for piracy use, it's merely it's most common use.
It's very regularly used for Linux distros, game patches (World of Warcraft!), etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the quotes are awesome, if you start reading the article in depth...
"So I polled six old friends who ARE cybersecurity experts and they kinda-sorta agreed with me." - so, they didn't agree, is what you mean?
"I'm pretty sure they don't know each other." - So we're talking a group that is apparently terrible at knowing about each other, to estimate how many there are?
"I was an expert in AV, IDS, and other areas. But I was not the all knowing security guru." - So, the press release says "security expert" and Cringely decides to interpret this as "omniscient about computer security". Governments tend not to announce specific areas where they feel their security is lacking, in press releases. They like vague terms like "security expert", which give the reassurance they're doing something, without exposing too much real information.
Forget Windows, in security terms if someone has the hardware, you can fairly much consider it merely a matter of time. There are some hardware systems that are essentially unhackable, but... not in this price range. Consider that "unhackable" smart cards cost $100+ a piece, and infer from there...
> And the user experience is usually a lot nicer, you can easily buy it without walking to store.
I have to disagree. For any recent game, it's just too big. I picked up FEAR 2 on Steam yesterday (it's half price this weekend), and rapidly discovered that actually downloading it will involve tying up my Internet connection for a significant number of hours. Given I sleep in the same room as the computer (and therefore am not leaving it on overnight), what this amounts to is that it will take me significantly longer to download, than if I'd just had it posted to me.
The iPhone developer program distribution page talks about ad hoc and enterprise distribution. Neither is ideal; ad hoc is limited to 100 users, enterprise is expensive and for companies with at least 500 employees, but they do exist as distribution paths.
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/distribute.html
Also, I just _love_ having all my music stuck on my phone, possibly in weird/hard to get off formats...
Would you kindly ask you government why it's much MUCH easier to get an H1-B visa (so; move to the US, work for 3 years, then take half your earnings and all your experience home) than it is an EB-1, EB-2 or EB-3 ( http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f35e66f614176543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=84096138f898d010VgnVCM10000048f3d6a1RCRD&vgnextchannel=4f719c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD ) or similar visa for people who actually want to move full time to the US? EB-1-3 visa have waiting periods of about 3-4 years, vs 6 months for H1-B with 1 month express processing apparently an option...
> You're correct that an SSN is not required, but assuming you are employed, your employer IS required to file taxes in your name and that requires an SSN.
Technically, you can use an ITIN instead: http://www.irs.gov/individuals/article/0,,id=96287,00.html
They're primarily for people who need to tell the US IRS how much they earnt, but are not eligible for an SSN. I was looking at getting one because I do currency trading with a broker in the US, but am UK based (it mostly just makes it easier for them to find the paperwork showing you don't owe them anything because you're not a US resident).
From my understanding of these things, 30% isn't out of the ordinary for "limited edition" gold coins (y'know, the ones they make 5,000 of because they don't think there's 6,000 people stupid enough to buy them), or other sources of non-investment gold.
That means your average fool on the street will probably see it as about what they'd expect to pay...
> Legal or not, if this isn't AS GOOD AS what us pirates can get, then just why would we even think about paying for it?
Some sort of crazy notion of rewarding people who create the content in the first place?
As someone else pointed out, component would be fine, and heck why not have an HDMI out?
> The GFX on the Wii look pretty poor on a decent sized 1080p capable panel.
They look like a smeared mess, IMHO.
What bothers me isn't that it can't do HD, but that it doesn't even do an on-board upscale. If it did the upscale as graphics were written into the image buffer, it could get a MUCH better upscaling than any TV could do to the content, by understanding it better.
I'm damn sure there was a warning in the giant pages of stuff I had to read before I was given the W7 RC. Certainly, I read this and went "Erm, yeah..."
On top of which, it's always been very clearly "Do NOT install on a production system, this is for testing only". If it wiped my drive wholesale, it wouldn't be a catastrophe, because it's not on a system I can't trivially re-install. Methinks he didn't really read all the details...
No?
I mean, in theory yes, however common sense should make it rapidly apparent that having a variety of diferent devices in use reduces the risk of a critical failure in one type bringing the whole system to its knees...
There were a variety of different plants producing Deskstars, and only one of them had the issue if I remember correctly. I _think_ it came down to them re-using components from a slightly different drive model, or something, but can't remember exactly...
I think you have to take each game on its own merit. I think DLC is frequently content that hit the cutting room floor to make it to launch, yes, but I don't think we're exactly being short-changed on Fallout 3. There's always going to be content like that (Deus Ex 1 lacked a bunch of content, including a moon base level, apparently).
For a game like say Spore, I think there's a lot more evidence that it was chopped up to sell more expansions. As people have pointed out, there were stages with more content shown at a variety of gaming conventions.
Copying work data onto a personal machine is all sorts of dubious. I certainly would not admit to the fact that I regularly take an encrypted dump of our database and SVN repository off-site, for example.
I mean, if I did such a thing. Which clearly I don't.
There's something SERIOUSLY wrong with your Vista install. I was dabbling with my server box and WoW a while back; at 720p on onboard graphics, it runs smoothly on medium settings. It's a quad core, but again 2GB RAM.
Run msconfig.exe, see what's running on startup. I'd put money on Acrobat update, Java update, OpenOffice.org quick launch and a bucket of other things are clogging your system down.
> Linux would be great for gaming, since the OS itself uses so little memory, it means there's a good chance that games are going to run faster than on Windows (XP) with explorer.exe taking up a large chunk of memory.
Linux is terrible for gaming; the driver support makes Vista look like heaven. As a result, assuming you can even get drivers for your card, and you can get them to run with the distro you use, and you can get the accelerated mode to work, they're still probably going to be slower than the Windows drivers.
Not to mention, just being credited with coming up with Google's next big thing is enough to almost certainly land you a well paid job for life somewhere.
Yikes they must be horrifically expensive in the US. Okay, for my iPhone I had to sell my soul to O2, and for the giant lump they take out of my bank balance I get 600 free texts/month, which is a bit mad, but many of my friends get a some free texts with their pay as you go phones, and in the worst cases it's about equivalent to 10 seconds of phone conversation here.
Maybe it's just calling is expensive here.
Good lord yes.
I don't want my documents to be unavailable if the Internet is. I don't want Google to store my documents for me.
Hell, as a non-citizen considering trying to move to the US (to be with a US citizen), I don't have a serious problem with this. Moving country is an exceptional event, and even before the whole terrorism scare it would be quite reasonable to check things like you're not letting in foreign spies.
I would look for them to say they'll get rid of the data if you become a citizen, but beyond that this isn't any more unreasonable than anything else you're asked to do to get a green card.
As a Mac user, I'm seeing progressively more games wrapped up in Cedega by their own developers. It's not as good as direct port, but frankly it's still fairly good stuff and a start.
Apple's not taking games seriously though. Having had a conference about a year ago where they wheeled out EA and Id Software people to talk about how they were going to do games for the Mac, they then have epically failed to get sorted on the hardware.
My Mac Pro has a Nvidia 8800 in it. If I'd gone with an iMac, I'd have an older card and it wouldn't be upgradable. Even as it stands, I cannot buy any of the two generations of cards since the 8800, for my Mac. The Mac _needs_ to have upgradable cards in the high-end iMacs, and it needs to have cards out within 3 months of PC equivalents.
... and I'm still buying the vast majority of my music on CDs. Internet music is nice for instant access, but having to manage by own backups is a pain.
For movies/games, it may well be faster for me to walk into town and buy it, than wait for it to download. They're not appreciably cheaper, plus I have to fork out for my own media if I want to do backups, assuming I even _can_ do backups. Oh, and they take a chunk out of my bandwidth allowance for the month.
Remind me why I'd want this?
One of the things that always amused was when people claimed Bram Cohen was "selling out" by working with the movie/music industry. BitTorrent was never intended for piracy use, it's merely it's most common use.
It's very regularly used for Linux distros, game patches (World of Warcraft!), etc.