> The fact that you are "concerned" at ANY level about the possibility of not being able to play a game for a little while is difficult to understand, especially when you have the free choice of not purchasing said game.
You clearly speak as someone who has never tried to connect Steam over wifi to an Android phone, so they can get it into offline mode, to give them something to do while while the Internet is down...
Seriously though; when the Internet is down is more or less exactly when I want to have computer games readily available to play. It's almost like it's fine tuned to be as annoying as possible.
I've had over a week's Internet downtime in the last year, and absolutely no power outage. You can understand if perhaps I'm more concerned about one than the other, then?
I'm not buying it. I'll probably buy something from GOG instead.
Still disappointed though.
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I work on a research campus, that helps...
Seriously though; it would be nice to believe that a miracle-cure for massive brain injuries is just around the corner (or in fact, a miracle cure for pretty much anything serious), but realistically you have to weigh your odds, and I don't like them. If I'm that much of a vegetable, I wouldn't want to hang around hoping..
> I have to say that I think civil disobedience against copyright law is justified
Really? You think helping yourself to as much copyright material as you would like sends any message except "I don't like paying for stuff"?
If you really want to make a stand, don't buy OR pirate content. Watch more Youtube, play more free games, download music that's been genuinely released for free.
A "protest" that makes things easier for you isn't going to sway anyone.
> Being part of the generation Z, sometimes I still wonder how people survived with less than one megabyte of memory, no tabs (no Internet!)... Depressing!
I still have flashbacks sometimes, but I'm slowly recovering....
Any of those companies could have taken the concept of Facebook and implemented their own, but they would have remained playing catch-up with features in Facebook (as it moved from a college-centric system to a more generalised social media platform, as the API was released, etc.)
As it stands, it took Google 7 years to get its own Facebook-clone out, and that's doing decidedly mixedly so far. I don't recall patents being amongst G+'s issues, though...
> You might one day have a eureka moment in which you realize that a very easily implemented bit of code can increase computations exponentially or work around some issue.
Do you have any examples?
From my point of view, very little is done as a small, isolated invention these days. I would indicate, for example, Facebook. The idea of Facebook is trivial to reverse engineer, and numerous attempts at improved versions have been attempted, but most have failed with a few (LinkedIn springs to mind) carving out small niches for themselves. The secret ingredient is no longer in a single trivially replicated invention, but in a process (how Facebook has evolved as a platform has kept it ahead of the competition - although I'll admit getting market share early also helped a lot).
I'd also argue that if you simply have a eureka moment, why is that enough to let you retire? Surely we should be looking to reward effort expended over luck?
> Imagine that you have 1000 employees. Every workstation, every server, every switch, every usb-stick, every external drive could hold the seed to restoring hacker control on your network. You'd have to wipe all of them before allowing them to reconnect to the network.
I wish people would remember this when they claim company's estimates of damage from a cracked system are excessive. You can bring an entire company to a standstill for an extended period of time by requiring (unless as a customer you're just fine with them taking risks with your data?) multiple critical systems to be isolated and rebuilt from scratch at the same time, even if there's no clear damage done, because you have no other way of verifying they're clear.
In a high security environment, destroying the physical machines to be sure (tampered firmware, stuff hidden in bad blocks on the hard drive, or who knows what else) is probably a sensible move.
Given we have problems with people (at my work) complaining that Froyo is too recent to expect them to have, ICS seems a bit optimistic for widespread adoption quite yet.
That said, I did go read up on alternative firmwares for phones, and in particular how they're doing with ICS. Further on than I'd realised, and in an enterprise setting flashing Gingerbread phones to ICS that way may well be an option (assuming they're the employer's phone, of course).
> *current* version of Android actually has full native IPSec support
Do you mean Ice Cream Sandwich? In which case, to be fair it's not what you'd call in widespread use yet... (I have never seen anyone with an ICS device IRL, or heard of anyone having one)
Out of curiosity, if I wanted to have a web application that used AJAX to listen for change events from the server (long-poll style), how in PHP would I notify any waiting requests of a new message to be sent out?
That's fairly naive in web terms. For example, the application may carefully check an incoming string is valid for what it expects, but fail to correctly encode it on output and create a cross-site-scripting attack vulnerability (for example if the input contained a element). There's also a lot to check; for a number, it's not too hard, you check that the input is an integer/decimal as appropriate, and do range check if relevant. For a string it gets harder; length check is obvious, but what about checking character set? It turns out just finding out what the character set of an incoming string _is_, is difficult (blame IE): http://www.crazysquirrel.com/computing/general/form-encoding.jspx
Then you get cases such as CSRF (cross-site request forgery) attacks ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery ), where the user is fooled into clicking a link that sends a request to the web site, If they're logged in, the browser will typically send appropriate cookies, meaning from the server point of view the user has sent an entirely valid request.
OTOH, to say "If you don't know, you can't do it", is hopelessly defeatist. I would not start with a security-critical web application any more than I would start with any other security-critical application, but you can learn this stuff. Alas, it does take time...
Pending any world-wide figures, it'll have to do. I don't think there's much reason to assume PC vs console breakdown in the UK is much different to anywhere else.
In terms of digital distribution, I'd presume this is a relatively small proportion, as it's substantially more expensive in the UK (don't ask, I don't know):
You are joking, right? A software developer (individual or company) that leaked their product early would be opening themselves to massive lawsuits from the publishers. A developer leaking their game early would be career and/or financial suicide.
I'll concede, there are some dodgy looking "leaks" of Windows early builds; these are seriously cut down, typically time-limited, and MS is its own publisher, and that's even presuming they're not actual leaks.
There's a difference between "More DRM will help with this" (what I believe you think they said) and "The publishers will have a knee-jerk reaction of more DRM" (which is what I think they meant).
> I assume this is because the games are harded to pirate on a console, they can get away with pricing it higher.
I believe it's actually, at least in part, due to licensing costs from the console manufacturer. Traditionally this compensates for the hardware being sold at or below cost, although I believe the Wii was profitable per-unit at launch.
> That sort of situation should be accounted for and non-profit piracy should not be prosecuted.
Should not be prosecuted is an unusual one (I've frequently seen people argue it should be legal), but I'd still be cautious that for many copyright works (music, film, books being obviously examples) non-profit use is the most common, and this risks people never paying for the material at all.
OTOH, the humble indie bundles ( http://www.humblebundle.com/ ) do well and rely primarily on people being honest, so it's a much better argument than "should be legal".
Slashdot Mirror
Gyah; apologies, correct spec was edited the 12th ( http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/editing/raw-file/tip/editing.html ).
The relevant spec ( http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#refsEDITING ) was last edited yesterday (28th March 2012). Damn hard to hit a moving target and all that.
> The fact that you are "concerned" at ANY level about the possibility of not being able to play a game for a little while is difficult to understand, especially when you have the free choice of not purchasing said game.
You clearly speak as someone who has never tried to connect Steam over wifi to an Android phone, so they can get it into offline mode, to give them something to do while while the Internet is down...
Seriously though; when the Internet is down is more or less exactly when I want to have computer games readily available to play. It's almost like it's fine tuned to be as annoying as possible.
I've had over a week's Internet downtime in the last year, and absolutely no power outage. You can understand if perhaps I'm more concerned about one than the other, then?
I'm not buying it. I'll probably buy something from GOG instead.
Still disappointed though.
I work on a research campus, that helps...
Seriously though; it would be nice to believe that a miracle-cure for massive brain injuries is just around the corner (or in fact, a miracle cure for pretty much anything serious), but realistically you have to weigh your odds, and I don't like them. If I'm that much of a vegetable, I wouldn't want to hang around hoping..
> I have to say that I think civil disobedience against copyright law is justified
Really? You think helping yourself to as much copyright material as you would like sends any message except "I don't like paying for stuff"?
If you really want to make a stand, don't buy OR pirate content. Watch more Youtube, play more free games, download music that's been genuinely released for free.
A "protest" that makes things easier for you isn't going to sway anyone.
Global warming will take a long time to make winters consistently mild. Keep in mind, for example, that the west coast just got snowed senseless.
> Being part of the generation Z, sometimes I still wonder how people survived with less than one megabyte of memory, no tabs (no Internet!)... Depressing!
I still have flashbacks sometimes, but I'm slowly recovering....
Any of those companies could have taken the concept of Facebook and implemented their own, but they would have remained playing catch-up with features in Facebook (as it moved from a college-centric system to a more generalised social media platform, as the API was released, etc.)
I would also point out that Facebook patent filings appear to have first been done in 2006 ( http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/01/facebook-patent-filings/ ), two years later.
As it stands, it took Google 7 years to get its own Facebook-clone out, and that's doing decidedly mixedly so far. I don't recall patents being amongst G+'s issues, though...
> You might one day have a eureka moment in which you realize that a very easily implemented bit of code can increase computations exponentially or work around some issue.
Do you have any examples?
From my point of view, very little is done as a small, isolated invention these days. I would indicate, for example, Facebook. The idea of Facebook is trivial to reverse engineer, and numerous attempts at improved versions have been attempted, but most have failed with a few (LinkedIn springs to mind) carving out small niches for themselves. The secret ingredient is no longer in a single trivially replicated invention, but in a process (how Facebook has evolved as a platform has kept it ahead of the competition - although I'll admit getting market share early also helped a lot).
I'd also argue that if you simply have a eureka moment, why is that enough to let you retire? Surely we should be looking to reward effort expended over luck?
> as for the "backups" problem. I have yet to see a hacker that can infect a machine using an odf file
http://www.openoffice.org/security/bulletin.html
Although I'll admit, never seen any of those in a real use-case.
> Imagine that you have 1000 employees. Every workstation, every server, every switch, every usb-stick, every external drive could hold the seed to restoring hacker control on your network. You'd have to wipe all of them before allowing them to reconnect to the network.
I wish people would remember this when they claim company's estimates of damage from a cracked system are excessive. You can bring an entire company to a standstill for an extended period of time by requiring (unless as a customer you're just fine with them taking risks with your data?) multiple critical systems to be isolated and rebuilt from scratch at the same time, even if there's no clear damage done, because you have no other way of verifying they're clear.
In a high security environment, destroying the physical machines to be sure (tampered firmware, stuff hidden in bad blocks on the hard drive, or who knows what else) is probably a sensible move.
Given we have problems with people (at my work) complaining that Froyo is too recent to expect them to have, ICS seems a bit optimistic for widespread adoption quite yet.
That said, I did go read up on alternative firmwares for phones, and in particular how they're doing with ICS. Further on than I'd realised, and in an enterprise setting flashing Gingerbread phones to ICS that way may well be an option (assuming they're the employer's phone, of course).
> *current* version of Android actually has full native IPSec support
Do you mean Ice Cream Sandwich? In which case, to be fair it's not what you'd call in widespread use yet... (I have never seen anyone with an ICS device IRL, or heard of anyone having one)
> Disclaimer: at $DAYJOB I develop a web proxy; HTTP abuse makes me cry
This will probably be your equivalent of Cthulhu mythos then (induce gibbering madness): http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Reverse_HTTP
> PHP syntatically follows the same style as Perl and C
Yes, but writing web applications in C is fairly much a guaranteed sign of madness (prior or soon to be).
Out of curiosity, if I wanted to have a web application that used AJAX to listen for change events from the server (long-poll style), how in PHP would I notify any waiting requests of a new message to be sent out?
That's fairly naive in web terms. For example, the application may carefully check an incoming string is valid for what it expects, but fail to correctly encode it on output and create a cross-site-scripting attack vulnerability (for example if the input contained a element). There's also a lot to check; for a number, it's not too hard, you check that the input is an integer/decimal as appropriate, and do range check if relevant. For a string it gets harder; length check is obvious, but what about checking character set? It turns out just finding out what the character set of an incoming string _is_, is difficult (blame IE): http://www.crazysquirrel.com/computing/general/form-encoding.jspx
Then you get cases such as CSRF (cross-site request forgery) attacks ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery ), where the user is fooled into clicking a link that sends a request to the web site, If they're logged in, the browser will typically send appropriate cookies, meaning from the server point of view the user has sent an entirely valid request.
OTOH, to say "If you don't know, you can't do it", is hopelessly defeatist. I would not start with a security-critical web application any more than I would start with any other security-critical application, but you can learn this stuff. Alas, it does take time...
Pending any world-wide figures, it'll have to do. I don't think there's much reason to assume PC vs console breakdown in the UK is much different to anywhere else.
In terms of digital distribution, I'd presume this is a relatively small proportion, as it's substantially more expensive in the UK (don't ask, I don't know):
Amazon UK - £8.99: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Electronic-Arts-Crysis-PC-DVD/dp/B002BWONOY/
EA Origin UK - £14.99: http://store.origin.com/store/eaemea/en_GB/pd/productID.225985400/sac.true
(this continues with other releases, for example SWTOR is £37.70 boxed http://www.amazon.co.uk/Star-Wars-Old-Republic-DVD/dp/B005DD6R6A/ or £44.99 to download http://store.origin.com/store/eaemea/en_GB/html/pbPage.SWTOR_EN/ )
As of end of Q1 FY2012, Crysis 2 sold 3 million copies ( http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=594196 ). Hoping we can infer from the first week sales the general proportions of sales, PC accounts for about 14% ( http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/crysis_2/news/crysis_2_is_eas_biggest_launch_of_the_year_so_far.html ).
So that's 420,000-ish copies on PC. What proportion of those torrents has to be a possible sale lost, for PC to be a viable game platform?
You are joking, right? A software developer (individual or company) that leaked their product early would be opening themselves to massive lawsuits from the publishers. A developer leaking their game early would be career and/or financial suicide.
I'll concede, there are some dodgy looking "leaks" of Windows early builds; these are seriously cut down, typically time-limited, and MS is its own publisher, and that's even presuming they're not actual leaks.
There's a difference between "More DRM will help with this" (what I believe you think they said) and "The publishers will have a knee-jerk reaction of more DRM" (which is what I think they meant).
> I assume this is because the games are harded to pirate on a console, they can get away with pricing it higher.
I believe it's actually, at least in part, due to licensing costs from the console manufacturer. Traditionally this compensates for the hardware being sold at or below cost, although I believe the Wii was profitable per-unit at launch.
> That sort of situation should be accounted for and non-profit piracy should not be prosecuted.
Should not be prosecuted is an unusual one (I've frequently seen people argue it should be legal), but I'd still be cautious that for many copyright works (music, film, books being obviously examples) non-profit use is the most common, and this risks people never paying for the material at all.
OTOH, the humble indie bundles ( http://www.humblebundle.com/ ) do well and rely primarily on people being honest, so it's a much better argument than "should be legal".