Seriously though, what would happen if you simply refused to pay the charges? i.e. Work with your phone company so that you pay them their side of the line, then simply refuse to cough up the cash to the foreign carrier. Attempts at prosecution would have to be through your home country's legal system, which may have laws regarding fraudulent debts.
It's black mail. Do you really want to go to court with "Nude 17 years olds of Nigeria inc." and risk getting a rep as a porn fiend? Not that many do so this form of "blackmail" will work on most people. They'd rather pay then have others find out.
Petty crime, like B&E, vandalism, and so on comprise the bulk of crimes people experience. Most of the time their unsolved. Any thing more severe then it gets more attention and ussually gets solved.
War is total an absolute. Weakness anywhere is still weakness. The American army has one weakness. The inability to stomach casualties. An army does not exsist on it own but is an exstension of it's countries will. The american will is insuffiennctly strong to really commit to an attack on anythign like N. Korea. The full might of the US military could possibly "defeat" the N. Koreans but they could not "occupy" them.
The problem is that your support of preservation of the american empire, usually means the destruction of all other countries' independence
Was is independence. The ability to make choices for youselves. How often is that choice really really stupid? America's isn't the most enlightened but it sure beats bowing to our new "Iranian" overlords who out law dancing...
No army can win a war if that war is fought according to the dictates of politicsal expediency instead of military necessity.
This is true. That was a point of another post. Did America withdraw? yes. Did the Viet kong win? the Americans withdrew so yes. So America was defeated. A internal socio/political defeat is still a defeat. Did this shame the Americans? yes. A large well funded army being defeated by it's own populace is a pretty shameful defeat. The viet kong has chinese support but the americans still coudl have won. But they pulled out because useless hippies made it politically unfavourable not to.
America as a warmachine is powerful and could crush any combination of two or more nations not includign Russia/China or the combined EU. However America as a nation is weak willed, easily frightened, bunch of sissies. When it is fully mobilized (see WWI/WWII) it can accomplish amazing things with their citizen soldiers, but America doesn't have a strong will to fight. Thats why they won the initial campaign in Iraq but will lose the "war for hearts and minds" because their leadership resorts to bullshit as actually callign it the "war for hearts and minds". If they want to invade then maintain contorl they shoudl do as china does. come in, guns blazing. Then set about policing the nation and maintaining order. Instead, they came in guns blazing, annihlating the infrasturcture (since 1991) and then just circle the wagons around the oil. If they had brought police (or replaced them) and maintained some order in the cities, I doubt the Iraqies woudl be as hostile. Although they still would be because of years and years of anti-western propaganda and radical islam. but they would look much better at home and to the world. They could say "we brought Democracy to iraq" and not have each and everyone of their allies snicker about it.
As for "utterly destroying", You can have a incredible kill rate, but if you still lost it meant ntohing. See Germany vs russia. Germany killed them 10 to one in the intital capaign and still lost. victory is still victory.
What america needs is to stop raising idiot hippies. I'm not Left-wing, I'm not Right-wing, I support left wing ideas liek medi-care and the enviroment, but I also support a strong American presence aroudn the world and the preservation of the american empire, because America is the least of all the evils out there.
In defence of your own country, pay has little to do with it. A effective fighting force is unrelated to how much it's paid or how much it eats. It has more about how well their trained and how motivated they are. The Viet Kong were completely unpaid, starving, and eventually corrupt but they defeated the Americans, forced a retreat and shamed them. Terrain has more to do with it then anythign else. Cities/Jungles/moutains are all very very difficult to assault. They provide cover and allow small groups to cripple larger ones and air supuriority doesn't affect the ground war significantly.
Since it's pay "cpu cycles" and not pay cash, I'd have a hard time seeing where the $10,000 bill is ocming from? Perhaps their using P4's and the $10,000 is the power bill?
Look up the 10 known missions of the GSG 9. Look up operations by the SAS (the majority are successful).
Generally only in bad soaps are Hostage situatiosn resolved by negotiation. Now, with the new wave of "kidnapping" hostage situations, they fact we cannot locate them makes negotiotion (they always ask for dumb propaganda motivated things which cannot be done) impossible, and force (Can't storm the buiding if you don't know where it is) useless.
My gut reaction to many of these situatiosn is to remove the issue of contention by thermo-nuclear related resolution. But I am aware that there is no simple solutions and killing a bunch of mostly innocent people isn't the answer, no matter hwo good it would feel.
The reason the US lost Vietnam was because they did a poor job of convincing their population that the war was at all nessacary and also in letting reported free into the theotre of war. Television was a great hinderance in this. Also, they had vague objectives and Politicians and not generals commanded the armies.
good objectives: -Take and ocupy hill 1 mile north of this point -Kill person X -Anihalate air field
bad objectives -bring democracy to those people -eliminate communism/terrorism/scabbies/radial scientology -get oil for daddy
A war with N. Korea. A ground war in mountanous terrain against a entrenched, well trained and native troop. Sounds like that as close to unwinnable short of WWII type public support.
Modern war is as much getting your own populace to support it as it is bombing the fuck out of your opponent.
Absolute measurements ensure more cosistency between 1024x768 and 800x600, the two most used resolutions. Using relative values can make a site look very strange at higher resolutiosn or like garbage at lower resolutions.
The point of CS isn't entirely to eliminate the other team. You can always follow the VIP/Bomb carrier. And on each map there is really only 2 or 3 spots where 705 of the action is. After the initial "choke points", the field gets whittled down to 2-3 players on each side. Easy enough to follow.
You have the misconception that a PC can give the Graphics card all the bandwidth on the memory bus, and that the device bus can do so as well. What I'm saying is that the textures can only trickle in from the HD when the system has time to do so. Because of this, it better for a PC to have more memory, so when it is allowed to take textures formt he HD it can grab as muhc as it needs for a whoel scene. On a console, it had direct and unhindered access to the DVD which is slower but the over all bandwidth is greater on average then the PC. As well the GPU does a lot of operations on objects in memory. A Graphics card GPU/memory has a large amount of bandwidth as well ebcause for a x4 AA scene it pulls the whole scene form Video ram and process it 4 times.
Also HDTV support on the Xbox is only the output, the textures and everything else are jut scaled up. And it will remain so for the next generation as well because HDTV is a nice geek feature that helps it sell but won't be the focus because the money is in the mass market.
So compare: at NTSC resolutions the whole screen is 220k pixels. at 1076x768 the whole screen is 786k pixels. Thats 3 times as large at a average resolution. That means the textures are around 3 times larger and that operations are done on a dataset at least 3 times as big. So while a Pc runnign a game at 1024x768 requires a bit of ram, a console can get away with less due to 1. Higher memory bandwidth for moving textures aand so on, as well as refreshing them from disk(dvd). 2. Lower texture sizes and area to work on.
HDTV might become a factor, but likely not within this generation. There simply aren't enough people with a HDTV that can play video games. I have one, it's a rear projection.
A PC graphics requires a large On board memory because it can only trickle in the textures it needs so it must grab as much as it can. (it gets the textures form a shared device bus that runs the floppy/cd rom/HD/ethernet card ect..).
A Console GPU/video ram setup needs less ram to do the same job because it can grab much as much of the texturs as it needs almost on demand.
A Pc card must deal with 1024x768 resolution at least.
A Console GPU does 648 x 486. Hardly requires much ram.
256 unified dedicated for gaming is more then most PC dedicate to it. The OS takes up the first 360 or so megs of ram while IE can take another 32 or more and is always running and leaves about 160 megs of ram free for games on a 512 meg system. More ram helps but after a certain point more ram doesn't help at all. The video ram is dedicated for textures and scratch space for the GPU. for NTSC, 256 is fine. For HDTV it's insufficient but the penetration of Game playing HDTV is low. All porjection screen HDTV's will have problems playing games and LCD versions have the LCD refresh problem to deal with, leaving only 10k plus plasmas and a few other varieties that can play it. And their pretty rare at the moment.
New technologies will come to rectifiy this but not for the price of a Xbox.
There are two, big markets for video games. Japan and north america. Japan still is about 40% of the market despite their recession, 50 million fanatical game players don't diappear, they just get too broke to buy 5 games a month. They aren't "Marginalized", you can't say 40% of the market is marginal.
The Xbox is pretty gaudy. A PS2 looks like a steroe amp. The Gc looks liek... a toy block. For it's target demographic thats fine. the Ps2 as well. The Xbox looks like a bade pop-up ad for the XFL.
Slice1: OS slice2: Load game from hd slice3: initialize game slice4: OS slice5: network monitoring slice6: switch back to game.... Each context switch requires a refresh form main memory and a huge huge penalty in regaurds to the predictive branching algorithm for cpu pipelining. the context switches occur often, and each time the memory bus must be ustilized to refresh the cache and resupply the pipeline.
Console (Xbox et al) slice1: load game frm DVd slice2: Rungame.... little to no context switching and the biggest thing on the bus is graphics. It doesn't have any context switching and thus the memory bus is almost dedicated to the GPU, since instructiosn are about 1/100 the size of textures.
As for jaming everything, a PC graphics card know it has a small and busy bus to get it's textures, so it grabs as much as it can when the pipe is available and stores it in the video ram. While a console GPU knows the bus won't be very busy and it can grab the textures when ever. Theres a big big difference in memory bandwidth. Peak bandwidth for the highest rated DDR is theoretically 3.2 gb/s Reference. While a PS2 has a theoetical memory bandwidth of 3.2 gb per second Reference. The xbox has a bandwidth of 6.4 gb/s Reference. Now for the PC it divides this bandwidth between every device that is on the memory bus, the GPU/CPU/carious controllers and the device bus. The Xbox/PS2 dedicates it to GPU/cpu. A Pc GPU has maybe 10% of the memory bus to itself, 0.32 gigs/s while a PS2/Xbox GPU has essentially the whole bus. A scene in NTSC of PAL will never require 3.2 gigs of textures every second. But a 1260x1024 res monitor will require more then 0.32gigs/s of textures thus the high ram sizes of graphics cards.
Sueing them, makes it less likely that someone will make these programs. since 1: their mostly free. 2: hobbiests make them. IT's unlikely their goign to just moev offshore. Their goignt o stop. then a small economy sprigns up looking for "valid" cheats... see Diablo 2. But even so. IT'll reduce the amoutn of cheaters from "almost everyone" to "somepeople here and there". which greatly increases the amoutn of fun I have.
Actually fixing the game so that the cheats just won't work, now there is an idea. ... Thats a pretty tall order. how about making a perpetual motion machine? their about the same difficulty.
in Software devlopement you have Security/Performance/Stability/cost pick 3 of these. You will never have 4 of these. Most things stop at 2 of these.
What exactly gives them the right to shut down a website that distributes software that they don't like? While I hate cheating, I don't know how they have the legal right to do this.
because the software infringes on your IP. The software is meant to alter the ability of your end user to use the program as they see fit. Honestly, a few cheaters can be dealt with but if it becomes too prevalent people will abandon the game.
Their in a economic recession. Their games are selling as well due mostly to that. As for 70-80% market share. Only sony has that. And they have to screw up pretty bad. Even then MS had to do some amazing thigns to capitilize. MS wont' just come in and snap up that market share. they'll likyl either be 45/45/10 Sony/Ms/nintendo (very very optimistic). or 80/10/10 sony/Ms/Nintendo in America if their mutally exclusive. in the world at large it's 99/20/15 Sony/Nintendo/MS while it's 99/19/20 sony/Nintendo/MS in America. (figrues approximate).
A PC has a very busy and congested memory bus, thus loading all the graphics onto the Graphics card is mro eefficient. To avoid the bottle neck in the memory bus. A console isn't as busy. It's doesn't have to run OS stuff while your playing. since code is miniscule compared to textures/ graphics the memory bus is almost dedicated to graphics. thus instead of having 1/3 of a 166mzh bus, you get 9/10 of a 233mzh bus. Which means you can just jam the textures when you need them.
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Seriously though, what would happen if you simply refused to pay the charges? i.e. Work with your phone company so that you pay them their side of the line, then simply refuse to cough up the cash to the foreign carrier. Attempts at prosecution would have to be through your home country's legal system, which may have laws regarding fraudulent debts.
It's black mail. Do you really want to go to court with "Nude 17 years olds of Nigeria inc." and risk getting a rep as a porn fiend? Not that many do so this form of "blackmail" will work on most people. They'd rather pay then have others find out.
Petty crime, like B&E, vandalism, and so on comprise the bulk of crimes people experience. Most of the time their unsolved. Any thing more severe then it gets more attention and ussually gets solved.
War is total an absolute. Weakness anywhere is still weakness. The American army has one weakness. The inability to stomach casualties. An army does not exsist on it own but is an exstension of it's countries will. The american will is insuffiennctly strong to really commit to an attack on anythign like N. Korea. The full might of the US military could possibly "defeat" the N. Koreans but they could not "occupy" them.
The problem is that your support of preservation of the american empire, usually means the destruction of all other countries' independence
Was is independence. The ability to make choices for youselves. How often is that choice really really stupid? America's isn't the most enlightened but it sure beats bowing to our new "Iranian" overlords who out law dancing...
No army can win a war if that war is fought according to the dictates of politicsal expediency instead of military necessity.
This is true. That was a point of another post. Did America withdraw? yes. Did the Viet kong win? the Americans withdrew so yes. So America was defeated. A internal socio/political defeat is still a defeat. Did this shame the Americans? yes. A large well funded army being defeated by it's own populace is a pretty shameful defeat. The viet kong has chinese support but the americans still coudl have won. But they pulled out because useless hippies made it politically unfavourable not to.
America as a warmachine is powerful and could crush any combination of two or more nations not includign Russia/China or the combined EU. However America as a nation is weak willed, easily frightened, bunch of sissies. When it is fully mobilized (see WWI/WWII) it can accomplish amazing things with their citizen soldiers, but America doesn't have a strong will to fight. Thats why they won the initial campaign in Iraq but will lose the "war for hearts and minds" because their leadership resorts to bullshit as actually callign it the "war for hearts and minds". If they want to invade then maintain contorl they shoudl do as china does. come in, guns blazing. Then set about policing the nation and maintaining order. Instead, they came in guns blazing, annihlating the infrasturcture (since 1991) and then just circle the wagons around the oil. If they had brought police (or replaced them) and maintained some order in the cities, I doubt the Iraqies woudl be as hostile. Although they still would be because of years and years of anti-western propaganda and radical islam. but they would look much better at home and to the world. They could say "we brought Democracy to iraq" and not have each and everyone of their allies snicker about it.
As for "utterly destroying", You can have a incredible kill rate, but if you still lost it meant ntohing. See Germany vs russia. Germany killed them 10 to one in the intital capaign and still lost. victory is still victory.
What america needs is to stop raising idiot hippies. I'm not Left-wing, I'm not Right-wing, I support left wing ideas liek medi-care and the enviroment, but I also support a strong American presence aroudn the world and the preservation of the american empire, because America is the least of all the evils out there.
you forgot starving, corrupt, and unpaid
In defence of your own country, pay has little to do with it. A effective fighting force is unrelated to how much it's paid or how much it eats. It has more about how well their trained and how motivated they are. The Viet Kong were completely unpaid, starving, and eventually corrupt but they defeated the Americans, forced a retreat and shamed them. Terrain has more to do with it then anythign else. Cities/Jungles/moutains are all very very difficult to assault. They provide cover and allow small groups to cripple larger ones and air supuriority doesn't affect the ground war significantly.
Since it's pay "cpu cycles" and not pay cash, I'd have a hard time seeing where the $10,000 bill is ocming from? Perhaps their using P4's and the $10,000 is the power bill?
IT doesn't require mass adoption, only mass whitelisting.... and the ability to ignore a lost of false positives.
What happens when your box has just been highjacked by the latest MS exploit and used as a Spam server/relay.
You would then notice instantanously, as your mouse woudl be moving 1px/minute.
Look up the 10 known missions of the GSG 9.
Look up operations by the SAS (the majority are successful).
Generally only in bad soaps are Hostage situatiosn resolved by negotiation. Now, with the new wave of "kidnapping" hostage situations, they fact we cannot locate them makes negotiotion (they always ask for dumb propaganda motivated things which cannot be done) impossible, and force (Can't storm the buiding if you don't know where it is) useless.
My gut reaction to many of these situatiosn is to remove the issue of contention by thermo-nuclear related resolution. But I am aware that there is no simple solutions and killing a bunch of mostly innocent people isn't the answer, no matter hwo good it would feel.
The reason the US lost Vietnam was because they did a poor job of convincing their population that the war was at all nessacary and also in letting reported free into the theotre of war. Television was a great hinderance in this. Also, they had vague objectives and Politicians and not generals commanded the armies.
good objectives:
-Take and ocupy hill 1 mile north of this point
-Kill person X
-Anihalate air field
bad objectives
-bring democracy to those people
-eliminate communism/terrorism/scabbies/radial scientology
-get oil for daddy
'miserable defeat for us'
A war with N. Korea. A ground war in mountanous terrain against a entrenched, well trained and native troop. Sounds like that as close to unwinnable short of WWII type public support.
Modern war is as much getting your own populace to support it as it is bombing the fuck out of your opponent.
UbiSoft is French / Candian. Main Office in France, with a significant branch developer in Canada.
Absolute measurements ensure more cosistency between 1024x768 and 800x600, the two most used resolutions. Using relative values can make a site look very strange at higher resolutiosn or like garbage at lower resolutions.
The point of CS isn't entirely to eliminate the other team. You can always follow the VIP/Bomb carrier. And on each map there is really only 2 or 3 spots where 705 of the action is. After the initial "choke points", the field gets whittled down to 2-3 players on each side. Easy enough to follow.
You have the misconception that a PC can give the Graphics card all the bandwidth on the memory bus, and that the device bus can do so as well. What I'm saying is that the textures can only trickle in from the HD when the system has time to do so. Because of this, it better for a PC to have more memory, so when it is allowed to take textures formt he HD it can grab as muhc as it needs for a whoel scene. On a console, it had direct and unhindered access to the DVD which is slower but the over all bandwidth is greater on average then the PC. As well the GPU does a lot of operations on objects in memory. A Graphics card GPU/memory has a large amount of bandwidth as well ebcause for a x4 AA scene it pulls the whole scene form Video ram and process it 4 times.
Also HDTV support on the Xbox is only the output, the textures and everything else are jut scaled up. And it will remain so for the next generation as well because HDTV is a nice geek feature that helps it sell but won't be the focus because the money is in the mass market.
So compare:
at NTSC resolutions the whole screen is 220k pixels. at 1076x768 the whole screen is 786k pixels. Thats 3 times as large at a average resolution. That means the textures are around 3 times larger and that operations are done on a dataset at least 3 times as big. So while a Pc runnign a game at 1024x768 requires a bit of ram, a console can get away with less due to
1. Higher memory bandwidth for moving textures aand so on, as well as refreshing them from disk(dvd).
2. Lower texture sizes and area to work on.
HDTV might become a factor, but likely not within this generation. There simply aren't enough people with a HDTV that can play video games. I have one, it's a rear projection.
A PC graphics requires a large On board memory because it can only trickle in the textures it needs so it must grab as much as it can. (it gets the textures form a shared device bus that runs the floppy/cd rom/HD/ethernet card ect..).
A Console GPU/video ram setup needs less ram to do the same job because it can grab much as much of the texturs as it needs almost on demand.
A Pc card must deal with 1024x768 resolution at least.
A Console GPU does 648 x 486. Hardly requires much ram.
256 unified dedicated for gaming is more then most PC dedicate to it. The OS takes up the first 360 or so megs of ram while IE can take another 32 or more and is always running and leaves about 160 megs of ram free for games on a 512 meg system. More ram helps but after a certain point more ram doesn't help at all. The video ram is dedicated for textures and scratch space for the GPU. for NTSC, 256 is fine. For HDTV it's insufficient but the penetration of Game playing HDTV is low. All porjection screen HDTV's will have problems playing games and LCD versions have the LCD refresh problem to deal with, leaving only 10k plus plasmas and a few other varieties that can play it. And their pretty rare at the moment.
New technologies will come to rectifiy this but not for the price of a Xbox.
There are two, big markets for video games. Japan and north america. Japan still is about 40% of the market despite their recession, 50 million fanatical game players don't diappear, they just get too broke to buy 5 games a month. They aren't "Marginalized", you can't say 40% of the market is marginal.
The Xbox is pretty gaudy. A PS2 looks like a steroe amp. The Gc looks liek... a toy block. For it's target demographic thats fine. the Ps2 as well. The Xbox looks like a bade pop-up ad for the XFL.
Lets go oevr an example:
....
....
PC:
Slice1: OS
slice2: Load game from hd
slice3: initialize game
slice4: OS
slice5: network monitoring
slice6: switch back to game
Each context switch requires a refresh form main memory and a huge huge penalty in regaurds to the predictive branching algorithm for cpu pipelining. the context switches occur often, and each time the memory bus must be ustilized to refresh the cache and resupply the pipeline.
Console (Xbox et al)
slice1: load game frm DVd
slice2: Rungame
little to no context switching and the biggest thing on the bus is graphics. It doesn't have any context switching and thus the memory bus is almost dedicated to the GPU, since instructiosn are about 1/100 the size of textures.
As for jaming everything, a PC graphics card know it has a small and busy bus to get it's textures, so it grabs as much as it can when the pipe is available and stores it in the video ram. While a console GPU knows the bus won't be very busy and it can grab the textures when ever. Theres a big big difference in memory bandwidth. Peak bandwidth for the highest rated DDR is theoretically 3.2 gb/s Reference. While a PS2 has a theoetical memory bandwidth of 3.2 gb per second Reference. The xbox has a bandwidth of 6.4 gb/s Reference. Now for the PC it divides this bandwidth between every device that is on the memory bus, the GPU/CPU/carious controllers and the device bus. The Xbox/PS2 dedicates it to GPU/cpu. A Pc GPU has maybe 10% of the memory bus to itself, 0.32 gigs/s while a PS2/Xbox GPU has essentially the whole bus. A scene in NTSC of PAL will never require 3.2 gigs of textures every second. But a 1260x1024 res monitor will require more then 0.32gigs/s of textures thus the high ram sizes of graphics cards.
Sueing them, makes it less likely that someone will make these programs. since 1: their mostly free. 2: hobbiests make them. IT's unlikely their goign to just moev offshore. Their goignt o stop. then a small economy sprigns up looking for "valid" cheats... see Diablo 2. But even so. IT'll reduce the amoutn of cheaters from "almost everyone" to "somepeople here and there". which greatly increases the amoutn of fun I have.
Actually fixing the game so that the cheats just won't work, now there is an idea. ... Thats a pretty tall order. how about making a perpetual motion machine? their about the same difficulty.
in Software devlopement you have
Security/Performance/Stability/cost
pick 3 of these. You will never have 4 of these. Most things stop at 2 of these.
What exactly gives them the right to shut down a website that distributes software that they don't like?
While I hate cheating, I don't know how they have the legal right to do this.
because the software infringes on your IP. The software is meant to alter the ability of your end user to use the program as they see fit. Honestly, a few cheaters can be dealt with but if it becomes too prevalent people will abandon the game.
Their in a economic recession. Their games are selling as well due mostly to that. As for 70-80% market share. Only sony has that. And they have to screw up pretty bad. Even then MS had to do some amazing thigns to capitilize. MS wont' just come in and snap up that market share. they'll likyl either be 45/45/10 Sony/Ms/nintendo (very very optimistic). or 80/10/10 sony/Ms/Nintendo in America if their mutally exclusive. in the world at large it's 99/20/15 Sony/Nintendo/MS while it's 99/19/20 sony/Nintendo/MS in America. (figrues approximate).
A PC has a very busy and congested memory bus, thus loading all the graphics onto the Graphics card is mro eefficient. To avoid the bottle neck in the memory bus. A console isn't as busy. It's doesn't have to run OS stuff while your playing. since code is miniscule compared to textures/ graphics the memory bus is almost dedicated to graphics. thus instead of having 1/3 of a 166mzh bus, you get 9/10 of a 233mzh bus. Which means you can just jam the textures when you need them.