IMHO the problem with Doom3 is the engine. The graphics where ok, but if all it can render are five foot long corridors its just isn't much impressive in the long run.
Is it really the engine, or the need for it to run on a console with 1/10th of the resources?
Are you an Enron accountant by any chance? It's not a dollar, or anything per hour. It's a subscription service, and one that will sooner or later disappear, rendering your bought game (for the same price as any standalone game) entirely useless.
Yes. There are lots of games out there, and I tend to have several installed at a time ($80 per game + potentially that again per month in access fees).
I haven't played Freelancer or CounterstrikeWC3 (for eg; these are persistent state games that aren't pay-to-play MMOGs) for months, but I can still go back and find a couple of populated local servers to play on, which I do from time to time.
If they were $15 a month each, I, and probably most other people, would have cancelled our accounts and never played again once the games were over their popularity peaks, thus basically killing the game forever. Servers for non-MMOGs are usually either downloadable for free, or by mere purchase of a full copy of the game, so ISPs generally do it for free (at least to their own customers). Consequentially the player base stays around longer.
This is especially important for games that aren't taking the world by storm (warcraft), and those of us that don't like in especially populous countries. Here in Australia with only a 20 million population, and the nearby New Zealand with around 4 million (AFAIK), multiplayer games, especially the less popular ones, quickly lose their player bases, and we're fucked. Everywhere else with players is too far away (lag).
And where's the retro action for MMOGs? Once the profit is gone, the servers close. And the publishers will sue your arse into the next dimension if you try to clone the server (bnetd, EQ).
$15 a month for access to a single all-encompassing MMOG host, with access to any game I want to play for no extra cost, would be acceptable (although that will lead to monopoly pricing anyway).
But per-game fees? Fuck off. Never have, never will.
Of course, it helps that I don't give a rats flying ring about the "fastasy" genre (wizards and shit), and/or the level-up keep-em-paying treadmill, which it seems most MMOGs are.
Aside from the fact that the Man isn't going to know what goes on on your private internet, you wouldn't have common carrier protection on it, therefore everything that happens on it is automatically your responsibility.
It wouldn't matter to the government whether you kept logs or not, they're going to nail someone either way. It might matter to you if you intend to pass the blame onto someone else though.
Forget offline archives. Keep everything "on-line" ie. on an active HDD. When you upgrade your HDD, it's a simple matter of moving everything across & convert formats if something better has arrived (use lossless formats when dealing with the master copy of anything).
The format and longevity of your backups is now not an issue. They only have to last one backup cycle. The physical medium doesn't matter, since if you can write the backups regularly, you can obviously still read them; when a medium starts going out of style, switch before your backup hardware dies. And the data format doesn't matter since you handle that on the primary storage.
With the view that your backups don't need to last in mind, you can now select a backup strategy. Simplest solution is a second HDD for first level, either RAID or periodic sync with a USB/FW drive, and DVD-Rs second level.
I believe the ridges were explained in Enterprise.
A handful of remnants of the eugenics wars (kept in secret by data's creator, before he turned to robotics) started getting delusions of grandieur (as they do), left their secret home and captured a klingon vessel. The klingons decided to create their own engineered people in response.
Unfortunately, they fucked up somehow and created/mutated a virus that infected an entire klingon planet. So the scientists responsible captured the Enterprise doctor to help create a cure, otherwise other klingons were going to exterminate the planet's population to contain the virus.
This cure was created from human DNA (or some shit) and resulted in the patient losing his ridges.
In the future came technology to give them back their ridges, but until then, klingons from that planet were human-like.
AIUI, terraforming would take centuries (alien pyramids notwithstanding), so there's no huge rush, and we're going to have to build airtight structures to start with anyway.
That's one hell of a "boss button" - just like real life.. when you're about to get caught, grab the pr0n and throw it as far away as possible/under something else.
Or.. *waves hand* this isn't teh pr0n you're looking for. err, I mean.. *waves* Hi boss! Yep, just checking these figures here, see? No problem.
He wasn't even opposed to someone writing a free alternative, as stated by Linus. It was someone reverse-engineering BitKeeper's protocol that he had a problem with.
What a crock. You can't write a free alternative (client, that is) without either official specs, or reverse engineering it. This is just a way of being an arsehole but still trying to come off looking like the good guy.
1) Open Source programmers don't give much thought to patents. They even actively avoid them, so any violations are purely accidental, not from "contamination" or some shit.
Now, since embracing Open Source, IBM is now in a bit of a pickle, since they're in a prime position to get sued over these patents. A tighter patent system means IBM is free(r) to engage in open source without the same level of risk.
2) IBM is a big research organisation; they're into real patents. The kinds that other companies want to licence, not the kinds those lesser companies get sued for after accidentally reinventing the same thing.
IBM's business is all Signal, and filtering out the Noise is just good business for them.
And I would suggest that the "something you have, something you know" system is severely compromised if the "something you have" part is something that can't be voided and replaced.
It's "something you have, something you know, something you are."
All that shit can be faked/stolen. The thing is, a real human is infinitely more capable of recognising someone trying to fake what they are. An eyeball on the tip of a fountain pen would be a... dead giveaway. We don't just analyse the eyeball, we observe the whole scene, including the wannabe infiltrators body language. Until a computer can be programmed with that level of instinct, you're best off keeping your biometrics under the observation of actual security guards.
If there are several hundred TLDs, are companies actually going to register every single one?
Yes, they would. Smaller businesses would buy the most common/relevant ones; larger businesses would just buy the whole kit and kaboodle. 1000 TLDs x $20 each = $20,000 pa. Sounds like a lot to 'the little guy' but a medium to large company would be paying quite a few employees significantly more than that every year.
It also offers a handy solution to trademark issues and disposable domain names. Why not "matrix.movie" instead of "matrixmovie.com"?
Which Matrix might that be? What about conflicts with more generic movie titles? Or really long ones? Is it matrix.movie, or thematrix.movie? DNS is not a search engine. Use one, or go to studio.com/movie (like it says on the advertising).
And who is the grant arbiter of.movie? The MPAA? If ICANN wants to fund the entire Internet's infrastructure management from specialty domains, so be it, but it shouldn't be conduring up hundreds of money-printing TLDs and just go handing them over to industry consortiums for a pittance.
You might as well just abolish TLDs entirely if you're going to go the "hundreds of TLDs" route.
Not employing fanbois, such of yourself, of any platform would also help. The (in)ability to a) properly identify the problem, b) choose the correct product, and c) implement it properly, is the primary failure of IT.
And FWIW, the correct product isn't necessarily the most hardcore geekfest you can find. VHS, x86, Windows95, etc. may be/have been the inferior technologies, but they were the superior products. You need to realise this reality and deal with it before it costs you your business (unless your business happens to be the aformentioned niche geekfest products).
Firewalls and routers are technological solutions - throw money at the problem and it goes away.
The problem with social engineering is that before the users can be given a clue, management has to get one.
And they can't just buy it in a shrinkwrapped package from $VENDOR, they'd have to admit (to the entire company) they don't know something and be educated. But they're not going to do that, nor will they defer to the experts they (should have) employed to handle it without managerial fiddling. Therefore the problem doesn't exist, mmkay?
Unless you're talking dual 486s, Winamp uses bugger all CPU time. I've been doing that since Win95 and Pentium Classic/MMX.
Try something a little more hardcore -- playing games while HTPC software runs in the background, possibly capping a large HDTV stream, and/or feeding it to the rest of the house.
Short retention would basically force The Man to have some manners, as just showing up with a van full of goons and confiscating everything won't do them much good. If they want data on someone, they'll have to have a proper order that said data on said someone over a certain period be kept.
This also means it will be much harder to mine for minor infractions post-fact, and instead persue actual "true criminals" - ie. the kind they are willing to invest time into actively following and getting warrants and whatnot.
I think that's kind of sad for a site like/., which (at least in theory) should be a haven for people who take a positive aproach to life, instead of chicken-little ludites.
It's also a haven for tin-foil-hat types. It's not that we're against GMO as such, we're just against the amoral, unethical, moneygrubbing, politician buying, fascist, arsehole corporations that do it.
As far as Windows goes, the core is really the best bit. It's just that it got buried under layers of PHBs/corporate bullshit and market domineering egomaniacs.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it really the engine, or the need for it to run on a console with 1/10th of the resources?
Are you an Enron accountant by any chance? It's not a dollar, or anything per hour. It's a subscription service, and one that will sooner or later disappear, rendering your bought game (for the same price as any standalone game) entirely useless.
Yes. There are lots of games out there, and I tend to have several installed at a time ($80 per game + potentially that again per month in access fees).
I haven't played Freelancer or CounterstrikeWC3 (for eg; these are persistent state games that aren't pay-to-play MMOGs) for months, but I can still go back and find a couple of populated local servers to play on, which I do from time to time.
If they were $15 a month each, I, and probably most other people, would have cancelled our accounts and never played again once the games were over their popularity peaks, thus basically killing the game forever. Servers for non-MMOGs are usually either downloadable for free, or by mere purchase of a full copy of the game, so ISPs generally do it for free (at least to their own customers). Consequentially the player base stays around longer.
This is especially important for games that aren't taking the world by storm (warcraft), and those of us that don't like in especially populous countries. Here in Australia with only a 20 million population, and the nearby New Zealand with around 4 million (AFAIK), multiplayer games, especially the less popular ones, quickly lose their player bases, and we're fucked. Everywhere else with players is too far away (lag).
And where's the retro action for MMOGs? Once the profit is gone, the servers close. And the publishers will sue your arse into the next dimension if you try to clone the server (bnetd, EQ).
$15 a month for access to a single all-encompassing MMOG host, with access to any game I want to play for no extra cost, would be acceptable (although that will lead to monopoly pricing anyway).
But per-game fees? Fuck off. Never have, never will.
Of course, it helps that I don't give a rats flying ring about the "fastasy" genre (wizards and shit), and/or the level-up keep-em-paying treadmill, which it seems most MMOGs are.
Console games are getting more complex to satisfy the PC crowd, and PC games are getting nerfed to satisfy the console crowd.
Two different styles meet in the middle and end up a mediocre compromise. Unshocker.
Aside from the fact that the Man isn't going to know what goes on on your private internet, you wouldn't have common carrier protection on it, therefore everything that happens on it is automatically your responsibility.
It wouldn't matter to the government whether you kept logs or not, they're going to nail someone either way. It might matter to you if you intend to pass the blame onto someone else though.
I think you mean half-duplex.
Forget offline archives. Keep everything "on-line" ie. on an active HDD. When you upgrade your HDD, it's a simple matter of moving everything across & convert formats if something better has arrived (use lossless formats when dealing with the master copy of anything).
The format and longevity of your backups is now not an issue. They only have to last one backup cycle. The physical medium doesn't matter, since if you can write the backups regularly, you can obviously still read them; when a medium starts going out of style, switch before your backup hardware dies. And the data format doesn't matter since you handle that on the primary storage.
With the view that your backups don't need to last in mind, you can now select a backup strategy. Simplest solution is a second HDD for first level, either RAID or periodic sync with a USB/FW drive, and DVD-Rs second level.
And keep your backups offsite.
I believe the ridges were explained in Enterprise.
A handful of remnants of the eugenics wars (kept in secret by data's creator, before he turned to robotics) started getting delusions of grandieur (as they do), left their secret home and captured a klingon vessel. The klingons decided to create their own engineered people in response.
Unfortunately, they fucked up somehow and created/mutated a virus that infected an entire klingon planet. So the scientists responsible captured the Enterprise doctor to help create a cure, otherwise other klingons were going to exterminate the planet's population to contain the virus.
This cure was created from human DNA (or some shit) and resulted in the patient losing his ridges.
In the future came technology to give them back their ridges, but until then, klingons from that planet were human-like.
AIUI, terraforming would take centuries (alien pyramids notwithstanding), so there's no huge rush, and we're going to have to build airtight structures to start with anyway.
That's one hell of a "boss button" - just like real life.. when you're about to get caught, grab the pr0n and throw it as far away as possible/under something else.
Or.. *waves hand* this isn't teh pr0n you're looking for. err, I mean.. *waves* Hi boss! Yep, just checking these figures here, see? No problem.
And Enterprise will stumble upon this frozen world, and discover that all is not as it appears...
Fear not, Canadians! The Enterprise is about to boldly go and meddle in your affairs (you think Star Fleet may be related to the Americans somehow?).
1) Patent: {thing}
2) Patent: {thing} on teh intarwebs!
3) Patent: {thing} in Australia!!
Exactly.
1) Open Source programmers don't give much thought to patents. They even actively avoid them, so any violations are purely accidental, not from "contamination" or some shit.
Now, since embracing Open Source, IBM is now in a bit of a pickle, since they're in a prime position to get sued over these patents. A tighter patent system means IBM is free(r) to engage in open source without the same level of risk.
2) IBM is a big research organisation; they're into real patents. The kinds that other companies want to licence, not the kinds those lesser companies get sued for after accidentally reinventing the same thing.
IBM's business is all Signal, and filtering out the Noise is just good business for them.
All that shit can be faked/stolen. The thing is, a real human is infinitely more capable of recognising someone trying to fake what they are. An eyeball on the tip of a fountain pen would be a... dead giveaway. We don't just analyse the eyeball, we observe the whole scene, including the wannabe infiltrators body language. Until a computer can be programmed with that level of instinct, you're best off keeping your biometrics under the observation of actual security guards.
Which Matrix might that be? What about conflicts with more generic movie titles? Or really long ones? Is it matrix.movie, or thematrix.movie? DNS is not a search engine. Use one, or go to studio.com/movie (like it says on the advertising).
And who is the grant arbiter of
You might as well just abolish TLDs entirely if you're going to go the "hundreds of TLDs" route.
I don't suppose you know any Linux software that does the prediction (T.E.C.) thing? smartctl doesn't seem to. I've only seen Windows utils do that.
Not employing fanbois, such of yourself, of any platform would also help. The (in)ability to a) properly identify the problem, b) choose the correct product, and c) implement it properly, is the primary failure of IT.
And FWIW, the correct product isn't necessarily the most hardcore geekfest you can find. VHS, x86, Windows95, etc. may be/have been the inferior technologies, but they were the superior products. You need to realise this reality and deal with it before it costs you your business (unless your business happens to be the aformentioned niche geekfest products).
Firewalls and routers are technological solutions - throw money at the problem and it goes away.
The problem with social engineering is that before the users can be given a clue, management has to get one.
And they can't just buy it in a shrinkwrapped package from $VENDOR, they'd have to admit (to the entire company) they don't know something and be educated. But they're not going to do that, nor will they defer to the experts they (should have) employed to handle it without managerial fiddling. Therefore the problem doesn't exist, mmkay?
bugger all == fuck all. ie. negligible.
Unless you're talking dual 486s, Winamp uses bugger all CPU time. I've been doing that since Win95 and Pentium Classic/MMX.
Try something a little more hardcore -- playing games while HTPC software runs in the background, possibly capping a large HDTV stream, and/or feeding it to the rest of the house.
Short retention would basically force The Man to have some manners, as just showing up with a van full of goons and confiscating everything won't do them much good. If they want data on someone, they'll have to have a proper order that said data on said someone over a certain period be kept.
This also means it will be much harder to mine for minor infractions post-fact, and instead persue actual "true criminals" - ie. the kind they are willing to invest time into actively following and getting warrants and whatnot.
As far as Windows goes, the core is really the best bit. It's just that it got buried under layers of PHBs/corporate bullshit and market domineering egomaniacs.