Actually, companies probably see that as an incentive to move away from the PC. PC gamers have higher expectations. We won't pay more than $50 for a game unless it's a collector's edition. The graphics better look awesome on a 8800GTX, and at least playable on a 6600. You can forget about PC gamers paying for something like LIVE. And of course piracy is much less of a problem on consoles. Of course, we also put up with installing multiple patches on a just-released game and waiting a year for a game poorly ported from a console.
As much as I dislike the proprietary, expensive world of console gaming, I suspect that things will keep moving towards consoles. It took a long time for them to get an online service for the consoles, but they did eventually. Now they also have digital downloads, and they could probably figure out a way to allow free mods. The PS3 lets you use a keyboard.
Of course, it could just be selection bias. Maybe there's dozens of stale meme posts that all say "I know I'm going to be modded down" that do get modded to -1, but you only pay attention to the ones that get modded +5 Funny.
That's actually where Microvision started off -- retinal scanning displays that project directly into your eyes with lasers. It turns out it's slightly expensive ($4000+ for monochrome red) to get it down to a size and weight you'd be comfortable wearing, so after countless millions in research they're probably going for something more mass marketable.
Actually, there was an article in the San Jose Mercury News today about PG&E rolling out smart meters. If you consider $2.3 billion / 10.3 million meters installed, that's about $220 per household.
People get paid to develop expensive and useless cold-war-style weapon systems, but that doesn't mean it's the best use of the money. Maybe you've heard of the parable of the broken window? What if they spent the money on developing cutting edge field medicine instead? Better body armor?
Now I actually think you're right on the parties though -- they serve a purpose, and the money spent goes to people who don't already charge millions for overpriced government contracts. But you have to be careful when you start arguing that money isn't "wasted" merely because people are paid for their productive/non-productive effort.
Detecting the simulator requires knowledge about the simulator and the outside world. If you've always been on the inside, you wouldn't know where to look. The majority of software is not designed to know if it's living in a simulated machine (in fact, that's one of the principles of computer architecture), and maybe it's similarly true of humans.
Suppose I left a DVD at a friend's house, and neglect to mention to the cops when they raid my house. Later the friend hands it over as part of the investigation. Is it really incriminating that I didn't tell them about it? Does the 5th amendment cover it?
I trust the pilots are a lot better at flying the plane than I am, so yes, I'm happy giving up control to them:)
I suspect that people are overly confident about their driving skills as well. If I knew someone else were a better driver and responsible enough not to do anything stupid, I'd definitely want them to drive instead of me.
Actually, Adam Smith lived in a world where tiny companies were benign (in fact, highly productive), and big companies were not. The worst of the lot were government-sanctioned monopolies -- often achieved through bribes. The key thing is that capitalism is not the same as a free market.
Interestingly, Marx's era had worse things than your typical corporate monopoly. It was the age of imperialism, when the drive to expand meant invading other countries to satisfy the resource and market needs of corporations when they had saturated their home country.
Actually, it's more effective at being invasive, so therefore it's more invasive. I don't mind cops patrolling the streets because the privacy impact is relatively quite minor compared to having cameras everywhere. Liberty is definitely being lost, even if a 220-year-old document doesn't explicitly state that police stalking you everywhere you go in public is against the rules.
I think we all deserve a reasonable expectation of privacy no matter where we are, in public or not, and the only thing that changes with our location is what we consider "reasonable." Stepping outside should not be a blank check for people to spy on you.
Most games with a dedicated server (usually FPS) already validate everything -- or more precisely, the only thing you can do is enter keystrokes and mouse movements. I'd actually call it particularly bad design if you don't do something like that -- although maybe at a higher level.
One problem is with non-dedicated servers like for RTS games, where one of the players hosts the server. You really have to trust that player not to cheap by manipulating the server.
Alternately some games use a P2P model where each client knows everything (and is effectively a server), so there's no way to bend the rules because all the other clients are watching and cross-checking the data. On the other hand, it gives *everyone* the opportunity to cheat by simply revealing info they shouldn't know, and there's no way to detect that without some kind of draconian trusted computing watchdog.
However, you should also be aware of the related XSRF (cross-site request forgery) attack, which can actually be done from a different site. For example, someone on your site says "Hey, go to myevilsite.com", and then when you view the page it uses Javascript to auto-submit a form pointed at your site. If that form happens to be "delete account" and you don't have any protection (such as a generated form ID that only legit forms from your site would have, or requiring a password), there could be trouble.
From the official press release: "Funds will be used for new titles, expansion to additional hardware platforms, and additional staff"
Which additional hardware platforms is a bit early to speculate on (and only one of their goals), but I wouldn't be surprised if they were looking into the Wii and/or Mac.
Actually, my rental contract was a lot easier to read and probably a bit shorter than most EULAs. On the other hand, the credit card agreement is absolutely horrible to read and no doubt includes a lot of gotchas.
But do you have PHP, MySQL, shell access, and more? Hosting static websites is trivial compared to having to manage a shared scripting environment and the considerably higher resource usage that goes along with it.
You could always use client prepared statements, which is mostly the same as building your own SQL statements strings but are much cleaner and does the quoting for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, companies probably see that as an incentive to move away from the PC. PC gamers have higher expectations. We won't pay more than $50 for a game unless it's a collector's edition. The graphics better look awesome on a 8800GTX, and at least playable on a 6600. You can forget about PC gamers paying for something like LIVE. And of course piracy is much less of a problem on consoles. Of course, we also put up with installing multiple patches on a just-released game and waiting a year for a game poorly ported from a console.
As much as I dislike the proprietary, expensive world of console gaming, I suspect that things will keep moving towards consoles. It took a long time for them to get an online service for the consoles, but they did eventually. Now they also have digital downloads, and they could probably figure out a way to allow free mods. The PS3 lets you use a keyboard.
Of course, it could just be selection bias. Maybe there's dozens of stale meme posts that all say "I know I'm going to be modded down" that do get modded to -1, but you only pay attention to the ones that get modded +5 Funny.
That's actually where Microvision started off -- retinal scanning displays that project directly into your eyes with lasers. It turns out it's slightly expensive ($4000+ for monochrome red) to get it down to a size and weight you'd be comfortable wearing, so after countless millions in research they're probably going for something more mass marketable.
Actually, there was an article in the San Jose Mercury News today about PG&E rolling out smart meters. If you consider $2.3 billion / 10.3 million meters installed, that's about $220 per household.
That's hilarious :) If I had mod points I'd give you some.
People get paid to develop expensive and useless cold-war-style weapon systems, but that doesn't mean it's the best use of the money. Maybe you've heard of the parable of the broken window? What if they spent the money on developing cutting edge field medicine instead? Better body armor?
Now I actually think you're right on the parties though -- they serve a purpose, and the money spent goes to people who don't already charge millions for overpriced government contracts. But you have to be careful when you start arguing that money isn't "wasted" merely because people are paid for their productive/non-productive effort.
Detecting the simulator requires knowledge about the simulator and the outside world. If you've always been on the inside, you wouldn't know where to look. The majority of software is not designed to know if it's living in a simulated machine (in fact, that's one of the principles of computer architecture), and maybe it's similarly true of humans.
Suppose I left a DVD at a friend's house, and neglect to mention to the cops when they raid my house. Later the friend hands it over as part of the investigation. Is it really incriminating that I didn't tell them about it? Does the 5th amendment cover it?
There's status.livejournal.org but it's incredibly slow right now.
I see headlines like that in The Onion :)
I trust the pilots are a lot better at flying the plane than I am, so yes, I'm happy giving up control to them :)
I suspect that people are overly confident about their driving skills as well. If I knew someone else were a better driver and responsible enough not to do anything stupid, I'd definitely want them to drive instead of me.
Actually, Adam Smith lived in a world where tiny companies were benign (in fact, highly productive), and big companies were not. The worst of the lot were government-sanctioned monopolies -- often achieved through bribes. The key thing is that capitalism is not the same as a free market.
Interestingly, Marx's era had worse things than your typical corporate monopoly. It was the age of imperialism, when the drive to expand meant invading other countries to satisfy the resource and market needs of corporations when they had saturated their home country.
Actually, it's more effective at being invasive, so therefore it's more invasive. I don't mind cops patrolling the streets because the privacy impact is relatively quite minor compared to having cameras everywhere. Liberty is definitely being lost, even if a 220-year-old document doesn't explicitly state that police stalking you everywhere you go in public is against the rules.
I think we all deserve a reasonable expectation of privacy no matter where we are, in public or not, and the only thing that changes with our location is what we consider "reasonable." Stepping outside should not be a blank check for people to spy on you.
Most games with a dedicated server (usually FPS) already validate everything -- or more precisely, the only thing you can do is enter keystrokes and mouse movements. I'd actually call it particularly bad design if you don't do something like that -- although maybe at a higher level.
One problem is with non-dedicated servers like for RTS games, where one of the players hosts the server. You really have to trust that player not to cheap by manipulating the server.
Alternately some games use a P2P model where each client knows everything (and is effectively a server), so there's no way to bend the rules because all the other clients are watching and cross-checking the data. On the other hand, it gives *everyone* the opportunity to cheat by simply revealing info they shouldn't know, and there's no way to detect that without some kind of draconian trusted computing watchdog.
However, you should also be aware of the related XSRF (cross-site request forgery) attack, which can actually be done from a different site. For example, someone on your site says "Hey, go to myevilsite.com", and then when you view the page it uses Javascript to auto-submit a form pointed at your site. If that form happens to be "delete account" and you don't have any protection (such as a generated form ID that only legit forms from your site would have, or requiring a password), there could be trouble.
From the official press release: "Funds will be used for new titles, expansion to additional hardware platforms, and additional staff"
Which additional hardware platforms is a bit early to speculate on (and only one of their goals), but I wouldn't be surprised if they were looking into the Wii and/or Mac.
Actually, my rental contract was a lot easier to read and probably a bit shorter than most EULAs. On the other hand, the credit card agreement is absolutely horrible to read and no doubt includes a lot of gotchas.
I guess in the future, Elrond is an evil computer program.
But do you have PHP, MySQL, shell access, and more? Hosting static websites is trivial compared to having to manage a shared scripting environment and the considerably higher resource usage that goes along with it.
FYI, that programming model is called futures.
You could always use client prepared statements, which is mostly the same as building your own SQL statements strings but are much cleaner and does the quoting for you.
Correction: whoever submitted the Slashdot article doesn't know how to do a whois lookup. That makes more sense.
Whoever wrote the linked blog apparently doesn't know how to do whois lookups.
Insurgency Mod for HL2 is under development. Play as either the US, or insurgent forces in Iraq and Somalia.
The corporate letter-writers are bots nowadays though.