I somehow doubt that any game made today really "stretches" the computer as far as it can be stretched... The last game I saw that "stretched" the hardware was a breakout game (with mouse support) written for the amiga.... entirely in the boot sector of a floppy disk.
PASSWORD=$* if [ "$PASSWORD" == 'blah' ]; then
echo 'yup' fi
Progb: echo 'yup'
% proga blah yup % proga foo % proga % progb blah yup % progb foo yup % progb yup
So I have proga which asks for a password, and prog b with performs the same function, but skips the password request (and ignores one if it is given). progb is supposedly a violation of the DMCA because it circumvents the protection of proga?
All bnetd does is allow legally purchased copies of various battle.net games to play together with a common character storage area and common high-score ladders. If you have an illegally copied game, that isn't bnetd's fault, anymore than if you found a cdkey generator and played on the real battle.net.
Blizzard needs to pick their targets. The fault lies in their faulty copy-protection and/or cd-key system being insecure, and in unscrupulous people taking advantage of that, not in bnetd for providing an alternative place to play.
So, why then did Blizzard/Vivendi not have the common courtesy to simply ask the bnetd team to remove any warcraft 3 support until further notice?
If they're going to claim it allows people to play without a CD-Key, then I want them to ship me a copy of ALL their games without the cd-based copy protection. I have purchased each game, and have a valid CD-Key, so obviously the cd-based protection is redundant. Why? Because if it did any good, people who didn't BUY the game still couldn't play it with bnetd!
The really sad part is, Blizzard will continue to drag us back to the bad-old-days of physical cd's that knock our drives out of alignment with their thrashing non-standard formats, and they'll glean ideas from the source code of people whose projects they shut down, and we'll have to make the choice of bending over for this stupidity, or missing out on the next incredible game they make.
I see no difference between this kind of behavior and a thug with a billy club demanding my lunch money in exchange for the right to stay in line and not get beaten up. Thanks Blizzard.
As an analogy, let me say that here in Michigan, it is illegal to drive a car that has spiked tires on any public road. This is justified because the cost of repairing the damage done to the roads is tremendous in comparison to the few accidents the extra traction would prevent.
There's nothing preventing me from tearing up my own personal racetrack with spikes.
Likewise, Blizzard can and should prevent unauthorized play on their servers. They should also prevent unauthorized copies of their clients from running... but they should not have a problem with legitimate clients (who have to pass the cd copy-protection check -- good luck if your cdrom drive is not 100% aligned) talking to a local server. It should be no different to them than those same clients playing in single-player mode.
So, not that anyone at Blizzard will read this, I will ask Blizzard to encourage the development of alternative servers AND clients for their products.... if they are indeed open source, Blizzard could glean some useful improvements to their own products from our work, at the cost of a URL being included in their documentation. Seems like a good deal to me.
Also not having a strong physics background, but if anti-particles annihilate themselves when coming into contact with their positive counterpart, one would assume that an anti-atom would also release the energy used in the strong-force bond of the anti-particles. Hence, we'd have a tiny version of a nuclear reaction.
Can anyone who IS a physics person describe how this might really work?
You're reading a web page on my server. I put a firewall rule in place to only allow access from a single IP address. You use SNAT to spoof my firewall into letting you in.
I get to go after the tcp/ip protocol people for DMCA violations?
The copy protection is to prevent you from playing on THEIR servers, you can play single-player all day long without any server at all.
Yes, but if the cable has been declared illegal, then building your own cable from pinouts would be circumventing the "protection", and that is itself a violation of the DMCA.
In that light, ordering a non-region-1 DVD is also a circumvention of copy protection, and thus violates the DMCA.... of course reading this post also violates the DMCA as it circumvents the copy-protection I put in place -- namely writing "Don't read this post!".
E-books will never replace "real" books for me until the day I can have a "book" full of flexible paper-like pages that I can turn, and I can cause any of a number of texts to fill the pages. Ideally, the backlight of the "paper" should adjust itself to always keep a steady illumenation (dimming when you put it in normal light, brightening when you're in the dark).
Hey, anyone remember those little photocells they used to put in televisions to adjust the brightness? Why don't any current PDA's or laptops spend the extra 25 cents for one of those?
People are starting to make flexible LCD panels that act like paper, but they're still a long ways off and very expensive... certainly binding a couple hundred into a "book" would be insane for the moment.
Maybe in 20 years, I'll be able to have a handful of books on my shelves that contain (or download) all the texts that currently fill a room in my house, but I'm not holding my breath!
Woah! Maybe we can link these with the cuecat somehow??? That way I can have a wearable linux box that can scan the barcodes at the store and automatically translate them into real prices!
As I recall, we were all damn impressed when we could get our C-64 to play about 30 seconds of poorly digitized music back in 1986.
It wouldn't fit much more than that in the 48K or so we had to give it.
A movie? Hmmmm.. maybe as a series of black-and-white screens... that is, the scren alternates between black and white.
THE most important feature of any IDE!
on
Java IDEs?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Any programmer knows the most important feature any development environment should have is the free soda fountain, stocked with a variety of caffinated beverages in unending supply.
A nice modular addition is the freezer with various frozen mexican foods, but that isn't as mission critical.
I don't mean to sound *too* harsh, but isn't upgrading hardware and/or software to keep up with currently used standards part of your job?
I certainly believe stability is FAR more important than increased speed, and being on the @ss end of an ISP, I'd much rather have a reliable connection -- but there's a limit to how long you can blame the vendors.
If the vendors won't release updates in a reasonable manner (IE: *NOT* require you to purchase all new equipment), then dump them for someone who will.
If the upgrades needed aren't in your budget, than you didn't do your budget properly. Hardware shouldn't be considered to have a lifespan much beyond 2 years nowadays.
The main thing is to setup test modem pools and let people use them at their own (pre-warned!) risk. Don't be like my ISP and test new things on the main network (unless you want lots of angry customers!).
The problem of how to maintain power to all that RAM indefinately is still pretty tricky, but how about this idea. Why not put enough SDRAM on your hard drive to buffer the whole thing? Whenever you read anything off the platters, hold it in RAM, and whenever anything is written, page it back to disk as usual. Thus as you use your system, the speed will continue to improve (up to a point) without tying up system RAM.
I seem to recall that the purchaser of a software package has a legal right to make a single backup copy for their protection. Does anything like that apply to published media?
When I buy a new piece of (copy protected) software, I usually find myself looking for a crack so that I don't have to keep the stupid CD on my desktop every time I want to run the thing. I can't afford a 200 disc CD-ROM changer, but I can afford a 100 Meg hard drive.
By the same token, I usually rip most of my audio cd's to mp3/ogg format so that I can listen to whatever I want without having to go dig out the cd.
At least copy protected software doesn't (usually! Still wondering about Diablo II) damage my cd-rom drive...
Why can't these publishers realize that cd's are best used as a delivery media, NOT as a way of controlling how the content gets used. We should be buying the content, not the physcial disc it's on.
The sad thing about this is that we're NOT talking about a traditional closed-source vendor sneaking away with a chunk of cheese from their rivals and offering it up as their own.
If you use a piece of free software as a part of your own development, does it really hurt your profits that much to admit it? I don't blame them (RedHat) for using perfectly good code, but who decided to blow the headers away?
Back in the good(?) old days of DikuMUD, you not only had to leave headers intact, but you had to show the developers names in the login screen. How would any linux developer like to have to display a nice screen of hundreds of names before their logo came up?
Leaving a copyright notice intact seems like a pretty small price to pay for avoiding months of development time spent on solving a problem someone else already solved. Get a clue RedHat. Your attitude only goes so far...
Let's face it. The governement desperatly wants our trust so they can do their job, but they can't trust us in the same way, because they have to assume we're bad (and they're not).
Asking for mandatory backdoors to cryptography is just another example of how authority figures abuse the honest law-abiding public with restrictions that they KNOW criminals will ignore (by using alternative, unregistered crypto). I think it is also safe to say that any backdoor will be compromised shortly after its introduction. The average citizen has no desire to try, but the criminals will put forth every effort to break it or steal it. They have everything to gain, and far more manpower than the government.
It's all well and good to say it's a short-term response to the current terrorist threat (which has been with us for more than 10 years, unnoticed by most). Do you really think they'll recind the law after the perceived threat is over?
No, add it to the same list that's given us joys like Macrovision, SecureROM, and dongles. More ways to harass the legitimate users and annoy them to the point of becoming outlaws.
I can't see why they'd have to support anything beyond standard IP protocols and DHCP to obtain your address. Any OS that you'd "reasonably" want to use has or can have a DHCP client.
As for port blocking, Charter here in Michigan has taken the lovely view of blocking access to the SMTP port. Even though my mail "server" would actually reduce their resource load by having me stop using their disk space... I'm sure some executive somewhere saw the word server and stomped.
The few neurons I have seem to recall that the internet was "supposed to be" an idea and information exchange for the military, research institutions, and selected big businesses (read Banks). Then they decided to commercialize it.
Imagine going down into your favourite ghetto and finding all the people spraying grafitti on the walls. Now, you announce that there's free cans of any colour spray-paint they want in the main public library. Feel free to test them out while you're there.
Sure, you get a few masterpieces tucked away in the corners, but boy is there alot of "B0b Ru1ez" to wade through.
I think the answer to that question is to rate just how flexible the current API's can be. The two contenders (and please, let's try not to make MORE!) are OpenGL and DirectX. Nvidia has ressurected the venerable Amiga's idea for a fully programmable graphics processor, and I presume that ATI's post-Raedon chip will be similar.
So, which API allows one to most easily get at the GPU's coding power? How many hooks does the high level api have into the gpu's engine, and can the gpu get data from the api on the fly?
If anyone out there has worked with them, I'd be curious to hear what's present or lacking from the standards, and if it's feasable to try and write GPU level code abstractly.
I always thought the idea was that options had dashes, while actions did not. Thus tar c -vf blah was supposedly the "right" way to say it. Since a, u, and x are all options telling ps HOW to display the process information, they should have a dash.
Besides, it's annoying to have to recompile ps just to get rid of a stupid *NAG* field.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The ultimate shooting game has already been created and if you didn't have an Amiga, you missed it.
Smurf Hunt!
You, a shotgun, and Papa Smurf... need I say more?
I somehow doubt that any game made today really "stretches" the computer as far as it can be stretched... The last game I saw that "stretched" the hardware was a breakout game (with mouse support) written for the amiga.... entirely in the boot sector of a floppy disk.
Hmmmm...
Proga:
PASSWORD=$*
if [ "$PASSWORD" == 'blah' ]; then
echo 'yup'
fi
Progb:
echo 'yup'
% proga blah
yup
% proga foo
% proga
% progb blah
yup
% progb foo
yup
% progb
yup
So I have proga which asks for a password, and prog b with performs the same function, but skips the password request (and ignores one if it is given). progb is supposedly a violation of the DMCA because it circumvents the protection of proga?
All bnetd does is allow legally purchased copies of various battle.net games to play together with a common character storage area and common high-score ladders. If you have an illegally copied game, that isn't bnetd's fault, anymore than if you found a cdkey generator and played on the real battle.net.
Blizzard needs to pick their targets. The fault lies in their faulty copy-protection and/or cd-key system being insecure, and in unscrupulous people taking advantage of that, not in bnetd for providing an alternative place to play.
So, why then did Blizzard/Vivendi not have the common courtesy to simply ask the bnetd team to remove any warcraft 3 support until further notice?
If they're going to claim it allows people to play without a CD-Key, then I want them to ship me a copy of ALL their games without the cd-based copy protection. I have purchased each game, and have a valid CD-Key, so obviously the cd-based protection is redundant. Why? Because if it did any good, people who didn't BUY the game still couldn't play it with bnetd!
The really sad part is, Blizzard will continue to drag us back to the bad-old-days of physical cd's that knock our drives out of alignment with their thrashing non-standard formats, and they'll glean ideas from the source code of people whose projects they shut down, and we'll have to make the choice of bending over for this stupidity, or missing out on the next incredible game they make.
I see no difference between this kind of behavior and a thug with a billy club demanding my lunch money in exchange for the right to stay in line and not get beaten up. Thanks Blizzard.
As an analogy, let me say that here in Michigan, it is illegal to drive a car that has spiked tires on any public road. This is justified because the cost of repairing the damage done to the roads is tremendous in comparison to the few accidents the extra traction would prevent.
There's nothing preventing me from tearing up my own personal racetrack with spikes.
Likewise, Blizzard can and should prevent unauthorized play on their servers. They should also prevent unauthorized copies of their clients from running... but they should not have a problem with legitimate clients (who have to pass the cd copy-protection check -- good luck if your cdrom drive is not 100% aligned) talking to a local server. It should be no different to them than those same clients playing in single-player mode.
So, not that anyone at Blizzard will read this, I will ask Blizzard to encourage the development of alternative servers AND clients for their products.... if they are indeed open source, Blizzard could glean some useful improvements to their own products from our work, at the cost of a URL being included in their documentation. Seems like a good deal to me.
Also not having a strong physics background, but if anti-particles annihilate themselves when coming into contact with their positive counterpart, one would assume that an anti-atom would also release the energy used in the strong-force bond of the anti-particles. Hence, we'd have a tiny version of a nuclear reaction.
Can anyone who IS a physics person describe how this might really work?
So, by that extension...
You're reading a web page on my server. I put a firewall rule in place to only allow access from a single IP address. You use SNAT to spoof my firewall into letting you in.
I get to go after the tcp/ip protocol people for DMCA violations?
The copy protection is to prevent you from playing on THEIR servers, you can play single-player all day long without any server at all.
Hey, if these things are selling for >= $12k right now, how about a healthy alternative?
For those who want to improve their coordination, excercise, AND still look like a fool, the POGO-STICK is the right tool for you!
No wimpy 10MPH speed limits on these babies, you can go as fast as your muscles (and the pavement) will carry you!
Act now, before anyone else makes their way to their local toy store and gets one first!
Yes, but if the cable has been declared illegal, then building your own cable from pinouts would be circumventing the "protection", and that is itself a violation of the DMCA.
In that light, ordering a non-region-1 DVD is also a circumvention of copy protection, and thus violates the DMCA.... of course reading this post also violates the DMCA as it circumvents the copy-protection I put in place -- namely writing "Don't read this post!".
E-books will never replace "real" books for me until the day I can have a "book" full of flexible paper-like pages that I can turn, and I can cause any of a number of texts to fill the pages. Ideally, the backlight of the "paper" should adjust itself to always keep a steady illumenation (dimming when you put it in normal light, brightening when you're in the dark).
Hey, anyone remember those little photocells they used to put in televisions to adjust the brightness? Why don't any current PDA's or laptops spend the extra 25 cents for one of those?
People are starting to make flexible LCD panels that act like paper, but they're still a long ways off and very expensive... certainly binding a couple hundred into a "book" would be insane for the moment.
Maybe in 20 years, I'll be able to have a handful of books on my shelves that contain (or download) all the texts that currently fill a room in my house, but I'm not holding my breath!
Woah! Maybe we can link these with the cuecat somehow??? That way I can have a wearable linux box that can scan the barcodes at the store and automatically translate them into real prices!
Boy, I can't wait for the first time I can take a tcpdump of my electrical wiring in to dispute my bill...
:)
And how about a DDOS attack? Do I have to firewall off my toaster now?
Sounds like all the people involved with Divx are dodging the unemployment line. We didn't fall for it then, why should we now?
Well, the phrase "Better late than never" comes to mind. Of course, they've already got the obscurity part written and debugged.
Maybe M$ should try focusing on stability first... it's much easier to have a secure OS when it doesn't crash on a new mouse driver install....
As I recall, we were all damn impressed when we could get our C-64 to play about 30 seconds of poorly digitized music back in 1986.
It wouldn't fit much more than that in the 48K or so we had to give it.
A movie? Hmmmm.. maybe as a series of black-and-white screens... that is, the scren alternates between black and white.
Any programmer knows the most important feature any development environment should have is the free soda fountain, stocked with a variety of caffinated beverages in unending supply.
A nice modular addition is the freezer with various frozen mexican foods, but that isn't as mission critical.
I don't mean to sound *too* harsh, but isn't upgrading hardware and/or software to keep up with currently used standards part of your job?
I certainly believe stability is FAR more important than increased speed, and being on the @ss end of an ISP, I'd much rather have a reliable connection -- but there's a limit to how long you can blame the vendors.
If the vendors won't release updates in a reasonable manner (IE: *NOT* require you to purchase all new equipment), then dump them for someone who will.
If the upgrades needed aren't in your budget, than you didn't do your budget properly. Hardware shouldn't be considered to have a lifespan much beyond 2 years nowadays.
The main thing is to setup test modem pools and let people use them at their own (pre-warned!) risk. Don't be like my ISP and test new things on the main network (unless you want lots of angry customers!).
The problem of how to maintain power to all that RAM indefinately is still pretty tricky, but how about this idea. Why not put enough SDRAM on your hard drive to buffer the whole thing? Whenever you read anything off the platters, hold it in RAM, and whenever anything is written, page it back to disk as usual. Thus as you use your system, the speed will continue to improve (up to a point) without tying up system RAM.
I seem to recall that the purchaser of a software package has a legal right to make a single backup copy for their protection. Does anything like that apply to published media?
When I buy a new piece of (copy protected) software, I usually find myself looking for a crack so that I don't have to keep the stupid CD on my desktop every time I want to run the thing. I can't afford a 200 disc CD-ROM changer, but I can afford a 100 Meg hard drive.
By the same token, I usually rip most of my audio cd's to mp3/ogg format so that I can listen to whatever I want without having to go dig out the cd.
At least copy protected software doesn't (usually! Still wondering about Diablo II) damage my cd-rom drive...
Why can't these publishers realize that cd's are best used as a delivery media, NOT as a way of controlling how the content gets used. We should be buying the content, not the physcial disc it's on.
The sad thing about this is that we're NOT talking about a traditional closed-source vendor sneaking away with a chunk of cheese from their rivals and offering it up as their own.
If you use a piece of free software as a part of your own development, does it really hurt your profits that much to admit it? I don't blame them (RedHat) for using perfectly good code, but who decided to blow the headers away?
Back in the good(?) old days of DikuMUD, you not only had to leave headers intact, but you had to show the developers names in the login screen. How would any linux developer like to have to display a nice screen of hundreds of names before their logo came up?
Leaving a copyright notice intact seems like a pretty small price to pay for avoiding months of development time spent on solving a problem someone else already solved. Get a clue RedHat. Your attitude only goes so far...
Let's face it. The governement desperatly wants our trust so they can do their job, but they can't trust us in the same way, because they have to assume we're bad (and they're not).
Asking for mandatory backdoors to cryptography is just another example of how authority figures abuse the honest law-abiding public with restrictions that they KNOW criminals will ignore (by using alternative, unregistered crypto). I think it is also safe to say that any backdoor will be compromised shortly after its introduction. The average citizen has no desire to try, but the criminals will put forth every effort to break it or steal it. They have everything to gain, and far more manpower than the government.
It's all well and good to say it's a short-term response to the current terrorist threat (which has been with us for more than 10 years, unnoticed by most). Do you really think they'll recind the law after the perceived threat is over?
No, add it to the same list that's given us joys like Macrovision, SecureROM, and dongles. More ways to harass the legitimate users and annoy them to the point of becoming outlaws.
I can't see why they'd have to support anything beyond standard IP protocols and DHCP to obtain your address. Any OS that you'd "reasonably" want to use has or can have a DHCP client.
As for port blocking, Charter here in Michigan has taken the lovely view of blocking access to the SMTP port. Even though my mail "server" would actually reduce their resource load by having me stop using their disk space... I'm sure some executive somewhere saw the word server and stomped.
The few neurons I have seem to recall that the internet was "supposed to be" an idea and information exchange for the military, research institutions, and selected big businesses (read Banks). Then they decided to commercialize it.
Imagine going down into your favourite ghetto and finding all the people spraying grafitti on the walls. Now, you announce that there's free cans of any colour spray-paint they want in the main public library. Feel free to test them out while you're there.
Sure, you get a few masterpieces tucked away in the corners, but boy is there alot of "B0b Ru1ez" to wade through.
I think the answer to that question is to rate just how flexible the current API's can be. The two contenders (and please, let's try not to make MORE!) are OpenGL and DirectX. Nvidia has ressurected the venerable Amiga's idea for a fully programmable graphics processor, and I presume that ATI's post-Raedon chip will be similar.
So, which API allows one to most easily get at the GPU's coding power? How many hooks does the high level api have into the gpu's engine, and can the gpu get data from the api on the fly?
If anyone out there has worked with them, I'd be curious to hear what's present or lacking from the standards, and if it's feasable to try and write GPU level code abstractly.
I always thought the idea was that options had dashes, while actions did not. Thus tar c -vf blah was supposedly the "right" way to say it. Since a, u, and x are all options telling ps HOW to display the process information, they should have a dash.
:)
Besides, it's annoying to have to recompile ps just to get rid of a stupid *NAG* field.