So, instead of 5 minutes of frustration in 15 degree weather, trying to re-tighten my windshield wiper arm, I would be facing a $50 service call and a $50 tow-truck fee since I couldn't see to drive without the wiper???
Yes, I had to open my hood, as the nut tightening the wiper arm to the motor was not accessible from above (at least not with MY tools).
And just how will I convince the redneck neighbors around me that they need to install wireless devices, and that it won't help them get better TV reception, or heat up their nukerwave dinners?
I think the point was, why do they autoban retrieval of a small XML file, while they do NOT autoban someone sitting in a graphical browser with no cache hitting refresh every 30 seconds?
If RSS is such a great thing, they should be encouraging people to use it and punishing people who abuse the (more costly) html interface.
Can someone explain when the use of the word "feed" changed from being a pushed-on-arrival kind of thing to a pull-on-view kind of thing?
Back in the days of yore, when dragons ate virgins for dinner, and there were still virgins about, a thing called usenet used to be referred to. Typically, knights of the Realm would mention a newsfeed, and it was known that if you were a "real" usenet site, your parent would *push* new data to your news server as it became available.
Now, those poor folk who had tiny disk drives, or who were on a slow connection had the option to *pull* data from their server instead of accepting a feed... but we laughed at them and called them names.
Nowadays, it seems that lots of people talk about RSS feeds, or XML feeds, when they're really talking about pulling data from a source, not being fed data.
Bill Gates needs to make more money. He doesn't have the vision to really innovate, so he needs to expand his current product line by adding lots of new features that most people don't need. More and more features requires bigger hardware to support them.
Intel needs to make more money. Once they produce a chip that adequately powers the current generation of software, they will see a decline in sales, since people don't need to upgrade their hardware unless they have software requirements to fill. If you install Windows98SE on a Pentium 233, it will perform pretty much identically to a Pentium IV 3.2GHz box -- in terms of the desktop environment.
Soooo, hmmmm, how can these two companies continue to make money when they both make products that do everything the customer wants? Convince the customer that they need MORE!
Let's be honest here. Do you (with your shiny new 3GHz CPU and 1G of RAM, and 120G SATA hard drive) actually get any more productive work done today, than you did with a 40MHz 486DX cpu, 16M of RAM, and 20G IDE drive? Be honest!
Bah... if you hear someone EXPRESSLY tell you what a good idea it would be to invest in SCO/Unix right now, and you do it because of that recommendation... why should they be responsible for your gullibility? If Harry Potter likes eating hamsters, and says we should all buy a six pack, bully for him! I'll just politely decline and make sure any pet hamsters I might own in the future aren't on his plate.
I don't buy into the idea that responsibility for your actions should ever be pushed off onto someone else, unless there is duress involved. If mere incitation were enough, every stupid marketer on the planet should be in jail right now -- hey... that's not a bad idea!
If the VOIP provider maps calls to phone network numbers, then it (and the phone company in question) should work to ensure that the service is accessible... If VOIP eventually replaces the phone network, then it will have to manage connecting to the 911 call centres (with the help of the agency running those centeres).
I agree that 911 service should be available to VOIP consumers, since it should be a legitimate replacement for other phone services... but I don't think they should shoulder the entire burden alone.
I feel for anybody whose circumstances prevent them from playing on bNet.
Hmmm, like bnet crashing, or having horrible lag because the windows servers they use are unstable.... or just plain slow ISP.
But as long as a project like this gives the ability for anybody to effortlessly negate Blizzard's main layer of piracy control,
Hmmm, so what is the purpoe of the pain-in-the-ass CD Key I have to type in every time I reinstall my legitimate copies of every Blizzard product? Why do I have to keep the stupid original jewel cases around to ensure those numbers stay put?
How about that non-standard CD format that prevents me from (easily) making a backup copy? You know, the one that might save my $50 game from having a young child take the disc and start playing frisbee with it?
as well as providing a tool to use in developing cheats that will work on bNet (by providing a nice reference on the network protocol),
Hmmm, our company is too lame to use an encryption protocol for our packet stream... so can we please use the DMCA to make up for our lack of competence in the technical arena?
Not to mention the fact that Rule #1 of client-server programming is that you never trust state-updates from the client. The client is for command input, and state display... the server is for state management. If you have to push more data across than needed to display the current state, you better encrypt it (if you want the extra state data to remain hidden).
I fully agree with Blizzard's decision to shut it down. It's indisputable that bnetd provided both of those things,
I fully agree with the government's decision to remove computers from the hands of private citizens, and require security clearances and licensing for employees to use them. It's indisputable that computers provide a means to commit criminal activities.
and I'm pretty sure that some form of copy protection wasn't on their list of future features, either.
Wrong. They not only planned on honoring the CD-Key protocol that Blizzard used, but tried to obtain information from Blizzard about authenticating this protocol.
Unfortunately for them, Blizzard doesn't understand public-key encryption, and so used a simple cd key generation algorithm which (if explained) would make pirate key generators trivial.
Neither did they plan on closing the source to deny bad cheaters easy reference.
That much is true.
bnetd was a way to supplement existing Blizzard products by providing a local character vault and game server, which could be used on the LAN. Most Blizzard titles allow LAN games, but character information is stored on each local hard drive, and thus easily hackable.
Neverwinter Nights provided a similar concept by allowing you to download and run a server locally, where characters are stored in that server. If you trust the person running the server, no client can cheat. In fact, they liked the idea well enough (plus the fact that servers can be linked) that they abandoned their own server ideas as redundant.
Allowing private servers should not be an issue for Blizzard. The desire to play in a ladder and compete against everyone else would always keep battle.net alive... but for those who want a fast lag-free game with friends, or who wanted to setup a private game with their own maps or mods, bnetd provided that opportunity, and could have done so without weakening Blizzard's position -- had they chosen to work WITH instead of AGAINST them.
Blizzard makes good software, and I'm sure I'll buy WoW when it materializes. I'll be annoyed at whatever copy protection hoops I am forced to jump through (even though a subscription-based game should have none -- your credit card is the best dongle I can think of). But, they make software. When I buy a hammer, I don't want Sears telling me I can't use it to break ice off my roof because it was only designed to hit nails. Why should software be any different?
Yes, and this isn't a defense of spammers, it's a deficiency in the law.
Afterall, there's nothing *inherantly* bad about drug dealers who simply obtain a product and sell it to those who desire it. Our society has mandated that certain substances are detrimental to the public good, and thus have been outlawed. People selling these banned items are violating that law, and thus are held accountable when possible.
I would suggest that spam is also detrimental to the public good, both in paper form and as electronic transmissions. It costs everyone in terms of lost resources needed to support the delivery mechanism (lag on the internet, extra manpower and slower deliveries in the post office), and the only people gaining anything are the spammers themselves.
This doesn't even touch on the personal cost of being a spam recipient. Telemarketing calls can drive people to ignore important calls out of fear or anger, documents and bills can get lost in the mail because they get mixed into a pile of spam, and certainly email accounts can be rendered almost worthless if the spam level rises so great that they exceed their quota, blocking legitimate mail delivery.
So don't defend spammers by saying it's not illegal, instead let's make it illegal and start making spammers pay for the resources they are using.
Tempest! Omega Race, Robotron, Zoo Keeper, Dig Dug, Joust. Yep, those were all good.
I read an article a few months ago about the original Atari developers, and how they were forced to be creative because of the limited hardware resources they had to work with.
If you look at games today, most of them start with a design like "How can we simulate a guy moving through a jungle, shooting anything that moves"? You then build rendering engines, figure out how much of the terrain you need to model, and what can be repeated. Do physics to try and simulate impacts, etc without using too much CPU.
Back then, the design was more like "What can we do in the 17ms we have left before the vertical retrace kicks in"? Lots of abstract games, lots of original ideas that probably evolved as much from what drawing routines would work in real-time as from what game-concept was in mind.
Hardware bloat encourages software bloat. If a resource is available, it will be used. That's why we don't see really NEW ideas in the video game world anymore, everyone is trying to build a better mousetrap without thinking about ways to get rid of the mice.
I'm sure aiming giant ultra-sonic boom-boxes up at the sky SOUNDED like a good idea to someone, but I suspect every bird and bat in the area will be pretty unhappy.
OTOH, maybe the UFO's that pass overhead will come down and buy something.
A set of principles of right conduct.
Hmmm, pretty vague, but ok. Trying to deceive people with counterfeit money is probably not "right conduct". How is printing facsimilies of money wrong? By your reckoning then, it is wrong to take photographs of money, or to document in any way, what money actually looks like -- other than with a physical sample itself?
A theory or a system of moral values: "An ethic of service is at war with a craving for gain" (Gregg Easterbrook).
Again, vague. This would be the legal implementation of the concept that counterfeiting money is wrong. As another poster mentioned further up, the law does not assign criminal status to the creation of unofficial currancy, only in the attempt to use it AS official currancy.
ethics (used with a sing. verb) The study of the general nature of morals and of the specific moral choices to be made by a person; moral philosophy.
Here, we're talking personal ethics... so you might have one here if you think that creating an image of something is blaspheme. Neither the law nor the corporation has any business in this realm, however.
ethics (used with a sing. or pl. verb) The rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession: medical ethics.
And here we have HP actually disgracing their chosen profession, that is the art of creating an exact representation of an artistic expression on paper. If HP had ethics, they would never have violated their responsiblity to the community in this way. One now has to wonder how many OTHER ways HP products will intentionally mis-print documents.... perhaps competitors brochures will be silently printed at 50dpi to make them look worse?
Slashdot Mirror
So, instead of 5 minutes of frustration in 15 degree weather, trying to re-tighten my windshield wiper arm, I would be facing a $50 service call and a $50 tow-truck fee since I couldn't see to drive without the wiper???
Yes, I had to open my hood, as the nut tightening the wiper arm to the motor was not accessible from above (at least not with MY tools).
When it's available in the model they used for the new Battlestar Galactica cylon fembot, I'll order two so they can make videos while I'm asleep. :)
And just how will I convince the redneck neighbors around me that they need to install wireless devices, and that it won't help them get better TV reception, or heat up their nukerwave dinners?
So, you never actually tried the second joystick, did you?
I think the point was, why do they autoban retrieval of a small XML file, while they do NOT autoban someone sitting in a graphical browser with no cache hitting refresh every 30 seconds?
If RSS is such a great thing, they should be encouraging people to use it and punishing people who abuse the (more costly) html interface.
Can someone explain when the use of the word "feed" changed from being a pushed-on-arrival kind of thing to a pull-on-view kind of thing?
Back in the days of yore, when dragons ate virgins for dinner, and there were still virgins about, a thing called usenet used to be referred to. Typically, knights of the Realm would mention a newsfeed, and it was known that if you were a "real" usenet site, your parent would *push* new data to your news server as it became available.
Now, those poor folk who had tiny disk drives, or who were on a slow connection had the option to *pull* data from their server instead of accepting a feed... but we laughed at them and called them names.
Nowadays, it seems that lots of people talk about RSS feeds, or XML feeds, when they're really talking about pulling data from a source, not being fed data.
So, when did a feed become a slurp?
You're only just now getting it?
Bill Gates needs to make more money. He doesn't have the vision to really innovate, so he needs to expand his current product line by adding lots of new features that most people don't need. More and more features requires bigger hardware to support them.
Intel needs to make more money. Once they produce a chip that adequately powers the current generation of software, they will see a decline in sales, since people don't need to upgrade their hardware unless they have software requirements to fill. If you install Windows98SE on a Pentium 233, it will perform pretty much identically to a Pentium IV 3.2GHz box -- in terms of the desktop environment.
Soooo, hmmmm, how can these two companies continue to make money when they both make products that do everything the customer wants? Convince the customer that they need MORE!
Let's be honest here. Do you (with your shiny new 3GHz CPU and 1G of RAM, and 120G SATA hard drive) actually get any more productive work done today, than you did with a 40MHz 486DX cpu, 16M of RAM, and 20G IDE drive? Be honest!
"Nobody's stressed out by indoor plumbing..."
Obviously, you don't own your own house.
Bah... if you hear someone EXPRESSLY tell you what a good idea it would be to invest in SCO/Unix right now, and you do it because of that recommendation... why should they be responsible for your gullibility? If Harry Potter likes eating hamsters, and says we should all buy a six pack, bully for him! I'll just politely decline and make sure any pet hamsters I might own in the future aren't on his plate.
I don't buy into the idea that responsibility for your actions should ever be pushed off onto someone else, unless there is duress involved. If mere incitation were enough, every stupid marketer on the planet should be in jail right now -- hey... that's not a bad idea!
Well, so much for my idea of a new Goth Oriented Vampiric Necrocannibalism Anonymous Page (GOVNAP).
If the VOIP provider maps calls to phone network numbers, then it (and the phone company in question) should work to ensure that the service is accessible... If VOIP eventually replaces the phone network, then it will have to manage connecting to the 911 call centres (with the help of the agency running those centeres).
I agree that 911 service should be available to VOIP consumers, since it should be a legitimate replacement for other phone services... but I don't think they should shoulder the entire burden alone.
Actually, if you don't have that silly flash/java crap enabled, hitting cancel skips right past any ads that might have been there :)
You're new here, aren't you?
*grin* (couldn't resist)
You're right, of course. They should have posted a link to google's cache and let THEM do the copyright infringing.
Sorry, I can't reply to this comment. I've been declared a casualty and have to report to the nearest disintegration chamber.
:)
ST:TOS did this long before Attack of the Clowns
We must be in Soviet Russia, because it seems that Microsoft is afraid of you!
So now I have to compete with people who can play Diablo for 5 days without even taking a bathroom break????
How about that non-standard CD format that prevents me from (easily) making a backup copy? You know, the one that might save my $50 game from having a young child take the disc and start playing frisbee with it?
Hmmm, our company is too lame to use an encryption protocol for our packet stream... so can we please use the DMCA to make up for our lack of competence in the technical arena?Not to mention the fact that Rule #1 of client-server programming is that you never trust state-updates from the client. The client is for command input, and state display... the server is for state management. If you have to push more data across than needed to display the current state, you better encrypt it (if you want the extra state data to remain hidden).
I fully agree with the government's decision to remove computers from the hands of private citizens, and require security clearances and licensing for employees to use them. It's indisputable that computers provide a means to commit criminal activities. Wrong. They not only planned on honoring the CD-Key protocol that Blizzard used, but tried to obtain information from Blizzard about authenticating this protocol.Unfortunately for them, Blizzard doesn't understand public-key encryption, and so used a simple cd key generation algorithm which (if explained) would make pirate key generators trivial.
That much is true.bnetd was a way to supplement existing Blizzard products by providing a local character vault and game server, which could be used on the LAN. Most Blizzard titles allow LAN games, but character information is stored on each local hard drive, and thus easily hackable.
Neverwinter Nights provided a similar concept by allowing you to download and run a server locally, where characters are stored in that server. If you trust the person running the server, no client can cheat. In fact, they liked the idea well enough (plus the fact that servers can be linked) that they abandoned their own server ideas as redundant.
Allowing private servers should not be an issue for Blizzard. The desire to play in a ladder and compete against everyone else would always keep battle.net alive... but for those who want a fast lag-free game with friends, or who wanted to setup a private game with their own maps or mods, bnetd provided that opportunity, and could have done so without weakening Blizzard's position -- had they chosen to work WITH instead of AGAINST them.
Blizzard makes good software, and I'm sure I'll buy WoW when it materializes. I'll be annoyed at whatever copy protection hoops I am forced to jump through (even though a subscription-based game should have none -- your credit card is the best dongle I can think of). But, they make software. When I buy a hammer, I don't want Sears telling me I can't use it to break ice off my roof because it was only designed to hit nails. Why should software be any different?
Yes, and this isn't a defense of spammers, it's a deficiency in the law.
Afterall, there's nothing *inherantly* bad about drug dealers who simply obtain a product and sell it to those who desire it. Our society has mandated that certain substances are detrimental to the public good, and thus have been outlawed. People selling these banned items are violating that law, and thus are held accountable when possible.
I would suggest that spam is also detrimental to the public good, both in paper form and as electronic transmissions. It costs everyone in terms of lost resources needed to support the delivery mechanism (lag on the internet, extra manpower and slower deliveries in the post office), and the only people gaining anything are the spammers themselves.
This doesn't even touch on the personal cost of being a spam recipient. Telemarketing calls can drive people to ignore important calls out of fear or anger, documents and bills can get lost in the mail because they get mixed into a pile of spam, and certainly email accounts can be rendered almost worthless if the spam level rises so great that they exceed their quota, blocking legitimate mail delivery.
So don't defend spammers by saying it's not illegal, instead let's make it illegal and start making spammers pay for the resources they are using.
Tempest! Omega Race, Robotron, Zoo Keeper, Dig Dug, Joust. Yep, those were all good.
I read an article a few months ago about the original Atari developers, and how they were forced to be creative because of the limited hardware resources they had to work with.
If you look at games today, most of them start with a design like "How can we simulate a guy moving through a jungle, shooting anything that moves"? You then build rendering engines, figure out how much of the terrain you need to model, and what can be repeated. Do physics to try and simulate impacts, etc without using too much CPU.
Back then, the design was more like "What can we do in the 17ms we have left before the vertical retrace kicks in"? Lots of abstract games, lots of original ideas that probably evolved as much from what drawing routines would work in real-time as from what game-concept was in mind.
Hardware bloat encourages software bloat. If a resource is available, it will be used. That's why we don't see really NEW ideas in the video game world anymore, everyone is trying to build a better mousetrap without thinking about ways to get rid of the mice.
You think encryption without a license will be permitted?
Trust the computer, the computer is your friend.
It's called Assembly. Assembly is what lowly humans use because their meat-brains can't keep track of all those 0's an 1's.
Hey baby, wanna Kill All Humans?
% cat windows.c
#include
int main() {
printf("Loading...");
while(1) {
usleep(10000);
printf(".");
fork();
}
return 0;
}
I'm sure aiming giant ultra-sonic boom-boxes up at the sky SOUNDED like a good idea to someone, but I suspect every bird and bat in the area will be pretty unhappy.
OTOH, maybe the UFO's that pass overhead will come down and buy something.
Hmmm, pretty vague, but ok. Trying to deceive people with counterfeit money is probably not "right conduct". How is printing facsimilies of money wrong? By your reckoning then, it is wrong to take photographs of money, or to document in any way, what money actually looks like -- other than with a physical sample itself?
Again, vague. This would be the legal implementation of the concept that counterfeiting money is wrong. As another poster mentioned further up, the law does not assign criminal status to the creation of unofficial currancy, only in the attempt to use it AS official currancy.
Here, we're talking personal ethics... so you might have one here if you think that creating an image of something is blaspheme. Neither the law nor the corporation has any business in this realm, however.
And here we have HP actually disgracing their chosen profession, that is the art of creating an exact representation of an artistic expression on paper. If HP had ethics, they would never have violated their responsiblity to the community in this way. One now has to wonder how many OTHER ways HP products will intentionally mis-print documents.... perhaps competitors brochures will be silently printed at 50dpi to make them look worse?