Amazing that essentially a "yawn" gets an "Interesting" moderation.
It doesn't use HD DVD, but standard DVD
Does anything? Should they hold up the release date and tack on another $100 -- at least -- to the price for HD-DVD when no one else has it and there's no software for it aside from games?
Wireless is extra, extra controllers are a lot extra.
A wireless controller is included in that $400 you just mentioned with the hard drive. And since when are extra controllers ever included?
Games are 60 dollars and it doesn't play XBox games.
Really? The first-party ones I've seen are still $50. And it will support Xbox games if you have the hard drive, though precisely which Xbox games is still a matter of confusion.
I wouldn't call Firefox particularly "light weight" either but it doesn't clock in at
anywhere near 122MB.
This sounds like "WOMM" (Works On My Machine) syndrome... you left off "in my installation." Firefox currently reports 110,896k in Task Manager in my installation, with 9 tabs open. I imagine it depends on plugins installed and used among other things.
Sweeping generalizations are rarely good, including this one.
The jump system is truly awful - it can take ages to build up the proper jump height, and it is easy to make a mistake. Really unforgiving.
As I said in the first part of the review, it does take a while to get used to the jumping mechanic -- and some spots are harder than others to get the oscillation going, like next to a wall -- but soon enough it's very easy to immediately get an oscillation going right off the bat, on demand.
That's the essence of the game: controlling a ball of tar that responds in predictable ways to gravity, elasticity, friction, and momentum. Dumbing down the jumping mechanic would make it essentially just another Mario clone.
...EULAs of this Xbox sort are illegal. Maybe we'll be seeing some court action in the coming weeks?
You know, that would be just dandy. I hope someone in Europe does sue Microsoft because of this, I think it would be fun. Their only recourse would be what exactly? Shutting down Xbox Live as a service in Europe. I mean, since they can't update their Live service effectively, even when someone explicitly accesses a feature requiring Xbox Live since that's a no-no, what else can they do? There you go, Linux wanks! Enjoy!
All because someone wants to run "ps -aux" on their goddamned game console. Pardon me if my sympathy runs dry.
a man with his anus on fire will most likely run faster than an azalea. Story at 11.
Hell, if that's what it takes to become a speaker at the Game Developer's Conference, I'm totally in. Blaringly obvious inanities?! Check!
"Gamers prefer playing games with attractive visuals, high-fidelity textures, and richly composed sonic landscapes to being struck in the scrotum with a mallet."
"When it comes to plot, focus on the classic storytelling elements like theme, character development, conflict/resolution, and female characters with enormous, cunningly detailed, high-polygon-count breast renderings."
Yeah, I'm going to book my hotel room for the San Jose GDC right-the-hell now.
It is of limited use for those looking for a guid on changing the timing belts in '98 Pintos,
We should strongly consider bombing Ford Motor Company instead of Iraq if they made a Pinto in '98... that seems a far more insidious threat to me than mere Scuds and the ubiquitous WMD.
Easy, man, he was simply going for a (+5, Funny), he didn't screw your sister. I mean, he is a geek, he'd probably just ask her whether she could help him exchange his floppy for a hard drive, get slapped, mope in his room and play Doom before shooting a dozen people at his high school.
Oh wait, am I mixing stereotypes?! I always get geeks and goths mixed up.
That makes me think of Smart Dust and the network intelligence of Smart Dust.
I'll narrowly skirt OT and say that this sounds remarkably like the "localizer" technology in Vernor Vinge's sci-fi book, A Deepness in the Sky. And oh my God did I lust after that tech. That's the mark of good sci-fi (well, one of 'em, anyhow): lusting after what's described:). That's definitely OT. But lustworthy.
"The (Timeline patent) license ensures that all users of Microsoft SQL Server 7, Office 2000 and other Microsoft products that utilize this type of technology are unencumbered by Timeline's patents."
It would be hard for Microsoft to claim it did not know or should have known its statement was false.
Hence, Microsoft seems to have willingly and knowingly mislead its customers. I sense that if individual customers do end up getting sued by Timeline, those customers could turn right around and sue Microsoft for misleading them. IANAL(ThankGod).
In a curious press release announcing the judgment, Osenbaugh appears to be threatening legal action against some SQL Server developers, "particularly those Microsoft customers who relied on Microsoft's assurances, failed to investigate them thoroughly, and knowingly continued to provide material steps in an Infringing Combination. These infringers, if any, may face treble damages for the entire three and one-half years the case was tied up in the courts. Microsoft is not a law firm. Relying on its advice should not constitute acting in good faith; which is the required defense to treble damages for failure to investigate and honor patents once on notice of their existence."
Emphasis mine. This just seems vindictive, here. These are customers of a customer to Timeline... why go after the end-user so viciously?
That's how long it will be until Kazza, Gnutella, Limewire, et all will switch to an SSL encapsulated protocol
I've said it before and I'll say it again, and I'll bold face it for good measure:
If administrators can't distinguish "good" traffic from "bad" traffic, they will have no choice but to simply remove any access at all to the Internet from the problem subnets, namely dorms.
So, encrypt the traffic. Make it so that nobody can tell what's inside the stream. That's dandy. But if P2P usage makes it such that researchers can't get the resources or bandwidth do actually do their work or are significantly impacted (the argument of whether researchers are doing anything more than reading Slashdot or Dilbert is for a separate post), even if the traffic isn't recognized as P2P per se, you can bet that this will be the next step.
You know, I've heard that a number of times. Sounds witty, and gets a +5, Funny, but are you really thinking about this? Most of the porn stars that I've seen are just barely on the attractive side as viewed on a VCR or DVD. The various naughty bits of all parties, when seen in close up, can still be titillating at 480i.
Enter 1080i and the caked layers of makeup start to become obvious, and what once was perhaps a rather appealing, umm, "honeypot" is now revealed in vastly greater resolution, where all sorts of rather distasteful aberrations and assorted blemishes show up twice the size of Kansas. You think actual human skin enjoys being shaven down to nothing without some kind of visual result? Pubic shaving bumps at 1080i are far from yummy.
No thanks, I'll keep my prurient material at 480i with a nice soft edge to them, thank you very much.
I am repeatedly surprised by the amount of spam out there that does not contain any way to contact the spammer. How do they expect to make money if there is no way to contact them?
Are you really gonna leave that hanging up there like a big, juicy grapefruit?
Sling a kajillion spam messages with no contact information whatsoever.
???
Profit!
"We apologize for the previously displayed shenanigans. Those responsible for that ordered list have been sacked."
I can't think of any sites with specific examples, but it seems like I've seen this before...
<robot voice>
You have reached the end of the Internet. You have seen everything there is to see. Please go back.
Now.
</robot voice>
Doh.
Actually, Apple was interested in hearing...
on
No More Mac Tweaking?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
... about what developers wanted/needed access to in new versions of the operating system (yes, I know that this article is really about UI tweaks, but figured I'd offer a perspective on what the topic of the post implied). I attended one of the Apple WWDCs (World Wide Developers' Conference) when I worked for the now defunct (well, "assimilated into the NAI universe") Dr. Solomon's Software on Virex, an anti-virus application for the Mac. When OS X was announced, we were decidedly worried about how we were going to get access to the file system areas that we needed to hook in to to intercept file opens and closes, along with other similar things. During a particular mixer, where Apple engineers and architects were around to sip beer and eat free food, we talked to the main architect and engineers of the file system team and had a great dialogue about what we needed and how best we could get it. They were interested to hear how we had worked around so many disgusting parts of the OS 7, 8 and 9 systems, and were honestly quite horrified to hear what was required in certain circumstances:). But, customers want to be protected from viruses in every possible way they can access files, so we had to do it.
Traditionally this is a pretty tough thing to do, even in the best of times. Under OS 8 and 9, we had a hell of a time keeping the on-access scanning parts working with each new release of the OS... they would change behavior in AppleTalk functionality, asynchronous hooks, or whatever and POOF!, what used to work just fine now times out on accesses to remote volumes.
The Apple guys were very open to trying to give us more reliable, sanctioned access to the file system hooks that we needed to have. Unfortunately, Dr. Solly's was soon thereafter assimilated by NAI and I was not able to work on the product anymore, so I don't know what they eventually did with the OS X product.
But Halo? Just your average FPS game on a console. Who plays FPS games on a console? Not me.
<sarcasm>And golly, if WildBeast doesn't play it, nobody does!</sarcasm>
Seriously, though, you do realize that Halo is the only Xbox game to have remained in the top 10 sales charts for all consoles since debut, don't you? So, quite obviously, somebody plays FPS games on consoles.
Hehe! Yeah, at lunch today I figured it sounded rather "in your face" to the wrong person. My apologies, I'm not attacking you for the suggestion, but rather the spate of folks seriously attempting to merely circumvent the new shaping. Your suggestion was merely the nearest target for my rant =). Again, sorry for the personal sounding blast.
If people are getting annoyed by these bandwidth shaping restrictions, I'm surprised someone hasn't created a software that employs the http port? How would they restrict traffic then -- Or does this not work for some reason?
Are you thinking before you type? "How would they restrict traffic then," as if it's ordained by God that you must be able to download the latest Tool CD. Indeed, how would they restrict the bandwidth if everyone's traffic looked the same, whether they were viewing research data or slinging Korn rips? I'll tell you how:
IT guy #1 - "Hmmm, the only thing going on is HTTP requests, but 99% of them are coming from dorms and our researchers are getting latency in the 2 to 5 second range. What should we do?"
IT guy #2 - "This was easier when we had a traffic distinguisher so that we could just ratchet down the P2P networks. Now everything looks the same."
IT guy #3 - "Oh well, guess we'll just shut down the dorm lines, that way we can at least get something done."
You think what's currently happenning is draconian? Remember what that access is for, and be humbly grateful that you can even do what you're currently doing.
...a world-wide run on geckos, a corresponding decline in the general gecko population, and at least a few dozen additional entries in the annual Darwin Awards each year.
MUSGROVE CREEK, Arkansas (AP): Authorities for the Musgrove County Sheriff's Department today confirmed the identity of a man found dead on the sidewalk near the Spring Street BB&T building Tuesday morning.
Deputy Ernest Townsend identified the man as 34-year-old Cosworth county native Chester "Twoie" Brack. Brack was discovered early Tuesday morning by workers at the main branch of the BB&T building, dead on the sidewalk with what onlookers described as "just a seriously crushed head."
Police were confused about the incident, until medical examiners arrived at the scene and discovered what appeared to be one half of a lizard glued to each of Brack's hands. "They were super-glued to the palms of the deceased's hands, from head to tail along their back," revealed Harvey Edgeblat, Musgrove County Chief Medical Examiner. No explanation was given as to why Brack had glued split lizards to his hands.
Noted taxonomist Dr. Francis Farnsworth solved the mystery Wednesday by identifying the supposed lizards as a species of gecko, Sphaerodactylinae, a lidless gecko native to the region. Dr. Farnsworth noted that geckos are known to have extremely sticky pads and can hold perhaps as much as 285 pounds of weight with the force of adhesion.
Evidently Brack had heard of this ability, and derived a test involving using the geckos as a kind of suction cup, scaling the side of the BB&T building during the early morning hours.
"Unfortunately," Dr. Farnsworth continued, " Sphaerodactylinae bodies are not quite capable of supporting the kind of weight the deceased was placing on them." Medical examiners estimated Brack's weight at 275 pounds. "He must have thought that two geckos were sufficient to hold him up."
Authorities eventually determined that Brack had reached the 7th floor of the 17 story BB&T building before the geckos finally succumbed to the enormous pressures being placed on them. "The geckos pads were capable of sustaining the weight, the Super Glue was capable of sustaining the weight, but the fragile geckos' bodies just gave out," continued Edgeblat.
The bottom half of the geckos were found still attached to the 7th floor story.
Teach me to read before my morning coffee: I read that as Overwhelmingly Large Testicle Closer to Reality. Nothing says "good morning" like shockingly large testicles.
Think of RFCs and you generally think of stodgy prose, about as scintillating as professional wall painting competitions ("Oh he really put out for those last square feet, Al!"). But some of them can be quite fun. My favorites come from RFC 2410, The NULL Encryption Algorithm and Its Use With IPsec. For those not familiar, the NULL algorithm is essentially a do-nothing algorithm: what goes in comes out. It's a way to specify, for instance, authentication only for an IPsec policy. Some excerpts:
2.1 Keying Material Like other modern ciphers, e.g., RC5 [RFC-2040], the NULL encryption algorithm can make use of keys of varying lengths. However, no measurable increase in security is afforded by the use of longer key lengths.
2.4 Performance The NULL encryption algorithm is significantly faster than other commonly used symmetric encryption algorithms and implementations of the base algorithm are available for all commonly used hardware and OS platforms.
2.5 Test Vectors The following is a set of test vectors to facilitate in the development of interoperable NULL implementations.
test_case = 2 data = "Network Security People Have A Strange Sense Of Humor" data_len = 53 NULL_data = "Network Security People Have A Strange Sense Of Humor"
And finally:
At the time of this writing there are no known laws preventing the exportation of NULL with a zero (0) bit key length.
We should warn the Bush administration of the dangers of allowing exports of this powerful algorithm!
It is worthwhile to mention that Spider-Man is being shown on over 1000 screens more than AOTC, etc.
It is equally worthwhile to mention that, with the opening of AOTC, Spider-Man is now playing on far smaller screens than AOTC currently is, meaning that fewer people are even able to see it now. And, if my experience is any indication, Spider-Man is still selling out these smaller screens (tried to go to a showing this weekend, but missed out on tickets).
According to Webwereld (in Dutch) Kazaa is pondering if they should sue back for lost damages.
Where's the "if" come from? Absolutely they should sue for damages (I mean, if they can afford to countersue, of course). IANAL, but to me this is the only way that these baseless, frivolous lawsuits are going to be stopped is to start making it too costly to attempt. Let's hope that the global implications of this cause some rethinking at all levels of the judicial and legislative branches in the States.
If we can start racking up some reversals in the States, and get some damages against the RIAA and others, you can bet the lawsuits would start drying up and it might equate to the first chinks in the armor of the DMCA.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anything? Should they hold up the release date and tack on another $100 -- at least -- to the price for HD-DVD when no one else has it and there's no software for it aside from games?
A wireless controller is included in that $400 you just mentioned with the hard drive. And since when are extra controllers ever included?
Really? The first-party ones I've seen are still $50. And it will support Xbox games if you have the hard drive, though precisely which Xbox games is still a matter of confusion.
This sounds like "WOMM" (Works On My Machine) syndrome... you left off "in my installation." Firefox currently reports 110,896k in Task Manager in my installation, with 9 tabs open. I imagine it depends on plugins installed and used among other things.
Sweeping generalizations are rarely good, including this one.
That's the essence of the game: controlling a ball of tar that responds in predictable ways to gravity, elasticity, friction, and momentum. Dumbing down the jumping mechanic would make it essentially just another Mario clone.
S'mores.
You know, that would be just dandy. I hope someone in Europe does sue Microsoft because of this, I think it would be fun. Their only recourse would be what exactly? Shutting down Xbox Live as a service in Europe. I mean, since they can't update their Live service effectively, even when someone explicitly accesses a feature requiring Xbox Live since that's a no-no, what else can they do? There you go, Linux wanks! Enjoy!
All because someone wants to run "ps -aux" on their goddamned game console. Pardon me if my sympathy runs dry.
a man with his anus on fire will most likely run faster than an azalea. Story at 11.
Hell, if that's what it takes to become a speaker at the Game Developer's Conference, I'm totally in. Blaringly obvious inanities?! Check!
"Gamers prefer playing games with attractive visuals, high-fidelity textures, and richly composed sonic landscapes to being struck in the scrotum with a mallet."
"When it comes to plot, focus on the classic storytelling elements like theme, character development, conflict/resolution, and female characters with enormous, cunningly detailed, high-polygon-count breast renderings."
Yeah, I'm going to book my hotel room for the San Jose GDC right-the-hell now.
We should strongly consider bombing Ford Motor Company instead of Iraq if they made a Pinto in '98... that seems a far more insidious threat to me than mere Scuds and the ubiquitous WMD.
Easy, man, he was simply going for a (+5, Funny), he didn't screw your sister. I mean, he is a geek, he'd probably just ask her whether she could help him exchange his floppy for a hard drive, get slapped, mope in his room and play Doom before shooting a dozen people at his high school.
Oh wait, am I mixing stereotypes?! I always get geeks and goths mixed up.
Hence, Microsoft seems to have willingly and knowingly mislead its customers. I sense that if individual customers do end up getting sued by Timeline, those customers could turn right around and sue Microsoft for misleading them. IANAL(ThankGod).
Emphasis mine. This just seems vindictive, here. These are customers of a customer to Timeline... why go after the end-user so viciously?
If administrators can't distinguish "good" traffic from "bad" traffic, they will have no choice but to simply remove any access at all to the Internet from the problem subnets, namely dorms.
So, encrypt the traffic. Make it so that nobody can tell what's inside the stream. That's dandy. But if P2P usage makes it such that researchers can't get the resources or bandwidth do actually do their work or are significantly impacted (the argument of whether researchers are doing anything more than reading Slashdot or Dilbert is for a separate post), even if the traffic isn't recognized as P2P per se, you can bet that this will be the next step.
You know, I've heard that a number of times. Sounds witty, and gets a +5, Funny, but are you really thinking about this? Most of the porn stars that I've seen are just barely on the attractive side as viewed on a VCR or DVD. The various naughty bits of all parties, when seen in close up, can still be titillating at 480i.
Enter 1080i and the caked layers of makeup start to become obvious, and what once was perhaps a rather appealing, umm, "honeypot" is now revealed in vastly greater resolution, where all sorts of rather distasteful aberrations and assorted blemishes show up twice the size of Kansas. You think actual human skin enjoys being shaven down to nothing without some kind of visual result? Pubic shaving bumps at 1080i are far from yummy.
No thanks, I'll keep my prurient material at 480i with a nice soft edge to them, thank you very much.
"We apologize for the previously displayed shenanigans. Those responsible for that ordered list have been sacked."
Ponies are irrelevant relics of the past. We can transport ourselves anytime/anywhere without need for any manner of furry, miniature quadruped.
Except they're kinda cute and tickle when they eat oats from one's hand. Screw it, give him the pony.
You have reached the end of the Internet. You have seen everything there is to see. Please go back.
Now.
</robot voice>
Doh.
... about what developers wanted/needed access to in new versions of the operating system (yes, I know that this article is really about UI tweaks, but figured I'd offer a perspective on what the topic of the post implied). I attended one of the Apple WWDCs (World Wide Developers' Conference) when I worked for the now defunct (well, "assimilated into the NAI universe") Dr. Solomon's Software on Virex, an anti-virus application for the Mac. When OS X was announced, we were decidedly worried about how we were going to get access to the file system areas that we needed to hook in to to intercept file opens and closes, along with other similar things. During a particular mixer, where Apple engineers and architects were around to sip beer and eat free food, we talked to the main architect and engineers of the file system team and had a great dialogue about what we needed and how best we could get it. They were interested to hear how we had worked around so many disgusting parts of the OS 7, 8 and 9 systems, and were honestly quite horrified to hear what was required in certain circumstances :). But, customers want to be protected from viruses in every possible way they can access files, so we had to do it.
Traditionally this is a pretty tough thing to do, even in the best of times. Under OS 8 and 9, we had a hell of a time keeping the on-access scanning parts working with each new release of the OS... they would change behavior in AppleTalk functionality, asynchronous hooks, or whatever and POOF!, what used to work just fine now times out on accesses to remote volumes.
The Apple guys were very open to trying to give us more reliable, sanctioned access to the file system hooks that we needed to have. Unfortunately, Dr. Solly's was soon thereafter assimilated by NAI and I was not able to work on the product anymore, so I don't know what they eventually did with the OS X product.
Seriously, though, you do realize that Halo is the only Xbox game to have remained in the top 10 sales charts for all consoles since debut, don't you? So, quite obviously, somebody plays FPS games on consoles.
Hehe! Yeah, at lunch today I figured it sounded rather "in your face" to the wrong person. My apologies, I'm not attacking you for the suggestion, but rather the spate of folks seriously attempting to merely circumvent the new shaping. Your suggestion was merely the nearest target for my rant =). Again, sorry for the personal sounding blast.
Are you thinking before you type? "How would they restrict traffic then," as if it's ordained by God that you must be able to download the latest Tool CD. Indeed, how would they restrict the bandwidth if everyone's traffic looked the same, whether they were viewing research data or slinging Korn rips? I'll tell you how:
IT guy #1 - "Hmmm, the only thing going on is HTTP requests, but 99% of them are coming from dorms and our researchers are getting latency in the 2 to 5 second range. What should we do?"
IT guy #2 - "This was easier when we had a traffic distinguisher so that we could just ratchet down the P2P networks. Now everything looks the same."
IT guy #3 - "Oh well, guess we'll just shut down the dorm lines, that way we can at least get something done."
You think what's currently happenning is draconian? Remember what that access is for, and be humbly grateful that you can even do what you're currently doing.
Teach me to read before my morning coffee: I read that as Overwhelmingly Large Testicle Closer to Reality. Nothing says "good morning" like shockingly large testicles.
And finally:
We should warn the Bush administration of the dangers of allowing exports of this powerful algorithm!
If we can start racking up some reversals in the States, and get some damages against the RIAA and others, you can bet the lawsuits would start drying up and it might equate to the first chinks in the armor of the DMCA.