This Comment Is Slash-Meta-Tag enhanced for Slash-Meta-Tag enhanced browsers.
[obvious correction] Its interesting how the gaming industry is using all this technology out of the Military. Networks, 3D Graphics, and Even Voxel Based animation all had their start in Military applications. [/obvious correction]
[bitch about slashdot] I whish the editors would stop having 'insightfull' observations about artilces and just let them stand on their own. [/bitch about slashdot]
How about a romz site instead of a warez site. Ultimate Irony, Download the Super Mario Bros. Rom and Nesticle off a Game Boy Advance. Sweet sweet irony.
Through accounting loopholes MSFT only pays 0$ in taxes anyway. What do they care if.gov gets less $$?
This is a case for Jury Nullification
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
This is so incredibly stupid. Copyright violation is already a crime. All I can ever hope for is to get jury duty on a DMCA\SSSCA case so I can nullify. What more can I do? I have already written my senators (Fritz H. and Strom T. [neither of which got my vote])
Actually, My windows box has been very stable ever since I bolted the chassis of my box to a 4 inch concrete slab in the back yard. Hardly moves at all now.
I agree, what he says is absolutely true. Its an issue of timing, When I wrote him in October, he was planing to introduce the bill, but when he replied in November, the bill had been tabled. It was dishonest of him to attempt to lead me to believe that he had no intent to introduce the bill, but clearly the last few days indicate he did intend to do so.
Also lets not forget who he is. Washington is known for people saying one thing and meaning another. So yes his words were truth, but his message was not. That is the lie. Before you tell me I am not being fair, remmeber, he does represent me therefore I can judge him by a higher standard than just technically true.
Last October I wrote Senator Hollings a letter asking about the SSSCA. I suppose since I am a South Carolina resident he took the time to reply. In a letter dated November 13, 2001 from the senator:
Dear Mr. Sattler
Thank you for your recent communication regarding legislation that address copyright protection on the internet.
I believe that any proposed legislation must meet consumers' expectations while protecting intellectual property. Ideally, the private sector will work to solve these problems. While I am considering legislation in this area, I am not intoducing a bill at this time.
You can be certain that if legislation is developed, I will take your concerns into consideration in order to ensure the rights of consumers as well as those of the creators of Internet material.
With kindest regards, I am
Sincerely,
Ernest F. Hollings
So basically he denied that the SSSCA existed at the time. What a blatant lie.
I happen to live in South Carolina and have e-mailed Hollings on a couple occasions with questions about the SSSCA. A several weeks later I did get a response (Mail was slow, probably because of anthrax). Points for Hollings in that someone there actually checks his e-mail. Big red X's for sending me a letter denying the existence of the SSSCA.
First one should observe the difference between visual and non-visual components. Non visual components aren't really relavant to this. They are invisible so they don't get drawn to screen. Visual Components on the other hand are drawn to the display and have their own ways of getting there. Visual CLX components are really just QT with some code added to make them easy to use from Object Pascal.
This is why KDE is listed as a requirement for Kylix because if they have KDE then they have QT. Also if you compile a CLX app in Delphi, then your windows EXE will require a QT DLL (I forget which one.)
Anyway the point here is that CLX doesn't really belong in this discussion.
Here! Here! Delphi Is flat out amazing. Oh, as far as porting goes, Write in Kylix First, then Port to Delphi and you'll have near zero work to do. The reason is that all the libraries Kylix uses are available in Delphi, but not vice versa so by starting in Kylix you can't use something thats not supported in Delphi. You are so right on. I wish I had mod points.
Destination-based Wavelengths
on
Is Hyperchip Hype?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
From Thier site:
Accelerating the war are the recent advances in ultra-long-haul optics and optical switches, which are making it practical for routers to place packets on destination-based wavelengths that can take them as close as possible to their final destination in the core, thus eliminating intermediate routing hops and unnecessary O-E-O conversions.
I read this as meaning that you have a strand of fiber that runs from say for example Boston, to NY to Washington to Richmond to Charlotte to Atlanta to.... and that a packet originates in Boston and is transmitted in red light to the next node, if the light isn't the color for that node, So if red was Richmond, NY and Washington would reflect the red light down the line until it gets to Richmond. This way NY and WAS don't have to convert the signal which saves a lot of time and work. Also this allows Boston to talk to Richmond as 1 hop as far as the software is concerned. Similarly a packet transmitted in Amber light might go all the way to Atlanta before being converted to Electrons.
Sounds like a good idea to me since it should work on existing fiber. The real question is how hard and expensive is it to start with two nodes and grow from there.
The simple answer to your question is console games are marketed to people who don't have a PC.
Technically the windows API is an emulator of sorts. It provides a level of abstraction that makes it fairly easy to write a game for and have it work on most machines. There really are only two advantages to console gaming. Less fuss over hardware and bios/os issues because they are all practically identical, and Cost.
Why would I as a developer want to write a high performance game to run inside an emulator. I'd get better preformace coding to the OS instead of inside yet another layer of performace sucking bloat. However it does raise the interesting possibilty for OS independant games, but Java can do that and I haven't seen any killer games written in Java.
Most people who play a game (say Tony Hawk 2) on a PC and on a console will all agree the PC version is better if only for video resolution alone. Most people who own a console and a PC will usually opt for the PC version if the title is available on both. One of the few reasons a PC owner would get a console is if a really great title was only available on that console.
Oh, one more thing, how am I going to convince cost aware customers that they are better off buying a $1000 PC to play my games instead of a $300 Xbox? The idea only really works for customers who already own a PC, which explains the huge selection of PC titles on the shelf at best buy.
Me thinks you are forgetting about a major player in the ISP business. Let me tell you about an absolutely huge ISP that almost no one knows about. The are called InfoAve.net. Based out of Pineville, North Carolina (just a hair south of Charlotte) is the nations 3rd largest (probably not anymore as their have been a few mergers over the last year or so) ISP. Third? Really? Yep. You know why no one is heard of them? They are marketed under several hundred brand names. Many smaller local telco's (read anybody who's not a baby bell) resell InfoAvenue services as their own. This allows the small telco's to compete against AOL, MSN, Earthlink, ect. because they share many of the costs of being an ISP. All of them together support one call center. and split backbone costs and whatnot.
Ok big deal, What does this have to do with broadband? Well the real issue is that many of these smaller telcos are the cable company too. Now I ask you if you own both the twisted pairs and the coax into every home, where is the incentive to rollout broadband? All your customers are paying you 20$ a month for dialup and you are making huge profit margin since you've already recouped your cost. Why switch to broadband and make a serious financial commitment to a connection with a smaller profit margin.
So there you have it. For most smaller telco's the is no push for broadband, and since the big telcos see no threat to their customer base from small telco's they are in no hurry to provide a service the small telcos aren't.
Disclaimer: I have worked for a small telco/cable co., and I've seen the financial reports that come out of the meetings so I am pretty confident telling you skinnyband is more profitable than broadband.
Part of this perception is based on stodgy "conventional wisdom", and part of it is based on the reality that people with basic and advanced degrees can sometimes feel a little resentful when having to report to someone with no degree at all
What was that about gates being a college drop out?
Add Erskine, a small private Methodist Church backed university in Due West, South Carolina to the stack of schools with a campus-wide wireless network. Honestly they are someone I'd never expect to see on the list of wireless schools, but they are. (My little sister attends and when I visit I am surprised to see students sitting on lawns computing away.)
Another surprising issue at Erskine is that they didn't ban Peer to Peer networks. They just changed their policy to read bandwidth intensive applications (Such as P2P, or downloading Linux distros) should only be done between 9PM and 6AM when network demand is at a minimum. (That is not the exact wording of the policy but you get the idea.) Me thinks Erskine actually has an IT department with a brain, or the school has leaders smart enough to let the IT department make IT decisions. Either way Erskine is setting a great example for other schools.
I don't care how good the graphics libraries are, Linux apps will still be Butt-Ugly as long as developers (myself included - Kylix Yea!) continue writing Butt-Ugly apps.
Then again I've made some damn ugly Windows apps too.
One of the things the MS did right in concept, but screwed up in implementation was the critical update notification system. Essentially you install this little program (probably spy-ware) that periodically checks what updates are installed on your machine, and what updates are available from MS. When a new patch comes out a window pops up and tells you that that are new updates. You can even configure this thing to download them first in the background and then have it pop up a window when its ready to install the updates. Sounds like a pretty good idea right? Just one problem with it. It doesn't actually check to see if you have or even use a certain app before deciding if you need an update. On a couple machines I run I have the Critical update notification running, they kept wanting to install an update for windows media player on those machines. These two machines don't even have windows media player installed. Infact they aren't in the list of allowed binaries, so even if they were installed you couldn't run them. But yet this thing kept insisting to install the update. Anyway the point here is that Microsoft has gotten better as far as updates are concerned (espcially for home end end users who would never check for updates on their own) but the system still needs help, Unless of course they left it broken on purpose to get more people to install 'optional' software. I did end up having to install Windows Media Player (although it is still not an allowed EXE) to get update notification to STFU.
Wait, Whats the motive for MS to do this? This will do one of two things. Either people will buy it or they won't. If people do buy it then MS is a monopoly, or people are real stupid. If people don't buy it then they will buy something else, which will kill the monopoly that they are protecting. Conclusion: Informed consumers kill monopolies.
Since there are no informed consumers out there, we are all screwed.
The article says the blocks could be up to 6000 years old, not that they are 6000 years old. They might be as young as 1000. The number 6000 probably comes from the time they think humans first set foot on Cuba.
Verant Interactive (the company that makes EQ) was simply not prepared for the anticipation for this release. The release is the first major upgrade to the systems graphics. Previous upgrades only affect territory in Norrath (the fictional world that is the setting in EQ), but this one affects a whole lot more. Previous expansion packs didn't affect the anywhere near as much of the game.
This combined with lots of hype (every time you log into EQ they send a message saying Luclin is comming) left Verant feeling like they had to make deadlines. Luclin wasn't even in most stores when it was supposed to be. I know people who preordered and were supposed to have it delivered by now who still don't have it.
All the hype means 400,000 subscribers all foaming at the mouth to see the changes. So they log in as soon as the system is back up. The catch? All of them need updated files, and none of them have them. That by itself isn't bad, but when they had trouble updating their servers, the system didn't come back up till 4:00 California Time, which means that all of North America was in primetime for playing.
Since the server came up at the worst time of day, The patch servers got hit hard. Most users were stuck waiting to get their updates because the patch server couldn't handle the load. Eventually over the night Verant got more patch servers up and things started moving more quickly.
By 5:00 AM California time, (8:00 AM for me) the traffic jam was gone.
In Short it was all hype and incredible bad timing that made it such a mess.
Under the plan approved by the Legislature for the Maine Learning Technology Endowment, all seventh grade students and teachers will begin using portable, wireless computers in the Fall of 2002, and all eighth grade students and teachers will be equipped the following year.
Call me crazy, but thats the same students right? (Ok, I know what they meant, but it made me giggle.)
Wouldn't ISP better spend their scarce resources converting their networks to IPv6 instead of pushing NAT research? Am I uninformed that NAT research is more cost effective than converting to IPv6?
Seems to me this would allow full control over the IP addresses issued to a customer. Bonus! You would have real IP addresses for each node and could easily block your picture frame from accessing the WAN.
Whoa! Perhaps this is the work of the IP address cartel. (There is no address cartel.) If they switch to Ipv6, then the address shortage would go away and they wouldn't be able to charge for additional addresses! No wonder we haven't switched over yet.
Ha, the developers of GNU software should use this mentality.
Doing your homework to get your degree and writing free software are not very comparable. He is supposed to do the work to get the degree, even if that means duplicating work that someone else has already done. GNU software on the otherhand by its own nature avoids duplicating work.
Sharing work to complete a task is acceptable. Sharing work to improve, or prove and individuals skills is not acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
This Comment Is Slash-Meta-Tag enhanced for Slash-Meta-Tag enhanced browsers.
[obvious correction]
Its interesting how the gaming industry is using all this technology out of the Military. Networks, 3D Graphics, and Even Voxel Based animation all had their start in Military applications.
[/obvious correction]
[bitch about slashdot]
I whish the editors would stop having 'insightfull' observations about artilces and just let them stand on their own.
[/bitch about slashdot]
Actually The First X is for Excel So logicially It Does Spell WEPONX, Seems like Steve is going Beserker attack ala Logan.
How about a romz site instead of a warez site. Ultimate Irony, Download the Super Mario Bros. Rom and Nesticle off a Game Boy Advance. Sweet sweet irony.
Through accounting loopholes MSFT only pays 0$ in taxes anyway. What do they care if .gov gets less $$?
This is so incredibly stupid. Copyright violation is already a crime. All I can ever hope for is to get jury duty on a DMCA\SSSCA case so I can nullify. What more can I do? I have already written my senators (Fritz H. and Strom T. [neither of which got my vote])
More about Jury Nullification
Actually, My windows box has been very stable ever since I bolted the chassis of my box to a 4 inch concrete slab in the back yard. Hardly moves at all now.
I agree, what he says is absolutely true. Its an issue of timing, When I wrote him in October, he was planing to introduce the bill, but when he replied in November, the bill had been tabled. It was dishonest of him to attempt to lead me to believe that he had no intent to introduce the bill, but clearly the last few days indicate he did intend to do so.
Also lets not forget who he is. Washington is known for people saying one thing and meaning another. So yes his words were truth, but his message was not. That is the lie. Before you tell me I am not being fair, remmeber, he does represent me therefore I can judge him by a higher standard than just technically true.
Last October I wrote Senator Hollings a letter asking about the SSSCA. I suppose since I am a South Carolina resident he took the time to reply. In a letter dated November 13, 2001 from the senator:
Dear Mr. Sattler
Thank you for your recent communication regarding legislation that address copyright protection on the internet.
I believe that any proposed legislation must meet consumers' expectations while protecting intellectual property. Ideally, the private sector will work to solve these problems. While I am considering legislation in this area, I am not intoducing a bill at this time.
You can be certain that if legislation is developed, I will take your concerns into consideration in order to ensure the rights of consumers as well as those of the creators of Internet material.
With kindest regards, I am
Sincerely,
Ernest F. Hollings
So basically he denied that the SSSCA existed at the time. What a blatant lie.
I happen to live in South Carolina and have e-mailed Hollings on a couple occasions with questions about the SSSCA. A several weeks later I did get a response (Mail was slow, probably because of anthrax). Points for Hollings in that someone there actually checks his e-mail. Big red X's for sending me a letter denying the existence of the SSSCA.
At least I didn't vote form him.
First one should observe the difference between visual and non-visual components. Non visual components aren't really relavant to this. They are invisible so they don't get drawn to screen. Visual Components on the other hand are drawn to the display and have their own ways of getting there. Visual CLX components are really just QT with some code added to make them easy to use from Object Pascal.
This is why KDE is listed as a requirement for Kylix because if they have KDE then they have QT. Also if you compile a CLX app in Delphi, then your windows EXE will require a QT DLL (I forget which one.)
Anyway the point here is that CLX doesn't really belong in this discussion.
Here! Here! Delphi Is flat out amazing. Oh, as far as porting goes, Write in Kylix First, then Port to Delphi and you'll have near zero work to do. The reason is that all the libraries Kylix uses are available in Delphi, but not vice versa so by starting in Kylix you can't use something thats not supported in Delphi. You are so right on. I wish I had mod points.
From Thier site:
.... and that a packet originates in Boston and is transmitted in red light to the next node, if the light isn't the color for that node, So if red was Richmond, NY and Washington would reflect the red light down the line until it gets to Richmond. This way NY and WAS don't have to convert the signal which saves a lot of time and work. Also this allows Boston to talk to Richmond as 1 hop as far as the software is concerned. Similarly a packet transmitted in Amber light might go all the way to Atlanta before being converted to Electrons.
Accelerating the war are the recent advances in ultra-long-haul optics and optical switches, which are making it practical for routers to place packets on destination-based wavelengths that can take them as close as possible to their final destination in the core, thus eliminating intermediate routing hops and unnecessary O-E-O conversions.
I read this as meaning that you have a strand of fiber that runs from say for example Boston, to NY to Washington to Richmond to Charlotte to Atlanta to
Sounds like a good idea to me since it should work on existing fiber. The real question is how hard and expensive is it to start with two nodes and grow from there.
The simple answer to your question is console games are marketed to people who don't have a PC.
Technically the windows API is an emulator of sorts. It provides a level of abstraction that makes it fairly easy to write a game for and have it work on most machines. There really are only two advantages to console gaming. Less fuss over hardware and bios/os issues because they are all practically identical, and Cost.
Why would I as a developer want to write a high performance game to run inside an emulator. I'd get better preformace coding to the OS instead of inside yet another layer of performace sucking bloat. However it does raise the interesting possibilty for OS independant games, but Java can do that and I haven't seen any killer games written in Java.
Most people who play a game (say Tony Hawk 2) on a PC and on a console will all agree the PC version is better if only for video resolution alone. Most people who own a console and a PC will usually opt for the PC version if the title is available on both. One of the few reasons a PC owner would get a console is if a really great title was only available on that console.
Oh, one more thing, how am I going to convince cost aware customers that they are better off buying a $1000 PC to play my games instead of a $300 Xbox? The idea only really works for customers who already own a PC, which explains the huge selection of PC titles on the shelf at best buy.
I could keep going but I'll stop now.
Me thinks you are forgetting about a major player in the ISP business. Let me tell you about an absolutely huge ISP that almost no one knows about. The are called InfoAve.net. Based out of Pineville, North Carolina (just a hair south of Charlotte) is the nations 3rd largest (probably not anymore as their have been a few mergers over the last year or so) ISP. Third? Really? Yep. You know why no one is heard of them? They are marketed under several hundred brand names. Many smaller local telco's (read anybody who's not a baby bell) resell InfoAvenue services as their own. This allows the small telco's to compete against AOL, MSN, Earthlink, ect. because they share many of the costs of being an ISP. All of them together support one call center. and split backbone costs and whatnot.
Ok big deal, What does this have to do with broadband? Well the real issue is that many of these smaller telcos are the cable company too. Now I ask you if you own both the twisted pairs and the coax into every home, where is the incentive to rollout broadband? All your customers are paying you 20$ a month for dialup and you are making huge profit margin since you've already recouped your cost. Why switch to broadband and make a serious financial commitment to a connection with a smaller profit margin.
So there you have it. For most smaller telco's the is no push for broadband, and since the big telcos see no threat to their customer base from small telco's they are in no hurry to provide a service the small telcos aren't.
Disclaimer: I have worked for a small telco/cable co., and I've seen the financial reports that come out of the meetings so I am pretty confident telling you skinnyband is more profitable than broadband.
For the lazy:
See: http://www.inc.salk.edu/
Part of this perception is based on stodgy "conventional wisdom", and part of it is based on the reality that people with basic and advanced degrees can sometimes feel a little resentful when having to report to someone with no degree at all
What was that about gates being a college drop out?
How many legions report to him?
Ok, I'm a whore. I feel so dirty.
Add Erskine, a small private Methodist Church backed university in Due West, South Carolina to the stack of schools with a campus-wide wireless network. Honestly they are someone I'd never expect to see on the list of wireless schools, but they are. (My little sister attends and when I visit I am surprised to see students sitting on lawns computing away.)
Another surprising issue at Erskine is that they didn't ban Peer to Peer networks. They just changed their policy to read bandwidth intensive applications (Such as P2P, or downloading Linux distros) should only be done between 9PM and 6AM when network demand is at a minimum. (That is not the exact wording of the policy but you get the idea.) Me thinks Erskine actually has an IT department with a brain, or the school has leaders smart enough to let the IT department make IT decisions. Either way Erskine is setting a great example for other schools.
I don't care how good the graphics libraries are, Linux apps will still be Butt-Ugly as long as developers (myself included - Kylix Yea!) continue writing Butt-Ugly apps.
Then again I've made some damn ugly Windows apps too.
One of the things the MS did right in concept, but screwed up in implementation was the critical update notification system. Essentially you install this little program (probably spy-ware) that periodically checks what updates are installed on your machine, and what updates are available from MS. When a new patch comes out a window pops up and tells you that that are new updates. You can even configure this thing to download them first in the background and then have it pop up a window when its ready to install the updates. Sounds like a pretty good idea right? Just one problem with it. It doesn't actually check to see if you have or even use a certain app before deciding if you need an update. On a couple machines I run I have the Critical update notification running, they kept wanting to install an update for windows media player on those machines. These two machines don't even have windows media player installed. Infact they aren't in the list of allowed binaries, so even if they were installed you couldn't run them. But yet this thing kept insisting to install the update. Anyway the point here is that Microsoft has gotten better as far as updates are concerned (espcially for home end end users who would never check for updates on their own) but the system still needs help, Unless of course they left it broken on purpose to get more people to install 'optional' software. I did end up having to install Windows Media Player (although it is still not an allowed EXE) to get update notification to STFU.
Wait, Whats the motive for MS to do this? This will do one of two things. Either people will buy it or they won't. If people do buy it then MS is a monopoly, or people are real stupid. If people don't buy it then they will buy something else, which will kill the monopoly that they are protecting. Conclusion: Informed consumers kill monopolies.
Since there are no informed consumers out there, we are all screwed.
The article says the blocks could be up to 6000 years old, not that they are 6000 years old. They might be as young as 1000. The number 6000 probably comes from the time they think humans first set foot on Cuba.
Verant Interactive (the company that makes EQ) was simply not prepared for the anticipation for this release. The release is the first major upgrade to the systems graphics. Previous upgrades only affect territory in Norrath (the fictional world that is the setting in EQ), but this one affects a whole lot more. Previous expansion packs didn't affect the anywhere near as much of the game.
This combined with lots of hype (every time you log into EQ they send a message saying Luclin is comming) left Verant feeling like they had to make deadlines. Luclin wasn't even in most stores when it was supposed to be. I know people who preordered and were supposed to have it delivered by now who still don't have it.
All the hype means 400,000 subscribers all foaming at the mouth to see the changes. So they log in as soon as the system is back up. The catch? All of them need updated files, and none of them have them. That by itself isn't bad, but when they had trouble updating their servers, the system didn't come back up till 4:00 California Time, which means that all of North America was in primetime for playing.
Since the server came up at the worst time of day, The patch servers got hit hard. Most users were stuck waiting to get their updates because the patch server couldn't handle the load. Eventually over the night Verant got more patch servers up and things started moving more quickly.
By 5:00 AM California time, (8:00 AM for me) the traffic jam was gone.
In Short it was all hype and incredible bad timing that made it such a mess.
Under the plan approved by the Legislature for the Maine Learning Technology Endowment, all seventh grade students and teachers will begin using portable, wireless computers in the Fall of 2002, and all eighth grade students and teachers will be equipped the following year.
Call me crazy, but thats the same students right? (Ok, I know what they meant, but it made me giggle.)
Wouldn't ISP better spend their scarce resources converting their networks to IPv6 instead of pushing NAT research? Am I uninformed that NAT research is more cost effective than converting to IPv6?
Seems to me this would allow full control over the IP addresses issued to a customer. Bonus! You would have real IP addresses for each node and could easily block your picture frame from accessing the WAN.
Whoa! Perhaps this is the work of the IP address cartel. (There is no address cartel.) If they switch to Ipv6, then the address shortage would go away and they wouldn't be able to charge for additional addresses! No wonder we haven't switched over yet.
Ha, the developers of GNU software should use this mentality.
Doing your homework to get your degree and writing free software are not very comparable. He is supposed to do the work to get the degree, even if that means duplicating work that someone else has already done. GNU software on the otherhand by its own nature avoids duplicating work.
Sharing work to complete a task is acceptable. Sharing work to improve, or prove and individuals skills is not acceptable.