while TiVos don't allow you to burn to DVD (AFAIK), they don't also force you to get the guide subscription. The thing is, if you don't have the guide info, you have to specify all of your recordings by time and channel (just like your old VCR!), also the thumbs up/down functionality and everything that goes with it won't work. You also won't get the ability to record shows based on metadata (like the actors, director, substrings in the title, etc...). Honestly, once you get the full fledged TiVo functionality you won't want to go back, even if it does cost you $10 a month (I forget what the monthly fee is these days, my TiVo has a lifetime subscription).
Can't you slipstream patches into an XP or 2000 install? I know I install XP off of a XP + SP2 CD these days, I'm not seeing where Vista is that much different. Frankly, this whole article is retarded, if you're downloading a copy of the OS off of some pirate site that associates with spammers it really doesn't matter which OS it is, they all could have something bad in them.
A better title for this article would have been: "Downloading and running untrusted software from disreputable sources can get you owned".
On the other hand, at only 150k PS3s they have room to sell millions more boxes, preferably after a couple of hardware revisions where the cost of the components (particularly the BD-ROM drive) come way down.
You've really hit on one of the big reasons why these social engineering tasks work. If you are "that guy" who insists on calling in everyone who comes into the office, you are also the reason the copier is still broken because he turned away the repairman at the door simply because the copier place's front desk didn't have easy access to the work schedules of the repairmen.
In a perfect world everyone would be competent and always available on the other end of the phone, but in the real world it can be a pain in the rear to find the right person at the other company who could verify that the technician you have is supposed to be there now, not to mention the cleaning staff and all of the other people who need access to your building. You could escort them, but most companies don't have enough dedicated security guards or people without work to do to watch over the guy for 2 hours while he works on some machinery. Even if they do, most of the people at your local bank would have no idea that what he's doing is actually sniffing passwords off of the network, not working on the copier. This guy went to plenty of trouble to make himself look like a copier repairman, he could have easily set up a "diagnostic" program on his laptop and plugged it into the copier's network port (when in actuality he's plugging the network cable into his laptop), and sniff passwords for some time.
That said: How much danger is his knowledge of the passwords? Obviously it isn't good, but what does that actually get you in the bank? Access to the printers and network shares? Without knowing the bank's IT setup it's hard to know how valuable that information is. Clearly he couldn't try to fire up a copy of their software on his laptop (if he even had it), because any teller walking into the copy room would no doubt recognize it and put up a red flag. Presumably the transactions from that software would be encrypted (at least I hope it would be), and they may have additional protections.
Wow, when was the last time you used X? Was it back in 1992? I've run X on plenty of low end machines (A Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM was my primary system for a long time and I ran X on it) and I've never seen behavior like you describe. I'm wondering if there wasn't something misconfigured with your system, or if you didn't have some great memory hog of a desktop manager (like KDE) installed on a machine that was just not powerful enough (or didn't have enough memory). One thing that is true about X is that it will slow down a lot if you make the X server swap to disk, but that's true on Macs too (ever run OS 10.3 on an older 128MB machine?)
I've seen my fair share of crappy dead optical drives. None of the ones I actually bought myself though (tend to stay away from Lite-on drives, even though they're everywhere). There are some things you can do to get an idea of how long a power supply will last. One of the best is to just pick it up. Is it noticeably lighter or heavier than you expected? Heavy is good for power supplies, the ones that skimp on metal tend to die early.
Hard drives typically last a very very long time, unless they die right away (within a month, but this is rare). The exception here is if your case is not properly cooled and you let your hard drive heat up. A hard drive that heats up more than +10C over ambient will tend to die within a year or so. People who tell me they have terrible luck with hard drives invariably have badly designed cases that don't force air over the drives. I've hacked fans (literally, with a Dremel in some cases) onto cases and that usually does the trick.
You have brought up a good point. Sometimes stuff just isn't engineered very well and you have to take matters in your own hands. If that chip runs too hot then hack a fan on top of the heatsink or rearrange your case to get airflow over the chip. Aftermarket cooling isn't necessarily for overclockers you know.
He has power and money though, he would only learn what oppression is about from the side of the oppressor, which is not a lesson I think he needs.
In the future, when someone is making the kinds of statements he is making, you can assume that they intend to come out on the "winning side" in the end. Free speech isn't really meant to protect the powerful, it's meant to protect the weak who can't otherwise protect themselves.
You can replace iPod batteries. I did it on my 3G iPod. It takes a bit of work, but it is completely worth it to get several more years of use out of the old pod.
In short: I will defend to the death the right of Mr. Gringich to make a total ass out of himself, even when he's going directly against my cause. That is the beauty of Free Speech.
Free speech is also about allowing me to tell Mr. Gringich to go fuck himself.
I've dropped my share of gadgets and I have to say that it is exceedingly rare that they actually break. My cell phone (A Blackberry 7100t) has been through a considerable amount of abuse in the two years I've owned it (partially due to the badly designed belt clip for this phone, if you run or jump with it the phone will fly out). Other than some scratches on the screen, it's as good as the day I bought it.
The only computer motherboards I've ever had die were an actual IBM motherboard (back before they even formed Aptiva), and a Soltek Socket A that fell victim to cap explosions (which were an epidemic at the time). Otherwise, my tech has all been replaced due to gross obsolescence rather than actual breakage (which is a shame when you're waiting for a Matrox G200 to die so you can upgrade your video card, and eventually just have to buy a Geforce 5900 because the new motherboard didn't support high voltage AGP).
There is a caveat here: When I buy stuff I don't buy it if it feels flimsy or is a cheap knockoff made by a no-name company. Perhaps the lesson for the author is: Stop buying cheap crap and maybe it will last longer?
I'm really tempted to save that article just so I can pull it out and show how naive people were back in 2006. If there is one thing time has taught me, it's that the volume of information expands in relation to your available storage. I mean 10 years ago one of our 500GB modern hard drives could have probably stored all of the video available on the internet with room to spare.
I do agree that an iPod like device could probably hold enough video (high quality video at that) to well exceed its battery life however (modern iPods have no trouble doing that with music).
Carbon exhaust is causing climate change. Okay.
1) there is no scientific consensus on this
2) I seriously doubt that consensus will be forthcoming withing less than 10 or 20 years
I assume by "consensus" you mean everybody who calls themselves a "scientist" agrees? I think that will take longer than 10 or 20 years. If you mean the mainstream scientific community, then the consensus has already occurred. You will see people occasionally raise doubts about certain aspects of it, but the base is sound and excess CO2 is defiantly warming the Earth.
When you think about the scales involved (the US alone emits around 1.5 Billion (with a B!) tons of CO2 a year[1]), and the fact that only about half of that gets reabsorbed by the biosphere[2], coupled with the fact that we know CO2 causes a greenhouse effect (this has been replicated in high school science labs), and there really isn't much room for doubt that the Earth is warming due to human influences.
For a company who's motto is "Don't be evil.", it seems strange that they would go with the most evil cell phone company around (and believe me, the competition was fierce). I know several people up in the Northern Virginia area with Verizon and they all hate it, but due to exclusive licensing agreements Verizon is the only one that works on the Metro. If someone else got in there they would switch in an instant. The Verizon reps know this too, they treat you like dirt, have the worst phones, and still manage to be one of the most expensive options available.
Blimps are real gas guzzlers if you're going against the wind though. Even if you're going with the wind I doubt there are any savings at all compared to freight trains, and they're slower than trains to boot. Using blimps for shipping just doesn't seem like a good idea to me, unless you're shipping to some area that doesn't already have infrastructure (out in the middle of nowhere), in which case it would probably be more fuel efficient than the helicopters/light aircraft you would otherwise have to use.
Those servers only host a few dozen people at a time though (at most), they can easily be run from a home DSL or Cable connection. These guys are talking about taking over the playerbase from the game, which even for a third rate MMO like this is thousands of players. You need a real server somewhere to handle that kind of traffic, and real servers aren't free.
His point is that people won't "switch" to Vista like that anyway (nobody buys the upgrade OS box in the store unless they have some compelling need). The point is that when their computers are old and breaking down and they buy a new one, poof, suddenly they have Vista. Certainly it might be possible to use your old XP license on your new computer (assuming you trash the old one or rob it for all of the parts that you can use in your new system), but just try to find an OEM that will let you do that. Even Microsoft is pretty cagey about letting you upgrade a system without rebuying the OS, especially if you got your XP license from an OEM (and good luck getting the regular OS install disk if you buy OEM too).
All games have min-maxing, however giving players access to the formulas directly doesn't affect that much. In fact all hiding the formulas does is make it take slightly longer for the players to start min-maxing. City of Heroes showed this quite well I think. Cryptic Studios were extremely tight lipped about the formulas and tables used, but in the end the playerbase reverse engineered the whole thing and still min-maxed.
In fact, it is easy to argue that the min-maxing was good for the game in the end. Without the players constantly beating on your system it can be very difficult to determine which combos are overly powerful (or overly gimped for that matter). CoH was badly unbalanced for well over a year before the developers finally got a handle on the balance. Granted, it wasn't popular with the players who were used to their old demi-god status (Invulnerability Tankers used to live up to their name, there was almost nothing in the game that could kill them once they reached level 30 or so, and even moreso when they hit 38. Unfortunatly, they were kinda boring to play because you could herd up an entire instanced mission and still not be in any real danger). WoW gives out their numbers quite freely and the min-max situation isn't exactly a catastrophe over there.
I wonder who's bright idea it was to make the donation meter Penis Shaped. I can see where they were maybe trying for the thermometer look, but the proportions are all wrong.
I think the biggest problem with Ryzom is that it's an also-ran in the fantasy MMO market. Frankly, I can't think of many reasons to play this over WoW (and I don't even play WoW). I'm also not sure how the whole "community owned" aspect is going to work. I mean someone has to pay for the bandwidth and servers to host it (it's an MMO after all), so it seems likely that they're going to have to have a monthly fee still. I'm really not convinced that these people have though this all of the way through.
Admittedly it could be pretty cool to have a few dedicated teams on the internet building new content for the game, but I'm not sure it's going to be compelling when compared to WoW.
Loki had at least one major problem with their system that I think was largely responsible for crushing them in the end: Not only did they have to port the game the first time, but they had to go back and redo all of their testing (even though the porting framework was pretty generic) every time the publisher released a patch. Keeping stuff patched was an enormous task and I think it did them in eventually.
I don't know about the other games, but I know Kohan had a reasonably active userbase. It's a shame it's hard to get any of those old Loki games working anymore (library version bumps on the base system killed them), I still liked firing Kohan up from time to time.
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while TiVos don't allow you to burn to DVD (AFAIK), they don't also force you to get the guide subscription. The thing is, if you don't have the guide info, you have to specify all of your recordings by time and channel (just like your old VCR!), also the thumbs up/down functionality and everything that goes with it won't work. You also won't get the ability to record shows based on metadata (like the actors, director, substrings in the title, etc...). Honestly, once you get the full fledged TiVo functionality you won't want to go back, even if it does cost you $10 a month (I forget what the monthly fee is these days, my TiVo has a lifetime subscription).
Can't you slipstream patches into an XP or 2000 install? I know I install XP off of a XP + SP2 CD these days, I'm not seeing where Vista is that much different. Frankly, this whole article is retarded, if you're downloading a copy of the OS off of some pirate site that associates with spammers it really doesn't matter which OS it is, they all could have something bad in them.
A better title for this article would have been: "Downloading and running untrusted software from disreputable sources can get you owned".
On the other hand, at only 150k PS3s they have room to sell millions more boxes, preferably after a couple of hardware revisions where the cost of the components (particularly the BD-ROM drive) come way down.
You've really hit on one of the big reasons why these social engineering tasks work. If you are "that guy" who insists on calling in everyone who comes into the office, you are also the reason the copier is still broken because he turned away the repairman at the door simply because the copier place's front desk didn't have easy access to the work schedules of the repairmen.
In a perfect world everyone would be competent and always available on the other end of the phone, but in the real world it can be a pain in the rear to find the right person at the other company who could verify that the technician you have is supposed to be there now, not to mention the cleaning staff and all of the other people who need access to your building. You could escort them, but most companies don't have enough dedicated security guards or people without work to do to watch over the guy for 2 hours while he works on some machinery. Even if they do, most of the people at your local bank would have no idea that what he's doing is actually sniffing passwords off of the network, not working on the copier. This guy went to plenty of trouble to make himself look like a copier repairman, he could have easily set up a "diagnostic" program on his laptop and plugged it into the copier's network port (when in actuality he's plugging the network cable into his laptop), and sniff passwords for some time.
That said: How much danger is his knowledge of the passwords? Obviously it isn't good, but what does that actually get you in the bank? Access to the printers and network shares? Without knowing the bank's IT setup it's hard to know how valuable that information is. Clearly he couldn't try to fire up a copy of their software on his laptop (if he even had it), because any teller walking into the copy room would no doubt recognize it and put up a red flag. Presumably the transactions from that software would be encrypted (at least I hope it would be), and they may have additional protections.
Wow, when was the last time you used X? Was it back in 1992? I've run X on plenty of low end machines (A Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM was my primary system for a long time and I ran X on it) and I've never seen behavior like you describe. I'm wondering if there wasn't something misconfigured with your system, or if you didn't have some great memory hog of a desktop manager (like KDE) installed on a machine that was just not powerful enough (or didn't have enough memory). One thing that is true about X is that it will slow down a lot if you make the X server swap to disk, but that's true on Macs too (ever run OS 10.3 on an older 128MB machine?)
Also, each one comes with a free pony.
I've seen my fair share of crappy dead optical drives. None of the ones I actually bought myself though (tend to stay away from Lite-on drives, even though they're everywhere). There are some things you can do to get an idea of how long a power supply will last. One of the best is to just pick it up. Is it noticeably lighter or heavier than you expected? Heavy is good for power supplies, the ones that skimp on metal tend to die early.
Hard drives typically last a very very long time, unless they die right away (within a month, but this is rare). The exception here is if your case is not properly cooled and you let your hard drive heat up. A hard drive that heats up more than +10C over ambient will tend to die within a year or so. People who tell me they have terrible luck with hard drives invariably have badly designed cases that don't force air over the drives. I've hacked fans (literally, with a Dremel in some cases) onto cases and that usually does the trick.
You have brought up a good point. Sometimes stuff just isn't engineered very well and you have to take matters in your own hands. If that chip runs too hot then hack a fan on top of the heatsink or rearrange your case to get airflow over the chip. Aftermarket cooling isn't necessarily for overclockers you know.
He has power and money though, he would only learn what oppression is about from the side of the oppressor, which is not a lesson I think he needs.
In the future, when someone is making the kinds of statements he is making, you can assume that they intend to come out on the "winning side" in the end. Free speech isn't really meant to protect the powerful, it's meant to protect the weak who can't otherwise protect themselves.
You can replace iPod batteries. I did it on my 3G iPod. It takes a bit of work, but it is completely worth it to get several more years of use out of the old pod.
In short: I will defend to the death the right of Mr. Gringich to make a total ass out of himself, even when he's going directly against my cause. That is the beauty of Free Speech.
Free speech is also about allowing me to tell Mr. Gringich to go fuck himself.
I've dropped my share of gadgets and I have to say that it is exceedingly rare that they actually break. My cell phone (A Blackberry 7100t) has been through a considerable amount of abuse in the two years I've owned it (partially due to the badly designed belt clip for this phone, if you run or jump with it the phone will fly out). Other than some scratches on the screen, it's as good as the day I bought it.
The only computer motherboards I've ever had die were an actual IBM motherboard (back before they even formed Aptiva), and a Soltek Socket A that fell victim to cap explosions (which were an epidemic at the time). Otherwise, my tech has all been replaced due to gross obsolescence rather than actual breakage (which is a shame when you're waiting for a Matrox G200 to die so you can upgrade your video card, and eventually just have to buy a Geforce 5900 because the new motherboard didn't support high voltage AGP).
There is a caveat here: When I buy stuff I don't buy it if it feels flimsy or is a cheap knockoff made by a no-name company. Perhaps the lesson for the author is: Stop buying cheap crap and maybe it will last longer?
Is that the version of Shadowrun where you jog down the street blowing away monsters with your big guns?
I think I have an idea why Shadowrun veterans might be hard to find for the beta.
I'm really tempted to save that article just so I can pull it out and show how naive people were back in 2006. If there is one thing time has taught me, it's that the volume of information expands in relation to your available storage. I mean 10 years ago one of our 500GB modern hard drives could have probably stored all of the video available on the internet with room to spare.
I do agree that an iPod like device could probably hold enough video (high quality video at that) to well exceed its battery life however (modern iPods have no trouble doing that with music).
When you think about the scales involved (the US alone emits around 1.5 Billion (with a B!) tons of CO2 a year[1]), and the fact that only about half of that gets reabsorbed by the biosphere[2], coupled with the fact that we know CO2 causes a greenhouse effect (this has been replicated in high school science labs), and there really isn't much room for doubt that the Earth is warming due to human influences.
1. http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/each
For a company who's motto is "Don't be evil.", it seems strange that they would go with the most evil cell phone company around (and believe me, the competition was fierce). I know several people up in the Northern Virginia area with Verizon and they all hate it, but due to exclusive licensing agreements Verizon is the only one that works on the Metro. If someone else got in there they would switch in an instant. The Verizon reps know this too, they treat you like dirt, have the worst phones, and still manage to be one of the most expensive options available.
Blimps are real gas guzzlers if you're going against the wind though. Even if you're going with the wind I doubt there are any savings at all compared to freight trains, and they're slower than trains to boot. Using blimps for shipping just doesn't seem like a good idea to me, unless you're shipping to some area that doesn't already have infrastructure (out in the middle of nowhere), in which case it would probably be more fuel efficient than the helicopters/light aircraft you would otherwise have to use.
I think supercatavation only works if you're moving rather quickly through the water, so torpedoes are just about the only thing it makes sense on.
I don't know, it seems to me that they're trying to follow EA's model, I mean it worked for the #1 didn't it. :P
Those servers only host a few dozen people at a time though (at most), they can easily be run from a home DSL or Cable connection. These guys are talking about taking over the playerbase from the game, which even for a third rate MMO like this is thousands of players. You need a real server somewhere to handle that kind of traffic, and real servers aren't free.
His point is that people won't "switch" to Vista like that anyway (nobody buys the upgrade OS box in the store unless they have some compelling need). The point is that when their computers are old and breaking down and they buy a new one, poof, suddenly they have Vista. Certainly it might be possible to use your old XP license on your new computer (assuming you trash the old one or rob it for all of the parts that you can use in your new system), but just try to find an OEM that will let you do that. Even Microsoft is pretty cagey about letting you upgrade a system without rebuying the OS, especially if you got your XP license from an OEM (and good luck getting the regular OS install disk if you buy OEM too).
Yes, clearly you should be running NetBSD on that kid instead.
All games have min-maxing, however giving players access to the formulas directly doesn't affect that much. In fact all hiding the formulas does is make it take slightly longer for the players to start min-maxing. City of Heroes showed this quite well I think. Cryptic Studios were extremely tight lipped about the formulas and tables used, but in the end the playerbase reverse engineered the whole thing and still min-maxed.
In fact, it is easy to argue that the min-maxing was good for the game in the end. Without the players constantly beating on your system it can be very difficult to determine which combos are overly powerful (or overly gimped for that matter). CoH was badly unbalanced for well over a year before the developers finally got a handle on the balance. Granted, it wasn't popular with the players who were used to their old demi-god status (Invulnerability Tankers used to live up to their name, there was almost nothing in the game that could kill them once they reached level 30 or so, and even moreso when they hit 38. Unfortunatly, they were kinda boring to play because you could herd up an entire instanced mission and still not be in any real danger). WoW gives out their numbers quite freely and the min-max situation isn't exactly a catastrophe over there.
I wonder who's bright idea it was to make the donation meter Penis Shaped. I can see where they were maybe trying for the thermometer look, but the proportions are all wrong.
I think the biggest problem with Ryzom is that it's an also-ran in the fantasy MMO market. Frankly, I can't think of many reasons to play this over WoW (and I don't even play WoW). I'm also not sure how the whole "community owned" aspect is going to work. I mean someone has to pay for the bandwidth and servers to host it (it's an MMO after all), so it seems likely that they're going to have to have a monthly fee still. I'm really not convinced that these people have though this all of the way through.
Admittedly it could be pretty cool to have a few dedicated teams on the internet building new content for the game, but I'm not sure it's going to be compelling when compared to WoW.
Loki had at least one major problem with their system that I think was largely responsible for crushing them in the end: Not only did they have to port the game the first time, but they had to go back and redo all of their testing (even though the porting framework was pretty generic) every time the publisher released a patch. Keeping stuff patched was an enormous task and I think it did them in eventually.
I don't know about the other games, but I know Kohan had a reasonably active userbase. It's a shame it's hard to get any of those old Loki games working anymore (library version bumps on the base system killed them), I still liked firing Kohan up from time to time.