I get the impression that they are actually not too interested in attourney's fees. I believe they are more concerned about people getting declared innocent. Right now I believe their tactic is to sue people and get them to settle, (basically declaring themselves guilty) 100% of the time. They don't want any "not guilty" verdicts to mar their reputation. So if the victim really puts up a fight, the legal system will most likely work the way it's supposed to, and the court will have to find them not guilty. The riaa wil do whatever it can to avoid this, and wants to have the case dropped since it has become clear now that (A) they cannot really win the case (they already actually knew this from the start) and (B) this victim is willing and able to see this case to the bitter end. They are going to pull anything they can to avoid chalking up a "not guilty" verdict on their record. I believe the judge is pissed off that the riaa has wasted the court's time with a case that they knew they could not win in the first place, trying to use the courts to extort money and PR from the victim, and in this case both the victim and the judge are all for a full drag out see-it-to-the-end case.
The riaa uses money to stuff their mattress pad. They could care less about paying one person's attourney's fees. The problem here is if they end up paying THIS woman's attourney, this will send a very loud message to all the other future victims that yes you really can win against the riaa and engaging in a court battle is not going to make you lose your house and your job, as the riaa is trying to scare everyone into believing. Once we get a couple Not Guilty chalked up, the riaa will find there are a lot fewer victims willing to just roll over when the lawyers come calling. Then it will not be a matter of paying one woman's attourney - if they sue 100 ppl a year then they will be paying 95 of them attourney fees, and THIS is going to bust their groove. This is the scenario the riaa is desperately trying to avoid by having this case dropped without prejudice.
Marathon's map editor viewed the map from straight above, and the vertical axis could not be adjusted. The map was actually drawn on a 2D plane, and was composed of 3-8 sided polygons. Where two polygons shared a side, there was technically a wall but it usually had no texture and the player could move and see through it. On sides that did not meet with other polygons, formed a wall that a texture could be applied to in a very flexible way. Each map had a pallate of around 30 detailed textures following a theme for that level, the textures can be zoomed, rotated, or shifted.
Each polygon had a height, all polygons started at the "absolute floor" and extended up to their height. because they had no bottom height, bridges could not be made. To clarify, every polygon had a floor and a ceiling height, and the floor was always below the ceiling, creating a single void area between the two. Therefore all polygons extended to the very bottom of the map and to the very top of the map, with an empty space in between.
Unlike most games of the time, 4D space was possible. It's hard to describe here, but if you built a chain of polygons slowly looping in a circle, you could get back to where you started. But unless you linked the last polygon with the first one by sharing a side, they really weren't in the same place. This made for a strange effect because the ambient sounds were not limited by the polygons in any way, and were placed at specific x,y locations on the map, and so if you had a 4d map it was possible to hear the same sound effect from an apparently different location. This included the sound of munitions going off, so you could hear a grenade blowing up right next to you when you were a good 40 second travel from where the explosion occurred. One of the bundled maps was called "4D Space", and had three different areas (somewhat ring shaped) overlapping each other. The map was very compact as viewed from the editor, but seemed very large when you were in it. You could run around a post three complete times before returning to your original location. That map made it very hard to judge where other people were at by the sound of the weapons going off, and made it extremely easy to lose someone that was chasing you.
Since the polygons only had a single height attribute, all surfaces you walked on were flat level. Stairs were possible because they were just strings of linked polygons with slightly different heights, and the game engine allowed the player to run between polygons as long as their height was an acceptable transition. (short amount up, or any amouny you wanted down, AAAaaahhhh!) but ramps were not possible. Though you could fake a ramp by using a lot of polygons spaced closely that differed very little in height.
Doors were also polygons. A typical door was a poly 4ft wide and 3 inches thick. Polygon heights could be adjusted by events and controls in game, so you would walk up to a differently textured area on a wall and hit the action key, and the height of the poly would adjust to its other setting. (or you could hit a switch on the wall or just wait for it to move) Speed of travel was adustable, as was an accompanying sound while it moved. So as you might imagine, all doors were more like you see in sci fi shows, they were doors that slid upward or downward, since it was not possible for a poly to move sideways. Interesting restriction, but it was almost effortless for them to implement what could have been a very difficult concept to integrate into the map engine.
Lifts/elevators were also possible by moving onto a poly and triggering an action that adjusted the poly's height. Polys getting taller would lift you up at their speed, polys moving down would drop out from under you and if they were too fast they could leave you behind. (remember marathon used real physics, including gravity and inertia, to manage the player)
Makes me want to play it again. I've never tried playing marathon on an intel, hope it works...
I suppose we would call this a "2.5-D" map. The map itself was 2-D but had height attributes for different areas, and the player's movement was 3-D. It wasn't true 3-d mapping like say, Descent, but you wouldn't really notice it playing.
Bridges weren't possible, but they did a good job of faking it. There's one room you can't get into on one level that has windows you can look inside, and from the two perspectives you can see into the room, there is a functional bridge in the room. It serves no purpose on the level other than to say "haha, look what we can do with the map editor!". It's a fraud of course, but a good fraud.
Marathon itself for me was tense but never really scarry. The game being open sourced, several whole new scenario games popped up. One of them was Aleph-1. THAT game scared me. The background music and ambient sounds would make most horror film directors jealous. Play it sometime. If you DON'T at least jump back a few inches from your screen when the first big nasty jumps you from around the corner, you must be dead. (or soon will be...) And that first level was downright claustrophobic.
Though I detest Bungee for selling out to microsoft, they had one of the most ground-breaking games of their time. Marathon featured 3D maps (not merely 2D, it had stairs and lifts) as well as real physics models, (your bullets and you were affected by gravity) ammunition limits (what, no 999 bullets in your pistol? really!) and used a physics model that allowed for adjustment of things like gravity and weight. I beleve it was also the first game to allow you to be submerged in a "medium" such as water, muck, and lava. (with the physics models adjusting accordingly, try firing an RPG in the water...)
There was nothing even remotely like it until after the realease of the second in the series, Marathon II Durandall. They even published the map editor with M2 and you could make your own levels and even modify the physics of the game. Monsters could be set to trigger on a variety of events, including each other, and it was possible to "pull" several other mobs so if you were spotted, by the time the mob found his way to you (and he WOULD find a way to get to you) he may have pulled several other mobs with him. MMORPG fans will recognize the "train" effect.
Mobs could even aggro each other. If a fighter's missile weapon hit a grunt one too many times the fighter would be on the grunt's aggro list and it was quite possible to get them sufficiently pissed off at each other that they would mostly kill each other.
Even with all that it had a flawless network play for up to 16 people. (admittedly poor internet performance, but LAN was smooth) Unfortunately multiplayer was only for the arenas, not for the actual game.
And the game... the depth of the plot and storyline was unheard of at that time. Even moving as fast as you could you might get to the end in a week. Most players took months to beat the game, and spent the next several months discovering the amazing variety of hidden rooms, secret weapons, and amazing powerups hidden on every level, of which there were what, 20? Large and unique, each map with a theme that set it visually apart from the other levels. (how could you not get tired of seeing the same room over and over and over again in Halo??) The different levels used different color pallates for the walls, ceiling, floors, etc, and all of them had a unique background sound.
Although it did not have dynamic lighting, individual map squares (3-8 sided polys actually!) could be lit individually, and even dynamically change by itself or due to player action. Ambient sounds were also present, and were variable by distance and in stereo - you could follow a sound to its source if you were wearing headphones.
It took almost four years for anything like Marathon I to come out on any platform, it was groundbreaking on every front. Doom was the only thing like it at the time and that was sad by comparison.
It occurs to me that in some ways Marathon was more real than even today's games. Think of a FPS game you like. Can you turn while you are falling? How is that possible? You can't turn while falling in Marathon. And ignoring the 999 bullets in your pistol, what happens after you have shot seven of them? You shoot #8 right? In marathon you see his hand come out, drop out the clip, jam in a new clip, and cock the gun. You can't shoot while you're doing that, so emptying a clip in preparation for a tough encounter was one of many strategy decisions you had to make. It was years before any other FPS decided that guns needed to be reloaded. Authentic sound FX too, and bullets that ricocheted off a wall would have one of several random visual effects result on the wall.
Not only did you have to worry about ammo and health, but some levels were hard vacuum and you had to manage your air as well. Certain mobs were resistant to certain weapons also, so you had to be peticular about who you used your limited fusion pistol shots on.
If something exploded on the floor beside you, you didn't just take damage. You were tossed up into the air and over
The technology will require discs that are slightly different from the conventional DVD-Rs found in shops today
You can bet those disks, which cost them a nickel to make, will cost you $7 apiece. They are not going to stop robbing us, they are just trying to make it less obvious.
this is not a bad idea. There are many examples of where kids are trying to improve themselves and where the adults of the world push them a lot harder than they really should be pushed. You see 7 yr old actors that work 6 hrs a day on the set, or 9 yr olds that can out iceskate anyone in their city. (think jr olympics) Encouraging a kid to spend all their spare time doing any one thing is a waste of their childhood. I don't see why homework is any different than that. Sure, studying is time well-spent, but some parents and some teachers push the kids to overdo it. What good is it to have a straight-A student that has had a dismal childhood? Some would consider that a good trade, but not me. Life is not a contest, you don't "win" if you die successful. You "win" if you had a good ride, regardless of the outcome. Sacrificing the journey for sake of the end is a shame. That's the way I have lived my life and I have no regrets. I wonder just how many adults look back at their early lives and wish they had not obcessed so much over atheletics/grades/socializing.
- admitting fault - taking actions to correct or at least mitigate the problem - accepting responsibility for other problems that arise as a result - understanding that you have lost a degree of trust due to your neglegence, and not assuming you will just get that trust back immediately after taking action - making changes necessary to lessen the odds of a reocurrance
Issuing a patch covers the first three, but Symantec seems to have a problem with the other two. Just how many times do you have to see the fourth one before you find someone else to work with? It's naive to expect a customer to just keep forgiving you for your neglegence.
Imagine the public's reaction if ford trucks started spontaneously catching on fire? OK they found a problem with the fuel tank, ok that's fixed now. Next month two more trucks catch fire, oops guess there are issues with the gas line, ok that's fixed. Whoops, three weeks later we see a pattern of fuel pumps being defective and causing a fire under the hood. At that point, don't you just lose trust in their ability to produce a quality product? How many times do you turn the other cheek? Symantec is making my face sore.
"filevault" is just a method of using encrypted disk images for your home folder. And yes the source code to the disk encryption is available. So unless they are squirreling away your password or a copy of the master password somewhere in the system when you turn on filevault (which would have been discovered long ago) there's no getting into it without your password or the master password.
To enable filevault you are required to define a master password, but if you like, you can delete/etc/master.passwd after the fact and then not even someone that knows the master password can recover your vault - just you with your password.
Just because we already know we can't trust Bill doesn't mean the rest of the world is just as untrustworthy. There are a few you can still depend on. If you think about it, image is a LOT more important to Apple than it is to MS. Bill doesn't care if people don't trust him because he has his users locked into Windows software, and you wil buy it even though you know he has a back door. (I am under the impression that windows users are just used to surrendering their privacy and security?) Steve on the other hand knows that if he were to put in a back door, it WOULD be discovered due to the open nature of the core of OS X, and that this coming to public knowledge would be devastating to the Apple brand. So even if he was being heavily pressured, he'd be a fool to do it. Even if you don't like him, you have to recognize he is a successful businessman and would never do something so damaging to his brand.
I make mistakes, but I take responsibility for and ownershio of them. I don't just issue an opology and then expect the world to forget it ever happened.
if they hadn't dropped the ball in the first place and left the hole there to begin with this would not be their problem. But they did. A patch is like an apology, it helps but it doesn't undo the damage and it doesn't remove your liability for your prior actions.
But then I have 2gb so I'm only using a bit over 1/3 of my memory, the rest is just green. Heh, funny tho, the VM swap is 11gb right now. Glad I have a good size HD. But it runs nice and snappy. Though I have noticed it takes less time to launch an app that I have already opened once this session, so I assume some things are hanging around in cache somewhere when apps are quit. That being said, I never run out of physical memory. (never seen usage go over 90%)
From what I've read so far though, microsoft maintains a master key that can open any bitlocker-locked home. Any truth to this? On OS X for example, they have had filevault for what, two years now. When you make a vault, you have to set up a master password, and with that you can get in and reset a password, but if you lose the master password or it is deleted from the computer, and you lose your password, not even Steve himself can get your data back.
I don't see how people can settle for "it's totally secure. unless WE want in".
to be there, I would find a copy of the pages taken from the handout, hit up a kinkos with about $300 and recruit a swarm of volunteers to run around the conference like paperboys, handing out flyers and setting out stacks of them at every bench.
And the last page would have a "you're number one" on the bottom.
Wouldn't this fall into the same category as boobytraps? You cannot legally boobytrap your car seat to injure someone that is trying to steal your car for example.
More specifically, deliberate destruction of another person' propety is not lawful even if they are in the act of committing a crime, whether or not the crime is against you or anyone else. For example, if you see a man run into a bank and the alarm bells start going off and you know he is robbing the bank, if you pull out your pocketknife and slash his tire to stop him from getting away, you will still be held liable for the damge to the tire.
I have 3TB of storage here. 1TB of that is in a 5 x 250 hardware raid-5. In this case it's a stand-alone enclosure with firewire/usb ports on the back. I chose this because it's easily portable to another machine, so if the server buys the farm, I simply unplug it and walk it to the next server and jack it in. Also if the computer crashes, there is less risk of corruption of data since the raid box is handling parity calculation. It also does not hammer the server if I have to do a rebuild.
The other 2TB is the large, more easily replaceable data, mostly video media. Those are arranged as single drives. I am not stupid enough to try to stripe them, I don't like the idea of any 1 of 8 drives failing leading to total data loss on all drives.
I have a script that runs once a week and reads 100% of all blocks on all drives, and emails me if a bad block was found. I replace the drive immediately. To date I have yet to lose a byte.
Closest call I had was a few years ago before the raid5, I had a pair of software mirrors. I had a server crash that wiped one drive's partition table and wiped the other drive's directory. Neither alone was fixable by any utility I tried. I ended up doing some really scarry things with DD and XXD in terminal to reconstruct the partition table from scratch on one drive and install firewire drivers on it so I could get at my data. I am very thankful for having a very high level of knowledge on partition table and basic directory layouts, most people would have had to cough up a stack of benjamins to get that fixed.
My near future plans are to buy two 1tb lacie bigdick (they have a horrible failure rate, never use them for critical anything) and use that to back up the loose drives. Long term I plan to get a larger raid5 box to phase out the old raid as primary storage, and convert it to cover some of the less critical storage. Right now the cheapest and simplest backup plan for us seems to be to buy large cheap drives and keep 1 or 2 complete clones.
Our manager has an "impact maintenane tool". Its a wrench. A wrench used in the army to change the tracks on a tank. It's big enough to survive being run over by said tank.
We simply refer to it as "the wrench". Usually mentioning The Wrench is sufficient motivation for... most anything.
I also enjoy hearing about someone using a LART. (Lamer Attitude Readjustment Tool)
What does being a company have to do with being nice? You must be new here.
Companies are all about money. For the most part, moral companies go out of business and are replaced by unconscionable companies. There are of course exceptions, but that's just what they are, exceptions.
Pointing a finger at a company and yelling "hey, you can't do that, that's not NICE!" will buy you a ticket to nowhere. If you are waiting for a company to "do the right thing" you are in for a long wait, and I can't pity you if you grow old in the process.
This is not prejudice. Many that cry "age discrimination" are unhappy because, due to their age, they cannot perform as well as their younger coworkers and as a direct result they are not able to provide as much value to the company as their juniors. Companies are just making sensible, justifiable financial decisions.
While it's quite possible his age had something to do with this, it's also very likely he is guilty as charged. It would be a sensible thing for an employer to put a close eye on someone approaching retirement with pension, in the hopes that they screw up enough to justify termination, this saves the company money. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and sorry but PTSD does not justify surfing porn at work any more than forgiving turrets at mcdonalds. Crackheads are not allowed to smoke up at work just because they are crackheads. If you have a behavioral disorder you need to keep it in check while you're at work, or you need to find a different job that is known to be tolerant of your behavioral problems. I suppose another parallel we could draw is someone spending an hour a day at work on an online casino, and claiming its OK because they are a gambling addict.
Bottom line, if you are 6 mos from retiring with pension you should know to be on your best behavior. If you walk out the door with a company stapler, i don't care if you are a recovering klepto, out you go. (I consider deliberately wasting company time to be theft)
I hope this fellow loses his case and gets to pay IBM's attorneys.
A friend brought over a non-rollable unit (think tablet) that was loaded up with several books. It uses that E-ink also. I don't recall who makes it, (phillips?) but it was easy to read with just ambient light in the room, and had a backlight for low light use. The screen looked like crisp jet-black typeset ink on a slightly off-white page, it was very easy to read and did not put any strain on the eyes. It did take a second or so to switch pages though which I was not expecting. I don't know if that was a limitation of the device or of the screen, but when it switched it was a snap switch, not where you see the text being drawn vertically.
It wasn't very portable in the modern sense though. This unit was about 5.5" x 8", hardly pocket-size. I don't know how portable they will be able to get these - you can only roll it in one direction, so at best that one would have to be at least 5" in some direction. This screen was perfectly flat of course, and I wonder how much it would mess with your vision to read a page with a curl or warp to it? I know it bugs me to try to read a newspaper if it's not laying flat. I suppose this would be ideal for say, a long plane flight or while waiting for a connecting flight at a gate.
'DRM increases not decreases consumer value', such as by enabling people to rent content at a lower price than ownership
That statement takes advantage of the nearsighted. DRM's purpose is to maximize proffit, and to do that you have to maximize the money you squeeze out of the consumer. You cannot maximize proffit AND provide the customer with a better value, the two goals are opposed to each other.
Yes, DRM allows a consumer to rent content for less, but it also requires them to rent it every time they want to watch it, paying several times instead of once. As a result, the consumer ends up paying more over the long term to rent the content many times than they would have paid to purchase it and play it as many times as they liked.
Saying that DRM provides better value to the customer is a very poorly disguised lie.
Anyone trying to convince me that companies are spending millions of dollars and pissing off their customers because they are "trying to provide the consumer with better value" will be laughed at. (and then kicked)
This interested me enough to call up Chase Visa and ask them if this was legal, and what would happen to me if I tried this. I was transferred to the Dispute Resolution line and talked with Chase's dispute resolution people. They said that if you have a receipt that says you paid X for Y, and you were billed X and shipped Y, they cannot threaten to charge you more for it under any condition, including failure to return it, unopened or otherwise. He compared it to buying something at Wal-Mart via credit card and then taking the item home, and later that day getting a call from Wal-Mart demanding you bring it back or they will charge your card for another $50. He said that would not be considered fraud. Fraud would be if they charged you more than they were supposed to. In this case it's a separate, unauthorized charge, and would be considered theft.
He advised me that if this ever happened to me, to make sure you have a copy of the receipt, and to call the disupte line for your credit card. They will likely have you send a copy of your receipt to them. The seller will not have a legitimate receipt that says you were supposed to pay their other amount, (they may have an invoice but it would be an altered one and you have provided the original to which you agreed) and the charge would be reversed by the credit card company.
I guess what it all boils down to is the fact that Amazon is unhappy with the terms of the sale does not entitle them to make a second charge or to alter the terms of the deal after the fact. To alter the terms is fraud. To charge you more later is theft. I'm surprised that someone as big as Amazon would do something that their lawyers would have a heart attack over.
Slashdot Mirror
I get the impression that they are actually not too interested in attourney's fees. I believe they are more concerned about people getting declared innocent. Right now I believe their tactic is to sue people and get them to settle, (basically declaring themselves guilty) 100% of the time. They don't want any "not guilty" verdicts to mar their reputation. So if the victim really puts up a fight, the legal system will most likely work the way it's supposed to, and the court will have to find them not guilty. The riaa wil do whatever it can to avoid this, and wants to have the case dropped since it has become clear now that (A) they cannot really win the case (they already actually knew this from the start) and (B) this victim is willing and able to see this case to the bitter end. They are going to pull anything they can to avoid chalking up a "not guilty" verdict on their record. I believe the judge is pissed off that the riaa has wasted the court's time with a case that they knew they could not win in the first place, trying to use the courts to extort money and PR from the victim, and in this case both the victim and the judge are all for a full drag out see-it-to-the-end case.
The riaa uses money to stuff their mattress pad. They could care less about paying one person's attourney's fees. The problem here is if they end up paying THIS woman's attourney, this will send a very loud message to all the other future victims that yes you really can win against the riaa and engaging in a court battle is not going to make you lose your house and your job, as the riaa is trying to scare everyone into believing. Once we get a couple Not Guilty chalked up, the riaa will find there are a lot fewer victims willing to just roll over when the lawyers come calling. Then it will not be a matter of paying one woman's attourney - if they sue 100 ppl a year then they will be paying 95 of them attourney fees, and THIS is going to bust their groove. This is the scenario the riaa is desperately trying to avoid by having this case dropped without prejudice.
Marathon's map editor viewed the map from straight above, and the vertical axis could not be adjusted. The map was actually drawn on a 2D plane, and was composed of 3-8 sided polygons. Where two polygons shared a side, there was technically a wall but it usually had no texture and the player could move and see through it. On sides that did not meet with other polygons, formed a wall that a texture could be applied to in a very flexible way. Each map had a pallate of around 30 detailed textures following a theme for that level, the textures can be zoomed, rotated, or shifted.
Each polygon had a height, all polygons started at the "absolute floor" and extended up to their height. because they had no bottom height, bridges could not be made. To clarify, every polygon had a floor and a ceiling height, and the floor was always below the ceiling, creating a single void area between the two. Therefore all polygons extended to the very bottom of the map and to the very top of the map, with an empty space in between.
Unlike most games of the time, 4D space was possible. It's hard to describe here, but if you built a chain of polygons slowly looping in a circle, you could get back to where you started. But unless you linked the last polygon with the first one by sharing a side, they really weren't in the same place. This made for a strange effect because the ambient sounds were not limited by the polygons in any way, and were placed at specific x,y locations on the map, and so if you had a 4d map it was possible to hear the same sound effect from an apparently different location. This included the sound of munitions going off, so you could hear a grenade blowing up right next to you when you were a good 40 second travel from where the explosion occurred. One of the bundled maps was called "4D Space", and had three different areas (somewhat ring shaped) overlapping each other. The map was very compact as viewed from the editor, but seemed very large when you were in it. You could run around a post three complete times before returning to your original location. That map made it very hard to judge where other people were at by the sound of the weapons going off, and made it extremely easy to lose someone that was chasing you.
Since the polygons only had a single height attribute, all surfaces you walked on were flat level. Stairs were possible because they were just strings of linked polygons with slightly different heights, and the game engine allowed the player to run between polygons as long as their height was an acceptable transition. (short amount up, or any amouny you wanted down, AAAaaahhhh!) but ramps were not possible. Though you could fake a ramp by using a lot of polygons spaced closely that differed very little in height.
Doors were also polygons. A typical door was a poly 4ft wide and 3 inches thick. Polygon heights could be adjusted by events and controls in game, so you would walk up to a differently textured area on a wall and hit the action key, and the height of the poly would adjust to its other setting. (or you could hit a switch on the wall or just wait for it to move) Speed of travel was adustable, as was an accompanying sound while it moved. So as you might imagine, all doors were more like you see in sci fi shows, they were doors that slid upward or downward, since it was not possible for a poly to move sideways. Interesting restriction, but it was almost effortless for them to implement what could have been a very difficult concept to integrate into the map engine.
Lifts/elevators were also possible by moving onto a poly and triggering an action that adjusted the poly's height. Polys getting taller would lift you up at their speed, polys moving down would drop out from under you and if they were too fast they could leave you behind. (remember marathon used real physics, including gravity and inertia, to manage the player)
Makes me want to play it again. I've never tried playing marathon on an intel, hope it works...
Descent was like m
you no longer get a good grade for trying.
RESULTS are all that matters in the real world. I don't care how hard you're trying to make my fries, if you stil burn them, you SUCK.
I suppose we would call this a "2.5-D" map. The map itself was 2-D but had height attributes for different areas, and the player's movement was 3-D. It wasn't true 3-d mapping like say, Descent, but you wouldn't really notice it playing.
Bridges weren't possible, but they did a good job of faking it. There's one room you can't get into on one level that has windows you can look inside, and from the two perspectives you can see into the room, there is a functional bridge in the room. It serves no purpose on the level other than to say "haha, look what we can do with the map editor!". It's a fraud of course, but a good fraud.
Marathon itself for me was tense but never really scarry. The game being open sourced, several whole new scenario games popped up. One of them was Aleph-1. THAT game scared me. The background music and ambient sounds would make most horror film directors jealous. Play it sometime. If you DON'T at least jump back a few inches from your screen when the first big nasty jumps you from around the corner, you must be dead. (or soon will be...) And that first level was downright claustrophobic.
Though I detest Bungee for selling out to microsoft, they had one of the most ground-breaking games of their time. Marathon featured 3D maps (not merely 2D, it had stairs and lifts) as well as real physics models, (your bullets and you were affected by gravity) ammunition limits (what, no 999 bullets in your pistol? really!) and used a physics model that allowed for adjustment of things like gravity and weight. I beleve it was also the first game to allow you to be submerged in a "medium" such as water, muck, and lava. (with the physics models adjusting accordingly, try firing an RPG in the water...)
There was nothing even remotely like it until after the realease of the second in the series, Marathon II Durandall. They even published the map editor with M2 and you could make your own levels and even modify the physics of the game. Monsters could be set to trigger on a variety of events, including each other, and it was possible to "pull" several other mobs so if you were spotted, by the time the mob found his way to you (and he WOULD find a way to get to you) he may have pulled several other mobs with him. MMORPG fans will recognize the "train" effect.
Mobs could even aggro each other. If a fighter's missile weapon hit a grunt one too many times the fighter would be on the grunt's aggro list and it was quite possible to get them sufficiently pissed off at each other that they would mostly kill each other.
Even with all that it had a flawless network play for up to 16 people. (admittedly poor internet performance, but LAN was smooth) Unfortunately multiplayer was only for the arenas, not for the actual game.
And the game... the depth of the plot and storyline was unheard of at that time. Even moving as fast as you could you might get to the end in a week. Most players took months to beat the game, and spent the next several months discovering the amazing variety of hidden rooms, secret weapons, and amazing powerups hidden on every level, of which there were what, 20? Large and unique, each map with a theme that set it visually apart from the other levels. (how could you not get tired of seeing the same room over and over and over again in Halo??) The different levels used different color pallates for the walls, ceiling, floors, etc, and all of them had a unique background sound.
Although it did not have dynamic lighting, individual map squares (3-8 sided polys actually!) could be lit individually, and even dynamically change by itself or due to player action. Ambient sounds were also present, and were variable by distance and in stereo - you could follow a sound to its source if you were wearing headphones.
It took almost four years for anything like Marathon I to come out on any platform, it was groundbreaking on every front. Doom was the only thing like it at the time and that was sad by comparison.
It occurs to me that in some ways Marathon was more real than even today's games. Think of a FPS game you like. Can you turn while you are falling? How is that possible? You can't turn while falling in Marathon. And ignoring the 999 bullets in your pistol, what happens after you have shot seven of them? You shoot #8 right? In marathon you see his hand come out, drop out the clip, jam in a new clip, and cock the gun. You can't shoot while you're doing that, so emptying a clip in preparation for a tough encounter was one of many strategy decisions you had to make. It was years before any other FPS decided that guns needed to be reloaded. Authentic sound FX too, and bullets that ricocheted off a wall would have one of several random visual effects result on the wall.
Not only did you have to worry about ammo and health, but some levels were hard vacuum and you had to manage your air as well. Certain mobs were resistant to certain weapons also, so you had to be peticular about who you used your limited fusion pistol shots on.
If something exploded on the floor beside you, you didn't just take damage. You were tossed up into the air and over
I mean really, this is the FBI. Is anyone really surprised by this? It's against their moral code to play by the rules.
The technology will require discs that are slightly different from the conventional DVD-Rs found in shops today
You can bet those disks, which cost them a nickel to make, will cost you $7 apiece. They are not going to stop robbing us, they are just trying to make it less obvious.
this is not a bad idea. There are many examples of where kids are trying to improve themselves and where the adults of the world push them a lot harder than they really should be pushed. You see 7 yr old actors that work 6 hrs a day on the set, or 9 yr olds that can out iceskate anyone in their city. (think jr olympics) Encouraging a kid to spend all their spare time doing any one thing is a waste of their childhood. I don't see why homework is any different than that. Sure, studying is time well-spent, but some parents and some teachers push the kids to overdo it. What good is it to have a straight-A student that has had a dismal childhood? Some would consider that a good trade, but not me. Life is not a contest, you don't "win" if you die successful. You "win" if you had a good ride, regardless of the outcome. Sacrificing the journey for sake of the end is a shame. That's the way I have lived my life and I have no regrets. I wonder just how many adults look back at their early lives and wish they had not obcessed so much over atheletics/grades/socializing.
I consider "taking ownership" to mean
- admitting fault
- taking actions to correct or at least mitigate the problem
- accepting responsibility for other problems that arise as a result
- understanding that you have lost a degree of trust due to your neglegence, and not assuming you will just get that trust back immediately after taking action
- making changes necessary to lessen the odds of a reocurrance
Issuing a patch covers the first three, but Symantec seems to have a problem with the other two. Just how many times do you have to see the fourth one before you find someone else to work with? It's naive to expect a customer to just keep forgiving you for your neglegence.
Imagine the public's reaction if ford trucks started spontaneously catching on fire? OK they found a problem with the fuel tank, ok that's fixed now. Next month two more trucks catch fire, oops guess there are issues with the gas line, ok that's fixed. Whoops, three weeks later we see a pattern of fuel pumps being defective and causing a fire under the hood. At that point, don't you just lose trust in their ability to produce a quality product? How many times do you turn the other cheek? Symantec is making my face sore.
"filevault" is just a method of using encrypted disk images for your home folder. And yes the source code to the disk encryption is available. So unless they are squirreling away your password or a copy of the master password somewhere in the system when you turn on filevault (which would have been discovered long ago) there's no getting into it without your password or the master password.
/etc/master.passwd after the fact and then not even someone that knows the master password can recover your vault - just you with your password.
To enable filevault you are required to define a master password, but if you like, you can delete
Just because we already know we can't trust Bill doesn't mean the rest of the world is just as untrustworthy. There are a few you can still depend on. If you think about it, image is a LOT more important to Apple than it is to MS. Bill doesn't care if people don't trust him because he has his users locked into Windows software, and you wil buy it even though you know he has a back door. (I am under the impression that windows users are just used to surrendering their privacy and security?) Steve on the other hand knows that if he were to put in a back door, it WOULD be discovered due to the open nature of the core of OS X, and that this coming to public knowledge would be devastating to the Apple brand. So even if he was being heavily pressured, he'd be a fool to do it. Even if you don't like him, you have to recognize he is a successful businessman and would never do something so damaging to his brand.
I make mistakes, but I take responsibility for and ownershio of them. I don't just issue an opology and then expect the world to forget it ever happened.
if they hadn't dropped the ball in the first place and left the hole there to begin with this would not be their problem. But they did. A patch is like an apology, it helps but it doesn't undo the damage and it doesn't remove your liability for your prior actions.
remove a syllable and you'll have it right
I don't know what "679mb used" means in real terms, but here on OS X with a loaded system I am taking up a bit more than that.
215mb "wired"
275mb "active"
365mb "inactive"
855mb "used"
But then I have 2gb so I'm only using a bit over 1/3 of my memory, the rest is just green. Heh, funny tho, the VM swap is 11gb right now. Glad I have a good size HD. But it runs nice and snappy. Though I have noticed it takes less time to launch an app that I have already opened once this session, so I assume some things are hanging around in cache somewhere when apps are quit. That being said, I never run out of physical memory. (never seen usage go over 90%)
From what I've read so far though, microsoft maintains a master key that can open any bitlocker-locked home. Any truth to this? On OS X for example, they have had filevault for what, two years now. When you make a vault, you have to set up a master password, and with that you can get in and reset a password, but if you lose the master password or it is deleted from the computer, and you lose your password, not even Steve himself can get your data back.
I don't see how people can settle for "it's totally secure. unless WE want in".
to be there, I would find a copy of the pages taken from the handout, hit up a kinkos with about $300 and recruit a swarm of volunteers to run around the conference like paperboys, handing out flyers and setting out stacks of them at every bench.
And the last page would have a "you're number one" on the bottom.
Wouldn't this fall into the same category as boobytraps? You cannot legally boobytrap your car seat to injure someone that is trying to steal your car for example.
More specifically, deliberate destruction of another person' propety is not lawful even if they are in the act of committing a crime, whether or not the crime is against you or anyone else. For example, if you see a man run into a bank and the alarm bells start going off and you know he is robbing the bank, if you pull out your pocketknife and slash his tire to stop him from getting away, you will still be held liable for the damge to the tire.
I have 3TB of storage here. 1TB of that is in a 5 x 250 hardware raid-5. In this case it's a stand-alone enclosure with firewire/usb ports on the back. I chose this because it's easily portable to another machine, so if the server buys the farm, I simply unplug it and walk it to the next server and jack it in. Also if the computer crashes, there is less risk of corruption of data since the raid box is handling parity calculation. It also does not hammer the server if I have to do a rebuild.
The other 2TB is the large, more easily replaceable data, mostly video media. Those are arranged as single drives. I am not stupid enough to try to stripe them, I don't like the idea of any 1 of 8 drives failing leading to total data loss on all drives.
I have a script that runs once a week and reads 100% of all blocks on all drives, and emails me if a bad block was found. I replace the drive immediately. To date I have yet to lose a byte.
Closest call I had was a few years ago before the raid5, I had a pair of software mirrors. I had a server crash that wiped one drive's partition table and wiped the other drive's directory. Neither alone was fixable by any utility I tried. I ended up doing some really scarry things with DD and XXD in terminal to reconstruct the partition table from scratch on one drive and install firewire drivers on it so I could get at my data. I am very thankful for having a very high level of knowledge on partition table and basic directory layouts, most people would have had to cough up a stack of benjamins to get that fixed.
My near future plans are to buy two 1tb lacie bigdick (they have a horrible failure rate, never use them for critical anything) and use that to back up the loose drives. Long term I plan to get a larger raid5 box to phase out the old raid as primary storage, and convert it to cover some of the less critical storage. Right now the cheapest and simplest backup plan for us seems to be to buy large cheap drives and keep 1 or 2 complete clones.
Our manager has an "impact maintenane tool". Its a wrench. A wrench used in the army to change the tracks on a tank. It's big enough to survive being run over by said tank.
We simply refer to it as "the wrench". Usually mentioning The Wrench is sufficient motivation for... most anything.
I also enjoy hearing about someone using a LART. (Lamer Attitude Readjustment Tool)
What does being a company have to do with being nice? You must be new here.
Companies are all about money. For the most part, moral companies go out of business and are replaced by unconscionable companies. There are of course exceptions, but that's just what they are, exceptions.
Pointing a finger at a company and yelling "hey, you can't do that, that's not NICE!" will buy you a ticket to nowhere. If you are waiting for a company to "do the right thing" you are in for a long wait, and I can't pity you if you grow old in the process.
This is not prejudice. Many that cry "age discrimination" are unhappy because, due to their age, they cannot perform as well as their younger coworkers and as a direct result they are not able to provide as much value to the company as their juniors. Companies are just making sensible, justifiable financial decisions.
While it's quite possible his age had something to do with this, it's also very likely he is guilty as charged. It would be a sensible thing for an employer to put a close eye on someone approaching retirement with pension, in the hopes that they screw up enough to justify termination, this saves the company money. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and sorry but PTSD does not justify surfing porn at work any more than forgiving turrets at mcdonalds. Crackheads are not allowed to smoke up at work just because they are crackheads. If you have a behavioral disorder you need to keep it in check while you're at work, or you need to find a different job that is known to be tolerant of your behavioral problems. I suppose another parallel we could draw is someone spending an hour a day at work on an online casino, and claiming its OK because they are a gambling addict.
Bottom line, if you are 6 mos from retiring with pension you should know to be on your best behavior. If you walk out the door with a company stapler, i don't care if you are a recovering klepto, out you go. (I consider deliberately wasting company time to be theft)
I hope this fellow loses his case and gets to pay IBM's attorneys.
A friend brought over a non-rollable unit (think tablet) that was loaded up with several books. It uses that E-ink also. I don't recall who makes it, (phillips?) but it was easy to read with just ambient light in the room, and had a backlight for low light use. The screen looked like crisp jet-black typeset ink on a slightly off-white page, it was very easy to read and did not put any strain on the eyes. It did take a second or so to switch pages though which I was not expecting. I don't know if that was a limitation of the device or of the screen, but when it switched it was a snap switch, not where you see the text being drawn vertically.
It wasn't very portable in the modern sense though. This unit was about 5.5" x 8", hardly pocket-size. I don't know how portable they will be able to get these - you can only roll it in one direction, so at best that one would have to be at least 5" in some direction. This screen was perfectly flat of course, and I wonder how much it would mess with your vision to read a page with a curl or warp to it? I know it bugs me to try to read a newspaper if it's not laying flat. I suppose this would be ideal for say, a long plane flight or while waiting for a connecting flight at a gate.
'DRM increases not decreases consumer value', such as by enabling people to rent content at a lower price than ownership
That statement takes advantage of the nearsighted. DRM's purpose is to maximize proffit, and to do that you have to maximize the money you squeeze out of the consumer. You cannot maximize proffit AND provide the customer with a better value, the two goals are opposed to each other.
Yes, DRM allows a consumer to rent content for less, but it also requires them to rent it every time they want to watch it, paying several times instead of once. As a result, the consumer ends up paying more over the long term to rent the content many times than they would have paid to purchase it and play it as many times as they liked.
Saying that DRM provides better value to the customer is a very poorly disguised lie.
Anyone trying to convince me that companies are spending millions of dollars and pissing off their customers because they are "trying to provide the consumer with better value" will be laughed at. (and then kicked)
This interested me enough to call up Chase Visa and ask them if this was legal, and what would happen to me if I tried this. I was transferred to the Dispute Resolution line and talked with Chase's dispute resolution people. They said that if you have a receipt that says you paid X for Y, and you were billed X and shipped Y, they cannot threaten to charge you more for it under any condition, including failure to return it, unopened or otherwise. He compared it to buying something at Wal-Mart via credit card and then taking the item home, and later that day getting a call from Wal-Mart demanding you bring it back or they will charge your card for another $50. He said that would not be considered fraud. Fraud would be if they charged you more than they were supposed to. In this case it's a separate, unauthorized charge, and would be considered theft.
He advised me that if this ever happened to me, to make sure you have a copy of the receipt, and to call the disupte line for your credit card. They will likely have you send a copy of your receipt to them. The seller will not have a legitimate receipt that says you were supposed to pay their other amount, (they may have an invoice but it would be an altered one and you have provided the original to which you agreed) and the charge would be reversed by the credit card company.
I guess what it all boils down to is the fact that Amazon is unhappy with the terms of the sale does not entitle them to make a second charge or to alter the terms of the deal after the fact. To alter the terms is fraud. To charge you more later is theft. I'm surprised that someone as big as Amazon would do something that their lawyers would have a heart attack over.