Funny about that. Humans really don't have any authoritative proof of who they are. They have a series of interdependent documents. In most places a driver's license is considered to be acceptable proof of identity. But if you need to replace it, you need to furnish further proof of identity. Usually a birth certificate and or a SS card. But the birth cert isn't authoritative either. When I got married a few years back, I needed to furnish proof of my identity and they needed my drivers license and birth certificate. Well... I had my original birth cert, but lost it in a move a few years back. No problem, I had a scan of it. Fortunately, a scan is NOT acceptable. So I had to go to city hall in the city I was born in and get a copy of my birth cert from them. The thing is... it wasn't a copy of the original at all. It was a new birth cert that was notarised. Looks easy to forge to me. So if that's the case, what IS the authoritative proof of your identity? Answer: there isn't one. Yet.
Of course it's easier to have higher standars with someone else's money. SPECIFICALLY when they have more money than they need. People like you really need to learn about this concept called sharing. Think back... you should have learned about it in pre-school. Maybe you need a refresher course?;P
So... where are these terrorists? Have you met one? Honestly, I don't think the terrorism issue is as big as the current administration likes to lie that it is. Here's the way I see it:
1. If the Clinton administration did this in the name of protecting us from terrorists, the anti-Clinton folks would be crying about jackbooted thugs and saying that there's no terrorist threat.
2. The Clinton supporters would say, they don't see a problem with the concept.
It all depends on who is in charge. The Repugs didn't trust Clinton because of his opposition to many of the things they believe they are entitled to. Now it's the reverse and the Dems and Liberals don't trust Bush for the same reasons. However, being an average real American, many of Bush's policies (and those of his administration) threaten my way of life. So I have a good reason for not trusting the man.
What's extremely funny is that all the anti-"Big Government" folks who support Bush are saying, "I don't have a problem with this". So, one of the requirements of being a right-winger (or libertarian since most of you guys are just Repubs that want to smoke pot) is that you can just turn off one of the major tenets of your belief system if it's inconvenient? You'll note that liberals/democrats never give voice to being afraid of "Big Government", so they don't have to turn off any of their beliefs. Hehehe... typical right wing illogic.:)
I don't get it? If the Clinton administration was trying to sneak this thing through, we'd hear cries of "jackbooted thugs" and "America under seige by the lih-rals"! But if G.W. Bush does it in the name of fighting "Terra", it's OK? To be fair, I'm sure there are a handful of right wingers and libertarians who are true to their beliefs regarding "Big government" and they are hopping mad. But, I don't think it's a majority. There are too many "Americans" who are willing to band over and lube up for the Bush administration as long as G.W. keeps smirking and telling them what they want to hear.
Let's put it in another context. If you had to choose between two people to get involved with in a long term romantic relationship, which would you choose:
Person A - Attractive when well polished, tells you the things you want to hear ("You're the most amazing person I've ever been with" or "We were destined to be together, I can feel it" or "You make me feel like no one else has ever made me feel before") and a liar.
or
Person B - Attractive even if not polished, but tends not to work on the polish, tells you things point blank without any flair ("I love you very much", "I'm glad I met you", " You're a good friend as well as my partner") and is completely trustworthy.
A lot of people would chose person A even though that person is likely to be bad for them. The reason is that person A makes them feel good. Person B, just doesn't compare even though person B is the perfect match.
The president (as much of an idiot as he appears many times) has a lot of people working on his polish. He also says the things people want to hear in order to feel good. And he is a liar at worst, and a fool at best. It all comes down to one basic fact: Americans don't want to face the truth. They don't want to be told about the bad things that are happening right now. They don't want to accept that America is losing it's grip on the world and the only way to keep it is by military power which is leading us deeper into dangerous ground. And now, national ID cards?
Once more, it's time for you damned fool Red Staters to wake the fuck up and realize that the "jackbooted thugs" are here but they're wearing smiley faces and have their weapons deocrated with flowers. We're under attack by our own government and a lot of you are too stupid to realize it. By the time you do it will be too late. And when you complain, I'm going to laugh at you and spit on you.
Again... this would illustrate the ignorance of a typical user (not directed at you). Users should know to backup their own data if it's vaulable to them. This is something that should be the requirement of getting authorized to use a computer. If a user isn't smart enough to backup up their data and to understand why that's important, they shouldn't be using a computer. Or... if the OS isn't smart enough to back up the data for the user, it shouldn't be running on a CPU and loaded into RAM.;P
The important thing about not running as root or Administrator is that it keeps exploits from being able to gain deeper control of the system (barring buffer overflows). Sure, the user might lose their data, but that's more of an inconvenience than a problem if they are backing it up. The positive thing about not running as root or Administrator is that they don't have to wipe the machine because they don't know how deep the infection went. Running as a regular user also prevent data loss/infection for other users on the system. (If people aren't doing multiple logins at home for each member of the family in XP, they're stupid) Again, understanding the importance of using multiple logins and implementing them should be a requirement for authorization to use a computer.
The real problem is that computer OSes aren't easy enough for most people. XP makes a lot of things dead simple, but if a user has to click more than twice, they're not going to do what they should be doing. If we required authorization and imposed fines on people who run infected machines on the net at home, they'd probably learn enough to get by or pay someone to do it for them. Just like cars... people don't wnat to change their oil, but they need to. Same thing.
This means the exploit is Windows only. If Microsoft did a better job of locking people out of the Administrator account, this would not be an issue. MS should make using the Administrator account as difficult as possible and there really should be an exam that users need to pass before they are authorized to have access to it. I'd like to see this exploit even try to do this on a properly configured *nix system where the user is smart enough to know not to run as root. In fact, I would go as far as saying that the browser itself should not allow users to run it if they are logged in as Administrator or root without having the knowledge as to how to do it. Hehe. We need to take exams to get a driver's license, the same should be done with computers. Of course, look at the number of people who don't follow the rule of the road (obeying speed limits, using turn indicators, NOT tailgating, etc...) and I suppose an exam like this wouldn't totally stop the idiots from turn the on switch on.
Actually what is needed is a public, non-profit benchmark competition. Both Windows and Linux enthusiasts are welcome to join in. Limit the contest to 100 teams of up to ten people. The 100 teams are all suprvised by the people who run the contest. The contest itself should make no money of any kind in order to keep away any monetary incentive. Hardware donations from the big players are acceptable with the understanding that the hardware will be returned after the compeition. In this way, the ugly little trait called "competition" gets in without any monetary incentive. At that point it's enthusiasts trying to outdo each other on both platforms. With this set up, you really get to test the performance of both OSes in a fair way because enthusiasts are likley to know all the tricks to get their OS and application to perform best. This means you'll likely see Windows outperforming a typical Windows system and Linux outperforming a typical RedHat/Mandrake/Debian/Gentoo/SuSE Linux system. Sounds like fun. SO who wants to get this party started?:)
More fun than you Anonymous Coward. All I ever see from you are stupid posts and you seem to have so many opposing viewpoints to yourself it may be that you are schizophonic. I'd hang with the Trip Master Monkey any day and have a beer rather than hang out with you!
Don't talk about a "rod-like column of glowing power" on/. It could cause too many trolls to start talking about "fleshlights " and the like. Thank you.;p
Ummm.. shouldn't they be tyring to make a Windows that doesn't crash before they try to make a car that doesn't crash? Seriously people... The IT industry is deluged with crappy commercial software being designed by nitwits who haven't a clue how to program properly. There are people using MS Access to hold larger amounts of data than it was made for. There are other people who are using HTTP for every possible thing under the sun when it isn't really appropriate in many cases. And they are basing it off of IIS to boot! This is all Microsoft's fault. They made computing and programming "easy" and with it the quality of software has plummeted. Do you really want these kinds of people designing the cars that you will be driving in the future? I certainly don't. Keeping costs down by letting less skilled people work in some areas is possibly beneficial, but not when lives are involved.
...might think I'm a cheap bastard, but I take months on important purchases. For example, I've been researching the move to a dual Opteron system for the home server. I've been researching it since January. I might purchase it sometime in June or July, but as late as Fall as well.
Personally, I think it comes down to the individual. If they are more intelligent, they are going to take longer to consider their purchases. After all, these companies have no right to my money. It's a privelege that I even consider spending my money on their crap. But other folks who are less intelligent are going to spend their money just because they want something. Even if they don't have the funds to support that purchase. These are the folks who get bad credit ratings but always have a story about how the system did it to them. Wake up jackass! The system didn't do it to you, you did it to yourself by living beyond your means. Don't fall for the televised hype about how you SHOULD be living, just buy what you honestly need and save everything else by assuming that you may not be employed tomorrow. Depression era mentalities rule. Of course, only time will tell.
....that this is nothing more than Microsoft attempting, once again, to buy off bloggers in an effort to astroturf their propaganda. Oh wait... did someone already say that?;P
There is no reason to believe that a supreme being (ie. God) couldn't use evolution to hone his creations to perfection. As I've said before, anyone who takes the bible completely literally (The world was created in seven days) is insane. I'll bet if you sat down and had a face to face talk with God about the creation of Earth, it's animals and the human race, he'd laugh you out of existence when you would say you think it's awesome that he created everything in seven days. Think of it this way. As a talented artist, you could get a canvas and some paint and attempt to render a great work. If you spent one hour doing it, you'd probably have a pretty lame piece of crap. If you spent one day, it would probably be a lot better. If you spent one year doing it, you'd probably be approaching something worthy of being revered for years to come. If you spent one lifetime working on it, it could very well be a masterpiece. The point is that it takes time for great things to happen. Developing a sentient being and having it survive for millions of years is not something you do in a decade or a century or ten thousand years. It takes a VERY long time. Especially is you are writing it in assembler... errr... DNA.
I suppose it would't be too hard to twist the DMCA into "protecting" hidden text as a security/DRM mechanism and calling this action "circumvention". The main problem is that our technology has outgrown 90% of the human race. Another example of this kind of thinking is on the moblog site, yafro.com. There are tons of women who post nude photos of themselves in their accounts. Much like Slashdot, there is a friends/foes type system. If you and another person are mutually in a friend relation, then you can see their "locked" pictures. So... when a few jackasses decided to mutually friend some of the Yafro women, take their locked photos and post them in a public forum on Yafro (a club), these women flipped out. They griped about how they were entitled to their privacy and it had been violated. They're right as far as ethics and respect go. But, this is the internet. Anything you place on it can't be expected to be private or protected in any fashion. If someone wants the info bad enough, they are going to get it.
I think I have mixed views on it because I'm not a gamer. Personally, I like games because of the gameplay. I still enjoy 2D "platform" games like Leander just as much as I enjoy the original Doom, Doom2, Doom3, Quake, and Quake 3 (didn't like Quake 2 for some reason). I also loved Myst and Riven. If I had a choice, I'd go for games more like Myst and Riven because there is more to do than just blow stuff up. I especially like the puzzles that you need to solve in order to progress.
But, he's right. New graphics != new gameplay. New weapons != new gameplay. And if you add photorealism, it still doesn't equal new game play. Part of the limitations come from the technology itself. It requires you to be sitting in one place rather than actually physically doing something. There are plenty of non-computer games that are like this as well, but there are many different formats: card games, board games, RPGs, etc... But what about hybrids? Once wearables are commonplace, why couldn't we superimpose the virtual environments over real ones and make the player get up out of their chairs? Imagine a wearable gaming system that scans your entire house and then automatically builds a map based on it to superimpose baddies everywhere. You and your friends then run around the house and break the china, destroy the windows and kick over the potted plants. Lots more fun than sitting at a boring old 3D computer terminal... It could also be used as a way to force lazy (not all gamers are lazy) gamers into getting more physically fit. If they want to play the latest game, they have to get off their asses.
But the fundamental problem is one of creativity. The people designing games today are still, at the core, programmers. They are not people who spent their time trying to find ways to entertain people with actual games. That's OK for the most part because most gamers have a similar mindset. But think of the games that are not computer based that provide hours of fun for kids:
-Hide and Seek (still a favorite of mine) -Leap frog -Hangman -Baseball -Soccer -Bowling -Twi ster -Chess -Tic-tac-toe
The list goes on. The main thing, when it comes to games is good gameplay and computers can only go so far in their present form. Expect to see a lot of changes when they go wearable.
Yeah. VNC on Windows slows things down a good deal. But *nix to *nix seems fine even over a slow link. I use it over a 512k DSL line with an OpenVPN tunnel and it's very usable. With the WLAN laptops at home, it feels like the desktop is running right on the laptop. On the wired network, I can even get some 3D acceleration stuff happening if I am using the vnc extention to X for the actual X server on display:0 and it works pretty darned well. But whenever I've done Windows to *nix, it's been slow. I don't know why though.
Not meaning to troll, but I have yet to see a decent, stable, well performing Java application. I've worked with quite a few both at home and at work, and they tend to be resource hogs no matter what platform you are on. The Cisco management GUIs that are Java based perform pretty poorly regardless of is I am on Windows or Unix. They're also unstable as hell unless you have the EXACT version of the JVM required for it to run properly. More often than not, that means some other Java managment app isn't going to work.
On the HP side, I use the HP Commandview SDM GUI on HP-UX to manage our drive array. Again, this is a Java app with some of the strangest confilcts with the X window system I've seen outside of one especailly bad Java based GUI. The worst of the lot is SunOne's Java LDAP manager. There is a pane on the left hand side of the app that provides a tree view of the objects in LDAP. If I click on the plus to expand the list of objects, I have to wait a good 5-8 minutes before the screen finally redraws. According to Sun, this is just an issue of running the Java app over the network using X. But that's the only way I can run it because the Sun box doesn't have a video card in it. It's meant to run headless.
At home, I used Limewire for a while until I saw just how much RAM and CPU the 'java' process was consuming on my RedHat 8 box. After that I moved to Overnet (which I still like to call eDonkey) and being a native app, it ran much better.
I still don't get why a lot of people are really into Java. But then again, I don't code in it, I just have used a wide assortment of Java apps.
Why is this even front page news? It's not that funny. I've seen far funnier things on Bash.org. It almost seems to be that someone here at/. has an axe to grind with this supposed "hacker".
Turning on my karma bonus? Don't you mean turning it off? It's on by default as it should be. I have the option to not use it if I don't want to, but I only do that when posting something that is really WAYYYYY off topic. Settle down there spunky, you might bust a nut or something. Hypocrite? Care to elaborate?
Slashdot Mirror
Funny about that. Humans really don't have any authoritative proof of who they are. They have a series of interdependent documents. In most places a driver's license is considered to be acceptable proof of identity. But if you need to replace it, you need to furnish further proof of identity. Usually a birth certificate and or a SS card. But the birth cert isn't authoritative either. When I got married a few years back, I needed to furnish proof of my identity and they needed my drivers license and birth certificate. Well... I had my original birth cert, but lost it in a move a few years back. No problem, I had a scan of it. Fortunately, a scan is NOT acceptable. So I had to go to city hall in the city I was born in and get a copy of my birth cert from them. The thing is... it wasn't a copy of the original at all. It was a new birth cert that was notarised. Looks easy to forge to me. So if that's the case, what IS the authoritative proof of your identity? Answer: there isn't one. Yet.
Of course it's easier to have higher standars with someone else's money. SPECIFICALLY when they have more money than they need. People like you really need to learn about this concept called sharing. Think back... you should have learned about it in pre-school. Maybe you need a refresher course? ;P
So... where are these terrorists? Have you met one? Honestly, I don't think the terrorism issue is as big as the current administration likes to lie that it is. Here's the way I see it:
:)
1. If the Clinton administration did this in the name of protecting us from terrorists, the anti-Clinton folks would be crying about jackbooted thugs and saying that there's no terrorist threat.
2. The Clinton supporters would say, they don't see a problem with the concept.
It all depends on who is in charge. The Repugs didn't trust Clinton because of his opposition to many of the things they believe they are entitled to. Now it's the reverse and the Dems and Liberals don't trust Bush for the same reasons. However, being an average real American, many of Bush's policies (and those of his administration) threaten my way of life. So I have a good reason for not trusting the man.
What's extremely funny is that all the anti-"Big Government" folks who support Bush are saying, "I don't have a problem with this". So, one of the requirements of being a right-winger (or libertarian since most of you guys are just Repubs that want to smoke pot) is that you can just turn off one of the major tenets of your belief system if it's inconvenient? You'll note that liberals/democrats never give voice to being afraid of "Big Government", so they don't have to turn off any of their beliefs. Hehehe... typical right wing illogic.
I don't get it? If the Clinton administration was trying to sneak this thing through, we'd hear cries of "jackbooted thugs" and "America under seige by the lih-rals"! But if G.W. Bush does it in the name of fighting "Terra", it's OK? To be fair, I'm sure there are a handful of right wingers and libertarians who are true to their beliefs regarding "Big government" and they are hopping mad. But, I don't think it's a majority. There are too many "Americans" who are willing to band over and lube up for the Bush administration as long as G.W. keeps smirking and telling them what they want to hear.
Let's put it in another context. If you had to choose between two people to get involved with in a long term romantic relationship, which would you choose:
Person A - Attractive when well polished, tells you the things you want to hear ("You're the most amazing person I've ever been with" or "We were destined to be together, I can feel it" or "You make me feel like no one else has ever made me feel before") and a liar.
or
Person B - Attractive even if not polished, but tends not to work on the polish, tells you things point blank without any flair ("I love you very much", "I'm glad I met you", " You're a good friend as well as my partner") and is completely trustworthy.
A lot of people would chose person A even though that person is likely to be bad for them. The reason is that person A makes them feel good. Person B, just doesn't compare even though person B is the perfect match.
The president (as much of an idiot as he appears many times) has a lot of people working on his polish. He also says the things people want to hear in order to feel good. And he is a liar at worst, and a fool at best. It all comes down to one basic fact: Americans don't want to face the truth. They don't want to be told about the bad things that are happening right now. They don't want to accept that America is losing it's grip on the world and the only way to keep it is by military power which is leading us deeper into dangerous ground. And now, national ID cards?
Once more, it's time for you damned fool Red Staters to wake the fuck up and realize that the "jackbooted thugs" are here but they're wearing smiley faces and have their weapons deocrated with flowers. We're under attack by our own government and a lot of you are too stupid to realize it. By the time you do it will be too late. And when you complain, I'm going to laugh at you and spit on you.
Again... this would illustrate the ignorance of a typical user (not directed at you). Users should know to backup their own data if it's vaulable to them. This is something that should be the requirement of getting authorized to use a computer. If a user isn't smart enough to backup up their data and to understand why that's important, they shouldn't be using a computer. Or... if the OS isn't smart enough to back up the data for the user, it shouldn't be running on a CPU and loaded into RAM. ;P
The important thing about not running as root or Administrator is that it keeps exploits from being able to gain deeper control of the system (barring buffer overflows). Sure, the user might lose their data, but that's more of an inconvenience than a problem if they are backing it up. The positive thing about not running as root or Administrator is that they don't have to wipe the machine because they don't know how deep the infection went. Running as a regular user also prevent data loss/infection for other users on the system. (If people aren't doing multiple logins at home for each member of the family in XP, they're stupid) Again, understanding the importance of using multiple logins and implementing them should be a requirement for authorization to use a computer.
The real problem is that computer OSes aren't easy enough for most people. XP makes a lot of things dead simple, but if a user has to click more than twice, they're not going to do what they should be doing. If we required authorization and imposed fines on people who run infected machines on the net at home, they'd probably learn enough to get by or pay someone to do it for them. Just like cars... people don't wnat to change their oil, but they need to. Same thing.
This means the exploit is Windows only. If Microsoft did a better job of locking people out of the Administrator account, this would not be an issue. MS should make using the Administrator account as difficult as possible and there really should be an exam that users need to pass before they are authorized to have access to it. I'd like to see this exploit even try to do this on a properly configured *nix system where the user is smart enough to know not to run as root. In fact, I would go as far as saying that the browser itself should not allow users to run it if they are logged in as Administrator or root without having the knowledge as to how to do it. Hehe. We need to take exams to get a driver's license, the same should be done with computers. Of course, look at the number of people who don't follow the rule of the road (obeying speed limits, using turn indicators, NOT tailgating, etc...) and I suppose an exam like this wouldn't totally stop the idiots from turn the on switch on.
Actually what is needed is a public, non-profit benchmark competition. Both Windows and Linux enthusiasts are welcome to join in. Limit the contest to 100 teams of up to ten people. The 100 teams are all suprvised by the people who run the contest. The contest itself should make no money of any kind in order to keep away any monetary incentive. Hardware donations from the big players are acceptable with the understanding that the hardware will be returned after the compeition. In this way, the ugly little trait called "competition" gets in without any monetary incentive. At that point it's enthusiasts trying to outdo each other on both platforms. With this set up, you really get to test the performance of both OSes in a fair way because enthusiasts are likley to know all the tricks to get their OS and application to perform best. This means you'll likely see Windows outperforming a typical Windows system and Linux outperforming a typical RedHat/Mandrake/Debian/Gentoo/SuSE Linux system. Sounds like fun. SO who wants to get this party started? :)
More fun than you Anonymous Coward. All I ever see from you are stupid posts and you seem to have so many opposing viewpoints to yourself it may be that you are schizophonic. I'd hang with the Trip Master Monkey any day and have a beer rather than hang out with you!
*Moderator Hint: Joke*
Don't talk about a "rod-like column of glowing power" on /. It could cause too many trolls to start talking about "fleshlights " and the like. Thank you. ;p
"Nothing to see here. Move along..." ;P
Ummm.. shouldn't they be tyring to make a Windows that doesn't crash before they try to make a car that doesn't crash? Seriously people... The IT industry is deluged with crappy commercial software being designed by nitwits who haven't a clue how to program properly. There are people using MS Access to hold larger amounts of data than it was made for. There are other people who are using HTTP for every possible thing under the sun when it isn't really appropriate in many cases. And they are basing it off of IIS to boot! This is all Microsoft's fault. They made computing and programming "easy" and with it the quality of software has plummeted. Do you really want these kinds of people designing the cars that you will be driving in the future? I certainly don't. Keeping costs down by letting less skilled people work in some areas is possibly beneficial, but not when lives are involved.
...might think I'm a cheap bastard, but I take months on important purchases. For example, I've been researching the move to a dual Opteron system for the home server. I've been researching it since January. I might purchase it sometime in June or July, but as late as Fall as well.
Personally, I think it comes down to the individual. If they are more intelligent, they are going to take longer to consider their purchases. After all, these companies have no right to my money. It's a privelege that I even consider spending my money on their crap. But other folks who are less intelligent are going to spend their money just because they want something. Even if they don't have the funds to support that purchase. These are the folks who get bad credit ratings but always have a story about how the system did it to them. Wake up jackass! The system didn't do it to you, you did it to yourself by living beyond your means. Don't fall for the televised hype about how you SHOULD be living, just buy what you honestly need and save everything else by assuming that you may not be employed tomorrow. Depression era mentalities rule. Of course, only time will tell.
....that this is nothing more than Microsoft attempting, once again, to buy off bloggers in an effort to astroturf their propaganda. Oh wait... did someone already say that? ;P
*Hint: This is what's called a joke
TripMaster Monkey has got the score once again.
There is no reason to believe that a supreme being (ie. God) couldn't use evolution to hone his creations to perfection. As I've said before, anyone who takes the bible completely literally (The world was created in seven days) is insane. I'll bet if you sat down and had a face to face talk with God about the creation of Earth, it's animals and the human race, he'd laugh you out of existence when you would say you think it's awesome that he created everything in seven days. Think of it this way. As a talented artist, you could get a canvas and some paint and attempt to render a great work. If you spent one hour doing it, you'd probably have a pretty lame piece of crap. If you spent one day, it would probably be a lot better. If you spent one year doing it, you'd probably be approaching something worthy of being revered for years to come. If you spent one lifetime working on it, it could very well be a masterpiece. The point is that it takes time for great things to happen. Developing a sentient being and having it survive for millions of years is not something you do in a decade or a century or ten thousand years. It takes a VERY long time. Especially is you are writing it in assembler... errr... DNA.
Pure genius. You used one sentence and covered the following all in one fell swoop:
:)
1. Star Wars
2. Internet geekery
3. Pr0n
4. Masturbation
Hats off to you sir.
I suppose it would't be too hard to twist the DMCA into "protecting" hidden text as a security/DRM mechanism and calling this action "circumvention". The main problem is that our technology has outgrown 90% of the human race. Another example of this kind of thinking is on the moblog site, yafro.com. There are tons of women who post nude photos of themselves in their accounts. Much like Slashdot, there is a friends/foes type system. If you and another person are mutually in a friend relation, then you can see their "locked" pictures. So... when a few jackasses decided to mutually friend some of the Yafro women, take their locked photos and post them in a public forum on Yafro (a club), these women flipped out. They griped about how they were entitled to their privacy and it had been violated. They're right as far as ethics and respect go. But, this is the internet. Anything you place on it can't be expected to be private or protected in any fashion. If someone wants the info bad enough, they are going to get it.
That's funny. 640k scales to 70 million users for me pretty well. But then again, I'm using a 486 running Linux. *ducks*
I think I have mixed views on it because I'm not a gamer. Personally, I like games because of the gameplay. I still enjoy 2D "platform" games like Leander just as much as I enjoy the original Doom, Doom2, Doom3, Quake, and Quake 3 (didn't like Quake 2 for some reason). I also loved Myst and Riven. If I had a choice, I'd go for games more like Myst and Riven because there is more to do than just blow stuff up. I especially like the puzzles that you need to solve in order to progress.
i ster
But, he's right. New graphics != new gameplay. New weapons != new gameplay. And if you add photorealism, it still doesn't equal new game play. Part of the limitations come from the technology itself. It requires you to be sitting in one place rather than actually physically doing something. There are plenty of non-computer games that are like this as well, but there are many different formats: card games, board games, RPGs, etc... But what about hybrids? Once wearables are commonplace, why couldn't we superimpose the virtual environments over real ones and make the player get up out of their chairs? Imagine a wearable gaming system that scans your entire house and then automatically builds a map based on it to superimpose baddies everywhere. You and your friends then run around the house and break the china, destroy the windows and kick over the potted plants. Lots more fun than sitting at a boring old 3D computer terminal... It could also be used as a way to force lazy (not all gamers are lazy) gamers into getting more physically fit. If they want to play the latest game, they have to get off their asses.
But the fundamental problem is one of creativity. The people designing games today are still, at the core, programmers. They are not people who spent their time trying to find ways to entertain people with actual games. That's OK for the most part because most gamers have a similar mindset. But think of the games that are not computer based that provide hours of fun for kids:
-Hide and Seek (still a favorite of mine)
-Leap frog
-Hangman
-Baseball
-Soccer
-Bowling
-Tw
-Chess
-Tic-tac-toe
The list goes on. The main thing, when it comes to games is good gameplay and computers can only go so far in their present form. Expect to see a lot of changes when they go wearable.
Yeah. VNC on Windows slows things down a good deal. But *nix to *nix seems fine even over a slow link. I use it over a 512k DSL line with an OpenVPN tunnel and it's very usable. With the WLAN laptops at home, it feels like the desktop is running right on the laptop. On the wired network, I can even get some 3D acceleration stuff happening if I am using the vnc extention to X for the actual X server on display :0 and it works pretty darned well. But whenever I've done Windows to *nix, it's been slow. I don't know why though.
Not meaning to troll, but I have yet to see a decent, stable, well performing Java application. I've worked with quite a few both at home and at work, and they tend to be resource hogs no matter what platform you are on. The Cisco management GUIs that are Java based perform pretty poorly regardless of is I am on Windows or Unix. They're also unstable as hell unless you have the EXACT version of the JVM required for it to run properly. More often than not, that means some other Java managment app isn't going to work.
On the HP side, I use the HP Commandview SDM GUI on HP-UX to manage our drive array. Again, this is a Java app with some of the strangest confilcts with the X window system I've seen outside of one especailly bad Java based GUI. The worst of the lot is SunOne's Java LDAP manager. There is a pane on the left hand side of the app that provides a tree view of the objects in LDAP. If I click on the plus to expand the list of objects, I have to wait a good 5-8 minutes before the screen finally redraws. According to Sun, this is just an issue of running the Java app over the network using X. But that's the only way I can run it because the Sun box doesn't have a video card in it. It's meant to run headless.
At home, I used Limewire for a while until I saw just how much RAM and CPU the 'java' process was consuming on my RedHat 8 box. After that I moved to Overnet (which I still like to call eDonkey) and being a native app, it ran much better.
I still don't get why a lot of people are really into Java. But then again, I don't code in it, I just have used a wide assortment of Java apps.
Nice to know that you care. Sorry about the fact that you don't seem to have a sense of humor though...
Why is this even front page news? It's not that funny. I've seen far funnier things on Bash.org. It almost seems to be that someone here at /. has an axe to grind with this supposed "hacker".
Who is Nelson? What is this "schooled" you speak of? I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
So you actually, actively turn your karma bonus off a lot do you? I don't see the point...
Turning on my karma bonus? Don't you mean turning it off? It's on by default as it should be. I have the option to not use it if I don't want to, but I only do that when posting something that is really WAYYYYY off topic. Settle down there spunky, you might bust a nut or something. Hypocrite? Care to elaborate?