It's really not a case of FUD*, but rather a case of security through obscurity.
* "Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products.... has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.", ESR's Jargon File - which also has an entry on security through obscurity, incidently.
No, I don't. I assume as soon as they actually have the information they are legally required to keep it for a certain period of time; OTOH if they never create the logs that's okay, too. That's what I wrote. Now, what you propose would probably illegal at least in the States - once you create a log file, you have to keep it, and are forbidden from deleting it "after a few days". Since most ISPs do create the logs e.g. for billing reasons, or sheer stupidity and lack of informational discipline, they have to keep it for a while. (Note that this might be wrong, maybe ISPs can delete it after a few days, ie are note required to keep it for any amount of time - IANAL.)
Great! That's were innocent until proven comes in. Being sued doesn't mean that you're convicted, just that they think you should be. You can convince the judge that somebody else did it, and maybe even them. Or actually, they have to convince the judge you did it - if they can't do that, you're fine. That's the theory at least. There are problems, but I don't think there's any violation of "innocent until proven guilty" is one of it. Rather, maybe there ought to be more severe repurcussions if someone innocent is charged. And it should definitely be more difficult to get somebody's name from an IP. And maybe copyright laws should be changed to more accurately reflect what many people seem to think.
They really don't need the MAC. Once you sign in and get assigned an IP the ISP just logs time, login information and the IP. When they're asked who used an IP at some point, they just look it up - I doubt the MAC is involved at any point. Most ISP do this, although I am not sure what the legal requirements are. I assume as soon as they actually have the information they are legally required to keep it for a certain period of time; OTOH if they never create the logs that's okay, too. Here in Germany and assumedly all of the EU, there's also an upper limit when ISPs (and other companies) are meant to delete your logs, I don't know whether a similar thing exists in the USA. Obviously, ISPs may not just give your information out to anyone, they used to need a court order and still need one in the EU, I think in the US the Patriot Act or some similar directive has opened other ways for assholes like the MPAA to acquire such data. There were law suits on that, which the **AA won.
Sure. It's a PHP script, though, so it won't work on a "vanilla" WinXP system.
<?
$drives = array('c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h');
print "<pre>Testing partitions...<br><br>";
foreach ($drives as $letter) {
unset($results);
exec("defrag -a $letter:", $results);
print(strtoupper($letter) . ": " . $results[4] . "<br>\n"); }
print "</pre>";
?>
Don't shoot me if this does anything untoward to your system, you have been warned.:)
As for performance losses due to having multiple partitions, got any resources that go into some detail why this should happen? Credible ones, preferably. I haven't heard anything like that so far...
I wrote a script some time ago to more easily let me check how badly my partitions are fragmented, here's it's current output: C: 5,72 GB Total, 1,97 GB (34%) Free, 4% Fragmented (8% file fragmentation) D: 40,00 GB Total, 1,00 GB (2%) Free, 41% Fragmented (82% file fragmentation) E: 66,69 GB Total, 105 MB (0%) Free, 10% Fragmented (21% file fragmentation) F: 30,00 GB Total, 1,21 GB (4%) Free, 3% Fragmented (7% file fragmentation) G: 10,00 GB Total, 1,54 GB (15%) Free, 5% Fragmented (9% file fragmentation) H: 35,03 GB Total, 551 MB (1%) Free, 39% Fragmented (79% file fragmentation)
D ("Dump") and H ("Online") get a lot of throughput, by personal computing standards anyway, E ("Games") doesn't get changed that much, but if it does, a lot of data leaves and comes. Seems like whenever I defrag D or H, they're back to the values above within days. I guess Win XP has a hard time doing the internal on-the-fly defragging of the hard drives that rarely have moer than 1% free space... Guess I should just get a new HD and have some more free space that way - but I bet I'd have that filled up with junk after some weeks, anyway.
That said, I'm not sure how relevant this is for NTFS partitions, anyway. I recall hearing that they aren't affected by fragmentation as much as FAT partitions (which were a nightmare), however I'm not sure if that means they don't fragment that easily (heh) or whether accessing data isn't slowed down as much by any existing fragmentation.
I've also rarely heard anyone talking about fragmentation in the popular Linux file systems, a Unix partisan I know actually thought they didn't fragment full stop, which I don't believe is possible, at least not if you consider situations which might not occur in practice. But then again, I suppose Linux might solve it the same way Apple seems to - I guess I'll know more after a couple of hundred comments on this article.:)
Thanks for posting that list. I'm actually in the process of rewatching TNG for the n-th time (although for the first time in English instead of my native German), but reading about those episodes is still great.
There are probably far more sheets of paper in the world that are US Letter size than any other size at all. And file folders to match.
Um, no, probably not. There are far, far more people using ISO A4 sized paper than US Letter, in countries that produce as much paper as the US. More if you want to believe Europeans lamenting their countries overabundance of bureaucracy...
In the same vein as a poster before, here's a quote from the EPA article you referred to, under the heading "How can plutonium affect people's health?":
External exposure to plutonium poses very little health risk, since plutonium isotopes emit alpha radiation, and almost no beta or gamma radiation. In contrast, internal exposure to plutonium is an extremely serious health hazard. It generally stays in the body for decades, exposing organs and tissues to radiation, and increasing the risk of cancer. Plutonium is also a toxic metal, and may cause damage to the kidneys.
How do Li-S batteries perform when they're heated inside a laptop? How how do Li-S batteries get when being recharged? Those are some of the questions one might ask. (I don't, though, or I'd have read the article - just giving some examples of issues related to heat.)
Do keep in mind that this test does not only involve MP3. I imagine the one I could (fairly) easily pick out as being somewhat off is the sample encoded by LAME or some other MP3 codec. The other schemes are more modern, and may be more difficult to distinguish from the source. Looking at previous results from that guy's listening tests, the other codecs routinely scored between 4 and 5 points - that is, between "Perceptible, but not annoying" and "Imperceptible". Lame and another MP3 codec (I think) didn't get grades quite that good.
I must be deaf, I just did the test on a the kraftwerk sample file, and it took me a lot of relistening to finally pick out 3 out of 6 encoded files (although the first one - whatever it was - was fairly easy). The other 3 sounded exactly like the reference sample to me. This is using Sennheiser HD500 headphones and an Audigy ZX2 sound card.
Try doing the test, you might be surprised, or conversely if you're not surprised, you might contribute valuable information to the project.
Flight yokes and pedals are best for flight simulators, and after that I'd then prefer an analogue pad over a keyboard/mouse anyway, a mouse isn't particularly authentic, which is half the point in simulation.
Yes, of course. You'd typically use pedals, a joystick of some sorts in the right hand - and the keyboard with the left hand, or vice versa if you're left-handed. Flight sims routinely have hundreds of commands, most keys even on the keyboard are massively overloaded using meta-keys like control and alt. There will never be a serious flight sim game for any console unless it ships with it's own controller offering keyboard-like amount of controls. (And yes, I realize that this has - sort of - been done before on the Xbox with that mech game.)
Driving simulators are best served with a wheel and pedals,
Yes, like I said, racing games aren't very well suited to the keyboard. I referred to thinker sims and tactical sims, not sports sims, ie car racing sims, I don't think there are any other unless you consider FIFA and NHL games as simulations.
For turn-based strategy it's fairly irrelevant.
I've just spent a weekend re-playing Civ3, and the many keyboard commands are greatly appreciated. It's way faster to hit I, or R to irrigate or build roads respectively than to click the buttons, even more so if you take into account functions like "build road to..." and so on. Of course the game would be playable without the keyboard, but it's more enjoyable with than without.
The same is true for Sim City and real-time strategy games, they're a lot more fun (to me, at least) with the keyboard to save extraneous "mousing".
and I'd certainly attribute many more game types to consoles than just 'racing and platform'.
Yes, so do I. The last comment was tongue-in-cheeck, sorry if that wasn't clear.
Whatever. I think it's great for real-time strategy, turn-based strategy, thinker simulation games like SimCity as well as strategic sims like flight sims, role playing games and on and on. It's not much of a use as a primary or only control in any of these, but it's a great complement to the mouse. Or, to mimic you: It's not very good for racing and platform games, but that's OK because there's got to be something consoles are good at.
2) GTA is still preferable on a joypad, it has too many instantly required moves at fingertips to make keyboard/mouse play fully worthwhile. The time taken to find the correct key outweighs any advantage in having unique keys. I find even on PC games I usually just scroll through weapons using the mouse wheel, as it's quicker.
It might be, using the mouse wheel. It's not quicker if you use a button for scrolling. And anyway, I certainly don't need to take time to find the correct keys in most games, after a short time of adaptation (minutes), using the right is typically second nature. And most of the time, the problem doesn't even come up since the games offer reconfigurable keys on the rare occasion that they don't conform to the standards like WASD, R for reload and so on.
Apart from the fact that it's not analogue, which is required or at least preferable in some situations, the keyboard's a really good controller. Which would explain why none of the keyboard alternatives being released and reviewed every other month never seem to make much of an impact outside, perhabs, of certain bleeding edge gamer circle with too much monthly allowance.
Actually, Germany does have a constitutional right to free speech, (Artikel 5 Grundgesetzbuch, the constition mandated in 1949 by the Western German government and the allied occupying forces) - it's just that Germany also has an article in the constitition dealing with getting rid of the remainder of the Nazis, obviously an important thing especially in 1949. What you're saying is basically right, anyway.
Thank god it's rugged. Wouldn't want to ship up a new one if one of those thoughtless astronauts drops his iPaq off a table or something, now would you?;)
I've played through both. One is a classic AD&D role-playing game heavily focused on multiplayer gaming, set in the Forgotten Realms. The other is a strictly single-player action/adventure RPG. If KOTOR is a NWN mod, then nearly all FPS games are simply mods of Wolf3d, Doom (which could then actually be considered a Wolf3d mod), Quake and the original Unreal. If that's your definition of mod, so be it.
I did some research on the topic, and among other things I found was the Wikipedia article/stub on EULAs, claiming: "Assuming that publishers follow the correct procedures (such as giving the user the right to return the software for a refund), EULA licenses are generally enforceable in the United States. See ProCD v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996)."
So there. IANAL, obviously, so I can't really interpret that, and neither would I be able to properly interpret the legal requirements for a binding contract, as you suggested. Again, there might be the question of interpreting the law the way you'd like it to be or the way it has been interpreted for a long time.
You can open some of the resources of (the first Java app that comes to my mind:) Borland Together with any fucking ZIP program, therefore Borland Together is just a derivate of Winzip. QED. Jesus. I bet both use linked lists as an internal data structure, too - amazing!
EULAs are valid, IF you agree to them before the sale is finalized.
(I assume that means "if, and only if".)
Got any references to back up that claim? As far as I know, the legal bindingness of EULAs has been argued over for some time, but there has not been any meaningful result to those discussions. Most people (at least here on Slashdot) would certainly like EULAs to be invalid, but that doesn't make it true.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really not a case of FUD*, but rather a case of security through obscurity.
... has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.", ESR's Jargon File - which also has an entry on security through obscurity, incidently.
* "Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products.
No, I don't. I assume as soon as they actually have the information they are legally required to keep it for a certain period of time; OTOH if they never create the logs that's okay, too. That's what I wrote. Now, what you propose would probably illegal at least in the States - once you create a log file, you have to keep it, and are forbidden from deleting it "after a few days". Since most ISPs do create the logs e.g. for billing reasons, or sheer stupidity and lack of informational discipline, they have to keep it for a while. (Note that this might be wrong, maybe ISPs can delete it after a few days, ie are note required to keep it for any amount of time - IANAL.)
Great! That's were innocent until proven comes in. Being sued doesn't mean that you're convicted, just that they think you should be. You can convince the judge that somebody else did it, and maybe even them. Or actually, they have to convince the judge you did it - if they can't do that, you're fine. That's the theory at least. There are problems, but I don't think there's any violation of "innocent until proven guilty" is one of it. Rather, maybe there ought to be more severe repurcussions if someone innocent is charged. And it should definitely be more difficult to get somebody's name from an IP. And maybe copyright laws should be changed to more accurately reflect what many people seem to think.
They really don't need the MAC. Once you sign in and get assigned an IP the ISP just logs time, login information and the IP. When they're asked who used an IP at some point, they just look it up - I doubt the MAC is involved at any point. Most ISP do this, although I am not sure what the legal requirements are.
I assume as soon as they actually have the information they are legally required to keep it for a certain period of time; OTOH if they never create the logs that's okay, too. Here in Germany and assumedly all of the EU, there's also an upper limit when ISPs (and other companies) are meant to delete your logs, I don't know whether a similar thing exists in the USA. Obviously, ISPs may not just give your information out to anyone, they used to need a court order and still need one in the EU, I think in the US the Patriot Act or some similar directive has opened other ways for assholes like the MPAA to acquire such data. There were law suits on that, which the **AA won.
As for performance losses due to having multiple partitions, got any resources that go into some detail why this should happen? Credible ones, preferably. I haven't heard anything like that so far...
I wrote a script some time ago to more easily let me check how badly my partitions are fragmented, here's it's current output:
:)
C: 5,72 GB Total, 1,97 GB (34%) Free, 4% Fragmented (8% file fragmentation)
D: 40,00 GB Total, 1,00 GB (2%) Free, 41% Fragmented (82% file fragmentation)
E: 66,69 GB Total, 105 MB (0%) Free, 10% Fragmented (21% file fragmentation)
F: 30,00 GB Total, 1,21 GB (4%) Free, 3% Fragmented (7% file fragmentation)
G: 10,00 GB Total, 1,54 GB (15%) Free, 5% Fragmented (9% file fragmentation)
H: 35,03 GB Total, 551 MB (1%) Free, 39% Fragmented (79% file fragmentation)
D ("Dump") and H ("Online") get a lot of throughput, by personal computing standards anyway, E ("Games") doesn't get changed that much, but if it does, a lot of data leaves and comes. Seems like whenever I defrag D or H, they're back to the values above within days. I guess Win XP has a hard time doing the internal on-the-fly defragging of the hard drives that rarely have moer than 1% free space... Guess I should just get a new HD and have some more free space that way - but I bet I'd have that filled up with junk after some weeks, anyway.
That said, I'm not sure how relevant this is for NTFS partitions, anyway. I recall hearing that they aren't affected by fragmentation as much as FAT partitions (which were a nightmare), however I'm not sure if that means they don't fragment that easily (heh) or whether accessing data isn't slowed down as much by any existing fragmentation.
I've also rarely heard anyone talking about fragmentation in the popular Linux file systems, a Unix partisan I know actually thought they didn't fragment full stop, which I don't believe is possible, at least not if you consider situations which might not occur in practice. But then again, I suppose Linux might solve it the same way Apple seems to - I guess I'll know more after a couple of hundred comments on this article.
s/Xindi/Reptilians/ - or perhabs the sphere-builders.
Don't misunderstand me, though, I love Enterprise season 3.
Thanks for posting that list. I'm actually in the process of rewatching TNG for the n-th time (although for the first time in English instead of my native German), but reading about those episodes is still great.
Screw ICMP, I want to see ASCII Art Over ICBM!
There are probably far more sheets of paper in the world that are US Letter size than any other size at all. And file folders to match.
Um, no, probably not. There are far, far more people using ISO A4 sized paper than US Letter, in countries that produce as much paper as the US. More if you want to believe Europeans lamenting their countries overabundance of bureaucracy...
How do Li-S batteries perform when they're heated inside a laptop? How how do Li-S batteries get when being recharged? Those are some of the questions one might ask. (I don't, though, or I'd have read the article - just giving some examples of issues related to heat.)
Do keep in mind that this test does not only involve MP3. I imagine the one I could (fairly) easily pick out as being somewhat off is the sample encoded by LAME or some other MP3 codec. The other schemes are more modern, and may be more difficult to distinguish from the source. Looking at previous results from that guy's listening tests, the other codecs routinely scored between 4 and 5 points - that is, between "Perceptible, but not annoying" and "Imperceptible". Lame and another MP3 codec (I think) didn't get grades quite that good.
I must be deaf, I just did the test on a the kraftwerk sample file, and it took me a lot of relistening to finally pick out 3 out of 6 encoded files (although the first one - whatever it was - was fairly easy). The other 3 sounded exactly like the reference sample to me. This is using Sennheiser HD500 headphones and an Audigy ZX2 sound card.
Try doing the test, you might be surprised, or conversely if you're not surprised, you might contribute valuable information to the project.
Flight yokes and pedals are best for flight simulators, and after that I'd then prefer an analogue pad over a keyboard/mouse anyway, a mouse isn't particularly authentic, which is half the point in simulation.
Yes, of course. You'd typically use pedals, a joystick of some sorts in the right hand - and the keyboard with the left hand, or vice versa if you're left-handed. Flight sims routinely have hundreds of commands, most keys even on the keyboard are massively overloaded using meta-keys like control and alt. There will never be a serious flight sim game for any console unless it ships with it's own controller offering keyboard-like amount of controls. (And yes, I realize that this has - sort of - been done before on the Xbox with that mech game.)
Driving simulators are best served with a wheel and pedals,
Yes, like I said, racing games aren't very well suited to the keyboard. I referred to thinker sims and tactical sims, not sports sims, ie car racing sims, I don't think there are any other unless you consider FIFA and NHL games as simulations.
For turn-based strategy it's fairly irrelevant.
I've just spent a weekend re-playing Civ3, and the many keyboard commands are greatly appreciated. It's way faster to hit I, or R to irrigate or build roads respectively than to click the buttons, even more so if you take into account functions like "build road to..." and so on. Of course the game would be playable without the keyboard, but it's more enjoyable with than without.
The same is true for Sim City and real-time strategy games, they're a lot more fun (to me, at least) with the keyboard to save extraneous "mousing".
and I'd certainly attribute many more game types to consoles than just 'racing and platform'.
Yes, so do I. The last comment was tongue-in-cheeck, sorry if that wasn't clear.
Whatever. I think it's great for real-time strategy, turn-based strategy, thinker simulation games like SimCity as well as strategic sims like flight sims, role playing games and on and on. It's not much of a use as a primary or only control in any of these, but it's a great complement to the mouse. Or, to mimic you: It's not very good for racing and platform games, but that's OK because there's got to be something consoles are good at.
Apart from the fact that it's not analogue, which is required or at least preferable in some situations, the keyboard's a really good controller. Which would explain why none of the keyboard alternatives being released and reviewed every other month never seem to make much of an impact outside, perhabs, of certain bleeding edge gamer circle with too much monthly allowance.
Actually, Germany does have a constitutional right to free speech, (Artikel 5 Grundgesetzbuch, the constition mandated in 1949 by the Western German government and the allied occupying forces) - it's just that Germany also has an article in the constitition dealing with getting rid of the remainder of the Nazis, obviously an important thing especially in 1949. What you're saying is basically right, anyway.
Thank god it's rugged. Wouldn't want to ship up a new one if one of those thoughtless astronauts drops his iPaq off a table or something, now would you? ;)
My apologies, the original post said "look at the fact that it is just a Neverwinter Nights Star Wars Mod". I disagreed, he re-stated his claim, and you backed him up (or so it seemed to me).
I've played through both. One is a classic AD&D role-playing game heavily focused on multiplayer gaming, set in the Forgotten Realms. The other is a strictly single-player action/adventure RPG. If KOTOR is a NWN mod, then nearly all FPS games are simply mods of Wolf3d, Doom (which could then actually be considered a Wolf3d mod), Quake and the original Unreal. If that's your definition of mod, so be it.
I did some research on the topic, and among other things I found was the Wikipedia article/stub on EULAs, claiming: "Assuming that publishers follow the correct procedures (such as giving the user the right to return the software for a refund), EULA licenses are generally enforceable in the United States. See ProCD v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996)."
So there. IANAL, obviously, so I can't really interpret that, and neither would I be able to properly interpret the legal requirements for a binding contract, as you suggested. Again, there might be the question of interpreting the law the way you'd like it to be or the way it has been interpreted for a long time.
You can open some of the resources of (the first Java app that comes to my mind:) Borland Together with any fucking ZIP program, therefore Borland Together is just a derivate of Winzip. QED. Jesus. I bet both use linked lists as an internal data structure, too - amazing!
EULAs are valid, IF you agree to them before the sale is finalized.
(I assume that means "if, and only if".)
Got any references to back up that claim? As far as I know, the legal bindingness of EULAs has been argued over for some time, but there has not been any meaningful result to those discussions. Most people (at least here on Slashdot) would certainly like EULAs to be invalid, but that doesn't make it true.
What specs are that? The e800 runs 480x640. The e400, released at the same time and similar in design, runs the standard 240x360.