Or possibly because of EyeTV, which actually does more than this shitty Apple TV. I don't get why they didn't just include a TV card for recording (here in Germany, Apple TV with DVB-T would *rule*). The way it is now, it's just a wireless streamer - so I'll stay with my rewritables and DVB-T instead of spending 200+ bucks on a product which doesn't make anything easier for me.
People mod this funny, and I agree it is, but even more than that it's insightful.
I indeed hope that this inspired a bunch of the right people. I know it inspired me. If we do more stuff than this, it might get the message to the sheeple, and it will be a heeluva good time.
Yay. Gotta look into Second Life. Seems as if there's a target which is even easier to exploit than the stuff Microsoft built...
Remember, we must have made the press often enough before they are finished redesigning everything, this time with security in mind. After all, SL already had its impressive golden ring worm.
I have switched from PCs with Windows and Linux to a Powerbook two years ago. I can't tell you why "everyone" is "excited", but I can tell you why *my* next home machine will be a Mac:
* I can ssh into my Linux and FreeBSD boxen and use Apple's X11 to seamlessly work with those (in OSX 10.3 use ssh -CX, in 10.4 better use ssh -CY). * Via VirtualPC (or Parallels for those with Intel Macs), I can use the very few Windows apps I need and test my stuff in IE. * Considering the former two points, I can use Linux apps, Windows apps and Macintosh apps all at the same time on the same screen, with good performance, and without ever having to reboot to change environments. * You have a complete set of your *nix toolset, so that you can scp, grep, tail, sed, rsync, whois... all you want.
As for your complaint that the config files aren't 'where they belong', I think this is intentional so that you don't go and edit lots of stuff and expect the machine to do the same as your Linux box would. It IS a different animal after all, and as long as cron works as well as it does (for my backup), I'll gladly leave the server stuff to my real BSD boxen (read: I haven't found anything I want to do with the Powerbook I'd need to edit config files for).
OSX is far from perfect, but gives me a good mix of having the most things I need available while letting me conveniently access everything else. So when you're like me and use your fair share of Mac apps, you get the best of all three worlds.
Actually I was genuinely amazed by the moderation of your post, especially if you consider that the/. user stereotype is that of the eternal virgin living in his parents' basement. My karma was already at 50 when it was still numeric. Your UID is small enough that I know you remember that time.;)
Then again, we both got two moderations, I got 2 funny, you got 2 insightful, the rest is from your modifiers I suppose...
(sometimes, winning karma means sleeping on the couch. . . ) *ggg* You see, my wife doesn't speak English. No, I won't swap.;)
So, your wife doesn't cajole you into dissing other women? ("gawd she's fat." "why, yes, honey, I agree completely!") No, she doesn't. Yet. Luckily she can't read your comment and get ideas from it.;)
Go talk to a rabid "knife-makes-you-run-faster" CounterStrike player and ask him about the importance of latency.
You say that knife thing as if it were a sign of a hardcore gamer, but it definitely isn't. Actually the gain in speed is clearly visible even to someone who plays CS for the first time, and one of the first questions you'll read from a new player will be "how do you run so fast?". (Mischevious players of course immediately tell them and collect some free headshots while the newbie is occupied with changing from knife to... handgun. Some find out about redefining keyboard shortcuts and scripting, others stop running with the knife. *g*)
As for latency, I agree with you that hardcore gamers always talk about latency while I have never felt it made much of a difference (as long as your latency isn't twice as high as everyone else's and below, say, 70 ms).
I guess that's why I hear German people say bullshit and fuck so often.. It was quite disturbing the first time, especially with the force they are spoken with! This is more of a cultural than a linguistic difference - swearing isn't as big a taboo as it is in the states. Therefore Germans just keep their natural swearing habit and use the English equivalents of their German swearwords. If you wonder about Germans saying bullshit and fuck a lot, you should listen to them in informal situations.;)
Personally, I find the fake friendlyness of many Americans, like asking "how are you" without expecting an answer, shallow and sometimes even offensive, but I'm aware that this is a matter of personal taste and cultural background. I am pretty straightforward, and find it tiresome to deal with people who are unable to express disagreement without feeling guilty or justifying themselves. Here in Germany, if someone asks "how are you", he wants to know, and if he thinks I'm an asshole, he will tell me. I like it this way.
AC telling me he thinks I'm an asshole in 3... 2... 1...
What's also odd is the pronunciation of 'V' as 'W' (you'd expect german people to say W as V not the other way around) Maybe I'd have an explanation if I understood your statement.;) Do you mean that when spelling out words people say W when it should be V or do you mean that they mispronounce the letter V (say as in 'vest' pronounced as 'west')? I've heard the former a lot, but that's because Germans tend to be slightly obsessed with "doubleyou" - they like to say it a lot.;)
The moderator and everybody in the Yahoo Group is a similarly divorced obese 40-ish woman, and they write stupid shit like "litle Buster just LUVS it when i scrtahc his tumy." (SIC) Someone else replies "LOL".Holy cow. You owe my boss a keyboard.
Note to self: Don't drink coffee when reading Slashdot at work.
Parent got it right, it's indeed "Handy" here in Germany. Many Germans mistakenly use "handy" instead of "mobile" when talking to native English speakers.
Then again, if it really is funny because it's a reference to a handjob, I'd like to know.;) Actually telling people this will help them avoiding saying "handy" when they mean "mobile".
You see, I'm getting modded flamebait, but I was serious. What kind of input devices are there which can be used with emulators and are usable by someone with arthritis? My family is plagued with it, and I can expect to get there in about ten years, too. I tried The Google, but didn't come up with anything useful.
I'm German, so I can offer some informed comment. Actually, it's a bit different - according to German law you can be held resposible for the stuff you link to. This sounds reasonable until you look at the implementation of that idea. Basically, if you link to a site which has remotely questionable stuff even *elsewhere* (i.e. not on the page you're linking to), you can be into trouble. Even ads on the other side can get you into trouble, e.g. if there's explicit porn ads (which must not be shown to minors), you can get sued.
Effectively you are fully responsible for *everything on the whole site* you link to which lead to the epidemic outbreak of people including disclaimers on their sites which basically say "I dissociate from anything I link to", because there has been a rule of a German court that said you need to do so to avoid prosecution. I always found that hilarious because why would I be linking to ANYTHING then? (As for the epidemic, it's still going on. Google for "Urteil vom 12. Mai 1998" (the day of said stupid court rule), it still is at 1.070.000 results.)
FWIW, the disclaimers actually make things worse for you if you use them because if you get sued, the disclaimer is regarded as a sign you were fully aware of the legal situation. And you say the American legal system is weird. Well, ours is fucked as well. Don't get me talking about the legal bullshit concerning domain names.
Have you ever heard of self-policing real live communities? They died out with the advent of the written law, in the middle ages.
No, they didn't. Actually they make quite a comeback in the low-income quarters of most Western cities. I don't think for example you're going to shout racist paroles in a French banlieue for very long, or try to molest a woman where I grew up. Gangs are another instrument of self-policing. Groups of patrolling Nazis, as in the eastern part of Germany, are another.
Mind you, this self-policy doesn't necessarily correspond with this 'written law' thing you talk of, but it does exist, and it's growing *fast*. Actually I'm under the impression that written law is losing force as the poor get poorer, which will lead to quite some problems in the future when the number of people who feel as the big losers of modern society grows big enough and people are poor enough to not care any more.
To not make this completely off-topic - when I went online around 12 years ago, most people online were rather wealthy and tech-savvy, and the net was a *very* different place. Many of today's problems (Eternal September, anyone?) are caused by what/.ers tend to call the 'unwashed masses', so what we're seeing in South Korea also is the result of a general social tendence slopping over into the online world.
And then what? Then the 'gibberish' will come from Wikipedia, Gutenberg project or any site the spammer ran through a grammar checker himself. The script to accomplish this would be like
* Google for some common term, wget the result sites * run text from those sites through grammar checker * if grammar checker does not show any errors (yes, those sites exist), append text to spam mails
This can be made virtually unbeatable by having a dictionary of search terms and not using the first x number of results but some random selection.
So, grammar checks do nothing. In the long run, any content check can be fooled.
I've been getting a lot of spam lately where the text message is encapsulated in an image, and there doesn't seem to be an easy way around this.
But yes, of course there is. Flag all email containing inline images as spam. I can whitelist the about 10 domains which are legitimately using inline images (clueless clients with logos in their sigs and newsletters I signed up for (VMware etc)) in about one minute.
I am not seeing the 'surge' TFA talks about. Then again I've also noticed that Bayes is becoming less useful - but that was easy to foretell. Beating it by appending random text from the web is just too obvious a strategy to anyone with half a brain.
[ ] Imagine a beowulf cluster of Natalie Portman (hot grits, petrified) [ ] I for one welcome our system-destroying overlords! [ ] In SOVIET RUSSIA, Vista bugfixes YOU!! [ ] Developers Developers Developers [ ] PROFIT!!! [x] CowboyNeal can test Vista for me
Chris, your reply is well appreciated. Sorry I'm that late.
I meant 'computer applications' as in 'uses for computers', not as in 'programs'. Computer entertainment software is a tiny subset of what you can do with computers and I think you assign too much meaning to computer-based entertainment. Seeing your CV, I can let you get away with it.;)
I disagree that games are 100% of computer entertainment. If I let my iTunes run with a nice visual plug-in in the background when some friends visit, it definitely is computer entertainment even though it's not a game. I could think of many others.
Disagreeing with you on this doesn't mean that you don't have a point, however. I find the idea of a simulator like the one you're building very interesting indeed, and having been a role-player, your stance on storytelling really appeals to me. I don't think however, that there are many people who are interesting in modeling such worlds, storylines or whatever you tell them.
You see, I've been playing the legendary 'Elite' for years, and combined with your ideas it would have been a real killer. With the advent of online playing, I am just not sure that your ideas can gain much momentum in gaming - real persons are always more interesting than anything generated by an AI, no matter how sophisticated it is. Plus, they act surprisingly, have hidden agendas, and can be met IRL. If I could choose between Elite Online and Elite Storytron Edition, my choice would be clear.
Maybe I just misunderstand your intention. Maybe you just want to help people to build interesting, dynamic game worlds without learning anything about programming. Then again, I'm not sure if this wouldn't be a bit of a waste of a great technological idea.
A friend of mine will kill me if I end this comment without asking you this: What do you think of developments like the Wii, which tries to add depth to gaming by inventing new ways of interacting with games? Do you think this is a good idea or do you think that a change in gaming can't be established by changing the input methods alone?
You are correct, they are counted as two separate places - but this also counts tax-wise so that you can reduce your taxes by declaring your costs for that 'extra place'. There is a standard amount for this you can declare without *any* proof, which amounts to much more than those 5,66 or whatever you'll have to pay to the GEZ.
Did I mention that the German tax system is among the craziest things I ever encountered? We bought a house in late 2005, partially for own use, partially for renting. There is NO CHANCE of EVER being able to fill out all necessary tax forms for this. Even the tax office has no idea about it, and they are by law obliged to help you fill out what's necessary. What a pity I'm no tax consultant, they rake in the cash big time.
Okay, candy is a tiny subset of food. And cartoons are a tiny subset of video, and comic books are a tiny subset of literature, and computer games are a tiny subset of-- what? That thing doesn't exist yet, but when it does, it's got to be, by analogy, much bigger than computer games.
Computer games are a tiny subset of computer applications. What was his point again?
He's into something, though, with his ideas in general. I play games for about 30 years now and am still looking for that kind of game he's talking about.
The point he'll fail at is that there is no practical balance between the capabilities of his architecture and the usability for non-programmers. You can make something like this powerful or easy to use. But I'll sure as hell take a closer look at his stuff. Getting involved might prove interesting, even if it doesn't pan out in the end.
I'm genuinely impressed - if you can do *that*, you can also lick your own balls. w00t!
As a non-native speaker however, I wondered about Cockface. I thought Goatse was the way to go on Slashdot. (And I didn't know there was an animated Goatse, too.)
(If I hadn't been posting, I'd mod you funny, as I literally LOLd.;) )
Slashdot Mirror
Or possibly because of EyeTV, which actually does more than this shitty Apple TV. I don't get why they didn't just include a TV card for recording (here in Germany, Apple TV with DVB-T would *rule*). The way it is now, it's just a wireless streamer - so I'll stay with my rewritables and DVB-T instead of spending 200+ bucks on a product which doesn't make anything easier for me.
People mod this funny, and I agree it is, but even more than that it's insightful.
I indeed hope that this inspired a bunch of the right people. I know it inspired me. If we do more stuff than this, it might get the message to the sheeple, and it will be a heeluva good time.
Yay. Gotta look into Second Life. Seems as if there's a target which is even easier to exploit than the stuff Microsoft built...
Remember, we must have made the press often enough before they are finished redesigning everything, this time with security in mind. After all, SL already had its impressive golden ring worm.
I have switched from PCs with Windows and Linux to a Powerbook two years ago. I can't tell you why "everyone" is "excited", but I can tell you why *my* next home machine will be a Mac:
* I can ssh into my Linux and FreeBSD boxen and use Apple's X11 to seamlessly work with those (in OSX 10.3 use ssh -CX, in 10.4 better use ssh -CY).
* Via VirtualPC (or Parallels for those with Intel Macs), I can use the very few Windows apps I need and test my stuff in IE.
* Considering the former two points, I can use Linux apps, Windows apps and Macintosh apps all at the same time on the same screen, with good performance, and without ever having to reboot to change environments.
* You have a complete set of your *nix toolset, so that you can scp, grep, tail, sed, rsync, whois... all you want.
As for your complaint that the config files aren't 'where they belong', I think this is intentional so that you don't go and edit lots of stuff and expect the machine to do the same as your Linux box would. It IS a different animal after all, and as long as cron works as well as it does (for my backup), I'll gladly leave the server stuff to my real BSD boxen (read: I haven't found anything I want to do with the Powerbook I'd need to edit config files for).
OSX is far from perfect, but gives me a good mix of having the most things I need available while letting me conveniently access everything else. So when you're like me and use your fair share of Mac apps, you get the best of all three worlds.
Then again, we both got two moderations, I got 2 funny, you got 2 insightful, the rest is from your modifiers I suppose... (sometimes, winning karma means sleeping on the couch. . . ) *ggg* You see, my wife doesn't speak English. No, I won't swap.
You see, I'm married. I don't have ANY opinion on women. ESPECIALLY other women.
(Dito.)
And only on /. can this be modded +3, Insightful.
You say that knife thing as if it were a sign of a hardcore gamer, but it definitely isn't. Actually the gain in speed is clearly visible even to someone who plays CS for the first time, and one of the first questions you'll read from a new player will be "how do you run so fast?". (Mischevious players of course immediately tell them and collect some free headshots while the newbie is occupied with changing from knife to... handgun. Some find out about redefining keyboard shortcuts and scripting, others stop running with the knife. *g*)
As for latency, I agree with you that hardcore gamers always talk about latency while I have never felt it made much of a difference (as long as your latency isn't twice as high as everyone else's and below, say, 70 ms).
You know /. is dying if it takes the AC almost 32 hours to catch this troll invitation.
Personally, I find the fake friendlyness of many Americans, like asking "how are you" without expecting an answer, shallow and sometimes even offensive, but I'm aware that this is a matter of personal taste and cultural background. I am pretty straightforward, and find it tiresome to deal with people who are unable to express disagreement without feeling guilty or justifying themselves. Here in Germany, if someone asks "how are you", he wants to know, and if he thinks I'm an asshole, he will tell me. I like it this way.
AC telling me he thinks I'm an asshole in 3... 2... 1...
The moderator and everybody in the Yahoo Group is a similarly divorced obese 40-ish woman, and they write stupid shit like "litle Buster just LUVS it when i scrtahc his tumy." (SIC) Someone else replies "LOL".Holy cow. You owe my boss a keyboard.
Note to self: Don't drink coffee when reading Slashdot at work.
Parent got it right, it's indeed "Handy" here in Germany. Many Germans mistakenly use "handy" instead of "mobile" when talking to native English speakers.
;) Actually telling people this will help them avoiding saying "handy" when they mean "mobile".
Then again, if it really is funny because it's a reference to a handjob, I'd like to know.
You see, I'm getting modded flamebait, but I was serious. What kind of input devices are there which can be used with emulators and are usable by someone with arthritis? My family is plagued with it, and I can expect to get there in about ten years, too. I tried The Google, but didn't come up with anything useful.
...and that input device would be what, Mr Smartypants?
I'm German, so I can offer some informed comment. Actually, it's a bit different - according to German law you can be held resposible for the stuff you link to. This sounds reasonable until you look at the implementation of that idea. Basically, if you link to a site which has remotely questionable stuff even *elsewhere* (i.e. not on the page you're linking to), you can be into trouble. Even ads on the other side can get you into trouble, e.g. if there's explicit porn ads (which must not be shown to minors), you can get sued.
Effectively you are fully responsible for *everything on the whole site* you link to which lead to the epidemic outbreak of people including disclaimers on their sites which basically say "I dissociate from anything I link to", because there has been a rule of a German court that said you need to do so to avoid prosecution. I always found that hilarious because why would I be linking to ANYTHING then? (As for the epidemic, it's still going on. Google for "Urteil vom 12. Mai 1998" (the day of said stupid court rule), it still is at 1.070.000 results.)
FWIW, the disclaimers actually make things worse for you if you use them because if you get sued, the disclaimer is regarded as a sign you were fully aware of the legal situation. And you say the American legal system is weird. Well, ours is fucked as well. Don't get me talking about the legal bullshit concerning domain names.
No, they didn't. Actually they make quite a comeback in the low-income quarters of most Western cities. I don't think for example you're going to shout racist paroles in a French banlieue for very long, or try to molest a woman where I grew up. Gangs are another instrument of self-policing. Groups of patrolling Nazis, as in the eastern part of Germany, are another.
Mind you, this self-policy doesn't necessarily correspond with this 'written law' thing you talk of, but it does exist, and it's growing *fast*. Actually I'm under the impression that written law is losing force as the poor get poorer, which will lead to quite some problems in the future when the number of people who feel as the big losers of modern society grows big enough and people are poor enough to not care any more.
To not make this completely off-topic - when I went online around 12 years ago, most people online were rather wealthy and tech-savvy, and the net was a *very* different place. Many of today's problems (Eternal September, anyone?) are caused by what
And then what? Then the 'gibberish' will come from Wikipedia, Gutenberg project or any site the spammer ran through a grammar checker himself. The script to accomplish this would be like
* Google for some common term, wget the result sites
* run text from those sites through grammar checker
* if grammar checker does not show any errors (yes, those sites exist), append text to spam mails
This can be made virtually unbeatable by having a dictionary of search terms and not using the first x number of results but some random selection.
So, grammar checks do nothing. In the long run, any content check can be fooled.
But yes, of course there is. Flag all email containing inline images as spam. I can whitelist the about 10 domains which are legitimately using inline images (clueless clients with logos in their sigs and newsletters I signed up for (VMware etc)) in about one minute.
I am not seeing the 'surge' TFA talks about. Then again I've also noticed that Bayes is becoming less useful - but that was easy to foretell. Beating it by appending random text from the web is just too obvious a strategy to anyone with half a brain.
[ ] Imagine a beowulf cluster of Natalie Portman (hot grits, petrified)
[ ] I for one welcome our system-destroying overlords!
[ ] In SOVIET RUSSIA, Vista bugfixes YOU!!
[ ] Developers Developers Developers
[ ] PROFIT!!!
[x] CowboyNeal can test Vista for me
Chris, your reply is well appreciated. Sorry I'm that late.
;)
I meant 'computer applications' as in 'uses for computers', not as in 'programs'. Computer entertainment software is a tiny subset of what you can do with computers and I think you assign too much meaning to computer-based entertainment. Seeing your CV, I can let you get away with it.
I disagree that games are 100% of computer entertainment. If I let my iTunes run with a nice visual plug-in in the background when some friends visit, it definitely is computer entertainment even though it's not a game. I could think of many others.
Disagreeing with you on this doesn't mean that you don't have a point, however. I find the idea of a simulator like the one you're building very interesting indeed, and having been a role-player, your stance on storytelling really appeals to me. I don't think however, that there are many people who are interesting in modeling such worlds, storylines or whatever you tell them.
You see, I've been playing the legendary 'Elite' for years, and combined with your ideas it would have been a real killer. With the advent of online playing, I am just not sure that your ideas can gain much momentum in gaming - real persons are always more interesting than anything generated by an AI, no matter how sophisticated it is. Plus, they act surprisingly, have hidden agendas, and can be met IRL. If I could choose between Elite Online and Elite Storytron Edition, my choice would be clear.
Maybe I just misunderstand your intention. Maybe you just want to help people to build interesting, dynamic game worlds without learning anything about programming. Then again, I'm not sure if this wouldn't be a bit of a waste of a great technological idea.
A friend of mine will kill me if I end this comment without asking you this: What do you think of developments like the Wii, which tries to add depth to gaming by inventing new ways of interacting with games? Do you think this is a good idea or do you think that a change in gaming can't be established by changing the input methods alone?
You are correct, they are counted as two separate places - but this also counts tax-wise so that you can reduce your taxes by declaring your costs for that 'extra place'. There is a standard amount for this you can declare without *any* proof, which amounts to much more than those 5,66 or whatever you'll have to pay to the GEZ.
Did I mention that the German tax system is among the craziest things I ever encountered? We bought a house in late 2005, partially for own use, partially for renting. There is NO CHANCE of EVER being able to fill out all necessary tax forms for this. Even the tax office has no idea about it, and they are by law obliged to help you fill out what's necessary. What a pity I'm no tax consultant, they rake in the cash big time.
Computer games are a tiny subset of computer applications. What was his point again?
He's into something, though, with his ideas in general. I play games for about 30 years now and am still looking for that kind of game he's talking about.
The point he'll fail at is that there is no practical balance between the capabilities of his architecture and the usability for non-programmers. You can make something like this powerful or easy to use. But I'll sure as hell take a closer look at his stuff. Getting involved might prove interesting, even if it doesn't pan out in the end.
Verdammte Scheiße, und ich dachte, ich müßte nur länger auf die Pointe warten...
I'm genuinely impressed - if you can do *that*, you can also lick your own balls. w00t!
;) )
As a non-native speaker however, I wondered about Cockface. I thought Goatse was the way to go on Slashdot. (And I didn't know there was an animated Goatse, too.)
(If I hadn't been posting, I'd mod you funny, as I literally LOLd.