In a not-so-surprising move the ESRB affirmed it's position on not giving a damn about the people or companies involved. The ESRB went onto say that we really don't care what you do as long you don't bother us and continue to fund our worthless existence.
The ESRB representative declined to provide his identity on the grounds that he really didn't want to be bothered with wasting his breathe. He went on to further shout obscenities and shake his bum at those attempting to pose questions regarding the recent actions by the ESRB.
In a follow-up interview they clarified their position and noted that the ESRB had never been in a position in which it listened to consumers. A representative apologized for the confusion and stated the company had never actually done anything to warrant such a view. In a prepared statement release early today, "The ESRB does not believe it has created any such illusions by statement, action or even accidental means whereby the consumer would would be in a position to believe we operate in ANY of their interests."
See earlier post regarding gold actually having real value and being a trade good in and of itself. ie, real world purpose.
so bitcoins have value because someone says they do. I'm going to make ecoins which is very similar to bitcoins, but quite completely different. There are a limited number of ecoins in existance too and that is why they have value.
My neighbor ted has digicoins for sale if you want to get in on his system. It's fairly similar to both bitcoins and ecoins, but it has an entirely different name. I think my cousin is going to make the euro-digibitcoin soon which aims to replace all the current market ecoins.
With all of these standards it's a bit tough to choose, but since they all have real honest to goodness value it's fairly safe to put your money into it. Hell, in your spare time you can generate some of the 12 billion coins that will be available on the market.
This is not the gold rush and it's silly to generate currency in your spare time. A real standard would have to be gold backed to keep any honest to goodness credit.
The value of the system is the possible anonymous nature of the trade. However, being as how there is nothing that stops me from using cash or making transactions anyway I'm not worried. This system appeals to those who need to make untraceable transactions.
Gold itself actually has a real value. It's worth is determined by more then magic. It can be used in elements other then currency exchange. (Jewelry, crafting, electronics and generally anything that needs to avoid corrosion) It is a trade good in and of itself at the end of the day.
The pdf linked in the document is a snippet for what looks like a struct for the elf API interface. This specification is open and judging by the code they are using it exactly as intended.
I'm going to guess the majority of their findings are specifically computer generated. They may have known first hand what the code was or even where it came from. However, if pressed to say how they discovered these violations I'm quite sure they would fall back on "the program made the mistake your honor." This would generate a plausible stance when the foundation began to crumble.
Going further on a limb I'm also guessing this is why they would never release any of the alleged violations. In days a website similar to groklaw would be up in for everyone to review, identify and mark the source of the "violation." ie, this is a struct for the elf library specification or this is a header of a BSD library. (Remember that BSD ancestry is likely still there in large chunks)
All of this happening in the court room and they had to know there were big holes in the allegations. Even a cursory glance reveals that some of the crap submitted is just that. This was a court room poker face with a huge bluff that many parties would just settle. I suppose it worked because too many people rolled over and handed out free cash.
A base value for bitcoins is assumed to be the energy used to create it. The system itself appears to be far more profitable when operating at am exchange entity or trader. ie, the ability to control the effective value of the coin in question. Which lends the whole process to feeling more like a pyramid scheme than anything else. Now, if you wanted a lossy system that was anonymous and had morally bankrupt exchange locations it would be useful anywhere an anonymous transaction is a must.
On the flip side, because wealth is always being generated for free, a purpose built rig which excels at generating coins more efficiently would essentially be a living cash machine. This would in effect mean that the coin itself has no actual value. It's worthless because it cannot be returned to the previous state. This is somewhat important to me when a system is based on the trade of goods.
In terms of actual exchange it introduces to much latency to ensure the transaction is actually valid. In terms of instant gratification the whole thing begins to break down.
The good news is that anybody is certainly free to use it. Unfortunately, because anyone can print money (even small amounts) I'm not going to be giving up any of my items today.
Well being as how they publicly admit to do everything awful in the universe to make a buck and stay afloat I'm not surprised.
To the guys credit he was pretty much right on. The people who would read the article and actually worry are the ones they were not targeting. Basically, any informed viewer of their applications they knew they were already going to make less on.
He was also a bit prophetic and wagered that the scum bugs would be pushed out of the business as it legitimized. It's a bit like a wave in that the gray area guys can occasionally rise up as they follow the tide of rising popularity.
Still, what he said made me understand that nothing good come from associating with them. I made sure never to use another zynga game again. To be on the safe side I'll probably avoid google's variants as well.
I'm afraid they will run into issues if they do. There are already storage providers that will determine what data you are accessing frequently and move said data chunk to the faster storage area. Conversely it will move less frequently accessed data to the slower and cheaper bulk disks.
It's a nifty optimization/shuffle technique that allows you to mix ssd, sas and sata disks for their various needs. The best part is it is rather auto-magic.
We used to do something similar in a very manual process by keeping the most frequently access oracle data on the leading edge of the disk platters.
The problem with all of these approaches is the data may not be needed now. Hell, I would certainly say that 90% of the data I store is useless. Except when they want to roll back to a certain period in the archive's life or we lose a chunk of data. The other half of the time is just legal requirements that necessitates storing EVERYTHING.
At least it will be a very pretty ending when the nuclear war begins.
These images look very similar to what I had seen last night. The colors bouncing off of the clouds lit up the sky quite well. In fact, if no one replies in the next few minutes I can probably assume that was the end of humanity.
In the end I suppose it's time to do what I always wanted to do. You know, the things we won't do because of societies "rules." However, now that society no longer exists I can finally bathe myself in chocolate sauce, whip cream, nuts and ride my bike around town screaming who has a banana!
Even being the end of the world it's shaping up to be a great day.
At a point a seasoned project should have something a bit better then one page scrolls for eternity. Maybe I want to quickly find the change logs or look at the latest screen shots?
Just because something is better then minimalistic does not mean the project has no engineering merit. It's not a bias slider that prevents any meaningful development.
In the volunteer aspect it is more of a passion based decision than an recruitment oriented process. My advice is find something you both care about and also feel the site in question needs improvement. Next, simply hop on the forums or news feed and offer your services. It doesn't necessarily hurt to have some material already developed to get the discussion flowing.
Higher profile is probably going to be a bit more difficult so you may not want to go looking for the top 10 applications of all time. Those circles (even of volunteers) tend to be more work to edge your way into responsibility. Still, my experience has been very positive with contributions and generally working with a project I do not own. I had a good deal of fun one weekend with a BitPim developer banging out support for my phone.
If you need explicit areas where your talents could probably be used I highly recommend seeing if you can get the guys over at http://www.memtest.org/ to let you revamp their page. The program is nice, but the web page is atrocious.
Does anyone else have any suggestions for who needs a make over? (That could be a reality series television show!)
I offered to come in and be a cook for a day. I pretty much felt their home menu was terrible and the chili was awful. Instead, I got a lecture on how chili will vary with the weather and whatnot. (Things I already knew about food, but regardless I still make a pretty good batch of chili.)
On the plus side they didn't really last very long. Turns out you can only serve something people don't like for so long.
There were no supplies on the vessel and the pod was purposely sent off course. This was a very thoroughly planned tactical decision in order to acquire the funds for the supplies via the insurance payoff.
We would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids and their dog!
There are a few important differences between the two systems.
Adam's design was not tethered and has a finite amount of power to work with. This meant he had to rely on a few mechanical components. I think overall his gear appeared to be quite a bit heavier.
The kid's design is not an efficient system and has a relatively infinite power source. It gets to be lighter and a bit more lossy in terms of suction. This is how he is able to scale brick walls with what appears to be a few hoses and cups.
However, I think if they adopted some of the simpler aspects of the kids machine it would lighten the weight on the Adam crawler.
The problem TFA describes and with similar discussions herein is not limited to just video games. A long time ago some friends would gather around to play table top rpgs. We tried various systems and nearly all of them have the same issue.
At a certain level (or points) the game just goes to stupid. It was very easy to break GURPS in a supers campaign. Generally, the only way to control a rampant and degradation of the game was to play it fairly mildly.
Now, sometimes it is just fun to head straight for stupid and see what kind of fun you can have.
Scribblenauts actually did fairly well with a free form diverse tool of summon anything.
In fact, it was just too much fun to randomly see what I could do. ie, summon a vampire, a priest and a vampire hunter to watch them duke it out. (Seriously, you can do that!)
The down side is there really isn't much more to do then solve their word puzzles. I'm sure in a more complex game the free form behavior of the ability would break any attempt at constructed story telling.
If you can solve the problem of allowing god like powers and keeping semi-structured storyline in place you probably should start working on a product now.
It was a late night with several issues cropping up during a data center migration. I'm sure there are other mistakes in my writing today, but it's a bit too late to correct those errors now.
I actually thought it was a bit funny when I realized the mistake.
You're mini10 actually has a terribly high and consistent error rate on the IDE channel.
In Windows XP this will eventually force the disk access down to PIO Mode 4.
This is a known issue with the chipset and the only fix is to occasionally reset the disk to UDMA.
I don't care what the desktop suffers go through. I have their servers and I hate them. They finally patched the oddest behavior on the M610 after swearing it wasn't really a problem. We could consistently reboot the hosts and force an error state on the motherboard.
I've had good luck with the Amazon basic cables and fiber optic cables. Granted I am not moving the stuff around enough to test the stability over long term use, but the quality seems fair enough to me.
However, I would suggest holding off a few years on your purchase because HDBaseT is going to take over the market.
I'm rather divided on this particular bit of news.
I'm invested in the HDMI technology already and I don't really want to replace everything. With the HDMI 1.4 spec they will address most of the current issues with the technology and provide backward compatibility with the existing devices on the market. HDMI 1.3 kinda sucks if you have an AV receiver and 5.1 setup. (Long story short video processor creates delay and without an auto-sync setup there will be issues with video and audio). This is all made possible because of the requirement for a protected path and downgraded audio on analog ports!
In theory HDMI 1.4 provides a built in protected return audio path, networking, power and a kitchen sink. Regardless, it is rather unimportant to me at this juncture because I doubt I will be upgrading my television and receiver in the near future.
The entire HDBaseT looks like they did mostly the same offerings but in an entirely new cable which has been around for ages. I get the feeling that actually plugging the cable into a switch won't do much good.
I'm going to assume that in the end they really just get around some royalties and introduce even further market fragmentation.
BusyBox with a custom kernel could probably have been pulled off in that time frame. As long you were quite aware of it already.
I find some of the more obscure and useful stuff is simply about finding it.
Plop is a nice busybox variant which has been design to boot and run entirely in ramdisk. I designed several rack burn utilities with plop so I could test on a closed network. The advantage of creating a single head and moving onto the next host with my usb stick was quite handy.
However, getting to that point and finding someone who had laid a good foundation was a bit time consuming.
Slashdot Mirror
In a not-so-surprising move the ESRB affirmed it's position on not giving a damn about the people or companies involved. The ESRB went onto say that we really don't care what you do as long you don't bother us and continue to fund our worthless existence.
The ESRB representative declined to provide his identity on the grounds that he really didn't want to be bothered with wasting his breathe. He went on to further shout obscenities and shake his bum at those attempting to pose questions regarding the recent actions by the ESRB.
In a follow-up interview they clarified their position and noted that the ESRB had never been in a position in which it listened to consumers. A representative apologized for the confusion and stated the company had never actually done anything to warrant such a view. In a prepared statement release early today, "The ESRB does not believe it has created any such illusions by statement, action or even accidental means whereby the consumer would would be in a position to believe we operate in ANY of their interests."
See earlier post regarding gold actually having real value and being a trade good in and of itself. ie, real world purpose.
so bitcoins have value because someone says they do. I'm going to make ecoins which is very similar to bitcoins, but quite completely different. There are a limited number of ecoins in existance too and that is why they have value.
My neighbor ted has digicoins for sale if you want to get in on his system. It's fairly similar to both bitcoins and ecoins, but it has an entirely different name. I think my cousin is going to make the euro-digibitcoin soon which aims to replace all the current market ecoins.
With all of these standards it's a bit tough to choose, but since they all have real honest to goodness value it's fairly safe to put your money into it. Hell, in your spare time you can generate some of the 12 billion coins that will be available on the market.
This is not the gold rush and it's silly to generate currency in your spare time. A real standard would have to be gold backed to keep any honest to goodness credit.
The value of the system is the possible anonymous nature of the trade. However, being as how there is nothing that stops me from using cash or making transactions anyway I'm not worried. This system appeals to those who need to make untraceable transactions.
Except gold has value.
I can exchange gold for currency and vice versa.
Gold itself actually has a real value. It's worth is determined by more then magic. It can be used in elements other then currency exchange. (Jewelry, crafting, electronics and generally anything that needs to avoid corrosion) It is a trade good in and of itself at the end of the day.
I would not say the same thing regarding ecoins.
The pdf linked in the document is a snippet for what looks like a struct for the elf API interface. This specification is open and judging by the code they are using it exactly as intended.
I'm going to guess the majority of their findings are specifically computer generated. They may have known first hand what the code was or even where it came from. However, if pressed to say how they discovered these violations I'm quite sure they would fall back on "the program made the mistake your honor." This would generate a plausible stance when the foundation began to crumble.
Going further on a limb I'm also guessing this is why they would never release any of the alleged violations. In days a website similar to groklaw would be up in for everyone to review, identify and mark the source of the "violation." ie, this is a struct for the elf library specification or this is a header of a BSD library. (Remember that BSD ancestry is likely still there in large chunks)
All of this happening in the court room and they had to know there were big holes in the allegations. Even a cursory glance reveals that some of the crap submitted is just that. This was a court room poker face with a huge bluff that many parties would just settle. I suppose it worked because too many people rolled over and handed out free cash.
A base value for bitcoins is assumed to be the energy used to create it. The system itself appears to be far more profitable when operating at am exchange entity or trader. ie, the ability to control the effective value of the coin in question. Which lends the whole process to feeling more like a pyramid scheme than anything else. Now, if you wanted a lossy system that was anonymous and had morally bankrupt exchange locations it would be useful anywhere an anonymous transaction is a must.
On the flip side, because wealth is always being generated for free, a purpose built rig which excels at generating coins more efficiently would essentially be a living cash machine. This would in effect mean that the coin itself has no actual value. It's worthless because it cannot be returned to the previous state. This is somewhat important to me when a system is based on the trade of goods.
In terms of actual exchange it introduces to much latency to ensure the transaction is actually valid. In terms of instant gratification the whole thing begins to break down.
The good news is that anybody is certainly free to use it. Unfortunately, because anyone can print money (even small amounts) I'm not going to be giving up any of my items today.
Well being as how they publicly admit to do everything awful in the universe to make a buck and stay afloat I'm not surprised.
To the guys credit he was pretty much right on. The people who would read the article and actually worry are the ones they were not targeting. Basically, any informed viewer of their applications they knew they were already going to make less on.
He was also a bit prophetic and wagered that the scum bugs would be pushed out of the business as it legitimized. It's a bit like a wave in that the gray area guys can occasionally rise up as they follow the tide of rising popularity.
Still, what he said made me understand that nothing good come from associating with them. I made sure never to use another zynga game again. To be on the safe side I'll probably avoid google's variants as well.
I'm afraid they will run into issues if they do. There are already storage providers that will determine what data you are accessing frequently and move said data chunk to the faster storage area. Conversely it will move less frequently accessed data to the slower and cheaper bulk disks.
It's a nifty optimization/shuffle technique that allows you to mix ssd, sas and sata disks for their various needs. The best part is it is rather auto-magic.
We used to do something similar in a very manual process by keeping the most frequently access oracle data on the leading edge of the disk platters.
The problem with all of these approaches is the data may not be needed now. Hell, I would certainly say that 90% of the data I store is useless. Except when they want to roll back to a certain period in the archive's life or we lose a chunk of data. The other half of the time is just legal requirements that necessitates storing EVERYTHING.
She's hot. I'm going to add her now and see if I can hit it.
Which is really funny because the specification calls for very specific codec usage.
It's not like DVB-T where the transport specification is clearly defined, but leaves the underlying codec plenty of room.
QAM and ATSC are very specific and rely strictly on mpeg-2.
At least it will be a very pretty ending when the nuclear war begins.
These images look very similar to what I had seen last night. The colors bouncing off of the clouds lit up the sky quite well. In fact, if no one replies in the next few minutes I can probably assume that was the end of humanity.
In the end I suppose it's time to do what I always wanted to do. You know, the things we won't do because of societies "rules." However, now that society no longer exists I can finally bathe myself in chocolate sauce, whip cream, nuts and ride my bike around town screaming who has a banana!
Even being the end of the world it's shaping up to be a great day.
At a point a seasoned project should have something a bit better then one page scrolls for eternity. Maybe I want to quickly find the change logs or look at the latest screen shots?
Just because something is better then minimalistic does not mean the project has no engineering merit. It's not a bias slider that prevents any meaningful development.
In the volunteer aspect it is more of a passion based decision than an recruitment oriented process. My advice is find something you both care about and also feel the site in question needs improvement. Next, simply hop on the forums or news feed and offer your services. It doesn't necessarily hurt to have some material already developed to get the discussion flowing.
Higher profile is probably going to be a bit more difficult so you may not want to go looking for the top 10 applications of all time. Those circles (even of volunteers) tend to be more work to edge your way into responsibility. Still, my experience has been very positive with contributions and generally working with a project I do not own. I had a good deal of fun one weekend with a BitPim developer banging out support for my phone.
If you need explicit areas where your talents could probably be used I highly recommend seeing if you can get the guys over at http://www.memtest.org/ to let you revamp their page. The program is nice, but the web page is atrocious.
Does anyone else have any suggestions for who needs a make over? (That could be a reality series television show!)
Well, given that such a low ID would have been given out a number of years ago now........
People do get older, you know.
No they don't. PooFace!
Don't try to fix it yourself at a restaurant.
I offered to come in and be a cook for a day. I pretty much felt their home menu was terrible and the chili was awful. Instead, I got a lecture on how chili will vary with the weather and whatnot. (Things I already knew about food, but regardless I still make a pretty good batch of chili.)
On the plus side they didn't really last very long. Turns out you can only serve something people don't like for so long.
Are you sure? AFAIK no bank robber has ever been caught when escaping on a duck.
You make a good point there.
Quick, someone get me the fastest duck in town! I've got a full proof plan to get rich.
Actually,
Everything is going completely as planned.
There were no supplies on the vessel and the pod was purposely sent off course. This was a very thoroughly planned tactical decision in order to acquire the funds for the supplies via the insurance payoff.
We would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids and their dog!
There are a few important differences between the two systems.
Adam's design was not tethered and has a finite amount of power to work with. This meant he had to rely on a few mechanical components. I think overall his gear appeared to be quite a bit heavier.
The kid's design is not an efficient system and has a relatively infinite power source. It gets to be lighter and a bit more lossy in terms of suction. This is how he is able to scale brick walls with what appears to be a few hoses and cups.
However, I think if they adopted some of the simpler aspects of the kids machine it would lighten the weight on the Adam crawler.
Replying to myself here.
The problem TFA describes and with similar discussions herein is not limited to just video games. A long time ago some friends would gather around to play table top rpgs. We tried various systems and nearly all of them have the same issue.
At a certain level (or points) the game just goes to stupid. It was very easy to break GURPS in a supers campaign. Generally, the only way to control a rampant and degradation of the game was to play it fairly mildly.
Now, sometimes it is just fun to head straight for stupid and see what kind of fun you can have.
Scribblenauts actually did fairly well with a free form diverse tool of summon anything.
In fact, it was just too much fun to randomly see what I could do. ie, summon a vampire, a priest and a vampire hunter to watch them duke it out. (Seriously, you can do that!)
The down side is there really isn't much more to do then solve their word puzzles. I'm sure in a more complex game the free form behavior of the ability would break any attempt at constructed story telling.
If you can solve the problem of allowing god like powers and keeping semi-structured storyline in place you probably should start working on a product now.
It was a late night with several issues cropping up during a data center migration. I'm sure there are other mistakes in my writing today, but it's a bit too late to correct those errors now.
I actually thought it was a bit funny when I realized the mistake.
Let's not forget the detection algorithm's which are really damn good.
It's not like I wouldn't expect them to use the DMCA frivolously and then complain when everyone uses it to the letter of the law.
I suppose in the end the only way to appease the beast is with large sums of money. Feed it now to quell it's anger!
You're mini10 actually has a terribly high and consistent error rate on the IDE channel.
In Windows XP this will eventually force the disk access down to PIO Mode 4.
This is a known issue with the chipset and the only fix is to occasionally reset the disk to UDMA.
I don't care what the desktop suffers go through. I have their servers and I hate them. They finally patched the oddest behavior on the M610 after swearing it wasn't really a problem. We could consistently reboot the hosts and force an error state on the motherboard.
I've had good luck with the Amazon basic cables and fiber optic cables. Granted I am not moving the stuff around enough to test the stability over long term use, but the quality seems fair enough to me.
However, I would suggest holding off a few years on your purchase because HDBaseT is going to take over the market.
I'm rather divided on this particular bit of news.
I'm invested in the HDMI technology already and I don't really want to replace everything. With the HDMI 1.4 spec they will address most of the current issues with the technology and provide backward compatibility with the existing devices on the market. HDMI 1.3 kinda sucks if you have an AV receiver and 5.1 setup. (Long story short video processor creates delay and without an auto-sync setup there will be issues with video and audio). This is all made possible because of the requirement for a protected path and downgraded audio on analog ports!
In theory HDMI 1.4 provides a built in protected return audio path, networking, power and a kitchen sink. Regardless, it is rather unimportant to me at this juncture because I doubt I will be upgrading my television and receiver in the near future.
The entire HDBaseT looks like they did mostly the same offerings but in an entirely new cable
which has been around for ages. I get the feeling that actually plugging the cable into a switch won't do much good.
I'm going to assume that in the end they really just get around some royalties and introduce even further market fragmentation.
Good jorb!
BusyBox with a custom kernel could probably have been pulled off in that time frame. As long you were quite aware of it already.
I find some of the more obscure and useful stuff is simply about finding it.
Plop is a nice busybox variant which has been design to boot and run entirely in ramdisk. I designed several rack burn utilities with plop so I could test on a closed network. The advantage of creating a single head and moving onto the next host with my usb stick was quite handy.
However, getting to that point and finding someone who had laid a good foundation was a bit time consuming.