Speaking protection systems that replace your atapi drivers, If you install one of these you won't be able to play doom3 or FarCry, which bug out if they don't like your atapi drivers.
So now you not only have to deal with drm, but drm that conflicts with other drm and give no clue why. It wasn't untill we went through a re-install from scratch (I mean the WHOLE sytem!) paying close attention to what did what to what that we found out why neigther would work on my brothers system. In this case it was some optimized nvidia drivers (nforce2 Mobo). Since then I've learned they did this to try and stop people mounting a cd image on a virtual cd drive.
Yeah, it went through worse and worse anti-copy schemes and then back to nothing then started to ramp up again from 1984 through 1990 iirc.
But it looks like this cycle is going to be slower, the drm snake oil salesmen are giving better pitches these days I guess.
Someone needs to start really lobbying these game companies shareholders with the facts, well presented and documented. Once the shareholders start to see how much money is wasted on this snake oil and how much it just pushes would be paying customers towards cracked versions they'll apply real pressure.
What your saying migh make sense, if the fault was lack of internet connection, it's not.
They meet the requirements, it's Valve who is not doing what thier supposed to, so the customers are NOT getting what they paid for.
Except it doesn't matter how easy it is to crack. Unless it's impossible, someone WILL crack it in short order. After that the crack get worldwide distibution in a matter of hours via the net.
Only people affected negatively by drm are a)legitimate users, and b)The makers of the game who pay for the snake oil (and thier shareholders, someone needs to tell them!)
I seriously doubt they cost that much, I got 1 16meg usb drive with a custom app on it for my brother for christmass so he copy savegames to something his computer could use for less than $30.
If they'd added dongle I doubt it would have been more expensive than the bandwith and server costs, especially when you consider they have to have a staff to keep the server running, which it's not so they're also loosing in the pr dept which may cost sales.
Sorry the dongle would be cheaper and more reliable than Steam. By reliable I mean less likely fail in use, not harder to crack, any drm would've probably gotten cracked just a quick as Steam did.
"I also happen to remember when piracy wasn't so bad too."
If your refering to amount of games and other software 'pirated', then eigther you go back a long ways before me (I doubt much Eniac software was 'warez') or you don't remember so well or just didn't notice back then.
I can remember clearly back in the early to mid 80's being able to get almost any game I wanted without buying it. They tried cd keys, deliberate disc errors and all sorts fo things back then as well. DRM has never worked for long. The single best drm from when I paid attention in detail was GOES on the commodore64, undocumented op-codes, self modifying code, games with track placement, and probably some sort of self integrity check as well. And even all that got beaten within a few weeks (IIRC they had to dig to figure out the undocumented op-codes on the 6510 and wrote a dissasembler to follow what the code was doing).
DRM does nothing to prevent piracy (the crakers thrive on the challenge) and only encourage it by making un-cracked software harder and less convient to use.
That doesn't make them look better, it makes them look worse. For something this critical they should have LOTS of redundancy. A spare server or two at least.
Besides from what other posters have said it looks like it's not tied to any specific server.
How is DRM nescessary? It doesn't even work. Right now there are at least TWO cracks that go right around steam. Most games and other software drm schemes have been beaten quickly, in some cases the cracked versions have come out first.
Yet the game companies, music companies, and movie companies still make very large proffits.
Reality strongly argues against your claims. The simple factors are convience and quality.
Which is better: paying $6-$12 bucks to see a movie on the big screen, or searching for and downloading copy to watch on your 19" monitor, a copy that may be crappy quality?
Which is better: Paying $16 for a proffesional cd you pop into almost device the right shape and hear music, or searching for a copy of lower quality that you then have to expend resources (admitted only about &.50-&.75 and a few minutes with nero et al) and time and effort on to make a simularly playable disc that lacks the cool art, liner notes, etc.
See the pattern here? Games are still making lots of money even though they add drm schemes that reduce the convience factor, which in turn makes the 'pirated' versions MORE desirable simply from a convience standpoint even without the cost in dollars factor. FUD* is a factor against game 'piracy', without it DRM would likely drive a much larger segment towards the cracks than it already does. And as drm schemes get worse (and this is a LOT worse than most) it counters the fud even more.
Sorry but as I see it DRM is counter to the best intrests of the game companies as it only adds costs and costs them in paying users.
*=Not all fud is bogus, fear of being cought, uncertainty as whether or not the crack has built in malware,doubt as to whether it'll accidently screw up your system, etc. All have varying degrees of truth to them.
Mycroft
Re:So the shit's finally hit the fan, has it?
on
Steam Users Steamed
·
· Score: 1
They don't have to guarantee 100% uptime for a suit to occur, or even win.
Given the repeated issues they've had since HL2 came out I wouldn't be suprised if they'd opened themselves up to leagle issues.
A product was sold, that due to faulty design or other incompetence or negligence on thier part, does not work as advertised.
The only obvious thing I can see (though IANAL, and one could probably think up a few things here that might help them out is the EULA, depending how valid the court in question decides it is, and whether the court decides it's enforceable in this case. Not all possible contract or contract provisions are enforceable in all cases, and that even assumes the courts hold a EULA to be a contract and not just an attempt fool people un-aware of first sale. I would think any lawyer/lawfirm looking into this would try for the best venue on both counts. (but venue gets into crap I know even less about than watching matlock reruns would tell you)
Mycroft
Re:Online authentication unavailable for one night
on
Steam Users Steamed
·
· Score: 1
The users internet connections are fine, they meet the requirement. IT's valves servers that are the problem.
Look at it this way. Suppose you bought a car with a manual transmission. And someone able to drive a manual transmission buys it, but the clutch goes out at random without warning every few weeks and makes the car unusable for a day or two each time. Now is the buyers fault for buying a car with a manual transmission, or the car manufacturers fault for using a bad transmission.
This should NOT have any effect on the offline mode, and should be reasonably reliable in online mode, otherwise your giving your customers less than they paid for.
I see plenty of good reason to return any game affected by this as 'defective' if this isn't resolved fast or becomes a chronic issue. You bought the game to play it, it's advertised as playable, if by design or defect on the manufacturers end of things it doesn't work then one should be entitled to a refund.
I always found University the best to play, they get thier research done faster, this means one of thier military units can kill two of anyone elses once you get much past the beginning. And of course being ahead in all the ways that save money and improve population situations. Then of course you reasearch your way to victory while the oppenents are still trying to get aircraft.
I rather like thier robot arena two. It's not a robotech/battletech game. It's more of a robo-wars game based on the robot wars type tv shows.
I'd really like to see a version three that lets one add new parts and motors and such.
Not to mention more flexibility in designing the outer shape of the bot.
The nic's may be a no-go anyway. I can't find anything on them for the 64bit ver of any distro.
The nics aren't that critical at the moment anyway, and I can easily afford to buy a new one that works for what little use I currently have for one. Though it looks like I might finally have a broadband solution out here (isdn only, but it looks like thier price might have come down out of the clouds(.
It looks like most of the rest of your references there have equivalants for 64bit as well, the ATI drivers in particular have what apear to be identical directions. Gatos isn't caught up to the newer 'theater' chip that newer AIW's use for the AIW features, though they did recently get the documentation from ati that they need to implement them.
Kinda sad you still have to jump through all those hoops for mainstream hardware. Untill all these work-arounds and patches get a LOT nearer point and click most home users are not going to switch over from windows, which means a great many comercial app companies won't eigther. This also means the number of zombies and virus/worm spreading windows installs is going to stay high enough to keep the signal to noise ratio on the net bad.
I can understand needing work arounds and special config tweaks and all that when hardware vendors refuse to give enough details for driver writers, but when a method IS found there should be much more effort to get the cruft out of using them.
Still Suse9.2 for amd64 looks do-able on my machine. just a matter of getting around to it in a couple weeks (busy at both jobs all next week at least).
Thank you very much. I really appretiate it. I'm likely to try suse next.
If the 802.11g card is iffy I do have a usb 80211.g adapter I may try instead and put the card in a system I'm building out of spare parts.
I hadn't really paid much attention to suse till I saw the $80 ver9.2 box the other day, but when I went to thier website I got that crap of novells and was shortly diss-interested. They really shouldn't let PHB's design websites, especially for technology items, it sets off the bs alarm for most non-PHB's.
Gotta set a bunch of bookmarks in FF now:)
Admittedly the correlation is a bit week, this was a while ago, but IIRC the disc's came from two different 25disc spindles, but the same brand bought in a two for $x sale somewhere.
As far as brands go, that usually means nothing except price. Most 'brands' come from whichever factory was selling the cheapest for the the lot size at the time so todays brand x may come from factory y this month, and next month from factory z while brand w is now using factory y's product.
I do recall a time when 2x cd-burners still cost over $500 and blanks cost $5-10 each. A buddy lost a couple burned disks that were deffinately from marker bleed through, you could SEE it without holding the disc to the light.
It wouldn't suprise me if the varnish thickness and resistance to bleed through had improved since then however and I suspect it's a fairly rare phenomenon these days, but considering that cd markers are so cheap (4 for less than $3, comparable to most cheap sharpie type markers) I really don't see a reason to risk it.
Not having isdn capability at the local office is one of the reasons they cited when asking a small fortune to hook it up, though they did also cite the cost of running the lines to my house.
Don't know if that changes anything, but I might check again.
IIRC you can get isdn anywhere in the us because it's considered a 911 available service like regular pots. However just because the phone company must fill the order if you place doesn't mean they have to do so cheaply.
I looked into it here, but they wanted several hundred to set it up and $80 a month to keep it. This for just basic isdn at the lowest standard rate.
So you don't have to kill anyone, just rob a few of them, repeatedly.
Strictly anectedotal evidence, but of the five discs I've had die, one was broken in half, one scratched very bad (still sometimes could read it, took iso-buster set to retry a sector 4 times before I finally got it read) and the other three were written on with 'sharpie' type pens. Those last three were all done in the same week and all refused to read less than a month later. I've no other disc's written on with sharpies, just regular cd lable pens that cost about the same.
I don't remember where I read it, but I've read the chemicals in sharpies can leak through the back varnish used on some discs and potententially damage the data containing layer.
O.K. I'll post a sytem summary here. grabbed from the device manager and sandra.
system mb is an A8V delux (asus ami bios 1005.027) with at 3500 athlon64. Video is an ATI 9600 All-In-Wonder nics: marvell ukon gigabit 10/100/1000 (built in)
device manager calls the 811.g nic a Motorola wireless pci adapter wpci810g and sandra says broadcom corp bcm4306(??) for device name and oem name, I suspect sandra is reporting chipset and the device manager is reporting who put the card together (it was sold by motorola) sound is Soundblaster live! platinum (ct4760) modem is usrobotic 56k fax pci (real modem, not winmodem)
And I've got one of those floppy + 7in1 usb card readers(the floppy uses a floppy connection, but the card readers run to the internal on-board usb).
I've got two lite-on dvd burners as well (and ldw-451S and a sohw-832S which is a dual layer writer). But I'm under the impression burners, lite on especially, are fairly well supported.
I'd much rather have a good resource for checking these things myslef as well as finding out what comes with the distro software wise.
I've gotten tired of see-ing installs that refuse to run (mandrake in the 7.x and 8.x, you could only get sofar before it crashed with a divide by zero error, this on several different machines, x crashes during boot on thier live cd, redhat had issues with dependancies if you did ANYTHING not on the install disks) or don't work with half the hardware.
Now I'm already aware no-one has managed to get the AIW functions to work yet and ATI's drivers for linux are rather feeble and glitchy. I can deal with that as long as I can get decent 2d resolution and colors at good refresh rates.
I've seen the Soundblaster work before as well as the modem under various distros and I've seen 2d video work under my previous AIW (7000 series).
I'd be suprise if the main chipset for the MB didn't work. I'm mostly worried eigther the nic's or the flash memory reader or some such will creat issues that prevent the system from being stable.
Well maybe I'll take another look in a couple months, but I'm not comfortable with the level of marketting hype (very high) or level of usefull info (Very low) that I currently see.
I've got a system that I'd like to try an amd64 compiled distro on, but I'd like to sure it'll run first. The one that worries me most is the vid card (ati9600aiw), but it's also got two nics (one 10/100 ethernet and one 802.11g/b) and few other things I'd want to know work decently.
Yeah a good pack well loaded can make a huge difference. Try it with a mere 15-20lbs (8-10kgkg) just tossed into a cheap pack though any distance at all kills you.
I'm shure did some good research on how to distribute that mass and reduce astronaut wear and tear.
They do occasional change thier orientation relative to the sun.
Also the heat sink would be pure radiative source, no convection, so you'd have to take that into account.
Thanks, I'm glad I'm not total scrambling it. Though the guys who actually did the work on this had actuall numbers and details that would help could I remember who did it or what they called the concept I could google it. They also covered all sorts of things I don't remember well, possible hazzards and usefull ideas, ways to deal with specific scenarios, ideal composition of useable asteroids (some wouldn't inflate well, likely rupture) and so on. It's not my work or assumptions, just my memory of thier work.
Actually short term radiation is a much smaller hazzard than most assume because of our ability to heal from most minor damage and the extra exposure isn't normally huge. However there are occasional incedents like the recent solar storm that had the iss crew head for the safest part of station.
Over time these odds build up, and thick rock walls help. They're not guaranteed to be needed for radiation shielding, but the longer the trip the more likely. They also serve a good purpose in absorbing small impacts.
Small impacts is another place where big size is your friend. Put a 1 inch hole in a 10 man craft and it's air is bled out very fast, likely to fast for non-automatic systems to handle. In a 1000 man craft it's going to take much longer for air pressure to drop below what the crew can deal with and gives them more time to 'suit up' and patch it. You also lose a much smaller percentage of your total air and if the system is compartmentalized right the situation gets even better.
One thing most people don't realize is that METAL walls can actually hurt you through secondary effects, catching radiation that would likely pass through you without harm, and emitting slower more numerous particles that are more dangerous.
Once your actually in space mass is your friend, however getting up there with any sort of reaction drive (nobel prize likely to anyone who can make a reactionless drive, or even prove one possible) makes mass your enemy. Has a lot to do with the saying 'getting to orbit is half way to anywhere'.
Gonna dig a little later today and see if I can find the original paper/study. I think there was more than one study into this, but I may just remember reading about it in more than one place. Some really fascinating stuff. hmm late 70's to mid 80's iirc, not shure.
Well first off the context is RATINGS not life in general. Try reading the WHOLE paragraph which contains the sentence "As an aside it does seem a bit absurd that a topless woman can raise the rating of a game/movie faster than a body count can."
Second off, yes voilence is sometimes the only choice, but it always in a negative situation. Nudity can occure in a non-negative situation.
Third who said anything about Howard Stern, frankly I find him pointless and rude/offensive purely to get attention and rating.
My whole point is that nudity and sex are far less acceptable, in media, than violence. On tv you can show, in primetime, someone go on a killing spree. Yet a 3 second glimps of someones nipple will raise a hue and outcry and scandle and huge fcc fee's. Now I ask you, does that even come CLOSE to sane?
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking protection systems that replace your atapi drivers, If you install one of these you won't be able to play doom3 or FarCry, which bug out if they don't like your atapi drivers.
So now you not only have to deal with drm, but drm that conflicts with other drm and give no clue why. It wasn't untill we went through a re-install from scratch (I mean the WHOLE sytem!) paying close attention to what did what to what that we found out why neigther would work on my brothers system. In this case it was some optimized nvidia drivers (nforce2 Mobo). Since then I've learned they did this to try and stop people mounting a cd image on a virtual cd drive.
Mycroft
Yeah, it went through worse and worse anti-copy schemes and then back to nothing then started to ramp up again from 1984 through 1990 iirc.
But it looks like this cycle is going to be slower, the drm snake oil salesmen are giving better pitches these days I guess.
Someone needs to start really lobbying these game companies shareholders with the facts, well presented and documented. Once the shareholders start to see how much money is wasted on this snake oil and how much it just pushes would be paying customers towards cracked versions they'll apply real pressure.
Mycroft
What your saying migh make sense, if the fault was lack of internet connection, it's not.
They meet the requirements, it's Valve who is not doing what thier supposed to, so the customers are NOT getting what they paid for.
Mycroft
Except it doesn't matter how easy it is to crack.
Unless it's impossible, someone WILL crack it in short order. After that the crack get worldwide distibution in a matter of hours via the net.
Only people affected negatively by drm are a)legitimate users, and b)The makers of the game who pay for the snake oil (and thier shareholders, someone needs to tell them!)
Mycroft
I seriously doubt they cost that much, I got 1 16meg usb drive with a custom app on it for my brother for christmass so he copy savegames to something his computer could use for less than $30.
If they'd added dongle I doubt it would have been more expensive than the bandwith and server costs, especially when you consider they have to have a staff to keep the server running, which it's not so they're also loosing in the pr dept which may cost sales.
Sorry the dongle would be cheaper and more reliable than Steam. By reliable I mean less likely fail in use, not harder to crack, any drm would've probably gotten cracked just a quick as Steam did.
Mycroft
"I also happen to remember when piracy wasn't so bad too."
If your refering to amount of games and other software 'pirated', then eigther you go back a long ways before me (I doubt much Eniac software was 'warez') or you don't remember so well or just didn't notice back then.
I can remember clearly back in the early to mid 80's being able to get almost any game I wanted without buying it. They tried cd keys, deliberate disc errors and all sorts fo things back then as well. DRM has never worked for long. The single best drm from when I paid attention in detail was GOES on the commodore64, undocumented op-codes, self modifying code, games with track placement, and probably some sort of self integrity check as well. And even all that got beaten within a few weeks (IIRC they had to dig to figure out the undocumented op-codes on the 6510 and wrote a dissasembler to follow what the code was doing).
DRM does nothing to prevent piracy (the crakers thrive on the challenge) and only encourage it by making un-cracked software harder and less convient to use.
Mycroft
That doesn't make them look better, it makes them look worse. For something this critical they should have LOTS of redundancy. A spare server or two at least.
Besides from what other posters have said it looks like it's not tied to any specific server.
Mycroft
How is DRM nescessary? It doesn't even work. Right now there are at least TWO cracks that go right around steam. Most games and other software drm schemes have been beaten quickly, in some cases the cracked versions have come out first.
Yet the game companies, music companies, and movie companies still make very large proffits.
Reality strongly argues against your claims.
The simple factors are convience and quality.
Which is better: paying $6-$12 bucks to see a movie on the big screen, or searching for and downloading copy to watch on your 19" monitor, a copy that may be crappy quality?
Which is better: Paying $16 for a proffesional cd you pop into almost device the right shape and hear music, or searching for a copy of lower quality that you then have to expend resources (admitted only about &.50-&.75 and a few minutes with nero et al) and time and effort on to make a simularly playable disc that lacks the cool art, liner notes, etc.
See the pattern here?
Games are still making lots of money even though they add drm schemes that reduce the convience factor, which in turn makes the 'pirated' versions MORE desirable simply from a convience standpoint even without the cost in dollars factor. FUD* is a factor against game 'piracy', without it DRM would likely drive a much larger segment towards the cracks than it already does. And as drm schemes get worse (and this is a LOT worse than most) it counters the fud even more.
Sorry but as I see it DRM is counter to the best intrests of the game companies as it only adds costs and costs them in paying users.
*=Not all fud is bogus, fear of being cought, uncertainty as whether or not the crack has built in malware,doubt as to whether it'll accidently screw up your system, etc. All have varying degrees of truth to them.
Mycroft
They don't have to guarantee 100% uptime for a suit to occur, or even win.
Given the repeated issues they've had since HL2 came out I wouldn't be suprised if they'd opened themselves up to leagle issues.
A product was sold, that due to faulty design or other incompetence or negligence on thier part, does not work as advertised.
The only obvious thing I can see (though IANAL, and one could probably think up a few things here that might help them out is the EULA, depending how valid the court in question decides it is, and whether the court decides it's enforceable in this case. Not all possible contract or contract provisions are enforceable in all cases, and that even assumes the courts hold a EULA to be a contract and not just an attempt fool people un-aware of first sale. I would think any lawyer/lawfirm looking into this would try for the best venue on both counts. (but venue gets into crap I know even less about than watching matlock reruns would tell you)
Mycroft
The users internet connections are fine, they meet the requirement. IT's valves servers that are the problem.
Look at it this way. Suppose you bought a car with a manual transmission. And someone able to drive a manual transmission buys it, but the clutch goes out at random without warning every few weeks and makes the car unusable for a day or two each time. Now is the buyers fault for buying a car with a manual transmission, or the car manufacturers fault for using a bad transmission.
This should NOT have any effect on the offline mode, and should be reasonably reliable in online mode, otherwise your giving your customers less than they paid for.
I see plenty of good reason to return any game affected by this as 'defective' if this isn't resolved fast or becomes a chronic issue. You bought the game to play it, it's advertised as playable, if by design or defect on the manufacturers end of things it doesn't work then one should be entitled to a refund.
Mycroft
I always found University the best to play, they get thier research done faster, this means one of thier military units can kill two of anyone elses once you get much past the beginning. And of course being ahead in all the ways that save money and improve population situations. Then of course you reasearch your way to victory while the oppenents are still trying to get aircraft.
Mycroft
I rather like thier robot arena two. It's not a robotech/battletech game. It's more of a robo-wars game based on the robot wars type tv shows.
I'd really like to see a version three that lets one add new parts and motors and such.
Not to mention more flexibility in designing the outer shape of the bot.
Mycroft
The nic's may be a no-go anyway. I can't find anything on them for the 64bit ver of any distro.
The nics aren't that critical at the moment anyway, and I can easily afford to buy a new one that works for what little use I currently have for one. Though it looks like I might finally have a broadband solution out here (isdn only, but it looks like thier price might have come down out of the clouds(.
It looks like most of the rest of your references there have equivalants for 64bit as well, the ATI drivers in particular have what apear to be identical directions. Gatos isn't caught up to the newer 'theater' chip that newer AIW's use for the AIW features, though they did recently get the documentation from ati that they need to implement them.
Kinda sad you still have to jump through all those hoops for mainstream hardware. Untill all these work-arounds and patches get a LOT nearer point and click most home users are not going to switch over from windows, which means a great many comercial app companies won't eigther. This also means the number of zombies and virus/worm spreading windows installs is going to stay high enough to keep the signal to noise ratio on the net bad.
I can understand needing work arounds and special config tweaks and all that when hardware vendors refuse to give enough details for driver writers, but when a method IS found there should be much more effort to get the cruft out of using them.
Still Suse9.2 for amd64 looks do-able on my machine. just a matter of getting around to it in a couple weeks (busy at both jobs all next week at least).
Mycroft
Thank you very much. I really appretiate it. I'm likely to try suse next. :)
If the 802.11g card is iffy I do have a usb 80211.g adapter I may try instead and put the card in a system I'm building out of spare parts.
I hadn't really paid much attention to suse till I saw the $80 ver9.2 box the other day, but when I went to thier website I got that crap of novells and was shortly diss-interested. They really shouldn't let PHB's design websites, especially for technology items, it sets off the bs alarm for most non-PHB's.
Gotta set a bunch of bookmarks in FF now
Mycroft
Admittedly the correlation is a bit week, this was a while ago, but IIRC the disc's came from two different 25disc spindles, but the same brand bought in a two for $x sale somewhere.
As far as brands go, that usually means nothing except price. Most 'brands' come from whichever factory was selling the cheapest for the the lot size at the time so todays brand x may come from factory y this month, and next month from factory z while brand w is now using factory y's product.
I do recall a time when 2x cd-burners still cost over $500 and blanks cost $5-10 each. A buddy lost a couple burned disks that were deffinately from marker bleed through, you could SEE it without holding the disc to the light.
It wouldn't suprise me if the varnish thickness and resistance to bleed through had improved since then however and I suspect it's a fairly rare phenomenon these days, but considering that cd markers are so cheap (4 for less than $3, comparable to most cheap sharpie type markers) I really don't see a reason to risk it.
Mycroft
Not having isdn capability at the local office is one of the reasons they cited when asking a small fortune to hook it up, though they did also cite the cost of running the lines to my house.
Don't know if that changes anything, but I might check again.
Mycroft
IIRC you can get isdn anywhere in the us because it's considered a 911 available service like regular pots. However just because the phone company must fill the order if you place doesn't mean they have to do so cheaply.
I looked into it here, but they wanted several hundred to set it up and $80 a month to keep it. This for just basic isdn at the lowest standard rate.
So you don't have to kill anyone, just rob a few of them, repeatedly.
Mycroft
Strictly anectedotal evidence, but of the five discs I've had die, one was broken in half, one scratched very bad (still sometimes could read it, took iso-buster set to retry a sector 4 times before I finally got it read) and the other three were written on with 'sharpie' type pens. Those last three were all done in the same week and all refused to read less than a month later. I've no other disc's written on with sharpies, just regular cd lable pens that cost about the same.
I don't remember where I read it, but I've read the chemicals in sharpies can leak through the back varnish used on some discs and potententially damage the data containing layer.
Mycroft
O.K. I'll post a sytem summary here. grabbed from the device manager and sandra.
system mb is an A8V delux (asus ami bios 1005.027) with at 3500 athlon64.
Video is an ATI 9600 All-In-Wonder
nics: marvell ukon gigabit 10/100/1000 (built in)
device manager calls the 811.g nic a Motorola wireless pci adapter wpci810g and sandra says broadcom corp bcm4306(??) for device name and oem name, I suspect sandra is reporting chipset and the device manager is reporting who put the card together (it was sold by motorola)
sound is Soundblaster live! platinum (ct4760)
modem is usrobotic 56k fax pci (real modem, not winmodem)
And I've got one of those floppy + 7in1 usb card readers(the floppy uses a floppy connection, but the card readers run to the internal on-board usb).
I've got two lite-on dvd burners as well (and ldw-451S and a sohw-832S which is a dual layer writer). But I'm under the impression burners, lite on especially, are fairly well supported.
I'd much rather have a good resource for checking these things myslef as well as finding out what comes with the distro software wise.
I've gotten tired of see-ing installs that refuse to run (mandrake in the 7.x and 8.x, you could only get sofar before it crashed with a divide by zero error, this on several different machines, x crashes during boot on thier live cd, redhat had issues with dependancies if you did ANYTHING not on the install disks) or don't work with half the hardware.
Now I'm already aware no-one has managed to get the AIW functions to work yet and ATI's drivers for linux are rather feeble and glitchy. I can deal with that as long as I can get decent 2d resolution and colors at good refresh rates.
I've seen the Soundblaster work before as well as the modem under various distros and I've seen 2d video work under my previous AIW (7000 series).
I'd be suprise if the main chipset for the MB didn't work. I'm mostly worried eigther the nic's or the flash memory reader or some such will creat issues that prevent the system from being stable.
Mycroft
Well maybe I'll take another look in a couple months, but I'm not comfortable with the level of marketting hype (very high) or level of usefull info (Very low) that I currently see.
I've got a system that I'd like to try an amd64 compiled distro on, but I'd like to sure it'll run first. The one that worries me most is the vid card (ati9600aiw), but it's also got two nics (one 10/100 ethernet and one 802.11g/b) and few other things I'd want to know work decently.
Mycroft
Yeah a good pack well loaded can make a huge difference. Try it with a mere 15-20lbs (8-10kgkg) just tossed into a cheap pack though any distance at all kills you.
I'm shure did some good research on how to distribute that mass and reduce astronaut wear and tear.
Mycroft
They do occasional change thier orientation relative to the sun.
Also the heat sink would be pure radiative source, no convection, so you'd have to take that into account.
Mycroft
HUH, divx IS mpeg4, I've had a few .mpg files with the divx logo in the corner.
The early versions only encoded to avi, but I've seen otherwise.
Mycroft
Thanks, I'm glad I'm not total scrambling it. Though the guys who actually did the work on this had actuall numbers and details that would help could I remember who did it or what they called the concept I could google it. They also covered all sorts of things I don't remember well, possible hazzards and usefull ideas, ways to deal with specific scenarios, ideal composition of useable asteroids (some wouldn't inflate well, likely rupture) and so on. It's not my work or assumptions, just my memory of thier work.
Actually short term radiation is a much smaller hazzard than most assume because of our ability to heal from most minor damage and the extra exposure isn't normally huge. However there are occasional incedents like the recent solar storm that had the iss crew head for the safest part of station.
Over time these odds build up, and thick rock walls help. They're not guaranteed to be needed for radiation shielding, but the longer the trip the more likely. They also serve a good purpose in absorbing small impacts.
Small impacts is another place where big size is your friend. Put a 1 inch hole in a 10 man craft and it's air is bled out very fast, likely to fast for non-automatic systems to handle. In a 1000 man craft it's going to take much longer for air pressure to drop below what the crew can deal with and gives them more time to 'suit up' and patch it. You also lose a much smaller percentage of your total air and if the system is compartmentalized right the situation gets even better.
One thing most people don't realize is that METAL walls can actually hurt you through secondary effects, catching radiation that would likely pass through you without harm, and emitting slower more numerous particles that are more dangerous.
Once your actually in space mass is your friend, however getting up there with any sort of reaction drive (nobel prize likely to anyone who can make a reactionless drive, or even prove one possible) makes mass your enemy. Has a lot to do with the saying 'getting to orbit is half way to anywhere'.
Gonna dig a little later today and see if I can find the original paper/study. I think there was more than one study into this, but I may just remember reading about it in more than one place. Some really fascinating stuff. hmm late 70's to mid 80's iirc, not shure.
Mycroft
Well first off the context is RATINGS not life in general. Try reading the WHOLE paragraph which contains the sentence "As an aside it does seem a bit absurd that a topless woman can raise the rating of a game/movie faster than a body count can."
Second off, yes voilence is sometimes the only choice, but it always in a negative situation. Nudity can occure in a non-negative situation.
Third who said anything about Howard Stern, frankly I find him pointless and rude/offensive purely to get attention and rating.
My whole point is that nudity and sex are far less acceptable, in media, than violence. On tv you can show, in primetime, someone go on a killing spree. Yet a 3 second glimps of someones nipple will raise a hue and outcry and scandle and huge fcc fee's. Now I ask you, does that even come CLOSE to sane?
Mycroft