The Wii's memory modules are just plain SD cards, so Nintendo doesn't have to release them, although I think they will sell branded SD cards. Also, older games probably had awful compression compared to today's standards. It would take some extra work, but CD games (and maybe N64, too) could probably be cut down in size with a bit a reworking.
Maybe the "drivers" for using the Wiimote as a light gun haven't been given priority. Or maybe they do not want to use it as a light gun because light guns apparently have problems with non-CRT TVs. It would take extra reworking of the games to use a pointer instead of a light gun.
Actually, there were at least two 6MB games for SNES: Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean. Theoretically, you could make a 8MB SNES cartridge, although I do not believe any were ever made (and a lot (around 0.5MB, I think) of the last 2MB would overlap with memory allocations for various subsystems).
That makes sense, but if you have malware installed on the computer doing the signing, you are still in trouble no matter how the system is implemented. The real solution is to bundle the web-of-trust app with Ad-Aware.;)
Something I have been wondering.... GCC now accepts Java source and emits either native binaries or Java bytecode. Can it take C/C++/etc and emit bytecode? If it is treating bytecode as just another target what if a C# frontend were written? Could gcc take C# on input and emit Java bytecode on the other end? And if a mono backend were added could it compile Java source to it? And if this all came to pass would it be a sure sign the end of times were at hand?
The problem with that is Java bytecode assumes access to the Java class library and.NET bytecode assumes access to the.NET library. You could probably make a lot of 1:1 connections between the two, but why bother when you have JVMs and Mono on multiple platforms. Also, I thought remembered seeing something about Mono being able to interface with Java somehow. Am I imagining things or does someone know what I am talking about?
That would be a cool idea, especially because that could be used to sign your small personal website by asking all of your friends to sign it and having it propogate via the six-degrees principle.
Actually, if I connect to a site via HTTPS that has no certs and no signatures, then I have no way of knowing whether there is a man-in-the-middle attack going on, so there must be some initial signatures by the creator and his friends and/or employees of the company, who would be within your web of trust, but maybe far away. That would be reasonable. Then, say, once you buy something from the company and actually get something for your money, you could sign it yourself, so people close to you would get a higher trust rating for the site.
The problem is getting people to actually use web of trust systems. Currently they are pretty well limited to a subset of geeks. (I confess that I do not use GPG on my e-mail.) The problem is that some sort of out-of-band communication is needed for verifying keys. For example, OTR (IM encryption, no web of trust) shows a hex digit string that it recommends reading over a phone connection if you want to ensure security.
Maybe you could make a set-up where public keys could be stored on USB mass storage devices (read: iPods) and automatically scanned for when such a device is plugged in. Then sharing public keys requires plugging your iPod into your friends' computers.
Although, that still has a problem (for the common user) that spyware could silently modify the trusted keys to include. On top of that, the common user would have to trust at least one person who had a reasonable idea of what sites were trustworthy. You could get sub-webs of people who are already clicking on phishing links distributing signatures saying those phishing sites are good.
I think you have it backwards. www.eebay.com can get a cert saying they really are www.eebay.com because, well, they are. On the other hand, if you are connecting to www.eebay.com, and your computer gets a signed cert saying the computer you are connecting to is really owned by www.ebay.com according to whatever trusted CA (because www.ebay.com intercepted your communication attempting a man-in-the-middle attack), then you will get a warning pop-up in your browser.
I don't know about you, but I heard the joke as "There are three types of people in the world: those who can count and those what can't." long before I every saw "There are 10 types of people in the world: those who know binary and those who don't." The.sig line is simply a combination of the two.
You "used to do" a lot of things. Well, guess what? You can still pull out the old tape deck or VHS unit. Your problem is that you "want to do" some superior new things. To your chagrin, no one has promised, offered or allowed you to do these things, unless you are willing to pay for them.
He is talking about misfeatures of new formats. I think it is reasonable to complain about actions allowed by old formats that new formats for the exact same media deny you. More so when, like VHS and DVD, the older format essientially no longer exists. At least with CDs you still have a choice (as long as you make the safe assumption all CD audio DRM schemes are trivial to defeat).
You don't seem to understand that DRM is entirely OPTIONAL!
Want to play a DVD on your home player? Buy a DVD here, instead of some pirated Asian ripoff that you can get on the cheap.
Uh, you got it backwards. If you want a DVD without DRM, then buy the pirated Asian "ripoff", which will more often than not be region 0 (region-less) and may or may not even have CSS encryption. The American DVD will only play on region 1 players, won't let you play it through a VCR onto your old TV with only RF inputs (Macrovision), and will definitely be encrypted.
If you want convenience in acquiring and using your media, pirate. If you are willing to sacrifice convenience for feeling that you are doing the right thing, go ahead and pay for your media.
Just don't go blaming the providers of legal content for your frustration. If you want the convenience, selection, and attractive pricing of a la carte music, you have to live by the rules. No one, especially Apple, is forcing you to use iTunes, to buy an iPod, or download a single song. If you don't like the terms, STAY AWAY!
Since when is a manufacturer allowed to tell me what I can do with a product that I have bought? Ford cannot tell me what roads I can drive an Explorer on or even if I have to drive it on roads. Apple can kindly request that I only install OS X on a computer they sold me, but there is no reason to obey that request. As far as I know, neither the iTMS nor the Plays For Sure music stores licenses even attempts to deny you the right to listen to the music in any way you see fit, they just make it difficult to do so. The DMCA has clauses that cover exemptions for compatibility.
There are plenty of reasonable complaints about Gaim 2's UI changes, but that one makes no sense. The "online" checkbox was just renamed to "enabled" because it has a slightly different meaning with the new status system. If an account is disabled, then it is offline, but if it is enabled, it is affected by whatever status you have set, which could possibly be "offline" (although, if you want all of your IM accounts to be offline, I personally suggest closing your IM client).
That's why every new Nintendo game (not sure exactly when it started) has a safety warning screen that you have to press a button to get through every time you start the game. (It used to be that the warning was just in small print in the manual.) Who knows what effect that actually has legally, though.
As I understand it, the main thing keeping game devs on Windows is that they use Direct3D. I believe that on Mac OS X, OpenGL is the only choice for 3D acceleration, and that is also supported on Linux, so I would expect Mac games to be much easier to port to Linux than Windows DirectX games.
If you have sufficiently efficient solar panels or whatever other simple renewable resource, then that's great. Currently, I believe that solar panels are too expensive/inefficient to make that a reasonable option for most people. Energy sources like oil/coal/nuclear are much more efficient when done on a large scale. I assume the same is true of compost/garbage burning-based power plants.
Thunderbird does not touch the registry (except for one thing...), it just uses the application data folder, which is the proper place for... application data (same with every open source app I have installed on my XP machine, I believe). The one exception is the default mail app setting, which I assume is stored in the registry, but Thunderbird does not need to run. I consider use of the registry to be a bug (or at least, an unwanted feature) in a Windows program. Someone please correct me if there actually is some reason why using the registry would be a good idea.
Even simplier, this gets rid of the problem of less savy computer users needing to either carry around flash drives or remembering to e-mail docs to themselves. Now they just need a presentation app.
Uh, isn't Cedega based on the Wine project? Wine is not an emulator. It is exactly what you describe: an open (and quite incomplete) implementation of the Windows APIs, including DirectX.
Re:What exactly does "decode" mean here?
on
The Next X Prize
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· Score: 1
I'm pretty sure that most of the human genome is unknown. Although, having the complete genome of another 100 people matched with their identities/characteristics would probably make figuring out genotype/phenotype matchings a lot easier. If you had, say, 100,000+ (which would probably be reasonable if someone develops a method cheap enough to win this X-prize), then you could probably find some very strong relations between sets of genes and characteristics of the person.
Which is probably why the GP made a distinction between music having the quality of being good and music having the quality of being "good" (i.e. on the top 20 list).
So true, I recently read a piece by Engel's from 1891 where he took a pot shot at the US for having a corrupt government with two parties that are really two sides of the same coin. It's nothing new. (It goes without saying that anything written by Engels should be taken with at least a few grains of salt.)
Nowhere do "politicians" form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions.
It is well known that the Americans have been striving for 30 years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and that in spite of all they can do they continue to stink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. and nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends -- and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it.
Slashdot Mirror
The Wii's memory modules are just plain SD cards, so Nintendo doesn't have to release them, although I think they will sell branded SD cards. Also, older games probably had awful compression compared to today's standards. It would take some extra work, but CD games (and maybe N64, too) could probably be cut down in size with a bit a reworking.
Maybe the "drivers" for using the Wiimote as a light gun haven't been given priority. Or maybe they do not want to use it as a light gun because light guns apparently have problems with non-CRT TVs. It would take extra reworking of the games to use a pointer instead of a light gun.
Actually, there were at least two 6MB games for SNES: Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean. Theoretically, you could make a 8MB SNES cartridge, although I do not believe any were ever made (and a lot (around 0.5MB, I think) of the last 2MB would overlap with memory allocations for various subsystems).
2000 point cards will be sold for $20 in the US. This implies that US points and Japanese points do not have the same value.
That makes sense, but if you have malware installed on the computer doing the signing, you are still in trouble no matter how the system is implemented. The real solution is to bundle the web-of-trust app with Ad-Aware. ;)
The problem with that is Java bytecode assumes access to the Java class library and .NET bytecode assumes access to the .NET library. You could probably make a lot of 1:1 connections between the two, but why bother when you have JVMs and Mono on multiple platforms. Also, I thought remembered seeing something about Mono being able to interface with Java somehow. Am I imagining things or does someone know what I am talking about?
That would be a cool idea, especially because that could be used to sign your small personal website by asking all of your friends to sign it and having it propogate via the six-degrees principle.
Actually, if I connect to a site via HTTPS that has no certs and no signatures, then I have no way of knowing whether there is a man-in-the-middle attack going on, so there must be some initial signatures by the creator and his friends and/or employees of the company, who would be within your web of trust, but maybe far away. That would be reasonable. Then, say, once you buy something from the company and actually get something for your money, you could sign it yourself, so people close to you would get a higher trust rating for the site.
The problem is getting people to actually use web of trust systems. Currently they are pretty well limited to a subset of geeks. (I confess that I do not use GPG on my e-mail.) The problem is that some sort of out-of-band communication is needed for verifying keys. For example, OTR (IM encryption, no web of trust) shows a hex digit string that it recommends reading over a phone connection if you want to ensure security.
Maybe you could make a set-up where public keys could be stored on USB mass storage devices (read: iPods) and automatically scanned for when such a device is plugged in. Then sharing public keys requires plugging your iPod into your friends' computers.
Although, that still has a problem (for the common user) that spyware could silently modify the trusted keys to include. On top of that, the common user would have to trust at least one person who had a reasonable idea of what sites were trustworthy. You could get sub-webs of people who are already clicking on phishing links distributing signatures saying those phishing sites are good.
I think you have it backwards. www.eebay.com can get a cert saying they really are www.eebay.com because, well, they are. On the other hand, if you are connecting to www.eebay.com, and your computer gets a signed cert saying the computer you are connecting to is really owned by www.ebay.com according to whatever trusted CA (because www.ebay.com intercepted your communication attempting a man-in-the-middle attack), then you will get a warning pop-up in your browser.
I don't know about you, but I heard the joke as "There are three types of people in the world: those who can count and those what can't." long before I every saw "There are 10 types of people in the world: those who know binary and those who don't." The .sig line is simply a combination of the two.
He is talking about misfeatures of new formats. I think it is reasonable to complain about actions allowed by old formats that new formats for the exact same media deny you. More so when, like VHS and DVD, the older format essientially no longer exists. At least with CDs you still have a choice (as long as you make the safe assumption all CD audio DRM schemes are trivial to defeat).
Uh, you got it backwards. If you want a DVD without DRM, then buy the pirated Asian "ripoff", which will more often than not be region 0 (region-less) and may or may not even have CSS encryption. The American DVD will only play on region 1 players, won't let you play it through a VCR onto your old TV with only RF inputs (Macrovision), and will definitely be encrypted.
If you want convenience in acquiring and using your media, pirate. If you are willing to sacrifice convenience for feeling that you are doing the right thing, go ahead and pay for your media.
Since when is a manufacturer allowed to tell me what I can do with a product that I have bought? Ford cannot tell me what roads I can drive an Explorer on or even if I have to drive it on roads. Apple can kindly request that I only install OS X on a computer they sold me, but there is no reason to obey that request. As far as I know, neither the iTMS nor the Plays For Sure music stores licenses even attempts to deny you the right to listen to the music in any way you see fit, they just make it difficult to do so. The DMCA has clauses that cover exemptions for compatibility.
Meebo is based on Gaim, just with a AJAX frontend instead of GTK.
There are plenty of reasonable complaints about Gaim 2's UI changes, but that one makes no sense. The "online" checkbox was just renamed to "enabled" because it has a slightly different meaning with the new status system. If an account is disabled, then it is offline, but if it is enabled, it is affected by whatever status you have set, which could possibly be "offline" (although, if you want all of your IM accounts to be offline, I personally suggest closing your IM client).
That's why every new Nintendo game (not sure exactly when it started) has a safety warning screen that you have to press a button to get through every time you start the game. (It used to be that the warning was just in small print in the manual.) Who knows what effect that actually has legally, though.
Yeah, Google Maps outside of a web browser would probably look much more like this. ;)
As I understand it, the main thing keeping game devs on Windows is that they use Direct3D. I believe that on Mac OS X, OpenGL is the only choice for 3D acceleration, and that is also supported on Linux, so I would expect Mac games to be much easier to port to Linux than Windows DirectX games.
If you have sufficiently efficient solar panels or whatever other simple renewable resource, then that's great. Currently, I believe that solar panels are too expensive/inefficient to make that a reasonable option for most people. Energy sources like oil/coal/nuclear are much more efficient when done on a large scale. I assume the same is true of compost/garbage burning-based power plants.
Thunderbird does not touch the registry (except for one thing...), it just uses the application data folder, which is the proper place for... application data (same with every open source app I have installed on my XP machine, I believe). The one exception is the default mail app setting, which I assume is stored in the registry, but Thunderbird does not need to run. I consider use of the registry to be a bug (or at least, an unwanted feature) in a Windows program. Someone please correct me if there actually is some reason why using the registry would be a good idea.
Even simplier, this gets rid of the problem of less savy computer users needing to either carry around flash drives or remembering to e-mail docs to themselves. Now they just need a presentation app.
Uh, isn't Cedega based on the Wine project? Wine is not an emulator. It is exactly what you describe: an open (and quite incomplete) implementation of the Windows APIs, including DirectX.
I'm pretty sure that most of the human genome is unknown. Although, having the complete genome of another 100 people matched with their identities/characteristics would probably make figuring out genotype/phenotype matchings a lot easier. If you had, say, 100,000+ (which would probably be reasonable if someone develops a method cheap enough to win this X-prize), then you could probably find some very strong relations between sets of genes and characteristics of the person.
Which is probably why the GP made a distinction between music having the quality of being good and music having the quality of being "good" (i.e. on the top 20 list).
So true, I recently read a piece by Engel's from 1891 where he took a pot shot at the US for having a corrupt government with two parties that are really two sides of the same coin. It's nothing new. (It goes without saying that anything written by Engels should be taken with at least a few grains of salt.)
Ah, I found an online copy of Engel's 1891 postscript to Marx's The Civil War in France :
You mean, they did a better job in the past two elections. ;)
... or have one disk image and use it with copy-on-write, so you don't have 3 identical OS installs.