the people behind the now infamous Dream Pinball affair,
OK, I'll bite, what "now infamous Dream Pinball affair"? Gee Slashdot, this is the web and a post in HTML. Would it have been so much to ask that any such statement like this might contain a link to some past discussion about this now infamous thing that we are all supposedly in the know about? Is it too much to ask that an editor who accepts such a story either requires such strong statements to be supported or (if he's willing to do more than just accept a submission verbatim (you know what I mean, edit) put the link in?
a drastic weakness in the Internet's infrastructure...to eavesdrop on Net traffic in a way that wouldn't be simple to detect.... testified to Congress in 1998... disclosed privately to government agents how BGP could also be exploited to eavesdrop. '..... We described this to intelligence agencies and to the National Security Council, in detail.'....
Great, give the very people who want to abuse this the most the inside details, then show shock when it isn't fixed.
Let's tell it like it is: Developer Praises Complexity Of Their Own Game. I don't really know if it's a good game or not, but Slashdot could be a little less hyping in their choice of headlines for this self promotional advertisement.
That's pretty disingenuous. Writing propaganda these days?.....
So you go on to point out how dangerous it is for the people in America to shine lasers upwards and in people's eyes, but you seem to be supporting this idiot's efforts to get people to do exactly that. Or don't you think that there can be any people in those buildings looking out of windows when the crowd below shines those lasers.Don't you think the Chinese have helicopters, and that they would be present at just such events? And do you completely discount the likely hood that someone will hold the laser low so to make it harder to pinpoint them as the protester in the crowd rather than overtly hold it high over their head, and in doing so would direct it through an area that is likely to be crossed by someone else's head and eyes? It's just fine for the US government to protect us from people who do this, but it comes as a complete shock to you that this guy would be stopped by Chinese authorities for organizing people to do the same, particularly when he is a foreigner going into the country to organize political protests?
Amen to that. Here in the Land of Freedom, the good old USA, we arrest people who make signs with simple blinking LEDs. This jerk goes to China, advocates for the freedom of Tibet, and tries to get people to shine green lasers at buildings (need I point out that many people in the USA have been arrested for pointing lasers skyward as well?). Personally I hope they keep him and we never hear from him again.
Lets call this what is really is, an involuntary forced payment to one of the most evil and hated organizations in the country from many people who have absolutely no interest in downloading bad low quality music at all and never will.
for an estimated hardware revenue between $86 million and $96 million; media sales would push the total above $100M.
What in the world is this saying? Lets take a figure lower than the midpoint and call the hardware sales $90 million (although one should be able to get it closer than within ten million dollars if you have the real number sold, since Amazon sells direct and the price is well known). That would only leave about $10 million or so for media sales. Are we really saying that people who shell out all of this money for the DRM encumbered Kindles are not spending more than about 12 percent of that price for stuff to read on it? Seems like a very expensive toy to buy if you're not going to actually use it, yet that's what the numbers here seem to be claiming.
Let us not forget, the first name that the Orientals came up with for a small hand help computer was not the "Palm Pilot", and unfortunately it was caught before it ever got released, but the name was "Hand Job".
And it's not like this is only a problem going to English, we have committed some blunders, there are many stories how Pepsi's "Come alive, You're in the Pepsi Generation" translated to something in Chinese like "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead".
As long as the cops don't beat too many people too extremely for false positive behavior I can't see where this could be a problem. And Homeland Security is already working on getting some Executive Orders written up that will make it a crime to act in ways that cause false positives, so there should be no false positives in the near future (by definition they will be real positives). Problem solved.
I too am discouraged by the quality of the current generation. It's sad that things like electronics kits and American Basic Science Club have all but disappeared because there is little demand for something that requires the owner to think (with the possible exception of kits like Lego Mindstorm). But you can't completely blame the obese little slackers for not liking puzzle games when many of the puzzle games that they might see are so bad. Expecting a player to duplicate a senseless series of steps with no logic behind them is far from a real puzzle.
True puzzles are the kind of thing that give you that "Eureka" moment when you solve them. Puzzles like in the original Zork/spoiler warning/ when you finally realized that you could lower the bucket down the well and get whatever it was out that way. When you thought it through, you knew you had used reasoning to accomplish something, and you were sure that you had the solution even before you tried it. Compare that to may lame series of pointless steps passed off as puzzles; by painful trial and error a player may occasionally come across a sequence of steps needed to complete the game, but I don't really see that as solving a puzzle. Not when even after the puzzle is "solved" there is no way to look back at it and see that a smart person might have been able to figure it out.
I loved some of the early puzzle games, particularly Adventure and the MIT version of Zork. Some of the puzzles were fantastic, and you really had to submerse yourself in the world and understand it to grasp how to solve the puzzle.
But unfortunately IMHO many of the later games (including some later offerings from Infocom) copped out and instead of eloquent puzzles they offered painful trial-and-error puzzles or puzzles so obscure and obtuse that you really had to buy the hint books, call the 900 number, or otherwise "cheat" or you were not going to solve the problems. Far from wonderful puzzles, these are just crude hacks disguised as puzzles from writers who either can't or will not take the time to design graceful puzzles. To come up with an absurd series of idiotic steps that a player must somehow recreate to accomplish the goal, with no logic behind doing these either in the real world or in the game world other than that's what the author has decided you must do, is hardly a valid puzzle. It's just an ego trip for the author and the reason for the decline in supposed puzzle games. And as at least one commenter here pointed out, there are still some good puzzle games, such as last year's Portal.
OK, I've RTFA. I've read the current comments here as far as they go when I start to write this. I'm still lacking understanding of what this is.
I've been using the free VMware player on-and-off for personal use. It works pretty well for what I've done with it (although sometimes the virtual machines get in a state where they refuse to start and I have to revert to a backup copy). I'm not able to find from the article or discussion here just what this brings to the table (or doesn't bring to the table) that the VMWare player doesn't (or does). Can anyone give a simple feature oriented breakdown of the various VMWare products (in particular the free ones)? A contrast to Microsoft and other offerings would also be interesting, although I expect I'll stick with some form of VMWare unless I learn something really amazing there.
If it matters I run VMware on dual core AMD2 processors that have the hardware visualization support.
Yea, old news, I saw all of the reports yesterday. But they never mentioned if the math in this study was done by a boy or a girl, and if it was by a girl it might have been bad math.
More on point, I would be interested in knowing what agenda the people who did this study were operating under. While it may well be a valid result, it also just might be the politically correct answer that someone wanted to get, and anyone who questions it will be labeled sexist (or even modded down if they do it on Slashdot).
Sure, it's bad news and yet another example of the sheer....
Boy, another editing mistake by the/. editors, they let the word "bad" slip through when the proper word was "good". A DRM based service dies. Anyone foolish enough to have bought DRM encumbered products gets punished, those who priated the music can continue to enjoy their copy. All is right with the world.
Today the Space Agency disputed Dr Edgar Mitchell claims that aliens exist, pointing out that for years he has claimed that he walked on the moon, when in fact the moon landings were all staged. "The visual evidence that we staged these "moon landings" is overwhelming, or at least what little of it still remains (we "lost" a lot of it, and that hardly could happen with any real lunar records), and this clearly shows that Dr Mitchell is a fraudster who cannot be trusted", they said.
Dr Mitchell must be lying, because I know my government would never lie to me.
Among their discoveries: Word and auto-saves the contents of encrypted files to the unencrypted portions of your disk,...
If you're like me (meaning that you pay attention to what you read), you may be wondering what in the world "Word and auto-saves" means. I wondered so much I even followed the link, and saw that the omitted term was Google Desktop, omitted because of very sloppy cut and paste of the article.
If the copy of a Game in RAM where it needs to be (at least in part) is somehow an illegal copy, then isn't the copy on hard disk also? Perhaps even opening the box will soon become illegal, as it could be taken as a sign of criminal intent.
I guess Blizzard is feeling real good about themselves for winning this suit. And I feel strongly that there should be a consumer backlash about the way that they did it.
Years ago I wrote an adventure type game for the 8 bit North Star Horizon. Very few copies were ever distributed. I was rather surprised years later when I move to another state, logged into a public BBS (this was pre-Internet) and found that the game was running as an option on that BBS. I contacted the sysop and introduced myself. And I ended up making a lot of changes to the code, streamlining it and expanding the game. In the process, one of the things that I did was to simply log all of the things that players typed in that the parser rejected. That allowed me to adjust the game for a few things that I had not expected users to try, and even spot a few repeated spelling errors, so that the game could give out spelling advice.
Echoing through the cave, you hear a voice in the distance call out "I before E except after C".
While the tone of the/. post comes across as thinking this is funny, the actual truth is that this may well impact some oem vendors in a serious way. For all of it's faults, Win3.1 was far more stable than Win 95, 98, WIN me or any later version. I personally worked on mission critical systems that ran 24/7, never needing to be shutdown (Heck, usually the only time I would have to deal with our old Novell file servers was when the daylight savings time changes took effect, and if that had been taken care of at the application level rather than the system level they may have run for years without human contact). We had a number of DOS and even Win 3.1 systems that sat there cranking out the product day after day. The programmer who did the 3.1 application was a true craftsman, he took the time to track down every memory leak in his code and correct it, and those systems were quite capable for running indefinitely without ever going down.
Contrast that to Win95. When it was discovered that there was a serious bug in Win95 that would crash the system after 40 days of operation, the reaction in many places, including here on Slashdot, was "You mean there are people who have actually kept Win95 running for 40 days?" I doubt that we will ever see products from Microsoft again that had the stability required for process control applications that existed in DOS and Win3.1 .
Of course, If they need it, many OEMs will simply keep shipping Win3.1 solutions, just not pay Microsoft. They may be putting themselves at quite a risk, but it sure would be an interesting lawsuit to see get to court. I would love to see how Microsoft reacts to the "We had to pirate the software to keep our company running and it's workers employed, because the newer Microsoft software is such crap" defense. Likely Microsoft would not, and would drop the suit.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I'll bite, what "now infamous Dream Pinball affair"? Gee Slashdot, this is the web and a post in HTML. Would it have been so much to ask that any such statement like this might contain a link to some past discussion about this now infamous thing that we are all supposedly in the know about? Is it too much to ask that an editor who accepts such a story either requires such strong statements to be supported or (if he's willing to do more than just accept a submission verbatim (you know what I mean, edit) put the link in?
Great, give the very people who want to abuse this the most the inside details, then show shock when it isn't fixed.
Let's tell it like it is: Developer Praises Complexity Of Their Own Game. I don't really know if it's a good game or not, but Slashdot could be a little less hyping in their choice of headlines for this self promotional advertisement.
So you go on to point out how dangerous it is for the people in America to shine lasers upwards and in people's eyes, but you seem to be supporting this idiot's efforts to get people to do exactly that. Or don't you think that there can be any people in those buildings looking out of windows when the crowd below shines those lasers.Don't you think the Chinese have helicopters, and that they would be present at just such events? And do you completely discount the likely hood that someone will hold the laser low so to make it harder to pinpoint them as the protester in the crowd rather than overtly hold it high over their head, and in doing so would direct it through an area that is likely to be crossed by someone else's head and eyes? It's just fine for the US government to protect us from people who do this, but it comes as a complete shock to you that this guy would be stopped by Chinese authorities for organizing people to do the same, particularly when he is a foreigner going into the country to organize political protests?
Amen to that. Here in the Land of Freedom, the good old USA, we arrest people who make signs with simple blinking LEDs. This jerk goes to China, advocates for the freedom of Tibet, and tries to get people to shine green lasers at buildings (need I point out that many people in the USA have been arrested for pointing lasers skyward as well?). Personally I hope they keep him and we never hear from him again.
Lets call this what is really is, an involuntary forced payment to one of the most evil and hated organizations in the country from many people who have absolutely no interest in downloading bad low quality music at all and never will.
So it's One Laptop Per Child, but Only One Laptop for an entire development team. Hardly seems right.
for an estimated hardware revenue between $86 million and $96 million; media sales would push the total above $100M. What in the world is this saying? Lets take a figure lower than the midpoint and call the hardware sales $90 million (although one should be able to get it closer than within ten million dollars if you have the real number sold, since Amazon sells direct and the price is well known). That would only leave about $10 million or so for media sales. Are we really saying that people who shell out all of this money for the DRM encumbered Kindles are not spending more than about 12 percent of that price for stuff to read on it? Seems like a very expensive toy to buy if you're not going to actually use it, yet that's what the numbers here seem to be claiming.
And it's not like this is only a problem going to English, we have committed some blunders, there are many stories how Pepsi's "Come alive, You're in the Pepsi Generation" translated to something in Chinese like "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead".
Right, as in the song "USA the Beautiful", right Oh Wise One?
And you don't think that will soon be made illegal? You sure sound like a terrorist to me, to Gitmo with you!
As long as the cops don't beat too many people too extremely for false positive behavior I can't see where this could be a problem. And Homeland Security is already working on getting some Executive Orders written up that will make it a crime to act in ways that cause false positives, so there should be no false positives in the near future (by definition they will be real positives). Problem solved.
Thanks
True puzzles are the kind of thing that give you that "Eureka" moment when you solve them. Puzzles like in the original Zork /spoiler warning/ when you finally realized that you could lower the bucket down the well and get whatever it was out that way. When you thought it through, you knew you had used reasoning to accomplish something, and you were sure that you had the solution even before you tried it. Compare that to may lame series of pointless steps passed off as puzzles; by painful trial and error a player may occasionally come across a sequence of steps needed to complete the game, but I don't really see that as solving a puzzle. Not when even after the puzzle is "solved" there is no way to look back at it and see that a smart person might have been able to figure it out.
But unfortunately IMHO many of the later games (including some later offerings from Infocom) copped out and instead of eloquent puzzles they offered painful trial-and-error puzzles or puzzles so obscure and obtuse that you really had to buy the hint books, call the 900 number, or otherwise "cheat" or you were not going to solve the problems. Far from wonderful puzzles, these are just crude hacks disguised as puzzles from writers who either can't or will not take the time to design graceful puzzles. To come up with an absurd series of idiotic steps that a player must somehow recreate to accomplish the goal, with no logic behind doing these either in the real world or in the game world other than that's what the author has decided you must do, is hardly a valid puzzle. It's just an ego trip for the author and the reason for the decline in supposed puzzle games. And as at least one commenter here pointed out, there are still some good puzzle games, such as last year's Portal.
I've been using the free VMware player on-and-off for personal use. It works pretty well for what I've done with it (although sometimes the virtual machines get in a state where they refuse to start and I have to revert to a backup copy). I'm not able to find from the article or discussion here just what this brings to the table (or doesn't bring to the table) that the VMWare player doesn't (or does). Can anyone give a simple feature oriented breakdown of the various VMWare products (in particular the free ones)? A contrast to Microsoft and other offerings would also be interesting, although I expect I'll stick with some form of VMWare unless I learn something really amazing there.
If it matters I run VMware on dual core AMD2 processors that have the hardware visualization support.
More on point, I would be interested in knowing what agenda the people who did this study were operating under. While it may well be a valid result, it also just might be the politically correct answer that someone wanted to get, and anyone who questions it will be labeled sexist (or even modded down if they do it on Slashdot).
Boy, another editing mistake by the /. editors, they let the word "bad" slip through when the proper word was "good". A DRM based service dies. Anyone foolish enough to have bought DRM encumbered products gets punished, those who priated the music can continue to enjoy their copy. All is right with the world.
Dr Mitchell must be lying, because I know my government would never lie to me.
Oh come on, if aliens really existed, how could the government keep it secret? Surely someone would get the word out that they exist. Oh, wait .....
If you're like me (meaning that you pay attention to what you read), you may be wondering what in the world "Word and auto-saves" means. I wondered so much I even followed the link, and saw that the omitted term was Google Desktop, omitted because of very sloppy cut and paste of the article.
trichard writes tips a column on the editorial page at ... the Wall Street Journal
So the TLA MSM now means WSJ? OMG! WTF!
I guess Blizzard is feeling real good about themselves for winning this suit. And I feel strongly that there should be a consumer backlash about the way that they did it.
Echoing through the cave, you hear a voice in the distance call out "I before E except after C".
Contrast that to Win95. When it was discovered that there was a serious bug in Win95 that would crash the system after 40 days of operation, the reaction in many places, including here on Slashdot, was "You mean there are people who have actually kept Win95 running for 40 days?" I doubt that we will ever see products from Microsoft again that had the stability required for process control applications that existed in DOS and Win3.1 .
Of course, If they need it, many OEMs will simply keep shipping Win3.1 solutions, just not pay Microsoft. They may be putting themselves at quite a risk, but it sure would be an interesting lawsuit to see get to court. I would love to see how Microsoft reacts to the "We had to pirate the software to keep our company running and it's workers employed, because the newer Microsoft software is such crap" defense. Likely Microsoft would not, and would drop the suit.