And Choplifter - the original 'helicopter' game in my personal archive of 'games I played'.
For the life of me, I still can't get over the thought of playing video games on a green-screen monochrome monitor. Days better left remembered, and left un-relived.
Played a gazillion hours of basic and first edition when I was younger. Read through the 2nd Ed and didn't particularly care for them, stuck to first ed AD&D. Flipped through the 3rd Ed rulebooks when they came out, closed them, put them back on the shelf and haven't played since.
Jeez. Listen to you two... Lest we forget - Lord of the Rings was a MOVIE, based on a BOOK. Hollywood makes a fictional movie based on a loose interpretation of a fictional book. Get it - fiction. Not real. Movies are not real. Books by Tolkien are not real. Neither of those has any bearing whatsoever in the real world of facts, dungeons, and dragons.
(grumble mumble god damn sword swinging wizards grumble mumble)
Disclaimer - as someone that played since the Blue Box came out, with its low-impact dice that rounded off after a few hours of gaming and two books with hand-drawn pictures in them, by Gary Gygax, and had to save up the money to buy the original DM's Guide months after it finally hit the stores - yea, I played a gazillion hours of first and second edition when I was younger. Read through the 3rd Ed rulebooks when they came out, closed them, put them back on the shelf and haven't played since.
Well, that and right now even premium memory is crazy cheap - you can pick up 2G sticks of Kingston for $40 apiece at NewEgg, when two or three years ago we were paying twice the money for a fourth of the memory (like $80 for 512M). All of a sudden big boxes become viable options, upgrading to 8G of quality memory for less than $200.
I just have to ask - if the only purpose of that OS (and thus, presumably a machine running it) is to be a 'file server on a home network' - what's the difference between it and say... running Windows XP (or even 2000) Professional and setting up a massive drive as a shared file system?
Besides the whole 'well those other OS's don't corrupt your files' thing - but any other reason or benefit to using WHS instead of XP/2000 Pro?
Cut back on the caffeine. A gram a day is a bit much. Don't ask how I know this. And if you want to really make a difference - try going ethanol free for a week. Eat dinner at least three hours before going to sleep, and during the two hours before bed drink three or four full glasses of water. Pee before climbing into bed. Go to bed eight and a half hours before you need to wake up, so you fall asleep over the next 30 minutes and still get eight solid hours of sleep.
I'm not saying I do this all the time, but when I do do it I'm in a lot better shape the next day.
Naw - let's not. Some clown at the clock company would start shaving seconds off each minute, then shaving minutes off each hour - then they would rename them Mebiseconds and Mebinutes and Gibihours - and then I'd have to kill one of those fuckers too (details in.sig).
That's nothing. My keyboard has a nifty 'password storage' integrated system - the post-it note on the underside where I write down my passwords. I'm surprised that keyboards don't just come from the factory with a white square piece of paper on them that says 'Put passwords here.'
Mebibytes didn't exist in 1982. Your 1982-vintage has 16 Megs (also known as megabytes) of RAM. And that's a pretty serious box, if it had 16 Megs back in 1982.
(Glonoinha looks around for witnesses)... Hey, let's go talk about MiB vs MB over here in this dark alley, where nobody else can see...
And yes, I played with Vista about 60 seconds, reformatted the drive and am back on XP Pro. And openSuSE 10.1.
Why the fuck should 1920x1080 content be 'difficult to access on a computer', were it not for the glorious DRM? It shouldn't. But it is. And THAT is the problem with DRM. Attitudes of people that think that full motion video at 1920x1080 is a gift from God that should both be cherished and protected, believing that watching full motion video at that resolution is a privilege, not a right.
It isn't 'extra nice'. It's 'put your dick in a meat-grinder' evil.
Actually I run XP on my Windows boxes for exactly one reason : as of about three years ago, Win2K didn't play nice with Hyperthreaded chips. Evidently the no-op spinner would freak out on HT chips making utilization go crazy, or something - I don't remember the details. XP Pro cooperated nicely with Intel Hyperthreaded CPUs, so I decided up upgrade.
Since then I occasionally go back to a Win2K box and have issues getting USB 2.0 to work (works fine with 1.1, but that's a really, really slow implementation compared to high speed 2.0) but if I'm on a single CPU machine and don't have any high speed USB devices I need to drive - it's a flying system on hardware that would seriously underperform on XP (and would choke and die on Vista.)
The NSA can 'presumably' crack 56-bit encryption quickly? Dude, it's seven bytes. Here is what a seven byte key looks like : ABCDEF - that's it, seven characters. 256 values per character. Given sufficient encrypted data and even a smidgen of insight into what some of the data contains (ie, the directory structure on a Windows box generally has a lot of similar files in similar places) I can crack 56-bit on my home system in a few days. Granted my home system is six machines consisting of about 26GHz spread across 11 CPUs sharing 9 Gigs of memory, connected by a GigE backbone, but still - in the bigger scheme of things my system isn't really considered that powerful anymore (and I'm actually considering an upgrade.)
Yea, NSA cuts through 56-bit crypto like a puppy on a pork-chop.
Just a thought - instead of sending $200 worth of bagged (ready to cook / eat) rice per child, send $200 worth of whatever kind of crop seed would grow where they live and teach them to grow it. And I'm not talking the genetically mangled terminator seeds (IMHO those are the work of the devil, one sure way to keep an entire race of people enslaved) - just regular ol' seeds as nature made them. Show them how to cordon off sections of land, keep out the bunnies (regular bunnies or jungle bunnies, depending on where they live) and help them create a sustainable lifestyle. It's pretty 18th century, but folks prospered enough in the 18th century to evolve into the 19th century pioneers that evolved into the 20th century inventors that put a man on the moon.
There is no reason, absolutely, positively ZERO reason to have swaths of people starving in the streets, if you live in a country with a gazillion acres of arable land and a few rivers as a reliable water supply. You simply can't write enough Javascript apps to create the kind of infrastructure needed to support a village, supply them with water and food and warmth and livestock, all fundamental to survival at the base level. Get THAT one figured out, and then you are ready to progress to level two. Laptops are about level 10, and until you have the first nine levels dialed in they are pretty well useless (or worse yet, an attractive nuisance.)
The way I understood it, the presence of WLANs and whether or not they were encrypted were all it used, not the actual data (or scrambled data if encrypted) - so the game behaves one way at home, behaves slightly different at your friend's house, and could potentially do crazy things if you played it while riding a bus downtown (signals changing all the time.) Then again I didn't RTFA.
All I know is that my car sees a few spectrums that I can't see (RADAR, GPS, LASER detection, temperature, AM/FM) and interprets those / reports them back to me. If there was a way it could see WLAN signals (strength, encryption, direction, etc) and report back to me on the screen with all the other stuff - well that would be spiffy. Useless, mostly, but still pretty spiffy. Assuming the signals were fairly static, though, they could be another tool to assist with navigation through strange areas (like aircraft static beacons, ILS or something?) - just thinking out of the box. The game just shows that the signals are out there, that we can see them if we want, and that they have other uses than originally intended.
If you base it off wifi, then you could potentially make things less random.
And what if that was the intent? As the game absorbs and integrates environmental factors from the user's environment, it offers a minute but significant blur at the subconscious between game and reality. Real world environment isn't random. It is slowly changing, but those changes are predictable. What if the real-world weather could be reflected in a flight sim, making the weather in the sim match the weather outside the user's house - when it is raining outside his window, it is raining on his cockpit - and when it is sunny outside his windows, it is sunny outside his plane (and yes, MS Flight Sim does exactly this, checking for weather updates in 15 minute increments.) The first time it is just concidence. The second time it is funny. The tenth time in a row, it's uncanny and blurs the division between game and reality.
You are listening, but you're not hearing. That's the difference (obscure reference : white people can listen to Jimmy Hendrix, but they aren't hearing Jimmy.)
This is next-generation, it's evolution towards an integration of extended perception into an environment most people are only vaguely aware exists. You can see a rainbow right now, red orange yellow green blue purple - guess what, there are other colors of light on either edge that you don't know exist, because you can't see them and never thought to look for them - ultraviolet and infrared. They're there, and nobody knows it. The world through which you walk is CHOCK FULL of new and old information that wasn't even there (or just couldn't be seen) four decades ago, telling you dozens of things about the world you live in - but you don't even know they are there. Your exact location on the planet, plus or minus three meters, is something you can tell (with help of a GPS) just by seeing the relative strengths electromagnetic signals from three satellites in the sky. Also the speed and direction you are traveling. Your relative distance to a motion sensing device and the nature of that device (door that automagically opens when people walk up indicates commercial building, intermittent Ka band that increases in strength when you approach an overpass or large street sign but goes away when you pass it indicates a cop car behind you, etc.) Open / closed wifi stations. You can tell whether or not a vehicle is running by looking at a heat signature from hundreds of feet away using thermal imaging.
The DS implementation is simply proof of concept of a much larger picture, opening the door to people seeing into light spectrums that were previously closed.
You're listening to the story, and you don't see the benefit. When this makes sense to you - then you're hearing the story.
Well then you're in luck. I imagine these things being DIRT CHEAP in less than a year, because nobody in their right mind would buy them as is. I wouldn't take one if they gave it to me (well I would, but only to give to you so you could hack it up for practice.)
The LAST thing I need when buying hardware is to have a fucking piece of HARDWARE deciding what files it will / will not hold. Hardware is hardware - do what I tell you to do, do it reliably and without questioning my motives, intent, or desires.
This is tantamount to a car that won't turn left because the onboard GPS doesn't think there's a road there - well guess what, I'm not driving to work by committee. When it comes to hardware, when I say 'jump' your ONLY question better be 'how high?'
The important thing to remember is : I'm going to forget ~why~ I don't buy Western Digital hardware long before I forget that I ~don't~ buy Western Digital hardware. A year or now it will simply be 'I don't remember why, but there's no fucking way I would buy a WD drive.'
Honestly if you are close enough to employ this technique (including operating the kind of hardware necessary to do this undeniably cool hack) then you are close enough to shoulder surf long enough to get the guy's password. Or wait for him to go to lunch, flip over his keyboard and read his password from the post-it note on the back-side of his keyboard. Or even just start typing, because most people don't even bother to lock their machine before walking away for lunch.
It is a cool, if mildly impractical hack - but given that my keyboard receiver is less than a meter from my keyboard and I STILL have occasional connection issues - I doubt it is going to be used against my workstation anytime soon.
Apache sports the M230 Chain Gun, which is a single barrel chain-fed air-cooled 30mm cannon, connected to the Pilot's / CPG's helmet-mounted monocle sighting device so it points where he looks. The point of impact is updated via computers with laser range finders, millimeter wave radar, TADS equipment, and even has some sort of friend / foe identification built into the computer (doesn't work on humans, but works pretty well on tanks / vehicles).
The first burst of rounds go exactly where they are intended to go, and they do a TON of damage.
Maybe you are thinking of the Cobra, which uses a three barrel rotary 20mm cannon, which needs to spin up to speed and uses some sort of manual aiming mechanism - I could see the first few rounds going in random directions before the gunner got things dialed in. The Apache's gun, however, is something somebody finally got right.
So the guy had a small burn in his chest, and was all busted up inside?
Super-cool (liquid nitrogen style) a twelve-gauge slug bullet-mold full of water, get ice-slug. Put ice-bullet in 12-gauge shell on top of the black-powder and primer. Put in shotgun. Shoot this guy at point blank range, maybe even shoot him through his cell phone.
Burn marks on the dead body, shattered rib/spine, no bullet (it melts pretty quick.) Blame it on the cell phone.
"256-bit encryption ought to be strong enough for anybody." - Glonoinha '07
Some of you laugh because you think it is true. Some of you laugh because you think it is false. Some laugh because you remember BillG saying the same thing about 640k. And very few of you laugh because you know what I know, but none of us will actually admit it.
Slashdot Mirror
And Choplifter - the original 'helicopter' game in my personal archive of 'games I played'.
For the life of me, I still can't get over the thought of playing video games on a green-screen monochrome monitor. Days better left remembered, and left un-relived.
Real programmers don't write catch blocks.
In the words of my master,
Do or do not.
There is no try.
Damn lack of preview on my part.
Played a gazillion hours of basic and first edition when I was younger. Read through the 2nd Ed and didn't particularly care for them, stuck to first ed AD&D. Flipped through the 3rd Ed rulebooks when they came out, closed them, put them back on the shelf and haven't played since.
Jeez. Listen to you two ...
Lest we forget - Lord of the Rings was a MOVIE, based on a BOOK. Hollywood makes a fictional movie based on a loose interpretation of a fictional book.
Get it - fiction. Not real. Movies are not real. Books by Tolkien are not real.
Neither of those has any bearing whatsoever in the real world of facts, dungeons, and dragons.
(grumble mumble god damn sword swinging wizards grumble mumble)
Disclaimer - as someone that played since the Blue Box came out, with its low-impact dice that rounded off after a few hours of gaming and two books with hand-drawn pictures in them, by Gary Gygax, and had to save up the money to buy the original DM's Guide months after it finally hit the stores - yea, I played a gazillion hours of first and second edition when I was younger. Read through the 3rd Ed rulebooks when they came out, closed them, put them back on the shelf and haven't played since.
Well, that and right now even premium memory is crazy cheap - you can pick up 2G sticks of Kingston for $40 apiece at NewEgg, when two or three years ago we were paying twice the money for a fourth of the memory (like $80 for 512M). All of a sudden big boxes become viable options, upgrading to 8G of quality memory for less than $200.
I just have to ask - if the only purpose of that OS (and thus, presumably a machine running it) is to be a 'file server on a home network' - what's the difference between it and say ... running Windows XP (or even 2000) Professional and setting up a massive drive as a shared file system?
Besides the whole 'well those other OS's don't corrupt your files' thing - but any other reason or benefit to using WHS instead of XP/2000 Pro?
Cut back on the caffeine. A gram a day is a bit much. Don't ask how I know this.
And if you want to really make a difference - try going ethanol free for a week. Eat dinner at least three hours before going to sleep, and during the two hours before bed drink three or four full glasses of water. Pee before climbing into bed. Go to bed eight and a half hours before you need to wake up, so you fall asleep over the next 30 minutes and still get eight solid hours of sleep.
I'm not saying I do this all the time, but when I do do it I'm in a lot better shape the next day.
Granted, Slashdotting a server wasn't much of a threat back then - what with all twelve of you hitting the poor server at the time.
Naw - let's not. .sig).
Some clown at the clock company would start shaving seconds off each minute, then shaving minutes off each hour - then they would rename them Mebiseconds and Mebinutes and Gibihours - and then I'd have to kill one of those fuckers too (details in
That's nothing. My keyboard has a nifty 'password storage' integrated system - the post-it note on the underside where I write down my passwords.
I'm surprised that keyboards don't just come from the factory with a white square piece of paper on them that says 'Put passwords here.'
Mebibytes didn't exist in 1982. Your 1982-vintage has 16 Megs (also known as megabytes) of RAM.
... Hey, let's go talk about MiB vs MB over here in this dark alley, where nobody else can see ...
And that's a pretty serious box, if it had 16 Megs back in 1982.
(Glonoinha looks around for witnesses)
And yes, I played with Vista about 60 seconds, reformatted the drive and am back on XP Pro. And openSuSE 10.1.
Why the fuck should 1920x1080 content be 'difficult to access on a computer', were it not for the glorious DRM?
It shouldn't. But it is. And THAT is the problem with DRM. Attitudes of people that think that full motion video at 1920x1080 is a gift from God that should both be cherished and protected, believing that watching full motion video at that resolution is a privilege, not a right.
It isn't 'extra nice'. It's 'put your dick in a meat-grinder' evil.
Actually I run XP on my Windows boxes for exactly one reason : as of about three years ago, Win2K didn't play nice with Hyperthreaded chips. Evidently the no-op spinner would freak out on HT chips making utilization go crazy, or something - I don't remember the details. XP Pro cooperated nicely with Intel Hyperthreaded CPUs, so I decided up upgrade.
Since then I occasionally go back to a Win2K box and have issues getting USB 2.0 to work (works fine with 1.1, but that's a really, really slow implementation compared to high speed 2.0) but if I'm on a single CPU machine and don't have any high speed USB devices I need to drive - it's a flying system on hardware that would seriously underperform on XP (and would choke and die on Vista.)
The NSA can 'presumably' crack 56-bit encryption quickly?
Dude, it's seven bytes. Here is what a seven byte key looks like : ABCDEF - that's it, seven characters. 256 values per character.
Given sufficient encrypted data and even a smidgen of insight into what some of the data contains (ie, the directory structure on a Windows box generally has a lot of similar files in similar places) I can crack 56-bit on my home system in a few days. Granted my home system is six machines consisting of about 26GHz spread across 11 CPUs sharing 9 Gigs of memory, connected by a GigE backbone, but still - in the bigger scheme of things my system isn't really considered that powerful anymore (and I'm actually considering an upgrade.)
Yea, NSA cuts through 56-bit crypto like a puppy on a pork-chop.
Just a thought - instead of sending $200 worth of bagged (ready to cook / eat) rice per child, send $200 worth of whatever kind of crop seed would grow where they live and teach them to grow it. And I'm not talking the genetically mangled terminator seeds (IMHO those are the work of the devil, one sure way to keep an entire race of people enslaved) - just regular ol' seeds as nature made them. Show them how to cordon off sections of land, keep out the bunnies (regular bunnies or jungle bunnies, depending on where they live) and help them create a sustainable lifestyle. It's pretty 18th century, but folks prospered enough in the 18th century to evolve into the 19th century pioneers that evolved into the 20th century inventors that put a man on the moon.
There is no reason, absolutely, positively ZERO reason to have swaths of people starving in the streets, if you live in a country with a gazillion acres of arable land and a few rivers as a reliable water supply. You simply can't write enough Javascript apps to create the kind of infrastructure needed to support a village, supply them with water and food and warmth and livestock, all fundamental to survival at the base level. Get THAT one figured out, and then you are ready to progress to level two. Laptops are about level 10, and until you have the first nine levels dialed in they are pretty well useless (or worse yet, an attractive nuisance.)
The way I understood it, the presence of WLANs and whether or not they were encrypted were all it used, not the actual data (or scrambled data if encrypted) - so the game behaves one way at home, behaves slightly different at your friend's house, and could potentially do crazy things if you played it while riding a bus downtown (signals changing all the time.) Then again I didn't RTFA.
All I know is that my car sees a few spectrums that I can't see (RADAR, GPS, LASER detection, temperature, AM/FM) and interprets those / reports them back to me. If there was a way it could see WLAN signals (strength, encryption, direction, etc) and report back to me on the screen with all the other stuff - well that would be spiffy. Useless, mostly, but still pretty spiffy. Assuming the signals were fairly static, though, they could be another tool to assist with navigation through strange areas (like aircraft static beacons, ILS or something?) - just thinking out of the box. The game just shows that the signals are out there, that we can see them if we want, and that they have other uses than originally intended.
If you base it off wifi, then you could potentially make things less random.
And what if that was the intent? As the game absorbs and integrates environmental factors from the user's environment, it offers a minute but significant blur at the subconscious between game and reality. Real world environment isn't random. It is slowly changing, but those changes are predictable. What if the real-world weather could be reflected in a flight sim, making the weather in the sim match the weather outside the user's house - when it is raining outside his window, it is raining on his cockpit - and when it is sunny outside his windows, it is sunny outside his plane (and yes, MS Flight Sim does exactly this, checking for weather updates in 15 minute increments.) The first time it is just concidence. The second time it is funny. The tenth time in a row, it's uncanny and blurs the division between game and reality.
You are listening, but you're not hearing. That's the difference (obscure reference : white people can listen to Jimmy Hendrix, but they aren't hearing Jimmy.)
This is next-generation, it's evolution towards an integration of extended perception into an environment most people are only vaguely aware exists. You can see a rainbow right now, red orange yellow green blue purple - guess what, there are other colors of light on either edge that you don't know exist, because you can't see them and never thought to look for them - ultraviolet and infrared. They're there, and nobody knows it. The world through which you walk is CHOCK FULL of new and old information that wasn't even there (or just couldn't be seen) four decades ago, telling you dozens of things about the world you live in - but you don't even know they are there. Your exact location on the planet, plus or minus three meters, is something you can tell (with help of a GPS) just by seeing the relative strengths electromagnetic signals from three satellites in the sky. Also the speed and direction you are traveling. Your relative distance to a motion sensing device and the nature of that device (door that automagically opens when people walk up indicates commercial building, intermittent Ka band that increases in strength when you approach an overpass or large street sign but goes away when you pass it indicates a cop car behind you, etc.) Open / closed wifi stations. You can tell whether or not a vehicle is running by looking at a heat signature from hundreds of feet away using thermal imaging.
The DS implementation is simply proof of concept of a much larger picture, opening the door to people seeing into light spectrums that were previously closed.
You're listening to the story, and you don't see the benefit. When this makes sense to you - then you're hearing the story.
Well then you're in luck. I imagine these things being DIRT CHEAP in less than a year, because nobody in their right mind would buy them as is. I wouldn't take one if they gave it to me (well I would, but only to give to you so you could hack it up for practice.)
Actually that's about the just of it.
The LAST thing I need when buying hardware is to have a fucking piece of HARDWARE deciding what files it will / will not hold. Hardware is hardware - do what I tell you to do, do it reliably and without questioning my motives, intent, or desires.
This is tantamount to a car that won't turn left because the onboard GPS doesn't think there's a road there - well guess what, I'm not driving to work by committee. When it comes to hardware, when I say 'jump' your ONLY question better be 'how high?'
The important thing to remember is : I'm going to forget ~why~ I don't buy Western Digital hardware long before I forget that I ~don't~ buy Western Digital hardware. A year or now it will simply be 'I don't remember why, but there's no fucking way I would buy a WD drive.'
This.
Honestly if you are close enough to employ this technique (including operating the kind of hardware necessary to do this undeniably cool hack) then you are close enough to shoulder surf long enough to get the guy's password. Or wait for him to go to lunch, flip over his keyboard and read his password from the post-it note on the back-side of his keyboard. Or even just start typing, because most people don't even bother to lock their machine before walking away for lunch.
It is a cool, if mildly impractical hack - but given that my keyboard receiver is less than a meter from my keyboard and I STILL have occasional connection issues - I doubt it is going to be used against my workstation anytime soon.
He uses a sound card as part of the decryption mechanism - use a ^G instead (so he can hear it go 'ding').
Apache sports the M230 Chain Gun, which is a single barrel chain-fed air-cooled 30mm cannon, connected to the Pilot's / CPG's helmet-mounted monocle sighting device so it points where he looks. The point of impact is updated via computers with laser range finders, millimeter wave radar, TADS equipment, and even has some sort of friend / foe identification built into the computer (doesn't work on humans, but works pretty well on tanks / vehicles).
The first burst of rounds go exactly where they are intended to go, and they do a TON of damage.
Maybe you are thinking of the Cobra, which uses a three barrel rotary 20mm cannon, which needs to spin up to speed and uses some sort of manual aiming mechanism - I could see the first few rounds going in random directions before the gunner got things dialed in. The Apache's gun, however, is something somebody finally got right.
So the guy had a small burn in his chest, and was all busted up inside?
Super-cool (liquid nitrogen style) a twelve-gauge slug bullet-mold full of water, get ice-slug.
Put ice-bullet in 12-gauge shell on top of the black-powder and primer. Put in shotgun. Shoot this guy at point blank range, maybe even shoot him through his cell phone.
Burn marks on the dead body, shattered rib/spine, no bullet (it melts pretty quick.)
Blame it on the cell phone.
(And yes, I'm for hire.)
"256-bit encryption ought to be strong enough for anybody." - Glonoinha '07
Some of you laugh because you think it is true.
Some of you laugh because you think it is false.
Some laugh because you remember BillG saying the same thing about 640k.
And very few of you laugh because you know what I know, but none of us will actually admit it.