Yeah but it's not like we can edit the hosts file on the PS3 now is it? I know I know this is slashdot, I should have some kind of linux based router but I don't, I have a standard one built in to my Billion ADSL modem, it's pretty powerful too:/ it does what I need.
This move by Sony is pretty stupid to be honest, I've paid for this game, I don't like or support ad driven games which aren't free, not happy.
You are right, the Volvo S80 is particularly sickening. How difficult is it to put these things on LPG or teach peeople to drive more sensibly (that alone can save 15% in fuel costs)
Then there is the wasted parts aspect, what the hell, this is simply raising the cost of used cars, I am truely in shock at this, it's absoloutely incredibly wasteful, I've never heard of such a preposterous thing.
I got rid of my Wii because I like games with some depth and not just waggling a controller around like an idiot. Not everyone is a gen y hipster having parties over at their house every night! That console is mostly useless for single player gamers (oh and it looked like crap on my HDTV)
I can give you several reasons why people think it's fine to do! Firstly we're geeks here, denying that 80% of us download TV and movies would be stupidity, I'm sure we've all been to astalavista for a crack now and then too.
As I get older I do less of the dodgy stuff but for example, I 'steal' TV shows from the US all the time, because they don't air here at all, or at sensible times or within months of them airing in the US. Now sure, that's a grey area to some you might say but the question then becomes, what is, or is not illegal? Me downloading those shows is most likely illegal but what if I really am going to buy the DVD? What if it's going to air on TV in 5 weeks here anyhow, sadly at 11pm though?
There's all kinds of complications here, what about someone who comes over to your house during a lan party, he boots his machine up and his torrent client slaps your connection? Now that may or may not be feasable, I think it's possible, in a worse case scenario - BAM there goes one of your strikes, you've only got 3 of them and accidents do happen. Open wifi is the most obvious one, accidental click the list goes on. How do I even know the people claiming "I was the one who did it!" have the right information?
How's this, a little far fetched but possible. I'm on ADSL right - so my ip address changes now and then. Some dodgy investigator in the states says he sees my ip at 3:00am downloading stuff and forwards this to his contact in Australia. this contact in Australia then contacts the ISP and says "this ip was stealing at 03:00am!" My ISP look up the logs, my up comes up, bam a letter comes out to me and I get in trouble for 'stealing'
Problem is the guy investigating is in a different timezone, my ip could have changed, not out of the realms of possibility at least. This is not something the government should be worrying themselves with, it's just going to cause problems
Ok this is,....fairly close to on topic, sorry to diverge slightly.
We really really need to take a much better look at online video playback within Firefox, browsers in general and flash. More and more video is being presented in a window via flash, it's taken over where ASX / ASF / Mov / MPG once dominated for better and for worse. Flash (and or ALL internet video playback!) needs several changes.
Firstly, I need more goddamn control over it, I'm sick of having to manually buffer! I want to click a video and I want it to pre-stream at least 10 or 15 seconds and then start playing, if this means delays, FINE but I'm tired of deliberately playing a video, then pressing pause to wait for it and tabbing off somewhere else for 5 minutes. Ultimately we need a much better 'control panel' for embedded flash video, since it's used so often now.
Secondly: Tab control, tab focus and application focus SERIOUSLY needs looking at! I can not use control tab, control shift tab, control page up etc with Firefox on some sites with embedded flash video, the player plugin steals focus of my keyboard input and it's bloody infuriating as I navigate with the keyboard constantly, I can control tab away from this tab, right now to Gmail, then back - I can do it for 90% of my tabs but hit a flash video one and focus is stolen, keyboard input is bunk - Adobe, Mozilla? Fix this!
Thirdly: Similar to the second, many of us have dual monitors now! - I want to maximise my damn flash videos on monitor number 2, be able to tab out of Firefox / whatever, work on a word document, explorer, whatever and not have the flash video shrink down back to regular embedded size!
Finally: We need a standard layout, I can't stand it when someone embeds a youtube 'basic' video interface on their page and the full screen option is missing, I need to click the video, which opens the real feed over at youtube.com and then I can full screen it.
Also it's in-efficient, I don't want it auto streaming, I don't want to have to click videos twice or pre-buffer or whatever, I swear 30% of the videos I open, I download them one and a half times for one reason or another, I live in Australia - I can not afford the bandwidth to keep doing this! For the love jesus can someone please please solve complaint 2 and 3, it's driving me batty! Is there a 3'rd party decent plugin for flash out there?
It also has uses allowing mid level techs to get the local admin they should have which tightass upper management restrict in draconian business's I've had to use it many times before, thank god I don't have to nowadays.
Why can't they install Outlook 2007 or whatever but Open Office for the document creation, or at LEAST a side by side install on the machine? I'd really like to see this start to happen, over 5 years you could eventually wean users from Office to Open Office, switch them to firefox, you're half way there to beginning the transition.
I can understand still sticking with Windows, to a point but Office seems crazy to me, the long term costs are incredible.
I'm happy to be the high and mighty prick, the browser is effectively useless to me. Once you've used FF with Tab Mix Plus, you can re-create the feel of Netcaptor which was brilliant in its day.
Very good tab control, Chrome just doesn't come close, ugly too, the performance gain (which is ALL it offers) is not enough, I'll just upgrade my PC.
I don't know much about law but do they ACTUALLY pay this fine? If they do pay the fine, who does it go to and what do they use it for?
I don't care how evil intel or Microsoft are, if the government is just taking cash and not supplying it to competitors then this is frankly bullshit.
What's to stop the government(s) of countries to start up some kind of frivolous lawsuit against another huge company just because they need big dollars? When is it apples turn, sony's turn? Etc
Unless this money is put to sensible use then I honestly don't see what right they have to demand the cash.
and the GTA4 DLC Thank you for this post, I don't have mod points today so a response will have to do.
I also own a PS3, I love it, I'm very happy with it but apparently if we get something exclusive then companies are EVIL yet ironically if Microsoft gets something exclusive they are business savvy! Jesus christ...
As long as they can get the read, write, random read, random write performance to be substantially better than a hard disk - across the board I don't care too much. Example: many many years ago, on my 286, I extracted a floppy disk with 1,800.ico files on it (754 bytes?) in a zip file. That took about an hour to do. I then learned about 'smartdrv.sys' (or was it EXE?) The time to do it went from an hour to about 30 to 60 seconds.
The way the FAT16 worked on my machine with a 20mb drive and a 286 CPU it was writing back and forth constantly for that many files, it was very in-efficient, each subsequent.ico file being extracted from the zip made it slower.
Now if we have some kind of alternative which alleviates this problem in Windows (and can still keep write corruption down, in the event of a power failure) I'd be curious to see it implimented. Sooner or later SSD's will be better than magnetic hard disks, across the board (possibly inclduing space) right now there's some issues but I'm thinking, after Anands huge article a month or so ago, the manufacturers know that the consumers are switched on to this.
You'll see an OCZ Vertex 2.0 drive sooner or later, across the board faster than the 1.0, possibly cheaper and possibly bigger. I would guess, within 18 months 'regular' non geeked out enthusiasts will be snapping up SSD's and within 48 months from now, you'll see SSD's shipped commonly in laptops and desktops purchased from IBM, Dell, HP at regular prices for regular office worker workstations (600$ US jobbies)
It's most definitely about time, each tab should have it's own process and it should support multiple cores. I love firefox but the performance is not what it should be, considering the 3ghz quad core machines we throw at it.
I mean it's moving pictures and text around for goodness sakes, also a tab should not lock up my whole damned browser!
Sierras adventure games up until around KQ6, Larry 6 were really quite fun, Space Quest too. Even Police Quest, up to 4 was great, so was LA of course, with MI 1 / 2 and the Indy Franchise - Full throttle. Those games were once the king of the IBM personal computer, you got a PC because it could run Larry or Space Quest, maybe castle, alleycat and eventually Lemmings, Prince of Persia etc.
I got 'in' around 18 years ago, 386DX was out and I had a 286 at the time, they were amazing - no doubt nostalgia has a hell of a lot to do with it but they were simpler times (not much conviential ram required for the old adventure games either, more games like Falcon etc) I spent many an hour playing these mysterious games and while some of it was frustrating, I think they shaped me to who I am today, my sense of humour and in part some of my intelligence and vocabulary is owed to these witty and intelligent game writers.
Do yourselves a favour and track down a developer of one of these games and fire them off a thank you email, I emailed Scott Murphy a while back (Space Quest 2) - he still has a website. I eagerly look forward to retirement, in about 30 to 40 years time there should be enough classic games to re-play for the rest of my life.
Are they so scared their programming is that bad, that they don't want people to know what they have on? It's one of the most stupid things a company has ever done, it's not like sharing the content, it's a bloody listing.
Someone needs to slap channel 9 on the upside of the head, wtf were they thinking?
I can assure you decent shoes are a must. My fleet are as flat as a board now (overweight kid, bad genes AND bad shoes) and the difference between my proper nike's with the inner supports and regular 'fasionable' work shoes is like night and day.
There is no longer a pain in the front of my shin and I feel supported. There's obviously an element of 'wank' and markup in high end shoes but bottom of the barrel is not a smart purchase by any means.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but it's not like we can edit the hosts file on the PS3 now is it? :/ it does what I need.
I know I know this is slashdot, I should have some kind of linux based router but I don't, I have a standard one built in to my Billion ADSL modem, it's pretty powerful too
This move by Sony is pretty stupid to be honest, I've paid for this game, I don't like or support ad driven games which aren't free, not happy.
You are right, the Volvo S80 is particularly sickening.
How difficult is it to put these things on LPG or teach peeople to drive more sensibly (that alone can save 15% in fuel costs)
Then there is the wasted parts aspect, what the hell, this is simply raising the cost of used cars, I am truely in shock at this, it's absoloutely incredibly wasteful, I've never heard of such a preposterous thing.
I got rid of my Wii because I like games with some depth and not just waggling a controller around like an idiot.
Not everyone is a gen y hipster having parties over at their house every night!
That console is mostly useless for single player gamers (oh and it looked like crap on my HDTV)
Vger
I can give you several reasons why people think it's fine to do!
Firstly we're geeks here, denying that 80% of us download TV and movies would be stupidity, I'm sure we've all been to astalavista for a crack now and then too.
As I get older I do less of the dodgy stuff but for example, I 'steal' TV shows from the US all the time, because they don't air here at all, or at sensible times or within months of them airing in the US.
Now sure, that's a grey area to some you might say but the question then becomes, what is, or is not illegal? Me downloading those shows is most likely illegal but what if I really am going to buy the DVD? What if it's going to air on TV in 5 weeks here anyhow, sadly at 11pm though?
There's all kinds of complications here, what about someone who comes over to your house during a lan party, he boots his machine up and his torrent client slaps your connection?
Now that may or may not be feasable, I think it's possible, in a worse case scenario - BAM there goes one of your strikes, you've only got 3 of them and accidents do happen.
Open wifi is the most obvious one, accidental click the list goes on.
How do I even know the people claiming "I was the one who did it!" have the right information?
How's this, a little far fetched but possible.
I'm on ADSL right - so my ip address changes now and then.
Some dodgy investigator in the states says he sees my ip at 3:00am downloading stuff and forwards this to his contact in Australia.
this contact in Australia then contacts the ISP and says "this ip was stealing at 03:00am!"
My ISP look up the logs, my up comes up, bam a letter comes out to me and I get in trouble for 'stealing'
Problem is the guy investigating is in a different timezone, my ip could have changed, not out of the realms of possibility at least.
This is not something the government should be worrying themselves with, it's just going to cause problems
Oh America! :(
Being charged money to RECEIVE SMS and phone calls, absoloutely apalling, my condolences.
- The rest of the world.
I'm sorry, this reply is not available in your region.
(summary: fuck Hulu anyhow.)
Ok this is ,....fairly close to on topic, sorry to diverge slightly.
We really really need to take a much better look at online video playback within Firefox, browsers in general and flash.
More and more video is being presented in a window via flash, it's taken over where ASX / ASF / Mov / MPG once dominated for better and for worse.
Flash (and or ALL internet video playback!) needs several changes.
Firstly, I need more goddamn control over it, I'm sick of having to manually buffer!
I want to click a video and I want it to pre-stream at least 10 or 15 seconds and then start playing, if this means delays, FINE but I'm tired of deliberately playing a video, then pressing pause to wait for it and tabbing off somewhere else for 5 minutes.
Ultimately we need a much better 'control panel' for embedded flash video, since it's used so often now.
Secondly: Tab control, tab focus and application focus SERIOUSLY needs looking at!
I can not use control tab, control shift tab, control page up etc with Firefox on some sites with embedded flash video, the player plugin steals focus of my keyboard input and it's bloody infuriating as I navigate with the keyboard constantly, I can control tab away from this tab, right now to Gmail, then back - I can do it for 90% of my tabs but hit a flash video one and focus is stolen, keyboard input is bunk - Adobe, Mozilla? Fix this!
Thirdly: Similar to the second, many of us have dual monitors now! - I want to maximise my damn flash videos on monitor number 2, be able to tab out of Firefox / whatever, work on a word document, explorer, whatever and not have the flash video shrink down back to regular embedded size!
Finally: We need a standard layout, I can't stand it when someone embeds a youtube 'basic' video interface on their page and the full screen option is missing, I need to click the video, which opens the real feed over at youtube.com and then I can full screen it.
Also it's in-efficient, I don't want it auto streaming, I don't want to have to click videos twice or pre-buffer or whatever, I swear 30% of the videos I open, I download them one and a half times for one reason or another, I live in Australia - I can not afford the bandwidth to keep doing this!
For the love jesus can someone please please solve complaint 2 and 3, it's driving me batty! Is there a 3'rd party decent plugin for flash out there?
I completely agree with your post, this is a ridiculous joke.
It also has uses allowing mid level techs to get the local admin they should have which tightass upper management restrict in draconian business's
I've had to use it many times before, thank god I don't have to nowadays.
Why can't they install Outlook 2007 or whatever but Open Office for the document creation, or at LEAST a side by side install on the machine?
I'd really like to see this start to happen, over 5 years you could eventually wean users from Office to Open Office, switch them to firefox, you're half way there to beginning the transition.
I can understand still sticking with Windows, to a point but Office seems crazy to me, the long term costs are incredible.
I'm happy to be the high and mighty prick, the browser is effectively useless to me.
Once you've used FF with Tab Mix Plus, you can re-create the feel of Netcaptor which was brilliant in its day.
Very good tab control, Chrome just doesn't come close, ugly too, the performance gain (which is ALL it offers) is not enough, I'll just upgrade my PC.
Exactly, this is my entire point, where is the benefit to ANYONE but government employees and coffers in this situation?
I don't know much about law but do they ACTUALLY pay this fine?
If they do pay the fine, who does it go to and what do they use it for?
I don't care how evil intel or Microsoft are, if the government is just taking cash and not supplying it to competitors then this is frankly bullshit.
What's to stop the government(s) of countries to start up some kind of frivolous lawsuit against another huge company just because they need big dollars?
When is it apples turn, sony's turn? Etc
Unless this money is put to sensible use then I honestly don't see what right they have to demand the cash.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MOD THIS MAN UP.
Where the hell is the god damned comment count, offtopic be damned this guy needs to be +6 right about now.
Who removed it in the first place? ugh.
and the GTA4 DLC
Thank you for this post, I don't have mod points today so a response will have to do.
I also own a PS3, I love it, I'm very happy with it but apparently if we get something exclusive then companies are EVIL yet ironically if Microsoft gets something exclusive they are business savvy!
Jesus christ...
However...
As long as they can get the read, write, random read, random write performance to be substantially better than a hard disk - across the board I don't care too much. .ico files on it (754 bytes?) in a zip file.
Example: many many years ago, on my 286, I extracted a floppy disk with 1,800
That took about an hour to do.
I then learned about 'smartdrv.sys' (or was it EXE?)
The time to do it went from an hour to about 30 to 60 seconds.
The way the FAT16 worked on my machine with a 20mb drive and a 286 CPU it was writing back and forth constantly for that many files, it was very in-efficient, each subsequent .ico file being extracted from the zip made it slower.
Now if we have some kind of alternative which alleviates this problem in Windows (and can still keep write corruption down, in the event of a power failure) I'd be curious to see it implimented.
Sooner or later SSD's will be better than magnetic hard disks, across the board (possibly inclduing space) right now there's some issues but I'm thinking, after Anands huge article a month or so ago, the manufacturers know that the consumers are switched on to this.
You'll see an OCZ Vertex 2.0 drive sooner or later, across the board faster than the 1.0, possibly cheaper and possibly bigger.
I would guess, within 18 months 'regular' non geeked out enthusiasts will be snapping up SSD's and within 48 months from now, you'll see SSD's shipped commonly in laptops and desktops purchased from IBM, Dell, HP at regular prices for regular office worker workstations (600$ US jobbies)
I for one, can't wait.
It's most definitely about time, each tab should have it's own process and it should support multiple cores.
I love firefox but the performance is not what it should be, considering the 3ghz quad core machines we throw at it.
I mean it's moving pictures and text around for goodness sakes, also a tab should not lock up my whole damned browser!
That is absoloutely brilliant and hilarious all at once.
I miss them both really.
Sierras adventure games up until around KQ6, Larry 6 were really quite fun, Space Quest too.
Even Police Quest, up to 4 was great, so was LA of course, with MI 1 / 2 and the Indy Franchise - Full throttle.
Those games were once the king of the IBM personal computer, you got a PC because it could run Larry or Space Quest, maybe castle, alleycat and eventually Lemmings, Prince of Persia etc.
I got 'in' around 18 years ago, 386DX was out and I had a 286 at the time, they were amazing - no doubt nostalgia has a hell of a lot to do with it but they were simpler times (not much conviential ram required for the old adventure games either, more games like Falcon etc)
I spent many an hour playing these mysterious games and while some of it was frustrating, I think they shaped me to who I am today, my sense of humour and in part some of my intelligence and vocabulary is owed to these witty and intelligent game writers.
Do yourselves a favour and track down a developer of one of these games and fire them off a thank you email, I emailed Scott Murphy a while back (Space Quest 2) - he still has a website.
I eagerly look forward to retirement, in about 30 to 40 years time there should be enough classic games to re-play for the rest of my life.
It's that a puppet version of Yoda for $5,000 is far, far superior to a pixel version of yoda for 5 million dollars.
and you love every minute of it, be honest!
I equate charging for a TV guide to the same thing as charging me for the price list of a store, it's lunacy.
It ENCOURAGES PEOPLE TO WATCH THEIR STATION!
Are they so scared their programming is that bad, that they don't want people to know what they have on?
It's one of the most stupid things a company has ever done, it's not like sharing the content, it's a bloody listing.
Someone needs to slap channel 9 on the upside of the head, wtf were they thinking?
I can assure you decent shoes are a must.
My fleet are as flat as a board now (overweight kid, bad genes AND bad shoes) and the difference between my proper nike's with the inner supports and regular 'fasionable' work shoes is like night and day.
There is no longer a pain in the front of my shin and I feel supported.
There's obviously an element of 'wank' and markup in high end shoes but bottom of the barrel is not a smart purchase by any means.