Even comments to your posts don't get it. All this guy did was prove just how easy it is to use a seemingly harmless database to prove your a commie. Oh wait, get my mind out of the 50's, a terrorist. Or did the boogyman change name again? Pedo's are an eternal favorite and you can't really defend the rights of pedo's unless you wanna be lynched.
No the FBI or anyone else would never bother with amazon wish list. They would simply get the sales records. This guy does not have access to those so he uses what he can to prove his point.
Yes it is scary. Especially for those of us who have family (or more to the point do not have family) killed for expressing the wrong ideas.
I however don't think we should blame the FBI or similar agencies, they are the instruments of us the people. It is we who have voted the current goverments into power. Corruption you say? Well then it is you and me that have allowed that to happen. I do not believe in the mythical innocent citizen. Others have died for freedom. No reason we should be allowed to sit on our backsides and complain our freedoms are taken away. FIGHT
Not that I will of course. I know deepdown that what is happening is wrong and also know that I am one of the cattle. Perhaps it will make it easier when I am put in a cattle wagon to be gassed.
The problem with fighting for your freedom is that one persons freedom fighter is another persons terrorist.
I ain't got an answer or a solution except to suggest "PAY CASH". Even if your part of the herd there is no reason to make it any easier for them to send you off to the slaughterhouse.
Will it happen? It has happened countless times before. Check the McCarty trials. The treatment of Japanse americans vs German americans. The gunning down of american citizens by police during peace protests. The way england handled the RIA and labor strikes. All of them pretty recent.
Something scary might happen in our lifetimes. Or not. This is one tiny example to prove that it won't be hard on the technical side. Now all we need to is to elect leaders crazy enough to do it./me looks at the current leaders of the "free" west. Too late.
and assuming this is a life form then this doesn't prove that we are immune to it. You see, this lifeform is an EX-lifeform. It has ceased to be. It is a dead space born cell based lifeform.
I don't know what killed it although exploding on entry might be a clue.
Anyway anyone knows that all alien invasions start of slowly at first. They are probably biding their time infiltrating our culture and drawing key companies under their evil control. You don't think outsourcing to india is just a coincidince right?
Sadly MS handling of it was typical and the windows user reaction to it was typical as well.
I am of course a geeky nerdy never washing never getting laid linux user who hasn't had to worry about security alerts at all in 2005 (Check somebody elses post in one of the CERT stories where he shows that there have been no cyber alerts for linux in 2005) the last I think was in 2004 or 2003 relating to opensll or ssh.
MS response was idiotic and shows they totally do not care about their customers. In the best case they should have made it very clear to every windows user that browsing the net was dangerous and put out a simple patch that disabled WMF completly or at least put up a warning before a wmf like file is accessed even if it is a WMF disguising itself as a jpeg.
Oh but this could break existing products? WHO THE FUCK CARES? It is like worrying that cutting off the electricity and gas after an earthquake is going to make your icecream melt. The WMF exploit is a disaster and that means it is time for drastic measures.
Windows users should have been up in arms. Browsing the internet became a no-no even with non-porn sites. Only thing that has to happen is 1 person on forum having a exploit for their avatar image and bang.
I have seen several people being affected by this exploit. Sure some were stupid free porn sites surfers but not all of them. Just normally using their computer and BAM. Infected.
We have been getting a lot of comments from MS fanboys about how much stabler XP is and that MS is getting a lot more serious about security. HA. This WMF thing has shown that MS is still the same MS of old. Nothing has changed. A full week to patch exploit affecting all your users and the all the MS fanboys can do is sputter "They had to test it" yeah right. Oh well at least it seems that this time the patch actually works. That gotta be a first.
Oh well now to answer your question. There is nothing to do here but disable unchecked content on your website. That means you gotta host every image yourselve and make sure you check that it is what it claims to be in your upload code.
The MS patch won't change a fucking thing. An awfull lot of MS users never patch up so this WMF exploit will be with us as long as that code red crap and every other windows exploit. If I am ever diagnosed with an incurable disease and only have a few weeks left, gates is going to get a bullet in the head.
Thought at first it might have been a PC game but finally managed to terrify the remaining braincells into remembering I played it on a console at work.
If you google for it you can defintely see hints that it has been released. Nothing definite but then it is an old title and google is infested with crap sites like 1up that push every game title they can find without having any content on their pages. (Wish there was a way to get google to filter its search results but that is another post)
Ah but of course wikipedia comes to the rescue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrill_Kill seems I played a bootleg version. So anyone else who could have sworn they played a game that was never launched. You ain't hallucinating.
If we had some cheese we could have some bread and cheese, if we had some bread.
IP-TV needs to have ads delivered over the internet. That much seems clear, but were is this IP-TV?
I happen to be familiar with the servers that were there for the initial dutch Big Brother (Yeah, our contribution to the world, your welcome) and it was a fairly impressive rack. I only drooled over them, we had 1 rack next to them but it seemed like a lot just to service a website for 1 tv program in a very small country.
Imagine the kind of hardware needed to serve all of a 24 hour tv channel to a country like america.
And that is the real problem with this whole internet tv idea. It just doesn't work. Just look at what happens to webcasts when a disaster happens. I had one of the 3G (G3?) phones during the london bombings. Took me ages to get it to connect and even then it was troublesome and that was a new system with very few subscribers.
Oh and IP-TV? We are just moving to HD tv. Do you really think the average ADSL or cable con can handle them?
Digital tv (over adsl) is being rolled out here but among all the ads there is one thing they don't mention. The moment a big program comes on like a soccer match they cut some of the lesser channels to make bandwidth available for the soccer match. If they don't? Well think early MPEG lego block vision.
So the entire article is based on google serving the ads for a form of tv that just don't exist.
Currently the only way to serve tv is to get a big transmitter and pump it through everyone at the cost of thousands of kilowats. It ain't pretty but it is the only way that works.
Will it chance any time soon? Doubt it. Just look at how dificult it is proving for digital tv to be accepted. Everywhere goverments are forced to choose between upsetting millions of voters or the gigantic profits promised by selling of spectrum.
But hey if you don't believe me, just do a search on video.google.com You can see exactly the state of streaming video the internet at large. Yeah, crappy low res unfiltered WMV. Woohoo! That is so not going to compete with HD tv.
We all know the urban legends of the car that had a funny name in country X. However just because those are myths does not mean it doesn't have a basis of truth. Simple things like having butter in a gold wrapping does not appeal the same everywhere.
There must be some reason why koreans love Starcraft while the west liked and moved on.
The article does however make a couple of mistakes. It somehow credits McDonalds and Apple with getting it right. Sorry but McD learned the hardway and Apples success with the iPod is just lucky that western tastes and japanese tastes happen to match up in this instance. If Apple really had a clue they would have insisted on all their content deals for iTunes to be international. Selling song X to a world audience must generate larger sales then just to a fraction considering there is no extra cost.
One thing however that most people forget is how that the japanese in general SUCK at english. Yeah yeah and americans suck at japanese BUT the americans have the advantage of their main language being THE international language. Americans can afford to be lazy.
I am currently watching far to much japanse idol tv (Morning Musume) and while teenage girls are never a good indication of a country's education it becomes pretty clear that there english skill are very poor if compared to the english skill of mainland europeans. If you don't believe me use google. http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=ayaka/ should give you a bunch of short clips showing a member of the group who was born and raised in hawaii giving english lessons to the japanese members.
Considering they are around the age of 16 on average it is nothing their english teacher should be proud of.
Learning a new language, especially one that has no common root, is hard. The hardest part is getting the basics, if you do not understand a simple sentence you do not use the language so you never get experience so you never learn to understand a simple sentence so you do not use it. ETC ETC. Japan probably isn't like holland were people of my generation had a choice, you watch american tv shows or you go play outside. If you didn't like the american show on then that was though, we had 1 tv station.
I think the problem is two-fold, MS being a bit of the typical arrogant american, and the japanese being just a little to snobbish to learn the international language of the world. Oh well at least this might mean Europe becomes a less neglected market.
Oh and if anyone wishes to point out that chinese is spoken by more people then english, I didn't say that. I said english is the international language. More people speak english as their 2nd or 3rd language then any other language. It is the language two people with different mother languages are most likely to have in common. Yes even the french. They all speak perfect english, they just enjoy being rude to americans. Who doesn't.
Not that easy is it? Is that bad? We been playing the same video F1 games since the first F1 video game BUT the real F1 hasn't changed either. Same with all sports games. They are all sequels but then every World Champion ship is a sequel. Go to the olympics and you got the sequels of sequels and apperenly it is still very popular.
It just ain't that easy to come up with a good game design and since any game design of the past can easily be sold again with better graphics and margenilly improved gameplay that is what is going to be produced the most.
In fact if you think about it what game is really original? Tetris? You move something to build a wall. Mmm sorta like that paddle game where you should a ball to demolish a wall wich of course was sorta like pong.
Sequels give the developers a base to work from and the customers something to base their judgement on.
Sure I would like to play something brillianty new and fun but sadly most of the games that try to be radical turn out to suck badly. Look at the adventure genre. Lucasarts tried to innovate with it, the game industry loved the 3D move and the punters didn't buy it. The genre was declared dead and point&click was quietly buried.
Sadly if you take the time to search you can still find quality click&point games just like the ones of days gone buy that continue to sell to a big enough hardcore audience to give us a sequel to The Longest Journey and Runaway a road adventure (Broken Sword 4 is also in development disproving my theorie that action adenture didn't work but BS3 was a lot different from the crapfest that was lucasarts 3d adventures with their crap controls)
I rather have a good sequel then a mediocre innovative game.
At the age of 13-14 you should be smart enough to figure out basic things. Like say do not meet a stranger who has send you naked movies of himself (this is from the police press release) in a park.
If the kid had been asaulted while just playing in the park he would have had my sympathy but this 13-14 yr old male went on a date with an adult male who had been sending him naked movies of himself. Exactly at what point do you suggest people need to get a sense of responsibilty?
This kid was not abducted, he was not assaulted. if you read the police report what happened was that the boy meets man on date in park, man touches boy, boy objects, man stops, boy goes home, mom finds out and calls the cops.
The man obviously had pedo tendencies but this can barely be called assault let alone rape. The police report and official complaint do not in fact call it that.
No compared to real victims like in the case I linked to above this boy gets no sympathy from me.
/. is a harsh place. If you want crying people watch Oprah. Here we only have sympathy for people who can't help their misfortune.
The HD is already the bottle neck, getting it to scan every few seconds would cause it to glow. Plus I HATE programs that try to think. They always get it wrong.
Anyway I just used the azureus example because it is a P2P app. Just wanted to make clear how using completly seperated apps can incur extra work work by the user. It was not meant to show any shortcoming in azureus.
Azureus is a memory hog and my linux desktop is hardware limited to 512mb. So I run it via X on a different machine. Saving the drag of java on my desktop while still having it seemingly run local. Except I can't associate it since Opera wouldn't have a clue where to look.
if anyone knows how to open a extension in opera with a remotely running app please let me know:)
Anyone remember the day when you bought a creative soundcard because it had proper midi support so you could listen to the ingame music at the quality the composer had intended?
Same time roughly when a game music dir was measured in kilobytes not install cd's.
First game to break the trend was I think Tomb Raider wich in a move I will never understand used actually audio tracks on the CD for both music and cutscene sound. Wich on my machine created horrible stuttering as the CD had to switch operating modes.
Oh, sorry, I guess my old grumpy guy who doesn't like the future personality has slipped through again.
YEAH, some unknown idiot gets to load a ton of mp3's in an already bloated OS to make sure yet another few cpu cycles are wasted and used to annoy everyone else in the office because people with funny desktop sounds never heard of headphones.
Or anyone who has played a PC vs Console version of a game can tell the difference.
A console has a very restricted interface. Simple but restrictive. A pc has hundreds of buttons. Complex but freeform.
One of the simplest examples is spell/weapon selection in game. On a PC you usually get a list handily labelled with the top row buttons 1-0 or in case of EQ2 1 to =. This allows fast switching/selection.
A console usually requires you to use and forwards/back setup.
Yet is this actually simpler? Depending on the game constantly having to search through a list could be considered a pain. Perhaps that is the reason Halo put grenades under a different button instead of making it a selectable weapon?
The Grenade under G is a nice feature however that also made it to PC land.So perhaps the limited input on the console made the PC with its 101 keys even easier to use? I can easily select my weapons directly AND thanks to consoles now can use grenades with a main weapon equipped.
The iPod is similar. I have had a lot of MP3 players and the iPod is my latest and it is nice. Yet at times I long for my iRiver player (wich died a painfull death) because while it had far more buttons and some odd button overloading once you figured them out it was so much easier. I never accidently changed the volume or skipped because all basic actions had their own function.
Simple example of how fewer buttons can be confusing? Well perhaps it is me and my fat clumsy fingers but I hate those buttons that combine skip and fastforward. The price we pay for saving two buttons is that you cannot instantly fast forward. You got to wait for the timeout and the fastforward to start.
There are other problems with the iPod, it is all to easy to screw up the volume as you try to change other settings. Yes the wheel is very nice usually but sometimes I just want to shuffle the selection (is it me or does iPod not support dynamic shuffling?) or change the equalizer settings without going deaf or losing all sound.
But this is nothing new. You got three kinds of gear control in cars. Full automatic, the american half-breed, and full manual. The fact that all three continue to be sold tells us that perhaps all three serve a segment of the market.
Perhaps it should be up to the consumer to decice what they want. For all the mac fans I do suggest that an awfull lot of people do not like the minimalist approach if it limits them in their speed. Proof? How many mac's are actually used with the original 1 button mouse?
Yes it is simple and the most default upgrade for a mac machine is a "real" mouse.
MS has always been in a sort of middle ground anyway. If you want total control you use a unix. If you want total simplicity you use a mac. The middle market is windows. It served them well. MS has plenty to worry about but their remote having more buttons is not one of them.
REAL engineers are responsible for what they produce. They got to sign their name to any design/product they produce. Do not put the QA monkeys at work at MS in the same category. That is like calling the guy who sells you miracle herbs to extend your penis a docter.
Oh and if you claim the they are really engineers then that is good. We should be able to find the person that signed of on this wmf code and promote him to head of software development at MS.
Cause lets face it, nobody has even been fired for putting bugs in MS software.
http://ci.santa-rosa.ca.us/default.aspx?PageId=120 &NewsId=660/ this shows almost exactly what you say. It seems this 26 yr old male showed movies of himself to this 13yr old boy after meeting on x-box live. it does not become clear how the video is exchanged perhaps via e-mail.
The kid and adult then meet up, adult touches the kid, kid objects, adult leaves him alone, kid cries to mom, police gets involved and a media hype is born.
Frankly this sounds an awfull lot less nasty then the headlines make it out to be.
However kids are allowed to be stupid, adults are not allowed to touch kids in certain ways. The kid is innocent if stupid, the adult is wrong. How wrong is for a jury to decide.
I wouldn't have thought the x-box was the easiest way to pick up little kids. I doesn't have text chat after all and with voice communication it should be a lot harder to disguise youreselve. Bit hard to pretend your HotLisa16F when your voice only comes in over the subwoofer.
Then again this kid doesn't sound like he is a major loss to the gene pool. Meeting a total stranger in a park after exchanging porn. Oh yeah. That is something nobody has ever warned kids about.
I suppose I should feel sorry to sound nice but frankly I hate stupid people. Perhaps it is harder then when I was a kid but geez, has never ever had a talk with this kid before? Do not accept candy from strangers? Oh well, cue new laws designed to dumb down the world because of one pervert and a dumb kid.
Wich OS is currently unsafe to browse the internet with?
Unless you been living in a cave the wmf exploit pretty much affects every windows out there and it is being exploited. Don't even think it is only people who visit weird porn sites. The most harmless forum wich allows those avatar images is vulnerable. Yes even those that only allow the jpg/gif extensions. Since MS in its infinite wisdom allows wmf images to properly load even when the extension is wrong because of content guessing.
A nice trick but as it turns out a rather dangerous one.
I don't remember any exploits like this for all the linux unix bsd even mac OS'es out there. Ever in fact. Not in my live time anyway.
And that is I am afraid what counts. Not how many bugs are reported but how many bugs go unfixed or unnoticed and become exploited.
On a side note am I the only one to find it hilarious how all the MS apologist say the WMF exploit is easy to avoid by going to the command line and putting in a super complex command? Isn't linux/unix bad because it is CLI orientated?
Everything used to be filmed on set with huge studios constantly being under construction. They needed sets to get all the light focused on the scene so the cameras could film it. In fact all the equipment used needed a large area to work in.
But know with digital camera's it has become far far easier to just shoot on location. Saving huge amounts of money in not having to have a studio and set building costs while at the same time being more realistic.
So how does this relate to games?
Morrowind was an open RPG placing you in a large continues world that you could freely explore. To help you find your way there were roadsigns (with gibberish text) that if you targetted them had a popup to tell you the direction.
One of the best user mods? Made use of the fact that most people had better PC then the minimum requirement and replaced all the signs textures with REAL readable text.
Of course that was a lot of work. BUT if I had known I could have easily written a simple PHP script that would have generated all the textures needed for all the signs.
Where the original signs were handcrafted, the replacement real text signs were marco'ed in photoshop I see a future game where the "artist" will only supply the look of the sign and the computer will draw in the necessary text.
The sequell to morrowind in fact already uses the computer to generate art. Supposedly the large forests you explore are computer generated. From what I seen they look beautifull and do not require an artist to place each tree and bush by hand.
Take this further and you could come to an era where the artist will have less and less work to do. In Half-Life if a wall had to show damage then the artist needed to draw a seperate texture and place it on that wall. Silent Storm had fully destrutable enviroments and some mods used this to pre-damage a building. Rather then carefully putting in holes the engine did it for the designer.
I think this is going to happen more and more. Were it is the computer itself that will adding a lot of the artwork. Think of it like this. The early vga games used seperate images to show a city at night or by day. Modern games got 1 set where the computer just changes the light levels.
Another cost saver could be the reuse of models. The mod scene already does this were you can often find one persons model of a gun in several games.
Same is true with the shift towards ragdoll physics. Before every animation of a character had to be inserted by hand. With ragdoll physics you can at least save on the death animations. Perhaps in the future even such things as walking will be created by the computer and not entered by filming an actor?
Awh shucks, well if it makes you feel better
on
The Odds at Macworld
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· Score: 3, Funny
Don't worry, all those Mac clowns are wrong. The real OS is linux. Feel better now? Now I am off to an extended lunch as gentoo does an essential emerge that is ensure to take the whole working day if I can find the right nice settings.
Mac users don't produce because they are to busy worrying about scratches.
Linux package users don't produce because they are to busy sorting out the latest dependency nightmare.
Linux portage users will start producing right after this compile.
Windows users don't produce because the last porn page they visited rooted their machine. Or put another way. Everyone is productive on your windows machine.
Wich can only lead to the conclusion that all the real work is being done on OS/2.
The extreme unix view is to get a lot of small apps that each do exactly 1 task and do it well. This has some advantages. The first is that the builder of such an app can concentrate on just 1 problem, another is that you should be able to mix and match. If I want to search through a number of files for a text string I can combine a number of tools as I want.
The disadvantage is also clear, you gotta learn about a lot of apps to do one end task. In windows search is simple. In linux it is two apps each with different syntax rules. Windows search is limited, linux search is complicated.
Another way of doing things is in adding similar functionality to an existing application. Making it feature rich or bloated (depending on your point of view). Web browsers are an obvious example. Should for instance bookmarks be part of the browser or a seperate app? What about a media player? Should the capability to view the source be an internal app (ala firefox) or an external app (IE and opera). Email? Well it is part of the internet isn't it? RSS? XML viewer? XML entry?
Get the picture?
I don't like suits either but then I am not a typical user. I prefer my email and browser and p2p and media player to be nicely seperated. Then again I can live with the fact that I have first to click on a link then choose to save the torrent file then go azureus select open torrent, select the torrent and finally be able to start leeching.
You would be suprised how many people would scream bloody murder if they had to do this.
Sadly it seems that at least in the browser sphere you and I are loosing. Feature creep seems to be a way of life for browser developers.
Anyway I wish the company luck, they already seem to have gotten themselves some free advertising and without even having a product to showoff. Good job.
Don't please tell me that slashdot is going to be a video blog. This sounds as wrong as voice communication in games. I DO NOT WANT TO SEE YOU and I am sure the feeling is mutual.
Sure current OS'es are crap at handling large data files that essentlially just have to be passed through, I got a linux machine that seems to love eating up all the available memory and my windows machine can never seem to grasp the concept of giving the video app priority to the HD.
So when I recently downloaded my first high def video clip (interlaced) I had a severe problem playing it. The dual P3 Linux had problems as it was an offbeat codec and could not handle it at full speed.
Windows P4 HT 2.8ghz didn't fare much better. Despite that fact that it had double the memory, less crap in the background and fewer active filters and had a cpu 3-4 times faster it could barely keep up. As soon as I tried to deinterlace it it started to get choppy with random freezing as MS could apperantly not supply the data fast enough.
No I don't have virusses or trojans and the hardware on both platforms is pretty decent.
The answer is really simple both OS'es at the core were never designed for this task. For that matter the hardware isn't either. Almost everything in the design is geared towards multitasking.
It reminds me of the days when side scrolling games were still available and how badly the PC would always struggle with them even when it was clear that in pure crunching power the PC beat the pants of the consoles. Wich was very clear when consoles tried to do 3D (ala doom1) wich was the strong horse of the PC.
I don't think there is any clear mechanism at the moment where you can easily dictate wich application gets priority access to the resources available. This would be far more then "nice". After all video device that gets super high priority would then falter because "system" wich does the reading from HD does not get enough cpu time.
Perhaps the move to multicore pc's will solve some of this. My P3 despite being only 800mhz can still keep up aminzgly well considering a p4 2.8 fails as well.
What I don't see however is how a new OS is going to solve this. Sure it is easy to make a new OS that does just video. They already exist, inside your stand alone dvd player. For that matter inside the iPod and similar devices. The consoles are an other example. Yes they do a lot better performance wise in displaying video then their PC counterparts. So?
One of the things I noticed is that USB is a bitch for cpu whoring. Joysticks especially can cost you more frames then switching all the options on. Perhaps I just got the wrong sticks but I have noticed this for several years with different makes.
A PC can do a dozen tasks, that makes it slow but it also is what makes it so fucking usefull. Most users do not want to watch just 1 video. They want their RSS streams and check their email and be safe from virusses and be chatting with their mates etc etc etc.
Saying the Windows/Linux are old clunkers and that you could make a faster video OS is like saying that Volvo's are clunkers and you could make a faster race car. Well yeah. F1 cars are very very fast. I just wouldn't like to take one on a trip. A recent promo in Amsterdam had a F1 car driving through the city streets. Very exciting but it was very clear the car was barely under control and totally useless as a form of transport.
The device that does it all will never be able to compete directly with a single purpose device. The PC is as multi purpose as it can be and for the last few decades has defeated all new comers. I don't see this going to change.
Oh and didn't we have this whole video internet before? The constant dream that people will next year have fat pipes to their doorsteps at cheap prices? I have heard that dream for over a decade and still download at a trickle. Current internet would be hardpushed to saturate a iPod. My half a decade old machine can easily deal with internet streaming. It ain't the OS, it is the net, fix that and the OS will follow.
It is different when you use it for commericial purposes. Such as building a database of people to sue for money.
I am afraid that the moment you collect information other then purely for information you do get involved with privacy laws. Or at least in holland. Even something as simple as getting people to give their email adress for a contest needs a privacy statement. That the law is rarely enforced means nothing.
I am afraid this problem is easiest to solve. Just plug in a USB keyboard. Already exists for the PS1 and PS2.
The linux/hd addon will be USB anyway. No I am afraid that the problem of the missing keyboard will be extremely simple to solve. A over priced extra gadget.
When the time comes to say goodbye to a MMORPG it is more then just uninstalling a single player RPG. Unless the bugs were to bad you will usually have spend some good time with other players getting to know a land.
Most single player games never have this. In fact if in a single player RPG you would still visit the beginner level merchant it would probably be considered a bad thing. Yet in MMORPG land you can really get to know your neighbourhood.
Leaving it can really create a sense of homesickness, a sense of something lost. Of course you know that the game is nothing more then a IRC with pretty pictures and yet it is more.
No MMORPG is any good if it were judged as a single player experience. Combat is simplistic and repetitive with moronic AI. Guild wars is about the only game were I seen proper interaction between AI enemies in that they really know how to use their healers. Even then simple pathfinding is a joke compared to "real" games.
The quests/story are a pale shadow of a single player RPG.
So the only "pull" left is either the level up OR the sense of community.
That community is more then simply chatting online. The MMORPG gives you a common goal to achieve. Chat for days on a IRC channel and you will maybe have made some friends. Play a MMORPG for days and you will have gone to hell and back shared victory and defeat, died and achieved vengeance. You will in fact have done more then most people can do in real live.
Leaving all that can cause a twinge or two. Or perhaps it is just the realisation that with the money you spend you could have bought several single player games.
Those who never played a MMORPG or do not become involved with other players will not understand and that is good. There is a reason we call it Evercrack.
I fear the day that an MMORPG will arrive that does not have horrid framerates and game breaking bugs. When someone invents a MMORPG that is bug free, glitch free, cheat free, lag free and has game play that would not be out of place in the best single player games that is the day I will sign up to be a battery in the matrix. Just plug me in and call me SmallFurryCreature Eater of Rats.
Slashdot Mirror
No the FBI or anyone else would never bother with amazon wish list. They would simply get the sales records. This guy does not have access to those so he uses what he can to prove his point.
Yes it is scary. Especially for those of us who have family (or more to the point do not have family) killed for expressing the wrong ideas.
I however don't think we should blame the FBI or similar agencies, they are the instruments of us the people. It is we who have voted the current goverments into power. Corruption you say? Well then it is you and me that have allowed that to happen. I do not believe in the mythical innocent citizen. Others have died for freedom. No reason we should be allowed to sit on our backsides and complain our freedoms are taken away. FIGHT
Not that I will of course. I know deepdown that what is happening is wrong and also know that I am one of the cattle. Perhaps it will make it easier when I am put in a cattle wagon to be gassed.
The problem with fighting for your freedom is that one persons freedom fighter is another persons terrorist.
I ain't got an answer or a solution except to suggest "PAY CASH". Even if your part of the herd there is no reason to make it any easier for them to send you off to the slaughterhouse.
Will it happen? It has happened countless times before. Check the McCarty trials. The treatment of Japanse americans vs German americans. The gunning down of american citizens by police during peace protests. The way england handled the RIA and labor strikes. All of them pretty recent.
Something scary might happen in our lifetimes. Or not. This is one tiny example to prove that it won't be hard on the technical side. Now all we need to is to elect leaders crazy enough to do it. /me looks at the current leaders of the "free" west. Too late.
I don't know what killed it although exploding on entry might be a clue.
Anyway anyone knows that all alien invasions start of slowly at first. They are probably biding their time infiltrating our culture and drawing key companies under their evil control. You don't think outsourcing to india is just a coincidince right?
Anyway you would expect other things, like hail of McNuggets in a meteroid vs bird incident.
It is a weird incident in anycase. If it is a life form then the fact that so much of it fell down could this mean the entire meteroid was made of it?
The previous theories suggested that small microbes might hide among the rocky part of the asteroid. Not the entire asteroid being made of it.
Also why is this taking so long? India is a tech nation isn't it? In 4 years they should have been able to analyze this down the individual atoms.
I am of course a geeky nerdy never washing never getting laid linux user who hasn't had to worry about security alerts at all in 2005 (Check somebody elses post in one of the CERT stories where he shows that there have been no cyber alerts for linux in 2005) the last I think was in 2004 or 2003 relating to opensll or ssh.
MS response was idiotic and shows they totally do not care about their customers. In the best case they should have made it very clear to every windows user that browsing the net was dangerous and put out a simple patch that disabled WMF completly or at least put up a warning before a wmf like file is accessed even if it is a WMF disguising itself as a jpeg.
Oh but this could break existing products? WHO THE FUCK CARES? It is like worrying that cutting off the electricity and gas after an earthquake is going to make your icecream melt. The WMF exploit is a disaster and that means it is time for drastic measures.
Windows users should have been up in arms. Browsing the internet became a no-no even with non-porn sites. Only thing that has to happen is 1 person on forum having a exploit for their avatar image and bang.
I have seen several people being affected by this exploit. Sure some were stupid free porn sites surfers but not all of them. Just normally using their computer and BAM. Infected.
We have been getting a lot of comments from MS fanboys about how much stabler XP is and that MS is getting a lot more serious about security. HA. This WMF thing has shown that MS is still the same MS of old. Nothing has changed. A full week to patch exploit affecting all your users and the all the MS fanboys can do is sputter "They had to test it" yeah right. Oh well at least it seems that this time the patch actually works. That gotta be a first.
Oh well now to answer your question. There is nothing to do here but disable unchecked content on your website. That means you gotta host every image yourselve and make sure you check that it is what it claims to be in your upload code.
The MS patch won't change a fucking thing. An awfull lot of MS users never patch up so this WMF exploit will be with us as long as that code red crap and every other windows exploit. If I am ever diagnosed with an incurable disease and only have a few weeks left, gates is going to get a bullet in the head.
If you google for it you can defintely see hints that it has been released. Nothing definite but then it is an old title and google is infested with crap sites like 1up that push every game title they can find without having any content on their pages. (Wish there was a way to get google to filter its search results but that is another post)
Ah but of course wikipedia comes to the rescue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrill_Kill seems I played a bootleg version. So anyone else who could have sworn they played a game that was never launched. You ain't hallucinating.
IP-TV needs to have ads delivered over the internet. That much seems clear, but were is this IP-TV?
I happen to be familiar with the servers that were there for the initial dutch Big Brother (Yeah, our contribution to the world, your welcome) and it was a fairly impressive rack. I only drooled over them, we had 1 rack next to them but it seemed like a lot just to service a website for 1 tv program in a very small country.
Imagine the kind of hardware needed to serve all of a 24 hour tv channel to a country like america.
And that is the real problem with this whole internet tv idea. It just doesn't work. Just look at what happens to webcasts when a disaster happens. I had one of the 3G (G3?) phones during the london bombings. Took me ages to get it to connect and even then it was troublesome and that was a new system with very few subscribers.
Oh and IP-TV? We are just moving to HD tv. Do you really think the average ADSL or cable con can handle them?
Digital tv (over adsl) is being rolled out here but among all the ads there is one thing they don't mention. The moment a big program comes on like a soccer match they cut some of the lesser channels to make bandwidth available for the soccer match. If they don't? Well think early MPEG lego block vision.
So the entire article is based on google serving the ads for a form of tv that just don't exist.
Currently the only way to serve tv is to get a big transmitter and pump it through everyone at the cost of thousands of kilowats. It ain't pretty but it is the only way that works.
Will it chance any time soon? Doubt it. Just look at how dificult it is proving for digital tv to be accepted. Everywhere goverments are forced to choose between upsetting millions of voters or the gigantic profits promised by selling of spectrum.
But hey if you don't believe me, just do a search on video.google.com You can see exactly the state of streaming video the internet at large. Yeah, crappy low res unfiltered WMV. Woohoo! That is so not going to compete with HD tv.
There must be some reason why koreans love Starcraft while the west liked and moved on.
The article does however make a couple of mistakes. It somehow credits McDonalds and Apple with getting it right. Sorry but McD learned the hardway and Apples success with the iPod is just lucky that western tastes and japanese tastes happen to match up in this instance. If Apple really had a clue they would have insisted on all their content deals for iTunes to be international. Selling song X to a world audience must generate larger sales then just to a fraction considering there is no extra cost.
One thing however that most people forget is how that the japanese in general SUCK at english. Yeah yeah and americans suck at japanese BUT the americans have the advantage of their main language being THE international language. Americans can afford to be lazy.
I am currently watching far to much japanse idol tv (Morning Musume) and while teenage girls are never a good indication of a country's education it becomes pretty clear that there english skill are very poor if compared to the english skill of mainland europeans. If you don't believe me use google. http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=ayaka/ should give you a bunch of short clips showing a member of the group who was born and raised in hawaii giving english lessons to the japanese members.
Considering they are around the age of 16 on average it is nothing their english teacher should be proud of.
Learning a new language, especially one that has no common root, is hard. The hardest part is getting the basics, if you do not understand a simple sentence you do not use the language so you never get experience so you never learn to understand a simple sentence so you do not use it. ETC ETC. Japan probably isn't like holland were people of my generation had a choice, you watch american tv shows or you go play outside. If you didn't like the american show on then that was though, we had 1 tv station.
I think the problem is two-fold, MS being a bit of the typical arrogant american, and the japanese being just a little to snobbish to learn the international language of the world. Oh well at least this might mean Europe becomes a less neglected market.
Oh and if anyone wishes to point out that chinese is spoken by more people then english, I didn't say that. I said english is the international language. More people speak english as their 2nd or 3rd language then any other language. It is the language two people with different mother languages are most likely to have in common. Yes even the french. They all speak perfect english, they just enjoy being rude to americans. Who doesn't.
Not that easy is it? Is that bad? We been playing the same video F1 games since the first F1 video game BUT the real F1 hasn't changed either. Same with all sports games. They are all sequels but then every World Champion ship is a sequel. Go to the olympics and you got the sequels of sequels and apperenly it is still very popular.
It just ain't that easy to come up with a good game design and since any game design of the past can easily be sold again with better graphics and margenilly improved gameplay that is what is going to be produced the most.
In fact if you think about it what game is really original? Tetris? You move something to build a wall. Mmm sorta like that paddle game where you should a ball to demolish a wall wich of course was sorta like pong.
Sequels give the developers a base to work from and the customers something to base their judgement on.
Sure I would like to play something brillianty new and fun but sadly most of the games that try to be radical turn out to suck badly. Look at the adventure genre. Lucasarts tried to innovate with it, the game industry loved the 3D move and the punters didn't buy it. The genre was declared dead and point&click was quietly buried.
Sadly if you take the time to search you can still find quality click&point games just like the ones of days gone buy that continue to sell to a big enough hardcore audience to give us a sequel to The Longest Journey and Runaway a road adventure (Broken Sword 4 is also in development disproving my theorie that action adenture didn't work but BS3 was a lot different from the crapfest that was lucasarts 3d adventures with their crap controls)
I rather have a good sequel then a mediocre innovative game.
At the age of 13-14 you should be smart enough to figure out basic things. Like say do not meet a stranger who has send you naked movies of himself (this is from the police press release) in a park.
If the kid had been asaulted while just playing in the park he would have had my sympathy but this 13-14 yr old male went on a date with an adult male who had been sending him naked movies of himself. Exactly at what point do you suggest people need to get a sense of responsibilty?
This kid was not abducted, he was not assaulted. if you read the police report what happened was that the boy meets man on date in park, man touches boy, boy objects, man stops, boy goes home, mom finds out and calls the cops.
The man obviously had pedo tendencies but this can barely be called assault let alone rape. The police report and official complaint do not in fact call it that.
No compared to real victims like in the case I linked to above this boy gets no sympathy from me.
/. is a harsh place. If you want crying people watch Oprah. Here we only have sympathy for people who can't help their misfortune.
Anyway I just used the azureus example because it is a P2P app. Just wanted to make clear how using completly seperated apps can incur extra work work by the user. It was not meant to show any shortcoming in azureus.
if anyone knows how to open a extension in opera with a remotely running app please let me know :)
Same time roughly when a game music dir was measured in kilobytes not install cd's.
First game to break the trend was I think Tomb Raider wich in a move I will never understand used actually audio tracks on the CD for both music and cutscene sound. Wich on my machine created horrible stuttering as the CD had to switch operating modes.
Oh, sorry, I guess my old grumpy guy who doesn't like the future personality has slipped through again.
YEAH, some unknown idiot gets to load a ton of mp3's in an already bloated OS to make sure yet another few cpu cycles are wasted and used to annoy everyone else in the office because people with funny desktop sounds never heard of headphones.
Sorry that is as positive as I can get.
A console has a very restricted interface. Simple but restrictive. A pc has hundreds of buttons. Complex but freeform.
One of the simplest examples is spell/weapon selection in game. On a PC you usually get a list handily labelled with the top row buttons 1-0 or in case of EQ2 1 to =. This allows fast switching/selection.
A console usually requires you to use and forwards/back setup.
Yet is this actually simpler? Depending on the game constantly having to search through a list could be considered a pain. Perhaps that is the reason Halo put grenades under a different button instead of making it a selectable weapon?
The Grenade under G is a nice feature however that also made it to PC land.So perhaps the limited input on the console made the PC with its 101 keys even easier to use? I can easily select my weapons directly AND thanks to consoles now can use grenades with a main weapon equipped.
The iPod is similar. I have had a lot of MP3 players and the iPod is my latest and it is nice. Yet at times I long for my iRiver player (wich died a painfull death) because while it had far more buttons and some odd button overloading once you figured them out it was so much easier. I never accidently changed the volume or skipped because all basic actions had their own function.
Simple example of how fewer buttons can be confusing? Well perhaps it is me and my fat clumsy fingers but I hate those buttons that combine skip and fastforward. The price we pay for saving two buttons is that you cannot instantly fast forward. You got to wait for the timeout and the fastforward to start.
There are other problems with the iPod, it is all to easy to screw up the volume as you try to change other settings. Yes the wheel is very nice usually but sometimes I just want to shuffle the selection (is it me or does iPod not support dynamic shuffling?) or change the equalizer settings without going deaf or losing all sound.
But this is nothing new. You got three kinds of gear control in cars. Full automatic, the american half-breed, and full manual. The fact that all three continue to be sold tells us that perhaps all three serve a segment of the market.
Perhaps it should be up to the consumer to decice what they want. For all the mac fans I do suggest that an awfull lot of people do not like the minimalist approach if it limits them in their speed. Proof? How many mac's are actually used with the original 1 button mouse?
Yes it is simple and the most default upgrade for a mac machine is a "real" mouse.
MS has always been in a sort of middle ground anyway. If you want total control you use a unix. If you want total simplicity you use a mac. The middle market is windows. It served them well. MS has plenty to worry about but their remote having more buttons is not one of them.
Oh and if you claim the they are really engineers then that is good. We should be able to find the person that signed of on this wmf code and promote him to head of software development at MS.
Cause lets face it, nobody has even been fired for putting bugs in MS software.
The kid and adult then meet up, adult touches the kid, kid objects, adult leaves him alone, kid cries to mom, police gets involved and a media hype is born.
Frankly this sounds an awfull lot less nasty then the headlines make it out to be.
However kids are allowed to be stupid, adults are not allowed to touch kids in certain ways. The kid is innocent if stupid, the adult is wrong. How wrong is for a jury to decide.
Then again this kid doesn't sound like he is a major loss to the gene pool. Meeting a total stranger in a park after exchanging porn. Oh yeah. That is something nobody has ever warned kids about.
I suppose I should feel sorry to sound nice but frankly I hate stupid people. Perhaps it is harder then when I was a kid but geez, has never ever had a talk with this kid before? Do not accept candy from strangers? Oh well, cue new laws designed to dumb down the world because of one pervert and a dumb kid.
Unless you been living in a cave the wmf exploit pretty much affects every windows out there and it is being exploited. Don't even think it is only people who visit weird porn sites. The most harmless forum wich allows those avatar images is vulnerable. Yes even those that only allow the jpg/gif extensions. Since MS in its infinite wisdom allows wmf images to properly load even when the extension is wrong because of content guessing.
A nice trick but as it turns out a rather dangerous one.
I don't remember any exploits like this for all the linux unix bsd even mac OS'es out there. Ever in fact. Not in my live time anyway.
And that is I am afraid what counts. Not how many bugs are reported but how many bugs go unfixed or unnoticed and become exploited.
On a side note am I the only one to find it hilarious how all the MS apologist say the WMF exploit is easy to avoid by going to the command line and putting in a super complex command? Isn't linux/unix bad because it is CLI orientated?
But know with digital camera's it has become far far easier to just shoot on location. Saving huge amounts of money in not having to have a studio and set building costs while at the same time being more realistic.
So how does this relate to games?
Morrowind was an open RPG placing you in a large continues world that you could freely explore. To help you find your way there were roadsigns (with gibberish text) that if you targetted them had a popup to tell you the direction.
One of the best user mods? Made use of the fact that most people had better PC then the minimum requirement and replaced all the signs textures with REAL readable text.
Of course that was a lot of work. BUT if I had known I could have easily written a simple PHP script that would have generated all the textures needed for all the signs.
Where the original signs were handcrafted, the replacement real text signs were marco'ed in photoshop I see a future game where the "artist" will only supply the look of the sign and the computer will draw in the necessary text.
The sequell to morrowind in fact already uses the computer to generate art. Supposedly the large forests you explore are computer generated. From what I seen they look beautifull and do not require an artist to place each tree and bush by hand.
Take this further and you could come to an era where the artist will have less and less work to do. In Half-Life if a wall had to show damage then the artist needed to draw a seperate texture and place it on that wall. Silent Storm had fully destrutable enviroments and some mods used this to pre-damage a building. Rather then carefully putting in holes the engine did it for the designer.
I think this is going to happen more and more. Were it is the computer itself that will adding a lot of the artwork. Think of it like this. The early vga games used seperate images to show a city at night or by day. Modern games got 1 set where the computer just changes the light levels.
Another cost saver could be the reuse of models. The mod scene already does this were you can often find one persons model of a gun in several games.
Same is true with the shift towards ragdoll physics. Before every animation of a character had to be inserted by hand. With ragdoll physics you can at least save on the death animations. Perhaps in the future even such things as walking will be created by the computer and not entered by filming an actor?
Wich can only lead to the conclusion that all the real work is being done on OS/2.
The extreme unix view is to get a lot of small apps that each do exactly 1 task and do it well. This has some advantages. The first is that the builder of such an app can concentrate on just 1 problem, another is that you should be able to mix and match. If I want to search through a number of files for a text string I can combine a number of tools as I want.
The disadvantage is also clear, you gotta learn about a lot of apps to do one end task. In windows search is simple. In linux it is two apps each with different syntax rules. Windows search is limited, linux search is complicated.
Another way of doing things is in adding similar functionality to an existing application. Making it feature rich or bloated (depending on your point of view). Web browsers are an obvious example. Should for instance bookmarks be part of the browser or a seperate app? What about a media player? Should the capability to view the source be an internal app (ala firefox) or an external app (IE and opera). Email? Well it is part of the internet isn't it? RSS? XML viewer? XML entry?
Get the picture?
I don't like suits either but then I am not a typical user. I prefer my email and browser and p2p and media player to be nicely seperated. Then again I can live with the fact that I have first to click on a link then choose to save the torrent file then go azureus select open torrent, select the torrent and finally be able to start leeching.
You would be suprised how many people would scream bloody murder if they had to do this.
Sadly it seems that at least in the browser sphere you and I are loosing. Feature creep seems to be a way of life for browser developers.
Anyway I wish the company luck, they already seem to have gotten themselves some free advertising and without even having a product to showoff. Good job.
Sure current OS'es are crap at handling large data files that essentlially just have to be passed through, I got a linux machine that seems to love eating up all the available memory and my windows machine can never seem to grasp the concept of giving the video app priority to the HD.
So when I recently downloaded my first high def video clip (interlaced) I had a severe problem playing it. The dual P3 Linux had problems as it was an offbeat codec and could not handle it at full speed.
Windows P4 HT 2.8ghz didn't fare much better. Despite that fact that it had double the memory, less crap in the background and fewer active filters and had a cpu 3-4 times faster it could barely keep up. As soon as I tried to deinterlace it it started to get choppy with random freezing as MS could apperantly not supply the data fast enough.
No I don't have virusses or trojans and the hardware on both platforms is pretty decent.
The answer is really simple both OS'es at the core were never designed for this task. For that matter the hardware isn't either. Almost everything in the design is geared towards multitasking.
It reminds me of the days when side scrolling games were still available and how badly the PC would always struggle with them even when it was clear that in pure crunching power the PC beat the pants of the consoles. Wich was very clear when consoles tried to do 3D (ala doom1) wich was the strong horse of the PC.
I don't think there is any clear mechanism at the moment where you can easily dictate wich application gets priority access to the resources available. This would be far more then "nice". After all video device that gets super high priority would then falter because "system" wich does the reading from HD does not get enough cpu time.
Perhaps the move to multicore pc's will solve some of this. My P3 despite being only 800mhz can still keep up aminzgly well considering a p4 2.8 fails as well.
What I don't see however is how a new OS is going to solve this. Sure it is easy to make a new OS that does just video. They already exist, inside your stand alone dvd player. For that matter inside the iPod and similar devices. The consoles are an other example. Yes they do a lot better performance wise in displaying video then their PC counterparts. So?
One of the things I noticed is that USB is a bitch for cpu whoring. Joysticks especially can cost you more frames then switching all the options on. Perhaps I just got the wrong sticks but I have noticed this for several years with different makes.
A PC can do a dozen tasks, that makes it slow but it also is what makes it so fucking usefull. Most users do not want to watch just 1 video. They want their RSS streams and check their email and be safe from virusses and be chatting with their mates etc etc etc.
Saying the Windows/Linux are old clunkers and that you could make a faster video OS is like saying that Volvo's are clunkers and you could make a faster race car. Well yeah. F1 cars are very very fast. I just wouldn't like to take one on a trip. A recent promo in Amsterdam had a F1 car driving through the city streets. Very exciting but it was very clear the car was barely under control and totally useless as a form of transport.
The device that does it all will never be able to compete directly with a single purpose device. The PC is as multi purpose as it can be and for the last few decades has defeated all new comers. I don't see this going to change.
Oh and didn't we have this whole video internet before? The constant dream that people will next year have fat pipes to their doorsteps at cheap prices? I have heard that dream for over a decade and still download at a trickle. Current internet would be hardpushed to saturate a iPod. My half a decade old machine can easily deal with internet streaming. It ain't the OS, it is the net, fix that and the OS will follow.
Everything since then is downhill.
I am afraid that the moment you collect information other then purely for information you do get involved with privacy laws. Or at least in holland. Even something as simple as getting people to give their email adress for a contest needs a privacy statement. That the law is rarely enforced means nothing.
The linux/hd addon will be USB anyway. No I am afraid that the problem of the missing keyboard will be extremely simple to solve. A over priced extra gadget.
Most single player games never have this. In fact if in a single player RPG you would still visit the beginner level merchant it would probably be considered a bad thing. Yet in MMORPG land you can really get to know your neighbourhood.
Leaving it can really create a sense of homesickness, a sense of something lost. Of course you know that the game is nothing more then a IRC with pretty pictures and yet it is more.
No MMORPG is any good if it were judged as a single player experience. Combat is simplistic and repetitive with moronic AI. Guild wars is about the only game were I seen proper interaction between AI enemies in that they really know how to use their healers. Even then simple pathfinding is a joke compared to "real" games.
The quests/story are a pale shadow of a single player RPG.
So the only "pull" left is either the level up OR the sense of community.
That community is more then simply chatting online. The MMORPG gives you a common goal to achieve. Chat for days on a IRC channel and you will maybe have made some friends. Play a MMORPG for days and you will have gone to hell and back shared victory and defeat, died and achieved vengeance. You will in fact have done more then most people can do in real live.
Leaving all that can cause a twinge or two. Or perhaps it is just the realisation that with the money you spend you could have bought several single player games.
Those who never played a MMORPG or do not become involved with other players will not understand and that is good. There is a reason we call it Evercrack.
I fear the day that an MMORPG will arrive that does not have horrid framerates and game breaking bugs. When someone invents a MMORPG that is bug free, glitch free, cheat free, lag free and has game play that would not be out of place in the best single player games that is the day I will sign up to be a battery in the matrix. Just plug me in and call me SmallFurryCreature Eater of Rats.