I think the low barrier of entry is the biggest point. With software that does almost what I want but not quiet, its easy to write a small patch to change it. I've done this several times and I still wouldn't say I even know C, but it's just that trivial to add some gethostbyaddr() calls to make a network monitoring tool spit out hostnames instead of ip adresses for example.
Not having the source is a huge change because then it becomes much harder, you're talking disassembling, patching the binary and hoping for the best, and arguably becoming illegal especially if you wanted to distribute your work. Huge change.
With open hardware, I really wouldn't be able to do much with it. I'd love it if my Scientific Atlanta DVR had wifi so I could feed it tv rips/share what it records. If I had the full open schematics for it, I'd.. not have a clue what to do and not want to risk breaking it all with trial and error fixes the way you can with software. No real difference than how it is now.
If you're using encryption that can't identify you on top of tor, you have no identification and better have a really important message to get out, otherwise any identity you claim to have will be re-used by the governments version of "Disregard, I suck cocks -OP", just look at 4chan's forced anonymous if you need proof.
Certainly still useful, but really limits any longterm connection you could make with someone else. Good for whistle blowing, not for organizing anything.
Valve actually has an even more interesting trick up its sleeve (unused afaik) called streaming. Inside their games is a precache file that tells steam exactly what files are needed for what map. Any texture, sound, model, etc that can occur in that map are in there. Because of this, they can* let you download only the core engine files, the first map, and everything it uses then start playing immediately while it proceeds to download level2. Presumably you could at some point remove anything only used in level1, although this is all theoretical as again as far as I know Valve never really went into production with this idea, so it just exists as a half developed concept and some interview answers.
As for WoW, it's pretty seamless and nice until you start raiding. Instance servers being seperate from the world servers hurts there though, as doing something like zoning in to get your corpse after you died just to zone back out and summon someone then zone back in leads to far more loading screens than you should have. Especially slow with a slow disk and a lot of addons, even though you'd think nothing an addon cares about would have changed.
Same argument could have been made for the original 3 star wars movies. Lucas had no intent on bringing them out for decades that people could get them via copyright infringement. Then one day Lucas decided to make them available, and made a hefty profit. Just like Disney could if they ever changed their mind and released it. If copyright didn't protect it people would completely devalue the product before its available.
It would be amazingly convenient if it wernt for the having to pair them. Phones can send vcards over bluetooth, so instead of giving someone your phonenumber or business card, you could send their phone your vcard with name, full contact info, etc and know it was saved correctly.
Of course thats pointless right now due to having to pair the devices up which takes more time and effort than it could save.
Because the definition of "works" changes all the time as well.
5 years ago I would have told you a 800x600 15" display works. Try upgrading to a 1600x1200 20", or better yet 20" 1600x1200 next to another monitor for dual monitor use. This also works, and works so much better that once you adapt to the new possibilities, the old way no longer 'works'.
Same with internet connectivity. Disk space. Etc.
Admittedly hardware, but you could say the same thing about some revolutionary software breakthroughs; Protected memory, fair scheduling, good filesystems, network filesystems, etc.
Ideally what you have now will always work for what you do now, but will limit you in what you can do in the future. You have to update what you have to update what you can then grow to do.
The trick is to weight he risks. If theres no noticable improvement, upgrade somewhere that isn't expected to be stable first. Test your updates. Make sure nothing breaks before you roll them out.
If they're the type that need you holding their hand like that, do you really trust them with a system wherein they type a password then any app on the system is free to dump the entire volume? What good will that do when someone (govt or otherwise) sends them an exe in their mail that they happily run that just waits for you to decrypt the volume?
Maybe they're smart enough to not run exes so blatantly, but theres plenty of other potential code execution like software that autoupdates (+ big enough power forcing someone to sign their code so it validates), exploits, backdoors, etc.
Then theres the operating system holes in your security. Filenames and content will still end up in "recently accessed" lists in common software, that alone can be more than enough info. Theres the cleartext copy that ends up sitting in your swap file if the app swaps out. Backup/temp files saved outside the secured drive, etc.
TrueCrypt is useful for what it is, and I certainly use it daily, you just have to be careful with helping people into the world of security as they're looking for a panacea to do everything for them.
You forget the other quick point to get back to an owner, serial number -> ATM that spit that out. Pay with >3 bills that all match you as the atm that generated them? Pretty good indication that its you, or someone you know. Obviously you would want to corroborate more data sources before acting on it, but its something.
lolwell is debatable but can be used right with good raid discipline (drop a lolwell for dpsers to grab as needed, especially warlocks. frees up your GCD's to be spent on the tank.)
Circle of Healing however is absolutely insane on the right fight, but worthlesss otherwise. The reason so few take it is so few are at a point in the game where you need to heal a group of people clumped up, but take a look at the Bloodboil fight and watch how much easier it gets with CoH.
While I agree about the warriors getting stupid buffs and warlocks getting the shaft, I have to question
For those only interested in PvE, it's not looking to good on that front either. If Zul'Aman is similar to Kara, there won't be many guilds progressing past it either.
"past it either"? Are you implying there aren't a lot of guilds that can beat kara? http://www.wowjutsu.com/world/ has 33284 total guilds listed, with 99.98% full clearing kara. If you're interested in PvE getting a pug together to clear kara is not hard. If anything ZA is a godsend to guild that can easily get 10 good players together but struggle to get 25 for ssc/tk without having to bring in people that can't dodge spouts.
The new heroic loot will also (marginally) help fill in the gaps for guilds still working on making it into hyjal. Marginally as its mostly spellhaste gear, which is severely overvalued and will not help someone otherwise too badly geared to keep up.
Also as for your armory data, I don't believe armory records chars below a certain level (10?) which can account for the discrepancy.
If I wish to donate, I can find my own suitable organization without prodding
I'd take that a step further. If I wish to donate, its to a charity that won't be spending my money paying someone to coldcall people to whore for donations.
Lets GPS track all our kids too! Promise only parents will have access to invasive information, its not like anyone else could possibly use this invasive info.
If you, a (I assume) adult male want to spend your free time playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure and when your friend comes over to play Tiger Woods and see your time played on the other game.. where does the parenting come in?
While your points true, I'm not too sure about orange box's performance on "extremely low end" machines. While playable, I get on average 20fps in tf2 in 800x600 with minimal settings and a fps config. Doesn't stop me, but is a lot less than I expected considering age of machine and how well a game like tf2 should scale. Maybe my windows install is just showing its clutter.
The log files are useless, last time I had to debug qmail it involved writing a bash script to race to strace as soon as the qmail process was ran (I forgot why I didn't just hook the parent process, but I digress).
If you know enough to want/need 2 screens, you know enough to make a few simple entries in a config file.
Which I have no problem with, except that X11's driver model made it impossible to have both an nvidia and an ati driver'd card running at the same time, so no amount of config editting would fix it. I also question if all the people who plug a monitor into their macbook pro and get dual monitors are also the type who would be fine with editing a config every time they wanted to do so. My guess is no.
Getting sound working hasn't been a problem for at least 7 years.
Again, if you want stereo audio with one source, it's been fine for 7 years. Internal mixing has been an issue up until the forced ALSA switch (which then limitted you to smaller hardware choices.), and I stil haven't seen 6channel audio done in linux though I'm sure it's possible, the support for the hardware is definitely lagging behind.
There's plenty of software available of equal or better quality than current offerings for Windows.
Name one that isn't also available for windows, which is my point. All the big names in linux software have windows ports, yet linux doesn't have ports of the big names in PC software.
In my opinion, they also have no right to deny users their right of first sale.
Can't say people are protected, unless taiwan has these kind of laws..and if they did they'd likely not be $20 cheaper.
They also have no right to require an active Internet connection in order for users to play offline, single player games.
They have the right to just as you have the right to go elsewhere. Personally I find the practice annoying, but I don't buy many SP games so I'm not really effected.
They also have no right to make the game "phone home" every time the user wants to play.
Again, sure they do, and they take advantage of this right to offer interesting features like public statistics and ingame messaging. Kind of nice opening up a friend chat mid-portal session to ask for advice.
They also have no right to force-push updates to single player offline games every time the user wants to play
Again, they have the right. They also don't force it, you can disable autoupdates at any time. Even for multiplayer games, though I believe it won't let you play until you do update.
I'm not sure why Steam wouldn't try to always beat retail prices, since it's got to cost less when you cut out all the overhead of packaging, shipping and stocking. I suppose their distribution deals with other publishers prevents them from doing this with games they don't own, and maybe Valve just wants to maximize their profits from their own games. That probably combines with the tendency of content providers to like to overcharge certain regions to make comparatively bad prices in non-US areas.
Accurate about the third party games, but for their own games it's not so much about maximizing profits as still wanting to be sold in retail stores. If they sold their games online significantly cheaper then no publisher would want to publish them and they would be stuck selling exclusively online, which the market is not yet ready for.
The more successful steam is, the more sour the relationship with Vivendi gets. At least this is how it was back in the pre-hl2 days, I'm not sure if its changed now that I see so many more third party games and publishers signed up for steam distribution.
I think its about time people lift those restrictions, they're really outdated. In an era of bittorrent and other p2p, few people are putting serious loads on their ISP via http hosting. The only type of people that would know how and desire to set up a webserver residentially are probably more interested in small file sharing amongst friends or just general learning about webdesign or admin.
It made sense when napster was still new and there was valid concern over people hosting all their stuff off cable, but that time is long over.
While bandwidth is a concern, you don't need a 20mbit pipe to run a gameserver. The reason most game servers ran at home suck is because its usually a listen server (the same software someone is playing the game with is hosting everyones server). That means any lag spike on their computer, say.. a smoke grenade or other nontrivial to render thing happens, everyones game spikes. Meanwhile he runs around with 0ping and 100% accurate gameplay as his game is authorative while everyone else is just predicting.
I'd say a 1.5mbit connection would actually do okay for game server hosting, and even some cable/dsl providers do that. Of course it depends entirely on number of slots and updates pushed per second, and with more bandwidth you can certainly host more.
Theres plenty of porn on photobucket. Photobucket also doesn't keep records on the people submitting the pictures. Certainly not copies of valid photo id and all the other things USC 18 2257 requires.
This ruling just means photobucket is no longer illegal. It won't really impact anything, as its not like they'd actually go after photobucket before, but it's nice when there aren't crazy laws being held over your head 24/7 that can be used against you at any time if you pose a threat or decide to not comply with some powerful persons request.
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I used the windows xp "windows messenger" version of MSN this morning to login to an @getanotherfuckingisp.com login with no problem. YMMV.
I think the low barrier of entry is the biggest point.
With software that does almost what I want but not quiet, its easy to write a small patch to change it. I've done this several times and I still wouldn't say I even know C, but it's just that trivial to add some gethostbyaddr() calls to make a network monitoring tool spit out hostnames instead of ip adresses for example.
Not having the source is a huge change because then it becomes much harder, you're talking disassembling, patching the binary and hoping for the best, and arguably becoming illegal especially if you wanted to distribute your work. Huge change.
With open hardware, I really wouldn't be able to do much with it. I'd love it if my Scientific Atlanta DVR had wifi so I could feed it tv rips/share what it records. If I had the full open schematics for it, I'd.. not have a clue what to do and not want to risk breaking it all with trial and error fixes the way you can with software. No real difference than how it is now.
If you're using encryption that can't identify you on top of tor, you have no identification and better have a really important message to get out, otherwise any identity you claim to have will be re-used by the governments version of "Disregard, I suck cocks -OP", just look at 4chan's forced anonymous if you need proof.
Certainly still useful, but really limits any longterm connection you could make with someone else. Good for whistle blowing, not for organizing anything.
Portal level 14 in 4 seconds. Speed running counts if its a goal of the game, right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0iSYB7fubg
Valve actually has an even more interesting trick up its sleeve (unused afaik) called streaming. Inside their games is a precache file that tells steam exactly what files are needed for what map. Any texture, sound, model, etc that can occur in that map are in there. Because of this, they can* let you download only the core engine files, the first map, and everything it uses then start playing immediately while it proceeds to download level2. Presumably you could at some point remove anything only used in level1, although this is all theoretical as again as far as I know Valve never really went into production with this idea, so it just exists as a half developed concept and some interview answers.
As for WoW, it's pretty seamless and nice until you start raiding. Instance servers being seperate from the world servers hurts there though, as doing something like zoning in to get your corpse after you died just to zone back out and summon someone then zone back in leads to far more loading screens than you should have.
Especially slow with a slow disk and a lot of addons, even though you'd think nothing an addon cares about would have changed.
Same argument could have been made for the original 3 star wars movies. Lucas had no intent on bringing them out for decades that people could get them via copyright infringement. Then one day Lucas decided to make them available, and made a hefty profit. Just like Disney could if they ever changed their mind and released it. If copyright didn't protect it people would completely devalue the product before its available.
It would be amazingly convenient if it wernt for the having to pair them. Phones can send vcards over bluetooth, so instead of giving someone your phonenumber or business card, you could send their phone your vcard with name, full contact info, etc and know it was saved correctly.
Of course thats pointless right now due to having to pair the devices up which takes more time and effort than it could save.
Because the definition of "works" changes all the time as well.
5 years ago I would have told you a 800x600 15" display works. Try upgrading to a 1600x1200 20", or better yet 20" 1600x1200 next to another monitor for dual monitor use. This also works, and works so much better that once you adapt to the new possibilities, the old way no longer 'works'.
Same with internet connectivity. Disk space. Etc.
Admittedly hardware, but you could say the same thing about some revolutionary software breakthroughs; Protected memory, fair scheduling, good filesystems, network filesystems, etc.
Ideally what you have now will always work for what you do now, but will limit you in what you can do in the future. You have to update what you have to update what you can then grow to do.
The trick is to weight he risks. If theres no noticable improvement, upgrade somewhere that isn't expected to be stable first. Test your updates. Make sure nothing breaks before you roll them out.
Find a weakness in it and then fully support the algorithm instead of one of its competition?
Maybe make suggestions on how to make it "more secure" that make it easier for them to attack?
Or at lest giving them a false sense if security.
If they're the type that need you holding their hand like that, do you really trust them with a system wherein they type a password then any app on the system is free to dump the entire volume? What good will that do when someone (govt or otherwise) sends them an exe in their mail that they happily run that just waits for you to decrypt the volume?
Maybe they're smart enough to not run exes so blatantly, but theres plenty of other potential code execution like software that autoupdates (+ big enough power forcing someone to sign their code so it validates), exploits, backdoors, etc.
Then theres the operating system holes in your security. Filenames and content will still end up in "recently accessed" lists in common software, that alone can be more than enough info. Theres the cleartext copy that ends up sitting in your swap file if the app swaps out. Backup/temp files saved outside the secured drive, etc.
TrueCrypt is useful for what it is, and I certainly use it daily, you just have to be careful with helping people into the world of security as they're looking for a panacea to do everything for them.
You forget the other quick point to get back to an owner, serial number -> ATM that spit that out. Pay with >3 bills that all match you as the atm that generated them? Pretty good indication that its you, or someone you know. Obviously you would want to corroborate more data sources before acting on it, but its something.
lolwell is debatable but can be used right with good raid discipline (drop a lolwell for dpsers to grab as needed, especially warlocks. frees up your GCD's to be spent on the tank.)
Circle of Healing however is absolutely insane on the right fight, but worthlesss otherwise. The reason so few take it is so few are at a point in the game where you need to heal a group of people clumped up, but take a look at the Bloodboil fight and watch how much easier it gets with CoH.
"past it either"? Are you implying there aren't a lot of guilds that can beat kara?
http://www.wowjutsu.com/world/ has 33284 total guilds listed, with 99.98% full clearing kara.
If you're interested in PvE getting a pug together to clear kara is not hard. If anything ZA is a godsend to guild that can easily get 10 good players together but struggle to get 25 for ssc/tk without having to bring in people that can't dodge spouts.
The new heroic loot will also (marginally) help fill in the gaps for guilds still working on making it into hyjal. Marginally as its mostly spellhaste gear, which is severely overvalued and will not help someone otherwise too badly geared to keep up.
Also as for your armory data, I don't believe armory records chars below a certain level (10?) which can account for the discrepancy.
I'd take that a step further. If I wish to donate, its to a charity that won't be spending my money paying someone to coldcall people to whore for donations.
Lets GPS track all our kids too! Promise only parents will have access to invasive information, its not like anyone else could possibly use this invasive info.
If you, a (I assume) adult male want to spend your free time playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure and when your friend comes over to play Tiger Woods and see your time played on the other game.. where does the parenting come in?
Doesn't stop me, but is a lot less than I expected considering age of machine and how well a game like tf2 should scale. Maybe my windows install is just showing its clutter.
Specs straight from steam:
The log files are useless, last time I had to debug qmail it involved writing a bash script to race to strace as soon as the qmail process was ran (I forgot why I didn't just hook the parent process, but I digress).
Your new password is a giant line from the top right corner to the bottom left.
Or just let them login passwordless forcing them to reset their password on next login, and expiring in 3 minutes if they don't login.
Which I have no problem with, except that X11's driver model made it impossible to have both an nvidia and an ati driver'd card running at the same time, so no amount of config editting would fix it.
I also question if all the people who plug a monitor into their macbook pro and get dual monitors are also the type who would be fine with editing a config every time they wanted to do so. My guess is no.
Again, if you want stereo audio with one source, it's been fine for 7 years. Internal mixing has been an issue up until the forced ALSA switch (which then limitted you to smaller hardware choices.), and I stil haven't seen 6channel audio done in linux though I'm sure it's possible, the support for the hardware is definitely lagging behind.
Name one that isn't also available for windows, which is my point. All the big names in linux software have windows ports, yet linux doesn't have ports of the big names in PC software.
OSS at the time, as ALSA didn't support my soundcard. Of course now I have a different card and I'd hope the support is overall better.
Can't say people are protected, unless taiwan has these kind of laws..and if they did they'd likely not be $20 cheaper.
They have the right to just as you have the right to go elsewhere. Personally I find the practice annoying, but I don't buy many SP games so I'm not really effected.
Again, sure they do, and they take advantage of this right to offer interesting features like public statistics and ingame messaging. Kind of nice opening up a friend chat mid-portal session to ask for advice.
Again, they have the right. They also don't force it, you can disable autoupdates at any time. Even for multiplayer games, though I believe it won't let you play until you do update.
Accurate about the third party games, but for their own games it's not so much about maximizing profits as still wanting to be sold in retail stores.
If they sold their games online significantly cheaper then no publisher would want to publish them and they would be stuck selling exclusively online, which the market is not yet ready for.
The more successful steam is, the more sour the relationship with Vivendi gets. At least this is how it was back in the pre-hl2 days, I'm not sure if its changed now that I see so many more third party games and publishers signed up for steam distribution.
I think its about time people lift those restrictions, they're really outdated. In an era of bittorrent and other p2p, few people are putting serious loads on their ISP via http hosting. The only type of people that would know how and desire to set up a webserver residentially are probably more interested in small file sharing amongst friends or just general learning about webdesign or admin.
It made sense when napster was still new and there was valid concern over people hosting all their stuff off cable, but that time is long over.
While bandwidth is a concern, you don't need a 20mbit pipe to run a gameserver. The reason most game servers ran at home suck is because its usually a listen server (the same software someone is playing the game with is hosting everyones server). That means any lag spike on their computer, say.. a smoke grenade or other nontrivial to render thing happens, everyones game spikes. Meanwhile he runs around with 0ping and 100% accurate gameplay as his game is authorative while everyone else is just predicting.
I'd say a 1.5mbit connection would actually do okay for game server hosting, and even some cable/dsl providers do that. Of course it depends entirely on number of slots and updates pushed per second, and with more bandwidth you can certainly host more.
Theres plenty of porn on photobucket. Photobucket also doesn't keep records on the people submitting the pictures. Certainly not copies of valid photo id and all the other things USC 18 2257 requires.
This ruling just means photobucket is no longer illegal. It won't really impact anything, as its not like they'd actually go after photobucket before, but it's nice when there aren't crazy laws being held over your head 24/7 that can be used against you at any time if you pose a threat or decide to not comply with some powerful persons request.