It's also miserably inefficient to emulate, say, an Amiga 500 inside an Amiga 500. The virtualised instance will be considerably slower than the host to the point where it's not feasible to use. However, from the perspective of the software running on that emulated instance nothing is different, it behaves as normal, instructions take the same number of CPU clocks as they would on real hardware.
It doesn't much matter how long the host takes to run one second of simulated time if we're part of that simulation. If one second of simulated time takes a year to simulate or a thousand years it'd still be one second of simulated time.
I'm with you, though, this is an interesting teleological plaything but little more. God isn't a computer scientist any more than he's a watchmaker.
I meant no offense by it. The books you cite are common degree texts.
I can't say I agree with your suggestion that the x86 ISA is simple. I would say that it's an extremely complex ISA that takes a lot of unnecessary pre-decode logic to hack it up into micro ops. If the ISA was simpler that pre-decode logic would not need to be so hefty (or could be scrapped entirely) and more of the transistor budget could be spent on L1 and register file size, as happens in better designed, modern ISAs.
I have yet to own a motherboard that does not have a fan on the northbridge, except for the one where I'd replaced the manufacturers fan with my own heatsink. This product isn't for that $500 PC you bought from Gateway; it's intended for the performance market. This is still kinda dumb, since fans are probably cheaper than heatsinks, and fans are definitely cheaper and more economical to manufacture than this thing. MSI are clearly doing this to grab some publicity after they realised they're being outclassed by pretty much every other manufacturer, even Foxconn.
Isn't reverse engineering with the tools used in this article disallowed by the license agreement for the game? I know little about law, so who has the trump card here?
All that would be great justification for having discrete levels, except for the fact that you can have payoffs without having levels. Cutscenes or scripted events are examples.
I think obvious levels (LEVEL 1... LEVEL 2 etc) have died out. These only exist in puzzle games. Nowadays we have maps, and these are generally structured to fit together seamlessly. I would not call these levels and I'm sure that if technology permitted it we wouldn't have loading between maps.
Having separate maps simply makes things easier to develop. Different people can work on different maps at the same time and tie them together afterwards.
I think the lingo has evolved and left you behind. I understand "hardware firewall" to mean a hardware device that only functions as a firewall. Obviously the firewall it runs will be software or firmware. The idea of having some sort of "pure" hardware firewall implementation where you flick DIP switches to accept or drop packets is ludicrous. Perhaps the term "discrete firewall" would suit you better?
Also, as far as Leopard's firewall functionality goes I think they have struck quite a nice balance between irritating and protecting the user. People buy Macs primarily because they don't want bullshit from their computer. I don't have a Mac but I'm confident that Apple understand that to run something as root is to grant it complete control of the system (and, incidentally, the firewall) and have made sure that only system-critical network services run as root. I would be surprised to find network services that listen on anything other than localhost running as root in the base install. Besides, blocking root services with a firewall that can be controlled by root is an entirely pointless exercise.
Don't forget the thin client technologies that are currently making a big impact. We're pretty much back to dumb terminals again. Having a large, centralised system is obviously an advantage until we find some way of utilising all that wasted power in the 2GHz desktops with 1Gib of RAM that companies buy in the hundreds.
It strikes me that along time ago some clever sod managed to dupe companies into buying and maintaining individual PCs at huge cost when small, lightweight terminals connected to a central mainframe were doing a great job. It's taken us nearly 20 years to notice that all people in most companies ever run is Office and most of them don't use even half of the features that were available in, say, Word 6.0. The idea of having hundreds of desktop PCs was a big mistake full of compromises like network drives, roaming profiles and remote control apps like VNC or Microsoft's Remote Assistance, none of which you need if you have the mainframe serve out desktops.
The greatest example of the evolution of the mainframe is the web. Web apps and office suites are quickly evolving thanks to technologies like AJAX and this all harks back to the general mainframe concept: Your clients show the UI, your (possibly distributed) servers do the work, keep the backups, and store everything in one place that's relatively easy to administer. If it goes down you have redundancy in the form of HA clusters or whatever to keep the system as a whole working. These ideas never went away, for some reason we just lost focus.
Who cares? They still got revenue for the sales however these licenses were purchased, and revenue is what matters. Microsoft don't give a damn whether you actually installed it or not, or whether you went back to XP after installing it. They know you have a license, and they'll tempt you to (re)install Vista by making some of their newer software only available on Vista.
I don't really see what's wrong with Vista anyway. DRM only applies if you're stupid enough to buy or download DRM protected material, the UI is quite attractive this time despite the Start menu being worse than ever, and there are some quite clever technologies under the hood when you get down to the kernel level. It seems that most bitching about Microsoft would be better directed towards the Shell team and the Marketing department.
We hear stories that run along these lines "Smith, who was a user of cannabis, rampaged through the building mercilessly blah blah" or, "Doe, who is reported to have been very much into violent video games, murdered 17 bystanders at yadda yadda", as if these things had any great bearing. Fact is, playing violent video games is a symptom and not a cause. Taking recreational drugs is a symptom and not a cause. They could probably dredge up something on what he had in his movie or music collection, what kind of books he read, what kind of food he ate. All of these things reflect a person's personality, they do not make it.
It's little consolation to know that video games were not a part of the Virginia shootings but at least it shows that it takes, at the very basic level, a madman to pull the trigger on 32 people. This is not the action of a sane individual, and neither was Columbine. What riles me about the whole deal is that they suspected he was unhinged and did nothing about it other than advising him to get therapy. I know hindsight is 20-20, but really if you suspect someone of being nuts you make damn sure they get checked out - they won't do it themselves because in their own minds they're not the one that's crazy: everyone else is. And you can clearly see that from his tape.
While I agree with many of the points the article raised, I have (I think) some more important ones.
1) 802.11g with WPA encryption. Nintendo's official response to this is pretty much "go screw yourself!" but I'm prevented from using many wifi features due to using WPA on my WLAN.
2) Better use of wifi technology. The initial menus should show any DS users in range and what game they're playing when the system boots. Then you should be able to ask to join their game (provided you insert the right cart) by touching one of the games. That main boot menu is unused most of the time because people simply hit the button that starts the game they have inserted. I've seen so many people with a DS on the train when I have mine in my bag, but I can never tell what game they're playing and it's kind of annoying for me to ask them to quit so I could give them a game. Conversely, if a message scrolled past saying "Steve wants to join your game, press START to allow it" (without interrupting their play) they would probably allow it and we might even strike up a conversation afterwards. We can already play strangers on Nintendo WFC, why can't we do it with some agility in ad-hoc play?
3) Don't lock-up the OS when I pop out the cart. This is ridiculous. The system menus boot from ROM and I should be able to swap games without crashing the initial menu system. This is a requirement for point 2 to work. There are interrupts that fire when a cart is removed, but the DS firmware doesn't seem to handle them.
4) The DS browser is very slow due to lack of system memory. An official way of expanding the memory (like a mini SD slot or *officially supported* mini-SD expansion cart for the GBA slot) would be a nice feature.
5) Improve the sound quality, I have no problem with the visuals but the sound quality isn't really good enough for MP3s on headphones. 44khz sampling rates at 16bit would be nice.
6) Allow me to download demos of games with the browser and stream mp3 audio like web radio.
7) Give me a custom avatar to store in my personal data instead of making me draw a different one in every game.
8) Keep everything else as it is and don't try to turn it into a PDA.
All this is conjecture, but this is what I'm guessing the elements in the ID block are.
UGD: Not sure. Looks like a UUID. HDSLN: Hard disk serial USID: User security identifier (id of logged in user, Microsoft can tell if you're any of the default SIDs like Administrator) CSID: Computer security identifier
So Microsoft can tell whether you're an admin or not, they know the unique ID of the computer (CSID), your account if you aren't "Administrator" and - perhaps - the hard disk. If UGD turns out to be something that is unique to each individual copy of Windows, then all the people who've ripped it off could find life inconvenient in the future. I'm not sure what the tracking implications are, it depends how many Microsoft products report the HD serial or USID to them.
My job carries a small support role in addition to systems admin and project work, and the users who know "too much" aren't the problem. In my experience they're the best ones to deal with. The users who know nothing are more tricky since explaining things in their terms can be complicated, but not anything to worry about.
The problem is the users who have confidence with computers but don't know what they're doing. These guys are the worst, they'll experience a problem and attack it on all fronts with limited knowledge. By the time they've called up support they've already tried several avenues of attack with no result and it's sometimes impossible to work out the mess they've left behind while not realising the true root of the problem.
I dread these users. They'll unplug and repatch and hard reset and swap their hardware for other incompatible hardware around the office, they'll meddle with printer settings until they've tried every combination of options without remembering the originals, they'll tinker with anything and everything that we haven't locked down like the public shared areas for their office, even download weird and dangerous software from the net.
When they finally swallow their pride and call support they'll be absolutely livid that they haven't managed to work it out and accuse our network of having broken or spout some completely irrelevant garbage they read on a troubleshooting forum when really their account is locked or they deleted/moved a file linked to the Access database they're working on or something along those lines. Usually this results in us having to spend an hour on the phone to them reverting all the changes they made, or simply reghost the machine.
I don't see any obvious solution to these guys beyond total and absolute lockdown, which isn't feasible as dealing with silly things like adding printers or setting application options would make first level support's workload much too high - often these things can't be locked down anyway.
I agree. Sonic doesn't need any more personality than he has already. I preferred Sonic when he was relatively silent, with a basic story that wasn't too plot-heavy. This allowed the game's attributes to shine through. When Sega conceived Sonic they had too goals: make him cool, and make him fast.
Sonic's cool because he was quiet and indifferent. He didn't need huge quantities of dialog to embellish his character, and he didn't need a complex plot to make the game fun. Sonic has always been about showing off the capabilities of the hardware while being extremely fast and responsive and filling the game with cutscenes and dialog only slows down the pace.
Characters in simple, cartoon platform games focussed on enjoyment are like toys. Toys that talk are always, in the long term, less fun than ones that are dumb objects because pre-packaged personalities stand in the way of (or at least affect) the ability of the player to project their own imagined personality onto the toy. I think it's the same with these simple, two dimensional game characters.
The moment Sega has to start justifying Sonic and finding detailed reasons for him to be fighting with giant ladybugs on wheels and crabs is the moment they spoil the game, it doesn't matter what the badniks are or why. All that matters is that Robotnik is the villain, the deformed animals/insects are his henchmen, and Sonic must save the day by running around collecting rings and defeating boss characters while wearing sneakers. He's a giant blue hedgehog that runs on his hind legs at terrific speed. That's too ridiculous to try to justify. Just let it be, go with it, and try to have some fun.
The only Sonic games that live up their heritage of late have been been Sonic Rush on NDS, and Sonic Advance 2 on GBA. Perhaps the limitations of handheld systems force the developers to concentrate on getting the most out of the hardware for the actual gameplay, rather than character embellishment.
Hang on, they gave the award to the DualShock not the DualShock II. Whatever, most of what I said still stands except for the pressure sensitive buttons.
It was pretty comfortable, and in its day it was the best because it did the job perfectly, had pressure sensitive buttons, vibration, 2 clickable sticks and didn't pit form against function. Simply, it was a very well designed piece of kit with a good weight to it. I think it probably had some influence on the design of controllers that came out afterwards.
Obviously, some will disagree and say it was a huge pain in the ass to use, but as far as I can see they're in the minority. It may well have been superseded by the 360's controller, but it deserves a belated award for its influence. That is, unless this award is just one big prank on Sony.
"Sony, we will be honouring your legendary controller technology with an Emmy."
"AWESOME we cannot believe we won over Nintendo with our hasty stab at copying their functionality. Release lots of embarrassing press releases patting ourselves on the back and saying how fantastic we are for our revolutionary SIXAXIS controller!!"
"Haha, only kidding. It's for the DualShock, suckers"
How much of a smack in the face is that? Quality work Emmy dudes.
OK I've clearly not been keeping up-to-date here after playing with the Vista release candidates, but does LUA really prevent you from even running an executable file you downloaded without an admin username and password? Surely LUA is there to stop the executable from doing "bad things" rather than the user from running it, like in pretty much every other multiuser OS.
If I download a game as an executable file, sure I expect to get a warning maybe. Then I expect the exe to run but with reduced privileges so it cannot harm the rest of the system. It should get access to my home directory, read-only access to other non-critical OS files such as libs, and be protected from making unauthorised Internet connections. Obviously a malicious exe may be able to gain elevated privileges by exploiting security flaws, but these holes should be patched regularly by the vendor to prevent other people from using the same exploits. Right?
If LUA requires me to enter an admin pass for every exe I download then that really *is* bad. However, I would expect it to be well designed enough not to. Any system that demands that of a user will ultimately result in the user keeping the admin pass on a sticky note on their screen and just giving every exe they run the keys to their entire system.
Surely that doesn't matter. Whether the source port is rewritten or not external services will still try to respond to that port and the firewall will have to deal with that for things like DNS to work. The firewall can rewrite the source port so long as it remembers it did so when a response comes to that port. Now, if the firewall randomly rewrites source ports depending on destination IP the system won't work, because a datagram has to be sent to the mediation server first to establish which port the datagrams are going to come from.
Also I think grasshoppa misinterpreted point of the parent. RelliK's point was that a stateful firewall cannot know that a remote firewall blocked the datagram it sent. As far as it is concerned, it got a response from the IP it sent the datagram to and the response was sent to the source port of the original packet (because the mediation server knows the source port that the datagrams come from and can inform the remote machine of this over an established stateful connection).
However, other posters are right. This is really nothing new yet the article is one of the simplest explanations of the concept I've seen.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also miserably inefficient to emulate, say, an Amiga 500 inside an Amiga 500. The virtualised instance will be considerably slower than the host to the point where it's not feasible to use. However, from the perspective of the software running on that emulated instance nothing is different, it behaves as normal, instructions take the same number of CPU clocks as they would on real hardware.
It doesn't much matter how long the host takes to run one second of simulated time if we're part of that simulation. If one second of simulated time takes a year to simulate or a thousand years it'd still be one second of simulated time.
I'm with you, though, this is an interesting teleological plaything but little more. God isn't a computer scientist any more than he's a watchmaker.
I meant no offense by it. The books you cite are common degree texts.
I can't say I agree with your suggestion that the x86 ISA is simple. I would say that it's an extremely complex ISA that takes a lot of unnecessary pre-decode logic to hack it up into micro ops. If the ISA was simpler that pre-decode logic would not need to be so hefty (or could be scrapped entirely) and more of the transistor budget could be spent on L1 and register file size, as happens in better designed, modern ISAs.
You're a computer science undergrad, right?
I have yet to own a motherboard that does not have a fan on the northbridge, except for the one where I'd replaced the manufacturers fan with my own heatsink. This product isn't for that $500 PC you bought from Gateway; it's intended for the performance market. This is still kinda dumb, since fans are probably cheaper than heatsinks, and fans are definitely cheaper and more economical to manufacture than this thing. MSI are clearly doing this to grab some publicity after they realised they're being outclassed by pretty much every other manufacturer, even Foxconn.
And here it is in graph form
Isn't reverse engineering with the tools used in this article disallowed by the license agreement for the game? I know little about law, so who has the trump card here?
All that would be great justification for having discrete levels, except for the fact that you can have payoffs without having levels. Cutscenes or scripted events are examples.
I think obvious levels (LEVEL 1... LEVEL 2 etc) have died out. These only exist in puzzle games. Nowadays we have maps, and these are generally structured to fit together seamlessly. I would not call these levels and I'm sure that if technology permitted it we wouldn't have loading between maps.
Having separate maps simply makes things easier to develop. Different people can work on different maps at the same time and tie them together afterwards.
I think the lingo has evolved and left you behind. I understand "hardware firewall" to mean a hardware device that only functions as a firewall. Obviously the firewall it runs will be software or firmware. The idea of having some sort of "pure" hardware firewall implementation where you flick DIP switches to accept or drop packets is ludicrous. Perhaps the term "discrete firewall" would suit you better?
Also, as far as Leopard's firewall functionality goes I think they have struck quite a nice balance between irritating and protecting the user. People buy Macs primarily because they don't want bullshit from their computer. I don't have a Mac but I'm confident that Apple understand that to run something as root is to grant it complete control of the system (and, incidentally, the firewall) and have made sure that only system-critical network services run as root. I would be surprised to find network services that listen on anything other than localhost running as root in the base install. Besides, blocking root services with a firewall that can be controlled by root is an entirely pointless exercise.
p.s. that url should have had a space in it but slashdot's tag is incompatible with amazon's crazy patents.
Yeah except that isn't what they patented. If wikipedia worked with http://en.wikipedia.org/Priorart then that would be an example of prior art.
Don't forget the thin client technologies that are currently making a big impact. We're pretty much back to dumb terminals again. Having a large, centralised system is obviously an advantage until we find some way of utilising all that wasted power in the 2GHz desktops with 1Gib of RAM that companies buy in the hundreds.
It strikes me that along time ago some clever sod managed to dupe companies into buying and maintaining individual PCs at huge cost when small, lightweight terminals connected to a central mainframe were doing a great job. It's taken us nearly 20 years to notice that all people in most companies ever run is Office and most of them don't use even half of the features that were available in, say, Word 6.0. The idea of having hundreds of desktop PCs was a big mistake full of compromises like network drives, roaming profiles and remote control apps like VNC or Microsoft's Remote Assistance, none of which you need if you have the mainframe serve out desktops.
The greatest example of the evolution of the mainframe is the web. Web apps and office suites are quickly evolving thanks to technologies like AJAX and this all harks back to the general mainframe concept: Your clients show the UI, your (possibly distributed) servers do the work, keep the backups, and store everything in one place that's relatively easy to administer. If it goes down you have redundancy in the form of HA clusters or whatever to keep the system as a whole working. These ideas never went away, for some reason we just lost focus.
The Moscow Times had this last month. Better pictures at Wired, though.
For those hardcores with a taste for Cyrillic, the Museum's website is www.15kop.ru
Those in the UK could see some of these games at Swindon's Museum of Computing, as this BBC article from 2004 states. Not sure if they're still there.
Wasn't this reviewed 2 months ago by AnandTech?
Who cares? They still got revenue for the sales however these licenses were purchased, and revenue is what matters. Microsoft don't give a damn whether you actually installed it or not, or whether you went back to XP after installing it. They know you have a license, and they'll tempt you to (re)install Vista by making some of their newer software only available on Vista. I don't really see what's wrong with Vista anyway. DRM only applies if you're stupid enough to buy or download DRM protected material, the UI is quite attractive this time despite the Start menu being worse than ever, and there are some quite clever technologies under the hood when you get down to the kernel level. It seems that most bitching about Microsoft would be better directed towards the Shell team and the Marketing department.
We hear stories that run along these lines "Smith, who was a user of cannabis, rampaged through the building mercilessly blah blah" or, "Doe, who is reported to have been very much into violent video games, murdered 17 bystanders at yadda yadda", as if these things had any great bearing. Fact is, playing violent video games is a symptom and not a cause. Taking recreational drugs is a symptom and not a cause. They could probably dredge up something on what he had in his movie or music collection, what kind of books he read, what kind of food he ate. All of these things reflect a person's personality, they do not make it.
It's little consolation to know that video games were not a part of the Virginia shootings but at least it shows that it takes, at the very basic level, a madman to pull the trigger on 32 people. This is not the action of a sane individual, and neither was Columbine. What riles me about the whole deal is that they suspected he was unhinged and did nothing about it other than advising him to get therapy. I know hindsight is 20-20, but really if you suspect someone of being nuts you make damn sure they get checked out - they won't do it themselves because in their own minds they're not the one that's crazy: everyone else is. And you can clearly see that from his tape.
While I agree with many of the points the article raised, I have (I think) some more important ones.
1) 802.11g with WPA encryption. Nintendo's official response to this is pretty much "go screw yourself!" but I'm prevented from using many wifi features due to using WPA on my WLAN.
2) Better use of wifi technology. The initial menus should show any DS users in range and what game they're playing when the system boots. Then you should be able to ask to join their game (provided you insert the right cart) by touching one of the games. That main boot menu is unused most of the time because people simply hit the button that starts the game they have inserted. I've seen so many people with a DS on the train when I have mine in my bag, but I can never tell what game they're playing and it's kind of annoying for me to ask them to quit so I could give them a game. Conversely, if a message scrolled past saying "Steve wants to join your game, press START to allow it" (without interrupting their play) they would probably allow it and we might even strike up a conversation afterwards. We can already play strangers on Nintendo WFC, why can't we do it with some agility in ad-hoc play?
3) Don't lock-up the OS when I pop out the cart. This is ridiculous. The system menus boot from ROM and I should be able to swap games without crashing the initial menu system. This is a requirement for point 2 to work. There are interrupts that fire when a cart is removed, but the DS firmware doesn't seem to handle them.
4) The DS browser is very slow due to lack of system memory. An official way of expanding the memory (like a mini SD slot or *officially supported* mini-SD expansion cart for the GBA slot) would be a nice feature.
5) Improve the sound quality, I have no problem with the visuals but the sound quality isn't really good enough for MP3s on headphones. 44khz sampling rates at 16bit would be nice.
6) Allow me to download demos of games with the browser and stream mp3 audio like web radio.
7) Give me a custom avatar to store in my personal data instead of making me draw a different one in every game.
8) Keep everything else as it is and don't try to turn it into a PDA.
All this is conjecture, but this is what I'm guessing the elements in the ID block are.
UGD: Not sure. Looks like a UUID.
HDSLN: Hard disk serial
USID: User security identifier (id of logged in user, Microsoft can tell if you're any of the default SIDs like Administrator)
CSID: Computer security identifier
So Microsoft can tell whether you're an admin or not, they know the unique ID of the computer (CSID), your account if you aren't "Administrator" and - perhaps - the hard disk. If UGD turns out to be something that is unique to each individual copy of Windows, then all the people who've ripped it off could find life inconvenient in the future. I'm not sure what the tracking implications are, it depends how many Microsoft products report the HD serial or USID to them.
Who needs a puny wok when you have a C-band satellite dish. Aww yeah.
My job carries a small support role in addition to systems admin and project work, and the users who know "too much" aren't the problem. In my experience they're the best ones to deal with. The users who know nothing are more tricky since explaining things in their terms can be complicated, but not anything to worry about.
The problem is the users who have confidence with computers but don't know what they're doing. These guys are the worst, they'll experience a problem and attack it on all fronts with limited knowledge. By the time they've called up support they've already tried several avenues of attack with no result and it's sometimes impossible to work out the mess they've left behind while not realising the true root of the problem.
I dread these users. They'll unplug and repatch and hard reset and swap their hardware for other incompatible hardware around the office, they'll meddle with printer settings until they've tried every combination of options without remembering the originals, they'll tinker with anything and everything that we haven't locked down like the public shared areas for their office, even download weird and dangerous software from the net.
When they finally swallow their pride and call support they'll be absolutely livid that they haven't managed to work it out and accuse our network of having broken or spout some completely irrelevant garbage they read on a troubleshooting forum when really their account is locked or they deleted/moved a file linked to the Access database they're working on or something along those lines. Usually this results in us having to spend an hour on the phone to them reverting all the changes they made, or simply reghost the machine.
I don't see any obvious solution to these guys beyond total and absolute lockdown, which isn't feasible as dealing with silly things like adding printers or setting application options would make first level support's workload much too high - often these things can't be locked down anyway.
I agree. Sonic doesn't need any more personality than he has already. I preferred Sonic when he was relatively silent, with a basic story that wasn't too plot-heavy. This allowed the game's attributes to shine through. When Sega conceived Sonic they had too goals: make him cool, and make him fast.
Sonic's cool because he was quiet and indifferent. He didn't need huge quantities of dialog to embellish his character, and he didn't need a complex plot to make the game fun. Sonic has always been about showing off the capabilities of the hardware while being extremely fast and responsive and filling the game with cutscenes and dialog only slows down the pace.
Characters in simple, cartoon platform games focussed on enjoyment are like toys. Toys that talk are always, in the long term, less fun than ones that are dumb objects because pre-packaged personalities stand in the way of (or at least affect) the ability of the player to project their own imagined personality onto the toy. I think it's the same with these simple, two dimensional game characters.
The moment Sega has to start justifying Sonic and finding detailed reasons for him to be fighting with giant ladybugs on wheels and crabs is the moment they spoil the game, it doesn't matter what the badniks are or why. All that matters is that Robotnik is the villain, the deformed animals/insects are his henchmen, and Sonic must save the day by running around collecting rings and defeating boss characters while wearing sneakers. He's a giant blue hedgehog that runs on his hind legs at terrific speed. That's too ridiculous to try to justify. Just let it be, go with it, and try to have some fun.
The only Sonic games that live up their heritage of late have been been Sonic Rush on NDS, and Sonic Advance 2 on GBA. Perhaps the limitations of handheld systems force the developers to concentrate on getting the most out of the hardware for the actual gameplay, rather than character embellishment.
Hang on, they gave the award to the DualShock not the DualShock II. Whatever, most of what I said still stands except for the pressure sensitive buttons.
It was pretty comfortable, and in its day it was the best because it did the job perfectly, had pressure sensitive buttons, vibration, 2 clickable sticks and didn't pit form against function. Simply, it was a very well designed piece of kit with a good weight to it. I think it probably had some influence on the design of controllers that came out afterwards.
Obviously, some will disagree and say it was a huge pain in the ass to use, but as far as I can see they're in the minority. It may well have been superseded by the 360's controller, but it deserves a belated award for its influence. That is, unless this award is just one big prank on Sony.
"Sony, we will be honouring your legendary controller technology with an Emmy." "AWESOME we cannot believe we won over Nintendo with our hasty stab at copying their functionality. Release lots of embarrassing press releases patting ourselves on the back and saying how fantastic we are for our revolutionary SIXAXIS controller!!" "Haha, only kidding. It's for the DualShock, suckers" How much of a smack in the face is that? Quality work Emmy dudes.
OK I've clearly not been keeping up-to-date here after playing with the Vista release candidates, but does LUA really prevent you from even running an executable file you downloaded without an admin username and password? Surely LUA is there to stop the executable from doing "bad things" rather than the user from running it, like in pretty much every other multiuser OS.
If I download a game as an executable file, sure I expect to get a warning maybe. Then I expect the exe to run but with reduced privileges so it cannot harm the rest of the system. It should get access to my home directory, read-only access to other non-critical OS files such as libs, and be protected from making unauthorised Internet connections. Obviously a malicious exe may be able to gain elevated privileges by exploiting security flaws, but these holes should be patched regularly by the vendor to prevent other people from using the same exploits. Right?
If LUA requires me to enter an admin pass for every exe I download then that really *is* bad. However, I would expect it to be well designed enough not to. Any system that demands that of a user will ultimately result in the user keeping the admin pass on a sticky note on their screen and just giving every exe they run the keys to their entire system.
Someone educate me here.
Surely that doesn't matter. Whether the source port is rewritten or not external services will still try to respond to that port and the firewall will have to deal with that for things like DNS to work. The firewall can rewrite the source port so long as it remembers it did so when a response comes to that port. Now, if the firewall randomly rewrites source ports depending on destination IP the system won't work, because a datagram has to be sent to the mediation server first to establish which port the datagrams are going to come from.
Also I think grasshoppa misinterpreted point of the parent. RelliK's point was that a stateful firewall cannot know that a remote firewall blocked the datagram it sent. As far as it is concerned, it got a response from the IP it sent the datagram to and the response was sent to the source port of the original packet (because the mediation server knows the source port that the datagrams come from and can inform the remote machine of this over an established stateful connection).
However, other posters are right. This is really nothing new yet the article is one of the simplest explanations of the concept I've seen.