There seem to be way, way, way more instances of spammers, phishing expeditions, fraudsters, character assassins [...] than there are examples of genuinely good things like whistle-blowing and free expression under non-free regimes that might legitimately be protected by anonymity.
And where from do these shady characters get large lists of e-mail addresses, social security numbers, credit card numbers, and the like? From databases that retain such data. In order to combat these problems, it would seem prudent to limit such data retention to the strictly necessary minimum.
Why would you not tell me? Because you are a fucking coward, obviously. And an idiot (or maybe an asshole that just plays stupid)... I already told you why I would have liked to know what it is that you have for sale.
This story has nothing whatsoever to do with anything every having been stolen from anyone.
Come on, don't be a coward, tell us which software you're making, so I can avoid ever buying anything from you fucking morons. (Not that I assume you could be capable of making something I could be interested in.)
Modded Troll by believers of retarded superstition everywhere.
That post literally called for idiots to make silly postings. You don't have to believe in retarded superstition to recognize this as a textbook example of trolling.
If the sensor of your digital camera matches the size of your film, and price is irrelevant, you can get one that at least matches the quality of the analog one. Pictures that the very best DSLRs can only dream about? No, definitely not. Gear that your wallet can only dream about? Yes.:-)
You're right, the bias isn't systematic and it won't work. My favourite way of getting an exposure as dark as possible is to use a camera that can shoot with the shutter closed; some can do that automatically right after a normal exposure in order to detect hot pixels. However, if you take an exposure that is "as light as possible", every pixel will be over-exposed to the max, so you'll get zero information. (Except you have a sensor with a really unusual fault.)
No, it can't be done; the artifacts you want to eliminate aren't so consistent that you could prepare a canned antidote beforehand. There's special anti-noise software that works on RAW images and can make use of calibration shots. GIMP and Photoshop are best suited to laborious manual retouching, but of course you can integrate specialised anti-noise software into your Photoshop/GIMP workflow. (I'm not recommending a particular product because I don't have personal experience with such tools.) Either way, you're mostly enhancing the visual impression of clarity, not actually recovering information that was lost already. Some cameras have a mode that takes a second exposure with a closed shutter, which is mostly used to find hot pixels and correct the previous exposure.
There are some problems that you can map out beforehand and generate data that's practically good forever. Lens distortion can be corrected in such a way, also sensor response curves and chromatic abberation. (Not that I'd recommend vanilla Photoshop or GIMP for that, but some of the specialised tools for that might be available as plug-ins.) However, what you're talking about is basically noise, which can't be eliminated like that. All you can do is gather some statistical data about it and use that to guide an anti-noise filter; it'll have to come up with a unique solution for each individual exposure though.
Now you've contributed to the problem, and your co-workers probably hate you. Or you're using headphones, and going deaf.
Or maybe he uses earphones at a sensible volume setting, thus neither disturbing anyone, nor going deaf? You just assumed he's an idiot, then you scold him for being an idiot, then you get modded insightful. Congratulations, you can now collect your merit badge for sphisticated trolling.
I've heard that European PlayStation 2's ship with a copy of BASIC (when I get round to getting one I'll find out...) to try and get round taxes
They did indeed try that, but didn't succeed. European PS2s haven't been coming with BASIC for many years now. And it was because of import tariffs, not VAT. VAT is set by the individual countries' governments and generally not lower for computers. In some places VAT might be even higher for a computer, or you might also end up paying a 'copying levy' for a machine classified as a computer, especially if it has a hard drive.
I want to see the GUI. The GUI neatly sums up what options the player has, and something about how the game is actually PLAYED.
I'm confused. What are you talking about? There are games where the virtual environment is the GUI. For example, what options does a player have to open a locked door? Well, find the key, use magic, pick the lock, bash it in, talk some character into opening it, or sneak in behind someone else using the door. Now, if you want an immersive, believable experience, filling the screen with a bunch of buttons, each offering one of these alternatives, isn't the best option. What about just picking the lockpick up and sticking it in the keyhole? Or performing a gesture to get the magic going? And the same goes for HUDs. In a contemporary setting, it's weird to have a display showing the remaining rounds in your magazine in your FOV. Just tilt your weapon and look at the cartridge. Have a look at Black&White. You may like or hate the game, but the user interface is brilliant, whereas in a screenshot, you just don't see any of it.
Oh, and another thing I don't understand: How do people that see a GUI pollute a screenshot? *scratches head*
As for the Mighty Mouse, that is a 1 1/2-button mouse. You can't click both the left and right buttons at the same time, making it useless for playing World of Warcraft.
That really is crap. My 5 button, 2 scrool wheel Microsoft mouse works pretty well with my Mac, though. Under Windows, it would only work better. The newest driver I installed, under Windows (but not the one that came on the CD with the mouse, even though that was already version 4.something), even lets you make the middle button perform a middle click. Oh, the wonders of modern technology! I wish I could've afforded a proper Logitech mouse...
When you're on the go and have no mouse... no problem with Mac OS X, I can use the one button for right-clicking and left-click by tapping the touch pad, or I can also configure the one button to do both left and right clicking. (Not at the same time, but gaming with a touch pad sucks anyways.) For Windows, I guess the mouse driver would have to be hacked to accomodate for that. I wonder how difficult that would be?
That's right, even more so when you s/complex/complicated/. And there are online role playing games suited to smaller groups, with lots of players enjoying them, so it'll make sense to make more of them. But massively multiplayer games aren't inherently complicated, and they have interesting aspects unique to them. I don't think it's a good trade-off to lose those by severely cutting back player interactions in all of them. There surely are other ways to deal with the internet fuckwad phenomenon. I would like having the option of playing a truly massively multiplayer game, and having a large number of players just share the same space, in which they play solo or in small groups, seems pointless to me. I'd rather have the massive aspects be done right or not at all. Not that I think that any currently popular MMORPG does them right...
Make the games so that you can fight with some comrades online (like good ol' dungeoncrawlers), but there's no interaction with other players / guilds / etc.
The moving can be done now. Take a course in algebra and a simple one in encryption.
So you think knowledge of elementary algebra and the very basics of encryption enables you to design secure systems. Your are wrong, it does not. Your childish scheme opens up more questions than it answers: How do A and B know that they are communicating with the correct server, how does the server know it is communicating with the true A and B? If all they have to do to get a decryption key is ask the server, how does the server know that they aren't storing the decrypted data forever, how does the server know they stop using it after the data has officially moved on to another 'place'?
Of course these issues can be fixed, but you didn't even mention them in passing. It doesn't seem that you're really in a position to say
A system like this is extremely hard to hack
Now for the best part:
and the routines to decrypt are themselves encrypted
Any secret data you need for decryption is just (part of) the key. Designing your system so sloppily that executable code is part of the key is bad practice. I'm not implying you're so stupid to suggest that the actual algorithm used for decryption should be secret; as an amateur cryptologer you know of course that this is way insecure and makes you prone to be hacked in no time. But still, executing any code that is input by users is a rather bad idea.
And if I may lump in a reply to squidguy's post: Lazy, clueless users don't run as root on Mac OS X, since it's not default. Figuring out how to run as root is way more difficult (thus more work, which lazy users loathe and clueless ones won't figure out) that simply entering your password any time you need it. Surely, many people will just enter it every time without thinking about it much, or checking which priviledges are required exactly, but when the dialog pops up even though you didn't ask for having anything about your system changed, and still give your authorization... well, then it really is your fault, not the system's.
You are of course right when you say more malware will come, and we shouldn't take it too lightly, but as an OS X user, I'm not exactly losing my sleep over the issue either.
Sounds more like a trojan to me. But the question is, how in the world did they get it to show up as a JPEG image and still be executable?
It definitely is a trojan, and a harmless one at that. It seems that if you have configured your computer correctly, you would have to enter your admin password in order to allow it to do any harm.
It doesn't really disguise as an image. It just uses the OS X standard icon for images as its own icon. However, it does not have a jpeg extension and if you select it in the finder, you will not get a preview thumbnail, thus you would know that opening in the Preview application (which you would do by double clicking) cannot work. Maybe, if you have set your Finder not to display extensions, or just didn't pay attention, you would try to open it in another image viewer, which would fail and not do any harm.
Although it is hard to envision this hand-held device being used to aim as well as for "mouselook".
Let's not forget that in mouse-controlled FPSs, aiming and mouselook are one and the same thing. You are quite right in pointing out that this wouldn't work with the revolution controller. There will be an accessory you attach to the primary controller with a short cable; it will have a joystick that lets your turn around. Thus, you lose the mouse's advantage of being able to aim precisely (which is irrelevant, you're aiming precisely with the primary controller, not the joystick as on a, say, PS2 FPS) and in the next millisecond do a 180 turn very quickly (which is a disadvantage, but not so bad if every player is bound by that limitation).
I have been playing Quake II this way years ago. However, I did so in a VR Cave, so turning around quickly was easily accomplished by just physically turning around. Let me tell you, wearing those 3D shutter glasses and seeing those badass weapons precisely attached to your hand, swiftly following its every move, is absofuckinglutely brilliant. The cost of the hardware is prohibitive though, not least because in order to set it up, you need to devote a large (and I mean large, even if you use mirrors you need plenty space behind the screens to set up the projectors) room to it. However, I hear affordable VR goggles of decent quality are just around the corner. Interesting times lie ahead!
I can see the alure in having a game that actually takes some effort to crack into.
Quite right, but it's best when it's 'easy to learn, hard to master'. Odd button combinations are a necessary evil, because no controller has enough buttons to assign a unique one to every special move. And it's not necessarily a bad idea to assign the most powerful moves to more complicated combinations that take some skill to pull off. Combos aren't a bad thing either if they're logical. Example: You just forced your opponent into a crough by knocking him/her off his/her feet. Now, crouching yourself and sweeping your leg into him/her sideways is not a good follow up, as it can still be easily blocked. But your opponent may very well be vulnerable, without a possible defense, if you jump on top of him/her and hit your opponent's head. Which might make him/her lose conciusness for a moment and give you the time to cast your magic fireball. This style of gameplay is so much more interesting and rewarding than randomly smashing buttons and see who wins, which is just a silly game of chance. On the other hand, a game designer randomly deciding that the magic fireball can only be cast after doing cartwheels... now that's also silly. If you're a casual player and don't want to memorize so many moves, you can just stick to your favourite character and just learn the moves of that one.
The crux – and if you don't have the time to read through this lengthy comment, this is the one part to read, so I'm making this bold – is, as my grandparent poster pointed out already, whether move combos and button combinations are clearly stated in the manual and/or a list you can bring up in the game, or secrets you have to find out by random button mashing. In the first case, the game rewards players who care to learn its intricacies and practise a little. In the second case, it rewards people with endless amounts of time that will mindlessly mash buttons for 8 hours a day.
In the past, there was in fact something to be said for the latter style of game, as a conversation along the lines of "how did you do that? can you reproduce that? can you show me?" can actually be quite interesting. It was nice to meet with friends for a round of NES/Famicom action and trade the newest secrets. But nowadays, you just meet up qith your friend Mr. Google and look the complete move list up on the web.
Games that rely heavily on chance make good party games, as you can play with people who don't own the game themselves and have hardly ever or never played it, and they still have a chance to win. But I don't know of a fighting game like that. With them, the random play style is merely the style of the incompetent, who are constantly devastated by that one person who knows all the moves... whether from the web or from endless trial and error.
My favourite game in that genre, by the way, is Tekken 3. I'm not a martial arts gaming geek and haven't played many of them, and those I did play, I didn't play for very long. But Tekken lets you bring up a menu with all the special moves for your character, and another one with many combos, and it clearly spells the sequence of button presses out on the screen and highlights the individual buttons as you progress through the sequence. It can also give you a demo so you can grok the proper timing. You can even command the computer opponent to not fight back or assume a certain stance, or let someone else take control of it via the second controller.
This is precisely the system we have in Canada, through a levy on blank media.
The problem with this system is that while it was perfectly suited to what we used to do in the past – copy albums from friends – it doesn't work with filesharing. I'm still getting music and paying a fee for what I want to keep – which I burn to CDs – but I'm not allowed to pass it on to anyone else, which would constitute copyright infringement. However, that's the very essence of file sharing.
Another reason to be uncomfortable with this fee is that 90% of what I burn to CDs is not created by anyone who gets any amount of that money. Backups of my personal files take up more space than MP3s, and even more space is consumed by video casts etc. Most of these files are copyrighted, but not by musicians or anyone else affiliated with the music industry.
Yet another reason is that I don't listen to any music you'd find in the Top 40, made by those who get the largest share of the fees I pay, and that a large part of my music collection is CC licensed, made by those who don't get a single cent. This scheme is essentially taking from the poor and giving it to the rich.
On the other hand, I wouldn't want my computer to be infected with spyware that tells some agency what I listen to, in order to distribute the money fairly. There are dozens of reasons why this could never really work anyway.
Thus, the only viable system is a distribution service that is even better than any current P2P service and well worth the admission fee for pretty much anyone, as opposed to the iTunes Music Store et alia, which do many things right (correct information [ID3 tags / Ogg comments / whatever] in every file, decent quality, no 'fake'/truncated files), but charge so much that the overwhelming majority of listeners still finds the 'black market' more attractive. They also do many things wrong (DRM, not cutting costs and boosting speed by using P2P technologies for shuttling the bits to and fro, ridiculous EULAs, don't offer the works of competitors through the same interface and thus severely restrict the available selection), so there's lots of room for improvement for a hypothetical new service. This service would charge a flat fee, which is distributed to the artists according to how often their songs are downloaded. Just imagine: a P2P download wouldn't hurt your favourite artist, it would help. The fans would love this. And it doesn't require to track who downloads what. You could even use your downloads to create mixtapes or podcasts, feed them back into the system, which counts the downloads towards the respective totals of the artists whose work you used, and if your show is successful, the system might even cut you a provision.
IMHO, everyone would win. Everyone, except for the record labels, which would be rendered obsolete in almost every respect. They couldn't claim to discover new talent any longer, the listeners would do that themselves. All they would do is provide venture capital to new artists, which won't be profitable in a future in which users can take DRM-unencumbered files and make their own ringtones, a future in which they can't threaten their customers with lawsuits and extort extra money for the right to make backup copies, play the files on a second/new platform, or keep them beyond your subscription period. Yet sadly, the big labels wield the most power, so they're preventing the creation of anything better. Truly unlimited, legal music downloads for $3.95 a month? No, not a chance, not as long as the uneducated masses put up with the current situation and support the status quo.
Thus, the record labels must die. Don't buy their overpriced CDs any longer. Make them go bankrupt. Give an adequate amount of your hard-earned cash to the artists directly. Once the greedy middlemen and middlewomen are cut out, everyone will win.
I find on my iBook at least, the bottleneck is the slow laptop disks.
This is making me curious (posting this from an iBook). Could I expect a performance increase if I used my somewhat current desktop drive (Barracuda) in an external FireWire case for, say, swap? Or would the iBook's FW400 port nix that potential?
IME, most users of Opera and Firefox have IE to fall back to if their prefered browser doesn't work.
IME, most users of Opera and Firefox will try an alternate browser if they must see the page in question, which isn't true most of the time, when a competitor's or otherwise similar page is only two clicks away or even already open in the next tab. If your page is so cutting edge that you think you have to use technology that only works in a couple of browsers, chances are that the most influential of your readers (those on which you rely for word of mouth, links from their blogs etc.) are geeks to some degree. And those are the users that are most likely to use a not-quite-mainstream browser and hold a grudge against you when you don't support their user agent, since so many of them know how easy it would be to make your pages compliant. Thus, supporting an outdated IE version only is never the right thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you not tell me? Because you are a fucking coward, obviously. And an idiot (or maybe an asshole that just plays stupid) ... I already told you why I would have liked to know what it is that you have for sale.
Rez is PS2 / DC.
This story has nothing whatsoever to do with anything every having been stolen from anyone.
Come on, don't be a coward, tell us which software you're making, so I can avoid ever buying anything from you fucking morons. (Not that I assume you could be capable of making something I could be interested in.)
If the sensor of your digital camera matches the size of your film, and price is irrelevant, you can get one that at least matches the quality of the analog one. Pictures that the very best DSLRs can only dream about? No, definitely not. Gear that your wallet can only dream about? Yes. :-)
You're right, the bias isn't systematic and it won't work. My favourite way of getting an exposure as dark as possible is to use a camera that can shoot with the shutter closed; some can do that automatically right after a normal exposure in order to detect hot pixels. However, if you take an exposure that is "as light as possible", every pixel will be over-exposed to the max, so you'll get zero information. (Except you have a sensor with a really unusual fault.)
No, it can't be done; the artifacts you want to eliminate aren't so consistent that you could prepare a canned antidote beforehand. There's special anti-noise software that works on RAW images and can make use of calibration shots. GIMP and Photoshop are best suited to laborious manual retouching, but of course you can integrate specialised anti-noise software into your Photoshop/GIMP workflow. (I'm not recommending a particular product because I don't have personal experience with such tools.) Either way, you're mostly enhancing the visual impression of clarity, not actually recovering information that was lost already. Some cameras have a mode that takes a second exposure with a closed shutter, which is mostly used to find hot pixels and correct the previous exposure. There are some problems that you can map out beforehand and generate data that's practically good forever. Lens distortion can be corrected in such a way, also sensor response curves and chromatic abberation. (Not that I'd recommend vanilla Photoshop or GIMP for that, but some of the specialised tools for that might be available as plug-ins.) However, what you're talking about is basically noise, which can't be eliminated like that. All you can do is gather some statistical data about it and use that to guide an anti-noise filter; it'll have to come up with a unique solution for each individual exposure though.
Whoops, I had failed to realize that the quote was taken from the article, not another poster. Thanks for the correction :-)
Oh, and another thing I don't understand: How do people that see a GUI pollute a screenshot? *scratches head*
When you're on the go and have no mouse
And if I may lump in a reply to squidguy's post: Lazy, clueless users don't run as root on Mac OS X, since it's not default. Figuring out how to run as root is way more difficult (thus more work, which lazy users loathe and clueless ones won't figure out) that simply entering your password any time you need it. Surely, many people will just enter it every time without thinking about it much, or checking which priviledges are required exactly, but when the dialog pops up even though you didn't ask for having anything about your system changed, and still give your authorization
You are of course right when you say more malware will come, and we shouldn't take it too lightly, but as an OS X user, I'm not exactly losing my sleep over the issue either.
It doesn't really disguise as an image. It just uses the OS X standard icon for images as its own icon. However, it does not have a jpeg extension and if you select it in the finder, you will not get a preview thumbnail, thus you would know that opening in the Preview application (which you would do by double clicking) cannot work. Maybe, if you have set your Finder not to display extensions, or just didn't pay attention, you would try to open it in another image viewer, which would fail and not do any harm.
I have been playing Quake II this way years ago. However, I did so in a VR Cave, so turning around quickly was easily accomplished by just physically turning around. Let me tell you, wearing those 3D shutter glasses and seeing those badass weapons precisely attached to your hand, swiftly following its every move, is absofuckinglutely brilliant. The cost of the hardware is prohibitive though, not least because in order to set it up, you need to devote a large (and I mean large, even if you use mirrors you need plenty space behind the screens to set up the projectors) room to it. However, I hear affordable VR goggles of decent quality are just around the corner. Interesting times lie ahead!
Regards,
Arthur D.
The crux – and if you don't have the time to read through this lengthy comment, this is the one part to read, so I'm making this bold – is, as my grandparent poster pointed out already, whether move combos and button combinations are clearly stated in the manual and/or a list you can bring up in the game, or secrets you have to find out by random button mashing. In the first case, the game rewards players who care to learn its intricacies and practise a little. In the second case, it rewards people with endless amounts of time that will mindlessly mash buttons for 8 hours a day.
In the past, there was in fact something to be said for the latter style of game, as a conversation along the lines of "how did you do that? can you reproduce that? can you show me?" can actually be quite interesting. It was nice to meet with friends for a round of NES/Famicom action and trade the newest secrets. But nowadays, you just meet up qith your friend Mr. Google and look the complete move list up on the web.
Games that rely heavily on chance make good party games, as you can play with people who don't own the game themselves and have hardly ever or never played it, and they still have a chance to win. But I don't know of a fighting game like that. With them, the random play style is merely the style of the incompetent, who are constantly devastated by that one person who knows all the moves
My favourite game in that genre, by the way, is Tekken 3. I'm not a martial arts gaming geek and haven't played many of them, and those I did play, I didn't play for very long. But Tekken lets you bring up a menu with all the special moves for your character, and another one with many combos, and it clearly spells the sequence of button presses out on the screen and highlights the individual buttons as you progress through the sequence. It can also give you a demo so you can grok the proper timing. You can even command the computer opponent to not fight back or assume a certain stance, or let someone else take control of it via the second controller.
The problem with this system is that while it was perfectly suited to what we used to do in the past – copy albums from friends – it doesn't work with filesharing. I'm still getting music and paying a fee for what I want to keep – which I burn to CDs – but I'm not allowed to pass it on to anyone else, which would constitute copyright infringement. However, that's the very essence of file sharing.
Another reason to be uncomfortable with this fee is that 90% of what I burn to CDs is not created by anyone who gets any amount of that money. Backups of my personal files take up more space than MP3s, and even more space is consumed by video casts etc. Most of these files are copyrighted, but not by musicians or anyone else affiliated with the music industry.
Yet another reason is that I don't listen to any music you'd find in the Top 40, made by those who get the largest share of the fees I pay, and that a large part of my music collection is CC licensed, made by those who don't get a single cent. This scheme is essentially taking from the poor and giving it to the rich.
On the other hand, I wouldn't want my computer to be infected with spyware that tells some agency what I listen to, in order to distribute the money fairly. There are dozens of reasons why this could never really work anyway.
Thus, the only viable system is a distribution service that is even better than any current P2P service and well worth the admission fee for pretty much anyone, as opposed to the iTunes Music Store et alia, which do many things right (correct information [ID3 tags / Ogg comments / whatever] in every file, decent quality, no 'fake'/truncated files), but charge so much that the overwhelming majority of listeners still finds the 'black market' more attractive. They also do many things wrong (DRM, not cutting costs and boosting speed by using P2P technologies for shuttling the bits to and fro, ridiculous EULAs, don't offer the works of competitors through the same interface and thus severely restrict the available selection), so there's lots of room for improvement for a hypothetical new service. This service would charge a flat fee, which is distributed to the artists according to how often their songs are downloaded. Just imagine: a P2P download wouldn't hurt your favourite artist, it would help. The fans would love this. And it doesn't require to track who downloads what. You could even use your downloads to create mixtapes or podcasts, feed them back into the system, which counts the downloads towards the respective totals of the artists whose work you used, and if your show is successful, the system might even cut you a provision.
IMHO, everyone would win. Everyone, except for the record labels, which would be rendered obsolete in almost every respect. They couldn't claim to discover new talent any longer, the listeners would do that themselves. All they would do is provide venture capital to new artists, which won't be profitable in a future in which users can take DRM-unencumbered files and make their own ringtones, a future in which they can't threaten their customers with lawsuits and extort extra money for the right to make backup copies, play the files on a second/new platform, or keep them beyond your subscription period. Yet sadly, the big labels wield the most power, so they're preventing the creation of anything better. Truly unlimited, legal music downloads for $3.95 a month? No, not a chance, not as long as the uneducated masses put up with the current situation and support the status quo.
Thus, the record labels must die. Don't buy their overpriced CDs any longer. Make them go bankrupt. Give an adequate amount of your hard-earned cash to the artists directly. Once the greedy middlemen and middlewomen are cut out, everyone will win.
Maybe no one w