I tried Ubuntu 7.10, but it didn't even tell me the root password:) By default Ubuntu does not enable the root account. It's nominally a security feature. Instead you use sudo, and type in your user account's password when prompted. See: RootSudo and How to change the root password in ubuntu
The name Hyperion predates Dan Simmons' book. *SPOILER FOLLOWS* If you read the rest of the series you find that Earth wasn't destroyed, it was transported to the Magellanic Clouds by the "Lions and Tigers and Bears"
They can already perform turing tests in game using text chat. And really that's all they should be doing, everything else client side is voodoo hand waving. But then again taking turing tests often enough to actually stop botting gets old fast. And 3rd world gold farmers pass turing tests just fine.
Hopefully when the $50 game playing box is on the market it will create a larger pool of players that demand the games be designed properly from the start so that I can play more games:)
Though you're probably right that plenty of gamers will also buy Blizzard's $50 spy box. But at least at that point it's much more blatantly obvious how much privacy they're giving up to play Blizzard's stupid voodoo games.
The war will continue until the cheaters are forced to use the same interface(keyboard/mouse/monitor) the humans use. I.e. within 5-10 years you'll be able to buy a little box for $50 that will plug into your mouse and keyboard ports(with passthru of course) and point a camera at your monitor that will play the game for you. There will probably even be an open source powered version of this box:) At that point it will become impossible to differentiate cheating from playing and the cheaters will have won.
This is the only way it can go down in the end. All of the current and future "anti-cheating" technology basically boils down to calling someone on the telephone and asking "are you cheating?" while expecting a truthful answer.
Instead of wasting time with all this crap the game makers should be redesigning the games such that reflex augmentation(aimbots) and robotic automation(24/7 farming) do not provide the advantages that they currently provide.
No, I'm sorry, you can't integrate my small component into your giant proprietary and ITAR-restricted satellite system unless you agree to give away the entire code to your giant ITAR-restricted satellite system to anybody who wants it. You are misrepresenting the GPL. You do not have to give it to "anybody who wants it". You are required to give the entire source code of the executable module containing GPLed code to anybody you give binaries to. And you are required to give the recipient permission to redistribute what you give them under the same terms.
I'd argue that there would be no problem adding GPLed code to an ITAR restricted software system since the ITAR restriction is coming from the US Govt, not the developer/distributer of the ITAR restricted software. The existence of GPLed crypto libraries would seem to support this interpretation.
The problem with this is not that a convicted criminal is having his rights infriged. This is of course ignoring whether or not whatever he/she did should be a crime with such a punishment.
The problem here is that in enforcing this sentence the govt/courts/whatever are supporting Microsoft's monopoly on desktop operating systems and proprietary software in general. I.e a goverment agent is interfering in the market, in a way they probably shouldn't be.
Not to mention the fact that trusting the client to report on itself is stupid. If you really want to monitor someone put in firewall that you control and make them use a very limited HTTP proxy for web access and block everything else off.
Asheron's call is the only monthly fee MMORPG I've ever played, mainly because of their policy on client side modifications. What happens on my machine is no ones business but my own. And cheating/automation in an on-line game is nowhere near an important enough issue to think otherwise.
If you want to stop automation, make games that don't reward it. Every multiplayer game since the dawn of time that rewarded automation had automation developed for it. BBS door games(Trade Wars), MUDs, Net Trek, etc. It's not a new problem, and furthermore it is not a solveable problem, outside of administering turing tests/captchas. And even those have their limits, not to mention they're really annoying.
Turbine was the only "large" MMORPG developer to admit there was nothing they could do about it, and act accordingly. Every other developer seems to try to employ a reality distortion field and pretend the problem away as they continue to develop grind fests that make millions of dollars for gold farmers.
MOO2 works fine on my XP gaming machine, I just played through an entire game yestarday for the first time in many months. I don't have any of the compatibility options switched on, and I don't think I patched the.exe(date: 3/26/1997 size: 1,564,560 bytes).
There is one small problem. It scrolls insanely fast on the tactical battle screen. But you can work around it by clicking on the minimap to move your viewpoint instead of scrolling.
You're kidding right? "Free" energy would allow the creation of absolutely incredible war machines. Tanks, planes, (space)ships, missiles, with unlimited range, speed, destructive power, etc. If anything I'd say the fact that such war machines haven't been fielded is a pretty good indicator that the military doesn't have this technology:)
You pointed out precisely why some "techs" would regard it as a badge of honor in your first paragraph. To most techs getting it right is far more important than making it look right.
And from such a point of view the examples in the article text are ludicrous. If I misspell definitely or misuse "should have" as "should of", then you, the person being communicated to, still know exactly what I mean. Thus the purpose of communication has been fulfilled.
That said, I learned all the stupid rules and try to follow them, and it irks me when I see their there, and they're mixed up. Though I do it myself from time to time.:)
But in the final analysis, I think the world is a better place when the language is decided by the people using it rather than by some central authority. And it wouldn't bother me at all to see the standard become completely phonetic. I.e. if it sounds right sounded out, then it's good enough. Even though I'd then have to get used to all of the theres being used interchangably:)
Would you rather have the LOTR movies (for example) available to watch for a fee, or not at all? When you come up with a way that the LOTR movies (for example) could be produced for free, let me know.
I would MUCH rather not have The Lord of the Rings movies than live in the police state that is/will be required to enforce copyright against individuals in the "internet age".
I've thought about copyright quite a bit and it seems to me that entertainment, especially large scale entertainment, is about the only set of works that would require major restructuring to get it made if individual copyright enforcement was abolished tommorrow. And further it seems to me that entertainment is about the last thing that makes the establishment of the copyright enforcement police state worthwhile. So bring on the end of abolishment of enforcement of copyright against individual non commercial infringement. I think I'll live.
I have just heard a new song. I love it, it's great. I want to tell the world about it, or at least a few friends.
Question: What is the single best method available for me to describe the song to someone else.
Answer: Send them a copy.
That would be speech.
In the open source utopia no one would buy your distribution. This is because everyone would see the value of open code and thus insist that all code they purchase was open source.
Imagine a world where when copyright law was updated to cover binary code it required registration of the human readable code with the copyright office. Books, and sound recordings are human readable, allowing the machine readable work to receive copyright protection was a mistake. Would there be any software companies as dominant as MS in this world if this mistake had not been made?
This would be especially true if copyright had a reasonable duration. How much further along would software development be if everyone could build off of everyone else's work after a short(3-14 year) period of monopoly?
The market is very distorted as of now, and very broken. I don't understand why so many of you can't see it.
True. BUT I contend the value of most(non reference) books is almost entirely obtained via the first reading. I.e. if I read a book and then my friend reads it whether we copy it or not both of us have gained nearly the full value of the book but only one unit of value has been paid for.
Thus I further contend that anyone who considers copying of books to be immoral must also consider loaning, giving, or selling of a book that has been read before the transfer to also be immoral.
It's admitedly not well documented. But winamp 2.x for at least the last 3 years(probably longer) has had a jump to file dialog accessible anytime by hitting the J key.
Basically you hit J the dialog pops up and you start typing and as you type you can watch the list of matches narrow itself down in real time as you add more letters. If you hit enter it plays the first match, or you can select other matches using the arrows keys or the mouse.
I haven't used itunes but compared to any other media player with search functionality I've tried it sure is fast and convenient. For instance these days I'm mostly using foobar 2000 but it's search functionality is:
1. Much slower. Even with a relatively short list there is a noticable delay between starting typing and rhe results showing.
2. Much less streamlined. You have to reach for the mouse or tab from the search field to the match field to actually make a selection.
For a switch I went with an 8 port SMC EZSwitch 8508T. I chose it since:
1. It supports jumbo frames. According to my testing it will pass ethernet packets up to 9212 bytes which should correspond to a 9198 byte MTU.
2. It doesn't have a cooling fan. A definate plus since in my experience the little fans in switches such as this can become quite annoying as they age.
3. It comes with rack mount ears.
4. It's affordable. I purchased it from Securemart.com for $139.31 shipped. Ordered it Thursday or Friday, it arrived Monday or Tuesday.
As to NICs, one of my PCs already had an Intel gigabit port on the motherboard. In addition I purchased 4 more Intel Pro 1000/MT Desktop Adapters. Since:
1. They have good driver support on both Linux and Windows.
2. They support jumbo frames. Supposedly up to around 16000 bytes.
3. They're supposed to be pretty fast/efficient. It's kind of dated but you can find a comparison of some 32-bit gigabit NICs here.
4. They'll do 66Mhz if your motherboard supports it and of my systems does.
5. They have DOS NDIS2 drivers so I can use Ghost to make/restore images over the network.
One I purchased through Intel's evaluation program for $35.31 shipped. As I recall it took over a week to show up. The other three I ordered from OnlineMicro for $28 each plus $11.32 shipping. Be sure to change the shipping option from ground to 2 day air if you order more than 1, it's cheaper. They shipped them out the day of my order and they arrived on time.
One of the Intel NICs died about 4 hours after I installed it. I swapped it with another and the replacement has been working fine for a few weeks now. I ran the diagnostics on it and other all but the link test passed. When the OS is booted up the switch shows no link lights but sometimes when the PC is off the link lights do come on. I've also tried it in another PC where it exhibits similar symptoms. I haven't yet contacted Intel about getting it replaced.
I spent a lot of time tweaking various things. Some findings:
1. With default SO_RCVBUF sizes a MTU in the neighborhood of 4000 or so bytes seems to get about the best network/application wide throughput. Specifically the otherwise fast NF7-S system below would lose almost 50% throughput with 9000 byte MTUs with the default SO_RCVBUF size. Linux to Linux lost around 30% as I recall.
In theory you can change the default SO_RCVBUF size on linux by echoing appropriate values to: /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_rmem
Other than that you appear to have to change this setting in each individual application. One application of note that allows you to easily make this change is samba. See your:/etc/samba/smb.conf
2. If you crank the SO_RCVBUF size up to 200ish k or more then a 9000ish byte MTU can eek out another 5ish percent more bandwidth. Thus for the moment I've decided to just stick with 4076.
3. MTUs that are not of a size of the form 8x+4 cause Linux to behave oddly when it performs path MTU discovery. Namely for jumbo sizes that don't fit that form the discovery decides that the PMTU is 1492. You can read more detail about it in a Usenet post I made here. I still don't have a good picture of what'
Dungeon Siege certainly is pretty. But game play? The only thing I ever did of any consequence while "playing" was to press the all drink potions button. Other than that it pretty much played itself. And the characters, items and spells were just generic. All that happened as you leveled up and found new stuff was that the numbers got bigger. No new strategies opened up. No cool new moves. Nothing. At least the world builders did a good job. I think the only thing that made me finish it was being able to see and explore each new area.
With any luck next time they'll devote more time to making a game to go with their awesome engine.
Thanks for the link. I've wanted to hear the Amnesia music many times in the past few years. But I never bothered to dig out ye olde 386. Now I don't have to:)
Great stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
The name Hyperion predates Dan Simmons' book. *SPOILER FOLLOWS* If you read the rest of the series you find that Earth wasn't destroyed, it was transported to the Magellanic Clouds by the "Lions and Tigers and Bears"
They can already perform turing tests in game using text chat. And really that's all they should be doing, everything else client side is voodoo hand waving. But then again taking turing tests often enough to actually stop botting gets old fast. And 3rd world gold farmers pass turing tests just fine.
:)
Hopefully when the $50 game playing box is on the market it will create a larger pool of players that demand the games be designed properly from the start so that I can play more games
Though you're probably right that plenty of gamers will also buy Blizzard's $50 spy box. But at least at that point it's much more blatantly obvious how much privacy they're giving up to play Blizzard's stupid voodoo games.
The war will continue until the cheaters are forced to use the same interface(keyboard/mouse/monitor) the humans use. I.e. within 5-10 years you'll be able to buy a little box for $50 that will plug into your mouse and keyboard ports(with passthru of course) and point a camera at your monitor that will play the game for you. There will probably even be an open source powered version of this box :) At that point it will become impossible to differentiate cheating from playing and the cheaters will have won.
This is the only way it can go down in the end. All of the current and future "anti-cheating" technology basically boils down to calling someone on the telephone and asking "are you cheating?" while expecting a truthful answer.
Instead of wasting time with all this crap the game makers should be redesigning the games such that reflex augmentation(aimbots) and robotic automation(24/7 farming) do not provide the advantages that they currently provide.
I'd argue that there would be no problem adding GPLed code to an ITAR restricted software system since the ITAR restriction is coming from the US Govt, not the developer/distributer of the ITAR restricted software. The existence of GPLed crypto libraries would seem to support this interpretation.
The problem with this is not that a convicted criminal is having his rights infriged. This is of course ignoring whether or not whatever he/she did should be a crime with such a punishment.
The problem here is that in enforcing this sentence the govt/courts/whatever are supporting Microsoft's monopoly on desktop operating systems and proprietary software in general. I.e a goverment agent is interfering in the market, in a way they probably shouldn't be.
Not to mention the fact that trusting the client to report on itself is stupid. If you really want to monitor someone put in firewall that you control and make them use a very limited HTTP proxy for web access and block everything else off.
Asheron's call is the only monthly fee MMORPG I've ever played, mainly because of their policy on client side modifications. What happens on my machine is no ones business but my own. And cheating/automation in an on-line game is nowhere near an important enough issue to think otherwise.
If you want to stop automation, make games that don't reward it. Every multiplayer game since the dawn of time that rewarded automation had automation developed for it. BBS door games(Trade Wars), MUDs, Net Trek, etc. It's not a new problem, and furthermore it is not a solveable problem, outside of administering turing tests/captchas. And even those have their limits, not to mention they're really annoying.
Turbine was the only "large" MMORPG developer to admit there was nothing they could do about it, and act accordingly. Every other developer seems to try to employ a reality distortion field and pretend the problem away as they continue to develop grind fests that make millions of dollars for gold farmers.
MOO2 works fine on my XP gaming machine, I just played through an entire game yestarday for the first time in many months. I don't have any of the compatibility options switched on, and I don't think I patched the .exe(date: 3/26/1997 size: 1,564,560 bytes).
There is one small problem. It scrolls insanely fast on the tactical battle screen. But you can work around it by clicking on the minimap to move your viewpoint instead of scrolling.
It's already been done in The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod.
You're kidding right? "Free" energy would allow the creation of absolutely incredible war machines. Tanks, planes, (space)ships, missiles, with unlimited range, speed, destructive power, etc. If anything I'd say the fact that such war machines haven't been fielded is a pretty good indicator that the military doesn't have this technology :)
http://www.idsoftware.com/business/techdownloads/ Quake and Quake II look pretty free to me.
You pointed out precisely why some "techs" would regard it as a badge of honor in your first paragraph. To most techs getting it right is far more important than making it look right.
:)
:)
And from such a point of view the examples in the article text are ludicrous. If I misspell definitely or misuse "should have" as "should of", then you, the person being communicated to, still know exactly what I mean. Thus the purpose of communication has been fulfilled.
That said, I learned all the stupid rules and try to follow them, and it irks me when I see their there, and they're mixed up. Though I do it myself from time to time.
But in the final analysis, I think the world is a better place when the language is decided by the people using it rather than by some central authority. And it wouldn't bother me at all to see the standard become completely phonetic. I.e. if it sounds right sounded out, then it's good enough. Even though I'd then have to get used to all of the theres being used interchangably
It most certainly is speech, and for the question at hand it is the SINGLE MOST EFFECTIVE speech I could possibly use.
I have just heard a new song. I love it, it's great. I want to tell the world about it, or at least a few friends. Question: What is the single best method available for me to describe the song to someone else. Answer: Send them a copy. That would be speech.
In the open source utopia no one would buy your distribution. This is because everyone would see the value of open code and thus insist that all code they purchase was open source.
Imagine a world where when copyright law was updated to cover binary code it required registration of the human readable code with the copyright office. Books, and sound recordings are human readable, allowing the machine readable work to receive copyright protection was a mistake. Would there be any software companies as dominant as MS in this world if this mistake had not been made?
This would be especially true if copyright had a reasonable duration. How much further along would software development be if everyone could build off of everyone else's work after a short(3-14 year) period of monopoly?
The market is very distorted as of now, and very broken. I don't understand why so many of you can't see it.
Why not? The government(supposedly the people in a western style republic) gave you the monopoly on your work in the first place.
True. BUT I contend the value of most(non reference) books is almost entirely obtained via the first reading. I.e. if I read a book and then my friend reads it whether we copy it or not both of us have gained nearly the full value of the book but only one unit of value has been paid for. Thus I further contend that anyone who considers copying of books to be immoral must also consider loaning, giving, or selling of a book that has been read before the transfer to also be immoral.
Aluminium doesn't smell bad when it burns. I suspect whatever soda pop chemicals remaining in the can do.
It's more likely that the plastic lining on the inside of the aluminum can is the source of the smell.
It's admitedly not well documented. But winamp 2.x for at least the last 3 years(probably longer) has had a jump to file dialog accessible anytime by hitting the J key.
Basically you hit J the dialog pops up and you start typing and as you type you can watch the list of matches narrow itself down in real time as you add more letters. If you hit enter it plays the first match, or you can select other matches using the arrows keys or the mouse.
I haven't used itunes but compared to any other media player with search functionality I've tried it sure is fast and convenient. For instance these days I'm mostly using foobar 2000 but it's search functionality is:
1. Much slower. Even with a relatively short list there is a noticable delay between starting typing and rhe results showing.
2. Much less streamlined. You have to reach for the mouse or tab from the search field to the match field to actually make a selection.
I've got a lot of 2 gig ghost image files lying around.
/home4 $ time copy /home3/dna3.gho .
:)
[d:\]timer on & copy \\INDEPENDENT\home3\dna3.gho . & timer off
Timer 1 on: 5:46:48
\\INDEPENDENT\home3\dna3.gho => D:\dna3.gho
1 file copied
Timer 1 off: 5:48:02 Elapsed: 0:01:13.75
[d:\]dir \\INDEPENDENT\home3\dna3.gho
4/07/2004 20:35 2,147,482,153 ___A________ dna3.gho
Hmmm let's see:
2147482153/73.75*8/1E6=232.9 megabits/second
And for fun a disk to disk copy on the linux box going between two channels on the onboard sil3114 sata controller:
independent
real 0m59.826s
2147482153/59.8*8/1E6=287.2886 megabits/second
So not bad for the boring disk subsystem I have.
Boy this turned into a bit of a tome.
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_rmem /etc/samba/smb.conf
For a switch I went with an 8 port SMC EZSwitch 8508T. I chose it since:
1. It supports jumbo frames. According to my testing it will pass ethernet packets up to 9212 bytes which should correspond to a 9198 byte MTU.
2. It doesn't have a cooling fan. A definate plus since in my experience the little fans in switches such as this can become quite annoying as they age.
3. It comes with rack mount ears.
4. It's affordable. I purchased it from Securemart.com for $139.31 shipped. Ordered it Thursday or Friday, it arrived Monday or Tuesday.
As to NICs, one of my PCs already had an Intel gigabit port on the motherboard. In addition I purchased 4 more Intel Pro 1000/MT Desktop Adapters. Since:
1. They have good driver support on both Linux and Windows.
2. They support jumbo frames. Supposedly up to around 16000 bytes.
3. They're supposed to be pretty fast/efficient. It's kind of dated but you can find a comparison of some 32-bit gigabit NICs here.
4. They'll do 66Mhz if your motherboard supports it and of my systems does.
5. They have DOS NDIS2 drivers so I can use Ghost to make/restore images over the network.
One I purchased through Intel's evaluation program for $35.31 shipped. As I recall it took over a week to show up. The other three I ordered from OnlineMicro for $28 each plus $11.32 shipping. Be sure to change the shipping option from ground to 2 day air if you order more than 1, it's cheaper. They shipped them out the day of my order and they arrived on time.
One of the Intel NICs died about 4 hours after I installed it. I swapped it with another and the replacement has been working fine for a few weeks now. I ran the diagnostics on it and other all but the link test passed. When the OS is booted up the switch shows no link lights but sometimes when the PC is off the link lights do come on. I've also tried it in another PC where it exhibits similar symptoms. I haven't yet contacted Intel about getting it replaced.
I spent a lot of time tweaking various things. Some findings:
1. With default SO_RCVBUF sizes a MTU in the neighborhood of 4000 or so bytes seems to get about the best network/application wide throughput. Specifically the otherwise fast NF7-S system below would lose almost 50% throughput with 9000 byte MTUs with the default SO_RCVBUF size. Linux to Linux lost around 30% as I recall.
In theory you can change the default SO_RCVBUF size on linux by echoing appropriate values to:
Other than that you appear to have to change this setting in each individual application. One application of note that allows you to easily make this change is samba. See your:
2. If you crank the SO_RCVBUF size up to 200ish k or more then a 9000ish byte MTU can eek out another 5ish percent more bandwidth. Thus for the moment I've decided to just stick with 4076.
3. MTUs that are not of a size of the form 8x+4 cause Linux to behave oddly when it performs path MTU discovery. Namely for jumbo sizes that don't fit that form the discovery decides that the PMTU is 1492. You can read more detail about it in a Usenet post I made here. I still don't have a good picture of what'
Dungeon Siege certainly is pretty. But game play? The only thing I ever did of any consequence while "playing" was to press the all drink potions button. Other than that it pretty much played itself. And the characters, items and spells were just generic. All that happened as you leveled up and found new stuff was that the numbers got bigger. No new strategies opened up. No cool new moves. Nothing. At least the world builders did a good job. I think the only thing that made me finish it was being able to see and explore each new area.
With any luck next time they'll devote more time to making a game to go with their awesome engine.
Get yourself a PS/2 to USB converter. I use one with one of my Model Ms and it works great. Expect to pay 15-25 USD.
Thanks for the link. I've wanted to hear the Amnesia music many times in the past few years. But I never bothered to dig out ye olde 386. Now I don't have to :)
Great stuff.