I'm surprised the government is still funding old-fashioned "Supercomputers" though. Well no, I guess I'm not. They're still subsidising helium production, so why not supercomputers?
Seems like everyone who needs tons of power has been doing Beowulf clusters for years. Wish the government would catch up.
Yup yup. I should have said that. In the states it's hard as hell to get a DVD from a region other than 1, which is what all our DVD players play anyway. I doubt most US DVD consumers even know that they can't view DVD's from other countries.
The argument isn't very persuasive, first of all. What the hell is he talking about? "Tee-hee, people should just look the other way, because some laws were meant to be broken, tee-hee." Moron.
If a law is constantly broken, one has to look at the law. Is it a fair law? Does it reflect reality? Is it enforcable? Does it hurt more people than it helps, or does it help more people than it hurts?
The problems with modern IP laws are simple:
1) They don't reflect reality. People are patenting vague thoughts and unrealized inventions, and being alowed to hold the patents forever. 2) They aren't enforcable. Information moves so fast these days, there is no way to control it without moving to MASSIVE DRM, which seems unworkable. 3) They aren't fair. If you BUY something you should have rights regarding it. 4) They hurt 99% and help 1%, who happen to be so rich it's absurd.
These are the reasons DRM sucks, not because it violates some imaginary principle regarding laws that are "meant to be broken."
Rememebr how the DVD format was hacked, and how the regional lockouts were too?
Heh. No, the real point is this: The only people who were effected by this were people who were in the position to do 2 things: 1) copy DVD's. 2) Try to watch DVD's from other countries.
Neither of these things apply to Joe Six pack, who probably hasn't even sold his VRC yet.
Microsoft has trained people into believing that technical stuff just doesn't work about half the time. Someone tries to copy a DVD and the VCR tape is full of static. Huh. Weird. Next.
Turn that around and sell someone a CD that DOESN'T WORK ON THEIR COMPUTER, or a DVD that EXPIRES regardless of whether you've watched it or not, and people will get pissed. True full-blown DRM will hit that 90% of the population that doesn't understand any of this junk, and the only bit that will penetrate won't be security, it won't be IP rights, it will be THEY'RE RIPPING ME OFF.
When someone's grandma calls me up crying about how someone hacked her brand new dell p4 that's always on, hooked to a cable modem, no firewall, no antivirus, I have to hit the mute button on the phone and bust out laughing. What the hell did she think was going to happen?
And don't give me this, "Awwww, but she didn't know." crap. This stuff is a responsibility. A P4 on a high bandwidth connection is an unsecured digital gun that can be used against my servers by some stupid script kiddie. Her negligence causes me problems, and all the rest of us as well. And to blame some 12 year old who isn't SUPPOSED to have any sense for picking it up and whacking a server with it is equally stupid.
And THIS? This is a joke of the highest order. A company that opens up a box to the outside world and leaves little "god-hacks" lying around their system, and then crys about it when some kid finds them? Please. This thing was hardly a hack; there is NO WAY someone hacked into the code enough to be able to move people around inside the game. You have to be able to use the game engine itself for that, and those things only do what they're programmed to do.
I sit in my office and watch my little "Code Red counter" still clicking up as servers that are STILL infected continue to spam me with little viral messages. In any just world, I'd be able to hold them responsible for the security hassles that THEY are causing ME. But no, no no no, it's all the original creators fault, not the morons that never bothered to protect themselves, and never bothered to clean up the mess afterwards. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Crackers and viruses happen. It's like a force of nature. Accept it and move on. And if you don't protect yourself, that's your lookout.
Say what you will about Sony and their MMORPGs but, they put together some serious security. This kind of thing hasn't happened yet in EQ and how long has it been up? Long fricking time. Now it's happened to Shadowbane or whatever the hell it's called, and it's been up how long?
They're just fricking sloppy. They've noone to blame but themselves.
Man that rules. I would have loved to have seen that. Should be a feature in more MMORPGs.
"Now featuring WRATH OF GOD mode, where pissed off GM's show you what it would REALLY be like if god cared. Experience plagues, meteors, and lightning from a clear sky. Divine retribution like you've never seen it before! Just 20 dallars a month."
I agree that it is a vehicle for DRM, which is my problem with it as well.
However you don't really own anything on your computer by current laws anyway. You don't own the software, you don't own the music/movies/etc (unless you create it yourself). All you get is the right to listen to it, and THAT is murky as hell now because of all the file sharing.
I wouldn't MIND a subscription service as long as it was moderately priced (which it won't be), and as long as thye don't include massive DRM, which they will.
I don't know. I kind of think of it like a library. There is a lot of really cool data out there that isn't freely available; I'd pay to have access to that.
Bah, probably a pipe dream. Be kinda cool though, done right.
It's digital media, how the hell can anyone really own it? I don't mind paying for a subscription service, but I'm sure as hell not going to buy into one run by microsoft. That's their dream, to make you "rent" their crappy software a year at a time.
I think, eventually, a lot of stuff will come this way. I pay for XFM radio, because it's worth it to me not to have to listen to open air radio. Same deal with this. There are a lot of games I'd rather spend $5 to have access to than $50 to "own".
Still, this is more of a paradigm shift than a solution that can be expidited by simply adding hard DRM to modern services.
If you don't understand it, then your options in fighting it are limited. A noob running a blade cluster on a t3 line has only one option when some script kiddie takes over his system: unplugging it. Far from optimal.
We have all this "anti-virus" software, but it is completely misnamed. If you get a flu shot, it's not an anti-virus, its a pallative. A weak shield against infection, not an active agent of protection. The same goes for the software that we currently use. I want to be able to unleash righteous nastyness against the damn viruses in my system, not poke around with fricking bloated software that's always playing catch up.
Until we learn to beat them at their own game, then it will BE their game.
So, we'll all agree that you can't work 8 hours at a stretch, with zero interruptions. I can get close if deadlines are coming up, but the caffinated beverages get to me eventually, and I start freaking out (The Mouse is talking to me! The Mouse is talking to me!), not including the bathroom breaks.
So, in a stress environment, I can see putting some sort of game system around to blow off steam every couple hours or so. Of course if you have a bunch of addicts around, you're going to go out of business...
The thing is, people compare it to PRODUCTIVE time. So, no, compared to actualy PRODUCTIVE time, playing games is a time waster.
On the other hand, compared to sitting mindlessly and passively in front of the TV, games achieve a level almost approaching productivity! So it depends on what you're doing.
Re:Wow, $336! Save $3 over a 2.53GHz Dell!
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 1
Everyone keeps talking about Dell's cheap assed computers. I could hammer together a clone for the same price which would CRUSH any Dell, and when you called me on the phone for tech support and I told you to go F*** yourself, you'd see that my tech support is better than theirs too!
Dell has started using some of the shoddiest parts I've ever seen. Their tech support is terrible; I had a damn harddrive crap out last week, click click click, and they ran me through hoops for almost TWO hours before they'd agree to send me a replacement.
And Dell RAID controllers! #@%^#!$^%^Q#$ BASTARDS! They go down more often than a 5 cent whore! And Dell loses the data EVERY TIME!@!!
For a $350 dell, I'd be REAL suspicious. Crappy onboard graphics and sound stapled to a board stamped out by Crazy Wong's house of cheap hardware in Korea.
They may not be in the best interests of the company, but the notion of taking the same kind of IP restrictions that everyone has swallowed over software and porting them to hardware is absurd. What's next? They going to try and sue me for loading the dishwasher wrong?
Is Dell going to send guys to my house with baseball bats because I installed my own ram? They already treat me like a freak whenever I call for tech support and tell them "Linux" when they ask what OS.
Speaking purely from my experience, half the problem
is managers who don't understand that "I've finished
coding" does not mean "I am ready to deploy."
It's been years since I got time to do serious
"pre-deployment" testing. The code deadlines are
so tight...well, you can imagine.
In school they always talked about post-production/predeployment. I've never worked in a place where that was anything but a dream. I've watched people edit LIVE CODE before, I mean the ACTUAL pages, while they're up! Used to be, compile time was so long, people exhaustively checked their code before trying to compile it. Now we compile to check for typos. Guess this is similar sloppiness.
I did a lot of scheme during undergrad, and ended up being a master of recursion of the most esoteric types. It is seriously elegant stuff, makes all my peers go, "Woooow man, that rocks."
However, in the place where I now live, the "real" world, recursion sucks. First it was people constantly calling me saying, "Hey I found this weird line of code what the hell does it do?" over and over, and THEN, I found an even more awful truth: the memory utilization becomes prohibitive whenever you have to recurse more than 10 or 20 levels.
Iteration is ugly, but it's easy to read, and it doesn't use half as much memory.
Why the hell are we clinging to this model where things can be released on one side of the world, and then released on the other side of the world 6 months later? If it's a linguistic thing, I understand (i.e. They're waiting for the dubbed/subtitled version) but, judging by the quality of said versions, a wait of 5 or six hours should be fine.
They need to clue in. If you can't GET it legally, then you're going to steal it. That's just the way it is.
You know there were 12000000 lines of code in windows 2000? Do you have any idea how long it would take them to source audit TWELVE MILLION LINES OF CODE? And the cost would be nearly incalculable.
And that's just for windows 2000. They would have to go over the (few) parts of XP that were different, then all of Office, then all of SQL Server. The idea that someone could sue MS for somethign like the Slammer epidemic has got to be Bill Gates recurring nightmare.
I predict MS will get behind this when hell freezes over.
You're right, a) that they don't really have any hard proof. Their argument is that there is NO WAY linux could have advanced so fast if IBM hadn't been feeding them code. Completely ignoring the whole "Open Source Movement" thing, which isn't exactly a small workforce, not to mention the major companies who build bits of it. (ie Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake...etc etc.)
Beyond that, however, when Caldera bought SCO, they did it for around 7 million dollars. And now they're suing IBM for like a billion for DEVALUING their 7 million dollar product. It's completely retarded, and I eagerly await the righteous can of whoopass that IBM is about to unleash.
Even if IBM had stolen ALL of SCO's code verbatim, and Linux had incorporated all of it verbatim, it is highly unlikely, based off past precidents, that they could recover even a fraction of what they are asking for.
I would almost welcome MS buying SCO, just for the amusement value of watching a convicted monopoly, and a convicted code stealer trying to sue someone else for monopolistic code stealing.
I've never met a business that went to the next upgrade up. I would expect more people to migrate from NT 4.0 to 2003 than people from 2000 to 2003.
I mean, these guys have finally gotten all the bugs ironed out after those awful slammer patches, and everything is running smooth, and they're going to throw it all away? For what? Incremental advances? MS ALWAYS breaks compatibility. ALWAYS. Hell they do it with patches sometimes.
At this point, I'm only going to move off W2K when I get all my damn VB apps ported to php, and then I'm going to shake that crappy OS like a bad case of the clap.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised the government is still funding old-fashioned "Supercomputers" though. Well no, I guess I'm not. They're still subsidising helium production, so why not supercomputers?
Seems like everyone who needs tons of power has been doing Beowulf clusters for years. Wish the government would catch up.
If I call Dell tech support about a Linux system, the person on the other end will now know what I'm talking about.
Heh. I think it's true. A lot of stupid crap is on the books. I kind of hope something similar will happen with the freaking patent system.
Yup yup. I should have said that. In the states it's hard as hell to get a DVD from a region other than 1, which is what all our DVD players play anyway. I doubt most US DVD consumers even know that they can't view DVD's from other countries.
The argument isn't very persuasive, first of all. What the hell is he talking about? "Tee-hee, people should just look the other way, because some laws were meant to be broken, tee-hee." Moron.
If a law is constantly broken, one has to look at the law. Is it a fair law? Does it reflect reality? Is it enforcable? Does it hurt more people than it helps, or does it help more people than it hurts?
The problems with modern IP laws are simple:
1) They don't reflect reality. People are patenting vague thoughts and unrealized inventions, and being alowed to hold the patents forever.
2) They aren't enforcable. Information moves so fast these days, there is no way to control it without moving to MASSIVE DRM, which seems unworkable.
3) They aren't fair. If you BUY something you should have rights regarding it.
4) They hurt 99% and help 1%, who happen to be so rich it's absurd.
These are the reasons DRM sucks, not because it violates some imaginary principle regarding laws that are "meant to be broken."
Just my opinion.
Rememebr how the DVD format was hacked, and how the regional lockouts were too?
Heh. No, the real point is this: The only people who were effected by this were people who were in the position to do 2 things: 1) copy DVD's. 2) Try to watch DVD's from other countries.
Neither of these things apply to Joe Six pack, who probably hasn't even sold his VRC yet.
Microsoft has trained people into believing that technical stuff just doesn't work about half the time. Someone tries to copy a DVD and the VCR tape is full of static. Huh. Weird. Next.
Turn that around and sell someone a CD that DOESN'T WORK ON THEIR COMPUTER, or a DVD that EXPIRES regardless of whether you've watched it or not, and people will get pissed. True full-blown DRM will hit that 90% of the population that doesn't understand any of this junk, and the only bit that will penetrate won't be security, it won't be IP rights, it will be THEY'RE RIPPING ME OFF.
It will be interesting to watch.
When someone's grandma calls me up crying about how someone hacked her brand new dell p4 that's always on, hooked to a cable modem, no firewall, no antivirus, I have to hit the mute button on the phone and bust out laughing. What the hell did she think was going to happen?
And don't give me this, "Awwww, but she didn't know." crap. This stuff is a responsibility. A P4 on a high bandwidth connection is an unsecured digital gun that can be used against my servers by some stupid script kiddie. Her negligence causes me problems, and all the rest of us as well. And to blame some 12 year old who isn't SUPPOSED to have any sense for picking it up and whacking a server with it is equally stupid.
And THIS? This is a joke of the highest order. A company that opens up a box to the outside world and leaves little "god-hacks" lying around their system, and then crys about it when some kid finds them? Please. This thing was hardly a hack; there is NO WAY someone hacked into the code enough to be able to move people around inside the game. You have to be able to use the game engine itself for that, and those things only do what they're programmed to do.
I sit in my office and watch my little "Code Red counter" still clicking up as servers that are STILL infected continue to spam me with little viral messages. In any just world, I'd be able to hold them responsible for the security hassles that THEY are causing ME. But no, no no no, it's all the original creators fault, not the morons that never bothered to protect themselves, and never bothered to clean up the mess afterwards.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Crackers and viruses happen. It's like a force of nature. Accept it and move on. And if you don't protect yourself, that's your lookout.
Just my opinion.
Say what you will about Sony and their MMORPGs but, they put together some serious security. This kind of thing hasn't happened yet in EQ and how long has it been up? Long fricking time. Now it's happened to Shadowbane or whatever the hell it's called, and it's been up how long?
They're just fricking sloppy. They've noone to blame but themselves.
Man that rules. I would have loved to have seen that. Should be a feature in more MMORPGs.
"Now featuring WRATH OF GOD mode, where pissed off GM's show you what it would REALLY be like if god cared. Experience plagues, meteors, and lightning from a clear sky. Divine retribution like you've never seen it before! Just 20 dallars a month."
Heh.
I agree that it is a vehicle for DRM, which is my problem with it as well.
However you don't really own anything on your computer by current laws anyway. You don't own the software, you don't own the music/movies/etc (unless you create it yourself). All you get is the right to listen to it, and THAT is murky as hell now because of all the file sharing.
I wouldn't MIND a subscription service as long as it was moderately priced (which it won't be), and as long as thye don't include massive DRM, which they will.
I don't know. I kind of think of it like a library. There is a lot of really cool data out there that isn't freely available; I'd pay to have access to that.
Bah, probably a pipe dream. Be kinda cool though, done right.
Just my opinion.
It's digital media, how the hell can anyone really own it? I don't mind paying for a subscription service, but I'm sure as hell not going to buy into one run by microsoft. That's their dream, to make you "rent" their crappy software a year at a time.
I think, eventually, a lot of stuff will come this way. I pay for XFM radio, because it's worth it to me not to have to listen to open air radio. Same deal with this. There are a lot of games I'd rather spend $5 to have access to than $50 to "own".
Still, this is more of a paradigm shift than a solution that can be expidited by simply adding hard DRM to modern services.
Just my (Mostly incoherent) opinion.
Politicians live by focus groups, so send this guy some email and maybe a few others will do the right thing. It sure as hell can't hurt.
.sig is gonna look REAL funny on this one.
Email Gov. Owens!
Heh. My
If you don't understand it, then your options in fighting it are limited. A noob running a blade cluster on a t3 line has only one option when some script kiddie takes over his system: unplugging it. Far from optimal.
We have all this "anti-virus" software, but it is completely misnamed. If you get a flu shot, it's not an anti-virus, its a pallative. A weak shield against infection, not an active agent of protection. The same goes for the software that we currently use. I want to be able to unleash righteous nastyness against the damn viruses in my system, not poke around with fricking bloated software that's always playing catch up.
Until we learn to beat them at their own game, then it will BE their game.
Just my opinion.
So, we'll all agree that you can't work 8 hours at a stretch, with zero interruptions. I can get close if deadlines are coming up, but the caffinated beverages get to me eventually, and I start freaking out (The Mouse is talking to me! The Mouse is talking to me!), not including the bathroom breaks.
So, in a stress environment, I can see putting some sort of game system around to blow off steam every couple hours or so. Of course if you have a bunch of addicts around, you're going to go out of business...
The thing is, people compare it to PRODUCTIVE time. So, no, compared to actualy PRODUCTIVE time, playing games is a time waster.
On the other hand, compared to sitting mindlessly and passively in front of the TV, games achieve a level almost approaching productivity! So it depends on what you're doing.
Everyone keeps talking about Dell's cheap assed computers. I could hammer together a clone for the same price which would CRUSH any Dell, and when you called me on the phone for tech support and I told you to go F*** yourself, you'd see that my tech support is better than theirs too!
Dell has started using some of the shoddiest parts I've ever seen. Their tech support is terrible; I had a damn harddrive crap out last week, click click click, and they ran me through hoops for almost TWO hours before they'd agree to send me a replacement.
And Dell RAID controllers! #@%^#!$^%^Q#$ BASTARDS! They go down more often than a 5 cent whore! And Dell loses the data EVERY TIME!@!!
For a $350 dell, I'd be REAL suspicious. Crappy onboard graphics and sound stapled to a board stamped out by Crazy Wong's house of cheap hardware in Korea.
Just my opinion.
They may not be in the best interests of the company, but the notion of taking the same kind of IP restrictions that everyone has swallowed over software and porting them to hardware is absurd. What's next? They going to try and sue me for loading the dishwasher wrong?
Is Dell going to send guys to my house with baseball bats because I installed my own ram? They already treat me like a freak whenever I call for tech support and tell them "Linux" when they ask what OS.
Just my 2 cents worth.
But they (we) always do.
Speaking purely from my experience, half the problem is managers who don't understand that "I've finished coding" does not mean "I am ready to deploy."
It's been years since I got time to do serious "pre-deployment" testing. The code deadlines are so tight...well, you can imagine.
In school they always talked about post-production/predeployment. I've never worked in a place where that was anything but a dream. I've watched people edit LIVE CODE before, I mean the ACTUAL pages, while they're up! Used to be, compile time was so long, people exhaustively checked their code before trying to compile it. Now we compile to check for typos. Guess this is similar sloppiness.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Heh. Recursion.
I did a lot of scheme during undergrad, and ended up being a master of recursion of the most esoteric types. It is seriously elegant stuff, makes all my peers go, "Woooow man, that rocks."
However, in the place where I now live, the "real" world, recursion sucks. First it was people constantly calling me saying, "Hey I found this weird line of code what the hell does it do?" over and over, and THEN, I found an even more awful truth: the memory utilization becomes prohibitive whenever you have to recurse more than 10 or 20 levels.
Iteration is ugly, but it's easy to read, and it doesn't use half as much memory.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Why the hell are we clinging to this model where things can be released on one side of the world, and then released on the other side of the world 6 months later? If it's a linguistic thing, I understand (i.e. They're waiting for the dubbed/subtitled version) but, judging by the quality of said versions, a wait of 5 or six hours should be fine.
They need to clue in. If you can't GET it legally, then you're going to steal it. That's just the way it is.
How much do you have to dislike someone to put a 10 meg download link in the header of a /. article?
If the FCC actually does put a crimp on the Internet, they can, of course, only regulate it INSIDE the U.S.
Which would mean, of course, that despite all our big talk about freedom we would be up there with China regarding the good old internet.
In Post-Soviet Russia, they still have real internet. =P
Just My Opinion.
You know there were 12000000 lines of code in windows 2000? Do you have any idea how long it would take them to source audit TWELVE MILLION LINES OF CODE? And the cost would be nearly incalculable.
And that's just for windows 2000. They would have to go over the (few) parts of XP that were different, then all of Office, then all of SQL Server. The idea that someone could sue MS for somethign like the Slammer epidemic has got to be Bill Gates recurring nightmare.
I predict MS will get behind this when hell freezes over.
Just my opinion.
We could make back the money for the rope and damaged trees with a mass email campaign selling videos of their last moments!
It's a can't miss opportunity! Especially since 90% of our competition would be...uh...hung out to dry.
Heh.
You're right, a) that they don't really have any hard proof. Their argument is that there is NO WAY linux could have advanced so fast if IBM hadn't been feeding them code. Completely ignoring the whole "Open Source Movement" thing, which isn't exactly a small workforce, not to mention the major companies who build bits of it. (ie Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake...etc etc.)
Beyond that, however, when Caldera bought SCO, they did it for around 7 million dollars. And now they're suing IBM for like a billion for DEVALUING their 7 million dollar product. It's completely retarded, and I eagerly await the righteous can of whoopass that IBM is about to unleash.
Even if IBM had stolen ALL of SCO's code verbatim, and Linux had incorporated all of it verbatim, it is highly unlikely, based off past precidents, that they could recover even a fraction of what they are asking for.
I would almost welcome MS buying SCO, just for the amusement value of watching a convicted monopoly, and a convicted code stealer trying to sue someone else for monopolistic code stealing.
I've never met a business that went to the next upgrade up. I would expect more people to migrate from NT 4.0 to 2003 than people from 2000 to 2003.
I mean, these guys have finally gotten all the bugs ironed out after those awful slammer patches, and everything is running smooth, and they're going to throw it all away? For what? Incremental advances? MS ALWAYS breaks compatibility. ALWAYS. Hell they do it with patches sometimes.
At this point, I'm only going to move off W2K when I get all my damn VB apps ported to php, and then I'm going to shake that crappy OS like a bad case of the clap.
Just my opinion