Yes, asking for money and immunity from prosecution is "nice". And "an offer to negate negative effects of the action" in exchange for the aforementioned concessions is, again, the very DEFINITION of blackmail.
As 500 people have pointed out: They demanded (not requested, I don't care what words they used) something from MS in return for not releasing information which could be damaging to MS. That is the definition of blackmail.
Dumping is selling products at below *market value*, not cost of production. The console market contains the Playstation 2 and Gamecube, both of which have prices similar to that of the Xbox (and the Gamecube is less). If MS was selling the Xbox for $25, then it could be accused of dumping.
It's a correlation, you can't conclude any more than that. As my statistics prof was fond of pointing out, there is a very strong correlation between ice cream sales and the murder rate.
I don't think it's unethical. The prices are publically posted, it's up to the consumer to research his choices instead of buying the first printer he sees when he walks into CompUSA.
Plus, the break-even point comes between 6 and 7 ink cartridges, which, if the printer is only used occasionally, might be pretty close to the life span of both models anyway.
How long before stores start installing cellphone jammers?
All of modern technology seems to be going that way: A constant arms race between the people trying to sell a device to perform a function and the people trying to sell a device or service to prevent the function from being performed.
Most of these cheats are not "real" cheats inserted by the developers. Gameshark-type devices patch the game in RAM (the data coming off the cartridge/CD) to alter its behavior. Find the correct address/value combination to change the instruction that commits a decrease in the player's ammo to the game world data and change it to a nop, and your ammo will never decrease. Find the place where the authoritative value of the other player's ammo is kept on your local listen server, and you can fuck with that too.
Bandwidth and latency (basically the fact that the game is running over a network).
The server can't wait until the character comes around the corner to start sending data; if it did there would be a noticable lag between the character coming around the corner and the client being made aware of that fact (and it would be all too common to be killed by a player on whose screen you appeared before he did on yours). So the client is told about the character a bit early. Wallhacks could be solved by using better visibility testing to not render the character at all unless you have line-of-sight to him, but that still wouldn't stop memory hack that check his 3D location, and would cost some performance for a more precise visibility check.
This is of course just a single case of client-side prediction, which is the only way modern network games can perform well even on broadband (How do you think games shove 64+ real-time player data streams, which update, say, 5 times a second each, into a 25K connection with 100ms of lag?)
If the client relied on the server for every bit of information in the game, lag would increase and the customers would bitch even more.
These cells are expected to operate at around 120C
Hmm... Laptops already have fairly serious heat problems, to the point where I cannot use a 12" Powerbook because of the left palm rest. And now the power supply is going to be at 120?
You can already trade G3 support for major speed gains if you use Altivec. Compiling a program for 64 bits will not give a *speed* gain, just address space and integer range. However, I'm sure Apple's and IBM's compilers are tweaked to take advantage of the G5's internal behavior quirks and performance hint instructions, and as in the example in the grandparent these optimizations might actually decrease performance on G4s and G3s.
MS is already losing money on the Xbox as a whole, and is resolved to keep losing money until they defeat Sony and Nintendo.
By buying an Xbox, you increase the installed based and make the market more attractive to developers (whether you buy games or not, you count as a potential customer).
Sure, but some people's jobs really do consist of performing Photoshop filters on gigantic images all day. With that minor change, the argument stands.
No, trolls make invalid points carefully worded and covered with misinformation so that they appear enough to be valid points. If his previous articles turned out to match this pattern, who says this latest one doesn't?
Apple has been in "stay alive" mode while they weathered the storm of the underperforming G4. Now that they have come back to parity with PC hardware, they are going on the offensive. Just look at all the MS jokes in today's keynote, if that's not a declaration of platform war I don't know what is.
The mobo isn't exactly chopped liver. The move from a 166Mhz/SDR to 400Mhz dual-channel DDR and 1Ghz frontside bus accounts for a large fraction of the performance improvement.
Actually, I expect this is an *advantage* for OS X. If you install Linux on your Windows box, you lose the use of Windows - you can only boot into one of them at a time. If you buy a Mac and put it next to the PC (possibly even sharing your monitor with a KVM switch), you can use both the new Mac and the familiar Windows at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, asking for money and immunity from prosecution is "nice". And "an offer to negate negative effects of the action" in exchange for the aforementioned concessions is, again, the very DEFINITION of blackmail.
As 500 people have pointed out: They demanded (not requested, I don't care what words they used) something from MS in return for not releasing information which could be damaging to MS. That is the definition of blackmail.
Dumping is selling products at below *market value*, not cost of production. The console market contains the Playstation 2 and Gamecube, both of which have prices similar to that of the Xbox (and the Gamecube is less). If MS was selling the Xbox for $25, then it could be accused of dumping.
It's a correlation, you can't conclude any more than that. As my statistics prof was fond of pointing out, there is a very strong correlation between ice cream sales and the murder rate.
I don't think it's unethical. The prices are publically posted, it's up to the consumer to research his choices instead of buying the first printer he sees when he walks into CompUSA.
Plus, the break-even point comes between 6 and 7 ink cartridges, which, if the printer is only used occasionally, might be pretty close to the life span of both models anyway.
Yeah but you get much better image quality when you use poodles.
How long before stores start installing cellphone jammers?
All of modern technology seems to be going that way: A constant arms race between the people trying to sell a device to perform a function and the people trying to sell a device or service to prevent the function from being performed.
Most of these cheats are not "real" cheats inserted by the developers. Gameshark-type devices patch the game in RAM (the data coming off the cartridge/CD) to alter its behavior. Find the correct address/value combination to change the instruction that commits a decrease in the player's ammo to the game world data and change it to a nop, and your ammo will never decrease. Find the place where the authoritative value of the other player's ammo is kept on your local listen server, and you can fuck with that too.
You still have to obtain the binary from the player's computer to run an md5 on it.
So he'll hack the md5 client to send the authentic binary but execute his haX0red one.
So you'll make the md5 part of the server login process.
So he'll intercept the fopen()s performed by the hacked binary to read itself, and return the authentic instead.
Face it, when push comes to shove you have no control over the other clients short of a hardware-level Palladium-style lockout.
Bandwidth and latency (basically the fact that the game is running over a network).
The server can't wait until the character comes around the corner to start sending data; if it did there would be a noticable lag between the character coming around the corner and the client being made aware of that fact (and it would be all too common to be killed by a player on whose screen you appeared before he did on yours). So the client is told about the character a bit early. Wallhacks could be solved by using better visibility testing to not render the character at all unless you have line-of-sight to him, but that still wouldn't stop memory hack that check his 3D location, and would cost some performance for a more precise visibility check.
This is of course just a single case of client-side prediction, which is the only way modern network games can perform well even on broadband (How do you think games shove 64+ real-time player data streams, which update, say, 5 times a second each, into a 25K connection with 100ms of lag?)
If the client relied on the server for every bit of information in the game, lag would increase and the customers would bitch even more.
Thanks, I'm glad to know shoplifting isn't stealing either. I mean, if I can get it out of the store, then I deserve to have it for free, right?
I don't think *drinking* is the reason he'll go blind while using his computer.
4 words: Try the iTunes store.
You can already trade G3 support for major speed gains if you use Altivec. Compiling a program for 64 bits will not give a *speed* gain, just address space and integer range. However, I'm sure Apple's and IBM's compilers are tweaked to take advantage of the G5's internal behavior quirks and performance hint instructions, and as in the example in the grandparent these optimizations might actually decrease performance on G4s and G3s.
You forgot:
-Cut up the article into 50 pages with 2 paragraphs each to maximize ad loads and annoy people on modems.
Sure, but some people's jobs really do consist of performing Photoshop filters on gigantic images all day. With that minor change, the argument stands.
No, trolls make invalid points carefully worded and covered with misinformation so that they appear enough to be valid points. If his previous articles turned out to match this pattern, who says this latest one doesn't?
If that's the case, I can't wait to see the acronym-happy lamer boards get a hold of them.
"I'm upgrading my athlon to a PP!"
You don't think losing by 10% with a clock speed handicap of 30% is fast?
If your job is compressing video, a 25% gain means 25% more video compressed in a workday, with the corresponding gain in clients and income.
Apple has been in "stay alive" mode while they weathered the storm of the underperforming G4. Now that they have come back to parity with PC hardware, they are going on the offensive. Just look at all the MS jokes in today's keynote, if that's not a declaration of platform war I don't know what is.
The mobo isn't exactly chopped liver. The move from a 166Mhz/SDR to 400Mhz dual-channel DDR and 1Ghz frontside bus accounts for a large fraction of the performance improvement.
Actually, I expect this is an *advantage* for OS X. If you install Linux on your Windows box, you lose the use of Windows - you can only boot into one of them at a time. If you buy a Mac and put it next to the PC (possibly even sharing your monitor with a KVM switch), you can use both the new Mac and the familiar Windows at the same time.