The P/E multiple indicates the expectation that investors have for future growth, because the market anticipates the success of a company (or lack thereof) moreso than it responds to it. Investors expect Apple to have substantially higher growth rate than Dell in the coming months/years. To get in on a piece of that action, you have to pay a premium, which is why the stock price - and hence the P/E ratio - is so much higher.
This still indicates that QA was a lot better back in the day than it is now, as the only bugs that remained were fairly obscure and unlikely ever to be caught by in-house testers (assuming they wanted to release the game before Duke Nukem Forever comes out). Yesterday's games win out on the obvious to not-so-obvious bugs, because the better QA process will catch them and they'll never see the light of day. Take the uninstaller for Ubisoft's Pool of Radiance (please), which would sometimes start deleting everything. A game that caused your SNES to stop working permanently sounds ridiculous, but it happened on the PC platform once the QA process became less critical due to patchability.
Oddly, though, today's games win out in terms of really obscure bugs, because while all bugs will eventually be found, only today's patchable games will ever have those bugs fixed. The patch notes for some games read something like, "Fixed a bug where if you hop on one foot and gargle peanut butter at the equinox, the game causes your power supply to catch fire."
On a side note, was the World -1 bug an actual bug, or was it an easter egg?
Re:Picking and choosing...
on
God Mode
·
· Score: 1
I think the point is that they can play FPSes and blow their competitors up with rocket launchers repeatedly without actually hating them, because it's all pretend. You know, just like any other normal person can do.
Re:Most violent book I have ever read
on
God Mode
·
· Score: 1
It includes such gems as a woman driving a tent spike through a guy's temple and into the ground, or a guy stabbing a fat man with a dagger so deep that the fat closed back over the hilt of the weapon so he couldn't get it back out. Surprisingly gory at times.
One of the siblings to your post pointed out something I didn't think of that makes a lot of sense to me - checking for the value "1" is a lot less conspicuous than checking for most other numbers, so if this was inserted surreptitiously into the code (or even if it was authorized), in the event that prying eyes ever went back and checked it out later, it would be a lot more likely to pass muster.
Your supposition would require that no record in a WMF file could be 6385492 words long - or, more specifically, that there is a known maximum less than the maximum storeable value. As Gibson mentioned, the minimum record size is 6 words, which frees up the values 0 through 5 to be chosen as your magic key (or perhaps negative numbers if you use signed values for the record size). Picking one of those values would have been a lot quicker than trying to construct a maximum sized record and determining its length so you could pick something bigger.
Gibson's findings are interesting, and as you say, certainly merit more study. As someone else said somewhere around here, stepping into and/or disassembling the relevant Microsoft code would give greater insight, as would finding out what old versions of Windows carry this problem - including old old versions like Win3.1 or whichever version introduced WMF in the first place.
It's his assertions based upon those findings that may be a bit suspect, but that's what future research would hopefully clear up. Considering that we can't rely upon Microsoft for full disclosure, we need someone in a country that's a bit more, um, liberated than the U.S. in terms of reverse engineering to take a look at it. Gibson's rantings may seem over the top sometimes, but his strategy is to get someone with the expertise/legal protections/authority/etc. to get involved. (For that matter, it's not unlike the kickback rumors that CmdrTaco responded to the other day. Few people believed that they were actually taking kickbacks, even among the people who posted those rumors in the first place, but the rumors were enough to get CmdrTaco to take action concerning the actual problem of people abusing Slashdot for PageRank.)
But you can never be completely certain that your TiVo won't suddenly stop doing the things you want it to do. At least with a homebrew PVR, you can be sure that some company under the pressure of the content industry won't surreptitiously patch your system and start (for example) deleting your old recorded shows.
If you look at Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, they have done more to help the world by investing billions into 3rd world nations and convincing others to do the same.
So remember, don't pirate Windows and don't use Linux instead. Please, won't you think of the children?
Leela: Look at that 5 o'clock rust. Bender, you've been up all night not drinking, haven't you?! Bender: Hey, what I don't do is none of your business! Leela: Please, Bender, have some malt liquor. If not for yourself, then for the people who love you.
This really doesn't have anything significant to do with the new DRM they're using on screener copies. This is about the *old* DRM that people have been contending with on DVDs for years: region coding. That's the problem here - in non-US countries, region-free players are fairly commonplace, so the screener-version DRM's only role in the story is to remind some British reviewers what life was like before region-free players.
Note that region coding doesn't prevent copying in any way - it only lets the content companies exercise control over the end user's ability to use legitimately purchased content. That's its sole purpose, and ultimately is the true motivation behind all consumer-level DRM schemes - copy prevention is just a hotbutton topic used to get DRM protected by legislation. What's more, region coding actually provides an incentive to rip a DVD coded with the wrong region into a playable format.
Making such claims is, like any tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, ultimately an attempt to bring CmdrTaco down off his throne (and hopefully he remembers to flush;) ) to address the issue. In this case, there was enough gnashing of teeth that it worked, right down to the point where the correct solution (nofollow attribute added to vanity links) is being implemented.
If he follows through on his resolution to be more involved with the meta aspects of Slashdot, then such conspiracy theories will fall to the wayside, because he actually will be accessible to the unwashed masses. This is the same strategy as the nofollow attrib - remove the motivation for users to participate in an undesired fashion, and the undesired behavior will stop. There's no need to have both the carrot and the stick when they contradict each other, after all.
Sounds like you spend a bit too much time on the WoW forums. Bitterness abounds, no?
Anyway, the biggest reason why the ancestor posters have reason to complain is that Turbine didn't just make another MMOG. They made a Dungeons and Dragons MMOG, probably the only one that will get made, at least within the next five years. This means that, for example, people who suck at twitch games are denied their chance to play in a MMOG environment using the D&D mechanics they love. Had Turbine developed their own setting, it would be no problem, but they didn't - and so the public has the justification to complain when Turbine's take doesn't mesh with the public's take.
So says you, and you're an expert in the field because....?
Just read the OP. It explains why there is value in killing these animals, however gruesome it might sound. Criminal forensics will benefit from having another tool at its disposal for determining cause of death, and such improved forensics may result in killers being convicted of their crimes rather than being allowed to kill again. Hence, the sacrifice of these mice may save human lives.
Industrial motors can (probably) play music, too
on
Scanjet Music
·
· Score: 1
When I was at my old co-op job at an industrial controls manufacturing company, back in the days before I decided to become a professional student, one of the guys out on the shop floor told me quite a few stories about interesting things that happened there over the years. One of these stories was about a guy who took a handheld tape recorder, recorded himself saying something, and then hooked the output up as a trim to the torque control for a 100hp industrial motor. He started up the motor and brought it to speed, and then hit play on the tape recorder. Apparently, you could actually hear his voice coming from the motor as the torque adjustments caused it to vibrate.
Of course, other stories I heard included a motor throwing a chunk of the rotor into the shop ceiling three storeys up, or another motor coming unbolted from the floor while it was spinning up and chasing a guy across the shop. Yeah, I can't confirm that any of them were true since they all happened years ago, but they were all funny:)
The contrast you quoted between scientists in France and lawyers in the US is interesting. Scientists generally prosper by teaching people to understand things rather than fear them. On the other hand, lawyers generally prosper by teaching people to be irrationally afraid of things, which can't happen if they truly understand them.
TTWO has recently postponed more than one game (one of the GTA games in Japan and Europe, and TES:Oblivion in general) and was collaterally stricken by the production problems that failed to get enough Xboxes to market quickly enough during the holiday season. The problem was bad enough that they prewarned for their fiscal Q4'05 and Q1'06 right when their Q4 ended at the end of October 2005, so this really isn't news, but just the culmination of what we all already knew about.
Agreed - especially the part where you used the word "control" instead of "copy prevention". Because, despite what the content industry keeps claiming, DRM isn't about copy prevention at all - it's about control over the consumer and hardware lock-in.
Actually, "reverse the polarity" was (perhaps also, perhaps first) a Doctor Who catchphrase. There's a montage on a recent Doctor Who DVD release that shows Jon Pertwee, who apparently hated all the technobabble he had to spew, saying to "reverse the polarity" of things about a dozen times in different episodes.
Have you actually watched Futurama? Because it's not like the Simpsons at all. Yes, the animation style is Groening's, but the show flows in a completely different manner (read: coherently) and includes plots ranging from outrageously hilarious to tear-jerkingly touching. The writing staff has/had several Ph.D.'s on it, meaning the humor was really sophisticated (and well-received by the Slashdot crowd for this reason). It didn't depend on the Homer randomness that plagues every Simpsons episode (which, though funny, gets tired after a while).
These are characters with depth, characters you can relate to and sympathize with - and considering that the characters are robots, 160 years old, cyclopses, lobsters, and Chinese, that's saying something:)
If the series had to end, that episode ("The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings") was as good a last episode as you could possibly have. But every show deserves its shark-jumping moment, and the only way we'll get that out of Futurama is if they make more episodes:)
Slashdot Mirror
Town board members surveyed the population and found that only 5.5 percent of townspeople are against the wind farm, while 58 percent are for it.
The remaining 36.5 percent voted for the Cowboy Neal-based solution.
The P/E multiple indicates the expectation that investors have for future growth, because the market anticipates the success of a company (or lack thereof) moreso than it responds to it. Investors expect Apple to have substantially higher growth rate than Dell in the coming months/years. To get in on a piece of that action, you have to pay a premium, which is why the stock price - and hence the P/E ratio - is so much higher.
This still indicates that QA was a lot better back in the day than it is now, as the only bugs that remained were fairly obscure and unlikely ever to be caught by in-house testers (assuming they wanted to release the game before Duke Nukem Forever comes out). Yesterday's games win out on the obvious to not-so-obvious bugs, because the better QA process will catch them and they'll never see the light of day. Take the uninstaller for Ubisoft's Pool of Radiance (please), which would sometimes start deleting everything. A game that caused your SNES to stop working permanently sounds ridiculous, but it happened on the PC platform once the QA process became less critical due to patchability.
Oddly, though, today's games win out in terms of really obscure bugs, because while all bugs will eventually be found, only today's patchable games will ever have those bugs fixed. The patch notes for some games read something like, "Fixed a bug where if you hop on one foot and gargle peanut butter at the equinox, the game causes your power supply to catch fire."
On a side note, was the World -1 bug an actual bug, or was it an easter egg?
I think the point is that they can play FPSes and blow their competitors up with rocket launchers repeatedly without actually hating them, because it's all pretend. You know, just like any other normal person can do.
It includes such gems as a woman driving a tent spike through a guy's temple and into the ground, or a guy stabbing a fat man with a dagger so deep that the fat closed back over the hilt of the weapon so he couldn't get it back out. Surprisingly gory at times.
Good points.
One of the siblings to your post pointed out something I didn't think of that makes a lot of sense to me - checking for the value "1" is a lot less conspicuous than checking for most other numbers, so if this was inserted surreptitiously into the code (or even if it was authorized), in the event that prying eyes ever went back and checked it out later, it would be a lot more likely to pass muster.
For thousands of years, mankind thought the moon was made of cheese.
Then we went there and found out it was made of rock.
We haven't been back since.
Behold the power of cheese.
Your supposition would require that no record in a WMF file could be 6385492 words long - or, more specifically, that there is a known maximum less than the maximum storeable value. As Gibson mentioned, the minimum record size is 6 words, which frees up the values 0 through 5 to be chosen as your magic key (or perhaps negative numbers if you use signed values for the record size). Picking one of those values would have been a lot quicker than trying to construct a maximum sized record and determining its length so you could pick something bigger.
Gibson's findings are interesting, and as you say, certainly merit more study. As someone else said somewhere around here, stepping into and/or disassembling the relevant Microsoft code would give greater insight, as would finding out what old versions of Windows carry this problem - including old old versions like Win3.1 or whichever version introduced WMF in the first place.
It's his assertions based upon those findings that may be a bit suspect, but that's what future research would hopefully clear up. Considering that we can't rely upon Microsoft for full disclosure, we need someone in a country that's a bit more, um, liberated than the U.S. in terms of reverse engineering to take a look at it. Gibson's rantings may seem over the top sometimes, but his strategy is to get someone with the expertise/legal protections/authority/etc. to get involved. (For that matter, it's not unlike the kickback rumors that CmdrTaco responded to the other day. Few people believed that they were actually taking kickbacks, even among the people who posted those rumors in the first place, but the rumors were enough to get CmdrTaco to take action concerning the actual problem of people abusing Slashdot for PageRank.)
But you can never be completely certain that your TiVo won't suddenly stop doing the things you want it to do. At least with a homebrew PVR, you can be sure that some company under the pressure of the content industry won't surreptitiously patch your system and start (for example) deleting your old recorded shows.
If you look at Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, they have done more to help the world by investing billions into 3rd world nations and convincing others to do the same.
So remember, don't pirate Windows and don't use Linux instead. Please, won't you think of the children?
Leela: Look at that 5 o'clock rust. Bender, you've been up all night not drinking, haven't you?!
Bender: Hey, what I don't do is none of your business!
Leela: Please, Bender, have some malt liquor. If not for yourself, then for the people who love you.
This really doesn't have anything significant to do with the new DRM they're using on screener copies. This is about the *old* DRM that people have been contending with on DVDs for years: region coding. That's the problem here - in non-US countries, region-free players are fairly commonplace, so the screener-version DRM's only role in the story is to remind some British reviewers what life was like before region-free players.
Note that region coding doesn't prevent copying in any way - it only lets the content companies exercise control over the end user's ability to use legitimately purchased content. That's its sole purpose, and ultimately is the true motivation behind all consumer-level DRM schemes - copy prevention is just a hotbutton topic used to get DRM protected by legislation. What's more, region coding actually provides an incentive to rip a DVD coded with the wrong region into a playable format.
Making such claims is, like any tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, ultimately an attempt to bring CmdrTaco down off his throne (and hopefully he remembers to flush ;) ) to address the issue. In this case, there was enough gnashing of teeth that it worked, right down to the point where the correct solution (nofollow attribute added to vanity links) is being implemented.
If he follows through on his resolution to be more involved with the meta aspects of Slashdot, then such conspiracy theories will fall to the wayside, because he actually will be accessible to the unwashed masses. This is the same strategy as the nofollow attrib - remove the motivation for users to participate in an undesired fashion, and the undesired behavior will stop. There's no need to have both the carrot and the stick when they contradict each other, after all.
Sounds like you spend a bit too much time on the WoW forums. Bitterness abounds, no?
Anyway, the biggest reason why the ancestor posters have reason to complain is that Turbine didn't just make another MMOG. They made a Dungeons and Dragons MMOG, probably the only one that will get made, at least within the next five years. This means that, for example, people who suck at twitch games are denied their chance to play in a MMOG environment using the D&D mechanics they love. Had Turbine developed their own setting, it would be no problem, but they didn't - and so the public has the justification to complain when Turbine's take doesn't mesh with the public's take.
So says you, and you're an expert in the field because....?
Just read the OP. It explains why there is value in killing these animals, however gruesome it might sound. Criminal forensics will benefit from having another tool at its disposal for determining cause of death, and such improved forensics may result in killers being convicted of their crimes rather than being allowed to kill again. Hence, the sacrifice of these mice may save human lives.
When I was at my old co-op job at an industrial controls manufacturing company, back in the days before I decided to become a professional student, one of the guys out on the shop floor told me quite a few stories about interesting things that happened there over the years. One of these stories was about a guy who took a handheld tape recorder, recorded himself saying something, and then hooked the output up as a trim to the torque control for a 100hp industrial motor. He started up the motor and brought it to speed, and then hit play on the tape recorder. Apparently, you could actually hear his voice coming from the motor as the torque adjustments caused it to vibrate.
:)
Of course, other stories I heard included a motor throwing a chunk of the rotor into the shop ceiling three storeys up, or another motor coming unbolted from the floor while it was spinning up and chasing a guy across the shop. Yeah, I can't confirm that any of them were true since they all happened years ago, but they were all funny
The contrast you quoted between scientists in France and lawyers in the US is interesting. Scientists generally prosper by teaching people to understand things rather than fear them. On the other hand, lawyers generally prosper by teaching people to be irrationally afraid of things, which can't happen if they truly understand them.
Of course, if you manipulate the conditions of the test enough, you can get any result you like.
Sounds like that's what happened here.
TTWO has recently postponed more than one game (one of the GTA games in Japan and Europe, and TES:Oblivion in general) and was collaterally stricken by the production problems that failed to get enough Xboxes to market quickly enough during the holiday season. The problem was bad enough that they prewarned for their fiscal Q4'05 and Q1'06 right when their Q4 ended at the end of October 2005, so this really isn't news, but just the culmination of what we all already knew about.
You people are the same ones who killed Futurama and SeaLab.
Nah. Sealab just wasn't half as funny without Harry Goz.
"Awww, there go my nipples again, there, Edith!"
I'd like it to be as open-ended as the theme allows. I think that will help get, and REALLY help keep, players.
Steve Jackson, meet Raph Koster. Raph, Steve.
I'll leave you two alone to get acquainted. I'm sure you'll have a lot to talk about.
Agreed - especially the part where you used the word "control" instead of "copy prevention". Because, despite what the content industry keeps claiming, DRM isn't about copy prevention at all - it's about control over the consumer and hardware lock-in.
Actually, "reverse the polarity" was (perhaps also, perhaps first) a Doctor Who catchphrase. There's a montage on a recent Doctor Who DVD release that shows Jon Pertwee, who apparently hated all the technobabble he had to spew, saying to "reverse the polarity" of things about a dozen times in different episodes.
Have you actually watched Futurama? Because it's not like the Simpsons at all. Yes, the animation style is Groening's, but the show flows in a completely different manner (read: coherently) and includes plots ranging from outrageously hilarious to tear-jerkingly touching. The writing staff has/had several Ph.D.'s on it, meaning the humor was really sophisticated (and well-received by the Slashdot crowd for this reason). It didn't depend on the Homer randomness that plagues every Simpsons episode (which, though funny, gets tired after a while).
:)
These are characters with depth, characters you can relate to and sympathize with - and considering that the characters are robots, 160 years old, cyclopses, lobsters, and Chinese, that's saying something
If the series had to end, that episode ("The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings") was as good a last episode as you could possibly have. But every show deserves its shark-jumping moment, and the only way we'll get that out of Futurama is if they make more episodes :)