The encryption was not built into the server and client to keep wanks from crashing games. It was built into the server and client to prevent competing servers from connecting to the client. It was anticompetitive.
This isn't a flamebait, it isn't a troll, and I'm telling the truth. The proof is in the fact that Blades and Clem refused to provide Mariusnet the ability to interface with the new clients until all of its players had left. Mariusnet, by telling people how to bypass the encryption built into the server, was only trying to survive.
Unfortunately, it looks like this group is being spearheaded by Clem and Blades. Previously, Take Two Interactive put those two in charge of Myth II development, but they were so immature that Take Two took it away from them.
We're talking profanity in the forums like you wouldn't believe, petty sniping, inhibiting progress to stroke their egos...
Bungie had open-sourced their Myth II metaserver code after the demise of they Myth II bungie.net server. Blades set up his own metaserver, and then added mandatory encrypted networking to the Myth II program as an update along with shiny new features as bait. As soon as people upgraded, only his metaserver would work with Myth, so the competing one (which was not run by egotistical bastards, I might add) had to close.
In other words, he intentionally changed Myth II so it couldn't work with the server source that Bungie itself released. All to give his own server an advantage. Why? Well, he didn't make money from the server. I think he just wanted a bunch of prisoners to exert power over.
Eventually, Clem's and Blades' malfeasance got so bad that the publisher yanked their right to tinker with the code and gave it to another group of programmers, who have done excellent work and remained responsive and dedicated ever since.
I hope Blades and Clem do better work now and focus less on ruling the community with an iron fist, but I have my doubts. They are like a plague on the Myth community -- every time you think they're gone for good, they make another power grab. Clem has been around for 7 or 8 years now. They are the reason I stopped playing.
According to their website, they already have plans to make Myth III incompatible with versions not under their control. They're going to rebrand the game "Legions of Destiny" or something and prevent it from interfacing with tools or servers they don't own.
...think about this from the station's point of view. If you played Avril's latest sound bite 129 times this past weekend, that was probably intentional. You probably didn't want to play it 130 times, or 131.
Next weekend rolls around, and you plan to play her song only 75 times this time. Now Avril's puppetmasters pay you for one ad slot which consists of... her song. Great. Now you only have to play it 74 times for free, and you get PAID to do the 75th.
Cause you only wanted to play it 75 times in the first place.
It's sort of like when some rich alumnus donates $3 million to a large university and says it must be put into, say, the English department. Okay, says the president, in goes your three million, thank you, and out comes a different three million that DIDN'T have strings attached. That can go back into the general budget, to be divvied up at the discretion of the university. So the alumnus is out three million, and his pet cause didn't go anywhere.
These labels should, presumably, get exactly the same benefit paying for a two-minute commercial slot and telling the station to fill it with whatever they want.
Problem is, the fax was designed to be an appliance. Mostly, that's still the way it's used. So when a junk faxer sends some spam, it gets automatically printed at the recipient's expense.
Imagine how you'd feel if every piece of junk snailmail automatically charged your bank account $.50 for printing costs... and then imagine how much more you'd get if it were free for the sender...
They actually make no money at all on the iTunes music store, and their profit margins on the iPod are lower than you'd think. They're hoping that if you buy an iPod, you'll buy a mac next.
I meant the commercial, exploitative, for-profit journals must die. I can certainly imagine a journal run by elected volunteer academics who charge exactly as much per subscription as it takes to cover printing costs. The content could be available for free under a lax creative commons licence online. I think that would be ideal. The highly qualified editorial board and peer reviewers would keep the academic rigor and relevance high, and the openness would keep the information accessible to everyone.
In an age long past, we had to have teams of professional typesetters in a corporate setting to put a journal together; nowadays, professors typeset their own papers with TeX. (At least, that's the way it's done in mathematics.) We don't NEED corporations behind the journal anymore; professors can adhere to the journal's style sheet themselves, with (minimal) enforcement from the editorial board.
The popular and prestigious journals add no value and incur no significant cost. They harvest papers from academics and redistrubute them to other academics, who peer review them for free. Then, a university pays ungodly sums to subscribe.
So when a professor can publish by himself on the internet and not give up all sorts of rights to the paper, why doesn't he? When the journal asks a professor to dedicate tens of hours of highly-valued time to reviewing articles for free, why does he?
Prestige. Professors make a name for themselves by being published in prestigious journals. They become better known in academia when they are a prominent peer reviewer for a prestigious journal.
It's a pretty sweet deal for those top journals: output nothing but brand name prestige (which is entirely renewable and not really subject to typical economics) and rake in loads of cash.
The sweetness of the deal for the journals comes at the expense of subscribing institutions: money paid for journals (which wouldn't have to be paid were it a competitive market) is money taken out of tuition and endowment revenues that could otherwise lower the outrageous price of college or add real value to the institution.
Not quite so easy. Fast-growing trees take a lot out of the soil, and a couple generations of trees suck the arability right out. Once gone, it's decidedly non-trivial to regenerate. So while paper certainly isn't a non-renewable good like oil, it's also certainly not as renewable as you imply.
Moreover, lots of paper comes not from regulated tree farms, as you imply, but from razing forests and jungles in third worlds, where there is no minimum wage or labor standards and the government isn't strong enough to regulate the industry. That practice certainly does harm: erosion, species extinction, climactic shift, and the opression of the locals are a few of the downsides.
how about if it is left in the environment, or becomes airborne and is inhaled, or is accidentally ingested??
How about current computer components? There's plenty of toxic stuff already in your computer -- the trick, as it has always been, will be: don't leave it in the environment, don't snort it, don't eat it.
If you can handle that with current computers, you're probably good to go for nanotubular memory.
I really like where you're going, and I want to believe you... and this is probably a stupid question, but where's the video out port on the thing if it's going to serve movies?
1. It doesn't seem to have an audio out port, so it just doesn't do what the Apple product seems primarily designed for.
2. There's no mention to whether it supports 802.11b or 802.11g; Apple supports the superior 802.11g, and I'm guessing this thing only supports 802.11b.
Duh. But "likely to be dragged through court" is very different from "legally liable" -- i.e. in violation of the law -- which the parent poster alleged.
Frankly, even if we run with your irrelevant question, I think the odds of getting nailed by the corporate gunners for something my neighbors do on my wireless hotspot are low enough that, in terms of cost-benefit, it's actually not even worth the few minutes it'd take to secure.
If the US at least if its yours then you are liable.
Care to back this up with citation? I'm not saying you're definitely wrong, but I have a hard time believing you're right.
Remember, we're talking about conviction -- it doesn't count if you find someone the RIAA indicted because someone else used his line. Ideally, he'd just show evidence that it was someone else in court and the tort would be dropped.
We're not solving a math problem; we're discussing corporate policy. If we used your definition of 0% and 100%, nothing at all is certain. That the universe won't end in a millisecond isn't guaranteed. For example, what if every particle in the universe just HAPPENS to find itself at the exact same point and drops right out of spacetime? Particles' positions aren't concrete, after all -- they're probability clouds that asymptotically approach zero but theoretically extend infinitely in every direction.
With your hardheaded insistence on superlative precision, absolutely nothing can be guaranteed, and absolutely nothing can be impossible. If you've personally ever used the words "guaranteed" or "impossible" to refer to real-life events, then clearly you don't exist in this mythical "engineer's understanding" of 100% either -- and it's a good thing you don't, as it's a pretty useless way of thinking. Assuming that's the case, you implicitly set bounds beyond which things are considered impossible.
So now it's just a question of whose bounds are more appropriate. And that's easy, since your standards are retarded:)
With that out of the way as a disclaimer, all of the events you cite would give at least 24 hours' notice, and probably closer to a week, before all the data was erased. So if any one of them start happening, issue an emergency press release saying that the guarantee is over and clients have 24 hours to restore from backup if they need to. (Obviously an engineer like you understands that the guarantee couldn't possibly be construed to last forever, since if nothing else, the universe is going to end eventually.) Once the press release goes out, ship all your data to every available data warehouse you can find, in-country, out of country, on every continent, for any cost. I think even with your nightmare scenarios, the data wouldn't be destroyed without giving the client PLENTY of notice. Whether or not they'd be in any condition to RETRIEVE the data, having been shat on by Cthulu, China, a meteor, nukes, and ebola is not your problem.
...which is why you'd use RAID: the 'r' stands for redundant...
network failures,
...which shouldn't delete data...
administration errors,
...which shouldn't have physical access to every copy of the data...
power outages,
...which should be covered by an on-site emergency generator and shouldn't delete data regardless...
disasters
...which is why the backup company should use an off-site data warehouse for an additional layer of redundancy...
etc etc etc.
No, please, keep them coming. None of the reasons here are acceptable reasons for a paid backup service to lose your data. If any one of these events results in data loss, that's proof that the service was negligent in protecting what you paid them to protect. Therefore, a company that isn't negligent should have no trouble promising 100% reliability. And any who don't promise 100% reliability obviously know -- or at least have reason to suspect -- that they are being negligent. Period.
Didn't read the article, did you? "some kind of nanoprobes that cleans up DNA/RNA errors in potentially each and every cell" is one part of what the author was predicting.
Read first, post later.
Re:Article text. Mod Down; Copyright Infringement
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 1
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Voting isn't like other governmental processes. It's way more fundamental than anything the government does. That is, its openness and reliability are prerequisite to the political mandate upon which we (ideally) found our trust for the government to do other things behind closed doors.
Actually, EZ-Pass tags are in fact active RFID tags. They have batteries in them to amplify their signal, and that's what separates them from the passive tags they talk about implementing in supermarkets.
Imagine: a couple hundred corporations around the united states each have dedicated facilities to process and/or store information. Other companies network these commodities to cohere the aspects of computing. These companies could specialize in redundancy/dependability, power, or affordability. You subscribe to one of these companies' services, and they give you a username and password. Now, you can use any compatible I/O device, log in, and you're at your (virtual) computer.
These I/O devices could be anything from a current monitor/keyboard/mouse desk setup to a wireless touchscreen you carry around with you (assuming pervasive WiFi). Even if it's a palmtop, it'll have all the processing power and storage of your desktop setup. So a gameboy would be just as powerful as a desktop system, and a no-moving-parts $10 MP3 player could access your entire hard drive. The virtual computer recognizes which device you're using to access it, and adopts its interface accordingly.
But the I/O devices could start posing as appliances: your kitchen telephone AND your cell phone are just computer terminals. Your coffee maker takes commands from the virtual computer: once you've set your alarm clock (another computer I/O device), your coffee maker knows when to start preparing a morning pot of coffee.
I don't even care to speculate what this model would do to our legal battles over IP and DRM; I think 30 years is far enough in the future that the technology will remake the legality beyond recognition.
The barriers to this model of computing are bandwidth and (to a lesser extent) wireless permittivity. Many of the gains could be recognized even with only wired technology -- it's just that the alarm clock, coffee maker, and mp3 player would have to jack in to a wall port somewhere.
It also doesn't matter if the DOD name was on it or not, it doesn't belong to you, so why take it? Basic theft.
There is a common law principle known as abandonment, stating that when property has been abandoned by its owner, the first one to find it can keep it.
So if you find an inexplicable electronic gadget in the middle of the desert, it would be reasonable to expect that it was abandoned.
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This isn't a flamebait, it isn't a troll, and I'm telling the truth. The proof is in the fact that Blades and Clem refused to provide Mariusnet the ability to interface with the new clients until all of its players had left. Mariusnet, by telling people how to bypass the encryption built into the server, was only trying to survive.
We're talking profanity in the forums like you wouldn't believe, petty sniping, inhibiting progress to stroke their egos...
Bungie had open-sourced their Myth II metaserver code after the demise of they Myth II bungie.net server. Blades set up his own metaserver, and then added mandatory encrypted networking to the Myth II program as an update along with shiny new features as bait. As soon as people upgraded, only his metaserver would work with Myth, so the competing one (which was not run by egotistical bastards, I might add) had to close.
In other words, he intentionally changed Myth II so it couldn't work with the server source that Bungie itself released. All to give his own server an advantage. Why? Well, he didn't make money from the server. I think he just wanted a bunch of prisoners to exert power over.
Eventually, Clem's and Blades' malfeasance got so bad that the publisher yanked their right to tinker with the code and gave it to another group of programmers, who have done excellent work and remained responsive and dedicated ever since.
I hope Blades and Clem do better work now and focus less on ruling the community with an iron fist, but I have my doubts. They are like a plague on the Myth community -- every time you think they're gone for good, they make another power grab. Clem has been around for 7 or 8 years now. They are the reason I stopped playing.
According to their website, they already have plans to make Myth III incompatible with versions not under their control. They're going to rebrand the game "Legions of Destiny" or something and prevent it from interfacing with tools or servers they don't own.
Sigh.
Next weekend rolls around, and you plan to play her song only 75 times this time. Now Avril's puppetmasters pay you for one ad slot which consists of... her song. Great. Now you only have to play it 74 times for free, and you get PAID to do the 75th.
Cause you only wanted to play it 75 times in the first place.
It's sort of like when some rich alumnus donates $3 million to a large university and says it must be put into, say, the English department. Okay, says the president, in goes your three million, thank you, and out comes a different three million that DIDN'T have strings attached. That can go back into the general budget, to be divvied up at the discretion of the university. So the alumnus is out three million, and his pet cause didn't go anywhere.
These labels should, presumably, get exactly the same benefit paying for a two-minute commercial slot and telling the station to fill it with whatever they want.
Problem is, the fax was designed to be an appliance. Mostly, that's still the way it's used. So when a junk faxer sends some spam, it gets automatically printed at the recipient's expense.
Imagine how you'd feel if every piece of junk snailmail automatically charged your bank account $.50 for printing costs... and then imagine how much more you'd get if it were free for the sender...
They actually make no money at all on the iTunes music store, and their profit margins on the iPod are lower than you'd think. They're hoping that if you buy an iPod, you'll buy a mac next.
I meant the commercial, exploitative, for-profit journals must die. I can certainly imagine a journal run by elected volunteer academics who charge exactly as much per subscription as it takes to cover printing costs. The content could be available for free under a lax creative commons licence online. I think that would be ideal. The highly qualified editorial board and peer reviewers would keep the academic rigor and relevance high, and the openness would keep the information accessible to everyone.
In an age long past, we had to have teams of professional typesetters in a corporate setting to put a journal together; nowadays, professors typeset their own papers with TeX. (At least, that's the way it's done in mathematics.) We don't NEED corporations behind the journal anymore; professors can adhere to the journal's style sheet themselves, with (minimal) enforcement from the editorial board.
The popular and prestigious journals add no value and incur no significant cost. They harvest papers from academics and redistrubute them to other academics, who peer review them for free. Then, a university pays ungodly sums to subscribe.
So when a professor can publish by himself on the internet and not give up all sorts of rights to the paper, why doesn't he? When the journal asks a professor to dedicate tens of hours of highly-valued time to reviewing articles for free, why does he?
Prestige. Professors make a name for themselves by being published in prestigious journals. They become better known in academia when they are a prominent peer reviewer for a prestigious journal.
It's a pretty sweet deal for those top journals: output nothing but brand name prestige (which is entirely renewable and not really subject to typical economics) and rake in loads of cash.
The sweetness of the deal for the journals comes at the expense of subscribing institutions: money paid for journals (which wouldn't have to be paid were it a competitive market) is money taken out of tuition and endowment revenues that could otherwise lower the outrageous price of college or add real value to the institution.
The journals must die.
Not quite so easy. Fast-growing trees take a lot out of the soil, and a couple generations of trees suck the arability right out. Once gone, it's decidedly non-trivial to regenerate. So while paper certainly isn't a non-renewable good like oil, it's also certainly not as renewable as you imply.
Moreover, lots of paper comes not from regulated tree farms, as you imply, but from razing forests and jungles in third worlds, where there is no minimum wage or labor standards and the government isn't strong enough to regulate the industry. That practice certainly does harm: erosion, species extinction, climactic shift, and the opression of the locals are a few of the downsides.
Keep recycling.
How about current computer components? There's plenty of toxic stuff already in your computer -- the trick, as it has always been, will be: don't leave it in the environment, don't snort it, don't eat it.
If you can handle that with current computers, you're probably good to go for nanotubular memory.
I really like where you're going, and I want to believe you... and this is probably a stupid question, but where's the video out port on the thing if it's going to serve movies?
Actually, the Squeezebox -- wireless cousin of SliMP3 -- does exactly that. Apple's not first.
1. It doesn't seem to have an audio out port, so it just doesn't do what the Apple product seems primarily designed for.
2. There's no mention to whether it supports 802.11b or 802.11g; Apple supports the superior 802.11g, and I'm guessing this thing only supports 802.11b.
Then it wouldn't be correcting, would it?
(That was meta-humor)
Duh. But "likely to be dragged through court" is very different from "legally liable" -- i.e. in violation of the law -- which the parent poster alleged.
Frankly, even if we run with your irrelevant question, I think the odds of getting nailed by the corporate gunners for something my neighbors do on my wireless hotspot are low enough that, in terms of cost-benefit, it's actually not even worth the few minutes it'd take to secure.
Care to back this up with citation? I'm not saying you're definitely wrong, but I have a hard time believing you're right.
Remember, we're talking about conviction -- it doesn't count if you find someone the RIAA indicted because someone else used his line. Ideally, he'd just show evidence that it was someone else in court and the tort would be dropped.
We're not solving a math problem; we're discussing corporate policy. If we used your definition of 0% and 100%, nothing at all is certain. That the universe won't end in a millisecond isn't guaranteed. For example, what if every particle in the universe just HAPPENS to find itself at the exact same point and drops right out of spacetime? Particles' positions aren't concrete, after all -- they're probability clouds that asymptotically approach zero but theoretically extend infinitely in every direction.
:)
With your hardheaded insistence on superlative precision, absolutely nothing can be guaranteed, and absolutely nothing can be impossible. If you've personally ever used the words "guaranteed" or "impossible" to refer to real-life events, then clearly you don't exist in this mythical "engineer's understanding" of 100% either -- and it's a good thing you don't, as it's a pretty useless way of thinking. Assuming that's the case, you implicitly set bounds beyond which things are considered impossible.
So now it's just a question of whose bounds are more appropriate. And that's easy, since your standards are retarded
With that out of the way as a disclaimer, all of the events you cite would give at least 24 hours' notice, and probably closer to a week, before all the data was erased. So if any one of them start happening, issue an emergency press release saying that the guarantee is over and clients have 24 hours to restore from backup if they need to. (Obviously an engineer like you understands that the guarantee couldn't possibly be construed to last forever, since if nothing else, the universe is going to end eventually.) Once the press release goes out, ship all your data to every available data warehouse you can find, in-country, out of country, on every continent, for any cost. I think even with your nightmare scenarios, the data wouldn't be destroyed without giving the client PLENTY of notice. Whether or not they'd be in any condition to RETRIEVE the data, having been shat on by Cthulu, China, a meteor, nukes, and ebola is not your problem.
drive failures,
network failures,
administration errors,
power outages,
disasters
etc etc etc.
No, please, keep them coming. None of the reasons here are acceptable reasons for a paid backup service to lose your data. If any one of these events results in data loss, that's proof that the service was negligent in protecting what you paid them to protect. Therefore, a company that isn't negligent should have no trouble promising 100% reliability. And any who don't promise 100% reliability obviously know -- or at least have reason to suspect -- that they are being negligent. Period.
My TI-89 calculator boots up a hell of a lot faster than that, and it also can do a hell of a lot more than an Apple II.
Indeed.
Didn't read the article, did you? "some kind of nanoprobes that cleans up DNA/RNA errors in potentially each and every cell" is one part of what the author was predicting.
Read first, post later.
Slashdot and its moderators are not responsible for enforcing federal copyright statutes.
Voting isn't like other governmental processes. It's way more fundamental than anything the government does. That is, its openness and reliability are prerequisite to the political mandate upon which we (ideally) found our trust for the government to do other things behind closed doors.
Actually, EZ-Pass tags are in fact active RFID tags. They have batteries in them to amplify their signal, and that's what separates them from the passive tags they talk about implementing in supermarkets.
Processing and storage will be recentralized.
Imagine: a couple hundred corporations around the united states each have dedicated facilities to process and/or store information. Other companies network these commodities to cohere the aspects of computing. These companies could specialize in redundancy/dependability, power, or affordability. You subscribe to one of these companies' services, and they give you a username and password. Now, you can use any compatible I/O device, log in, and you're at your (virtual) computer.
These I/O devices could be anything from a current monitor/keyboard/mouse desk setup to a wireless touchscreen you carry around with you (assuming pervasive WiFi). Even if it's a palmtop, it'll have all the processing power and storage of your desktop setup. So a gameboy would be just as powerful as a desktop system, and a no-moving-parts $10 MP3 player could access your entire hard drive. The virtual computer recognizes which device you're using to access it, and adopts its interface accordingly.
But the I/O devices could start posing as appliances: your kitchen telephone AND your cell phone are just computer terminals. Your coffee maker takes commands from the virtual computer: once you've set your alarm clock (another computer I/O device), your coffee maker knows when to start preparing a morning pot of coffee.
I don't even care to speculate what this model would do to our legal battles over IP and DRM; I think 30 years is far enough in the future that the technology will remake the legality beyond recognition.
The barriers to this model of computing are bandwidth and (to a lesser extent) wireless permittivity. Many of the gains could be recognized even with only wired technology -- it's just that the alarm clock, coffee maker, and mp3 player would have to jack in to a wall port somewhere.
There is a common law principle known as abandonment, stating that when property has been abandoned by its owner, the first one to find it can keep it.
So if you find an inexplicable electronic gadget in the middle of the desert, it would be reasonable to expect that it was abandoned.
(IANAL)