MDLP recorders use high-density recording to record 2-4x more data on an MD, but it seems unlikely they can adapt something like that to CD-Rs...so you can pretty much rule that out unless they've managed to shoehorn some funky blue-laser to write extra data to existing CD-R media (or they're just lowering the bit-rate and blowing smoke out their asses)
Technology destroys as it enables. Making high-quality music isn't something that takes tens of thousands of dollars anymore. Distribution obviously isn't a problem, either. Music isn't going anywhere. It might not be as over-produced or forced-down-your-throat as you're used to, though.
Does Yahoo still control a majority of users? I would have expected that MSN would have the greatest portal penetration simply by being the default home-page under windows, and most people I know have been using Google for their searching for a couple of years now (And I mean non-technical users)...Is Yahoo even that relevant any more?
I sure am glad I removed CUPS from my mom's debian box before I moved out last week (and took my firewall with me). I still think printing is the worst thing about unix in general (and about GNOME in particular...), but CUPS was relatively easy to set up. Sounds like it needs a serious security audit, though.
Well, I'm only an armchair cryptanalyst, but to the best of my knowledge you need some kind of challenge-response system in order to ensure that everyone is who they say they are. That pretty much eliminates any passive system, unless there are some wacky theoretical mathematics I don't understand...
Whole-drive encryption has been around for a long time now...even in-software encryption isn't bad on modern systems. I think the technology that makes this interesting is the token system used to determine the presence of a certain individual, and only decrypt the contents in this case. The underlying encryption technology would be inconsequential (provided it was strong enough for your needs)
I think the problem with rfids in a security environment is that anyone with a reader could query the device as you walked by, and would have your encryption keys (or token id, or whatever), and could probably reproduce them without too much grief...rf tags can't perform authentication, as far as I'm aware..
DriveCrypt has options for quick-kill and hotkey unmounting of encrypted volumes, and since this looks like it does the same thing, only better, maybe they could look into making it erase or publish the contents of the encrypted volume after receiving a distress call from the user's pacemaker? Now _there_ is a deadman switch!
I find the people at ElHost to be very flexible, and have very reasonable rates. I have all my hosting there. They've set up dedicated MySQL DBs, have lots of online management features, and even set up remote SSH for me!
I've been disgusted with the North American treatment of life as something to be bought and sold (and patented) ever since I read about how many genetic patents GE was awarded, back in the 80s. There seems to be something fundamentaly wrong with tinkering with a natural process, and then claiming some sort of ownership over it, regardless of how much reseach may have gone into it. We narrowly avoided such disaster with the human genome (although I think it may have proved unpatentable in any case...). Hopefully we can move beyond a world of farmers bankrupted by GM seed floating over their property, and other dubious forms of "ownership", which if garnered through more traditional breeding methods would be completely unpatentable.. I think this is as good a time as any to put on the brakes, take a look at where we've gone, and decide what has to be cleaned up. Hopefully this becomes an issue outside of Canada.
You mean, an ad that's shaped exactly like the widget set for the most widely installed OS in the world is misleading, just because it makes people think they're clicking on a native os dialog? THAT'S CRAZY! Seriously though, this is exactly what suing is for...making companies pay when they cross the line. Now if we can just get those misleading domain renewal notice companies strung up...
Oh, I was there the day they dumped the ROM ^_^ I actually played through both the English and Japanese versions through emulators (The Japanese version had FM music...much nicer), but prefer the console feel you can only get on a little TV in a musty basement (Yeah, I'm the freak who turns on the scanlines option in all those emulators). I never got into PSO, despite having a Japanese Dreamcast, and ample opportunities to buy it used for a few hundred Yen every time I go back. It just feels like a completely different game...I was totally pumped about it right up until it came out. Go figure. Speaking of emulators, I actually made a semi-working Saturn emulator way back in the day...got sidetracked when I went on exchange to Japan the first time. Anyone else remember when the only part of SEGA's development site that was password protected was the front page? I guessed a URL and downloaded all the dev kits and documents. They had that hole plugged by the end of the weekend, so it's a good thing I had telnet access to a T1...I wonder if anyone other than the network admin ever knew? ^_^; It was real cool having all those PDFs with "SEGA Confidential" written diagonally in grey on each page.
Phantasy Star was my introduction to the world of platform RPGs (since it came out before Final Fantasy in the west), and is still considered one of the finest of the genre. I'd even consider buying one of these things if it had been included. I guess I'll just have to settle for the emulated Saturn version in the Phantasy Star collection on my modded Saturn ^_^
The death of the adventure game...
on
Unfinished Adventures
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
was when the text-parser was axed. Adventure games lost the most of their expressiveness and became a game of "Click all the current screens with all your current items to advance" whenever you got stuck, because in the end, that was your only way of interacting with the environment. Maniac Mansion style games were a bit better, but were still a long way off of text-parser style action. Parsers gave the game authors so much more flexibility as to what could be done, and gave the player so much more to do and explore, that there isn't really any comparison between the games of yore and all the rodent infested ones that came after ^_^; Or maybe it's just me...
Small parts can indeed be tested independently of one another. It's when you need to tie a large amount of data together to come up with one or more results that things tend to come apart. Under loads/values/configurations/complexity that you didn't model in your test data, results are uncertain by definition. It's less a matter of poorly defined interfaces, and more one of a highly complex domain. I'm just warning against treating your test functions as an absolute measure of code correctness. Code that breaks a large number of real-world cases that were never considered when the data was designed, may test as good. Quality of data is hard to certify, except through actual use.
I agree with the author on the subject of writing a comprehensive test suite as you code, but I've found that in applications that need to process a significant variety of real-world data in large volumes, your mock-data will be far from sufficient. Often, the only real way to get good data for your tests is to have the software used in the field, and then use some of the more complex cases to test against. Corner cases are also a problem, esp. if you are relying on your tests to be comprehensive, and verify the correctness of your code. Tests are certainly valuable, but are by no stretch infallible. I've found that you don't get any really useful data until around the second revision of the code (assuming fairly wide use and access to end-user data). Sure, running tests against some custom widget might be pretty reliable, but once you run up against stuff that is inherently hairy, you need data that is representative of real-world usage patterns before you can be sure that changes you make won't break it out in the field.
You should be no more ashamed for producing an album than for producing buggywhips. Production and sales are two completely different animals. Regulating file-sharing is about as effective as regulating the flight patterns of geese. Even if DRM prevents digital ripping, once the signal hits analogue it can be re-digitized at near-perfect quality. At that point, there is no more degredation. The industry is effectively at the mercy of the consumers at the moment, and they're going to have to come to grips with this. Just because a business model has been profitable for close to a century doesn't make it a god-given right. Oh, and I own a small record company ^_^;
As a custom application developer, the main thing keeping me tied to windows is my customers. When you design software to work on the only computer in a storefront, you often don't have any option but to co-exist with the software that is already in use at that location. Unfortunately, this means windows approx. 100% of the time. Even when alternatives exist on other platforms, we don't have to time or clout ness. to migrate them over. We would be soundly trounced by competitors who support windows. I personally hate having to keep so many copies of different versions of windows around to fix version-specific bugs, but it seems that it simply comes with the territory. Anyone out there succeed in making inroads in such an environment? There are a million benefits to getting the client to switch, but we've met with nothing but resistance or indifference.
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind, I didn't know what I was talking about (despite owning a couple of the damn things). Guess my Japanese isn't as good as I thought...
MDLP recorders use high-density recording to record 2-4x more data on an MD, but it seems unlikely they can adapt something like that to CD-Rs...so you can pretty much rule that out unless they've managed to shoehorn some funky blue-laser to write extra data to existing CD-R media (or they're just lowering the bit-rate and blowing smoke out their asses)
Technology destroys as it enables. Making high-quality music isn't something that takes tens of thousands of dollars anymore. Distribution obviously isn't a problem, either. Music isn't going anywhere. It might not be as over-produced or forced-down-your-throat as you're used to, though.
that's what I want to see on CNN!
Does Yahoo still control a majority of users? I would have expected that MSN would have the greatest portal penetration simply by being the default home-page under windows, and most people I know have been using Google for their searching for a couple of years now (And I mean non-technical users)...Is Yahoo even that relevant any more?
I sure am glad I removed CUPS from my mom's debian box before I moved out last week (and took my firewall with me). I still think printing is the worst thing about unix in general (and about GNOME in particular...), but CUPS was relatively easy to set up. Sounds like it needs a serious security audit, though.
Publishing implied things that people would rather didn't get out; ie. blackmail etc. ^_^;
Well, I'm only an armchair cryptanalyst, but to the best of my knowledge you need some kind of challenge-response system in order to ensure that everyone is who they say they are. That pretty much eliminates any passive system, unless there are some wacky theoretical mathematics I don't understand...
Whole-drive encryption has been around for a long time now...even in-software encryption isn't bad on modern systems. I think the technology that makes this interesting is the token system used to determine the presence of a certain individual, and only decrypt the contents in this case. The underlying encryption technology would be inconsequential (provided it was strong enough for your needs)
I think the problem with rfids in a security environment is that anyone with a reader could query the device as you walked by, and would have your encryption keys (or token id, or whatever), and could probably reproduce them without too much grief...rf tags can't perform authentication, as far as I'm aware..
DriveCrypt has options for quick-kill and hotkey unmounting of encrypted volumes, and since this looks like it does the same thing, only better, maybe they could look into making it erase or publish the contents of the encrypted volume after receiving a distress call from the user's pacemaker?
Now _there_ is a deadman switch!
You mean, some great games were turned out by companies that EA syphoned up...e.g. wing commander was produced _before_ EA bought Origin.
I find the people at ElHost to be very flexible, and have very reasonable rates. I have all my hosting there. They've set up dedicated MySQL DBs, have lots of online management features, and even set up remote SSH for me!
I've been disgusted with the North American treatment of life as something to be bought and sold (and patented) ever since I read about how many genetic patents GE was awarded, back in the 80s. There seems to be something fundamentaly wrong with tinkering with a natural process, and then claiming some sort of ownership over it, regardless of how much reseach may have gone into it. We narrowly avoided such disaster with the human genome (although I think it may have proved unpatentable in any case...). Hopefully we can move beyond a world of farmers bankrupted by GM seed floating over their property, and other dubious forms of "ownership", which if garnered through more traditional breeding methods would be completely unpatentable.. I think this is as good a time as any to put on the brakes, take a look at where we've gone, and decide what has to be cleaned up. Hopefully this becomes an issue outside of Canada.
You mean, an ad that's shaped exactly like the widget set for the most widely installed OS in the world is misleading, just because it makes people think they're clicking on a native os dialog? THAT'S CRAZY!
Seriously though, this is exactly what suing is for...making companies pay when they cross the line. Now if we can just get those misleading domain renewal notice companies strung up...
Oh, I was there the day they dumped the ROM ^_^
I actually played through both the English and Japanese versions through emulators (The Japanese version had FM music...much nicer), but prefer the console feel you can only get on a little TV in a musty basement (Yeah, I'm the freak who turns on the scanlines option in all those emulators).
I never got into PSO, despite having a Japanese Dreamcast, and ample opportunities to buy it used for a few hundred Yen every time I go back. It just feels like a completely different game...I was totally pumped about it right up until it came out. Go figure.
Speaking of emulators, I actually made a semi-working Saturn emulator way back in the day...got sidetracked when I went on exchange to Japan the first time. Anyone else remember when the only part of SEGA's development site that was password protected was the front page? I guessed a URL and downloaded all the dev kits and documents. They had that hole plugged by the end of the weekend, so it's a good thing I had telnet access to a T1...I wonder if anyone other than the network admin ever knew? ^_^;
It was real cool having all those PDFs with "SEGA Confidential" written diagonally in grey on each page.
Phantasy Star was my introduction to the world of platform RPGs (since it came out before Final Fantasy in the west), and is still considered one of the finest of the genre. I'd even consider buying one of these things if it had been included. I guess I'll just have to settle for the emulated Saturn version in the Phantasy Star collection on my modded Saturn ^_^
was when the text-parser was axed. Adventure games lost the most of their expressiveness and became a game of "Click all the current screens with all your current items to advance" whenever you got stuck, because in the end, that was your only way of interacting with the environment. Maniac Mansion style games were a bit better, but were still a long way off of text-parser style action. Parsers gave the game authors so much more flexibility as to what could be done, and gave the player so much more to do and explore, that there isn't really any comparison between the games of yore and all the rodent infested ones that came after ^_^;
Or maybe it's just me...
Small parts can indeed be tested independently of one another. It's when you need to tie a large amount of data together to come up with one or more results that things tend to come apart. Under loads/values/configurations/complexity that you didn't model in your test data, results are uncertain by definition. It's less a matter of poorly defined interfaces, and more one of a highly complex domain. I'm just warning against treating your test functions as an absolute measure of code correctness. Code that breaks a large number of real-world cases that were never considered when the data was designed, may test as good. Quality of data is hard to certify, except through actual use.
I agree with the author on the subject of writing a comprehensive test suite as you code, but I've found that in applications that need to process a significant variety of real-world data in large volumes, your mock-data will be far from sufficient.
Often, the only real way to get good data for your tests is to have the software used in the field, and then use some of the more complex cases to test against. Corner cases are also a problem, esp. if you are relying on your tests to be comprehensive, and verify the correctness of your code. Tests are certainly valuable, but are by no stretch infallible. I've found that you don't get any really useful data until around the second revision of the code (assuming fairly wide use and access to end-user data). Sure, running tests against some custom widget might be pretty reliable, but once you run up against stuff that is inherently hairy, you need data that is representative of real-world usage patterns before you can be sure that changes you make won't break it out in the field.
You should be no more ashamed for producing an album than for producing buggywhips. Production and sales are two completely different animals. Regulating file-sharing is about as effective as regulating the flight patterns of geese. Even if DRM prevents digital ripping, once the signal hits analogue it can be re-digitized at near-perfect quality. At that point, there is no more degredation. The industry is effectively at the mercy of the consumers at the moment, and they're going to have to come to grips with this. Just because a business model has been profitable for close to a century doesn't make it a god-given right. Oh, and I own a small record company ^_^;
As a custom application developer, the main thing keeping me tied to windows is my customers. When you design software to work on the only computer in a storefront, you often don't have any option but to co-exist with the software that is already in use at that location. Unfortunately, this means windows approx. 100% of the time. Even when alternatives exist on other platforms, we don't have to time or clout ness. to migrate them over. We would be soundly trounced by competitors who support windows. I personally hate having to keep so many copies of different versions of windows around to fix version-specific bugs, but it seems that it simply comes with the territory. Anyone out there succeed in making inroads in such an environment? There are a million benefits to getting the client to switch, but we've met with nothing but resistance or indifference.