A member for almost four years, [Heather] Farley has nearly 400 friends on Facebook, a network she'd be hard-pressed to replicate
I never really got these sites. What's the attraction? Is it not just exactly the same phenomenom from the early/mid 90s, where everyone has a homepage and an email address? Except the email is handled in the browser?
Big whoop. Get contact details, email your friends.
So you get a chat thing for free that you like, but you pay for things the "inferior" service gives you for nothing...
And I've never opened a single port for the PS3 or noticed any game lag. DMZ is a ridiculous thing to even suggest for as petty a number of ports as 10 anyway.
Meh, it's not worth the money for me because I don't play online that frequently. For the twice a year I can be bothered with it, I'll stick to the free service that does everything just as well.
"Instead, it would be infringing as a new copy was made (the law doesn't care if an older copy was then destroyed; it's the act of copying that matters, not the number of copies left at the end of the day)"
But the law clearly has no interest in the act of copying, as format shifting is fine. I think this is very very open to debate (in the US).
In the UK it's not actually, strictly speaking, legal to rip a cd you own....
PS3 is being outsold by a good margin month to month,
I don't know how the recent economic climate and the recent xbox 360 price drops have affected it, but at from October 07 until sometime in the middle of this year (latest articles on it I can find with a quick search is may) the PS3 was outselling the Xbox 360 in Europe, month on month.
And according to this article the PS3 outsold the Xbox360 worldwide in Q208.
Now, that doesn't mean that there are more PS3s around, the 360 has a bigger install base, but that old "PS3 is failing" meme needs to die, badly. Maybe it's true in the US, but the rest of the world does exist, ya know.
"I don't use my PS3 online, but from what I am to understand, it's not even close to Xbox live."
I don't see what's so great about xbox live?
You can still send messages, have 'friends' lists, play games online, download demos and whole games, everything that live can do. Plus it's free.
Because then the browser needs to keep track of every certificate from every site it's been to, which is a pain and unreliable when people like to flush that sort of data.
Or would you propose having a "this site is super important and I'm pretty sure I'm not under attack at this moment" button?
Actually, much as I *love* robot games, the AC series got too repetitive even for me. After 2, 2 AA, 3, Silent Line and then Formula Front on the PSP I got a bit bored. I started Nexus and gave up. Nine Breaker and Last Raven sit unused on the shelf and I never did buy AC 4.
I'm British, there's no newegg here. We have other sites (dabs, aria, scan, etc) but amazon are often the easiest.
From my time spent in the US I'd say I like newegg, but there's nothing (perhaps except aria) that's close here any more. Perhaps I should consider them in future. Guess I fell into the single-vendor way of thinking and do most of my online purchasing through amazon now.
To tell the truth, most of my tech purchases are now made in the tech malls of the far east. I go out there a couple of times a year.
I have had the very same experience this year. I think it's mostly down to the physical stores having their damned "premium" cables. They don't try and sell you the Monster type, but they still try and rip you off. HDMI is a digital medium, once you have a cable that works, it works, there's no analog transmission error, or (especially when cables are a metre long) ghosting effect of need for extra shielding. It's just HDMI.
Pisses me off no end, especially seeing as my "I need it now" fallback is to go to a bricks and mortar store. But I'm damned if I'm paying 10x the price for that convenience.
FFS, sell the cheap stuff if you want my business, don't make me feel like an idiot for getting out and buying from you.
Damn easy, great selection, good delivery options, cheap, no crowds... brilliant.
However I'm not sure I like the new trend of having lots of items listed which they don't sell, and farming the actual selling off to smaller companies I've never heard of. And it's easy to miss the small print saying it's supplied by someone else and effectively a marketplace purchase.
Not that I have anything against the marketplace, but blurring the boundaries too much annoys me. This is especially annoying when it comes to things like SD/MemStick cards, as there has been a lot of trouble with fakes lately and I want to buy from a supplier I trust - Amazon.
All that said, it's no wonder some of the shitty high-street chains are going bankrupt. The days when you can overcharge for tat because you're the only game in town are over.
"It is called "sudo" and if your theoretical linux games would need root access to install mods as well. Or do you run your linux box as root all the time?"
No, no it's not. It's nothing at all like sudo.
Sure, it pops up a box once in a while asking for extra permissions. That bit is like sudo, or graphical sudo, but that's not all that UAC does, nor is it the annoying bit.
UAC blocks you from running programs at system startup on your own computer. It helpfully says that your administrator has set up a system policy to disallow it (lies). And I'm buggered if I can find a way to allow things to run that windows hasn't decided *on its own* that I'm not supposed to.
Add to that the pissing annoying virtual store technology that silently redirects activity aimed at files under Program Files to a directory under the user's private data area, without telling/warning/stopping anyone and screwing up multi-user uses of the machine (other users see a different version of the file). It doesn't ask for root, it just makes a total fucking mess. If they wanted to have restricted areas maybe they should investigate some goddamn file permissions. There is no dialog. It's a SILENT process that screws a lot of stuff up.
UAC sucks balls and is NOT like sudo.
As for the rest, if you couldn't function as a normal user in linux until graphical sudo came along, well, you were doing it wrong. Consider it a test, if you can't figure out how to go to a prompt and type sudo then perhaps you shouldn't be allowed near a computer.
Loser pays as a default, with the judge having final say on what he considers reasonable costs, is the only way to go. As in the UK system, where there is far better access. It is a no brainer.
It stops people being forced to roll over because they can't afford a lawyer, an absolutely disgusting facet of the US legal system.
Non-competes are unethical in the first place, and 5 years is just stupid. Frankly I'd just ignore it.
As long as you aren't actually taking designs, code or other property with you, they have no call to stop you and (AFAICT) no legal basis to do so either.
That's the bit that gets me, this virtual screen stuff. I don't like having a box drawn around my monitors, I want my screen resolutions to be the desktop,odd shaped and lumpy as it is.
Otherwise you end up with things drawn offscreen, or just bits of hidden real estate. Xinerama did this stuff well but seems to have been shelved.
Yup, your scenario is also good. I guess I hadn't considered that sort of thing. It's not an aspect/use-case I've come across in my professional dealings with SSL. I'm sure a CRL location could easily be built in to a self-signed server certificate, as it is with a CA cert, but then you have the problem of trusted comms with the CRL server too. Not that you don't anyway, but if you have layers then perhaps compromise of your root cert is less likely, allowing you to report certificates as broken from servers with non-broken certificates, so there's still a chain of trust? Tricky...
I think the main usage scenario people discuss is the internet one -
"I want some way of having secure, authenticated communications with someone I've never met before."
This is a minefield, because you end up with these nebulous authorities who authorise all comers and do a varying amount of checking (some do little to none). Then, because this is a complex subject, we want to keep it easy and transparent so people with no understanding of what's happening can use it. And so we get to where we are now, with browsers needing to have lots of authorities preconfigured, or else clueless users will complain that their internet is broken, or that this firefox/opera/safari thing doesn't work.
I don't really know how to solve that, but IMHO (I guess I'm repeating myself here) it would be good for banks and other important things to distribute a private CA cert and for browsers to have some sort of lockdown mode that could be switched on for talking to your financial institution only.
The GUI is pretty snappy too. I haven't used it for installing new stuff but for updates it's quick. Effectively it does the same thing but hides the shell, you get update reminders in a way that's very similar to windows. You could probably rig auto-update easily enough too.
Obviously it's going to depend on your link speed for download and your processor speed to run the actual updates. I don't have that much to go on in terms of hard figures, however if you look at the amount downloaded in a software update (anywhere from 0.5 to 100MB) on either system, I'd put money on the linux system actually applying them in around half the time (per MB).
Comparing an SP release to upgrading to a new Ubuntu release? Been a while since I did either so I can't really comment.
He's saying the gaming PC is on the way out, not PC Gaming.
When most mainstream PCs with a decent (but not necessarily bleeding or cutting edge) 3D card can cope with driving most games, and games target a large install base... well, who needs to spend 2 grand on an ub3r-1337 box any more?
Updates don't take all that long and are applied by typing -
sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade
Ubuntu tends to come with OO.o installed and evolution mail. If you don't want evolution mail (I've never used it) installing Thunderbird is a 30 second job involving the typing of-
sudo apt-get install thunderbird
Of course you could do this with the graphical software tool, but I'm a terrific geek and find command lines easier. Bare-bones Ubuntu comes with a lot of stuff already in place, more than enough for a full-featured internet box.
What happens when the private key on that server gets compromised and you need to revoke it (with CRL) and issue a new one? Or the server certificate expires? You have to use a secure, preferably offline, method of getting another public key out there again.
The idea here is trust. You import my CA details because you trust that I'm going to play fair. In the example I think we're talking about, we aren't talking huge companies doing thousands or even millions, just an individual (or single company) setting up a CA for their own servers. Doing it on an individual server basis makes the system just too brittle.
For instance, if my bank issued their own certificates, I'd be happier. They could mail me out their public key and I could set up a browser profile for important stuff like money and identity with only my bank's cert in it, maybe my credit card's etc. Then I *know* that I'm connecting to the exact right party. Not only that, but I don't actually care which one of their load-balancing web servers I actually connect to, just that I'm using genuine HSBC.
There are a lot of weird little things like this around. I have a startup script that copies one of several xorg.conf files into place depending on what hardware gets detected, as my laptop has two graphics cards and behaves differently in its dock to not in its dock.
Getting it to run two screens at different resolutions *without* coming up with some virtual screen real estate that encompassed both screens and allowed you to move stuff into areas you couldn't display, that was a problem. A problem Xinerama addressed pretty perfectly, though of course the 3d effects and Xinerama didn't work together. When I upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid it seems that Xinerama was gone. That's another of the reasons I went back to Debian.
I upgraded to Intrepid. Xorg refused to start when my laptop was in nVidia mode (I have a weird vaio with two vidcards and a switch) and the machine was in the dock. Switching nVidia drivers did nothing, using old ones, up to date, new beta drivers, anything.
Annoyed me so much I went back to my first love, Debian, which I've ben using on and off for over a decade now. Everything works just fine:)
Slashdot Mirror
I've nothing against people breastfeeding in public, BUT -
Why isn't the restaurant allowed to ask them to leave?
There are plenty of legal behaviours that the restaurant can decide are not appropriate for its atmosphere. Dress codes spring to mind.
A member for almost four years, [Heather] Farley has nearly 400 friends on Facebook, a network she'd be hard-pressed to replicate
I never really got these sites. What's the attraction? Is it not just exactly the same phenomenom from the early/mid 90s, where everyone has a homepage and an email address? Except the email is handled in the browser?
Big whoop. Get contact details, email your friends.
So you get a chat thing for free that you like, but you pay for things the "inferior" service gives you for nothing...
And I've never opened a single port for the PS3 or noticed any game lag. DMZ is a ridiculous thing to even suggest for as petty a number of ports as 10 anyway.
Meh, it's not worth the money for me because I don't play online that frequently. For the twice a year I can be bothered with it, I'll stick to the free service that does everything just as well.
"Instead, it would be infringing as a new copy was made (the law doesn't care if an older copy was then destroyed; it's the act of copying that matters, not the number of copies left at the end of the day)"
But the law clearly has no interest in the act of copying, as format shifting is fine. I think this is very very open to debate (in the US).
In the UK it's not actually, strictly speaking, legal to rip a cd you own....
PS3 is being outsold by a good margin month to month,
I don't know how the recent economic climate and the recent xbox 360 price drops have affected it, but at from October 07 until sometime in the middle of this year (latest articles on it I can find with a quick search is may) the PS3 was outselling the Xbox 360 in Europe, month on month.
And according to this article the PS3 outsold the Xbox360 worldwide in Q208.
Now, that doesn't mean that there are more PS3s around, the 360 has a bigger install base, but that old "PS3 is failing" meme needs to die, badly. Maybe it's true in the US, but the rest of the world does exist, ya know.
"I don't use my PS3 online, but from what I am to understand, it's not even close to Xbox live."
I don't see what's so great about xbox live?
You can still send messages, have 'friends' lists, play games online, download demos and whole games, everything that live can do. Plus it's free.
Because then the browser needs to keep track of every certificate from every site it's been to, which is a pain and unreliable when people like to flush that sort of data.
Or would you propose having a "this site is super important and I'm pretty sure I'm not under attack at this moment" button?
Not bad, but I prefer my way :)
Sorry to self reply but.... on top of that we should all switch away from MD5 anyway.
Sounds like a great plan to me. Plus have a "Use only my bank's CA" mode built into your browser so you know damn well it's them and nobody else.
My god, someone else plays Armored Core!
Actually, much as I *love* robot games, the AC series got too repetitive even for me. After 2, 2 AA, 3, Silent Line and then Formula Front on the PSP I got a bit bored. I started Nexus and gave up. Nine Breaker and Last Raven sit unused on the shelf and I never did buy AC 4.
Have I missed out or were they more of the same?
You may ask indeed.
I'm British, there's no newegg here. We have other sites (dabs, aria, scan, etc) but amazon are often the easiest.
From my time spent in the US I'd say I like newegg, but there's nothing (perhaps except aria) that's close here any more. Perhaps I should consider them in future. Guess I fell into the single-vendor way of thinking and do most of my online purchasing through amazon now.
To tell the truth, most of my tech purchases are now made in the tech malls of the far east. I go out there a couple of times a year.
I have had the very same experience this year. I think it's mostly down to the physical stores having their damned "premium" cables. They don't try and sell you the Monster type, but they still try and rip you off. HDMI is a digital medium, once you have a cable that works, it works, there's no analog transmission error, or (especially when cables are a metre long) ghosting effect of need for extra shielding. It's just HDMI.
Pisses me off no end, especially seeing as my "I need it now" fallback is to go to a bricks and mortar store. But I'm damned if I'm paying 10x the price for that convenience.
FFS, sell the cheap stuff if you want my business, don't make me feel like an idiot for getting out and buying from you.
it is there, but not glaring...
I guess I;m also just distrustful of buying memory cards through smaller places and it's hard to find one actually sold by amazon now.
I know, I know, some clever /.er is going to provide me with a billion links proving me wrong now....
Yes and No.
Damn easy, great selection, good delivery options, cheap, no crowds... brilliant.
However I'm not sure I like the new trend of having lots of items listed which they don't sell, and farming the actual selling off to smaller companies I've never heard of. And it's easy to miss the small print saying it's supplied by someone else and effectively a marketplace purchase.
Not that I have anything against the marketplace, but blurring the boundaries too much annoys me. This is especially annoying when it comes to things like SD/MemStick cards, as there has been a lot of trouble with fakes lately and I want to buy from a supplier I trust - Amazon.
All that said, it's no wonder some of the shitty high-street chains are going bankrupt. The days when you can overcharge for tat because you're the only game in town are over.
"It is called "sudo" and if your theoretical linux games would need root access to install mods as well. Or do you run your linux box as root all the time?"
No, no it's not. It's nothing at all like sudo.
Sure, it pops up a box once in a while asking for extra permissions. That bit is like sudo, or graphical sudo, but that's not all that UAC does, nor is it the annoying bit.
UAC blocks you from running programs at system startup on your own computer. It helpfully says that your administrator has set up a system policy to disallow it (lies). And I'm buggered if I can find a way to allow things to run that windows hasn't decided *on its own* that I'm not supposed to.
Add to that the pissing annoying virtual store technology that silently redirects activity aimed at files under Program Files to a directory under the user's private data area, without telling/warning/stopping anyone and screwing up multi-user uses of the machine (other users see a different version of the file). It doesn't ask for root, it just makes a total fucking mess. If they wanted to have restricted areas maybe they should investigate some goddamn file permissions. There is no dialog. It's a SILENT process that screws a lot of stuff up.
UAC sucks balls and is NOT like sudo.
As for the rest, if you couldn't function as a normal user in linux until graphical sudo came along, well, you were doing it wrong. Consider it a test, if you can't figure out how to go to a prompt and type sudo then perhaps you shouldn't be allowed near a computer.
Loser pays as a default, with the judge having final say on what he considers reasonable costs, is the only way to go. As in the UK system, where there is far better access. It is a no brainer.
It stops people being forced to roll over because they can't afford a lawyer, an absolutely disgusting facet of the US legal system.
5 Years?
That's ridiculous.
Non-competes are unethical in the first place, and 5 years is just stupid. Frankly I'd just ignore it.
As long as you aren't actually taking designs, code or other property with you, they have no call to stop you and (AFAICT) no legal basis to do so either.
That's the bit that gets me, this virtual screen stuff. I don't like having a box drawn around my monitors, I want my screen resolutions to be the desktop,odd shaped and lumpy as it is.
Otherwise you end up with things drawn offscreen, or just bits of hidden real estate. Xinerama did this stuff well but seems to have been shelved.
Yup, your scenario is also good. I guess I hadn't considered that sort of thing. It's not an aspect/use-case I've come across in my professional dealings with SSL. I'm sure a CRL location could easily be built in to a self-signed server certificate, as it is with a CA cert, but then you have the problem of trusted comms with the CRL server too. Not that you don't anyway, but if you have layers then perhaps compromise of your root cert is less likely, allowing you to report certificates as broken from servers with non-broken certificates, so there's still a chain of trust? Tricky...
I think the main usage scenario people discuss is the internet one -
"I want some way of having secure, authenticated communications with someone I've never met before."
This is a minefield, because you end up with these nebulous authorities who authorise all comers and do a varying amount of checking (some do little to none). Then, because this is a complex subject, we want to keep it easy and transparent so people with no understanding of what's happening can use it. And so we get to where we are now, with browsers needing to have lots of authorities preconfigured, or else clueless users will complain that their internet is broken, or that this firefox/opera/safari thing doesn't work.
I don't really know how to solve that, but IMHO (I guess I'm repeating myself here) it would be good for banks and other important things to distribute a private CA cert and for browsers to have some sort of lockdown mode that could be switched on for talking to your financial institution only.
The GUI is pretty snappy too. I haven't used it for installing new stuff but for updates it's quick. Effectively it does the same thing but hides the shell, you get update reminders in a way that's very similar to windows. You could probably rig auto-update easily enough too.
Obviously it's going to depend on your link speed for download and your processor speed to run the actual updates. I don't have that much to go on in terms of hard figures, however if you look at the amount downloaded in a software update (anywhere from 0.5 to 100MB) on either system, I'd put money on the linux system actually applying them in around half the time (per MB).
Comparing an SP release to upgrading to a new Ubuntu release? Been a while since I did either so I can't really comment.
Um, did you even read the summary?
He's saying the gaming PC is on the way out, not PC Gaming.
When most mainstream PCs with a decent (but not necessarily bleeding or cutting edge) 3D card can cope with driving most games, and games target a large install base... well, who needs to spend 2 grand on an ub3r-1337 box any more?
Updates don't take all that long and are applied by typing -
sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade
Ubuntu tends to come with OO.o installed and evolution mail. If you don't want evolution mail (I've never used it) installing Thunderbird is a 30 second job involving the typing of-
sudo apt-get install thunderbird
Of course you could do this with the graphical software tool, but I'm a terrific geek and find command lines easier. Bare-bones Ubuntu comes with a lot of stuff already in place, more than enough for a full-featured internet box.
Reading this I'm more glad than ever that I just did my undergraduate degree and then skipped out to industry.
What happens when the private key on that server gets compromised and you need to revoke it (with CRL) and issue a new one? Or the server certificate expires? You have to use a secure, preferably offline, method of getting another public key out there again.
The idea here is trust. You import my CA details because you trust that I'm going to play fair. In the example I think we're talking about, we aren't talking huge companies doing thousands or even millions, just an individual (or single company) setting up a CA for their own servers. Doing it on an individual server basis makes the system just too brittle.
For instance, if my bank issued their own certificates, I'd be happier. They could mail me out their public key and I could set up a browser profile for important stuff like money and identity with only my bank's cert in it, maybe my credit card's etc. Then I *know* that I'm connecting to the exact right party. Not only that, but I don't actually care which one of their load-balancing web servers I actually connect to, just that I'm using genuine HSBC.
There are a lot of weird little things like this around. I have a startup script that copies one of several xorg.conf files into place depending on what hardware gets detected, as my laptop has two graphics cards and behaves differently in its dock to not in its dock.
Getting it to run two screens at different resolutions *without* coming up with some virtual screen real estate that encompassed both screens and allowed you to move stuff into areas you couldn't display, that was a problem. A problem Xinerama addressed pretty perfectly, though of course the 3d effects and Xinerama didn't work together. When I upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid it seems that Xinerama was gone. That's another of the reasons I went back to Debian.
I upgraded to Intrepid. Xorg refused to start when my laptop was in nVidia mode (I have a weird vaio with two vidcards and a switch) and the machine was in the dock. Switching nVidia drivers did nothing, using old ones, up to date, new beta drivers, anything.
Annoyed me so much I went back to my first love, Debian, which I've ben using on and off for over a decade now. Everything works just fine :)