"The cause of the Great Depression was people panicking and selling all their stocks"
No, people panicing as a credit bubble burst was the cause of the stock market crash. It was a government determined to 'do something' that turned an ordinary, everyday stock market crash into a decade-long depression.
"If they did nothing and the economy completely crumbled leading to the Great Depression Part 2, you'd sure as hell feel it when you lost your job."
'Doing something' was the cause of the Great Depression; the government tried to prop up the economy rather than let the bad business go bankrupt and be bought up for a few cents on the dollar, and that was why it took so long to recover. Sure, they'd have had a recession if the government hadn't 'done something', but it wouldn't have been so bad and it would have been over much faster.
If anything is going to push the world into 'Great Depression 2: This Time It's Personal', it's governments 'doing something' with massive bailouts. But in a mass democracy the government have to show they're 'doing something', even if the 'something' they're 'doing' is actually making things worse.
"Lets face it, the reason the companies are employing DRM is because (most, not all) gamers fucked them over and forced their hand by just greedily pirating everything we could get out hands on."
When I was a kid in the 80s, pretty much everyone in my school who owned a computer pirated games, and all the fancy DRM scams they used were broken by ten-year-olds in their bedrooms; after trying more and more intrusive DRM scams, eventually the distributors gave up because it simply did not work, and games were released for years with no DRM at all.
DRM is 'sowed' by retarded control-freak publishers who have no clue about technology and don't care how much they screw their customers; piracy has little to do with it. Which is fortunate, because the ten-year-olds are still cracking DRM scams almost as soon as they're released.
"I can't remember the last time I actually saw someone browsing in the PC games section in the last year."
Who actually buys PC games in a retail store anymore?
They're much easier to buy online, either by ordering the box from an online store which actually has the game you want in stock, or paying to download through Steam or one of the numerous MMOGs that make up the vast majority of the billions of dollars a year of PC game revenues these days.
But I agree, the Xbox was a colossal screwup on Microsoft's part; they largely depend on gaming to drive consumer Windows upgrades and sales (what home user needs a new quad-core 5GHz CPU with 8GB of RAM running Windows if they're not playing new games?) and the morons went and tried to kill PC gaming with a new console. What the hell were they smoking?
"You mean the people who pay the bills? How's that suppose to work?"
Publishers don't pay the bills; game players do. Publishers may fund development, but at the end of the day the people who pay for it are the ones who buy the games.... the people who the publishers are screwing over by shipping buggy beta-quality games with intrusive DRM, to the point where at least some of us have simply stopped buying the games whose development they're funding.
Obviously many companies would struggle to raise funding without publishers, but there has to be a better business model than having developers funded by people who hate games and gamers and just want to rush some overhyped crap out the door.
Guild Wars seems to have done OK without a permanent grind; I'm sure they haven't made as much money as WoW with its monthly fees, but I'm equally sure they've made a decent profit.
"Keep trying to change the system through demonstration and voting."
More than a million people demonstrated in the streets of London against the invasion of Iraq, but the government went ahead and did it anyway. 78% of the British people did not vote for the Labour government, but they were elected anyway; worse, they were only elected because of Scottish votes, but many of the most unpopular laws they've passed don't apply in Scotland.
There is roughly zero chance of changing things through demonstrating or voting in the UK. It's a rapidly decaying police state where a chav who beats you up in the street will get a slap on the wrist, while a middle class productive worker who doesn't go along with the latest 'recycling' bullshit will get a big fine and a criminal record that will cause them problems for years afterwards.
And that is why I left for good last year. Anyone with a clue should be getting the hell out before emigration is banned too; they've already talked about requiring exit visas to leave the country, it won't be long before they're brought in.
"yes, an old idea. But i have yet to see it implemented well."
The original Guild Wars henchmen were a nightmare, but over time they've become fairly smart. The new heroes are often more effective than real human players, and much more so than henchmen because you can tell them which skills to memorise and use.
The big problem is making them smart enough to be useful without making them so smart that no-one will join a pick-up group with a random selection of players of whose skill levels you know nothing.
Didn't I read that Everquest was getting 'henchmen' in the next expansion? That would open up a lot of old content that's fun to do but not soloable and which has too low a risk to reward for pickup groups.
True, but again, if it's an important system you can buy a dedicated server or a second disk for logging for the cost of a few hours (possibly a few minutes) of downtime.
"Otherwise don't do much logging because it will hurt application performance, sometimes drastically."
You're assuming that performance -- or, more precisely, CPU usage -- is important; in many cases, reliability (and being able to track down bugs after a crash) are far more important than CPU usage. With quad-core CPUs so cheap these days, we can easily afford to spend another thousand dollars to throw more processing power into a system which has cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars of programmer time to develop and will cost thousands of dollars an hour for any downtime.
"As for writing the correct value - well, not my fault if coders are so incompetent they can't be bothered doing basic top-down design and bottom-up testing."
You just don't get it, do you? This is the way that these systems are broken, not by breaking encryption keys.
There is NO WAY to prevent these kind of attacks without some central validation; you can make them moderately difficult with complex hardware, but the hackers are generally smarter than the people building the system... if they have to dismantle a few dozen cards in order to determine how to duplicate them, so what?
The only way you can prevent duplicate cards (or storing the old contents of the cards and writing it back to the same card later) is by centrally validating all cards when they're used, or at least logging all transactions and flagging duplicate cards; but by then, they may already have got thousands of dollars or more of free services.
"You can store the value on the card. You just have to combine it with salt and encrypt it against a big enough private key. Shouldn't be hard in this day and age."
How does that help? If you can copy the data to another card or prevent the reader from updating the value, then you have infinite amounts of money available.
We used to have stored value cards at university back in the 80s, and it wasn't long before someone discovered how to prevent the automated readers from writing the value back to the card after they subtracted money from it so it never went down. There was also a bug where in some cases the reader would add $100 to the card rather than deducting $0.25...
I believe EQ1 still has >100k active accounts, I'm not sure about EQ2; certainly I and some of my old guild-mates keep resubscribing to EQ1 now and again after other games fail to live up to expectations. Obviously that's nothing compared to WoW, but if you sell 100k copies of an expansion by download at $50 apiece every year, that'll pay for a few developers and make a profit.
They have reduced the expansion rate from two per year to one per year, which is actually a damn good move since EQ1 suffers from having far too much content that's unusable (instanced and requires a group) and/or unused (risk vs reward nowhere near good enough for groups to go there).
I'd guess another 4-5 years before they stop updating it and the last server will probably shut down a 10-20 years after that.
Most big companies wouldn't exist in a free market, and most small companies can't afford to 'cheat' employees, so your point is not very convincing. While there are exceptions, big companies generally rely on big government to keep new, small competitors out of the market, funnel taxpayers' money to them and protect them from irate employees and ex-employees with RPGs,.50-caliber sniper rifles and surface-to-surface missiles.
"Windows may suck, but X11 has traditionally been one of the absolute worst things about Unix."
In some technical aspects, perhaps. But being able to run a graphics program on my work test system with the X11 output being ssh-forwarded to my work desktop computer then over the VPN to my Linux machine at home and then over the wireless network to my Windows laptop in the garden where it's finally displayed is one of the best features of Unix; whereas having to actually sit at the bloody keyboard and monitor to do pretty much anything at all is one of the worst features of Windows.
As for overlay, it was pretty much a requirement for decent video playback a few years ago when CPUs couldn't cope with color space conversion and scaling and the PCI/AGP bus couldn't cope with the data transfer requirements even if they could. Today it's pretty much obsolete as the hardware is plenty fast enough and rendering video through the GPU is much easier than having an overlay bodge unit stuck on the side.
"I'm guessing that the firewall software whitelists outgoing UDP requests from port 53, and the new randomized ports are being blocked, preventing DNS queries from succeeding."
Then you're guessing wrong; DNS works fine, but http gets blocked.
I agree though, that it could be a flaw in Zonealarm rather than Windows, since it hooks into the OS at such a low level.
Often you don't know where the problems will be until you put it under load. That wasn't Vanguard's problem: the problem was that the content was barely half-complete at launch, with much of the content for one of the three islands simply missing.
The game at launch was actually great fun up to the teen levels, but then I pretty much hit a brick wall in terms of power relative to the mobs in the game, and the lack of content in the island I started on made progression difficult, to say the least.
The game should have been developed for at least another six months before release; sure, it would have cost SoE more money, but in the long run they'd have far more players than they do today.
I did actually give it a try in the 'free month' they gave to old players last year, but I didn't see much difference and they'd merged servers and renamed most of my characters, so that left me with little incentive to resubscribe.
You can have Communism with a democracy you know, it just hasn't been tried (to my knowledge at least). Not true; the USSR was a democratic nation... of course you could only vote for Commies.
Communism is the most evil major political philosophy of the last century, and on a national scale it can't be anything but oppressive and totalitarian by its very nature; how can you eliminate private property from those who want to keep it, except by force? I'm amazed to see that anyone still defends such a vicious, sadistic and murderous philosophy, unless, perhaps, you want to be the next Stalin or Mao.
Please don't confuse the the two, as the red scare really makes communism look worse than it is. Given that communism killed around a hundred million people and destroyed the lives of over a billion in the 20th century, it's hard to see how anyone could make it look worse than it actually is.
Oh, I think we're running the software from Apollo 9 or 10, though we've never been able to absolutely verify which version we have. Most of them seem to have gone missing, since there wasn't much reason to keep the old versions after a mission had been flown.
"What's the oldest piece of code you can get running? Either on emulation or on original hardware."
Well, we have an emulated Apollo Guidance Computer flying an emulated Apollo CSM, though I'm there's older code running on other emulators.
Also, it currently gets confused by the Lunar Orbit Insertion burn due to limited simulation of the SPS rocket engine gimbals, though it can handle Earth-orbital missions OK.
If you contact NASA, you probably can get copies of most of their HD footage; you'll probably have to pay for the cost of tapes and copying, though.
NASA are actually very good at giving stuff away to the public; look at the vast gigabytes of technical reports on ntrs.nasa.gov, for example. But they probably can't justify the cost of having a server with petabytes of HD footage and the huge pipes required to let people download it.
"They should have just said, "NASA has scanned and restored the original film negatives to be shown in breathtaking HD quality on the Discovery Channel" or something similar"
Except, uh, NASA has done nothing of the kind; they let the Discovery Channel telecine the footage and restore it, just as they have with other organisations in the past.
I'd agree that 'restoring' is more accurate than 'enhancing', but arguing over that distinction is bordering on pedantry.
"Knowing the importance of this film, I should hope it was stored well"
I wouldn't bet on that; a significant amount of it, for example, was engineering camera footage that wasn't even developed unless there was a need to do so (e.g. if something failed during the launch). Much more was engineering footage that was of use during the development, but not much use since.
Certainly I've seen much of the footage in the trailer before, and it looks better now than it did then.
Slashdot Mirror
"The cause of the Great Depression was people panicking and selling all their stocks"
No, people panicing as a credit bubble burst was the cause of the stock market crash. It was a government determined to 'do something' that turned an ordinary, everyday stock market crash into a decade-long depression.
"If they did nothing and the economy completely crumbled leading to the Great Depression Part 2, you'd sure as hell feel it when you lost your job."
'Doing something' was the cause of the Great Depression; the government tried to prop up the economy rather than let the bad business go bankrupt and be bought up for a few cents on the dollar, and that was why it took so long to recover. Sure, they'd have had a recession if the government hadn't 'done something', but it wouldn't have been so bad and it would have been over much faster.
If anything is going to push the world into 'Great Depression 2: This Time It's Personal', it's governments 'doing something' with massive bailouts. But in a mass democracy the government have to show they're 'doing something', even if the 'something' they're 'doing' is actually making things worse.
"Lets face it, the reason the companies are employing DRM is because (most, not all) gamers fucked them over and forced their hand by just greedily pirating everything we could get out hands on."
When I was a kid in the 80s, pretty much everyone in my school who owned a computer pirated games, and all the fancy DRM scams they used were broken by ten-year-olds in their bedrooms; after trying more and more intrusive DRM scams, eventually the distributors gave up because it simply did not work, and games were released for years with no DRM at all.
DRM is 'sowed' by retarded control-freak publishers who have no clue about technology and don't care how much they screw their customers; piracy has little to do with it. Which is fortunate, because the ten-year-olds are still cracking DRM scams almost as soon as they're released.
"I can't remember the last time I actually saw someone browsing in the PC games section in the last year."
Who actually buys PC games in a retail store anymore?
They're much easier to buy online, either by ordering the box from an online store which actually has the game you want in stock, or paying to download through Steam or one of the numerous MMOGs that make up the vast majority of the billions of dollars a year of PC game revenues these days.
But I agree, the Xbox was a colossal screwup on Microsoft's part; they largely depend on gaming to drive consumer Windows upgrades and sales (what home user needs a new quad-core 5GHz CPU with 8GB of RAM running Windows if they're not playing new games?) and the morons went and tried to kill PC gaming with a new console. What the hell were they smoking?
"You mean the people who pay the bills? How's that suppose to work?"
Publishers don't pay the bills; game players do. Publishers may fund development, but at the end of the day the people who pay for it are the ones who buy the games.... the people who the publishers are screwing over by shipping buggy beta-quality games with intrusive DRM, to the point where at least some of us have simply stopped buying the games whose development they're funding.
Obviously many companies would struggle to raise funding without publishers, but there has to be a better business model than having developers funded by people who hate games and gamers and just want to rush some overhyped crap out the door.
obscure probes like this, why can't it spend more money on the shuttle?
The website URL might give you a hint :).
I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that this probe was funded by ESA, without any NASA money.
"MMO games are addiction machines."
Guild Wars seems to have done OK without a permanent grind; I'm sure they haven't made as much money as WoW with its monthly fees, but I'm equally sure they've made a decent profit.
"Keep trying to change the system through demonstration and voting."
More than a million people demonstrated in the streets of London against the invasion of Iraq, but the government went ahead and did it anyway. 78% of the British people did not vote for the Labour government, but they were elected anyway; worse, they were only elected because of Scottish votes, but many of the most unpopular laws they've passed don't apply in Scotland.
There is roughly zero chance of changing things through demonstrating or voting in the UK. It's a rapidly decaying police state where a chav who beats you up in the street will get a slap on the wrist, while a middle class productive worker who doesn't go along with the latest 'recycling' bullshit will get a big fine and a criminal record that will cause them problems for years afterwards.
And that is why I left for good last year. Anyone with a clue should be getting the hell out before emigration is banned too; they've already talked about requiring exit visas to leave the country, it won't be long before they're brought in.
"yes, an old idea. But i have yet to see it implemented well."
The original Guild Wars henchmen were a nightmare, but over time they've become fairly smart. The new heroes are often more effective than real human players, and much more so than henchmen because you can tell them which skills to memorise and use.
The big problem is making them smart enough to be useful without making them so smart that no-one will join a pick-up group with a random selection of players of whose skill levels you know nothing.
Didn't I read that Everquest was getting 'henchmen' in the next expansion? That would open up a lot of old content that's fun to do but not soloable and which has too low a risk to reward for pickup groups.
"It's not CPU that's at a premium, it's disk IO."
True, but again, if it's an important system you can buy a dedicated server or a second disk for logging for the cost of a few hours (possibly a few minutes) of downtime.
"Otherwise don't do much logging because it will hurt application performance, sometimes drastically."
You're assuming that performance -- or, more precisely, CPU usage -- is important; in many cases, reliability (and being able to track down bugs after a crash) are far more important than CPU usage. With quad-core CPUs so cheap these days, we can easily afford to spend another thousand dollars to throw more processing power into a system which has cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars of programmer time to develop and will cost thousands of dollars an hour for any downtime.
"As for writing the correct value - well, not my fault if coders are so incompetent they can't be bothered doing basic top-down design and bottom-up testing."
You just don't get it, do you? This is the way that these systems are broken, not by breaking encryption keys.
There is NO WAY to prevent these kind of attacks without some central validation; you can make them moderately difficult with complex hardware, but the hackers are generally smarter than the people building the system... if they have to dismantle a few dozen cards in order to determine how to duplicate them, so what?
The only way you can prevent duplicate cards (or storing the old contents of the cards and writing it back to the same card later) is by centrally validating all cards when they're used, or at least logging all transactions and flagging duplicate cards; but by then, they may already have got thousands of dollars or more of free services.
"You can store the value on the card. You just have to combine it with salt and encrypt it against a big enough private key. Shouldn't be hard in this day and age."
How does that help? If you can copy the data to another card or prevent the reader from updating the value, then you have infinite amounts of money available.
We used to have stored value cards at university back in the 80s, and it wasn't long before someone discovered how to prevent the automated readers from writing the value back to the card after they subtracted money from it so it never went down. There was also a bug where in some cases the reader would add $100 to the card rather than deducting $0.25...
I believe EQ1 still has >100k active accounts, I'm not sure about EQ2; certainly I and some of my old guild-mates keep resubscribing to EQ1 now and again after other games fail to live up to expectations. Obviously that's nothing compared to WoW, but if you sell 100k copies of an expansion by download at $50 apiece every year, that'll pay for a few developers and make a profit.
They have reduced the expansion rate from two per year to one per year, which is actually a damn good move since EQ1 suffers from having far too much content that's unusable (instanced and requires a group) and/or unused (risk vs reward nowhere near good enough for groups to go there).
I'd guess another 4-5 years before they stop updating it and the last server will probably shut down a 10-20 years after that.
"This is why pure capitalism doesn't work."
Most big companies wouldn't exist in a free market, and most small companies can't afford to 'cheat' employees, so your point is not very convincing. While there are exceptions, big companies generally rely on big government to keep new, small competitors out of the market, funnel taxpayers' money to them and protect them from irate employees and ex-employees with RPGs, .50-caliber sniper rifles and surface-to-surface missiles.
"Windows may suck, but X11 has traditionally been one of the absolute worst things about Unix."
In some technical aspects, perhaps. But being able to run a graphics program on my work test system with the X11 output being ssh-forwarded to my work desktop computer then over the VPN to my Linux machine at home and then over the wireless network to my Windows laptop in the garden where it's finally displayed is one of the best features of Unix; whereas having to actually sit at the bloody keyboard and monitor to do pretty much anything at all is one of the worst features of Windows.
As for overlay, it was pretty much a requirement for decent video playback a few years ago when CPUs couldn't cope with color space conversion and scaling and the PCI/AGP bus couldn't cope with the data transfer requirements even if they could. Today it's pretty much obsolete as the hardware is plenty fast enough and rendering video through the GPU is much easier than having an overlay bodge unit stuck on the side.
"I'm guessing that the firewall software whitelists outgoing UDP requests from port 53, and the new randomized ports are being blocked, preventing DNS queries from succeeding."
Then you're guessing wrong; DNS works fine, but http gets blocked.
I agree though, that it could be a flaw in Zonealarm rather than Windows, since it hooks into the OS at such a low level.
The game at launch was actually great fun up to the teen levels, but then I pretty much hit a brick wall in terms of power relative to the mobs in the game, and the lack of content in the island I started on made progression difficult, to say the least.
The game should have been developed for at least another six months before release; sure, it would have cost SoE more money, but in the long run they'd have far more players than they do today.
I did actually give it a try in the 'free month' they gave to old players last year, but I didn't see much difference and they'd merged servers and renamed most of my characters, so that left me with little incentive to resubscribe.
Communism is the most evil major political philosophy of the last century, and on a national scale it can't be anything but oppressive and totalitarian by its very nature; how can you eliminate private property from those who want to keep it, except by force? I'm amazed to see that anyone still defends such a vicious, sadistic and murderous philosophy, unless, perhaps, you want to be the next Stalin or Mao.
"Copying and mailing tapes is a helluva lot more expensive than running an Internet server."
NASA would have to pay for the server. You have to pay for copying tapes. See the difference?
Oh, I think we're running the software from Apollo 9 or 10, though we've never been able to absolutely verify which version we have. Most of them seem to have gone missing, since there wasn't much reason to keep the old versions after a mission had been flown.
"What's the oldest piece of code you can get running? Either on emulation or on original hardware."
Well, we have an emulated Apollo Guidance Computer flying an emulated Apollo CSM, though I'm there's older code running on other emulators.
Also, it currently gets confused by the Lunar Orbit Insertion burn due to limited simulation of the SPS rocket engine gimbals, though it can handle Earth-orbital missions OK.
If you contact NASA, you probably can get copies of most of their HD footage; you'll probably have to pay for the cost of tapes and copying, though.
NASA are actually very good at giving stuff away to the public; look at the vast gigabytes of technical reports on ntrs.nasa.gov, for example. But they probably can't justify the cost of having a server with petabytes of HD footage and the huge pipes required to let people download it.
"They should have just said, "NASA has scanned and restored the original film negatives to be shown in breathtaking HD quality on the Discovery Channel" or something similar"
Except, uh, NASA has done nothing of the kind; they let the Discovery Channel telecine the footage and restore it, just as they have with other organisations in the past.
I'd agree that 'restoring' is more accurate than 'enhancing', but arguing over that distinction is bordering on pedantry.
"Knowing the importance of this film, I should hope it was stored well"
I wouldn't bet on that; a significant amount of it, for example, was engineering camera footage that wasn't even developed unless there was a need to do so (e.g. if something failed during the launch). Much more was engineering footage that was of use during the development, but not much use since.
Certainly I've seen much of the footage in the trailer before, and it looks better now than it did then.