Suckers. "In the future", every game will have an online component and an unlocking system ala steam. - That won't really solve anything. In MMOGs people sell accounts no problem. How will a company stop a player from selling the CD and the account he created to activate it? Used game selling companies will adapt to it.
and Microsoft feels obligated to offer a realistic alternative to the $100 laptop
Microsoft always feels obligated to offer a competing product to anything related to IT.
PS2? Check! Google AdWords? Check. IPod? There is talk of some MS portable device. Check. 100$ laptop? Check.
Microsoft can't accept that some company has innovative ideas. It must kill it (or throw chairs at it, at least). The problem for MS will be that they are too late. The 100$ laptop is way beyond an idea, IPod is nearly a word in the dictionnary and Google is already a word. You can't compete with words. Plus, MS wakes up very late to innovation and it's almost too late to embrace them. Then Microsoft itself cannot deliver any innovation thus no new market opportunity and with the 100$ laptop it's even worse. It's not running Windows. When millions of people will get used to PCs with Linux, in the long term it will hurt Windows a lot. Same thing can be said about Google. The more and more people are using Google's services the less will use MS' services.
I think this is what we might see of more in the future. MS hopelessly throwing around new ideas in a last ditch effort to dominate the technology world, but it will fail because of companies who innovate will have a head start. And slowly people will get rid of the Microsoft addiction.
Act now? Slow down for a second there! Heat up this goddamn crappy planet more!
I for one love the "harsh" winter in Montreal this year. We had torrential rain in mid January, it's around 0 Celsius now. Usually winter around this time is around -15 to -20 Celsius for weeks, this January we had maybe 2 days below -10 Celsius!
I don't know if this counts as an accurate anthropological study but has anyone tried entering World Of Warcraft as a female character? If anything, it is 'they' who probably should fear 'us'...
If a man would roleplay a woman in WoW, he'll end up rich, in a big guild with TONS of friends. A friend of mine tried this stint in EQ, people would use to give him items and gold because they thought he was a real woman.
So much for getting out of the war anytime soon. Is anyone else sick and tired of living in a nation which is constantly at war with someone/something? I mean... how much more can your pocketbook take?
I just wonder why couldn't those billions of dollars invested in this war be used for Hydrogen fuel research or some other alternatives to oil. And this war is all about black gold.
FFS, Iceland plans (if it's not already) to be free from oil. Sweden, same thing for 2020? Why can't the US invest money to hydrogen research instead of wasting it on a war that is a melting pot for terrorists and the endresult, oil, will kill the planet faster?
It is ridiculous that 47% of Americans are not completely up-in-arms about this. We can't have our president breaking any law that he wants to.
I am actually suprised that only 47% are supporting it. With all the propaganda and "War on Terror" going on having 47% support is pretty damn good, not that I agree with it. It just shows how easily the big masses of people can be influenced by constant "War on Terror" propaganda.
Why would ID require there there be an infinite number of species in the universe? If the FSM was lazy perhaps it only wanted to create us?
- The central argument of ID is: Life is way too complex for it to arise from random combinations and random circumstances thus it must have a designer. By ID's own arguments and reasoning, a creator/designer creating complex creatures like us must be also irreductibly complex. This immediately leads to the question: Who created the designer? And it results in an infinite regression of designers.
People will believe what they want... I disagree. People beleive what they were indoctrinated to beleive. That's why teaching ID or creationism is so dangerous in public schools. You are going to have an entire generation beleiving that a scientific theory is nothing more than a "hunch" and these same people beleive that their lives are guided by some God and they will soon shun other scientific "theories" as voodo or just a fairy tale, global warming and al. Once an entire generation loses their confidence in science because they were brainwashed in classes with christian dogma, we are back in a modern dark ages.
Care to explain how? Care to give just one example of an experiment that can be performed to falsify the 'theory' of Intelligent Design?
We're all waiting.
If ID is correct, it means we have an infinite number of species in our universe. The time it took to create these species is infinite also. If our current insights in Cosmology are even remotely correct, the universe is finite and time is also finite (13.7 billion years or so). So in essence you can't fit an infinite number of living molecules into a finite universe, and you can't create an infinite number of species in a finite time span.
# 22% chose creationism # 17% opted for intelligent design
I am willing to bet that those who picked ID didn't look farther than their noses. Not to mention the pollers don't have a clue about ID.
ID *IS* creationism. If someone removes the theological binders, it's obvious to see why ID is creationism.
Let's suppose ID is right. Let's suppose our existance is due to some designer (aliens, Q, little green men, whatnot). We must ask immediately: Well... who designed our designer? And how about our designer's designer? If ID is correct (and we don't resort to God to explain it), it's impossible. Unless our universe can contain an infinite number of designers AND infinite number of species like ours. Have you met the little green men?
The only way out of this infinite designers & species paradox is by introducing a deity. A deity who is omnipotent and omnipresent and omniwhatever, who was there, who is eternal and who doesn't need a designer. Aka: God, Allah, Jeebus, whatever.
I had two different D-Link cards with Atheros chipsets, they both worked with the native Atheros driver. Had a bit of GUI problems with Kubuntu and Linux n00bness too but no driver issues.
I finished ripping my 300+ CD collection and I manually checked every CD. CDDB and other databases usually have different spellings of bands like "Smashing Pumpkins" vs "The Smashing Pumpkins", even song names are spelled differently across albums. On the live album you got a song spelled one way, on the studio version another way and so on. There is also the 3-4 versions of the same album, all spelled different way. Of course different spelling spells doom for library programs who think that 2 albums from same artist is different because name spelled a bit differently.
I ripped my CDs once in FLAC, keep em on two jumbo hard disks (manual raid 0). It was long, but well worth it. I have a lot of weird CDs, tried musicbrainz, Amazon tagger for MediaMonkey, all worked to a certain extent. Some unknown metal bands don't show up at all on musicbrainz or amazon, amazon gives me a rap album instead of Symphonic Pink Floyd... I said screw it, do it manually!
Give me a break, I very distinctly remember Microsoft saying that with the advent of protected mode operating systems that virii would become a thing of the past. Hmmm, do I even need to say any more?
Viruses on Mainframes? Linux? Macs? If Microsoft would have wanted, they could have eliminated a lot of scumware by something as simple as not letting everyone and their mother run as root. I wish they would "innovate" again and implement something like Ubuntu's no_on_has_access_to_root_user security setting.
Here's a newsflash - musical taste is SUBJECTIVE. What you consider to be the greatest musical masterpiece of humankind's existence might not be worth picking up from the 25-cent bargain bin at the local swap shop to someone else.
The term "One hit wonder" has been pretty good indicator of "artists" without any talent and something that the music industry is pushing.
Music is subjective, however there a few metrics that can be used to determine the quality: - Musical complexity. - Lyrical content. - Repetitive elements or lack of it.
Just take a look at a POS band like Linkin Park. Musical complexity: beyond simple, every single one of their song is based on the same template. Lyrical content: teenage angst, that's it. Repetive elements: same song template, same song structure, same riffs.
Now, a lot of teenagers like this music, but as soon as they get out of their rebellious years, most of them will throw it away as crap. Apply same ideas to N'Sync, Vanilla Ice and the likes.
I personally do not like many artists that are considered geniuses but I can recognize their talent and song writing skills vs a music industry marketed and pushed band like Linkin Park. Unfortunately, in most music genres you have the industry pushing their own bands who lack talent and skill but who make up in image and lot of hype, PR.
I think the real question about this WMF vulnerability is how on earth could it have survived five years under the new security aware, code auditting regime that we supposedly have at Microsoft?
Windows has a gigantic amount of code. That's one problem. Second problem might be that Microsoft lacked a reviewer who had could see "the big picture". I could code an API call that takes in a few parameters and makes a callback function. The API call itself is 110% well coded, safe, parameter checking and whatnot. But I do not know who uses it and for what reasons. So it can be made entirely unsafe if the upper layer of the system allows unsafe use of it. If someone doesn't see the "big picture", safe functions can be used in an unsafe way and since no one can connect the dots, the WMF flaw was probably reviewed as "safe".
Then again, it could be simply that it has fallen through the cracks. Maybe some reviewer did a sloppy job and said: Well, it's an old unused subsystem that no one uses so it's safe!
RIAA has won? Not IMO. RIAA wants to sell you a product. Product being one CD full of shit with maybe 1-2 good songs. Those good songs are being played on radio and bought in online download services. The CD itself is not bought. CD sales have gone down again last year while legal downloads are going up. Thanks to legal downloads, people are no longer inclined to buy an entire CD full of crap because they like maybe one song on it.
but is providing Athlon64 class performance with much lower power consumption.
Lower power consumption yes, Athlon64 performance? Not yet. According to this roadmap the highest clockspeed Yonah core is slated for January 2006 release and it's 2.16 GHZ. Now, Anandtech did some tests of the 2.0 GHZ core. This 2.0 GHZ core is barely able to reach Athlon64 3800+ X2 performance levels (the "slowest" AMD dualcore CPU, 90nm vs 65nm of Yonah). A 2.16 GHZ version should reach the 4200+ X2 and that's about it. Yonah is a nice CPU, but nowhere near top AMD performance. Maybe with higher clockspeeds in the future, not today though.
In these online games the currency is gold, platinum or some rare magical rings (Stone of Jordan, D2). Some people repeatedly kill the same bunch of monsters (who respawn and have treasure some amount of gold) and amass a big quantity of currency. These same people sell this ingame currency to other players for real world currency, $$. It has become a plague in some games, like WoW, where people hire many people to "play" and gather gold. Boss sells this gold for real world currency and makes a killing out of it. Chinese enterpreneurs are the most known "farmers", they essentialy hire many many people to work in shifts and play the same set of characters 24h a day doing the same mundane repetitive task of killing the mob, getting gold.
but I can after 5 years on EQ1, I can pretty much predict that anyone who will only group with people who can type 2 complete sentences without mistakes is doomed to a lifetime of soloing.
You are dead wrong. Up til I quit WoW last june, (we downed Onyxia and Domo) I was in a guild where everyone could type more than 2 sentences. Smart people and nice people. Oh and I never ever looked or had to look for a random pickup group.
Plenty of good guilds/clans exist with smart people who type more elaborate sentences than "d00d u ned any1 to fill grp?" or "OMGLOLZ!!!!!1111oneonetwo!!!. You will find these guilds in any MMOG, just have to do a bit of searching.
Slashdot Mirror
Suckers. "In the future", every game will have an online component and an unlocking system ala steam.
- That won't really solve anything. In MMOGs people sell accounts no problem. How will a company stop a player from selling the CD and the account he created to activate it? Used game selling companies will adapt to it.
How?
Take Madden 2004, slap on it new textures, make some minor gameplay changes, call it Madden 2005 and release it.
How the hell does that skyroket costs when they are using the same goddamn engine with prettier graphics and a few minor asthetic changes?
and Microsoft feels obligated to offer a realistic alternative to the $100 laptop
Microsoft always feels obligated to offer a competing product to anything related to IT.
PS2? Check!
Google AdWords? Check.
IPod? There is talk of some MS portable device. Check.
100$ laptop? Check.
Microsoft can't accept that some company has innovative ideas. It must kill it (or throw chairs at it, at least). The problem for MS will be that they are too late. The 100$ laptop is way beyond an idea, IPod is nearly a word in the dictionnary and Google is already a word. You can't compete with words. Plus, MS wakes up very late to innovation and it's almost too late to embrace them. Then Microsoft itself cannot deliver any innovation thus no new market opportunity and with the 100$ laptop it's even worse. It's not running Windows. When millions of people will get used to PCs with Linux, in the long term it will hurt Windows a lot. Same thing can be said about Google. The more and more people are using Google's services the less will use MS' services.
I think this is what we might see of more in the future. MS hopelessly throwing around new ideas in a last ditch effort to dominate the technology world, but it will fail because of companies who innovate will have a head start. And slowly people will get rid of the Microsoft addiction.
Act now? Slow down for a second there! Heat up this goddamn crappy planet more!
:)
I for one love the "harsh" winter in Montreal this year. We had torrential rain in mid January, it's around 0 Celsius now. Usually winter around this time is around -15 to -20 Celsius for weeks, this January we had maybe 2 days below -10 Celsius!
I am all for global warming!
PS: I was only half joking, mild winters own!
I don't know if this counts as an accurate anthropological study but has anyone tried entering World Of Warcraft as a female character? If anything, it is 'they' who probably should fear 'us' ...
If a man would roleplay a woman in WoW, he'll end up rich, in a big guild with TONS of friends. A friend of mine tried this stint in EQ, people would use to give him items and gold because they thought he was a real woman.
The rapper Ice Cube decided to sue a bunch of scientists for trademark violation.
So much for getting out of the war anytime soon. Is anyone else sick and tired of living in a nation which is constantly at war with someone/something? I mean... how much more can your pocketbook take?
I just wonder why couldn't those billions of dollars invested in this war be used for Hydrogen fuel research or some other alternatives to oil. And this war is all about black gold.
FFS, Iceland plans (if it's not already) to be free from oil. Sweden, same thing for 2020? Why can't the US invest money to hydrogen research instead of wasting it on a war that is a melting pot for terrorists and the endresult, oil, will kill the planet faster?
It is ridiculous that 47% of Americans are not completely up-in-arms about this. We can't have our president breaking any law that he wants to.
I am actually suprised that only 47% are supporting it. With all the propaganda and "War on Terror" going on having 47% support is pretty damn good, not that I agree with it. It just shows how easily the big masses of people can be influenced by constant "War on Terror" propaganda.
Why would ID require there there be an infinite number of species in the universe? If the FSM was lazy perhaps it only wanted to create us?
- The central argument of ID is: Life is way too complex for it to arise from random combinations and random circumstances thus it must have a designer. By ID's own arguments and reasoning, a creator/designer creating complex creatures like us must be also irreductibly complex. This immediately leads to the question: Who created the designer? And it results in an infinite regression of designers.
Evolution is somewhat shakier, as it's something we can't directly observe and predictive tests are long-term.
Why is every competent biologist so worried about H5N1?
People will believe what they want...
I disagree. People beleive what they were indoctrinated to beleive. That's why teaching ID or creationism is so dangerous in public schools. You are going to have an entire generation beleiving that a scientific theory is nothing more than a "hunch" and these same people beleive that their lives are guided by some God and they will soon shun other scientific "theories" as voodo or just a fairy tale, global warming and al. Once an entire generation loses their confidence in science because they were brainwashed in classes with christian dogma, we are back in a modern dark ages.
Care to explain how? Care to give just one example of an experiment that can be performed to falsify the 'theory' of Intelligent Design?
We're all waiting.
If ID is correct, it means we have an infinite number of species in our universe. The time it took to create these species is infinite also. If our current insights in Cosmology are even remotely correct, the universe is finite and time is also finite (13.7 billion years or so). So in essence you can't fit an infinite number of living molecules into a finite universe, and you can't create an infinite number of species in a finite time span.
There, I falsified it. Do I get a cookie?
here IS a difference between Creationism and Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design does NOT necessary imply that God did it,
... then ... who designed our designer? And designer's designer? And ... well .. you get the idea.
If you eliminate God from the equation
# 22% chose creationism
... who designed our designer? And how about our designer's designer? If ID is correct (and we don't resort to God to explain it), it's impossible. Unless our universe can contain an infinite number of designers AND infinite number of species like ours. Have you met the little green men?
# 17% opted for intelligent design
I am willing to bet that those who picked ID didn't look farther than their noses. Not to mention the pollers don't have a clue about ID.
ID *IS* creationism. If someone removes the theological binders, it's obvious to see why ID is creationism.
Let's suppose ID is right. Let's suppose our existance is due to some designer (aliens, Q, little green men, whatnot). We must ask immediately: Well
The only way out of this infinite designers & species paradox is by introducing a deity. A deity who is omnipotent and omnipresent and omniwhatever, who was there, who is eternal and who doesn't need a designer. Aka: God, Allah, Jeebus, whatever.
Megadeth: Five Magics, too IIRC.
I had two different D-Link cards with Atheros chipsets, they both worked with the native Atheros driver. Had a bit of GUI problems with Kubuntu and Linux n00bness too but no driver issues.
I finished ripping my 300+ CD collection and I manually checked every CD. CDDB and other databases usually have different spellings of bands like "Smashing Pumpkins" vs "The Smashing Pumpkins", even song names are spelled differently across albums. On the live album you got a song spelled one way, on the studio version another way and so on. There is also the 3-4 versions of the same album, all spelled different way. Of course different spelling spells doom for library programs who think that 2 albums from same artist is different because name spelled a bit differently.
... I said screw it, do it manually!
I ripped my CDs once in FLAC, keep em on two jumbo hard disks (manual raid 0). It was long, but well worth it. I have a lot of weird CDs, tried musicbrainz, Amazon tagger for MediaMonkey, all worked to a certain extent. Some unknown metal bands don't show up at all on musicbrainz or amazon, amazon gives me a rap album instead of Symphonic Pink Floyd
Give me a break, I very distinctly remember Microsoft saying that with the advent of protected mode operating systems that virii would become a thing of the past. Hmmm, do I even need to say any more?
Viruses on Mainframes? Linux? Macs? If Microsoft would have wanted, they could have eliminated a lot of scumware by something as simple as not letting everyone and their mother run as root. I wish they would "innovate" again and implement something like Ubuntu's no_on_has_access_to_root_user security setting.
Here's a newsflash - musical taste is SUBJECTIVE. What you consider to be the greatest musical masterpiece of humankind's existence might not be worth picking up from the 25-cent bargain bin at the local swap shop to someone else.
The term "One hit wonder" has been pretty good indicator of "artists" without any talent and something that the music industry is pushing.
Music is subjective, however there a few metrics that can be used to determine the quality:
- Musical complexity.
- Lyrical content.
- Repetitive elements or lack of it.
Just take a look at a POS band like Linkin Park. Musical complexity: beyond simple, every single one of their song is based on the same template. Lyrical content: teenage angst, that's it. Repetive elements: same song template, same song structure, same riffs.
Now, a lot of teenagers like this music, but as soon as they get out of their rebellious years, most of them will throw it away as crap. Apply same ideas to N'Sync, Vanilla Ice and the likes.
I personally do not like many artists that are considered geniuses but I can recognize their talent and song writing skills vs a music industry marketed and pushed band like Linkin Park. Unfortunately, in most music genres you have the industry pushing their own bands who lack talent and skill but who make up in image and lot of hype, PR.
I think the real question about this WMF vulnerability is how on earth could it have survived five years under the new security aware, code auditting regime that we supposedly have at Microsoft?
Windows has a gigantic amount of code. That's one problem. Second problem might be that Microsoft lacked a reviewer who had could see "the big picture". I could code an API call that takes in a few parameters and makes a callback function. The API call itself is 110% well coded, safe, parameter checking and whatnot. But I do not know who uses it and for what reasons. So it can be made entirely unsafe if the upper layer of the system allows unsafe use of it. If someone doesn't see the "big picture", safe functions can be used in an unsafe way and since no one can connect the dots, the WMF flaw was probably reviewed as "safe".
Then again, it could be simply that it has fallen through the cracks. Maybe some reviewer did a sloppy job and said: Well, it's an old unused subsystem that no one uses so it's safe!
RIAA has won? Not IMO. RIAA wants to sell you a product. Product being one CD full of shit with maybe 1-2 good songs. Those good songs are being played on radio and bought in online download services. The CD itself is not bought. CD sales have gone down again last year while legal downloads are going up. Thanks to legal downloads, people are no longer inclined to buy an entire CD full of crap because they like maybe one song on it.
but is providing Athlon64 class performance with much lower power consumption.
Lower power consumption yes, Athlon64 performance? Not yet. According to this roadmap the highest clockspeed Yonah core is slated for January 2006 release and it's 2.16 GHZ. Now, Anandtech did some tests of the 2.0 GHZ core. This 2.0 GHZ core is barely able to reach Athlon64 3800+ X2 performance levels (the "slowest" AMD dualcore CPU, 90nm vs 65nm of Yonah). A 2.16 GHZ version should reach the 4200+ X2 and that's about it. Yonah is a nice CPU, but nowhere near top AMD performance. Maybe with higher clockspeeds in the future, not today though.
IIRC, Microsoft said (in court) that if they had to remove IE from the OS it would break the OS and render it unusable.
Can someone fill me in on what Gold Farming is?
In these online games the currency is gold, platinum or some rare magical rings (Stone of Jordan, D2). Some people repeatedly kill the same bunch of monsters (who respawn and have treasure some amount of gold) and amass a big quantity of currency. These same people sell this ingame currency to other players for real world currency, $$. It has become a plague in some games, like WoW, where people hire many people to "play" and gather gold. Boss sells this gold for real world currency and makes a killing out of it. Chinese enterpreneurs are the most known "farmers", they essentialy hire many many people to work in shifts and play the same set of characters 24h a day doing the same mundane repetitive task of killing the mob, getting gold.
but I can after 5 years on EQ1, I can pretty much predict that anyone who will only group with people who can type 2 complete sentences without mistakes is doomed to a lifetime of soloing.
You are dead wrong. Up til I quit WoW last june, (we downed Onyxia and Domo) I was in a guild where everyone could type more than 2 sentences. Smart people and nice people. Oh and I never ever looked or had to look for a random pickup group.
Plenty of good guilds/clans exist with smart people who type more elaborate sentences than "d00d u ned any1 to fill grp?" or "OMGLOLZ!!!!!1111oneonetwo!!!. You will find these guilds in any MMOG, just have to do a bit of searching.