Rock Band, Guitar Hero, etc are all modeled off of stereotypical rocker behavior - sex, drugs, and rock & roll - in both game design and music choice. That's fine for those games, MTV and Blactivision are shooting for a semi-authentic experience and they get the age rating they're planning on: T(een). But you can't really peddle T games as family games, because they're not. People (at least in the conservative segment) don't particularly want their kids playing T games, or want to be playing T games with them. Rock Band/Guitar Hero don't quite fit in the casual gamer/family mold that the Wii has managed build so well.
So they want to push Rock Band as a truly family friendly game, and that means paring down the objectionable material to get the rating down to an E(veryone). If they just release Rock Band 3 like this, they're going to drive off the core gamers that they're shooting for in their other titles. They don't want to end up with a Core Gamer XOR Families situation, they want both.
So you get an offshoot, something that's similar in gameplay but different enough in style that it's clearly not going to encroach on the mainline Rock Band audience while still being a Rock Band game. LEGO games have proven to be extremely popular with the family friendly segment (there's nothing objectionable about about LEGO), so they have great band name recognition. Parents will immediately recognize a LEGO title as being family friendly, and at this point Rock Band is popular enough that most people recognize it too.
So why LEGO Rock Band? Because it's going to be the Rock Band title they can slap an E on, sell to families, and sell extremely well due to the branding.
It strikes me that they're looking to codify status quo. Right now the MPEG-LA tries to do the "right thing" with respect to maintaining their patent rights while at the same time not stopping people from using their technology for non-commercial purposes. There's a metric shitload of software out there implementing MPEG codecs without a license, largely software based on libavcodec and other FFmpeg projects.
The dick move for the MPEG-LA would be to enforce these patent rights over all such software, getting injunctions against the distribution of projects like VLC, Ubuntu, Media Player Classic, X264, FFDShow, etc in the United States and other countries with software patent rights. But the MPEG-LA has shown absolutely no interest in this whatsoever. They seem content to let non-commercial software implement their codecs (and infringe on their patents in the process). Their only real interest has been commercial users - if you're making a buck directly from their work, they want their share.
The thing is that none of this is codified under their current licenses. It's selective enforcement, which isn't a great legal strategy. This license looks to be a start for codifying status quo, so that open source users would be protected, while the MPEG-LA is still free to go license their patents to commercial entities.
But then again, IANAL, I may be reading this all wrong.
How exactly is this suppose to move people to update?
It's a slow weaning process, so no single step is intended to move everyone to update at once. Cutting off mainstream support is mainly intended to push application developers along - if they find an OS bug that inhibits their program, they can no longer count on MS to fix it. Instead they'll just have to make their minimum OS Vista, where if the bug hasn't already been fixed it can be. By moving developers and programs, some users will need to follow, hence the weaning aspect.
The other aspect of this is that it prods enterprises to start looking at upgrading in a different manner. Unlike the guys that sell software to the masses, if you develop software for internal use, it's more reasonable to pay MS to fix it. However the cost of such incidents greatly jumps up once mainstream support ends. If you want something fixed, you're basically paying whatever it costs Microsoft to fix it. This allows enterprises to stay on XP if they must, but provides a strong financial incentive to work on upgrading if they have not already started.
And more to the point, Amazon only gets special favors as long as the labels need them to be doing something to counteract Apple. Now that they have Apple buckling on variable pricing, there's no need for them to allow Amazon to maintain fixed pricing or otherwise grant Amazon favors. The next time Amazon's contract is up for renegotiation, they'll be forced to moved to move to variable pricing.
Apple was the lynch pin, no one else is currently strong enough to stand up to the labels and block variable pricing. You can go to Amazon today and get tracks at $.99, but tomorrow anything you* would want will be at price parity with the iTunes Music Store.
That's a pretty regular usage if we're looking at a University (or something that feeds a Uni), which I suspect we are. You get growth starting around August when the kids arrive and start figuring out how to maximize their resources, a leveling off once they do maximize resources, a dip during the holidays, and finally followed by a return to previous stable levels. This is all against a slight slope in the curve, because bandwidth consumption is always rising on average.
There's nothing in the yearly graph that outright disagrees with TFA.
Does this mean that apps in the Market have to adhere to the ToS for only T-Mobile, even when other carriers sign on? Will all apps have to adhere to the ToS for every carrier that supports Android phones?
You're asking the wrong questions, those are not the only possible outcomes. You need to take a look at option #3: Some apps will be restricted to customers of certain carriers. So the Anroid Market will not sell a tethering app to a T-Mobile customer because T-Mobile won't allow it, but they will to customers of [insert fictional non-sucky carrier here].
The "solution" doesn't need to be something complicated like trying to harmonize every carrier's TOS. Every carrier is different, and Google will respond to each of their different needs, just as they do when giving them Android in the first place.
While they could do that, any kind of significant deviation in performance that's not due to hardware differences is just going to drive developers away. PhysX is only of value to NVIDIA if developers use it, otherwise if they all flock to Havok (which is getting its own OpenCL implementation) then being able to run PhysX quickly isn't going to be of any real benefit to NVIDIA.
NVIDIA can't play games with OpenCL and PhysX, not at this stage at least.
There was a rumor a few years back that Sierra was willing to hand over the entire franchise to anybody around $100,000 or so I heard. Apparently its considered worthless to them.
It's no longer a rumor, InterActiveCorp/GarageGames bought the entire Starsiege IP from Activision late last year at what I can only assume was a fire sale price. They're going to be relaunching Tribes 1 as a browser game.
The only thing I'm 100% certain of is that AMD thought about the cross-licensing agreement when they came up with the idea for spinning off the fabs, and would not have done it if they thought it would cost them their license
I'm not so sure that was the case. The existing debt was crushing AMD, and the prospects of the costs needed to do yet another fab build-out would have further compounded that problem. Unless the x86 market were to pick up tomorrow and everyone bought AMD's highest margin chips, their options would have been bankruptcy or ceasing to invest in fabs (and there-by completely losing to Intel over the next few years).
AMD didn't have a choice, spinning off their fabs in order to secure billions of USD from ATIC was the only way they were going to stay afloat.
Not quite. They're not being honored by the State itself. If you read the resolutions, it's quite clear that they're being honored separately by the House and the Senate (although the resolutions are exactly the same, save for replacing Senate with House).
They were actually honored by the Washington Legislature twice, once from the Senate and once from the House. Of course I suspect that this has far more to do with PAX bringing in 50k+ visitors than it does with anything else, but hey, an honor is an honor.
I personally would like to see default accounts on Vista and Win7 back like the WinNT3.x-5.0 days where users ran as power users and the UAC when it does pop up, needs the password, instead of just a click.
Microsoft did consider this. The issue is that passwords are a greater risk for social engineering purposes. If you fake a click prompt, the worst the user can do is click on something. If you fake a password prompt, now you can trick the user in to giving up their password, the password that many of them tend to use everywhere else too. Now I'm not sure this is a good enough reason to justify using click prompts, but it's what made MS go the direction they did.
Unfortunately it's not a bug, or even a design flaw. Microsoft's in the position of trying to placate as many customers as they can. They tried doing security the "correct" way with Vista, only for the loudmouths of the world to run around telling everyone else that Vista sucked because they kept getting "those damned prompts." Hell, Apple even got in on the action and made TV advertisements about it lambasting Microsoft for doing security right*. So Microsoft does something about it: they scale back the security and scale up the convenience.
Now Peter makes a good point in the article that Microsoft should have stuck to their guns, and I agree with him. Users won't do the right thing unless it's also the easy thing, so now and then you're going to have to club them over the head and make them do the right thing anyhow. But if Microsoft isn't going to do this, then they're in effect (back to) designing an insecure OS, because that's what people want. At some point you have to trade some convenience for some security, it turns out most people (or at least the loudest of them) will trade away every bit of security for every bit of convenience they can get.
This isn't something that's going to be fixed. It's a design choice. It's what the people - in all their infinite stupidity - want.
* OS X has a pretty big hole: any admin user account can write to the Applications directory willy-nilly. Just like with Windows, people tend to use admin accounts for day-to-day work. From a high-level perspective, Vista does more things right than OS X does
It's not even an endorsement any more. Ubisoft bought his name for $30 million USD. They now own the name "Tom Clancy" and can slap it on anything and everything they want to, including things that aren't video games. There's no longer even a token endorsement going on, it's just a brand name now.
Presumably he gets to keep his name for use in any future books, but anyone else wanting to make something "Tom Clancy" has to license it from Ubisoft.
It doesn't. It was just put in the stimulus bill for the convenience of it. The DTV coupons have already been paid off via the analog spectrum sale; the issue was that not enough money from the sale had been allocated to the coupon program. So they put an item in the stimulus bill to have more money allocated to it (which at this point, all remaining money had been put in the general fund).
The fact that this is in the stimulus bill is just a matter of convenience, it's not a stimulus item and it's not intended to stimulate anything.
You're looking at the wrong CPU/Mobo combo. The Mac Pro would have a 2-way Xeon processor in it (you pay a premium for 2-way and higher) and an appropriate motherboard with two sockets, 8 DIMM slots, etc. It still doesn't add up to too much, but you would need to slap something around a few hundred dollars on to that price tag (exact value unknown, the Nehalem Xeons aren't for sale yet).
Crossfire/SLI does not function under OS X at this time (and all indications are that it would take quite a bit of work to change that), so X2 and NV Sandvich cards are out of the question. This makes their GPU choice for the Mac Pro all the more puzzling - the 4870 is competition for the GTX 260, not the GTX280/285. And this isn't even dealing with the wonkier ATI drivers, the lack of CUDA support (technically this doesn't matter with OpenCL, but ATI doesn't have their act together there either) and future support issues*. Why Apple didn't go with a top-to-bottom NVIDIA GPU lineup is baffling.
* There are 2 ATI cards in the current Mac lineup, both of which are BTO options and require separate drivers from the ATI 3k/2k lineup. Anyone want to wager on how quickly driver updates for them will stop coming in?
You wouldn't be able to build a phone for TV reception in North America anyhow. ATSC is not suitable for moving receivers (and as I understand it, neither is DVB-T).
This is just a government-sponsored lie to try to hide the fact that they already know about and have control of Atlantis. Anyone who watches TV knows the truth.
Until PEGI on-line is up and running, the report proposes fitting consoles, computers or other game devices with a "red button" to give parents the chance to disable a game or control access at certain times.
Furthermore in the actual draft report, the word "button" never appears. As such, the red button doesn't seem to be a literal red button, rather a figurative term used in the press release as a euphemism for parental controls. I'm not sure how this is any different from how the current-gen consoles implement parental controls though.
The Windows 7 Upgrade Program is designed to assist Microsoft's OEM partners in minimizing the number of end users who may postpone acquiring a new computer because of the impending release of the Windows 7 operating system
The current security situation of the platform is not an XOR matter. It is inherently more secure thanks in large part to tested Unix/BSD bits and very few backwards compatibility hacks that later end up used as vulnerabilities, but at the same time there are vulnerabilities that have not been found because not nearly as many people poke at it as they do Windows. If as many people poked at Mac OS X as they did Windows I'm sure we'd see more vulnerabilities in the wild, but I have no reason to believe there would be as many as we see with Windows.
As for the contest at hand, I'd be shocked if they didn't break it. Browsers are a mess, and this goes for IE8, Firefox, and Safari. They'll most certainly get Safari to trigger a remote code execution situation, the bigger challenge will be finding a local privilege escalation flaw to combine that with to actually own the system.
Lame blogs aside, The Fucking Article is damn near worthless. Highlights include:
The study was done by BeyondTrust Corp. who is looking to push their Privilege Manager software, which shockingly is permissions-management software. Right off the bat we have a dubious study due to the conflict of interest and the sponsor.
The article makes no distinction among what OSs were used in the study. Was it Vista? XP? Server 2003?
The article also makes no distinction on if UAC was used, if Vista was used at all. Of course why would a company trying to sell security software want to tell people that just enabling UAC and/or setting your users as standard users would fix the problem?
The only quote is from the director of marketing.
In conclusion: Running everything with admin privileges is bad, which is why Microsoft fixed this 2 years ago with UAC. It's a lame PR piece about an equally lame study from a company that wants to sell you stuff to do things that MS did years ago. If you are here reading Slashdot, there's nothing here you didn't already know.
Slashdot Mirror
The age rating
Rock Band, Guitar Hero, etc are all modeled off of stereotypical rocker behavior - sex, drugs, and rock & roll - in both game design and music choice. That's fine for those games, MTV and Blactivision are shooting for a semi-authentic experience and they get the age rating they're planning on: T(een). But you can't really peddle T games as family games, because they're not. People (at least in the conservative segment) don't particularly want their kids playing T games, or want to be playing T games with them. Rock Band/Guitar Hero don't quite fit in the casual gamer/family mold that the Wii has managed build so well.
So they want to push Rock Band as a truly family friendly game, and that means paring down the objectionable material to get the rating down to an E(veryone). If they just release Rock Band 3 like this, they're going to drive off the core gamers that they're shooting for in their other titles. They don't want to end up with a Core Gamer XOR Families situation, they want both.
So you get an offshoot, something that's similar in gameplay but different enough in style that it's clearly not going to encroach on the mainline Rock Band audience while still being a Rock Band game. LEGO games have proven to be extremely popular with the family friendly segment (there's nothing objectionable about about LEGO), so they have great band name recognition. Parents will immediately recognize a LEGO title as being family friendly, and at this point Rock Band is popular enough that most people recognize it too.
So why LEGO Rock Band? Because it's going to be the Rock Band title they can slap an E on, sell to families, and sell extremely well due to the branding.
It strikes me that they're looking to codify status quo. Right now the MPEG-LA tries to do the "right thing" with respect to maintaining their patent rights while at the same time not stopping people from using their technology for non-commercial purposes. There's a metric shitload of software out there implementing MPEG codecs without a license, largely software based on libavcodec and other FFmpeg projects.
The dick move for the MPEG-LA would be to enforce these patent rights over all such software, getting injunctions against the distribution of projects like VLC, Ubuntu, Media Player Classic, X264, FFDShow, etc in the United States and other countries with software patent rights. But the MPEG-LA has shown absolutely no interest in this whatsoever. They seem content to let non-commercial software implement their codecs (and infringe on their patents in the process). Their only real interest has been commercial users - if you're making a buck directly from their work, they want their share.
The thing is that none of this is codified under their current licenses. It's selective enforcement, which isn't a great legal strategy. This license looks to be a start for codifying status quo, so that open source users would be protected, while the MPEG-LA is still free to go license their patents to commercial entities.
But then again, IANAL, I may be reading this all wrong.
It's a slow weaning process, so no single step is intended to move everyone to update at once. Cutting off mainstream support is mainly intended to push application developers along - if they find an OS bug that inhibits their program, they can no longer count on MS to fix it. Instead they'll just have to make their minimum OS Vista, where if the bug hasn't already been fixed it can be. By moving developers and programs, some users will need to follow, hence the weaning aspect.
The other aspect of this is that it prods enterprises to start looking at upgrading in a different manner. Unlike the guys that sell software to the masses, if you develop software for internal use, it's more reasonable to pay MS to fix it. However the cost of such incidents greatly jumps up once mainstream support ends. If you want something fixed, you're basically paying whatever it costs Microsoft to fix it. This allows enterprises to stay on XP if they must, but provides a strong financial incentive to work on upgrading if they have not already started.
And more to the point, Amazon only gets special favors as long as the labels need them to be doing something to counteract Apple. Now that they have Apple buckling on variable pricing, there's no need for them to allow Amazon to maintain fixed pricing or otherwise grant Amazon favors. The next time Amazon's contract is up for renegotiation, they'll be forced to moved to move to variable pricing.
Apple was the lynch pin, no one else is currently strong enough to stand up to the labels and block variable pricing. You can go to Amazon today and get tracks at $.99, but tomorrow anything you* would want will be at price parity with the iTunes Music Store.
*You = the average person
That's a pretty regular usage if we're looking at a University (or something that feeds a Uni), which I suspect we are. You get growth starting around August when the kids arrive and start figuring out how to maximize their resources, a leveling off once they do maximize resources, a dip during the holidays, and finally followed by a return to previous stable levels. This is all against a slight slope in the curve, because bandwidth consumption is always rising on average.
There's nothing in the yearly graph that outright disagrees with TFA.
You're asking the wrong questions, those are not the only possible outcomes. You need to take a look at option #3: Some apps will be restricted to customers of certain carriers. So the Anroid Market will not sell a tethering app to a T-Mobile customer because T-Mobile won't allow it, but they will to customers of [insert fictional non-sucky carrier here].
The "solution" doesn't need to be something complicated like trying to harmonize every carrier's TOS. Every carrier is different, and Google will respond to each of their different needs, just as they do when giving them Android in the first place.
While they could do that, any kind of significant deviation in performance that's not due to hardware differences is just going to drive developers away. PhysX is only of value to NVIDIA if developers use it, otherwise if they all flock to Havok (which is getting its own OpenCL implementation) then being able to run PhysX quickly isn't going to be of any real benefit to NVIDIA.
NVIDIA can't play games with OpenCL and PhysX, not at this stage at least.
It's no longer a rumor, InterActiveCorp/GarageGames bought the entire Starsiege IP from Activision late last year at what I can only assume was a fire sale price. They're going to be relaunching Tribes 1 as a browser game.
I'm not so sure that was the case. The existing debt was crushing AMD, and the prospects of the costs needed to do yet another fab build-out would have further compounded that problem. Unless the x86 market were to pick up tomorrow and everyone bought AMD's highest margin chips, their options would have been bankruptcy or ceasing to invest in fabs (and there-by completely losing to Intel over the next few years).
AMD didn't have a choice, spinning off their fabs in order to secure billions of USD from ATIC was the only way they were going to stay afloat.
Not quite. They're not being honored by the State itself. If you read the resolutions, it's quite clear that they're being honored separately by the House and the Senate (although the resolutions are exactly the same, save for replacing Senate with House).
They were actually honored by the Washington Legislature twice, once from the Senate and once from the House. Of course I suspect that this has far more to do with PAX bringing in 50k+ visitors than it does with anything else, but hey, an honor is an honor.
And I think The Escapist put it best: Jack Thompson's brain is dangerously close to exploding.
Microsoft did consider this. The issue is that passwords are a greater risk for social engineering purposes. If you fake a click prompt, the worst the user can do is click on something. If you fake a password prompt, now you can trick the user in to giving up their password, the password that many of them tend to use everywhere else too. Now I'm not sure this is a good enough reason to justify using click prompts, but it's what made MS go the direction they did.
The only correct way is the secure way. Anything that allows code to run with admin privileges without user confirmation is a problem.
Unfortunately it's not a bug, or even a design flaw. Microsoft's in the position of trying to placate as many customers as they can. They tried doing security the "correct" way with Vista, only for the loudmouths of the world to run around telling everyone else that Vista sucked because they kept getting "those damned prompts." Hell, Apple even got in on the action and made TV advertisements about it lambasting Microsoft for doing security right*. So Microsoft does something about it: they scale back the security and scale up the convenience.
Now Peter makes a good point in the article that Microsoft should have stuck to their guns, and I agree with him. Users won't do the right thing unless it's also the easy thing, so now and then you're going to have to club them over the head and make them do the right thing anyhow. But if Microsoft isn't going to do this, then they're in effect (back to) designing an insecure OS, because that's what people want. At some point you have to trade some convenience for some security, it turns out most people (or at least the loudest of them) will trade away every bit of security for every bit of convenience they can get.
This isn't something that's going to be fixed. It's a design choice. It's what the people - in all their infinite stupidity - want.
* OS X has a pretty big hole: any admin user account can write to the Applications directory willy-nilly. Just like with Windows, people tend to use admin accounts for day-to-day work. From a high-level perspective, Vista does more things right than OS X does
It's not even an endorsement any more. Ubisoft bought his name for $30 million USD. They now own the name "Tom Clancy" and can slap it on anything and everything they want to, including things that aren't video games. There's no longer even a token endorsement going on, it's just a brand name now.
Presumably he gets to keep his name for use in any future books, but anyone else wanting to make something "Tom Clancy" has to license it from Ubisoft.
It doesn't. It was just put in the stimulus bill for the convenience of it. The DTV coupons have already been paid off via the analog spectrum sale; the issue was that not enough money from the sale had been allocated to the coupon program. So they put an item in the stimulus bill to have more money allocated to it (which at this point, all remaining money had been put in the general fund).
The fact that this is in the stimulus bill is just a matter of convenience, it's not a stimulus item and it's not intended to stimulate anything.
They're also as hot as hell. I'd be even more surprised if the Mini could handle the heat.
You're looking at the wrong CPU/Mobo combo. The Mac Pro would have a 2-way Xeon processor in it (you pay a premium for 2-way and higher) and an appropriate motherboard with two sockets, 8 DIMM slots, etc. It still doesn't add up to too much, but you would need to slap something around a few hundred dollars on to that price tag (exact value unknown, the Nehalem Xeons aren't for sale yet).
Crossfire/SLI does not function under OS X at this time (and all indications are that it would take quite a bit of work to change that), so X2 and NV Sandvich cards are out of the question. This makes their GPU choice for the Mac Pro all the more puzzling - the 4870 is competition for the GTX 260, not the GTX280/285. And this isn't even dealing with the wonkier ATI drivers, the lack of CUDA support (technically this doesn't matter with OpenCL, but ATI doesn't have their act together there either) and future support issues*. Why Apple didn't go with a top-to-bottom NVIDIA GPU lineup is baffling.
* There are 2 ATI cards in the current Mac lineup, both of which are BTO options and require separate drivers from the ATI 3k/2k lineup. Anyone want to wager on how quickly driver updates for them will stop coming in?
You wouldn't be able to build a phone for TV reception in North America anyhow. ATSC is not suitable for moving receivers (and as I understand it, neither is DVB-T).
Oh please, we already know where Atlantis is! Dr. Beckett parked it in San Francisco, next to the Golden Gate Bridge.
This is just a government-sponsored lie to try to hide the fact that they already know about and have control of Atlantis. Anyone who watches TV knows the truth.
From the EU Parliament Press release:
Furthermore in the actual draft report, the word "button" never appears. As such, the red button doesn't seem to be a literal red button, rather a figurative term used in the press release as a euphemism for parental controls. I'm not sure how this is any different from how the current-gen consoles implement parental controls though.
The current security situation of the platform is not an XOR matter. It is inherently more secure thanks in large part to tested Unix/BSD bits and very few backwards compatibility hacks that later end up used as vulnerabilities, but at the same time there are vulnerabilities that have not been found because not nearly as many people poke at it as they do Windows. If as many people poked at Mac OS X as they did Windows I'm sure we'd see more vulnerabilities in the wild, but I have no reason to believe there would be as many as we see with Windows.
As for the contest at hand, I'd be shocked if they didn't break it. Browsers are a mess, and this goes for IE8, Firefox, and Safari. They'll most certainly get Safari to trigger a remote code execution situation, the bigger challenge will be finding a local privilege escalation flaw to combine that with to actually own the system.
Lame blogs aside, The Fucking Article is damn near worthless. Highlights include:
In conclusion: Running everything with admin privileges is bad, which is why Microsoft fixed this 2 years ago with UAC. It's a lame PR piece about an equally lame study from a company that wants to sell you stuff to do things that MS did years ago. If you are here reading Slashdot, there's nothing here you didn't already know.