A friend told me about his experience with Utopia. It implemented GPU-accelerated physics in one of recent patches. But try hard as you wish, he failed to notice any difference for weeks of gameplay. Until he entered the central city. With flags by the entrance fluttering smoothly in the wind, instead of the old static animation.
Yep, that's it. Many megabytes of a patch, a game of hundreds of miles of terrain, hundreds of locations, battles, vehicles, all that stuff... and physics acceleration is used to flutter flags by the entrance.
I'm betting him being a big asshole is essential to the success of the project. Because things he's going to reveal are not nice at all, and a nice guy might try to obscure, whitewash and soften them. Only a real asshole will show them in all drastic gory glory they deserve...
...so a valid compromise could be found between free distribution and legal sales. Currently one side doesn't even want to hear about such a compromise, ranting and raving about thievery, losses and control, and the other side ignores the first one, and circumvents new barriers as they appear, making illegal digital distribution more appealing and better in all respects from traditional channels.
It's not impossible, it just requires a good slap to the media industry to shut up and try to find an actual -solution- and -compromise- instead of trying to impose more impotent restrictions.
Yes, exactly. People are not abstracted, not defined on the Internet, not searchable. There may be 3 experts in the world capable of answering your question, and not a single webpage even approaching it. It would be extremely difficult to find these people and ask them your question (having them willing to answer it is an entirely different matter.) And to filter out all the questions that are better suited for their less competent colleagues. This is a problem that needs to be solved and Internet may become capable of solving it (today, it isn't.)
Your indignation resembles indignation of a person who swears about people predicting cars will move on the roads. After all, roads are busy with horses and the noise of cars would spook the horses!
Libraries, recording radio music etc aren't illegal and neither do they ruin the industry. If there is an "anti-piracy tax", let that tax cover the perceived losses and let it go at this. I pay tax for purchasing a blank CD, to cover damages to the music industry for pirated songs I'm going to put on that CD. So why I still can't legally put the songs on the CD, if I paid that tax? The music industry is getting paid twice, once in my tax and once as damages from lawsuit against me...
What is your stance on erosion of privacy in UK? Will your party only follow the path of Intellectual Property rights, or do you plan to fight for freedom of speech, against invasion of privacy online and in daily life, censorship and other vital freedom-related problems.
Depending on location. In the USA, they violate DMCA. In Germany they use the specific law exception of "doing whatever necessary to get the product in working order", which overrides EULA in this case.
It works for complete end-to-end connection with Ubisoft servers. If the servers don't work, it doesn't work. They never claimed anything else. *shrug*
The idea of "Oh well they got their money," is rather short sighted. When businesses operate like that, screwing people over and saying "We already got the money so who cares?" the end result is often the business suffering or going broke in the future.
Yes. It's absolutely stupid, especially on scale of something so big as a corporation. Which makes it even more surprising when you see it happen (consequences included) over and again, and new companies not learning a thing from the fallen ones.
If you reject traffic at the inner end of your private pipe, you have already lost. It's not like the spam bots obey your RST. All they need is to saturate your uplink with any clutter they wish. Your servers may drop all wrong traffic and only accept valid one, according to any magic token you choose and even with 100% efficiency at accept/reject choices at ~0 load on your side, half or more incoming packets get dropped at your ISP level as its router decides your line is too narrow to accept all the incoming traffic.
DDoS can be more subtle and crafted to your specific application, requiring your servers to do more than they are capable of, while the requests themselves are relatively limited. Just like common DoS, which originates from one source. But most DDoS attacks are blind brute force attacks aimed at saturating your uplink. You can do very little about them.
Yes, DATA CENTERS and LARGE COMPANIES CAN cope with them. Smaller companies and individual websites are entirely at attacker's mercy.
There is exactly one method of directly dealing with DDoS threat, without limiting user experience and restricting services: make your infrastructure big enough to swallow all the extra traffic without a hitch.
Huge IT companies like Microsoft and Google have infrastructure big enough that any DDoS gets lost in the normal flux of data.
Large companies can afford to overengineer their systems to accept momentary spikes of traffic -and- DDoS overhead.
Data centers are designed to cope with this kind of traffic. A focused DDoS will get distributed over servers of the center using load balancing and it won't disrupt operation.
Small and medium companies either pay premium for big pipes they don't need, or simply wait it out, as victims. And let's hope they aren't billed for inbound traffic per megabyte over limit...
how comes you can't install a 5 years old OS on the newest PC and have it recognize and support all the new hardware fully?
The fact it knows how to use the CPU (in single-core 32 bit mode), the lower 4GB of RAM, and in general it -will- run... But that's not the "corporate quality" performance.
Global warming is disastrous to cities only, and changing for many regions, some for better some for worse. It is not suicidal for the Nature, just opposite, it may grant it some relief from the human problem...
A VM PC with a webpage vs an embedded device of different architecture CPU with an app that often interacts with the CPU... it is absolutely apparent that you have never done any embedded programming.
In embedded programming, "it runs without faults on emulator" is getting about as far as "it passes validator.w3.org" in web programming: the fun with nasty bugs and hidden problems just began.
Actually, they lost quite a lot of money. The DRM system costed tangible manhours of developer work, convertible to real money. Good several hundred thousands possibly. Since the purpose of it was defeated in day one, all this money went down the drain, because there will be exactly zero of return on investment on that part of project (and all the extra losses due to bad PR).
People who design and code it know from moment zero it is sentenced to failure (and that the blame will be on them no matter what they do). So they just do what they are told to do, how they are told to do it and don't try to make it any better (then start looking for other jobs).
Every time I upgrade, I see more options gone, more choices taken away, more things that were customizable getting fixed one way.
If the fear is "users will be confused", give them an "advanced" checkbox to hide these options, don't remove them!
You want to avoid "confusing"? I right-click on Panel and see all customization options disabled. Then I spend next 2 days looking first through config options, then through installable configurators, then through raw config files, then through a hundred different Internet fora, then through the sources of the package, to get them enabled. Now THIS is confusing!
- Submitter wants (for whatever weird project of theirs) a surface with magnetic image on it (a'la LightScribe, only magnetically). - Submitter missed the actual point, and wants to write raw data to drive (some embedded project) circumventing partitioning and filesystem overhead - quite frequent. - Submitter wants to record a lot of analog/unreliable data - skipping error checking and using the extra space to store more data (errors = acceptable noise) - Submitter doesn't care about data storage and wants to use disk heads as a very fast magnetic field sensor/generator
This is quite doable with ANCIENT pre-ATA drives. The computer controlled everything then, the head position, the moment of writing and so on. It is doable with old ATA drives that run PIO modes, probably with a bit of electronics tinkering. It is about impossible with modern drives. You'd have to replace the whole electronics with your own and drive the head and the motors with your own.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend told me about his experience with Utopia. It implemented GPU-accelerated physics in one of recent patches. But try hard as you wish, he failed to notice any difference for weeks of gameplay. Until he entered the central city. With flags by the entrance fluttering smoothly in the wind, instead of the old static animation.
Yep, that's it. Many megabytes of a patch, a game of hundreds of miles of terrain, hundreds of locations, battles, vehicles, all that stuff... and physics acceleration is used to flutter flags by the entrance.
Cover ugly things up and make everything seem fine and nice? Instead of flinging real dirt all around, given the opportunity?
I'm betting him being a big asshole is essential to the success of the project. Because things he's going to reveal are not nice at all, and a nice guy might try to obscure, whitewash and soften them. Only a real asshole will show them in all drastic gory glory they deserve...
...so a valid compromise could be found between free distribution and legal sales. Currently one side doesn't even want to hear about such a compromise, ranting and raving about thievery, losses and control, and the other side ignores the first one, and circumvents new barriers as they appear, making illegal digital distribution more appealing and better in all respects from traditional channels.
It's not impossible, it just requires a good slap to the media industry to shut up and try to find an actual -solution- and -compromise- instead of trying to impose more impotent restrictions.
Oh, that's an overstatement.
The real limitation is you can't cross the same river TWICE.
Yes, exactly. People are not abstracted, not defined on the Internet, not searchable. There may be 3 experts in the world capable of answering your question, and not a single webpage even approaching it. It would be extremely difficult to find these people and ask them your question (having them willing to answer it is an entirely different matter.) And to filter out all the questions that are better suited for their less competent colleagues. This is a problem that needs to be solved and Internet may become capable of solving it (today, it isn't.)
Your indignation resembles indignation of a person who swears about people predicting cars will move on the roads. After all, roads are busy with horses and the noise of cars would spook the horses!
Libraries, recording radio music etc aren't illegal and neither do they ruin the industry.
If there is an "anti-piracy tax", let that tax cover the perceived losses and let it go at this. I pay tax for purchasing a blank CD, to cover damages to the music industry for pirated songs I'm going to put on that CD. So why I still can't legally put the songs on the CD, if I paid that tax? The music industry is getting paid twice, once in my tax and once as damages from lawsuit against me...
What is your stance on erosion of privacy in UK? Will your party only follow the path of Intellectual Property rights, or do you plan to fight for freedom of speech, against invasion of privacy online and in daily life, censorship and other vital freedom-related problems.
Depending on location.
In the USA, they violate DMCA.
In Germany they use the specific law exception of "doing whatever necessary to get the product in working order", which overrides EULA in this case.
It works for complete end-to-end connection with Ubisoft servers. If the servers don't work, it doesn't work. They never claimed anything else. *shrug*
It didn't crack the DRM. It definitely broke it, in the old sense though. Not performing to specs (either way) = broken.
The idea of "Oh well they got their money," is rather short sighted. When businesses operate like that, screwing people over and saying "We already got the money so who cares?" the end result is often the business suffering or going broke in the future.
Yes. It's absolutely stupid, especially on scale of something so big as a corporation. Which makes it even more surprising when you see it happen (consequences included) over and again, and new companies not learning a thing from the fallen ones.
If you reject traffic at the inner end of your private pipe, you have already lost.
It's not like the spam bots obey your RST. All they need is to saturate your uplink with any clutter they wish. Your servers may drop all wrong traffic and only accept valid one, according to any magic token you choose and even with 100% efficiency at accept/reject choices at ~0 load on your side, half or more incoming packets get dropped at your ISP level as its router decides your line is too narrow to accept all the incoming traffic.
DDoS can be more subtle and crafted to your specific application, requiring your servers to do more than they are capable of, while the requests themselves are relatively limited. Just like common DoS, which originates from one source. But most DDoS attacks are blind brute force attacks aimed at saturating your uplink. You can do very little about them.
Why won't you tell them, wise guy?
Yes, DATA CENTERS and LARGE COMPANIES CAN cope with them. Smaller companies and individual websites are entirely at attacker's mercy.
There is exactly one method of directly dealing with DDoS threat, without limiting user experience and restricting services: make your infrastructure big enough to swallow all the extra traffic without a hitch.
Huge IT companies like Microsoft and Google have infrastructure big enough that any DDoS gets lost in the normal flux of data.
Large companies can afford to overengineer their systems to accept momentary spikes of traffic -and- DDoS overhead.
Data centers are designed to cope with this kind of traffic. A focused DDoS will get distributed over servers of the center using load balancing and it won't disrupt operation.
Small and medium companies either pay premium for big pipes they don't need, or simply wait it out, as victims. And let's hope they aren't billed for inbound traffic per megabyte over limit...
There's still the small third group of smartass white-hats who purchased the game and then applied the crack to a legally owned copy :)
how comes you can't install a 5 years old OS on the newest PC and have it recognize and support all the new hardware fully?
The fact it knows how to use the CPU (in single-core 32 bit mode), the lower 4GB of RAM, and in general it -will- run... But that's not the "corporate quality" performance.
Global warming is disastrous to cities only, and changing for many regions, some for better some for worse. It is not suicidal for the Nature, just opposite, it may grant it some relief from the human problem...
A VM PC with a webpage vs an embedded device of different architecture CPU with an app that often interacts with the CPU... it is absolutely apparent that you have never done any embedded programming.
In embedded programming, "it runs without faults on emulator" is getting about as far as "it passes validator.w3.org" in web programming: the fun with nasty bugs and hidden problems just began.
I think they just gained a customer.
Without drought there would be no need to nail owls to barn doors...
Actually, they lost quite a lot of money. The DRM system costed tangible manhours of developer work, convertible to real money. Good several hundred thousands possibly. Since the purpose of it was defeated in day one, all this money went down the drain, because there will be exactly zero of return on investment on that part of project (and all the extra losses due to bad PR).
SO PLEASE MAKE SURE IT DOESN'T GO BANKRUPT!
BUY THE ORIGINAL!
(...yeah, I know it doesn't work that way. Consider it just a feed for thought.)
People who design and code it know from moment zero it is sentenced to failure (and that the blame will be on them no matter what they do). So they just do what they are told to do, how they are told to do it and don't try to make it any better (then start looking for other jobs).
Every time I upgrade, I see more options gone, more choices taken away, more things that were customizable getting fixed one way.
If the fear is "users will be confused", give them an "advanced" checkbox to hide these options, don't remove them!
You want to avoid "confusing"?
I right-click on Panel and see all customization options disabled.
Then I spend next 2 days looking first through config options, then through installable configurators, then through raw config files, then through a hundred different Internet fora, then through the sources of the package, to get them enabled. Now THIS is confusing!
- Submitter wants (for whatever weird project of theirs) a surface with magnetic image on it (a'la LightScribe, only magnetically).
- Submitter missed the actual point, and wants to write raw data to drive (some embedded project) circumventing partitioning and filesystem overhead - quite frequent.
- Submitter wants to record a lot of analog/unreliable data - skipping error checking and using the extra space to store more data (errors = acceptable noise)
- Submitter doesn't care about data storage and wants to use disk heads as a very fast magnetic field sensor/generator
This is quite doable with ANCIENT pre-ATA drives. The computer controlled everything then, the head position, the moment of writing and so on.
It is doable with old ATA drives that run PIO modes, probably with a bit of electronics tinkering.
It is about impossible with modern drives. You'd have to replace the whole electronics with your own and drive the head and the motors with your own.