I guess I'll have to actually read it, but I'm still not getting the premise.
How is a hash of my email address in any way valuable personal data that I shouldn't expose? I mean, yeah, it tells someone my email address, provided they already know my email address. What's the point?
My favourite BUILD engine trick was using multiple rendering passes to defeat the limitations of the engine.
My favorite was simply exploiting the limitations of the engine. Elevators that went both up and sideways, rooms that curved back into themselves (with walls that appeared out of nowhere), and "water" that you would fall through into a different part of the map -- possibly out of the ceiling and back into the same water...
Much of this can be faked with newer engines, but that's the main reason portals appeal to me -- the fact that you can use them to screw with people's minds.
Fast, fast as shit and the video quality in the expanded mode was fantastic.
I saw Obama's speech tonight, on a coworker's laptop. And yes, fast, and decent quality -- like I might expect from Vimeo.
Except unlike Vimeo, it frequently sputtered and outright stopped.
I also noticed another thing -- it wasn't Silverlight. It required Silverlight for the controls, but the player itself was something else -- ironically, written in Java. So I still don't know what actual Silverlight-powered HD would look like.
Isn't this highly dependent on the filesystem you use and its strategy for block allocation ?
Yes, but...
Wouldn't it be possible to design the block allocation algorithm to favour SSDs...
Well, fragmentation isn't the answer. That seems to be what you're suggesting...
See, fragmentation introduces problems of its own -- for example, simple overhead of block allocation. If you've got a bunch of blocks that are sequential -- say, block 123, 124, 125, 126, and 127 -- you can say that a file is in an extent, from block 123-127. If, however, your file is stored in blocks 123, 259, 312, 567, and 964, you're going to have to store all of those addresses -- which means you're spending 250% more disk space simply storing addresses.
Also, Flash is written to (and read from) in rather huge blocks -- so you want a file to at least be contiguous on that level.
No, I would say that the simple solution to Flash not appearing to perform as well (for sequential operations) is to defragment just as aggressively, and to increase readahead by a lot. Flash would work great for contiguous sequential reads, assuming that the filesystem (or block layer) are anticipating that you'll keep reading from the same file.
But first, you need the flash disk itself to support simultaneous reads, and probably some OS support as well.
And for what it's worth, Linux has filesystems which are optimized for raw Flash -- which handle things like wear-leveling on their own. CompactFlash, and the newer standards, provide an IDE-like interface, which does the wear-leveling in hardware -- in other words, they pretend to be a hard disk, mostly for the benefit of Windows.
So I predict two things: First, that Linux will solve this problem the "right way", given sufficiently low-level access. And second, that there will be a lot of hardware, firmware, and BIOS hacks to get around the fact that Windows isn't going to be changing its filesystem anytime soon.
The second I read that your hashed email address was part of the URL I turned around and never looked back knowing full well that if someone wanted to, they could eventually get my email address.
Erm, WTF?
I don't like Gravatar either, as it's a centralized service, and one which frequently goes down.
But you're afraid that, given a hash, someone can find your email address? Do you understand how hashing works?
However, this move looks like a positive thing. Comcast always limited you, but it was always an arbitrary amount, which you wouldn't know till they banned you for a year. More recently, they pinned it down in terms of "songs", "videos", "pictures", "emails", etc.
This means you could conceivably sue Comcast if they raised a fuss and you were under your 250 gig limit.
Only if you're not particularly paranoid. Let's look at this again:
It obliterates (erases AND overwrites) any and all signs of your activity when you exit.
That implies both that you actually exit, and that you're actually running an unmodified version of Opera Portable. It also assumes that the host filesystem is actually overwriting the same blocks... and a few other things.
It also implies that you haven't already been pwned by something as simple as a keylogger.
So, better than nothing, but you've got to figure that whatever you do on a public terminal is public knowledge. Any attempt to prevent that is playing an arms race that you will lose.
I don't let XP upgrade to IE 7. I don't like the interface and it still 'feels' wrong. Probably because as someone pointed out above, it is even slower than IE 6 (which I liked okay).
Which makes you part of the problem -- part of the reason I, as a web developer, have to ensure our website works on IE6.
IE7 is a lot of things -- among them, it's more standards-compliant.
I get better functionality out of Firefox 3 with a couple of plugins.
So do I -- which is why, on XP, I do upgrade IE, and then barely use it outside of a Firefox IETab.
The point of Firefox, from the beginning, was to split this kind of functionality off into extensions, so that users can pick and choose what features they need, without being forced to accept bloat.
(Yes, ironically Firefox was an attempt to make a browser-only, bloat-free version of Mozilla. People sometimes talk, now, of doing the same to Firefox...)
Given that, I would call this:
brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for.
At least two physically separate copies, plus some kind of parity local to each device, I'd think.
Physically separate, in case, say, a DVD cracks completely.
Parity, so that if two DVDs get scratched in exactly the same place, at least each has enough information to rebuild the image.
But I think that's the key -- find something that's reliable enough, that you at least have a rough idea of how it'll deteriorate. Then use redundancy, both hardware and software, to make sure that when it does, you still have a high probability of all data bits being intact.
unless you can actually model the natural laws of physics, you're going to have to use hacks to fake most of it.
True.
My point here is that Quake was a milestone in avoiding such hacks -- most levels built in most modern FPSes could have been built in Quake, it's just that the performance would suck. These levels really couldn't have been built in Duke3D.
dropping down from that vent shaft in Hollywood Holocaust at the beginning of Episode 1: L.A. Meltdown, it totally blew my mind how "realistic" this game was.
Yeah, I remember that -- it was my first FPS. The explosions surrounding that were pretty cool, too -- camera shaking and everything.
Of course, it was also my first abuse of cheats. DNKROZ.
so the vertical layering issue is strictly limited to the map engine, and inside every "room" you had a fully 3d environment.
Well, you have a fully 3D column of air. I still find it quite a lot more interesting to explore a fully 3D environment -- Half-Life was probably the next game that blew my mind. (Though, to be honest, it was probably Counter-Strike first.)
The reason it and games like Doom were called 2.5D is because the data used to construct the 3D world was 2D in nature. The final output though was in fact 3D.
When Doom doesn't allow me to build something as simple as a ramp -- when neither Doom nor Duke3D allow me to do something as simple as a two-story building (and see both stories at once!) -- I call that 2.5D.
And yes, the final output was 3D... somewhat. Not a single 3D model to be seen, just sprites everywhere.
There's more hassles than flash when it comes to 64-bit linux.
I know! It's so bad! There's Java... and... um... Java...
Actually, 64-bit is even a hassle in Windows.
Pretty much. Mostly because Windows hasn't had nearly as much practice -- Linux has been running on 64-bit (non-x86) systems for quite awhile.
I think only Apple handled the 64 bit jump semi-elegantly,
They "handled" it by mostly leaving things 32-bit. In fact, neither Apple nor Microsoft have their default browsers 64-bit -- probably mostly because of things like Flash. Only Linux does.
Perhaps the one or two developers adobe has working on linux ports just don't want to be bothered with it.
Missing the point -- Adobe doesn't have 64-bit support on any platform. And if they did, it'd be a simple recompile -- I think even one or two developers could be bothered to do that.
If you want a flash-like solution that has a supported open source implementation, try silverlight.:)
Moonlight is a great idea, but honestly, how "supported" is it when sites like the Democratic National Convention block it outright?
Compare Moonlight to Gnash, and tell me which is farther along.
The world is represented as a series of convex sectors.
They couldn't be concave? I'm not sure.
Although I don't remember if they actually used the see-through ability in Duke.
I think that's what the glass was -- I seem to remember much more flexibility in shaping the glass than you might have with a simple sprite.
The good thing is that, as you mention, it is possible to design things that can't be laid on an actual 2D map
Indeed -- though I would imagine that a modern 3D portal system (even partially), given a good map editor, could allow similar things. (Speaking here of things you could do in Duke which you can't even do in a proper 3D map.)
you could move along all 3 axes.... i mean, it wasn't like Doom, where the ground was always completely flat... you also had full vertical aiming in Duke Nukem 3D, whereas you didn't in Doom.
That last one, I didn't know about. I do know that quite a lot of Doom source ports support mouselook and (optional) jumping (optional, because it let you cheat quite a lot).
all the 2d sprites could be placed/move in a fully 3D coordinate system (which is how bridges were created).
I don't remember -- could you align those diagonally?
Regardless, from what I remember, Duke 3D mostly added a lot of hacks to Doom-style tech.
Sloped floors added a lot of realism, and there was the fact that sectors could intersect, without problems, so long as you didn't see both at once.
And then there were the teleporters, and the water...
So, we can argue over the version number, but it was nowhere near, say, Quake.
So most people are running like powerpc or sparc linux or something?
Maybe I shouldn't have said "much", but really, if you're already targeting a niche market (Linux), why would you go even smaller than that?
Last I checked the desktop linux everyone refers to is 32 bit intel linux, the rest are "ports".
Actually, I think a fair number of us run 64-bit Intel Linux, which makes Flash a bit more of a hassle, less stable, and slower. And only practical for non-geeks because of quite a lot of work done by things like nspluginwrapper -- something which would be completely unnecessary if Adobe would release their source, or at least a 64-bit player.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I'll have to actually read it, but I'm still not getting the premise.
How is a hash of my email address in any way valuable personal data that I shouldn't expose? I mean, yeah, it tells someone my email address, provided they already know my email address. What's the point?
My favourite BUILD engine trick was using multiple rendering passes to defeat the limitations of the engine.
My favorite was simply exploiting the limitations of the engine. Elevators that went both up and sideways, rooms that curved back into themselves (with walls that appeared out of nowhere), and "water" that you would fall through into a different part of the map -- possibly out of the ceiling and back into the same water...
Much of this can be faked with newer engines, but that's the main reason portals appeal to me -- the fact that you can use them to screw with people's minds.
I'd also like to point out that it is completely unreasonable for us to expect a complete absence of corruption in our politicians.
Then I'd like to point out that it is completely unreasonable for us to tolerate such corruption, whatever our expectations are.
They are human,
They are our representatives, and they are our leaders. Don't you think we should hold them to a higher standard?
Because that is Godwinbait. (You know who else was human? Hitler!)
We shouldn't expect more of our politicians than we would deliver ourselves.
We should expect at least as much as we would deliver ourselves -- else, why aren't we running? Why are we asking them to do the job instead?
Fast, fast as shit and the video quality in the expanded mode was fantastic.
I saw Obama's speech tonight, on a coworker's laptop. And yes, fast, and decent quality -- like I might expect from Vimeo.
Except unlike Vimeo, it frequently sputtered and outright stopped.
I also noticed another thing -- it wasn't Silverlight. It required Silverlight for the controls, but the player itself was something else -- ironically, written in Java. So I still don't know what actual Silverlight-powered HD would look like.
Make the damn Linux install base standard.
Well, we have.
No one even bothers to, say, support the largest one out there (Ubuntu).
How about every distro uses the same GCC? That would be sweet
Why?
Isn't this highly dependent on the filesystem you use and its strategy for block allocation ?
Yes, but...
Wouldn't it be possible to design the block allocation algorithm to favour SSDs...
Well, fragmentation isn't the answer. That seems to be what you're suggesting...
See, fragmentation introduces problems of its own -- for example, simple overhead of block allocation. If you've got a bunch of blocks that are sequential -- say, block 123, 124, 125, 126, and 127 -- you can say that a file is in an extent, from block 123-127. If, however, your file is stored in blocks 123, 259, 312, 567, and 964, you're going to have to store all of those addresses -- which means you're spending 250% more disk space simply storing addresses.
Also, Flash is written to (and read from) in rather huge blocks -- so you want a file to at least be contiguous on that level.
No, I would say that the simple solution to Flash not appearing to perform as well (for sequential operations) is to defragment just as aggressively, and to increase readahead by a lot. Flash would work great for contiguous sequential reads, assuming that the filesystem (or block layer) are anticipating that you'll keep reading from the same file.
But first, you need the flash disk itself to support simultaneous reads, and probably some OS support as well.
And for what it's worth, Linux has filesystems which are optimized for raw Flash -- which handle things like wear-leveling on their own. CompactFlash, and the newer standards, provide an IDE-like interface, which does the wear-leveling in hardware -- in other words, they pretend to be a hard disk, mostly for the benefit of Windows.
So I predict two things: First, that Linux will solve this problem the "right way", given sufficiently low-level access. And second, that there will be a lot of hardware, firmware, and BIOS hacks to get around the fact that Windows isn't going to be changing its filesystem anytime soon.
What if I want a fancy title without using an image that screws over scalability (fluid layouts FTW) and screen reading software?
Won't help scalability, but you can always use semantic HTML (say, an h1 tag), and replace the text with images using CSS.
The second I read that your hashed email address was part of the URL I turned around and never looked back knowing full well that if someone wanted to, they could eventually get my email address.
Erm, WTF?
I don't like Gravatar either, as it's a centralized service, and one which frequently goes down.
But you're afraid that, given a hash, someone can find your email address? Do you understand how hashing works?
Doom allows for movement along all 3 axis therefore it is 3D.
It does not, however, allow for building over all 3 axes. Therefore it is 2D.
Since it can kind of look like 3D, and since both positions are valid, I call it 2.5D.
Even Quake used sprites for certain things...does that make it 2.5D also?
The things which Quake used sprites for, it didn't have to. The things Duke3D used sprites for (like bridges), it really did. That's the difference.
So, because I use applications that are not compatible with Microsoft's current non-standards compliant flavor of the week, I am part of the problem?
If said applications are compatible with Microsoft's former non-standards-compliant flavor-of-the-week, yes.
I agree with you, in general.
However, this move looks like a positive thing. Comcast always limited you, but it was always an arbitrary amount, which you wouldn't know till they banned you for a year. More recently, they pinned it down in terms of "songs", "videos", "pictures", "emails", etc.
This means you could conceivably sue Comcast if they raised a fuss and you were under your 250 gig limit.
Perfect for visiting internet cafes or libraries.
Only if you're not particularly paranoid. Let's look at this again:
It obliterates (erases AND overwrites) any and all signs of your activity when you exit.
That implies both that you actually exit, and that you're actually running an unmodified version of Opera Portable. It also assumes that the host filesystem is actually overwriting the same blocks... and a few other things.
It also implies that you haven't already been pwned by something as simple as a keylogger.
So, better than nothing, but you've got to figure that whatever you do on a public terminal is public knowledge. Any attempt to prevent that is playing an arms race that you will lose.
I don't let XP upgrade to IE 7. I don't like the interface and it still 'feels' wrong. Probably because as someone pointed out above, it is even slower than IE 6 (which I liked okay).
Which makes you part of the problem -- part of the reason I, as a web developer, have to ensure our website works on IE6.
IE7 is a lot of things -- among them, it's more standards-compliant.
I get better functionality out of Firefox 3 with a couple of plugins.
So do I -- which is why, on XP, I do upgrade IE, and then barely use it outside of a Firefox IETab.
The point of Firefox, from the beginning, was to split this kind of functionality off into extensions, so that users can pick and choose what features they need, without being forced to accept bloat.
(Yes, ironically Firefox was an attempt to make a browser-only, bloat-free version of Mozilla. People sometimes talk, now, of doing the same to Firefox...)
Given that, I would call this:
brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for.
That's Firefox's strength, not a weakness.
(two copies of everything)
At least two physically separate copies, plus some kind of parity local to each device, I'd think.
Physically separate, in case, say, a DVD cracks completely.
Parity, so that if two DVDs get scratched in exactly the same place, at least each has enough information to rebuild the image.
But I think that's the key -- find something that's reliable enough, that you at least have a rough idea of how it'll deteriorate. Then use redundancy, both hardware and software, to make sure that when it does, you still have a high probability of all data bits being intact.
So does "Orwell".
Well, technically, rubbish would be simply "trash" for Americans -- unless you call what you leave in the toilet "rubbish".
I suspect this makes me a pedant-o-holic.
Do you have any evidence for that?
I know that Debian handled that pretty aggressively. Too bad for anyone who somehow missed the memo.
unless you can actually model the natural laws of physics, you're going to have to use hacks to fake most of it.
True.
My point here is that Quake was a milestone in avoiding such hacks -- most levels built in most modern FPSes could have been built in Quake, it's just that the performance would suck. These levels really couldn't have been built in Duke3D.
dropping down from that vent shaft in Hollywood Holocaust at the beginning of Episode 1: L.A. Meltdown, it totally blew my mind how "realistic" this game was.
Yeah, I remember that -- it was my first FPS. The explosions surrounding that were pretty cool, too -- camera shaking and everything.
Of course, it was also my first abuse of cheats. DNKROZ.
so the vertical layering issue is strictly limited to the map engine, and inside every "room" you had a fully 3d environment.
Well, you have a fully 3D column of air. I still find it quite a lot more interesting to explore a fully 3D environment -- Half-Life was probably the next game that blew my mind. (Though, to be honest, it was probably Counter-Strike first.)
The reason it and games like Doom were called 2.5D is because the data used to construct the 3D world was 2D in nature. The final output though was in fact 3D.
When Doom doesn't allow me to build something as simple as a ramp -- when neither Doom nor Duke3D allow me to do something as simple as a two-story building (and see both stories at once!) -- I call that 2.5D.
And yes, the final output was 3D... somewhat. Not a single 3D model to be seen, just sprites everywhere.
Compare to Quake.
There's more hassles than flash when it comes to 64-bit linux.
I know! It's so bad! There's Java... and... um... Java...
Actually, 64-bit is even a hassle in Windows.
Pretty much. Mostly because Windows hasn't had nearly as much practice -- Linux has been running on 64-bit (non-x86) systems for quite awhile.
I think only Apple handled the 64 bit jump semi-elegantly,
They "handled" it by mostly leaving things 32-bit. In fact, neither Apple nor Microsoft have their default browsers 64-bit -- probably mostly because of things like Flash. Only Linux does.
Perhaps the one or two developers adobe has working on linux ports just don't want to be bothered with it.
Missing the point -- Adobe doesn't have 64-bit support on any platform. And if they did, it'd be a simple recompile -- I think even one or two developers could be bothered to do that.
If you want a flash-like solution that has a supported open source implementation, try silverlight. :)
Moonlight is a great idea, but honestly, how "supported" is it when sites like the Democratic National Convention block it outright?
Compare Moonlight to Gnash, and tell me which is farther along.
The world is represented as a series of convex sectors.
They couldn't be concave? I'm not sure.
Although I don't remember if they actually used the see-through ability in Duke.
I think that's what the glass was -- I seem to remember much more flexibility in shaping the glass than you might have with a simple sprite.
The good thing is that, as you mention, it is possible to design things that can't be laid on an actual 2D map
Indeed -- though I would imagine that a modern 3D portal system (even partially), given a good map editor, could allow similar things. (Speaking here of things you could do in Duke which you can't even do in a proper 3D map.)
you could move along all 3 axes.... i mean, it wasn't like Doom, where the ground was always completely flat... you also had full vertical aiming in Duke Nukem 3D, whereas you didn't in Doom.
That last one, I didn't know about. I do know that quite a lot of Doom source ports support mouselook and (optional) jumping (optional, because it let you cheat quite a lot).
all the 2d sprites could be placed/move in a fully 3D coordinate system (which is how bridges were created).
I don't remember -- could you align those diagonally?
Regardless, from what I remember, Duke 3D mostly added a lot of hacks to Doom-style tech.
Sloped floors added a lot of realism, and there was the fact that sectors could intersect, without problems, so long as you didn't see both at once.
And then there were the teleporters, and the water...
So, we can argue over the version number, but it was nowhere near, say, Quake.
Whoa there! Who's flaming anything?
Erm... whoops. This person.
Sorry about that.
Another post here linked to an article which says that Google is handling the Republican convention, while Microsoft is handling the Democrats...
I feel like I'm in Bizarro World.
So most people are running like powerpc or sparc linux or something?
Maybe I shouldn't have said "much", but really, if you're already targeting a niche market (Linux), why would you go even smaller than that?
Last I checked the desktop linux everyone refers to is 32 bit intel linux, the rest are "ports".
Actually, I think a fair number of us run 64-bit Intel Linux, which makes Flash a bit more of a hassle, less stable, and slower. And only practical for non-geeks because of quite a lot of work done by things like nspluginwrapper -- something which would be completely unnecessary if Adobe would release their source, or at least a 64-bit player.