Back when Doom came out, strafing was an option, not a requirement. As was mouselook. Then I rephrase the comment to reference Quake, or Half-Life. Even Doom is still a valid analogy -- I absolutely could play Tetris with the interface I described, just maybe not as well as with a keyboard.
Having a button click back at you isn't the same as being able to rest your finger on a button and feeling it move up and down as you press it. From the article I linked to:
Donâ(TM)t be fooled by simple vibrational imitations folks, this is the real McCoy â" you press a key on the screen, and it clicks under your finger with exactly the same sort of fingertip feedback as if youâ(TM)d pressed a conventional keyboard key. I don't know if it's possible to feel the edge of the button without pressing it.
What part of "graphically superior" did you not understand? Fine, how about the wireless? I don't remember 802.11 being an option on the Gameboy in any form, ever -- and I believe I linked to an online game.
I'd like to see you play Megaman with your finger And I'd like to see you play Doom with a D-pad. It's got nothing to do with it being a better or worse control system -- it will be better for different games, like just about every game interface.
Not every game interface -- I strongly suspect the PowerGlove is worthless. It's so bad.
Virtual buttons have no tactile feedback Actually, they do. Not the iPhone, of course... yet. No reason to think it never will.
They take up screen space, and what you have left is a graphically superior Gameboy Color. Gratz, you beat Nintendo c. 1998 I didn't realize Nintendo had 3D this good in 1998 -- or at all in a Gameboy.
A bluetooth addon would either drain the iPhone battery faster, or require its own power source Am I missing something? Because I thought Bluetooth was a wireless protocol. I don't think we have wireless power yet, if such a thing can exist -- that would imply it would require its own power source.
Now, think about a simple IR TV remote. How long does that last? And often on AAA batteries?
sidescroller games Touch where you want the character to go.
tetris Slide your finger back and forth -- the block follows to that column. Up and down, and it rotates.
virtual buttons are bust when it comes to gaming. Only if you lack imagination. For that matter...
There are no tactile buttons to press Only if you lack Bluetooth.
I guarantee you're NOT going to have Crackberry addicts or rabid texting teenagers going to the iPhone, with its predictive/presumptive bullshit "keyboard". Actually, I'll bet you'll have a good number of them wanting it for the keyboard alone. The rabid teenagers might not, though, given how expensive they are now.
You can flame anything. Maybe it was Microsoft specifically targeting a Linux exploit? Maybe it was a driver, or a modification that is entirely the router manufacturer's fault?
I think the most telling thing about this is the danger of monoculture. When routers are only tested against specific versions of Windows... But that's not a flame, as there's no one entity you can blame for this. Good routers wouldn't have this problem.
Yeah, let's just ignore all international keyboards, while we're at it. There's a reason most games let you map keys yourself.
1 study , done by the layout inventor, confirmed it's 'better' -1, Factually Incorrect. Relevant quote:
They say that the layout must be no good, because a 1944 U.S. Navy study that showed very positive results of Dvorak was supposedly conducted by Dr. Dvorak himself. This is NOT true. Dvorak was a Commander in the Navy reserve at the time but did not organize, conduct, or participate in the study in any way. That, and you didn't read my post -- the arrow keys are the same on Dvorak as everywhere else.
It does, in fact, support backups via rsync, even from Windows clients. That much, I knew -- in fact, "even from Windows clients" is a given; it'll work from any platform with a decent rsync client.
What I mean is, I think it hooked into rsync such that it could actually do an incremental backup via rsync, mostly without unpacking the original files (I always kept those bzipped). Not sure, though.
OLPCs don't solve a lot of third-world problems that need to tackled now.... Fucking myopic cunt. That's hilarious -- do you know what the word means? Here, read a fucking dictionary.
That's right -- it means nearsighted. Your whine is that OLPC doesn't solve problems that exist right now -- while a project like OLPC does quite a bit more in the long term than yet another dependency-inducing aid package.
Maybe the word you were looking for is farsighted? I guess "fucking farsighted cunt" just doesn't have the same ring to it...
Back to the topic at hand: A quick Google shows:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced today $8.3 million in grants to help public libraries in 10 states provide quality access to computers and the Internet. So they can put "quality access" in 10 states (who wants to bet those are back home in the US of A), but not one cent for a project which would bring computers, period, to some of the poorest places in the world?
One guess what those library computers were running...
Can't track the article down right now, but I distinctly remember Bill G himself demoing some sort of cell phone crap that was meant to be an "answer" to the OLPC.
I'm not saying he's done nothing good for the world, but saying "his dream was of openness" is pretty moronic. His dream was many things, but it was not open.
How about a slow net connection? It was interesting how it seemed to use absolutely no bandwidth when paused, but a steady stream while running -- probably actually streamed, rather than "progressive download" or whatever they're calling it.
The difference is, of course, that an actual download, or Flash in YouTube mode, will happily cache the entire file while paused. So, if your connection is slower (or just less consistent) than the video, you could still watch. Is that true for this video?
The bottleneck is how pitifully slow Flash is at playing videos -- maybe it's just me, maybe it's just 64-bit Linux, but anytime I actually want to watch a video fullscreen, I look for an FLV download.
Since your streaming seems to require actual streaming, I can't seem to even use the Firebug trick -- so I had to watch it in a tiny chunk of a browser window, or watch it fullscreen in laaaggy HD.
So no, your video is absolutely horrible compared to Vimeo, which also has 720p h.264, but provides an un-DRM'd MOV download.
Before that Flash was just the most horrible video format used online. And it still is, for any site that is not using H.264. Still is, period.
I still like YouTube for random browsing, but when I actually want decent quality, my favorite video site is Vimeo -- mostly because if you have an account (free), you can actually download videos. Not sure about the rest of them, but Wormtooth Nation in a 720p h.264 MOV was damned cool. (Still is -- final episode is Friday.)
Delayed, over and over... Multiple trailers and gameplay videos shown, some with features that never made it into the actual game, most of which were just cool, and made you want the game now...
Original game was a bestseller, a genre-defining blockbuster, with the kind of ending that demands a sequel... Sequel came out ten years after the original, and was at least five years in development. I'd expect the anticipation would be at least as hard to match.
Can you guess?
Half-Life 2.
Oh, and they did it again, to a lesser extent, with Team Fortress 2.
Now, it's possible Duke Nukem Forever may never be released. Maybe it will be a Windows Vista, and suck so much that most people would rather play Duke Nukem 3D.
But I see no reason why it couldn't be released, and be every bit what we expect -- especially when most of us don't have expectations much higher than yours.
What keeps the program from encrypting the whole backup repository, then demanding a key for that? Well, aside from what you said, there's the probability that the program will encrypt whatever it finds, and that the backup drive is unlikely to be plugged in at the time. It's not likely to keep encrypting things after the first time -- after all, as soon as you know you've been 0wned, the key should be gone -- but maybe it could anyway.
For backups, IMHO, the most secure way is to have a locked down backup server that runs some utility like Retrospect, Backup Exec, bru, or whatnot, and grabs the backups from machines via a dedicated client that supports encrypted connections. Pretty much. I used BackupPC last time I set this up.
This would be a good thing to include in a NAS-style device. I think Apple had a similar product, though I doubt it was designed not to trust the clients.
The downside is that the backup machine is a single point of failure -- it has the keys to everything you're backing up. But this doesn't matter if you're doing a full disk backup.
Only bad thing about backups -- only enterprise level tape drives have kept up with modern hard disk capacity So buy a hard drive.
This is hopefully a fairly common set of features, but what BackupPC did here was, aside from compressing all the files (bzip2), it pooled them by checksum across multiple backups. I believe it was even capable of hooking into rsync. Net result: Only the files which have changed get sent over the wire and stored.
Combined with ReiserFS for all the small files, and 60 gigs or so was plenty to backup a small office -- though we weren't doing applications and OSes.
So it's only, what, $100, $150 for a 500 gig drive? And the pool is across multiple clients, so if they all start with exactly the same Vista installation, most of that will be shared.
The problem is that a fresh install of Vista (Like most of the home users get with their recently bought PCs) is around 16GiB all by it self. A complete installed system (OS + Applications, etc...) is going to weight at least a couple of dozens GB. So what? Storage isn't that expensive -- and the smallest one there is 60 gigs, which should easily be able to hold it.
If the person doing the backup has a couple of TB storage (like I think, most of the/.ers) I see -- you didn't read it. That or you really didn't do the math.
Most people aren't going to have more than a hundred gigs or so of storage in their computer in the first place. Given a halfway-decent backup system -- one which uses hardlinks, as I mentioned before -- and yes, the OS might take half of the backup drive. It will not, however, need an additional half every incremental backup -- only every time the OS changes.
As most people aren't causing terabytes worth of change, it should be no problem to have many backups (as in, every day for the past few months) on a single, dirt-cheap external hard drive.
In MSFT's and even OS X time machine the default settings are to backup everything, the OS, applications etc. News flash: There are more than two backup programs in the universe.
for a home users that is just stupid. When was the last time you saw a home user reinstall an entire OS? How many home users still have all the application CDs needed?
For that matter, these are also things which don't change a lot. They shouldn't take up too much space in the backup, if you're using even a halfway-intelligent backup program -- both of the ones you mentioned at least do hardlinks.
The real danger here would be if the program actually corrupted the entire backup repository. For that to happen, it would have to know when your backup hard drive was plugged in -- and there are other ways of avoiding this, such as running backups over a network to a server with limited access.
This has been a real problem in the telecommunications field, which is probably why McCain is leery of further regulations without a clear and present case of abuse. There are several.
Even if everyone agrees on a definition of Net Neutrality (surprisingly difficult) and agrees that it's a good thing (also difficult) Not really, on both counts.
Bundling rollback inside a filesystem is one of the stupidest things that could be done to fs. Ok, you're right that the GP is stupid -- no filesystem a desktop user runs will have that transparent rollback. The closest might be "volume shadow copy", but I think that has to be done explicitly for every change you want to record.
But seriously, have you looked at FUSE lately? There's a filesystem for everything... And, historically, there are log-structured filesystems, which can, indeed, roll back any change that hasn't already been overwritten. That approach has nothing to do with inodes -- in fact, not all filesystems even have inodes.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Version control software and/or backups are designed for this purpose - and are filesystem agnostic (work with whatever fs suits your needs). As a philosophy, yes, they're FS agnostic. In reality, it depends very much on which you choose. What you probably want is incremental backups -- version control is nice, too, but it's mostly to protect you from yourself.
Wouldn't one person be able to pay of the extortion, and then give out the key to everyone else? All depends how it's implemented. One easy way would be to generate a random key, phone home with it, then destroy it on the local machine once the crypto is done -- so the key will be unique to the user.
Another way would be to have a finite (but still very large) number of keys to choose from, and store a checksum of the key on the local machine. If there were, say, a few thousand keys, it would still be enough to be unreasonable to try to "buy" them all, but it would also keep the payload down to maybe a few hundred kilobytes.
I kind of doubt that the key would be exactly the same for every instance of this.
Given properly rolling backups, you don't just keep dailies for the past month. You keep dailies for a week, and weeklies for a month, and monthlies for however long you have space for.
And given that most people work in files which are essentially text or the moral equivalent (Word docs, etc), it's likely that you do, in fact, have enough space for a very, very large number of backups.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's why I have the signature that I do.
Not every game interface -- I strongly suspect the PowerGlove is worthless. It's so bad. Virtual buttons have no tactile feedback Actually, they do. Not the iPhone, of course... yet. No reason to think it never will. They take up screen space, and what you have left is a graphically superior Gameboy Color. Gratz, you beat Nintendo c. 1998 I didn't realize Nintendo had 3D this good in 1998 -- or at all in a Gameboy. A bluetooth addon would either drain the iPhone battery faster, or require its own power source Am I missing something? Because I thought Bluetooth was a wireless protocol. I don't think we have wireless power yet, if such a thing can exist -- that would imply it would require its own power source.
Now, think about a simple IR TV remote. How long does that last? And often on AAA batteries?
It's not open until you put RockBox or Linux on it, and as I understand it, that's no easier or harder than jailbreaking an iPhone.
Nah, really should've been sold as Doom 4. ...which would be about the same thing. Never mind.
You can flame anything. Maybe it was Microsoft specifically targeting a Linux exploit? Maybe it was a driver, or a modification that is entirely the router manufacturer's fault?
I think the most telling thing about this is the danger of monoculture. When routers are only tested against specific versions of Windows... But that's not a flame, as there's no one entity you can blame for this. Good routers wouldn't have this problem.
What I mean is, I think it hooked into rsync such that it could actually do an incremental backup via rsync, mostly without unpacking the original files (I always kept those bzipped). Not sure, though.
That's right -- it means nearsighted. Your whine is that OLPC doesn't solve problems that exist right now -- while a project like OLPC does quite a bit more in the long term than yet another dependency-inducing aid package.
Maybe the word you were looking for is farsighted? I guess "fucking farsighted cunt" just doesn't have the same ring to it...
Back to the topic at hand: A quick Google shows: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced today $8.3 million in grants to help public libraries in 10 states provide quality access to computers and the Internet. So they can put "quality access" in 10 states (who wants to bet those are back home in the US of A), but not one cent for a project which would bring computers, period, to some of the poorest places in the world?
One guess what those library computers were running...
Can't track the article down right now, but I distinctly remember Bill G himself demoing some sort of cell phone crap that was meant to be an "answer" to the OLPC.
I'm not saying he's done nothing good for the world, but saying "his dream was of openness" is pretty moronic. His dream was many things, but it was not open.
Good for Vista.
How about a slow net connection? It was interesting how it seemed to use absolutely no bandwidth when paused, but a steady stream while running -- probably actually streamed, rather than "progressive download" or whatever they're calling it.
The difference is, of course, that an actual download, or Flash in YouTube mode, will happily cache the entire file while paused. So, if your connection is slower (or just less consistent) than the video, you could still watch. Is that true for this video?
I have fiber -- that's not the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is how pitifully slow Flash is at playing videos -- maybe it's just me, maybe it's just 64-bit Linux, but anytime I actually want to watch a video fullscreen, I look for an FLV download.
Since your streaming seems to require actual streaming, I can't seem to even use the Firebug trick -- so I had to watch it in a tiny chunk of a browser window, or watch it fullscreen in laaaggy HD.
So no, your video is absolutely horrible compared to Vimeo, which also has 720p h.264, but provides an un-DRM'd MOV download.
I still like YouTube for random browsing, but when I actually want decent quality, my favorite video site is Vimeo -- mostly because if you have an account (free), you can actually download videos. Not sure about the rest of them, but Wormtooth Nation in a 720p h.264 MOV was damned cool. (Still is -- final episode is Friday.)
Wouldn't be complete without a one-liner that sounds totally lame coming from me, but would rock in Jon St. John's voice:
"Shit. I'm gonna be here forever!"
Or something like that.
Delayed, over and over... Multiple trailers and gameplay videos shown, some with features that never made it into the actual game, most of which were just cool, and made you want the game now...
Original game was a bestseller, a genre-defining blockbuster, with the kind of ending that demands a sequel... Sequel came out ten years after the original, and was at least five years in development. I'd expect the anticipation would be at least as hard to match.
Can you guess?
Half-Life 2.
Oh, and they did it again, to a lesser extent, with Team Fortress 2.
Now, it's possible Duke Nukem Forever may never be released. Maybe it will be a Windows Vista, and suck so much that most people would rather play Duke Nukem 3D.
But I see no reason why it couldn't be released, and be every bit what we expect -- especially when most of us don't have expectations much higher than yours.
It actually plays perfectly well for me, but the performance is awful.
Does anyone have a downloadable version? Even FLV? Any player other than Flash would play it fine, even 720p, fullscreen.
some utility like Retrospect, Backup Exec, bru, or whatnot, and grabs the backups from machines via a dedicated client that supports encrypted connections. Pretty much. I used BackupPC last time I set this up.
This would be a good thing to include in a NAS-style device. I think Apple had a similar product, though I doubt it was designed not to trust the clients.
The downside is that the backup machine is a single point of failure -- it has the keys to everything you're backing up. But this doesn't matter if you're doing a full disk backup. Only bad thing about backups -- only enterprise level tape drives have kept up with modern hard disk capacity So buy a hard drive.
This is hopefully a fairly common set of features, but what BackupPC did here was, aside from compressing all the files (bzip2), it pooled them by checksum across multiple backups. I believe it was even capable of hooking into rsync. Net result: Only the files which have changed get sent over the wire and stored.
Combined with ReiserFS for all the small files, and 60 gigs or so was plenty to backup a small office -- though we weren't doing applications and OSes.
So it's only, what, $100, $150 for a 500 gig drive? And the pool is across multiple clients, so if they all start with exactly the same Vista installation, most of that will be shared.
Most people aren't going to have more than a hundred gigs or so of storage in their computer in the first place. Given a halfway-decent backup system -- one which uses hardlinks, as I mentioned before -- and yes, the OS might take half of the backup drive. It will not, however, need an additional half every incremental backup -- only every time the OS changes.
As most people aren't causing terabytes worth of change, it should be no problem to have many backups (as in, every day for the past few months) on a single, dirt-cheap external hard drive.
For that matter, these are also things which don't change a lot. They shouldn't take up too much space in the backup, if you're using even a halfway-intelligent backup program -- both of the ones you mentioned at least do hardlinks.
The real danger here would be if the program actually corrupted the entire backup repository. For that to happen, it would have to know when your backup hard drive was plugged in -- and there are other ways of avoiding this, such as running backups over a network to a server with limited access.
But seriously, have you looked at FUSE lately? There's a filesystem for everything... And, historically, there are log-structured filesystems, which can, indeed, roll back any change that hasn't already been overwritten. That approach has nothing to do with inodes -- in fact, not all filesystems even have inodes.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Version control software and/or backups are designed for this purpose - and are filesystem agnostic (work with whatever fs suits your needs). As a philosophy, yes, they're FS agnostic. In reality, it depends very much on which you choose. What you probably want is incremental backups -- version control is nice, too, but it's mostly to protect you from yourself.
Another way would be to have a finite (but still very large) number of keys to choose from, and store a checksum of the key on the local machine. If there were, say, a few thousand keys, it would still be enough to be unreasonable to try to "buy" them all, but it would also keep the payload down to maybe a few hundred kilobytes.
I kind of doubt that the key would be exactly the same for every instance of this.
Given properly rolling backups, you don't just keep dailies for the past month. You keep dailies for a week, and weeklies for a month, and monthlies for however long you have space for.
And given that most people work in files which are essentially text or the moral equivalent (Word docs, etc), it's likely that you do, in fact, have enough space for a very, very large number of backups.