I'm not sure that LogFS has anything to do with flash. jffs2 depends on whether the EEE is actually going to expose the raw flash to you, or whether there's a layer in the way that insists on pretending it's a hard disk.
Either way, ext2 seems like a very bad idea -- no journaling at all.
It's probably just a new initiation rite for the GNAA.
The truly sad thing is, it's shit like this that make people want to throw away the right to anonymity on the Internet. I guess we're stuck with the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, though.
Lets face it, a 3 Million dollar game would look like a uni science project, I don't get it.
Are you saying that a group of 5-10 university students, working for a semester, maybe a year, should be paid a total of 3 million dollars? That's at least some $300k each, for those not keeping track.
Or are you saying that a group of 5-10 university students, working for a semester or a year, would outperform the kind of development you could actually hire for 3 million?
BitTorrent has a couple of things going for it at this point:
For illegitimate traffic, you are reasonably safe by simply installing a PeerGuardian-esque plugin.
For legitimate traffic, it's going to be faster and easier to get up and running with a given torrent, and you can seed from your local filesystem -- you don't need to have a copy in the Freenet encrypted store and a copy that you can actually read.
And either way, you only seed what you want, when you want. With Freenet, you seed what the swarm wants you to, which is fairly random.
Now, if Freenet was decently fast, I'd rather use it than BitTorrent, but I'm the exception.
Seems to me there's a lot less pain involved in just dying.. Interesting that everyone always assumes that.
You know, one of the first things I tell suicidal people is that it won't necessarily take the pain away. No one knows what happens when you die. The best we can assume is that the brain stops functioning, in which case, it's probably instant unconscious nothingness.
Or it might be an eternity of intense pain -- in fact, many Christians believe that's exactly what awaits every non-Christian -- or even every Christian of a different faith.
You know, at least in fiction, a fair number of rape victims say things like "Kill me."
Now, it doesn't have to be either-or -- I imagine there was a fair bit of raping in the Holocaust, too. But swallow your Jewish pride for a moment -- there are things worse than death.
In any case, I do agree with the other poster here -- they are both unacceptable.
However, I would also consider the distribution of data -- of pictures, even -- to be nowhere near as bad as the act itself. That is why I support the idea of Freenet, although the implementation has sucked for awhile. Maybe 0.7 is better?
that is a dichotomy with two unacceptable outcomes. Why is it unacceptable to allow absolute freedom of speech in that way?
If your answer has to do with copyright infringement, every single technological measure attempted to stop it has failed. Try adding value to where we have an incentive to buy your product.
If your answer has to do with child pornography, keep in mind that the creation of it is still a crime. Go after that first, then worry about what to do with the images. The mere proliferation of data isn't what's harming those children, it's people.
The key is finding the one worthy of ruling. The problem is that power corrupts. While not absolutely true -- after all, I naively believe that I could be an effective ruler -- the real problem is that we can't know whether someone will abuse that power until they have it, and by then, it's too late. That, and most people are pretty pathetic judges of character -- otherwise, Bush would never have gotten a second term.
But to be an efficient and effective dictator you must be all-knowing and all-discerning. First, no, you don't -- you just need to delegate.
And second, I really hope "efficient and effective" isn't the only goal.
No, I think the function of a leader is not actually to rule, but to lead as long as people will follow. Take Linux -- Linus is an effective leader. If he ceases to be one, we're only a fork away from having a new leader. Much easier than in the real world, where the leaders all have real power over limited resources.
And I don't see how you have more latitude, other than the ability to free space (which makes sense). Sounds like something I'd have done.
I just liked the tech behind it... I remember when unionfs was the hot new thing, and now it's used in pretty much every livecd. For some reason, that tickles the geek in me.
Well, newer shooters will actually add a lot more to it. Things like snipers -- have to figure out where they are, and toss a grenade in there to flush them out. Or monsters that actually have decent AI, and coordinate an attack.
There's also the shooters that go beyond being purely a shooter -- like Natural Selection, which implements elements of an RTS.
Most upgrades can be done with USB nowadays. Define "upgrade". Hard drive upgrades can be done with USB. What else?
Notebooks usually employ power-saving features designed for longer battery life. Which they counter by sucking down ever more power. It can be fairly difficult to find a laptop that's deliberately less powerful and more power-efficient.
Also, once you start gaming, that's pretty much shot to hell.
You can use them on mostly on AC power, but save on energy, heat and noise anyways. Depends on the laptop. Mine has a large power brick that's actually noisier than my desktop sometimes. It's easier and cheaper to buy/build a quiet/efficient desktop than a gaming laptop, particularly a gaming laptop with good battery life.
Your machine has a built-in UPS and a somewhat shock-resistant HD From what I remember, desktop HDs are actually more shock-resistant than laptop ones. That said, some laptops will notice when they're being dropped, and park the HD -- most desktops won't.
And even while online, you don't have a rat's nest below your desk, but two cables lying around: mouse and AC power, nothing else. And Ethernet. And external keyboard, since most laptop keyboards suck. And another monitor, depending on your work -- so add another power cable and a DVI cable. And any USB things you plug in -- you mention "USB upgrades".
At which point, you really may as well have a desktop -- power, ethernet, keyboard, mouse, monitor. Pretty much the same.
You can work or game on the couch, in bed, in the garden or on boring business trips. That's a reason to have a laptop, maybe, but not necessarily a gaming laptop. On boring business trips, I'd rather have something that can play video for 4 hours than something that can game for 50 minutes.
All on the same machine as usual, so you don't have reconfigure your machine or adapt your motor skills. My motor skills are already adapted -- and, for that matter, I actually use the same keyboard and mouse with my laptop and desktop. The only time I use anything else is when I use the built-in keyboard on the laptop when actually on the couch -- but as I said, laptop keyboards suck, so I'll only use that when I have to.
People usually don't more than 120GB of data with them at all times, not even with Vista. The games you actually plan to play, some music and some applications should remain below 100 GB. It's nice not to have to manage them so much, though. I have my music in Flac, and I'll often have some high-def shows on there.
What's your argument for a desktop? In addition to the above, there's the fact that I can more easily get a desktop without an OS, and with my own selection of hardware that I'm fairly sure will work with Linux. And I've still got a legit copy of XP, which continues to work as long as it's still the same machine.
And it doubles as a NAS, for when I do have my laptop here. Add a tuner card and a decent monitor, and put a couch in the same room, and it's also a TV/PVR.
Now, for what it's worth, I do have a laptop capable of gaming. It's a work laptop. And I do agree with most of your points -- particularly nice for LAN parties, and for the built-in UPS. But I don't know if it will ever completely replace a desktop, and I'm really liking the idea of an EEE PC -- gaming laptops, as a rule, aren't nearly as portable as other laptops that will fill every single other role I wanted a laptop for other than gaming.
Also, while it is nice to be able to walk over to the LAN party with my gaming machine on my back, it's not as essential when most of the time, there are enough other people going to the LAN party that I can get a ride for myself and my desktop.
Last I checked, this is how all capitalist businesses operate, and you can't really fault them for attempting to promote their product. I can, however, fault their methods for promoting their product.
Oh, and there's the whole convicted monopoly part. Convicted monopolies are supposed to play by different rules.
Did I read that right?...So that's how they do it. The original OS can be in one folder, which is then unionfs-mounted over another folder, so that you can change anything you like, and still be able to trivially revert. Cool.
If that really worked, Linux would've been an instant hit long ago. Windows is easy to use, thus it's a toy -- on Linux, you have to use a command line! Real Men use Linux!
Ease of use was once Windows' strength, and is now Linux's weakness? WTF?
As opposed to examining some unusable GUI an OSS developer slapped together with what last week's trendy widget library was ? Let me guess -- you're on Windows. Go play with InfraRecorder. It's pretty much as easy to use as any other burner, and has a higher probability of "just working" in my experience. Specifically, whenever the built-in shiny looking and unusable GUI fails, I install InfraRecorder, and that works.
Or, you know, try a modern Ubuntu. Burning is trivially easy, and does, in fact, have a nice GUI.
Hilarious that you chose RedHat, because that's pretty much proof to the contrary.
In particular, Debian (and, by extension, Ubuntu) often steal ideas and code from RedHat, when said ideas and code are open source.
How easy is it to create a competition to, say, gcc? That is not because of the GPL, that's because writing compilers are hard. And that said, there are a few competitors -- I believe Intel has their own C compiler for Linux. And there are at least a few other languages which have entirely different compilers targeting the same platform -- Haskell, for example, has ghc, which has no relation to gcc.
But I will take you seriously if you can show that any model other than the GPL will do better in this circumstance.
Oh, and because I can: OpenOffice, you would think, would be a bigger and harder target than a C compiler. Indeed, it's a hell of a lot more code (and RAM wastage) -- and yet, we have individual projects like AbiWord and Gnumeric, and whole separate office suites like KOffice. And because of the GPL, these don't even have to waste effort -- anything that's done properly in one can be copied by the other.
Friends list -- essentially an IM client which allows me to join whatever game a friend happens to be playing in a few clicks. None of this reading IP addresses over the phone stuff we used to do.
Achievements. Auto-updates. Very cheap games, low barrier of entry for indie games -- competes directly with Xbox Live Arcade.
On top of that, there's the ability to re-download the game, from their servers, as many times as I like, and in as many places as I like -- and to make my own backups, if bandwidth is scarce.
You should read up on Mass Effect, the topic at hand.
Actually, looking up the message chain, harl was talking about Stardock. I was talking about how Steam provides similar features.
What value is being added by restricting usage?
I didn't say that. Read it again:
Steam actually adds value with their service. True, the service doesn't actually depend on DRM, but it makes the DRM so painless and incidental it's like bitching that WoW has a monthly fee.
Steam adds value with things like the ability to re-download as many times as I like. Most of the pain of most other DRM schemes is completely irrelevant.
You've still yet to offer a single argument that the extra restrictions of Steam are some how better than no restrictions.
Ah, I see. You thought I was going to make that argument.
No, what I'm arguing is that Steam with those restrictions is often better than non-Steam with no restrictions. You've somehow made the leap to thinking I was arguing that the DRM itself added anything -- although it does seem unlikely that anyone would try a service like Steam without DRM.
In other words: I made my point several posts ago, and you missed it, because you were looking for a different point entirely. Sorry about that.
Being forced into running windows is off topic.
Not really. Try to keep up...
The reason I really dislike DRM on media is that it actually is defective by design -- it takes away certain basic things that I might like to do with said media. It restricts it to certain OSes, certain hardware, etc, and there's no way that a DRM'd chunk of media (movie, song, etc) can give me as much freedom as an un-DRM'd chunk of media.
This is the same reason I dislike DRM on most games. Bioshock, Mass Effect, and others, add restrictions like a three-install limit. This is a pretty clear case -- if they did not have that restriction, I would be able to install more times. So they are removing value with DRM.
Other games do similar things -- requiring that I always have the original CD, for example.
And in the above scenarios, the legally-purchased product is often of lower value than a cracked, pirated version.
Now, enter Steam. Here, unless I'm missing something, here are the restrictions the DRM imposes:
I can't play more than one copy of the game at once -- which I can't physically do, unless I'm sharing with a friend, aka pirating.
I can't install the game without being online to register -- which is fine by me, since I always buy Steam games online anyway.
I have to run it on the platform they choose. That means x86 Windows or Wine -- or, recently, x86_64 Windows, if I'm masochistic. (64-bit Windows sucks.) But I already had to do that in order to play the game. The only real way around that would be if they released source code.
I have to remember a username and password. But in order to buy pretty much any game, I have to at least remember a credit card number, right?
I can't install the game on a Samba share. I've got nothing -- this is a genuinely stupid restriction, which, while it doesn't affect me currently, I still think it should be possible to do this.
Unless I'm missing something, the one restriction that DRM imposes that could really cause problems is lack of support for being installed on a network share. I can live with that.
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I'm not sure that LogFS has anything to do with flash. jffs2 depends on whether the EEE is actually going to expose the raw flash to you, or whether there's a layer in the way that insists on pretending it's a hard disk.
Either way, ext2 seems like a very bad idea -- no journaling at all.
It's probably just a new initiation rite for the GNAA.
The truly sad thing is, it's shit like this that make people want to throw away the right to anonymity on the Internet. I guess we're stuck with the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, though.
Well, if we can slow it down that much, I'd imagine we could use the same tricks to correct its orbit.
Somehow, I'm not that bothered by it -- how much does the moon weigh? It's often over your house, right?
Are you saying that a group of 5-10 university students, working for a semester, maybe a year, should be paid a total of 3 million dollars? That's at least some $300k each, for those not keeping track.
Or are you saying that a group of 5-10 university students, working for a semester or a year, would outperform the kind of development you could actually hire for 3 million?
Not likely.
BitTorrent has a couple of things going for it at this point:
For illegitimate traffic, you are reasonably safe by simply installing a PeerGuardian-esque plugin.
For legitimate traffic, it's going to be faster and easier to get up and running with a given torrent, and you can seed from your local filesystem -- you don't need to have a copy in the Freenet encrypted store and a copy that you can actually read.
And either way, you only seed what you want, when you want. With Freenet, you seed what the swarm wants you to, which is fairly random.
Now, if Freenet was decently fast, I'd rather use it than BitTorrent, but I'm the exception.
You know, one of the first things I tell suicidal people is that it won't necessarily take the pain away. No one knows what happens when you die. The best we can assume is that the brain stops functioning, in which case, it's probably instant unconscious nothingness.
Or it might be an eternity of intense pain -- in fact, many Christians believe that's exactly what awaits every non-Christian -- or even every Christian of a different faith.
You know, at least in fiction, a fair number of rape victims say things like "Kill me."
Now, it doesn't have to be either-or -- I imagine there was a fair bit of raping in the Holocaust, too. But swallow your Jewish pride for a moment -- there are things worse than death.
In any case, I do agree with the other poster here -- they are both unacceptable.
However, I would also consider the distribution of data -- of pictures, even -- to be nowhere near as bad as the act itself. That is why I support the idea of Freenet, although the implementation has sucked for awhile. Maybe 0.7 is better?
If your answer has to do with copyright infringement, every single technological measure attempted to stop it has failed. Try adding value to where we have an incentive to buy your product.
If your answer has to do with child pornography, keep in mind that the creation of it is still a crime. Go after that first, then worry about what to do with the images. The mere proliferation of data isn't what's harming those children, it's people. The key is finding the one worthy of ruling. The problem is that power corrupts. While not absolutely true -- after all, I naively believe that I could be an effective ruler -- the real problem is that we can't know whether someone will abuse that power until they have it, and by then, it's too late. That, and most people are pretty pathetic judges of character -- otherwise, Bush would never have gotten a second term. But to be an efficient and effective dictator you must be all-knowing and all-discerning. First, no, you don't -- you just need to delegate.
And second, I really hope "efficient and effective" isn't the only goal.
No, I think the function of a leader is not actually to rule, but to lead as long as people will follow. Take Linux -- Linus is an effective leader. If he ceases to be one, we're only a fork away from having a new leader. Much easier than in the real world, where the leaders all have real power over limited resources.
Another question, then... ext2? Not ext3?
And I don't see how you have more latitude, other than the ability to free space (which makes sense). Sounds like something I'd have done.
I just liked the tech behind it... I remember when unionfs was the hot new thing, and now it's used in pretty much every livecd. For some reason, that tickles the geek in me.
And the spiders, at one point in the game, until you manage to seal them off.
Melee range is what the Shotgun is for. In fact, when I probably knew where one would appear, I would switch to a Shotgun.
Well, newer shooters will actually add a lot more to it. Things like snipers -- have to figure out where they are, and toss a grenade in there to flush them out. Or monsters that actually have decent AI, and coordinate an attack.
There's also the shooters that go beyond being purely a shooter -- like Natural Selection, which implements elements of an RTS.
Well, and the atmosphere, and the "scary as hell" factor.
As long as you still have the lighting, it's still got those. Which means that unless you need to play it on a Voodoo3, you're fine.
Given that John Carmack actually came out against raytracing, at least as a viable alternative to rastering for game engines, I doubt it.
Also, once you start gaming, that's pretty much shot to hell. You can use them on mostly on AC power, but save on energy, heat and noise anyways. Depends on the laptop. Mine has a large power brick that's actually noisier than my desktop sometimes. It's easier and cheaper to buy/build a quiet/efficient desktop than a gaming laptop, particularly a gaming laptop with good battery life. Your machine has a built-in UPS and a somewhat shock-resistant HD From what I remember, desktop HDs are actually more shock-resistant than laptop ones. That said, some laptops will notice when they're being dropped, and park the HD -- most desktops won't. And even while online, you don't have a rat's nest below your desk, but two cables lying around: mouse and AC power, nothing else. And Ethernet. And external keyboard, since most laptop keyboards suck. And another monitor, depending on your work -- so add another power cable and a DVI cable. And any USB things you plug in -- you mention "USB upgrades".
At which point, you really may as well have a desktop -- power, ethernet, keyboard, mouse, monitor. Pretty much the same. You can work or game on the couch, in bed, in the garden or on boring business trips. That's a reason to have a laptop, maybe, but not necessarily a gaming laptop. On boring business trips, I'd rather have something that can play video for 4 hours than something that can game for 50 minutes. All on the same machine as usual, so you don't have reconfigure your machine or adapt your motor skills. My motor skills are already adapted -- and, for that matter, I actually use the same keyboard and mouse with my laptop and desktop. The only time I use anything else is when I use the built-in keyboard on the laptop when actually on the couch -- but as I said, laptop keyboards suck, so I'll only use that when I have to. People usually don't more than 120GB of data with them at all times, not even with Vista. The games you actually plan to play, some music and some applications should remain below 100 GB. It's nice not to have to manage them so much, though. I have my music in Flac, and I'll often have some high-def shows on there. What's your argument for a desktop? In addition to the above, there's the fact that I can more easily get a desktop without an OS, and with my own selection of hardware that I'm fairly sure will work with Linux. And I've still got a legit copy of XP, which continues to work as long as it's still the same machine.
And it doubles as a NAS, for when I do have my laptop here. Add a tuner card and a decent monitor, and put a couch in the same room, and it's also a TV/PVR.
Now, for what it's worth, I do have a laptop capable of gaming. It's a work laptop. And I do agree with most of your points -- particularly nice for LAN parties, and for the built-in UPS. But I don't know if it will ever completely replace a desktop, and I'm really liking the idea of an EEE PC -- gaming laptops, as a rule, aren't nearly as portable as other laptops that will fill every single other role I wanted a laptop for other than gaming.
Also, while it is nice to be able to walk over to the LAN party with my gaming machine on my back, it's not as essential when most of the time, there are enough other people going to the LAN party that I can get a ride for myself and my desktop.
Remember the spiders? Definitely could end up with lots of monsters.
Oh, and there's the whole convicted monopoly part. Convicted monopolies are supposed to play by different rules.
Assuming you can even run it off the battery.
Most external drives need to be plugged in, which, to me, defeats the whole point of having additional storage in a laptop.
Did I read that right? ...So that's how they do it. The original OS can be in one folder, which is then unionfs-mounted over another folder, so that you can change anything you like, and still be able to trivially revert. Cool.
If that really worked, Linux would've been an instant hit long ago. Windows is easy to use, thus it's a toy -- on Linux, you have to use a command line! Real Men use Linux!
Ease of use was once Windows' strength, and is now Linux's weakness? WTF?
Or, you know, try a modern Ubuntu. Burning is trivially easy, and does, in fact, have a nice GUI.
And if you're still reading: Anyone can fork gcc. Instant competition. And because of the GPL, no one in charge of gcc can do anything to stop it.
In particular, Debian (and, by extension, Ubuntu) often steal ideas and code from RedHat, when said ideas and code are open source. How easy is it to create a competition to, say, gcc? That is not because of the GPL, that's because writing compilers are hard. And that said, there are a few competitors -- I believe Intel has their own C compiler for Linux. And there are at least a few other languages which have entirely different compilers targeting the same platform -- Haskell, for example, has ghc, which has no relation to gcc.
But I will take you seriously if you can show that any model other than the GPL will do better in this circumstance.
Oh, and because I can: OpenOffice, you would think, would be a bigger and harder target than a C compiler. Indeed, it's a hell of a lot more code (and RAM wastage) -- and yet, we have individual projects like AbiWord and Gnumeric, and whole separate office suites like KOffice. And because of the GPL, these don't even have to waste effort -- anything that's done properly in one can be copied by the other.
Oh, they don't. The Platypus is both insane and good.
However, Moses' Law is insane, but not good.
What features?
Friends list -- essentially an IM client which allows me to join whatever game a friend happens to be playing in a few clicks. None of this reading IP addresses over the phone stuff we used to do.
Achievements. Auto-updates. Very cheap games, low barrier of entry for indie games -- competes directly with Xbox Live Arcade.
On top of that, there's the ability to re-download the game, from their servers, as many times as I like, and in as many places as I like -- and to make my own backups, if bandwidth is scarce.
You should read up on Mass Effect, the topic at hand.
Actually, looking up the message chain, harl was talking about Stardock. I was talking about how Steam provides similar features.
What value is being added by restricting usage?
I didn't say that. Read it again:
Steam actually adds value with their service. True, the service doesn't actually depend on DRM, but it makes the DRM so painless and incidental it's like bitching that WoW has a monthly fee.
Steam adds value with things like the ability to re-download as many times as I like. Most of the pain of most other DRM schemes is completely irrelevant.
You've still yet to offer a single argument that the extra restrictions of Steam are some how better than no restrictions.
Ah, I see. You thought I was going to make that argument.
No, what I'm arguing is that Steam with those restrictions is often better than non-Steam with no restrictions. You've somehow made the leap to thinking I was arguing that the DRM itself added anything -- although it does seem unlikely that anyone would try a service like Steam without DRM.
In other words: I made my point several posts ago, and you missed it, because you were looking for a different point entirely. Sorry about that.
Being forced into running windows is off topic.
Not really. Try to keep up...
The reason I really dislike DRM on media is that it actually is defective by design -- it takes away certain basic things that I might like to do with said media. It restricts it to certain OSes, certain hardware, etc, and there's no way that a DRM'd chunk of media (movie, song, etc) can give me as much freedom as an un-DRM'd chunk of media.
This is the same reason I dislike DRM on most games. Bioshock, Mass Effect, and others, add restrictions like a three-install limit. This is a pretty clear case -- if they did not have that restriction, I would be able to install more times. So they are removing value with DRM.
Other games do similar things -- requiring that I always have the original CD, for example.
And in the above scenarios, the legally-purchased product is often of lower value than a cracked, pirated version.
Now, enter Steam. Here, unless I'm missing something, here are the restrictions the DRM imposes:
I can't play more than one copy of the game at once -- which I can't physically do, unless I'm sharing with a friend, aka pirating.
I can't install the game without being online to register -- which is fine by me, since I always buy Steam games online anyway.
I have to run it on the platform they choose. That means x86 Windows or Wine -- or, recently, x86_64 Windows, if I'm masochistic. (64-bit Windows sucks.) But I already had to do that in order to play the game. The only real way around that would be if they released source code.
I have to remember a username and password. But in order to buy pretty much any game, I have to at least remember a credit card number, right?
I can't install the game on a Samba share. I've got nothing -- this is a genuinely stupid restriction, which, while it doesn't affect me currently, I still think it should be possible to do this.
Unless I'm missing something, the one restriction that DRM imposes that could really cause problems is lack of support for being installed on a network share. I can live with that.