Next time I buy a hard drive, if Hitachi, Maxtor, Western Digital, Dell, etc, has it for $5.99 cheaper -- the same amount of space; I'll be checking per byte -- guess where my money goes?
With hard drives, I have pretty much no brand loyalty. If the drive fails, and it's under warranty, I get a new one, and if I wasn't backed up, that's my fault. If the drive fails, and I'm not under warranty, great excuse to get more space. I try to pay attention to reviews, etc, even the little Newegg things, but frankly, a hard drive's a hard drive -- it's pretty well commoditized now. I'll be paying much more attention to things like video cards and processors, even RAM.
From the parents' point of view, it may not make a difference, but shame on you for saying this:
From the parents' point of view, it's a moot point whether content is shipped unlocked or trivially locked.
With Manhunt, maybe. With Oblivion, sorry, NO.
The offending content in Oblivion was not ever shipped in Oblivion. It wasn't "trivially locked". It was completely absent from the game, until someone added it -- as an optional, third-party mod.
To make it simpler, I'll use a car analogy: Manhunt is like a moped that comes with some sort of cap -- a physical device that can be removed, which was put there to limit how fast the engine can go. Oblivion is more like a cheap sedan -- ok, yes, it COULD be tricked out with Nitrous Oxide. But right now, it's just a cheap sedan. That old Lincoln Town Car could have rocket engines strapped to it -- in fact, someone has done so -- but until you do, it's relatively safe.
Now, I'd even go so far as to say that Manhunt should be covered here, as both unlocking and modding are generally going to be trivial. At least, once someone's done it once, it will be trivial to whoever. But the fact remains: Manhunt contained this content, even if it was locked. Oblivion did not.
It was a fun part of the game, and I can understand people thinking, "Aw, I don't want to burn it after it helped me reach the end of this level," but the kind of affection I'm seeing around the internet now is just unhealthy.
That's the point. It's ironic, because GlaDOS mentions exactly these symptoms. "We would like to take this opportunity to remind you that the Weighted Companion Cube cannot speak. If the Weighted Companion Cube does speak, we suggest that you disregard its advice."
People are begging for information about where they can buy a WCC t-shirt, or a scale model to have on their desk. There are hundreds of wallpapers featuring the cube, with additional hearts and even poems written by people I hope never to encounter. It's scary, and it's wrong.
Missing the point again. That's just All Your Base all over again.
Would anyone care about it at all if the texture were the same as every other cube, and GLaDOS didn't mention it during the boss fight?
I would, given that GlaDOS does mention it (as I said) while you are progressing through that level.
Also, go listen to the commentary about it. This was deliberate -- they wanted to make sure you didn't leave it behind in the first part, so they made you like it. "Please take care of it."
So good I've played through (all the way) probably two and a half times in one weekend. Spend $50 on Orange Box, haven't played the rest of it (Ep 2), but Portal alone makes it worth it.
However, this is HARD to do, especially hard to do consistently. Event harder to make it fit in with a plot -- how many plots can a handheld portal-making device really fit into?
You'd be hard pressed to get me to spend $25 to play a game that has a storyline, because it's wasted money after the story is complete.
Same could be said for movies, except I find a game is a lot more replayable than a movie. Especially a good game. Especially with online content.
Recently, I spent $50 on the Orange Box. That's Portal, a short, replayable game with a story -- but despite the story, it's just fun to play, and I'm sure we'll see custom maps for it soon. It's also Team Fortress 2, a multiplayer game, though maybe not "casual".
And it's also got Half-Life 2 and Episodes 1 and 2 -- purely single-player, story-driven games. And good enough that I find them replayable.
And a demo for Peggle, an arcade, Breakout-ish game. And probably a few more -- for $50, I call it a pretty good deal.
Or, of course, you could just grab an Xbox 360, or a PC with decent Internet and maybe Steam, and only buy the cheap games. Peggle, above, is $10. Portal is $20, by itself. I think Lugaru is $20, but VERY addictive and replayable, despite being "story-driven". And of course, there are things like Geometry Wars (though I've never played it).
Break the content up over a few games and I'll buy 'em one piece at a time, but don't make them updates, each would have to be a standalone title I'd be able to pick up and play for a few hours. At those prices you'd be competing with movies, and have my attention for at least twice as long.
Star Trek, mostly, was meant to be stand-alone, with the occasional two-part. TNG is like this. I think Voyager was mostly like this -- it allowed for character development, but almost never a serious, long-term change to the ship as a whole.
And DS9 was completely different. There may have been stand-alone episodes, but as a whole, it was a bigger story.
Firefly was kind of the best of both worlds. You could jump in anywhere and have fun, but you'd get a lot more out of it watching beginning to end (including the movie).
But Firefly is rare. It's hard to be that good at any one aspect of Firefly, even assuming it's a TV show. You're wanting a game that good -- a game in which you can buy tiny pieces (for $10 or $20), such that each stands alone -- but for it to be worth it, it really should have a bigger picture.
Why do I say this? Well... DS9 is widely considered the best Star Trek series, or at least the best after TOS (because everyone loves nostalgia), just as Enterprise is widely considered the worst, assuming they even acknowledge it as Star Trek. And the most unique thing about DS9 was its story arc.
But maybe Portal is kind of what you want -- the entire game lasts probably less than 10 hours, and while the story is awesome and often hilarious, it's also completely unnecessary. I don't imagine a sequel would be worse.
if your software matches your business methods, then releasing everything reduce your competitive advantage
If I may ridiculously oversimplify things:
AT&T gave us C.
Or, something that might be easier to understand:
Is Excel really meant to fit the business in question? No, it's a generic tool. I think it's a crappy one, but it's possible to have good generic tools. Thus, if a company invented the first spreadsheet to use internally, it might be in their best interest to release it as open, unless they really wanted to get into the software business.
That doesn't mean they have to release their spreadsheets.
This could be done in MANY other places. Accounting, taxes, inventory management, etc... All of which, once open, can certainly be tweaked within a company, without those custom patches ever seeing the light of day. But any code shared that doesn't expose trade secrets about your business is both good, generic code, and an opportunity for someone else to improve your business.
you can always reboot/reload it on a regular basis ( i reboot mine daily, the actual system is not writable unless you physically flip a swtich, only the swap and logs are writeable ) to mitigate any compromises that may have occurred.
Granted, that is more secure than a desktop.
I also think there's not a lot of point to it, if you're running pretty much the same OS (without the hardening) behind the firewall. If the desktop OS is "full of holes", I'd imagine that most of these holes -- at least the ones you'd have a prayer of stopping with a "hardware" firewall -- are holes which could as easily be exploited to simply pass connections through as to install something locally. And if they can pass a connection through, they're now in your main box.
I think that pretty much counters your point here:
If your firewall is compromised like this your workstation isn't automatically toast.
But that has nothing to do with it being "hardware". If it was simply a standard desktop/server OS at the firewall, you get the same protection -- and only assuming the same exploit that got them into the firewall won't get them into your desktop.
Sure, you can reboot it -- but if, as you say:
without the ability to update via software is even better
Great, how much are you going to update it?
If I find a vulnerability, and you simply reboot it the next day, fine, I'll punch through the next day, too. And every day, until you apply an update. Wouldn't you rather those updates happen faster?
I'd also argue that, if a desktop OS is secure enough to include in a firewall (Linux), then there is, in fact, a very good reason for running a firewall on your desktop. For one thing, it lets you take it to insecure networks -- great for a laptop. For another, it means you don't have to immediately freak out when a friend plugs in behind your firewall. Doesn't mean you have to turn off that firewall, though.
The liklihood of power going completely out such that a projector cannot be powered are quite a bit less than an Internet going dead.
Given that you can download a read-only copy of the presentation ahead of time, what is the likelihood that:
Every copy of the presentation you made ahead of time will be dead.
You won't be able to find any working (even marginally working) Internet in the hotel before the show, or the next day.
You'll actually need to make that last second change in the first place.
I still think that Internet could be reliable enough -- certainly is in the board room -- but if I understand it, the biggest weakness here is that you can't work on it while on a plane. I'd still use some other, open source client-side app (probably KPresenter, maybe write my own), but I don't think Google's spreadsheets are so completely a bad idea as to never be feasable -- and being able to easily share docs online is a very nice feature, too.
Hell, anything I'd present in front of a crowd now probably doesn't fit that anyway.
If it is a slow dying of the device then you don't take the device.
And again, suppose this happens for the first time in front of an audience?
That's not only dead time, it looks stupid, too. You have to explain how you didn't mean for it to look that way, etc etc.
I'm not talking about CPU power, I'm talking about electricity.
If I had an eight-core system, and I had to leave it on for some reason -- BitTorrent, say -- it could easily drop to some 500 mhz per core, if it was properly designed, and still use even less power (electricity!) for each of those 500,000 cycles that were not used.
Try running SETI on a modern laptop for more than about two minutes, and you'll get a very real demonstration of how this works. SETI on means the machine is not idle, means it will be scorchingly hot, and no longer a "lap" top. Leave it idle, and it might give you an extra hour (or two, or three) of battery life, while actually being cool enough to hold in your lap.
Yes, I like a good movie, and I won't say one is better than the other. I will say that I have seen brilliant storytelling done (HL being one example of this) in first person. However, you do need to pay attention.
And I have also seen cut scenes that just made the rest of the game worth playing, more real and personal.
I think what we're seeing here is a fundamentally different medium. Movies (cut scenes) and games are two completely different ways of telling stories, and I don't think you can really say one is better than the other -- only that you like one better than the other, or more importantly, that you like a particular game (or cutscene, or game+cutscenes) better than another.
Being able to crouch, jump, and run in circles while exposition happens isn't any more fun than just watching a pre-rendered movie.
You apparently haven't found the little things they leave you to do -- for example, in HL2 "Red Letter Day", there is a mini version of the teleporter you're about to use on a desk somewhere. You could easily spend most of that time playing with setting various items on that teleporter and testing it out. Or climbing on boxes.
I did appreciate one technique used for most of Portal, though -- a voice talks to you without interrupting you at all (mostly). By simply being fast enough, you can, in fact, skip large chunks of dialog (if you want to), though you're not likely that fast the first time through.
I also appreciate it a LOT for the shorter sequences. Nothing more jarring than grabbing control from you for ten seconds, then giving it back -- or more frustrating the second time through, even if you can skip it.
Cut scenes were originally used to fowward the plot in games because the computational power to render those scenes was not available in a real-time system.
Maybe so, but...
It stands to reason that as computers became more powerful, the reliance on pre-rendered cut-scenes would diminish. For evidence, look at HL2: almost no cut-scenes at all.
Come on, you've played Half-Life 2, but not 1? It's, what, $9.95 on Steam, now?
Half-Life 1 proved definitively that you could have a relatively deep plot not only without pre-rendered cutscenes, but almost entirely without pre-scripted sequences, too. Beginning and end battles, sure, but the plot does develop subtly between them, without having to interrupt the gameplay (much) to do it. Take the houndeyes in kennels...
Yes, you were forced into a certain path. But I'd argue it takes a lot more finesse to leave the UI alone and force the player along that path by sheer circumstance, rather than just grabbing them by the face, slapping black bars across the scene, and saying "You! Player! You go here now."
I'd almost argue that Half-Life was better at that than Half-Life 2 or its "episodes".
Half-Life 1, 2, and Episode 1 had probably five cutscenes between them.
Wait, let me count...
One in Half-Life, two in Half-Life 2, maybe two in Episode 1.
Oh, sure, there are times you could classify as a cutscene, but you absolutely do have control of your player. It's still "on rails" in that it's a linear game, and that sometimes you really do have to wait a bit for the plot to develop, but you can always go play with the miniature teleporter while they're talking, or something similar.
Haven't played Episode 2, yet, but only two in Portal.
And I wouldn't really count the "cutscenes" as such, I'm only saying they technically are, as the player has absolutely zero control. But I'd argue that yes, you do have full control over Gordon Freeman (or <<Subject Name Here>> in Portal), they just don't have full control of themselves at the time. (If I was being glomped by Alyx Vance, I'm not sure I could move much, either.)
I used to do this, until I realized that leaving my processor idle means less heat, less power usage, and a longer life.
Now, maybe if it wasn't my computer -- for example, Amazon EC2, Flexiscale, even just a cheap host that's neglected to include power requirements in their spec. On our EC2 machines, I can imagine that we'd want to always have a certain amount idle, and I see no problem pegging that with distributed.net, SETI, whatever. We'd also probably leave them on slightly longer than we need them, as they take longer to start than they do to kill.
But the essential difference there is: Amazon charges us the same rate per virtual machine whether or not we're actually using it. My power company absolutely does charge me more, so I won't be doing this in my own house. I'd rather just donate money to someone running this on a PS3.
"I can never know for sure that the experience will be the same each time I run the app."
So what do you do if the power goes out? Your laptop runs on batteries; does the projector?
What do you do if your laptop's hard drive dies? Or your RAM slowly starts to go bad?
Hell, what if your video card does this thing my old ATI started to do -- as it overheats, slowly start having a random checkerboard effect in various onscreen elements?
You even seem to admit this yourself:
On my machine, I know... that a well-done app will most likely perform as it should each and every time.
I realize that, in many places, you're going to need an offline version. That's in TFS -- while you can't edit it, you can download a copy to play. While you may have to make last-minute corrections, you really shouldn't be in that situation anyway -- and let's look at TFS:
The Splunkers would need to finalize their presos early in the morning in a rented conference room, where both Wi-Fi and Verizon wireless cards have been known to fail.
Keep in mind, you can always save one copy when you think you're done, then, if you get a chance to make last-minute changes, you can download a new version. If not, you still have the old one.
This actually sounds a lot like how I've seen many people do PowerPoint -- they'll always have some old version burned on a CD somewhere, or saved on a flash drive, just in case they have to borrow a computer.
I'll acknowledge that most Internet is less reliable than a given hard drive, but I think it's gotten to where it's reliable enough. After all, if you wanted the best possible reliability, you'd use a dedicated device with a video out, a couple USB ports, and some flash, not a full computer.
Enough to discover that this article is by someone who has absolutely no clue about OS X firewalls or security. Several of the responses here are pretty much the same.
PortSentry, if I understand, is to protect you from people doing portscans on you. While useful, that really doesn't seem anywhere near as essential as having a working firewall to begin with.
And you're right not to trust Norton -- that would likely make you LESS secure.
Personally, I run Linux with no firewall. I figure, by the time I need it (rather than simply refusing packets), I'm already 0wned. But dig through the comments a bit more, and you'll find that no matter what my personal beliefs are about firewalls, this one really is fine, if you need one. (I seem to remember leaving it on by default, since OS X never made it difficult for me to open the ports I needed.)
If anything, we should be laughing at the people who report nmap's "open|filtered" state as if it were a problem -- as if it were somehow open. At people who are writing an article about security, yet don't appear to understand how UDP works.
And, especially, at an article blatantly cashing in on Leopard's release -- if these are "flaws", they are just about exactly the same "flaws" that exist in Tiger.
I really appreciated that, because it showed that, like most of Hollywood, these writers only know enough to be dangerous -- but unlike most of Hollywood, they're stopping with what they know.
This after losing all respect for Law & Order: "He's using an encrypted IP address, so I can't trace him directly, but I can put up a trace program, so that the next time he goes online, visits a website, we'll see the same encrypted IP address, and be able to trace him." (This is almost certainly filtered through my own understanding to make somewhat more sense. Trust me, the real one was much worse.)
Well, first, I completely switched from IT to programming, but that's a bit beside the point.
The company I work for did hire me, in part, because of my Linux skills (and my promise to not be a zealot). We have a NAS device on-site -- basically a hard drive with a Samba server in it. Our ISP gives us fiber and a router/wireless. That's it -- everything just works.
Or rather, everything else has been outsourced. We pay one site to host our SVN repository and Trac bugs/wiki, we pay Google to host our email, and we pay Amazon to host our website -- that's S3 and EC2.
However, it does mean there's a new niche: Amazon EC2 is basically cheap Linux/Xen virtual machines, on demand. But that's it. No automatic Beowulf cluster, no load balancing, nothing of the sort. As no one has actually put together a really good package for this, I can still be useful writing scripts to spawn new instances (VMs) when load gets to high, drop them when load is acceptable, I can set up a load balancer, update the DNS to a new one if the old load balancer goes down, I can find ways to replicate data between them, and so on.
Basically, although admin is a much smaller part of my job, it's gone from admining one machine at a time (a fileserver here, webserver there, panic when the firewall dies and steal a desktop to build a new one, etc) to admining a cluster.
And if you were ever good with tools like cfengine, etc, you can probably adapt and find a similar job. Maybe even a job hacking on MySQL cluster, or (pretty please?) making Postgres able to operate as a cluster...
Every time I explain net neutrality to someone, I always have to explain how the phrase has been hijacked, and now means two opposite things.
Geeks think net neutrality means "Be neutral with our network traffic," and would interpret this to mean that there should be a law preventing this kind of bullshit from ISPs. This is the original definition, but much like "hacker", the original definition is somewhat less relevant than which definition the layperson, and especially the congressperson, will think of when you mention it.
ISPs and libertarian lunatics (hopefully not Ron Paul, anyone know?) think net neutrality means "Be neutral regarding what ISPs do to their networks," and would interpret this to mean that the government should not pass any kind of legislation about the Internet, or in other words, that ISPs should be allowed to continue to fuck with their networks, and that consumers will go elsewhere if it gets too bad.
In other words, no matter which side you support, you can claim to support net neutrality, or be anti-neutrality. So you should always be specific, and perhaps avoid the term altogether unless you're willing to paste this explanation.
iptables -N log_and_drop iptables -A log_and_drop -j LOG iptables -A log_and_drop -j DROP iptables -I INPUT -j log_and_drop -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags RST RST -m state --state NEW,INVALID
I'm not sure that INVALID is the same, though.
But I am saying that iptables rules, even though they're essentially a pile of GOTOs, should still at least strive for DRY -- don't repeat yourself. I don't know if it's actually more or less efficient, but it's sure a lot more maintainable. For example, if you wanted to try his first suggestion, you could just add:
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the $5.99.
Next time I buy a hard drive, if Hitachi, Maxtor, Western Digital, Dell, etc, has it for $5.99 cheaper -- the same amount of space; I'll be checking per byte -- guess where my money goes?
With hard drives, I have pretty much no brand loyalty. If the drive fails, and it's under warranty, I get a new one, and if I wasn't backed up, that's my fault. If the drive fails, and I'm not under warranty, great excuse to get more space. I try to pay attention to reviews, etc, even the little Newegg things, but frankly, a hard drive's a hard drive -- it's pretty well commoditized now. I'll be paying much more attention to things like video cards and processors, even RAM.
From the parents' point of view, it may not make a difference, but shame on you for saying this:
With Manhunt, maybe. With Oblivion, sorry, NO.
The offending content in Oblivion was not ever shipped in Oblivion. It wasn't "trivially locked". It was completely absent from the game, until someone added it -- as an optional, third-party mod.
To make it simpler, I'll use a car analogy: Manhunt is like a moped that comes with some sort of cap -- a physical device that can be removed, which was put there to limit how fast the engine can go. Oblivion is more like a cheap sedan -- ok, yes, it COULD be tricked out with Nitrous Oxide. But right now, it's just a cheap sedan. That old Lincoln Town Car could have rocket engines strapped to it -- in fact, someone has done so -- but until you do, it's relatively safe.
Now, I'd even go so far as to say that Manhunt should be covered here, as both unlocking and modding are generally going to be trivial. At least, once someone's done it once, it will be trivial to whoever. But the fact remains: Manhunt contained this content, even if it was locked. Oblivion did not.
That's the point. It's ironic, because GlaDOS mentions exactly these symptoms. "We would like to take this opportunity to remind you that the Weighted Companion Cube cannot speak. If the Weighted Companion Cube does speak, we suggest that you disregard its advice."
Missing the point again. That's just All Your Base all over again.
I would, given that GlaDOS does mention it (as I said) while you are progressing through that level.
Also, go listen to the commentary about it. This was deliberate -- they wanted to make sure you didn't leave it behind in the first part, so they made you like it. "Please take care of it."
$20, maybe 5-10 hours of gameplay.
So good I've played through (all the way) probably two and a half times in one weekend. Spend $50 on Orange Box, haven't played the rest of it (Ep 2), but Portal alone makes it worth it.
However, this is HARD to do, especially hard to do consistently. Event harder to make it fit in with a plot -- how many plots can a handheld portal-making device really fit into?
Same could be said for movies, except I find a game is a lot more replayable than a movie. Especially a good game. Especially with online content.
Recently, I spent $50 on the Orange Box. That's Portal, a short, replayable game with a story -- but despite the story, it's just fun to play, and I'm sure we'll see custom maps for it soon. It's also Team Fortress 2, a multiplayer game, though maybe not "casual".
And it's also got Half-Life 2 and Episodes 1 and 2 -- purely single-player, story-driven games. And good enough that I find them replayable.
And a demo for Peggle, an arcade, Breakout-ish game. And probably a few more -- for $50, I call it a pretty good deal.
Or, of course, you could just grab an Xbox 360, or a PC with decent Internet and maybe Steam, and only buy the cheap games. Peggle, above, is $10. Portal is $20, by itself. I think Lugaru is $20, but VERY addictive and replayable, despite being "story-driven". And of course, there are things like Geometry Wars (though I've never played it).
Star Trek, mostly, was meant to be stand-alone, with the occasional two-part. TNG is like this. I think Voyager was mostly like this -- it allowed for character development, but almost never a serious, long-term change to the ship as a whole.
And DS9 was completely different. There may have been stand-alone episodes, but as a whole, it was a bigger story.
Firefly was kind of the best of both worlds. You could jump in anywhere and have fun, but you'd get a lot more out of it watching beginning to end (including the movie).
But Firefly is rare. It's hard to be that good at any one aspect of Firefly, even assuming it's a TV show. You're wanting a game that good -- a game in which you can buy tiny pieces (for $10 or $20), such that each stands alone -- but for it to be worth it, it really should have a bigger picture.
Why do I say this? Well... DS9 is widely considered the best Star Trek series, or at least the best after TOS (because everyone loves nostalgia), just as Enterprise is widely considered the worst, assuming they even acknowledge it as Star Trek. And the most unique thing about DS9 was its story arc.
But maybe Portal is kind of what you want -- the entire game lasts probably less than 10 hours, and while the story is awesome and often hilarious, it's also completely unnecessary. I don't imagine a sequel would be worse.
If I may ridiculously oversimplify things:
AT&T gave us C.
Or, something that might be easier to understand:
Is Excel really meant to fit the business in question? No, it's a generic tool. I think it's a crappy one, but it's possible to have good generic tools. Thus, if a company invented the first spreadsheet to use internally, it might be in their best interest to release it as open, unless they really wanted to get into the software business.
That doesn't mean they have to release their spreadsheets.
This could be done in MANY other places. Accounting, taxes, inventory management, etc... All of which, once open, can certainly be tweaked within a company, without those custom patches ever seeing the light of day. But any code shared that doesn't expose trade secrets about your business is both good, generic code, and an opportunity for someone else to improve your business.
And that makes having to buy redundant hardware right?
Granted, that is more secure than a desktop.
I also think there's not a lot of point to it, if you're running pretty much the same OS (without the hardening) behind the firewall. If the desktop OS is "full of holes", I'd imagine that most of these holes -- at least the ones you'd have a prayer of stopping with a "hardware" firewall -- are holes which could as easily be exploited to simply pass connections through as to install something locally. And if they can pass a connection through, they're now in your main box.
I think that pretty much counters your point here:
But that has nothing to do with it being "hardware". If it was simply a standard desktop/server OS at the firewall, you get the same protection -- and only assuming the same exploit that got them into the firewall won't get them into your desktop.
Sure, you can reboot it -- but if, as you say:
Great, how much are you going to update it?
If I find a vulnerability, and you simply reboot it the next day, fine, I'll punch through the next day, too. And every day, until you apply an update. Wouldn't you rather those updates happen faster?
I'd also argue that, if a desktop OS is secure enough to include in a firewall (Linux), then there is, in fact, a very good reason for running a firewall on your desktop. For one thing, it lets you take it to insecure networks -- great for a laptop. For another, it means you don't have to immediately freak out when a friend plugs in behind your firewall. Doesn't mean you have to turn off that firewall, though.
Given that you can download a read-only copy of the presentation ahead of time, what is the likelihood that:
I still think that Internet could be reliable enough -- certainly is in the board room -- but if I understand it, the biggest weakness here is that you can't work on it while on a plane. I'd still use some other, open source client-side app (probably KPresenter, maybe write my own), but I don't think Google's spreadsheets are so completely a bad idea as to never be feasable -- and being able to easily share docs online is a very nice feature, too.
Hell, anything I'd present in front of a crowd now probably doesn't fit that anyway.
And again, suppose this happens for the first time in front of an audience?
That's not only dead time, it looks stupid, too. You have to explain how you didn't mean for it to look that way, etc etc.
I'm not talking about CPU power, I'm talking about electricity.
If I had an eight-core system, and I had to leave it on for some reason -- BitTorrent, say -- it could easily drop to some 500 mhz per core, if it was properly designed, and still use even less power (electricity!) for each of those 500,000 cycles that were not used.
Try running SETI on a modern laptop for more than about two minutes, and you'll get a very real demonstration of how this works. SETI on means the machine is not idle, means it will be scorchingly hot, and no longer a "lap" top. Leave it idle, and it might give you an extra hour (or two, or three) of battery life, while actually being cool enough to hold in your lap.
Chances are, the disc uses some sort of copy protection. Chances are, this circumvents it. At least, that's how I'd play it if I was there lawyer.
Thank you, DMCA, for making it illegal to crack copy protection, no matter what the intent.
What you're basically arguing for is movies.
Yes, I like a good movie, and I won't say one is better than the other. I will say that I have seen brilliant storytelling done (HL being one example of this) in first person. However, you do need to pay attention.
And I have also seen cut scenes that just made the rest of the game worth playing, more real and personal.
I think what we're seeing here is a fundamentally different medium. Movies (cut scenes) and games are two completely different ways of telling stories, and I don't think you can really say one is better than the other -- only that you like one better than the other, or more importantly, that you like a particular game (or cutscene, or game+cutscenes) better than another.
You apparently haven't found the little things they leave you to do -- for example, in HL2 "Red Letter Day", there is a mini version of the teleporter you're about to use on a desk somewhere. You could easily spend most of that time playing with setting various items on that teleporter and testing it out. Or climbing on boxes.
I did appreciate one technique used for most of Portal, though -- a voice talks to you without interrupting you at all (mostly). By simply being fast enough, you can, in fact, skip large chunks of dialog (if you want to), though you're not likely that fast the first time through.
I also appreciate it a LOT for the shorter sequences. Nothing more jarring than grabbing control from you for ten seconds, then giving it back -- or more frustrating the second time through, even if you can skip it.
Maybe so, but...
Come on, you've played Half-Life 2, but not 1? It's, what, $9.95 on Steam, now?
Half-Life 1 proved definitively that you could have a relatively deep plot not only without pre-rendered cutscenes, but almost entirely without pre-scripted sequences, too. Beginning and end battles, sure, but the plot does develop subtly between them, without having to interrupt the gameplay (much) to do it. Take the houndeyes in kennels...
Yes, you were forced into a certain path. But I'd argue it takes a lot more finesse to leave the UI alone and force the player along that path by sheer circumstance, rather than just grabbing them by the face, slapping black bars across the scene, and saying "You! Player! You go here now."
I'd almost argue that Half-Life was better at that than Half-Life 2 or its "episodes".
Half-Life 1, 2, and Episode 1 had probably five cutscenes between them.
Wait, let me count...
One in Half-Life, two in Half-Life 2, maybe two in Episode 1.
Oh, sure, there are times you could classify as a cutscene, but you absolutely do have control of your player. It's still "on rails" in that it's a linear game, and that sometimes you really do have to wait a bit for the plot to develop, but you can always go play with the miniature teleporter while they're talking, or something similar.
Haven't played Episode 2, yet, but only two in Portal.
And I wouldn't really count the "cutscenes" as such, I'm only saying they technically are, as the player has absolutely zero control. But I'd argue that yes, you do have full control over Gordon Freeman (or <<Subject Name Here>> in Portal), they just don't have full control of themselves at the time. (If I was being glomped by Alyx Vance, I'm not sure I could move much, either.)
I used to do this, until I realized that leaving my processor idle means less heat, less power usage, and a longer life.
Now, maybe if it wasn't my computer -- for example, Amazon EC2, Flexiscale, even just a cheap host that's neglected to include power requirements in their spec. On our EC2 machines, I can imagine that we'd want to always have a certain amount idle, and I see no problem pegging that with distributed.net, SETI, whatever. We'd also probably leave them on slightly longer than we need them, as they take longer to start than they do to kill.
But the essential difference there is: Amazon charges us the same rate per virtual machine whether or not we're actually using it. My power company absolutely does charge me more, so I won't be doing this in my own house. I'd rather just donate money to someone running this on a PS3.
So what do you do if the power goes out? Your laptop runs on batteries; does the projector?
What do you do if your laptop's hard drive dies? Or your RAM slowly starts to go bad?
Hell, what if your video card does this thing my old ATI started to do -- as it overheats, slowly start having a random checkerboard effect in various onscreen elements?
You even seem to admit this yourself:
I realize that, in many places, you're going to need an offline version. That's in TFS -- while you can't edit it, you can download a copy to play. While you may have to make last-minute corrections, you really shouldn't be in that situation anyway -- and let's look at TFS:
Keep in mind, you can always save one copy when you think you're done, then, if you get a chance to make last-minute changes, you can download a new version. If not, you still have the old one.
This actually sounds a lot like how I've seen many people do PowerPoint -- they'll always have some old version burned on a CD somewhere, or saved on a flash drive, just in case they have to borrow a computer.
I'll acknowledge that most Internet is less reliable than a given hard drive, but I think it's gotten to where it's reliable enough. After all, if you wanted the best possible reliability, you'd use a dedicated device with a video out, a couple USB ports, and some flash, not a full computer.
Learn more about the firewall.
Enough to discover that this article is by someone who has absolutely no clue about OS X firewalls or security. Several of the responses here are pretty much the same.
PortSentry, if I understand, is to protect you from people doing portscans on you. While useful, that really doesn't seem anywhere near as essential as having a working firewall to begin with.
And you're right not to trust Norton -- that would likely make you LESS secure.
Personally, I run Linux with no firewall. I figure, by the time I need it (rather than simply refusing packets), I'm already 0wned. But dig through the comments a bit more, and you'll find that no matter what my personal beliefs are about firewalls, this one really is fine, if you need one. (I seem to remember leaving it on by default, since OS X never made it difficult for me to open the ports I needed.)
If anything, we should be laughing at the people who report nmap's "open|filtered" state as if it were a problem -- as if it were somehow open. At people who are writing an article about security, yet don't appear to understand how UDP works.
And, especially, at an article blatantly cashing in on Leopard's release -- if these are "flaws", they are just about exactly the same "flaws" that exist in Tiger.
So what's the alternative? Some $1k Cisco firewall? Assuming, of course, that IOS hasn't been compromised...
Because your Linksys router, likely as not, runs some form of Linux. May as well throw it away, it's "the same as running without."
Or, in a perfect world, people would shut up if they don't know a thing about the subject at hand, instead of spewing random bullshit.
That dialog you just wrote?
Sounds EXACTLY like Legolas and Gimli in Lord of the Rings.
I really appreciated that, because it showed that, like most of Hollywood, these writers only know enough to be dangerous -- but unlike most of Hollywood, they're stopping with what they know.
This after losing all respect for Law & Order: "He's using an encrypted IP address, so I can't trace him directly, but I can put up a trace program, so that the next time he goes online, visits a website, we'll see the same encrypted IP address, and be able to trace him." (This is almost certainly filtered through my own understanding to make somewhat more sense. Trust me, the real one was much worse.)
Well, first, I completely switched from IT to programming, but that's a bit beside the point.
The company I work for did hire me, in part, because of my Linux skills (and my promise to not be a zealot). We have a NAS device on-site -- basically a hard drive with a Samba server in it. Our ISP gives us fiber and a router/wireless. That's it -- everything just works.
Or rather, everything else has been outsourced. We pay one site to host our SVN repository and Trac bugs/wiki, we pay Google to host our email, and we pay Amazon to host our website -- that's S3 and EC2.
However, it does mean there's a new niche: Amazon EC2 is basically cheap Linux/Xen virtual machines, on demand. But that's it. No automatic Beowulf cluster, no load balancing, nothing of the sort. As no one has actually put together a really good package for this, I can still be useful writing scripts to spawn new instances (VMs) when load gets to high, drop them when load is acceptable, I can set up a load balancer, update the DNS to a new one if the old load balancer goes down, I can find ways to replicate data between them, and so on.
Basically, although admin is a much smaller part of my job, it's gone from admining one machine at a time (a fileserver here, webserver there, panic when the firewall dies and steal a desktop to build a new one, etc) to admining a cluster.
And if you were ever good with tools like cfengine, etc, you can probably adapt and find a similar job. Maybe even a job hacking on MySQL cluster, or (pretty please?) making Postgres able to operate as a cluster...
Every time I explain net neutrality to someone, I always have to explain how the phrase has been hijacked, and now means two opposite things.
Geeks think net neutrality means "Be neutral with our network traffic," and would interpret this to mean that there should be a law preventing this kind of bullshit from ISPs. This is the original definition, but much like "hacker", the original definition is somewhat less relevant than which definition the layperson, and especially the congressperson, will think of when you mention it.
ISPs and libertarian lunatics (hopefully not Ron Paul, anyone know?) think net neutrality means "Be neutral regarding what ISPs do to their networks," and would interpret this to mean that the government should not pass any kind of legislation about the Internet, or in other words, that ISPs should be allowed to continue to fuck with their networks, and that consumers will go elsewhere if it gets too bad.
In other words, no matter which side you support, you can claim to support net neutrality, or be anti-neutrality. So you should always be specific, and perhaps avoid the term altogether unless you're willing to paste this explanation.
iptables -N log_and_drop
/etc/network/if-up.d and if-down.d.
iptables -A log_and_drop -j LOG
iptables -A log_and_drop -j DROP
iptables -I INPUT -j log_and_drop -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags RST RST -m state --state NEW,INVALID
I'm not sure that INVALID is the same, though.
But I am saying that iptables rules, even though they're essentially a pile of GOTOs, should still at least strive for DRY -- don't repeat yourself. I don't know if it's actually more or less efficient, but it's sure a lot more maintainable. For example, if you wanted to try his first suggestion, you could just add:
iptables -I INPUT -j log_and_drop -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags RST RST -m conntrack --cstate NEW,INVALID
Knowing me, I'd refactor this even more, if doing that:
iptables -N tcp_reset
iptables -I INPUT -j tcp_reset -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags RST RST
iptables -A tcp_reset -m conntrack --cstate NEW,INVALID -j log_and_drop
iptables -A tcp_reset -m state --state NEW,INVALID -j log_and_drop
And of course, add an "iptables --save" and "iptables --restore" to my
All of which is overkill for my little one-man server, but I like to keep my admin skills sharp, even when I don't need them.