Ignoring the fact that Apple occasionally gives back (Safari->khtml), and completely avoiding the argument of innovation, there is one thing to elevate them far above and beyond Microsoft: Apple products work.
Texting is perhaps the worst example. They call it "texting" so kids will forget that it's just much clumsier IM-ing, only it costs money now.
No, I think the problem is that we don't have a required course in oldspeak. We still require our kids to learn things like algebra, which isn't necessarily ever used in real life -- addition, subtraction, multiplication maybe, for calculating change and tax, but algebra? We require driver's education before you can get a car, and that makes sense, too. But we should have more courses in things like common sense. A course in basic computer skills, so we have less morons saying "Why would anyone want to hack me?", and of course, basic understanding of marketing newspeak.
Sadly, we may have to stoop to their level -- we may have to say "Newspeak doubleplus ungood!" or whatever the modern equivaent is. Kind of like the solution to AOL-speak.
No, the combination of the audio file with the RSS feed is called "A combination of an audio file and an RSS feed." You can generalize it to "An RSS feed which may have content other than text/html."
Podcast, aside from being called "pod", is annoying in that... Look, if I put up a video file with an RSS feed, everyone would call it a "video podcast". But if I put up, say, a spreadsheet with an RSS feed, you'd have to invent a new word for it. And of course a "blog" is an HTML page with an RSS feed.
Here's an idea: Audio Blog. More accessible than Audio RSS feed, but still generic enough -- I could still call it a "spreadsheet blog," and "video blog" doesn't sound quite as thoroughly retarded.
Blog is at least truthful -- a log on the web. A web journal, a periodically updated bunch of stuff, ordered from newest to oldest.
Podcast is just annoyingly inaccurate. As if we need yet another word to convince people that "iPod" == "portable music player". But it would still make sense, if it had anything at all to do with iPods. It doesn't -- most people are going to be listening to them on their computers.
But yes, buzzwords in general suck, even if it's nice to be able to explain something in one newspeak word (Slashdot is a tech blog), they also make it near-impossible to move outside what the word is supposed to mean (Slashdot is not like other tech blogs -- the Slashdot effect and the huge number of comments make it significantly different.) Worse, they lead to the generation of niche markets of rebranding and selling the same crap, but now buzzword enabled.
Literally. Monster sells something which is, I think, called the iCable. It's a cable to hook up your iPod to a stereo. It's a headphone jack at one end, and RCA at the other end, and these have been available for years, but now, simply by adding the "iPod" buzzword, they can sell it for $15 or $20. Same goes for "blogging software" or "podcasting software" -- making things like Shoutcast and Icecast irrelevant simply because no one calls them podcasting software.
Not only is it a better word, it's been around longer. The only problem is, it's too generic -- a webcast could be audio, video, or some bastardization. My parents give "webcasts" that are Powerpoint presentations, converted to Flash and synced with what they're actually presenting to a live audience, with their voice being streamed.
The lack of rumble alone is just the straw that broke the camel's back. It says a lot about Sony's incompetence, and I don't particularly want to buy a console from an incompetent company.
I'm suspending judgement until it comes out, but I'm telling everyone I know -- I don't care if you buy a Wii at launch, but wait a month or two after the PS3 comes out before you buy one. Then you'll know how much games will actually cost, you'll have a better idea all around if the console is worth it at any price, and the price itself will have dropped like a rock.
As an engineer at heart, he understands computers and software systems very well, but likely avoids and despises legal systems.
Or, put simpler: I think he simply doesn't understand it. And yes, I know that sounds arrogant, but if you remember his posts on Groklaw, he demonstrated again and again that he thought the GPLv3 demanded things that it didn't, and that he had completely missed the point of what it's actually trying to do. For instance, he actually brought out that old FUD about how disabling DRM will prevent certain security measures, which it doesn't.
I don't think Linus and PJ actually disagree, but I do think PJ actually knows her stuff, and Linus should stick to the actual coding, organizing, and benevolent dictating of the kernel itself.
That, or sometime fairly soon, we're going to actually squeeze a statement from Linus that, given the choice, he'd go with BSD or public domain. They seem more in line with his ideals.
I keep going over and over this, and I still can't figure out why Linus would want Linux to be able to be Tivo-ized, but not want it BSD-licensed. Can you explain to me what it is about these specific loopholes that makes them so much more desirable than people taking your code wholesale and making it into a proprietary program?
Tricky situation, I agree. But then, when would you not want the source to be distributed? I can't think of a situation where the FSF wouldn't want the source of a free software program (or its derivatives) distributed, and here, it makes perfect sense. The GPL is essentially useless for web services as it is anyway, since most of them will be PHP, which means if you're installing it on your server, you have the source already, GPL or not. If you're viewing it, you have as much freedom as you would without the GPL.
So really, the only reason we shouldn't just public domain all this web software now is that the GPL means that no matter how you acquire the software, if you do actually have the source, you're allowed to redistribute.
First, I've found that while working on any problem, given sufficient time to focus (maybe an hour), I can often improve my productivity by taking a break of a few hours or a few days. True, the longer I leave it, the longer it takes to get back in the groove, but if it's just, say, an hour a day, I'd still be better than ever by the end of the hour.
But more than that, he mentions a long list of unfinished games. Sounds like a quitter to me. Two thirds of the way through Tomb Raider: Legends, halfway through Kingdom Hearts II. I don't think it would've taken him any longer to actually finish Kingdom Hearts than it would to get that 2/3rds of the way through Tomb Raider.
This person has made a conscious choice to play more games and leave them half-finished, rather than playing fewer games and finishing them. I'd certainly take a few good games (the Half-Lives, the Halos, the Final Fantasies) over many, many bad ones (the Dooms, the Quakes, Final Fantasy X-2). So, he has two related, possibly valid complaints: It's hard to actually find a really good game, so he wishes he could play more games, in order to find that one -- except that games take a long time to complete, so he can't actually beat as many as he'd like to.
That, or it's a problem of attention span. But he mentions finishing War and Peace, and a Tomb Raider game is too much?
Italian Job: Did it actually say that "napster" wrote the program? Ignoring the fact that wireframes aren't that hard, I'd suggest that, like any good hacker, he simply put the best tech together, writing the minimum of custom stuff. If he can do a P2P app, though, he can do the custom stuff.
Antitrust: Well, when was the movie set? OCR + high def camera. Now the only laughable thing is that they'd have a high def security camera, and that it's reading a CRT (hard to sync).
Transporter 2: Actually, police are getting this kind of tech right now. Wireless networks for cops on the beat. And if you can get to the Internet, you can pretty much get two computers to sync anything you have the bandwidth for. That photo doesn't look that big...
Swordfish: Entirely correct, but I think a far bigger, often unnoticed problem here is people thinking of hacking as anything other than boolean. True, sometimes there can be multiple stages -- ok, now I own Apache, oops, it's chrooted -- but it's not at all like, say, chopping down a tree. And yet, supposedly, our hacker can break 128-bit encryption, so long as he has a gun to his head. And here's another problem: Hackers don't break encryption. They go around it.
Goldeneye: Right again about the hacking itself, but Boris was hilarious for the same reason that Hackers was, only more so. I am eenvEEENceeebull!
Jurrasic Park: As others have pointed out, that Unix interface did actually exist. Also, little girls know far more than they let on. Never give one your root password.
Firewall gets its own section, because it was so close to right, yet so wrong.
While it'd be an incredible feat of MacGyverism, it's not quite as implausible as it would seem. The hard drive in an iPod doesn't use some secret interface, it's just a smaller IDE. He can't take it out entirely, but he could rewire it (so he didn't have to deal with the actual board and software), so it'd just be a hard drive with a battery. Ten thousand songs means it can easily fit ten thousand accounts -- which sounds ridiculous when you think of them as ASCII numbers, but no way will this thing be able to do OCR on the fly. It'll just read data directly from the scanner and dump it to the hard drive, and if it does it at a slow enough rate, it could work.
Of course, it still can't work if the scanner works the way I think it does -- reading one line at a time, normally moving across the paper. Yes, the numbers scroll past, but they do so a line at a time, not a pixel at a time. Also, he'd barely have time to hack together a way to not obliterate his daughter's songs (or did he?), and to somehow feed that data, as a valid image, into OCR software which he just happens to have on his laptop. Meaning he'd have to implement a scanner driver -- arguably easier than an iPod interface, though.
The other inconsistency mentioned is adding a firewall rule on the fly. As far as I can tell, that was actually an iptables command, or something similar. It was also not far off from what a real admin would do. What's annoying is that blacklisting his class C block is seen as a brilliant insight -- the security "expert" sitting there is saying "Wow, I never would've thought of that!", when it's a common enough practice among IRC ops. It's also not necessarily a good choice -- does Harrison Ford know, off the top of his head, whether they have any customers at all in that block?
The frustrating thing is, Firewall is not only a good movie, but they actually seem to come much closer to day to day reality than other movies involving technology -- and then they have to go and ruin it by showing Harrison Ford taking several minutes to delete a simple log. That's neither short enough to be a simple unlink, nor long enough to actually be shredding any storage system I know of capable of storing terabytes of video logs (that is, actually overwriting the files).
This is compared to, say, Hackers, which never even pretends to b
It seems Slashdotted now, but I'm going to guess that it's yet another ALICE, and not something that actually, say, tries to understand the conversation.
In that case, well, I saw an ALICE implemented as a CGI with a bunch of GIF animations prepared. Type a question, hit submit, a page would come back with the answer and the relevant animation.
I don't remember where it was, but it was kind of cool, and also no closer to AI than any other ALICE.
Wake me up when an AI can answer the phone and actually be more helpful to me than a human being.
What was the benefits over VHS with DVD? The two stand-outs are picture and audio.
I just walked into the TV room. My roommate was watching the Mask of Zorro, and I was wondering why it was fullscreen (instead of widescreen). It was a VHS tape.
No difference in quality that I could tell, except once towards the end, there were lines visible on the screen, for less than a minute. Oh well, better than what happens when a DVD degrades.
No, the benefit of DVD is that it's digital. You can navigate easily via chapters, and fastforward/rewind as fast as you want. You get tons of extra features (commentary, deleted scenes, etc) which, even if they existed on the VHS tape (not likely), would not be as easy to find. You have to rewind a tape; you can just pop out the DVD. You can have multiple soundtracks (other languages, commentary), subtitle tracks (enable/disable subtitles at will, choose CC vs subtitles), even video tracks (angles, I think sometimes black and white vs color), all on the same disc. This is very nice for anime, too -- distribute one disc, purists will watch with Japanese audio and English subtitles (or no subtitles if they understand Japanese), people who hate subtitles will turn them off and watch with the English dub.
Really, need I go on? In fact, we're willing to take a LOSS in quality for this kind of convenience, which explains why piracy and fansubs can work, even if it looks much worse than old VHS tapes.
The picture and audio quality is a bigger jump with Blu-ray/HD-DVD than from VHS to DVD.
That's debatable. Most people can sort of tell the difference, but don't think it's worth spending any more money on.
The problem does not lie in the hardware (there really is no competition - Blu-ray is supported by basically the whole industry).
That, itself, is a problem. The problem also lies in the standard. If your particular model of PS3 is found to have an exploit, new blu-ray discs could be issued which would brick your shiny new PS3, or any other Blu-Ray player they choose.
You are getting a deal by buying the Playstation 3.
Yes, I'm sure. $500 + $100/game? Or have the numbers changed lately? Because it seems like everyone who wants a new game console is buying a Wii.
Or are you referring to the actual processing power of the thing? Those of us who care so deeply about how good our games look have either already bought an Xbox 360 (and are hurting for cash), or have already bought and are continuously upgrading a PC. I know this doesn't apply to you, and certainly there are exceptions -- given an infinite amount of money, most gamers would buy all three, and some gamers do have a huge amount to spend.
You may not want that deal, but then there is always the alternative.
Regarding Blu-Ray, you just told me "there really is no competition." But sure, show me an alternative that I can play over a DVI cable, to my existing LCD monitor.
So why are you complaining again?
Read again -- parent wasn't complaining, merely stating reasons for not wanting one.
If you don't want to pay for a Blu-ray player then buy an Xbox 360. The vast majority of games will be cross-platform between those two systems because they are equal on terms of system power.
Sorry, you were talking about a "deal" above? I guess you weren't talking about processing power. Actually, I suspect the PS3 will beat the 360, but not by nearly enough to matter. Remember the Xbox vs the PS2? DVD playback was just one of many things to love. Another is how much cheaper the PS2 was.
The Playstation 3 is a steal if you want, need, or love high definition movies right now. The content isn't here yet, but you can damn well bet its going to be flooding the market soon.
If you look up the MS definition of "critical", it's very carefully worded. I don't remember exactly, but there's a reason I grab Windows Updates which are not critical. Apparently, programs crashing, your entire system crashing, or massive data loss is not considered "critical" by MS.
Granted, it likely won't matter so much for a browser, but I suspect that if such a database were open, definitions would get twisted even more. If Firefox didn't similarly twist "critical" to mean "will instantly assimilate you into a botnet", we'd still have wrong numbers.
What we need are endorsements from respected people in the security community. Former IE developers, crypto specialists, Bruce Schneier, etc.
Aside from the fact that proprietary software already does this, open source does get more benefit of the doubt here, simply because if you don't like it, you can always fork it. You could even automate the process of patching new versions of Firefox to not auto-update. And of course, no one's forcing you to leave that auto-update enabled, and if you disable it, it will stay disabled.
Now, I admit, this puts MS in a tough position -- Firefox will always have certain advantages over IE, if not technical, than at least ideological. It would seem MS can do no right. But here's a question: Why does Microsoft bother? Why not simply install Firefox as the default browser for Windows, assign all their IE developers to Firefox, and be done with it? It would be seen as less anticompetitive, it would ultimately free resources, they aren't making any money off IE in the first place, and it would ultimately be more secure.
Oh, right, they'd lose control. Well, fine, can't they fork and rebrand Firefox? Or is that right reserved to Netscape? It would certainly be easier to keep a fork alive, following the progress of Firefox, than it would to maintain a whole separate browser.
I know why they continue to develop IE. At least a couple of possible reasons, none of which they would dare admit, and none of which strike me as very smart, certainly not in the customer's best interest. Admitting that open source development is superior, ever, would damage their FUD. Worse, it would promote standards to a much greater extent -- IE-only pages are Windows-only pages, which force people to stay on Windows. Worse still, the web is a competing application platform, which removes other reasons (applications) to hold people on Windows.
And of course, there's always the possibility that their corporate structure won't allow them to kill a product this big, or that their OS truly has become dependent on IE.
But I'm curious if there's a legitimate reason for keeping IE around.
You do sound like a fanboy. Not that I disagree entirely, I just don't think hyperbole is helping here. I doubt even MS uses VB for anything critical.
But let's ignore Windows, and Vista (which does it right, according to you), and focus on the Mac. Recently, I booted Ubuntu on my Powerbook, and I couldn't believe how much faster it was -- until I noticed where the speed was coming from. Switching virtual desktops on OS X currently gives me a rotating cube effect, which makes it easy to tell what I just did, and also helps teach people what a virtual desktop is -- but on Ubuntu, there's no animation at all, just an icon to show me which one I'm on.
This kind of thing is pervasive. It seems like launching an app by clicking it in the dock will always bounce the dock icon before it shows you a window. Expose, while it's a nice idea, animates, whereas alt+tab moves between apps, not individual windows. The Dashboard animates and still manages to take a solid couple of seconds if I haven't used it yet on that boot. Dialog boxes animate slowest of all, which is especially annoying if I'm moving quickly through a series of them with the keyboard.
So, you're right, animation doesn't necessarily have to slow down the machine. It can, however, slow down the user experience. But some of those fancy effects do help. No one would take an OS seriously if it didn't have solid dragging -- if dragging a window meant watching its outline move, then dropping the outline and watching the window blink over. Drop shadows and transparency, and even little animations, can actually improve the experience -- drop shadows, in particular, make a clear visual distinction between one window and another, and which is on top.
But misusing animation is like misusing any other GUI element, only worse. Misusing them can be like using checkboxes where you should use a radio button -- misleading at best. At worst, actually debilitating -- like using radio buttons where you should have checkboxes.
Your comment assumes Valve either never plays their own game, or that they're morons.
It does seem, on occasion, that both are true, but I wasn't suggesting that. I mention MMOs because of this -- MMOs are operated by people at least as smart as Valve, with at least as many resources, probably considerably more. And they still can't stop exploitation. With a huge amount of work, always staying a step ahead in the arms race, they can barely keep far enough ahead of exploiters to prevent them from having a significant impact on the in-game economy. And they do anyway, sometimes.
EVERY game has unintended consequences. In this case, it just makes a lot more sense to at least give players a choice: Use the weekly popularity data, allow admin to set prices manually, or use the old static prices so that it's completely isolated. And if they're so much smarter than me, they should've thought of this in the first place -- would it really be that hard? Certainly, if they were smarter than me, they'd have some mention of the ability to turn this off in their news item.
What if instead of total popularity, they looked at CHANGES in popularity, relative to that server's last data upload?
So if we figure that out, we show a steady increase, starting ridiculously low (one AWP per day), on up to ridiculously high towards the end of the week, then enjoy a couple days where nobody can afford an AWP.
Or what if they weight popularity of a gun based on how many DIFFERENT people buy it, seeing as some people absolutely love and stick to one or two guns (hmm, AK/M4?).
So you organize a large clan, and make sure you have everyone in the clan buy a gun you hate (AWP) at least once a week. That way, at least you cancel out any statistics about the gun you like (AK/M4).
If you thought of that little exploit in 2 minutes, I'm pretty sure their product managers, programmers, and testers noticed it months ago.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." -- Agent K, MIB.
Let me expand on that a bit further: The idea of Wikipedia, that the group is smarter than the individual, is entirely wrong. The group is only as good as its organization. A brain is intelligent, when organized properly -- it's certainly not intelligent if you take it out of its skull and semar it all over the wall.
And considering Valve's track record, I have no reason to assume that they, as a group, are smarter than me. Certainly not at making intelligent choices. They embedded IE to view the MOTD in a game server. 'Nuff said.
Assuming that they do have infinitely more insight into gaming than I do is equally arrogant.
I stand by it. They may eventually come up with an algorithm that works, but it will take a long time and a lot of annoyance, and I'm sure there will be a lot of people setting starting money and salaries to ridiculous values to avoid the whole system.
refusing to make available a version of the newer games that will certainly continue to work if something ever happened to Valve or their servers, refusing even to make a strong written commitment that they would create such a thing, etc.
May I see this refusal? Or have you not asked them?
I'm curious. Their lawyers would hate it, but I bet you could make them sign some promise that should their servers ever fail (really fail, not just a couple days, but they run out of money or something), they will release a patch to allow permanent Offline Mode.
Or at least a Social Contract. It would help a lot, even if they refused to make it legally binding.
Look, you may consider games to be "consumable," but they're still property if you've bought them. Don't you care about that?
I do, but I've made a compromise. Another compromise, in this case, and one I'm not sure I regret: I knew Half-Life 2 wouldn't be very playable on Linux, and that it'd make me keep a Windows partition around.
But nevertheless, if you've read my other post, you know I think I got a good deal. While technically Valve could shut everything down tomorrow, or plaster Coke and Pepsi ads all over everyone's Half-Life 2, in reality, I've actually had a better experience with Steam than with any other system of copy protection.
In fact, while I prefer close to no copy protection -- such as most Linux ports (various uts, quakes, dooms, and other things) -- or truly none at all (duke3d, quakes 1-3, dooms 1-2 are all open source now) -- I have to admit, being able to download and re-download a game is pretty damned convenient.
Besides, if they really were going to be time-limited, shouldn't you be able to rent them (for much less cost) instead?
I do agree with you somewhat. I don't rent my music, like some people (PlaysForMaybe). But there's a difference -- with PlaysForMaybe, I have to keep paying in order for it to work. With Steam, I don't have to pay a dime more. That seems like a significant difference between buying and renting.
Look at it this way: Even a hard drive or a light bulb is going to fail eventually. Game discs scratch, old photos fade. Are you suggesting that we all switch to renting our light bulbs, just to make it more honest?
So while you're up on your high horse about truth in advertising, I'll be looking at some of the newer Steam games, playing some demos, deciding which of them are worth the price to play for a few months. I figure Valve will keep operating for at least that long.
I have no problem with them having a centralized server network; I just object to them requiring it. I should have the option of running my own server and letting people directly connect to it without getting Valve involved.
I believe this has been done. It at least used to be possible to run a server with sv_lan on, and run your clients in disconnected mode.
Are you kidding? Half-Life 1 could do that with no problem! And so can (hyperbolically speaking) every other computer game in the history of computer games! It's. Not. That. Hard.
Yes, that is hyperbolic. In fact, there have been plenty of computer games and other programs which phone home to check for updates, and which tell you when an update is available. In fact, MMOs require you to update, just as Steam does. The difference is, you have to pay a monthly fee to play an MMO, plus your initial purchase (usually), whereas Steam games can be bought once and played for a much longer period of time.
But not zero. In fact, on a long enough timescale, the odds approach 100%.
Odds, in this case, must be derived from statistics. Let me give you some of my own statistics. I bought Duke Nukem 3D a long time ago, and also the Plutonium Pak upgrade. My original Duke3D disc is smashed, the Plutonium Pak one is scratched, and I no longer have a DOS computer to play it on. Technically, I could find a working Linux port -- maybe -- and buy the game again.
My brother has lost his Diablo II CDs, and we no longer have a working installation of it -- even if we did, such an installation requires the play disc to run.
My friend lent me his xbox and Halo 2. Now he wants them back, but we've lost the Halo 2 disc. We're SOL, just have to buy him a new one.
Need I go on?
The only games that we've been able to keep since we bought them years ago have been Valve games. Steam updates keep them running. Having that centrallized control also means that when I have to wipe and reinstall Windows, I can simply re-download a game. I can delete a game to free space, knowing I can always re-download or re-install it. I can burn as many backup copies as I want -- even in nice, neat files, split onto DVDs, which can be restored to anyone's Steam account who has the game -- can't burn a single one of most other games and expect it to work.
So, to put it simply, making Half-Life 2 playable offline makes about as much sense to me as downloading Wikipedia in case Google goes under. You may point out that there are other encyclopedias -- true, but I don't own any of the other ones. And there are other games.
By the way, are you aware of their policies regarding accounts? Did you know that if they decide (unilaterally) that an account got "hacked" or was used for cheating, that they can disable it? And did you know that disabling an account removes all ability to use it, including single-player?
Did you know that any single-player game could one day decide that it doesn't like your OS, software, DVD drive, or game disc, and decide to stop working? Doubly so if you're patching it, but even if you're not, scratch a critical part of the disc and you can't play anymore.
Valve is run by a bunch of assholes who apparently want to destroy the property rights of everybody but themselves. They need to be stopped, and Steam needs to die.
Because you got burned once? Look at how many times I was burned, and those are just the ones I've bothered to put down.
I wonder how you feel about Microsoft? I had to go through a similar hassle when I uninstalled Windows from my virtual machine and installed it onto a real partition on the host computer. The tech didn't understand what I was talking about, and kept asking the same question, over and over...
But regardless, you got burned once and this is your response? Don't you think you're overreacting just a little bit? Or is it all just the principle of the thing?
I still strongly suspect that there are enough people out there who hate the AWP that -- well, it might not be a zombie network, but there could still be enough people effectively ballot-stuffing.
Even if it's entirely un-exploitable, I don't think I'm going to like the results of this. But that's another discussion entirely.
I think that, for the most part, the responsible thing to do is make all updates tweakable, unless they fix an obvious bug. So, for instance, if they suddenly decided to change the gravity, they should make sure those of us running our own servers can tweak sv_gravity.
This, I think, is far superior to what you're describing with LOTR. In that case, if you don't like the patch, you can't usually uninstall it, you'll have to reinstall the game from scratch. Oh, and good luck finding the 1.1 patch if there's a 1.5 out already.
This is also one thing I liked about the smaller MMOs, the ones which you download for free, and which you only pay a subscription fee. The bigger ones, you have to buy a $50 game so that you get the install cd/dvd. Smaller ones, just download. Try it for a week, with limitations. Then try it for a month for $10. If you don't like it, cancel your account.
But that's only even necessary for MMOs because the strength of an MMO is having tons of people playing on the same server, so of course everyone has to be running the exact same version of the game. Even if they're not, server patches affect everyone, lie it or not.
For my money, I don't know about you, but I buy a game because I like it now, not because I want to enshrine it forever. It's always nice to be able to go back and play the original Half-Life or Doom, but really, if I was able to play through a game a few times, I'm happy. If Valve kills Half-Life 2 tomorrow, I'll be pissed, but I wouldn't feel I got a bad deal.
Let's say I hate a particular weapon. The popular weapon to hate, last I was there, was the AWP, so let's use that as an example.
Set up a server with unlimited buy time and a few million dollars of starting money. Now, start the spammage. Buy, drop, buy, drop, buy, drop. Before you know it, the AWP is completely impossible to afford, no matter what server you're on.
Suppose only one purchase per round counts. Ok, fine, now add a custom map, and do it with a friend, dropping buy time and time between rounds as much as you can tweak them. Now you alternate. Buy, snipe, respawn, buy, snipe, respawn. You don't even have to drop it this time -- whoever got sniped will have dropped their AWP.
This can be done for any weapon. Before long, someone will have written a mod that does it automatically. Imagine -- someone doesn't like that weapon you're carrying? They punch one button and their server starts spamming Valve with new price information. If you manage to kill them, they'll never be able to afford that weapon again.
It's an interesting idea, but Valve is about to learn that it's much more difficult to balance an MMO market, where so many things are in the players' control, than to balance arbitrary weapon prices or abilities. They should've just quietly collected statistics, and then set the prices based on those statistics, probably still having to manually tweak them, and tell us when they're all done, thus giving no one the opportunity to exploit it. Here, they're just asking for trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignoring the fact that Apple occasionally gives back (Safari->khtml), and completely avoiding the argument of innovation, there is one thing to elevate them far above and beyond Microsoft: Apple products work.
Texting is perhaps the worst example. They call it "texting" so kids will forget that it's just much clumsier IM-ing, only it costs money now.
No, I think the problem is that we don't have a required course in oldspeak. We still require our kids to learn things like algebra, which isn't necessarily ever used in real life -- addition, subtraction, multiplication maybe, for calculating change and tax, but algebra? We require driver's education before you can get a car, and that makes sense, too. But we should have more courses in things like common sense. A course in basic computer skills, so we have less morons saying "Why would anyone want to hack me?", and of course, basic understanding of marketing newspeak.
Sadly, we may have to stoop to their level -- we may have to say "Newspeak doubleplus ungood!" or whatever the modern equivaent is. Kind of like the solution to AOL-speak.
No, the combination of the audio file with the RSS feed is called "A combination of an audio file and an RSS feed." You can generalize it to "An RSS feed which may have content other than text/html."
Podcast, aside from being called "pod", is annoying in that... Look, if I put up a video file with an RSS feed, everyone would call it a "video podcast". But if I put up, say, a spreadsheet with an RSS feed, you'd have to invent a new word for it. And of course a "blog" is an HTML page with an RSS feed.
Here's an idea: Audio Blog. More accessible than Audio RSS feed, but still generic enough -- I could still call it a "spreadsheet blog," and "video blog" doesn't sound quite as thoroughly retarded.
Blog is at least truthful -- a log on the web. A web journal, a periodically updated bunch of stuff, ordered from newest to oldest.
Podcast is just annoyingly inaccurate. As if we need yet another word to convince people that "iPod" == "portable music player". But it would still make sense, if it had anything at all to do with iPods. It doesn't -- most people are going to be listening to them on their computers.
But yes, buzzwords in general suck, even if it's nice to be able to explain something in one newspeak word (Slashdot is a tech blog), they also make it near-impossible to move outside what the word is supposed to mean (Slashdot is not like other tech blogs -- the Slashdot effect and the huge number of comments make it significantly different.) Worse, they lead to the generation of niche markets of rebranding and selling the same crap, but now buzzword enabled.
Literally. Monster sells something which is, I think, called the iCable. It's a cable to hook up your iPod to a stereo. It's a headphone jack at one end, and RCA at the other end, and these have been available for years, but now, simply by adding the "iPod" buzzword, they can sell it for $15 or $20. Same goes for "blogging software" or "podcasting software" -- making things like Shoutcast and Icecast irrelevant simply because no one calls them podcasting software.
Not only is it a better word, it's been around longer. The only problem is, it's too generic -- a webcast could be audio, video, or some bastardization. My parents give "webcasts" that are Powerpoint presentations, converted to Flash and synced with what they're actually presenting to a live audience, with their voice being streamed.
The lack of rumble alone is just the straw that broke the camel's back. It says a lot about Sony's incompetence, and I don't particularly want to buy a console from an incompetent company.
I'm suspending judgement until it comes out, but I'm telling everyone I know -- I don't care if you buy a Wii at launch, but wait a month or two after the PS3 comes out before you buy one. Then you'll know how much games will actually cost, you'll have a better idea all around if the console is worth it at any price, and the price itself will have dropped like a rock.
As an engineer at heart, he understands computers and software systems very well, but likely avoids and despises legal systems.
Or, put simpler: I think he simply doesn't understand it. And yes, I know that sounds arrogant, but if you remember his posts on Groklaw, he demonstrated again and again that he thought the GPLv3 demanded things that it didn't, and that he had completely missed the point of what it's actually trying to do. For instance, he actually brought out that old FUD about how disabling DRM will prevent certain security measures, which it doesn't.
I don't think Linus and PJ actually disagree, but I do think PJ actually knows her stuff, and Linus should stick to the actual coding, organizing, and benevolent dictating of the kernel itself.
That, or sometime fairly soon, we're going to actually squeeze a statement from Linus that, given the choice, he'd go with BSD or public domain. They seem more in line with his ideals.
I keep going over and over this, and I still can't figure out why Linus would want Linux to be able to be Tivo-ized, but not want it BSD-licensed. Can you explain to me what it is about these specific loopholes that makes them so much more desirable than people taking your code wholesale and making it into a proprietary program?
Tricky situation, I agree. But then, when would you not want the source to be distributed? I can't think of a situation where the FSF wouldn't want the source of a free software program (or its derivatives) distributed, and here, it makes perfect sense. The GPL is essentially useless for web services as it is anyway, since most of them will be PHP, which means if you're installing it on your server, you have the source already, GPL or not. If you're viewing it, you have as much freedom as you would without the GPL.
So really, the only reason we shouldn't just public domain all this web software now is that the GPL means that no matter how you acquire the software, if you do actually have the source, you're allowed to redistribute.
First, I've found that while working on any problem, given sufficient time to focus (maybe an hour), I can often improve my productivity by taking a break of a few hours or a few days. True, the longer I leave it, the longer it takes to get back in the groove, but if it's just, say, an hour a day, I'd still be better than ever by the end of the hour.
But more than that, he mentions a long list of unfinished games. Sounds like a quitter to me. Two thirds of the way through Tomb Raider: Legends, halfway through Kingdom Hearts II. I don't think it would've taken him any longer to actually finish Kingdom Hearts than it would to get that 2/3rds of the way through Tomb Raider.
This person has made a conscious choice to play more games and leave them half-finished, rather than playing fewer games and finishing them. I'd certainly take a few good games (the Half-Lives, the Halos, the Final Fantasies) over many, many bad ones (the Dooms, the Quakes, Final Fantasy X-2). So, he has two related, possibly valid complaints: It's hard to actually find a really good game, so he wishes he could play more games, in order to find that one -- except that games take a long time to complete, so he can't actually beat as many as he'd like to.
That, or it's a problem of attention span. But he mentions finishing War and Peace, and a Tomb Raider game is too much?
Firewall gets its own section, because it was so close to right, yet so wrong.
While it'd be an incredible feat of MacGyverism, it's not quite as implausible as it would seem. The hard drive in an iPod doesn't use some secret interface, it's just a smaller IDE. He can't take it out entirely, but he could rewire it (so he didn't have to deal with the actual board and software), so it'd just be a hard drive with a battery. Ten thousand songs means it can easily fit ten thousand accounts -- which sounds ridiculous when you think of them as ASCII numbers, but no way will this thing be able to do OCR on the fly. It'll just read data directly from the scanner and dump it to the hard drive, and if it does it at a slow enough rate, it could work.
Of course, it still can't work if the scanner works the way I think it does -- reading one line at a time, normally moving across the paper. Yes, the numbers scroll past, but they do so a line at a time, not a pixel at a time. Also, he'd barely have time to hack together a way to not obliterate his daughter's songs (or did he?), and to somehow feed that data, as a valid image, into OCR software which he just happens to have on his laptop. Meaning he'd have to implement a scanner driver -- arguably easier than an iPod interface, though.
The other inconsistency mentioned is adding a firewall rule on the fly. As far as I can tell, that was actually an iptables command, or something similar. It was also not far off from what a real admin would do. What's annoying is that blacklisting his class C block is seen as a brilliant insight -- the security "expert" sitting there is saying "Wow, I never would've thought of that!", when it's a common enough practice among IRC ops. It's also not necessarily a good choice -- does Harrison Ford know, off the top of his head, whether they have any customers at all in that block?
The frustrating thing is, Firewall is not only a good movie, but they actually seem to come much closer to day to day reality than other movies involving technology -- and then they have to go and ruin it by showing Harrison Ford taking several minutes to delete a simple log. That's neither short enough to be a simple unlink, nor long enough to actually be shredding any storage system I know of capable of storing terabytes of video logs (that is, actually overwriting the files).
This is compared to, say, Hackers, which never even pretends to b
Why is this front-page news? Because it's Flash?
It seems Slashdotted now, but I'm going to guess that it's yet another ALICE, and not something that actually, say, tries to understand the conversation.
In that case, well, I saw an ALICE implemented as a CGI with a bunch of GIF animations prepared. Type a question, hit submit, a page would come back with the answer and the relevant animation.
I don't remember where it was, but it was kind of cool, and also no closer to AI than any other ALICE.
Wake me up when an AI can answer the phone and actually be more helpful to me than a human being.
I just walked into the TV room. My roommate was watching the Mask of Zorro, and I was wondering why it was fullscreen (instead of widescreen). It was a VHS tape.
No difference in quality that I could tell, except once towards the end, there were lines visible on the screen, for less than a minute. Oh well, better than what happens when a DVD degrades.
No, the benefit of DVD is that it's digital. You can navigate easily via chapters, and fastforward/rewind as fast as you want. You get tons of extra features (commentary, deleted scenes, etc) which, even if they existed on the VHS tape (not likely), would not be as easy to find. You have to rewind a tape; you can just pop out the DVD. You can have multiple soundtracks (other languages, commentary), subtitle tracks (enable/disable subtitles at will, choose CC vs subtitles), even video tracks (angles, I think sometimes black and white vs color), all on the same disc. This is very nice for anime, too -- distribute one disc, purists will watch with Japanese audio and English subtitles (or no subtitles if they understand Japanese), people who hate subtitles will turn them off and watch with the English dub.
Really, need I go on? In fact, we're willing to take a LOSS in quality for this kind of convenience, which explains why piracy and fansubs can work, even if it looks much worse than old VHS tapes.
That's debatable. Most people can sort of tell the difference, but don't think it's worth spending any more money on.
That, itself, is a problem. The problem also lies in the standard. If your particular model of PS3 is found to have an exploit, new blu-ray discs could be issued which would brick your shiny new PS3, or any other Blu-Ray player they choose.
Yes, I'm sure. $500 + $100/game? Or have the numbers changed lately? Because it seems like everyone who wants a new game console is buying a Wii.
Or are you referring to the actual processing power of the thing? Those of us who care so deeply about how good our games look have either already bought an Xbox 360 (and are hurting for cash), or have already bought and are continuously upgrading a PC. I know this doesn't apply to you, and certainly there are exceptions -- given an infinite amount of money, most gamers would buy all three, and some gamers do have a huge amount to spend.
Regarding Blu-Ray, you just told me "there really is no competition." But sure, show me an alternative that I can play over a DVI cable, to my existing LCD monitor.
Read again -- parent wasn't complaining, merely stating reasons for not wanting one.
Sorry, you were talking about a "deal" above? I guess you weren't talking about processing power. Actually, I suspect the PS3 will beat the 360, but not by nearly enough to matter. Remember the Xbox vs the PS2? DVD playback was just one of many things to love. Another is how much cheaper the PS2 was.
I think there's a plugin for that.
If you look up the MS definition of "critical", it's very carefully worded. I don't remember exactly, but there's a reason I grab Windows Updates which are not critical. Apparently, programs crashing, your entire system crashing, or massive data loss is not considered "critical" by MS.
Granted, it likely won't matter so much for a browser, but I suspect that if such a database were open, definitions would get twisted even more. If Firefox didn't similarly twist "critical" to mean "will instantly assimilate you into a botnet", we'd still have wrong numbers.
What we need are endorsements from respected people in the security community. Former IE developers, crypto specialists, Bruce Schneier, etc.
(Yes, Bruce Schneier gets a category of his own.)
Aside from the fact that proprietary software already does this, open source does get more benefit of the doubt here, simply because if you don't like it, you can always fork it. You could even automate the process of patching new versions of Firefox to not auto-update. And of course, no one's forcing you to leave that auto-update enabled, and if you disable it, it will stay disabled.
Now, I admit, this puts MS in a tough position -- Firefox will always have certain advantages over IE, if not technical, than at least ideological. It would seem MS can do no right. But here's a question: Why does Microsoft bother? Why not simply install Firefox as the default browser for Windows, assign all their IE developers to Firefox, and be done with it? It would be seen as less anticompetitive, it would ultimately free resources, they aren't making any money off IE in the first place, and it would ultimately be more secure.
Oh, right, they'd lose control. Well, fine, can't they fork and rebrand Firefox? Or is that right reserved to Netscape? It would certainly be easier to keep a fork alive, following the progress of Firefox, than it would to maintain a whole separate browser.
I know why they continue to develop IE. At least a couple of possible reasons, none of which they would dare admit, and none of which strike me as very smart, certainly not in the customer's best interest. Admitting that open source development is superior, ever, would damage their FUD. Worse, it would promote standards to a much greater extent -- IE-only pages are Windows-only pages, which force people to stay on Windows. Worse still, the web is a competing application platform, which removes other reasons (applications) to hold people on Windows.
And of course, there's always the possibility that their corporate structure won't allow them to kill a product this big, or that their OS truly has become dependent on IE.
But I'm curious if there's a legitimate reason for keeping IE around.
You do sound like a fanboy. Not that I disagree entirely, I just don't think hyperbole is helping here. I doubt even MS uses VB for anything critical.
But let's ignore Windows, and Vista (which does it right, according to you), and focus on the Mac. Recently, I booted Ubuntu on my Powerbook, and I couldn't believe how much faster it was -- until I noticed where the speed was coming from. Switching virtual desktops on OS X currently gives me a rotating cube effect, which makes it easy to tell what I just did, and also helps teach people what a virtual desktop is -- but on Ubuntu, there's no animation at all, just an icon to show me which one I'm on.
This kind of thing is pervasive. It seems like launching an app by clicking it in the dock will always bounce the dock icon before it shows you a window. Expose, while it's a nice idea, animates, whereas alt+tab moves between apps, not individual windows. The Dashboard animates and still manages to take a solid couple of seconds if I haven't used it yet on that boot. Dialog boxes animate slowest of all, which is especially annoying if I'm moving quickly through a series of them with the keyboard.
So, you're right, animation doesn't necessarily have to slow down the machine. It can, however, slow down the user experience. But some of those fancy effects do help. No one would take an OS seriously if it didn't have solid dragging -- if dragging a window meant watching its outline move, then dropping the outline and watching the window blink over. Drop shadows and transparency, and even little animations, can actually improve the experience -- drop shadows, in particular, make a clear visual distinction between one window and another, and which is on top.
But misusing animation is like misusing any other GUI element, only worse. Misusing them can be like using checkboxes where you should use a radio button -- misleading at best. At worst, actually debilitating -- like using radio buttons where you should have checkboxes.
It does seem, on occasion, that both are true, but I wasn't suggesting that. I mention MMOs because of this -- MMOs are operated by people at least as smart as Valve, with at least as many resources, probably considerably more. And they still can't stop exploitation. With a huge amount of work, always staying a step ahead in the arms race, they can barely keep far enough ahead of exploiters to prevent them from having a significant impact on the in-game economy. And they do anyway, sometimes.
EVERY game has unintended consequences. In this case, it just makes a lot more sense to at least give players a choice: Use the weekly popularity data, allow admin to set prices manually, or use the old static prices so that it's completely isolated. And if they're so much smarter than me, they should've thought of this in the first place -- would it really be that hard? Certainly, if they were smarter than me, they'd have some mention of the ability to turn this off in their news item.
So if we figure that out, we show a steady increase, starting ridiculously low (one AWP per day), on up to ridiculously high towards the end of the week, then enjoy a couple days where nobody can afford an AWP.
So you organize a large clan, and make sure you have everyone in the clan buy a gun you hate (AWP) at least once a week. That way, at least you cancel out any statistics about the gun you like (AK/M4).
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." -- Agent K, MIB.
Let me expand on that a bit further: The idea of Wikipedia, that the group is smarter than the individual, is entirely wrong. The group is only as good as its organization. A brain is intelligent, when organized properly -- it's certainly not intelligent if you take it out of its skull and semar it all over the wall.
And considering Valve's track record, I have no reason to assume that they, as a group, are smarter than me. Certainly not at making intelligent choices. They embedded IE to view the MOTD in a game server. 'Nuff said.
Assuming that they do have infinitely more insight into gaming than I do is equally arrogant.
I stand by it. They may eventually come up with an algorithm that works, but it will take a long time and a lot of annoyance, and I'm sure there will be a lot of people setting starting money and salaries to ridiculous values to avoid the whole system.
May I see this refusal? Or have you not asked them?
I'm curious. Their lawyers would hate it, but I bet you could make them sign some promise that should their servers ever fail (really fail, not just a couple days, but they run out of money or something), they will release a patch to allow permanent Offline Mode.
Or at least a Social Contract. It would help a lot, even if they refused to make it legally binding.
I do, but I've made a compromise. Another compromise, in this case, and one I'm not sure I regret: I knew Half-Life 2 wouldn't be very playable on Linux, and that it'd make me keep a Windows partition around.
But nevertheless, if you've read my other post, you know I think I got a good deal. While technically Valve could shut everything down tomorrow, or plaster Coke and Pepsi ads all over everyone's Half-Life 2, in reality, I've actually had a better experience with Steam than with any other system of copy protection.
In fact, while I prefer close to no copy protection -- such as most Linux ports (various uts, quakes, dooms, and other things) -- or truly none at all (duke3d, quakes 1-3, dooms 1-2 are all open source now) -- I have to admit, being able to download and re-download a game is pretty damned convenient.
I believe this has been done. It at least used to be possible to run a server with sv_lan on, and run your clients in disconnected mode.
Yes, that is hyperbolic. In fact, there have been plenty of computer games and other programs which phone home to check for updates, and which tell you when an update is available. In fact, MMOs require you to update, just as Steam does. The difference is, you have to pay a monthly fee to play an MMO, plus your initial purchase (usually), whereas Steam games can be bought once and played for a much longer period of time.
Odds, in this case, must be derived from statistics. Let me give you some of my own statistics. I bought Duke Nukem 3D a long time ago, and also the Plutonium Pak upgrade. My original Duke3D disc is smashed, the Plutonium Pak one is scratched, and I no longer have a DOS computer to play it on. Technically, I could find a working Linux port -- maybe -- and buy the game again.
My brother has lost his Diablo II CDs, and we no longer have a working installation of it -- even if we did, such an installation requires the play disc to run.
My friend lent me his xbox and Halo 2. Now he wants them back, but we've lost the Halo 2 disc. We're SOL, just have to buy him a new one.
Need I go on?
The only games that we've been able to keep since we bought them years ago have been Valve games. Steam updates keep them running. Having that centrallized control also means that when I have to wipe and reinstall Windows, I can simply re-download a game. I can delete a game to free space, knowing I can always re-download or re-install it. I can burn as many backup copies as I want -- even in nice, neat files, split onto DVDs, which can be restored to anyone's Steam account who has the game -- can't burn a single one of most other games and expect it to work.
So, to put it simply, making Half-Life 2 playable offline makes about as much sense to me as downloading Wikipedia in case Google goes under. You may point out that there are other encyclopedias -- true, but I don't own any of the other ones. And there are other games.
Did you know that any single-player game could one day decide that it doesn't like your OS, software, DVD drive, or game disc, and decide to stop working? Doubly so if you're patching it, but even if you're not, scratch a critical part of the disc and you can't play anymore.
Because you got burned once? Look at how many times I was burned, and those are just the ones I've bothered to put down.
I wonder how you feel about Microsoft? I had to go through a similar hassle when I uninstalled Windows from my virtual machine and installed it onto a real partition on the host computer. The tech didn't understand what I was talking about, and kept asking the same question, over and over...
But regardless, you got burned once and this is your response? Don't you think you're overreacting just a little bit? Or is it all just the principle of the thing?
I still strongly suspect that there are enough people out there who hate the AWP that -- well, it might not be a zombie network, but there could still be enough people effectively ballot-stuffing.
Even if it's entirely un-exploitable, I don't think I'm going to like the results of this. But that's another discussion entirely.
I think that, for the most part, the responsible thing to do is make all updates tweakable, unless they fix an obvious bug. So, for instance, if they suddenly decided to change the gravity, they should make sure those of us running our own servers can tweak sv_gravity.
This, I think, is far superior to what you're describing with LOTR. In that case, if you don't like the patch, you can't usually uninstall it, you'll have to reinstall the game from scratch. Oh, and good luck finding the 1.1 patch if there's a 1.5 out already.
This is also one thing I liked about the smaller MMOs, the ones which you download for free, and which you only pay a subscription fee. The bigger ones, you have to buy a $50 game so that you get the install cd/dvd. Smaller ones, just download. Try it for a week, with limitations. Then try it for a month for $10. If you don't like it, cancel your account.
But that's only even necessary for MMOs because the strength of an MMO is having tons of people playing on the same server, so of course everyone has to be running the exact same version of the game. Even if they're not, server patches affect everyone, lie it or not.
For my money, I don't know about you, but I buy a game because I like it now, not because I want to enshrine it forever. It's always nice to be able to go back and play the original Half-Life or Doom, but really, if I was able to play through a game a few times, I'm happy. If Valve kills Half-Life 2 tomorrow, I'll be pissed, but I wouldn't feel I got a bad deal.
Let's say I hate a particular weapon. The popular weapon to hate, last I was there, was the AWP, so let's use that as an example.
Set up a server with unlimited buy time and a few million dollars of starting money. Now, start the spammage. Buy, drop, buy, drop, buy, drop. Before you know it, the AWP is completely impossible to afford, no matter what server you're on.
Suppose only one purchase per round counts. Ok, fine, now add a custom map, and do it with a friend, dropping buy time and time between rounds as much as you can tweak them. Now you alternate. Buy, snipe, respawn, buy, snipe, respawn. You don't even have to drop it this time -- whoever got sniped will have dropped their AWP.
This can be done for any weapon. Before long, someone will have written a mod that does it automatically. Imagine -- someone doesn't like that weapon you're carrying? They punch one button and their server starts spamming Valve with new price information. If you manage to kill them, they'll never be able to afford that weapon again.
It's an interesting idea, but Valve is about to learn that it's much more difficult to balance an MMO market, where so many things are in the players' control, than to balance arbitrary weapon prices or abilities. They should've just quietly collected statistics, and then set the prices based on those statistics, probably still having to manually tweak them, and tell us when they're all done, thus giving no one the opportunity to exploit it. Here, they're just asking for trouble.