This is a silly stereotype, and I have yet to see it proven in numbers.
How many games are available for the PS1/PS2 combined? How many are considered bad/terrible/stupid by a majority of players (meaning, there's no reason it should have been released).
Yes, I said majority, because if you release a mediocre game and it has fans who go out and want to play it regularly and buy new releases, its not a failure, despite not being in the top-10.
Now, for the second statistic -- how many excellent PS2/PS1 games are there? Quite a few. I own at least 10 myself... not including those I've rented. And that's just in genres I actually like.
The PS2 has been a huge success as a platform, no matter what some "insiders" claim.
On the same note, the Gamecube has been a huge financial success for Nintendo, despite not having the sales figures of the PS2.
I've considered breaking down my user-level security further yet on a few occasions, but my E-mail and browser are the ones that stop me. I'd prefer to run thunderbird + firefox in their own users (call them meweb and memail for argument) which have basically no access to my home directory files, etc. because well, that's almost never an issue.
Downloads can go to/home/me/downloads (accessible to both me and meweb) and my files in/home/me/private... for example, but working out the details has been a little slow what with having a job and all:)
The behaviour described would be stupid and uneventful.
Option A: Dell does this, keeps up to date with GPL'd code they're basing their distro on and releases source patches (sans signature key data) to users.
Result: User gets working Linux desktop on Dell hardware but can't make their own modifications to it and run it on that hardware. Casual users don't care, hard core users get pissed.
Bad business decision probably.
Option B: Dell "pilfers" code, doesn't maintain it, leaves users with laptops and desktops that will only run 2 year out of date software they can't update.
Bad business decision again; users revolt.
There is no good reason for a company to do this unless they're simply 'evil' and it won't buy them any good will from customers or anyone else, nor would it have any effect on Linux as a product on the whole.
The local gaming store I deal with rents all their games (brand new releases too) and allows you to buy them if you want (used or new).
They get to make a few bucks renting the game out a bunch of times, then sell it at a reduced price and put another new one on the rack. Its good business, and it means I actually buy more games.
For a couple bucks I can rent the game for a night and see if its worthwhile. Sometimes, I've shelled out $10 and played it for a week and beaten it then returned it. Other times, I've just bought it knowing I'll love it for a long time (like Burnout 3).
For liability reasons I recommend exactly the opposite. Always do backups to destroyable media. Do media descruction runs after specific periods (3 yrs, 5yrs, 7 yrs, whatever applies to the information in question) and keep the media safe in the mean time.
For nightly backups, much of that data is only valuable if one copy is available. Do a full backup cycle or two and then start overwriting media. No need for last month's data (except the "month-end" backup), its out of date now.
I'd be more suspicious that they need special hardware to run software that checks for statistical irregularities and fraudulent activity on that size of numbers.
Consider as well the use of home entertainment devices like video games. My PS2 has an unroutable IP behind my Linux NAT box. My friend's new XBox 360 is in the same boat. Neither can communicate with others without going through a server of some form, and this puts unnecessary load on servers.
There are lots of other examples too (accessing my streaming media server from work, for example, without the VPN I had to configure instead).
And for all those who think NAT is the right way to handle their internal networks, consider that you could assign your internal network machines routable external IPv6 addresses that are all within one subnet firewalled by your existing firewall, just like with NAT.
How is this different? Well, first of all, TCP connections work between internal networks all of a sudden, without port forwarding. Secondly, firewalls can do what they're supposed to be doing and not worry about NATting (and un-NATting and dealing with fake NAT'd packets).
Benefit to NAT? Having hidden IP addresses. 90% of the time, its probably within 192.168.0.0/23 anyway.
Thank-you for such an intelligent response to the issue.
Re:Fuzzing and Obfuscation
on
Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 1
I often have ~/bin and ~/sbin in my path... they're self-writable and executable replacements of system tools I want for myself, but not for the whole system (like my setuid copy of cdrecord).
These are easily over-written in an attack situation, and they could be executed as root if I did 'su' instead of 'su -'. I always do the latter though.
What he's saying is that the villification means that the public doesn't care about sentencing anymore.
Just ask someone on the street what should be done with a person who is accused of child pornography. Their first reaction will not be "give them a fair trial like everyone else".
If instead of HDMI, the electronics world had instead used something like Firewire where an encoded (or raw) stream was sent from A->B, then your DVD player and DVB could each send an 'MPEG-2' stream (decrypted by the original device) to the TV instead of a raw video stream. Then we could opt to buy HDTVs with good MPEG decoders, or put good MPEG decoders between our hardware and our TVs.
The Incredibles and Ants for that matter have excellent plots as modern movies go. Much better plots than your average 'action' movie or even romantic comedies. Sure, they were cartoony (so are most sitcoms these days, but with real actors), but definately not cookie-cutter.
Toy Story, I could take it or leave it, but it was a great piece of technical know-how to produce.
I won't claim to be a political scientist nor a historian, but didn't Apartheid get abolished shortly (in historical terms) after western influence crept in?
Lets say that western investment was 'bad' for south africa. Why then is it no longer the way it was?
Books are a good comparison actually -- where's the ESRB ratings on my books? I want to make sure that book I bought has no profanity in it.
Seriously, they gave the game an M for mature rating, as is God of War. God of war has full frontal nudity cut-scenes and 'sex' mini-game.
Come on people.
Re:Perl is between awk and C
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
I've always found PERL to be (not so ironically) to be best at log analysis and other parsing of huge amounts of 'like' data.
Its so much easier in PERL than in any other language to do something as a result of a regex that iterates over every line of your code; I've written functions to simplify this feature for myself in Python (for example), but it never feels as easy still.
while () {/^(\d+)\s+(\w+)$/ and $vals{$2} = $1; } # do something with $vals
The really convoluted ones are the ones that make PERL shine, IMHO.
Personally, using the regex functionality in Python or imported into C, etc. is just painful... although Python does have the nice dictionary feature for regex matches.
Despite many peoples' objections to the use of double negatives, they have their place and have different meanings from their supposed opposite positive statements.
I don't disagree does not mean I could agree. It doesn't mean I do agree. I could possibly mean I have no opinion on the issue. It does however mean that I don't disagree.
"I don't disagree" is about as incorrect as "I didn't kill that man"... and I suppose "I left that man alive" would be your prefered response to the police? Perhaps you'd choose something more obscure like "I've had nothing to do with that man's death to my recollection, although I can't guarantee I'm fully aware of everything to which I'm making claim."
It depends on how you're administering your network, but for people like the grandparent one would only revoke certificates that had fallen into the wrong hands or may have done so.
For example, if I took a laptop on a business trip and used it on someone's network then left it there while I was at lunch, I may realize I should revoke my certs on that laptop and request new ones.
However, if I were fired, my certificates do not need to be revoked, the permissions associated with my identity are simply denied.
Deleting identities is a great way to lose auditability on your network incidentally.
I love having the seperate packages, but I too don't understand why the shared features are not distributed as versioned libraries (to be installed in Common Files on a Windows box, or/usr/lib/mozilla or a *nix box). It makes no sense to distribute so many binary copies of your own code.
That's not a valid usability test... whether Linux is hard to get on your desktop is no more a characteristic of Linux's usability than whether Windows is.
Windows was first to market on PC hardware and had some excellent marketing, this is why its available on all new PCs.
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This is a silly stereotype, and I have yet to see it proven in numbers.
... not including those I've rented. And that's just in genres I actually like.
How many games are available for the PS1/PS2 combined? How many are considered bad/terrible/stupid by a majority of players (meaning, there's no reason it should have been released).
Yes, I said majority, because if you release a mediocre game and it has fans who go out and want to play it regularly and buy new releases, its not a failure, despite not being in the top-10.
Now, for the second statistic -- how many excellent PS2/PS1 games are there? Quite a few. I own at least 10 myself
The PS2 has been a huge success as a platform, no matter what some "insiders" claim.
On the same note, the Gamecube has been a huge financial success for Nintendo, despite not having the sales figures of the PS2.
Its simple really ... those "improvements" were not well designed. Period.
Does this sound familiar? Microsoft wouldn't be famous for "don't use it before version 3" if they could design things properly the first time.
I've considered breaking down my user-level security further yet on a few occasions, but my E-mail and browser are the ones that stop me. I'd prefer to run thunderbird + firefox in their own users (call them meweb and memail for argument) which have basically no access to my home directory files, etc. because well, that's almost never an issue.
/home/me/downloads (accessible to both me and meweb) and my files in /home/me/private ... for example, but working out the details has been a little slow what with having a job and all :)
Downloads can go to
Who the !@# marked that insightful?
The behaviour described would be stupid and uneventful.
Option A:
Dell does this, keeps up to date with GPL'd code they're basing their distro on and releases source patches (sans signature key data) to users.
Result:
User gets working Linux desktop on Dell hardware but can't make their own modifications to it and run it on that hardware. Casual users don't care, hard core users get pissed.
Bad business decision probably.
Option B:
Dell "pilfers" code, doesn't maintain it, leaves users with laptops and desktops that will only run 2 year out of date software they can't update.
Bad business decision again; users revolt.
There is no good reason for a company to do this unless they're simply 'evil' and it won't buy them any good will from customers or anyone else, nor would it have any effect on Linux as a product on the whole.
So this is what McAfee Desktop used to be (except it didn't include anti-spam or spyware at the time, neither did anyone else).
Great desktop tools, anti-virus, encrytion, secure file deletion, etc.
Yeah, revolutionary.
The local gaming store I deal with rents all their games (brand new releases too) and allows you to buy them if you want (used or new).
They get to make a few bucks renting the game out a bunch of times, then sell it at a reduced price and put another new one on the rack. Its good business, and it means I actually buy more games.
For a couple bucks I can rent the game for a night and see if its worthwhile. Sometimes, I've shelled out $10 and played it for a week and beaten it then returned it. Other times, I've just bought it knowing I'll love it for a long time (like Burnout 3).
For liability reasons I recommend exactly the opposite. Always do backups to destroyable media. Do media descruction runs after specific periods (3 yrs, 5yrs, 7 yrs, whatever applies to the information in question) and keep the media safe in the mean time.
For nightly backups, much of that data is only valuable if one copy is available. Do a full backup cycle or two and then start overwriting media. No need for last month's data (except the "month-end" backup), its out of date now.
I'd be more suspicious that they need special hardware to run software that checks for statistical irregularities and fraudulent activity on that size of numbers.
Consider as well the use of home entertainment devices like video games. My PS2 has an unroutable IP behind my Linux NAT box. My friend's new XBox 360 is in the same boat. Neither can communicate with others without going through a server of some form, and this puts unnecessary load on servers.
There are lots of other examples too (accessing my streaming media server from work, for example, without the VPN I had to configure instead).
And for all those who think NAT is the right way to handle their internal networks, consider that you could assign your internal network machines routable external IPv6 addresses that are all within one subnet firewalled by your existing firewall, just like with NAT.
How is this different? Well, first of all, TCP connections work between internal networks all of a sudden, without port forwarding. Secondly, firewalls can do what they're supposed to be doing and not worry about NATting (and un-NATting and dealing with fake NAT'd packets).
Benefit to NAT? Having hidden IP addresses. 90% of the time, its probably within 192.168.0.0/23 anyway.
Thank-you for such an intelligent response to the issue.
I often have ~/bin and ~/sbin in my path ... they're self-writable and executable replacements of system tools I want for myself, but not for the whole system (like my setuid copy of cdrecord).
These are easily over-written in an attack situation, and they could be executed as root if I did 'su' instead of 'su -'. I always do the latter though.
Agreed, excellent game. Available as a port on the PS2 from Walmart for like $10 in many places.
Sure, its not the PC version, but it plays.
What he's saying is that the villification means that the public doesn't care about sentencing anymore.
Just ask someone on the street what should be done with a person who is accused of child pornography. Their first reaction will not be "give them a fair trial like everyone else".
If instead of HDMI, the electronics world had instead used something like Firewire where an encoded (or raw) stream was sent from A->B, then your DVD player and DVB could each send an 'MPEG-2' stream (decrypted by the original device) to the TV instead of a raw video stream. Then we could opt to buy HDTVs with good MPEG decoders, or put good MPEG decoders between our hardware and our TVs.
Just my $0.02.
The Incredibles and Ants for that matter have excellent plots as modern movies go. Much better plots than your average 'action' movie or even romantic comedies. Sure, they were cartoony (so are most sitcoms these days, but with real actors), but definately not cookie-cutter.
Toy Story, I could take it or leave it, but it was a great piece of technical know-how to produce.
I won't claim to be a political scientist nor a historian, but didn't Apartheid get abolished shortly (in historical terms) after western influence crept in?
Lets say that western investment was 'bad' for south africa. Why then is it no longer the way it was?
Just an honest question.
Books are a good comparison actually -- where's the ESRB ratings on my books? I want to make sure that book I bought has no profanity in it.
Seriously, they gave the game an M for mature rating, as is God of War. God of war has full frontal nudity cut-scenes and 'sex' mini-game.
Come on people.
I've always found PERL to be (not so ironically) to be best at log analysis and other parsing of huge amounts of 'like' data.
/^(\d+)\s+(\w+)$/ and $vals{$2} = $1; }
... although Python does have the nice dictionary feature for regex matches.
Its so much easier in PERL than in any other language to do something as a result of a regex that iterates over every line of your code; I've written functions to simplify this feature for myself in Python (for example), but it never feels as easy still.
while () {
# do something with $vals
The really convoluted ones are the ones that make PERL shine, IMHO.
Personally, using the regex functionality in Python or imported into C, etc. is just painful
Despite many peoples' objections to the use of double negatives, they have their place and have different meanings from their supposed opposite positive statements.
... and I suppose "I left that man alive" would be your prefered response to the police? Perhaps you'd choose something more obscure like "I've had nothing to do with that man's death to my recollection, although I can't guarantee I'm fully aware of everything to which I'm making claim."
I don't disagree does not mean I could agree. It doesn't mean I do agree. I could possibly mean I have no opinion on the issue. It does however mean that I don't disagree.
"I don't disagree" is about as incorrect as "I didn't kill that man"
(geez)
I know you're being funny, but I can see the government going quite far along that road before the prohibition-style repercussions set in.
The black market for media will become very prevalent and profitable and the rest will be a repetition of history.
Trust your consumers, educate your consumers, but do not abuse them.
It depends on how you're administering your network, but for people like the grandparent one would only revoke certificates that had fallen into the wrong hands or may have done so.
For example, if I took a laptop on a business trip and used it on someone's network then left it there while I was at lunch, I may realize I should revoke my certs on that laptop and request new ones.
However, if I were fired, my certificates do not need to be revoked, the permissions associated with my identity are simply denied.
Deleting identities is a great way to lose auditability on your network incidentally.
You mean, you don't? How would you know who's who without a DH key negotiation on your calculators before speaking to each other?
I love having the seperate packages, but I too don't understand why the shared features are not distributed as versioned libraries (to be installed in Common Files on a Windows box, or /usr/lib/mozilla or a *nix box). It makes no sense to distribute so many binary copies of your own code.
That's not a valid usability test ... whether Linux is hard to get on your desktop is no more a characteristic of Linux's usability than whether Windows is.
Windows was first to market on PC hardware and had some excellent marketing, this is why its available on all new PCs.