It is believed that numbers with 2000 or so digits will be secure for the indefinite future.
Digits? or bits? Because most RSA keys are in the 1024-4096 bit range if I understand the math correctly. Which is a lot less then 2000 decimal digits (2^4096 is roughly 1.044e1233 or about 1234 decimal digits while 2^2048 is only 3.23e616 or about 617 decimal digits).
I have a dream that someday MS will wise up and split itself. Operating Systems, Office Software, and maybe a few other independent companys. That or maybe MS will wise up and follow Apple down the BSD road. But that won't happen until they split.
(The more time I spend away from Microsoft servers, the more I'm reminded of the adage - "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.")
Develop a simple, basic framework and go online with it as soon as possible, add more content later and keep adding on. Let users create their own content.
User content is generally going to be crap. Unless you have a staff that can wade through it and pull out the 10% that isn't unbalanced, god-mode, stupid, non-canon, or simply crap.
There needs to be enough content there so that people have things to do, and preferably a decent selection of things to do. You need to appeal to a broad range (the PvP'ers, the no-so-hardcore PvP'ers, the hardcore raiders, the raiders who have a life, people who like to explore, people who like to make things for other people and to feel useful, those who want to play the politics game, etc.). Or else you need to seriously focus on a particular demographic.
But the biggest killer? Lack of polish and bugs. There are too many MMO choices out there that players will not stand around and put up with glitches, cheats, or stupid bugs that get in the way of enjoyment. Unless you offer an *extremely* unique experience (EVE Online, AoC), you damn well better get it running right out of the gate because a bad launch will kill you. (AoC seems to be stumbling forward in kind of a death walk... unique game, bad launch, and a shrinking population.)
Lot's of people decry WoW, but Blizzard manages to get things about 95% right out of the gate. Stupid annoying game mechanics have been replaced and there aren't a lot of rough edges. The first 20-30 levels are basically error-free and hassle-free. For the most part they get the concept that it's not always better to do something in a unique and backasswords fashion just because you can.
I agree with you but EVE-Online is still a tiny MMO and going for 6 years (i think?).
Tiny by what measure? Peak play time on Sunday usually has 40-45k accounts logged in. Sometimes as high as 55k.
Paid account is somewhere around 340k, which is quite decent. The 2nd qtr 2010 QEN (sorry, it's a PDF link) gives that hard number towards the bottom of page 8.
300k+ is pretty big in the MMO market. Tiny by WoW/Blizzard standards, but then what isn't?
It seems like in reality virus/adware/spyware infections are down to very, very low levels.
No, they're just more subtle. At least the ones that are attempting to build a botnet to use for DDoS, web hosting of illegal or fraudulent content, or as spam zombies.
But there's also a lot of them that do click-jacking, ad-insertion, or simply misbehave that frankly... even on a patched Windows box, allowing Javascript/Flash to run from every site out there is a bad idea. It's still the primary infection method (and has been for a few years).
It hasn't gotten better, in fact it's gotten a lot worse over the past 3 years. Used to be, we could keep our machines clean if we were careful where we browsed and kept things patched. That's no longer good enough and I see users constantly getting infected by websites. Not seedy websites either, legit and mainstream websites get hacked or they serve up malicious ads from 3rd party networks (hacked or being paid by hackers to serve the ads). I have at least half a dozen acquaintances who end up infected at least once a quarter - until I have them switch over to Firefox+AdBlock or Firefox+NoScript+FlashBlock.
Things are proceeding pretty much right along the path I predicted 2-3 years ago. Javascript/Flash are still the primary attack vectors and more and more people are turning it off, or selectively whitelisting. Blacklisting can't keep up. Signatures can't keep up. Heuristics might, but run the risk of enough false positives that users turn it back off. It's going to eventually kill the rich media ads - because nobody is going to be willing to run Javascript/Flash from random 3rd party sites. Or the sites will start hosting the ads locally, and open themselves up to liability lawsuits for hosting malicious content. (Oh joy.) That's going to do a number on a lot of ad-supported community sites that try to survive by serving up ads.
Of course as oil grows more scarce, the price will climb. That's the real issue - how will people be able to afford $10/gallon gasoline.
No, the real issue is "how fast" that price will climb.
Slow and steady? No big disruptions as people will have time to adjust. But if it spikes from $3/gal to $10/gal in the course of a year or three, then you're going to see huge issues.
Gas used to cost well under $1/gal. But that was probably 20 years ago now, and we're now at $3/gal. That's roughly equivalent of going from $3/gal to your $10/gal. If it happens over two decades, no big deal. People will complain about the "good old days", but for the most part they'll have adjusted.
Book sales increase now because the book IS a better product when compared to ebooks.
Eh, if you toss the DRM issue out the window (all the ebooks that I own are zero-DRM from places like Baen), then it's much less of a clear-cut issue.
I've had an ebook reader for almost 3 years now (a Sony PRS-505). For leisure, cover-to-cover, reading without a lot of diagrams/pictures - I absolutely love it. All the books that I want to read in an easy to cart around reader which I only have to tether to the USB cable every few weeks to charge it back up. No bulky paper to carry around (or worse, move from flat to flat when I move house), no dealing with the pain and pleasure of trying to turn pages with one hand. And I can change the font size to match my current needs.
Given a choice between reading a paperback for leisure or the ebook, I'll take the ebook every time. Mostly because the Sony unit simply gets out of the way and lets me read.
I just wish that technical books were feasible on it. (Screen refresh is one issue, difficulty in random-access or searching is another. And I'm not yet sold on the newer readers.)
I would qualify that as "And yet OS X and Linux systems don't have many viruses.".
There's a few reasons for that:
- Lack of market penetration.
- Hackers typically work on what they are familiar with, which is generally Windows.
- Better default out-of-the-box security (not running as admin, mostly).
Back in the bad old days, classic Mac OS was a badly designed system that was easy to infect (similar to Win95/Win98 design). I encountered numerous Mac OS viruses / trojans back in the late 80s and early 90s.
Frankly, at this point, I don't care whether Oracle finally releases ZFS in a Linux-compatible license. (Although they might, in order to shoehorn it into Unbreakable Linux(tm) that they use. Which I think is the biggest chance that we'll see ZFS in Linux.)
ZFS has been around long enough now that the flaws are known. It's not the end-all be-all of file systems and storage. And some of the flaws are pretty nasty (can't shrink a zpool, which they've been "working" on a fix since 2007 for that).
And the flexibility of layers where RAID is separate from LVM which is separate from the file system offers other advantages. And headaches... but I do prefer the flexibility of keeping the layers more separate then ZFS does. Checksumming of data is pretty smexy though and I would like to see more of that to guard against bitrot.
The client reports to the server the positioning of the character... fairly easy to hack if you know what you're doing. Seen the "underground hackers" yet, or are you on a low pop server?
It's doing wonderful things in PvP like Arenas as well. Lots of PvP folks using hacked clients to move faster, or warp around to get out of line of sight. Fun times.
This nonsense has been going on for over a year now - Blizzard has done nothing.
I totally agree, but there are some other bits to include. You probably already knew them, but they're worth mentioning. At one point, I had a decade of mail stored. It was broken up by year and month. Year folders, month subfolders. It made it just a bit more manageable to read through. That's just a personal decision though. Some people like sorting by the sender, or what they were involved in. You can subscribe or unsubscribe folders too, so it's not necessary to download the headers for 10 years of mail just to set up on a new computer.
I used to sort by subject (job number - for work related stuff), but ultimately fell back to archiving by year (year/month was too fine grained). Searching for a sender/receiver name is fast with IMAP, as your client will already have that information as part of the message headers. So I've never felt the need to file stuff away based on who sent it.
As I get older, I get lazier. Filing stuff by year is easy, so it gets done. And it keeps my individual folder sizes at a manageable size of a few thousand messages per year. Plus, I can generally guess the year and get a hit on the first search. Worst case, I have to look up/down one year. Trying to do the same by month would not get me as fast of results.
Especially since in Thunderbird I can quickly filter by subject line / to / from / etc. So I'm rarely looking at a list of more then 100 messages when hunting for something.
A lot of inexpensive hosting companies also now offer IMAP, and it shares space with your web content. I have a few gigabytes of email over at LogicWeb on their IMAP server for one of my personal domains.
I generally archive by year, rather then trying to archive by category. This is where GMail's tags would come in handy as you can apply multiple tags to an email. But if you don't have tags, sorting by year is quick and dirty, and you can always do full-text searches.
(I have archives going back a full decade, which is important for work email so I can find how we did something 2-3 years ago.)
Duke3D actually couldn't do rooms above rooms, but it had some hacks that let you do something almost equivalent, as long as they didn't have entrances on the same side. This meant that you could do things like have a figure of eight track where the two tracks crossed but they were still separate in the game world. Neither was on top of the other, but they were not accessible from each other, in spite of occupying the same location in 3D space.
Well, kind of... the rule for floors above other floors was that all of the vertices had to be at different coordinates and no sides could match up with the floor above/below. So it wasn't hard to do a bridge over another section, but a multi-floor building was out.
Multi-floor buildings had to be simulated. You would lay out individual floors on different parts of the map, then use teleporter effects to move the player between them.
The other big issue was that most monsters could not leave the polygon that they spawned on. I don't remember how they did the flying pig cops, I just remember the issue with the basic static spawns and that you needed to be careful laying out the floor cells.
It's supposed to learn from your email-reading habits, so it's something like Thunderbird's Bayesian spamfilter, i.e. gaming this would be difficult.
If it's anything like Thunderbird's spam filter, it's doomed to failure.
The only tool that I've seen do bayesian learning correctly and get the results right was Spambayes for Microsoft Outlook with it's "spam / maybe spam / ham" classification. I never had to look at the messages tagged as spam by Spambayes, because it always got it right. I did have to look at the "maybe spam", and then tell Spambayes what was spam/ham. It was a quick learner and you would rarely see the same spam/ham issue once trained.
Plus, you could pre-train the filter by providing it with a few hundred spam/ham messages.
Thunderbird's filter, OTOH, is a complete black box, with only 2 levels (spam or ham), and obtuse. Plus, if it decides to move something to the spam folder that isn't spam - you have to go rescue it by hand. And then you have to move it back by hand. (Spambayes would move mis-marked mail back to the original folder automatically.)
Wow, thanks for that, I remember reading those guidelines years ago, but have since forgotten all about them. I should probably read them again next time I get mod points.:)
However if you want a laptop with a SSD at the moment you have to either choose a SSD that can store everything you want on the laptop (which if you store a lot on your laptop means $$$), go for a monster size machine or sacrifice the optical drive (and pick your laptop from the very limited choice of machines that support replacing the optical drive with a hard drive).
Yes, it's a trade-off.
But it's worth it. As soon as SSDs get close to $1/GB, I'll be going that route for my Thinkpad. Run off a 256GB SSD for the main drive, then stuff a magnetic in the optical bay for auxiliary storage. It'll be like a brand new machine in feel, even though it's already 3 years old.
(I've used other laptops where we refitted magnetic with SSDs... it's amazing.)
Fallout 3 and Bioshock 2. I bought both on Steam, both use Windows Live, so I have to log into both to play them
No, no you don't have to login to LIVE to play Fallout 3. Even if you bought the DLCs via LIVE (which was the only option last year). Just move the DLC's ESM/ESP files over to the proper Fallout 3 program folder (C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\fallout 3\Data on Windows XP) and add them to your load order.
I haven't touched LIVE since last fall when I bought the DLCs for Fallout 3. With the advantage that I can now install mods and have a pleasantly customized game.
Spinning platter HDD are not going anywhere until SSD prices become CHEAPER per byte than regular HDD.
SSD needs to become cheaper per byte, yes. But not to the extreme of becoming cheaper then magnetic media in order for it to take off. At some point, it will become "cheap enough" to become useful to a wider range of customers.
Right now, we're a bit above $2/GB for MLC-based SSD while magnetic drives are in the 0.07/GB to 0.12/GB range (3.5" 1TB $70 or 2.5" 500GB $60). Which is about a 16x cost difference right now. And magnetic drives have a price minimum of around $40-$50, below which you won't find units for sale at retail. There's a base materials cost to be dealt with along with the prices of the rare earth magnets and circuitry.
So, on the $/GB side, SSD has a long way to go. But what about the fuzzier "big enough for practical purposes"? Well, that's probably in the range of about $1/GB or maybe 0.50/GB. When you can get a decent amount of storage in something that costs less then $100 to $150. A decent amount of storage varies by person and by purpose, but for general PC usage that is not heavy on multimedia recording/editing, something in the 100-200GB range is the current sweet spot.
I think, if you could drop a 200GB SSD for $100 or $150 into your laptop, most people would jump on the chance. Even if there was a 1TB magnetic for about the same price. The performance increase of using the SSD over the magnetic would vastly outweigh the storage capacity of the 1TB unit.
But, the 256GB units are still around $600 ($2.34/GB). So we're definitely not there yet. And the low-end of the SSD price curve seems to be closer to $80-$100 instead of the $40-$50 for magnetic hard drives.
Personally, I think the magic number is $1/GB for SSD. Which might happen next year.
The price is still far too high. I recognize that an SSD can provide a good performance boost, but still...the prices are way too high. I'll likely give it another year or two before I pull the trigger on one.
Getting close though. If they can drive the 128GB prices down below or close to $100, I think it suddenly becomes much more of a "hell yeah" choice. The current 32GB units that are in that price range are too small.
There have been research programs investigating X-Ray lithography and electron-beam lithography, but I don't think any of these have panned out for mass production.
From the reading I did earlier this week, you are correct. Those 2 methods worked, but they were expensive. What has caught on instead is "double-patterning" (and possibly triple/quad patterning). Double-patterning gives you the same feature size as the more advanced methods, but for a lot less cost.
(Assuming that I understood the articles correctly. Definitely do a search on double-patterns/patterning.)
Itanium failed because it used a VLIW architecture - great for specialized processing tasks on big machines but for general purpose computing (ie. what 99.9% of people do) it wasn't much faster than x86.
Itanium failed - because it could not run x86 code at an acceptable speed. Which meant that if you wanted to switch over to Itanium, you had to start from scratch - rebuying every piece of software that you depended on, or getting new versions for Itanium.
AMD's 64bit CPUs, on the other hand, were excellent at running older x86 code while also giving you the ability to code natively in 64bit for the future. AMD's method took the market by storm and Intel had to relent and produce a 64bit x86 CPU.
(There were other reasons why Itanium failed - such as relying too much on compilers to produce optimal code, cost of the units due to being limited quantity, and Intel arrogance.)
Hahaha! I didn't even look at the killboard until that. It is great that she got podded as well:P Serves them right. I mean, really, IF, I was to even think of moving a PLEX, I would make DAM[sic] sure I was in at a minimum a freighter, jump freighter, dreadnought, or similar and had plenty of escort.
I'd use an Orca in hi-sec. 250-280k effective HP (20-30% more then a freighter) if fitted properly. Stuff the PLEX in the corp hangar inside the Orca, where it won't drop if you get ganked and will never show up on any killmail. And stuff in the corp hangar doesn't show up when someone cargo-scans you. Toss a load of hi-sec ores or Tritanium in the regular cargo hold and people will think that you're just moving ore/minerals.
Of course, I wouldn't do so while involved in a CONCORD sanctioned war-dec. Your only option there is a covops frigate or a shuttle, both of which are difficult to catch without sensor boosted tacklers.
The other craft that I've used to run high-value stuff around in is a massively tanked battlecruiser. People just don't bother to scan them. They're easier to gank, but nobody bothers.
It wasn't a "pirate attack", it was a sanctioned war in a trade hub where hundreds of players are on at any time and it's difficult to spot war targets in local.
Okay, this is not hard... if you're one of the involved parties in a CONCORD sanctioned wardec - stay the hell away from the trade hub stations (and systems). You definitely don't go on shopping trips and haul stuff around that doesn't need to be hauled.
Or for goodness sake, spend 15 minutes and roll an alt. Now you've just flipped the problem on its head, because your WTs will have to pick your alt out from the other 1000-odd people in Jita. Except that it will be a name that they've never seen before, flying some random Tech-I frigate, mixed in with all the other pilots that belong to NPC-corps.
There's just some kinds of stupid in EVE that you don't have to be with a bit of common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
It is believed that numbers with 2000 or so digits will be secure for the indefinite future.
Digits? or bits? Because most RSA keys are in the 1024-4096 bit range if I understand the math correctly. Which is a lot less then 2000 decimal digits (2^4096 is roughly 1.044e1233 or about 1234 decimal digits while 2^2048 is only 3.23e616 or about 617 decimal digits).
I have a dream that someday MS will wise up and split itself. Operating Systems, Office Software, and maybe a few other independent companys. That or maybe MS will wise up and follow Apple down the BSD road. But that won't happen until they split.
(The more time I spend away from Microsoft servers, the more I'm reminded of the adage - "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.")
Develop a simple, basic framework and go online with it as soon as possible, add more content later and keep adding on. Let users create their own content.
User content is generally going to be crap. Unless you have a staff that can wade through it and pull out the 10% that isn't unbalanced, god-mode, stupid, non-canon, or simply crap.
There needs to be enough content there so that people have things to do, and preferably a decent selection of things to do. You need to appeal to a broad range (the PvP'ers, the no-so-hardcore PvP'ers, the hardcore raiders, the raiders who have a life, people who like to explore, people who like to make things for other people and to feel useful, those who want to play the politics game, etc.). Or else you need to seriously focus on a particular demographic.
But the biggest killer? Lack of polish and bugs. There are too many MMO choices out there that players will not stand around and put up with glitches, cheats, or stupid bugs that get in the way of enjoyment. Unless you offer an *extremely* unique experience (EVE Online, AoC), you damn well better get it running right out of the gate because a bad launch will kill you. (AoC seems to be stumbling forward in kind of a death walk... unique game, bad launch, and a shrinking population.)
Lot's of people decry WoW, but Blizzard manages to get things about 95% right out of the gate. Stupid annoying game mechanics have been replaced and there aren't a lot of rough edges. The first 20-30 levels are basically error-free and hassle-free. For the most part they get the concept that it's not always better to do something in a unique and backasswords fashion just because you can.
I agree with you but EVE-Online is still a tiny MMO and going for 6 years (i think?).
Tiny by what measure? Peak play time on Sunday usually has 40-45k accounts logged in. Sometimes as high as 55k.
Paid account is somewhere around 340k, which is quite decent. The 2nd qtr 2010 QEN (sorry, it's a PDF link) gives that hard number towards the bottom of page 8.
300k+ is pretty big in the MMO market. Tiny by WoW/Blizzard standards, but then what isn't?
It seems like in reality virus/adware/spyware infections are down to very, very low levels.
No, they're just more subtle. At least the ones that are attempting to build a botnet to use for DDoS, web hosting of illegal or fraudulent content, or as spam zombies.
But there's also a lot of them that do click-jacking, ad-insertion, or simply misbehave that frankly... even on a patched Windows box, allowing Javascript/Flash to run from every site out there is a bad idea. It's still the primary infection method (and has been for a few years).
It hasn't gotten better, in fact it's gotten a lot worse over the past 3 years. Used to be, we could keep our machines clean if we were careful where we browsed and kept things patched. That's no longer good enough and I see users constantly getting infected by websites. Not seedy websites either, legit and mainstream websites get hacked or they serve up malicious ads from 3rd party networks (hacked or being paid by hackers to serve the ads). I have at least half a dozen acquaintances who end up infected at least once a quarter - until I have them switch over to Firefox+AdBlock or Firefox+NoScript+FlashBlock.
Things are proceeding pretty much right along the path I predicted 2-3 years ago. Javascript/Flash are still the primary attack vectors and more and more people are turning it off, or selectively whitelisting. Blacklisting can't keep up. Signatures can't keep up. Heuristics might, but run the risk of enough false positives that users turn it back off. It's going to eventually kill the rich media ads - because nobody is going to be willing to run Javascript/Flash from random 3rd party sites. Or the sites will start hosting the ads locally, and open themselves up to liability lawsuits for hosting malicious content. (Oh joy.) That's going to do a number on a lot of ad-supported community sites that try to survive by serving up ads.
UltraEdit tells you in the status bar how many characters are selected.
Comes in handy at times. Copy/Paste into UE32 to check length is a common task.
(Yes I'm sure there's a linux command that does this... probably something like echo "X" | wc -c, or maybe -m.)
Of course as oil grows more scarce, the price will climb. That's the real issue - how will people be able to afford $10/gallon gasoline.
No, the real issue is "how fast" that price will climb.
Slow and steady? No big disruptions as people will have time to adjust. But if it spikes from $3/gal to $10/gal in the course of a year or three, then you're going to see huge issues.
Gas used to cost well under $1/gal. But that was probably 20 years ago now, and we're now at $3/gal. That's roughly equivalent of going from $3/gal to your $10/gal. If it happens over two decades, no big deal. People will complain about the "good old days", but for the most part they'll have adjusted.
Book sales increase now because the book IS a better product when compared to ebooks.
Eh, if you toss the DRM issue out the window (all the ebooks that I own are zero-DRM from places like Baen), then it's much less of a clear-cut issue.
I've had an ebook reader for almost 3 years now (a Sony PRS-505). For leisure, cover-to-cover, reading without a lot of diagrams/pictures - I absolutely love it. All the books that I want to read in an easy to cart around reader which I only have to tether to the USB cable every few weeks to charge it back up. No bulky paper to carry around (or worse, move from flat to flat when I move house), no dealing with the pain and pleasure of trying to turn pages with one hand. And I can change the font size to match my current needs.
Given a choice between reading a paperback for leisure or the ebook, I'll take the ebook every time. Mostly because the Sony unit simply gets out of the way and lets me read.
I just wish that technical books were feasible on it. (Screen refresh is one issue, difficulty in random-access or searching is another. And I'm not yet sold on the newer readers.)
I would qualify that as "And yet OS X and Linux systems don't have many viruses.".
There's a few reasons for that:
- Lack of market penetration.
- Hackers typically work on what they are familiar with, which is generally Windows.
- Better default out-of-the-box security (not running as admin, mostly).
Back in the bad old days, classic Mac OS was a badly designed system that was easy to infect (similar to Win95/Win98 design). I encountered numerous Mac OS viruses / trojans back in the late 80s and early 90s.
Frankly, at this point, I don't care whether Oracle finally releases ZFS in a Linux-compatible license. (Although they might, in order to shoehorn it into Unbreakable Linux(tm) that they use. Which I think is the biggest chance that we'll see ZFS in Linux.)
ZFS has been around long enough now that the flaws are known. It's not the end-all be-all of file systems and storage. And some of the flaws are pretty nasty (can't shrink a zpool, which they've been "working" on a fix since 2007 for that).
And the flexibility of layers where RAID is separate from LVM which is separate from the file system offers other advantages. And headaches... but I do prefer the flexibility of keeping the layers more separate then ZFS does. Checksumming of data is pretty smexy though and I would like to see more of that to guard against bitrot.
The client reports to the server the positioning of the character... fairly easy to hack if you know what you're doing. Seen the "underground hackers" yet, or are you on a low pop server?
It's doing wonderful things in PvP like Arenas as well. Lots of PvP folks using hacked clients to move faster, or warp around to get out of line of sight. Fun times.
This nonsense has been going on for over a year now - Blizzard has done nothing.
I totally agree, but there are some other bits to include. You probably already knew them, but they're worth mentioning. At one point, I had a decade of mail stored. It was broken up by year and month. Year folders, month subfolders. It made it just a bit more manageable to read through. That's just a personal decision though. Some people like sorting by the sender, or what they were involved in. You can subscribe or unsubscribe folders too, so it's not necessary to download the headers for 10 years of mail just to set up on a new computer.
I used to sort by subject (job number - for work related stuff), but ultimately fell back to archiving by year (year/month was too fine grained). Searching for a sender/receiver name is fast with IMAP, as your client will already have that information as part of the message headers. So I've never felt the need to file stuff away based on who sent it.
As I get older, I get lazier. Filing stuff by year is easy, so it gets done. And it keeps my individual folder sizes at a manageable size of a few thousand messages per year. Plus, I can generally guess the year and get a hit on the first search. Worst case, I have to look up/down one year. Trying to do the same by month would not get me as fast of results.
Especially since in Thunderbird I can quickly filter by subject line / to / from / etc. So I'm rarely looking at a list of more then 100 messages when hunting for something.
A lot of inexpensive hosting companies also now offer IMAP, and it shares space with your web content. I have a few gigabytes of email over at LogicWeb on their IMAP server for one of my personal domains.
I generally archive by year, rather then trying to archive by category. This is where GMail's tags would come in handy as you can apply multiple tags to an email. But if you don't have tags, sorting by year is quick and dirty, and you can always do full-text searches.
(I have archives going back a full decade, which is important for work email so I can find how we did something 2-3 years ago.)
Duke3D actually couldn't do rooms above rooms, but it had some hacks that let you do something almost equivalent, as long as they didn't have entrances on the same side. This meant that you could do things like have a figure of eight track where the two tracks crossed but they were still separate in the game world. Neither was on top of the other, but they were not accessible from each other, in spite of occupying the same location in 3D space.
Well, kind of... the rule for floors above other floors was that all of the vertices had to be at different coordinates and no sides could match up with the floor above/below. So it wasn't hard to do a bridge over another section, but a multi-floor building was out.
Multi-floor buildings had to be simulated. You would lay out individual floors on different parts of the map, then use teleporter effects to move the player between them.
The other big issue was that most monsters could not leave the polygon that they spawned on. I don't remember how they did the flying pig cops, I just remember the issue with the basic static spawns and that you needed to be careful laying out the floor cells.
It's supposed to learn from your email-reading habits, so it's something like Thunderbird's Bayesian spamfilter, i.e. gaming this would be difficult.
If it's anything like Thunderbird's spam filter, it's doomed to failure.
The only tool that I've seen do bayesian learning correctly and get the results right was Spambayes for Microsoft Outlook with it's "spam / maybe spam / ham" classification. I never had to look at the messages tagged as spam by Spambayes, because it always got it right. I did have to look at the "maybe spam", and then tell Spambayes what was spam/ham. It was a quick learner and you would rarely see the same spam/ham issue once trained.
Plus, you could pre-train the filter by providing it with a few hundred spam/ham messages.
Thunderbird's filter, OTOH, is a complete black box, with only 2 levels (spam or ham), and obtuse. Plus, if it decides to move something to the spam folder that isn't spam - you have to go rescue it by hand. And then you have to move it back by hand. (Spambayes would move mis-marked mail back to the original folder automatically.)
Wow, thanks for that, I remember reading those guidelines years ago, but have since forgotten all about them. I should probably read them again next time I get mod points. :)
Aw, but what fun would that be?
However if you want a laptop with a SSD at the moment you have to either choose a SSD that can store everything you want on the laptop (which if you store a lot on your laptop means $$$), go for a monster size machine or sacrifice the optical drive (and pick your laptop from the very limited choice of machines that support replacing the optical drive with a hard drive).
Yes, it's a trade-off.
But it's worth it. As soon as SSDs get close to $1/GB, I'll be going that route for my Thinkpad. Run off a 256GB SSD for the main drive, then stuff a magnetic in the optical bay for auxiliary storage. It'll be like a brand new machine in feel, even though it's already 3 years old.
(I've used other laptops where we refitted magnetic with SSDs... it's amazing.)
Possible Applications of 64 GB integrated into the motherboard.
1. BIOS
2. Hypervisor
3. Drivers
4. Malware / Rootkits / Spam Zombies / Spyware
Fallout 3 and Bioshock 2. I bought both on Steam, both use Windows Live, so I have to log into both to play them
No, no you don't have to login to LIVE to play Fallout 3. Even if you bought the DLCs via LIVE (which was the only option last year). Just move the DLC's ESM/ESP files over to the proper Fallout 3 program folder (C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\fallout 3\Data on Windows XP) and add them to your load order.
I haven't touched LIVE since last fall when I bought the DLCs for Fallout 3. With the advantage that I can now install mods and have a pleasantly customized game.
Spinning platter HDD are not going anywhere until SSD prices become CHEAPER per byte than regular HDD.
SSD needs to become cheaper per byte, yes. But not to the extreme of becoming cheaper then magnetic media in order for it to take off. At some point, it will become "cheap enough" to become useful to a wider range of customers.
Right now, we're a bit above $2/GB for MLC-based SSD while magnetic drives are in the 0.07/GB to 0.12/GB range (3.5" 1TB $70 or 2.5" 500GB $60). Which is about a 16x cost difference right now. And magnetic drives have a price minimum of around $40-$50, below which you won't find units for sale at retail. There's a base materials cost to be dealt with along with the prices of the rare earth magnets and circuitry.
So, on the $/GB side, SSD has a long way to go. But what about the fuzzier "big enough for practical purposes"? Well, that's probably in the range of about $1/GB or maybe 0.50/GB. When you can get a decent amount of storage in something that costs less then $100 to $150. A decent amount of storage varies by person and by purpose, but for general PC usage that is not heavy on multimedia recording/editing, something in the 100-200GB range is the current sweet spot.
I think, if you could drop a 200GB SSD for $100 or $150 into your laptop, most people would jump on the chance. Even if there was a 1TB magnetic for about the same price. The performance increase of using the SSD over the magnetic would vastly outweigh the storage capacity of the 1TB unit.
But, the 256GB units are still around $600 ($2.34/GB). So we're definitely not there yet. And the low-end of the SSD price curve seems to be closer to $80-$100 instead of the $40-$50 for magnetic hard drives.
Personally, I think the magic number is $1/GB for SSD. Which might happen next year.
The price is still far too high. I recognize that an SSD can provide a good performance boost, but still...the prices are way too high. I'll likely give it another year or two before I pull the trigger on one.
Getting close though. If they can drive the 128GB prices down below or close to $100, I think it suddenly becomes much more of a "hell yeah" choice. The current 32GB units that are in that price range are too small.
There have been research programs investigating X-Ray lithography and electron-beam lithography, but I don't think any of these have panned out for mass production.
From the reading I did earlier this week, you are correct. Those 2 methods worked, but they were expensive. What has caught on instead is "double-patterning" (and possibly triple/quad patterning). Double-patterning gives you the same feature size as the more advanced methods, but for a lot less cost.
(Assuming that I understood the articles correctly. Definitely do a search on double-patterns/patterning.)
Hynix was talking 22nm recently for SSD silicon.
Itanium failed because it used a VLIW architecture - great for specialized processing tasks on big machines but for general purpose computing (ie. what 99.9% of people do) it wasn't much faster than x86.
Itanium failed - because it could not run x86 code at an acceptable speed. Which meant that if you wanted to switch over to Itanium, you had to start from scratch - rebuying every piece of software that you depended on, or getting new versions for Itanium.
AMD's 64bit CPUs, on the other hand, were excellent at running older x86 code while also giving you the ability to code natively in 64bit for the future. AMD's method took the market by storm and Intel had to relent and produce a 64bit x86 CPU.
(There were other reasons why Itanium failed - such as relying too much on compilers to produce optimal code, cost of the units due to being limited quantity, and Intel arrogance.)
Hahaha! I didn't even look at the killboard until that. It is great that she got podded as well :P Serves them right. I mean, really, IF, I was to even think of moving a PLEX, I would make DAM[sic] sure I was in at a minimum a freighter, jump freighter, dreadnought, or similar and had plenty of escort.
I'd use an Orca in hi-sec. 250-280k effective HP (20-30% more then a freighter) if fitted properly. Stuff the PLEX in the corp hangar inside the Orca, where it won't drop if you get ganked and will never show up on any killmail. And stuff in the corp hangar doesn't show up when someone cargo-scans you. Toss a load of hi-sec ores or Tritanium in the regular cargo hold and people will think that you're just moving ore/minerals.
Of course, I wouldn't do so while involved in a CONCORD sanctioned war-dec. Your only option there is a covops frigate or a shuttle, both of which are difficult to catch without sensor boosted tacklers.
The other craft that I've used to run high-value stuff around in is a massively tanked battlecruiser. People just don't bother to scan them. They're easier to gank, but nobody bothers.
It wasn't a "pirate attack", it was a sanctioned war in a trade hub where hundreds of players are on at any time and it's difficult to spot war targets in local.
Okay, this is not hard... if you're one of the involved parties in a CONCORD sanctioned wardec - stay the hell away from the trade hub stations (and systems). You definitely don't go on shopping trips and haul stuff around that doesn't need to be hauled.
Or for goodness sake, spend 15 minutes and roll an alt. Now you've just flipped the problem on its head, because your WTs will have to pick your alt out from the other 1000-odd people in Jita. Except that it will be a name that they've never seen before, flying some random Tech-I frigate, mixed in with all the other pilots that belong to NPC-corps.
There's just some kinds of stupid in EVE that you don't have to be with a bit of common sense.