Jesus, Dude, look at the numbers. The "FX" scores about the same as the "4" in every real-world game. You may say that has to do with DX9 implementations, but that is just marketing crap.
Look at the numbers and you will see that the "4" and the "FX" are, basicly, the same card. I think a "p4 trick" is upon us. They boosted the clock speed but reduced the instructions per cycle.
Why the hell would you retool your factory to produce a card identical to the old one? Seems strange to me.
I installed XP pro. By default, it enables print sharing and creates admin file shares for hard drives. I think the EULA in this case is to prevent a customer from bugging MS with their printer not doing network stuff properly.
No one ever reads these licenses. If they are read, they are usually misunderstood or ignored. A lot of what is in them is just so MS can say "well, we told you not to do that" if someone calls the support line with a problem.
Some of the terms are crazy. If you don't like them, just ignore them or use another product.
The EULA is virtually unenforcable in any event. If you disagree with a EULA, the EULA says to return it to the place of purchace. If the place of purchace refuses to accept a return, the EULA has been voided. In that case, the product reverts to standard copyright law.
There are a thousand ways lawyers could turn it. None of them would end up in the small guys favor.
I have Mozilla set as the default browser. If I click on the "Windows Update" icon in the start menu, it launches IE and then goes to windowsupdate.microsoft.com.
There is no problem with setting Moz as the default browser.
Please explain the difference between atomic and nuclear.
The 2 bombs were, AFAIK, fission bombs. They were very dirty. People live in both those cities today. This is a far cry from the 50,000 years environmentalists will tell you.
You have radiation in you right now. So does your water, so does your food. After a few weeks of being diluted, the level of radiation from a single nuke would be almost the same level as background. Most people would never know if they had a little more in their water.
As for your last point, the main reason we don't use nukes is that we now have the accuracy needed to ensure a conventional bomb does the same damage as a nuke. If we need a building taken out, we don't nuke the town, we hit the building.
A tactical nuke would be good for taking out isolated targets. A column of Iraqui tanks in the desert would be a great example of a target. But nuking them would take away the fun our Apache pilots had launching Hellfires at them.
Re:Physics
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Don't get all bitchy with me...
Why do you think there will be fallout? Fallout comes from unused fissile material or material contaminated when it cam in direct contact with the material. There is very little unused fissile material in a modern nuke. There is also very little secondary contamination.
I live in Japan. I have visited Hiroshima. Having a nuke dropped on you is NOT the end of life as you know it. You just bulldoze the contaminated waste away and rebuild. With a modern nuke, you wouldn't even have to bulldoze the topsoil, just wait for a bit and the level would drop rapidly.
Dropping a nuke in a cave in Afganistan would be even less a problem. Just cordon off a area in the desert and leave it for a few years. The material won't decay that fast, but it will be reabsorbed into the groundwater and leached into the soil till it falls below detectable levels within a few weeks.
50 years ago, we had no way to make a small nuke. The "MAD Pact" you refer to never existed. It's not like a bunch of world leaders got together and decided to blow up the world.
What happened is that all these peace orginizations saw nothing but large nukes and submarines. They would go into the streets and preach MAD. Behind the scenes, we were developing smaller nukes with specific purposes. By time the public found oput about smaller nukes, the MAD was so ingrained it was impossible to overlook.
Nukes are weapons. They can be used safely. What is the difference between bombing a cave in Afganastan with 100 1000lb bombs or just throwing a 100kiloton nuke in there? The people inside are just as dead. There may be some residual fallout, but it is nothing like GreenPeace publishes.
Re:Physics
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Don't listen to what doomsayers are trying to tell you. Read the info on google about the b-61.
No one ever said MAD was the only way to have a nuclear war. In fact, most scenarios favored a short-term exchange followed by a reconcillation period.
I can't remember when we (the US) adopted this tactic, but all of our nukes are intended to detonate at altitude. The theory is that the blast will cover more area anyway, and will be less likely to be deflected by large buildings or goegraphic features.
Anyway, after studying this tactic, we found that the fallout was reduced. Building better nukes further reduced the fallout. I don't know if it is just crap or what, but I have heard that a limited exchange would result in almost no fallout. After the inital gama-ray burst, the areas would be relatively safe to occupy. The only casualties would be the people who were incenerated, those who were unprotected from the gama-ray burst, and those that were burned too badly from direct exposure.
I have heard of "lobbing" before. If you know the speed of the plane and the angle of the climb, it should be easy to calculate the distance of the "lob". The problem is that it is difficult to repeat the exact conditions repeatedly. One lob might be 7 miles, then next might be 7.5 miles.
I know some of you don't think that a few thousand feet would matter for a nuke, but most smaller tactical nukes are used to take out a specific target. The yeild can be as low as a few hundred kilotons or as high as a few megatons. Missing a deep bunker by a few hundred meters with a low-yeild nuke would mean a lot of collateral damage with almost no effect on the target.
If you are interested in reading more about tactical mukes, do a google for B-61. These are what the Air Force uses today. Or would have/will use(d) in the proper situation. I think the original design purpose was to drop on formations of Soviet tanks in the event they mobilized on Western Europe.
Our hell(p)desk still sends out quarterly e-mails with a subject of "Virus - Do Not Open". The mail has a read-recipt rule applied. We usually get about 90% of the targeted list opening the mail.
Then some poor hell(p)desk soul has to call every person on the list and politely tell them not to open strange e-mails. The funny thing is that the schmuck who does the calling is usually the first person in our Network Control Center who opened the e-mail.
We also do an annual "Hi, I work in the NCC, can I have your password" type program. About 20% of the people we call will give it us easily. About 1% follow the proper procedure of calling the cops to report an attempted break-in.
Cut the UPC bar code in half and send each company one of the havles. All they need is the bar code, so if it is readable, they should have no qualms.
You could also try to have the store charged with fradulent advertising. If they publish a rebate that you cannot possibly collect on, then the FTC or other local consumer rights groups should get involved.
They way arround that requires people stand up and put themselves on the line for what they belive in...
Just call the cops on yourself and tell them you are waiting in the bushes of the mayor/governor/judge's house. Once arrested, ask if they will also arrest the property owner. If they refuse, then the local buisness owners can file a lawsuit agianst the city for selective prosicution.
Of course, you'd still be in jail:( In order to add some power to it, make sure you have several hundred people there waiting to be arrested. If it doesn't get on the news, you WILL lose.
I'd just rig a switch over the fileserver. Flip the switch and a magnesium flare ignites a small packet of powdered aluminum over the hard drive. Isn't thermite wonderful?
You might get in trouble for destroying evidince, but if you planned it right, they'd never know there was a WAP in the basement.
You cannot, at least in the US, be required to assist the cops in collecting evidince agianst you. If you wanted, you could say to the judge that the encrypted stuff would prove you had been doing something illegal. At that point, the equipment would be locked away until the cops figure some way into it.
You might never see your hard drive agian, but at least you wouldn't be in jail.
On a side note, if the cops suspect that the hard drive of one computer is evidince, then they will keep every peice of computer-related equipment you own. A friend of mine had 3 computers, 2 monitors, a printer, a digital camera, and other related stuff taken. They even took a binder of his licensed software and his frickin Game Boy Advanced. All this was so they could analyse a hard disk on one of the computers.
Moral? Expect the cops to coerce you by seizing everything you own.
Ok, don't think I'm going off on you, cuz I'm not:
I am so tired of people telling me what I need as opposed to what I want. You know the type. "You don't NEED a SUV, just buy a minivan." "You don't NEED a 500w power supply, 350w is more than enough." "You don't NEED dual procs, a single, faster, proc is more economical."
I have some requirements about my home PC. One of those is that I should never like the machine I use at work more than the machine I use at home. I like the snappiness of dual procs I like the ability to play a game while I rip a DVD. I like it when Gentoo slams through an emerge.
If someone has the money to pick up a Mobo, dual Zeons, and an assload of RAM, either be happy for them or shut the hell up.
Uuh, I'm not sure which country you are from, but you can't just say "you are not doing it right. go home". You have to document, over time, the lack of quality.
Doing anything less would open us up to a lawsuit.
I think most people will agree that a MoBo or a hard drive makes a system. If you replace either of those components, a reinstall is nescessary. I have seen people upgrade their mobo while keeping the same OS, but they had al kinds of problems until a reinstall was done.
A processor/memory upgrade is trivial, you don't even need to change drivers. Modem, sound card, video card, or a new cdrom might be a little more complicated, but adding a modem does not mean you have a new computer.
In any event, it is a moot point. Your OEM license only exists for the curent configuration of the PC as it came out of the box. Try repartitioning your hard drives and then getting tech support. Basicly, once you open the case, your agreement with the vendor is void.
I have reread your comment several times, and I'm not sure if I should disagree, or agree.
First off, dongle, cd check, product key, all these things are trivial to circumvent. There is no technological frontier of copy protection. There is a binary with a loop that checks for a valid device. This binary loop stands out like a sore thumb in a hex editor. It is easy to take one JMP and redirect it past the loop. If you don't belive it is easy, just look at some of the Cracker FAQs. I'm not saying it is as easy as falling out of bed, but it definately is easier than designing a copy protection scheme in the first place.
Second, copy protection is like snake-oil of the gaming industry. You have companies with names like SafeDisk and WriteBlock. You have people writing huge databases for online product activation. Think about how much it costs MS just to run their call center to process activation. Think about how much Activision paid in royalties to SafeDisk. And for what? Just so I can spend all of 30 seconds at GameCopyWorld do download a no-cd crack.
About 3 nights ago, I was hanging at a friend's house for some gaming. His copy of WinXP crapped out on him. It took 20 minutes on a long-distance call from Tokyo to Washington to get his crap working agian. Oddly enough, my "leaked" serial code has worked perfectly since the day I downloaded it.
My local ISP just started to roll out DSL. Our current service is 56k dialup limited to 90 hours per month. We pay about $30 for that.
The new DSL is 1.5mbps "best effort". They have not mentioned any download caps, but they will probably be on the way soon. The worst part of the TOS is the restriction on NAT/PAT.
They say that they can detect how many computers are on a network. For each computer, you have to pay an additional $60 for the exact same bandwidth. They don't even give you another modem for the extra $60.
Anyway, how do you think they are detecting NAT/PAT? Is there any way to stop this detection? I had planned on running Gentoo or *BSD as a firewall, but paying more money for the exact same thing seems harsh to me.
What you say about the LaserJets is true. About 3 months ago, I was adding paper to the try of my LJ4. As I pulled out the tray, several black plastic peices fell out. I was worried for a while, but that mofo is still printing as well as the day it was new.
The problem is in the definition of distribution. Does making a copy of your MP3s for a friend constitute distribution? Does having a shared hard drive (while not actively advertising) constitute distribution? Does leaving your CD of Eminen on your dresser for your roomate to borrow constitute distribution? Does installing Kazaa and allowing it to open a share constitute distribution? Does programming a tool to list the filenames and locations of shared hard drives on your LAN constitute distribution?
How about fair use? You can take a quote from a book to use in a paper as long as you attribute it to that book. Making a copy of the entire book to give away may be illegal. Making a copy of an entire CD to give away may be illegal, but making one MP3 of a song on that CD probably constitutes fair use.
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Jesus, Dude, look at the numbers. The "FX" scores about the same as the "4" in every real-world game. You may say that has to do with DX9 implementations, but that is just marketing crap.
Look at the numbers and you will see that the "4" and the "FX" are, basicly, the same card. I think a "p4 trick" is upon us. They boosted the clock speed but reduced the instructions per cycle.
Why the hell would you retool your factory to produce a card identical to the old one? Seems strange to me.
It just doesn't work that way.
I installed XP pro. By default, it enables print sharing and creates admin file shares for hard drives. I think the EULA in this case is to prevent a customer from bugging MS with their printer not doing network stuff properly.
No one ever reads these licenses. If they are read, they are usually misunderstood or ignored. A lot of what is in them is just so MS can say "well, we told you not to do that" if someone calls the support line with a problem.
Some of the terms are crazy. If you don't like them, just ignore them or use another product.
The EULA is virtually unenforcable in any event. If you disagree with a EULA, the EULA says to return it to the place of purchace. If the place of purchace refuses to accept a return, the EULA has been voided. In that case, the product reverts to standard copyright law.
There are a thousand ways lawyers could turn it. None of them would end up in the small guys favor.
I have Mozilla set as the default browser. If I click on the "Windows Update" icon in the start menu, it launches IE and then goes to windowsupdate.microsoft.com.
There is no problem with setting Moz as the default browser.
Please explain the difference between atomic and nuclear.
The 2 bombs were, AFAIK, fission bombs. They were very dirty. People live in both those cities today. This is a far cry from the 50,000 years environmentalists will tell you.
You have radiation in you right now. So does your water, so does your food. After a few weeks of being diluted, the level of radiation from a single nuke would be almost the same level as background. Most people would never know if they had a little more in their water.
As for your last point, the main reason we don't use nukes is that we now have the accuracy needed to ensure a conventional bomb does the same damage as a nuke. If we need a building taken out, we don't nuke the town, we hit the building.
A tactical nuke would be good for taking out isolated targets. A column of Iraqui tanks in the desert would be a great example of a target. But nuking them would take away the fun our Apache pilots had launching Hellfires at them.
Don't get all bitchy with me...
Why do you think there will be fallout? Fallout comes from unused fissile material or material contaminated when it cam in direct contact with the material. There is very little unused fissile material in a modern nuke. There is also very little secondary contamination.
I live in Japan. I have visited Hiroshima. Having a nuke dropped on you is NOT the end of life as you know it. You just bulldoze the contaminated waste away and rebuild. With a modern nuke, you wouldn't even have to bulldoze the topsoil, just wait for a bit and the level would drop rapidly.
Dropping a nuke in a cave in Afganistan would be even less a problem. Just cordon off a area in the desert and leave it for a few years. The material won't decay that fast, but it will be reabsorbed into the groundwater and leached into the soil till it falls below detectable levels within a few weeks.
50 years ago, we had no way to make a small nuke. The "MAD Pact" you refer to never existed. It's not like a bunch of world leaders got together and decided to blow up the world.
What happened is that all these peace orginizations saw nothing but large nukes and submarines. They would go into the streets and preach MAD. Behind the scenes, we were developing smaller nukes with specific purposes. By time the public found oput about smaller nukes, the MAD was so ingrained it was impossible to overlook.
Nukes are weapons. They can be used safely. What is the difference between bombing a cave in Afganastan with 100 1000lb bombs or just throwing a 100kiloton nuke in there? The people inside are just as dead. There may be some residual fallout, but it is nothing like GreenPeace publishes.
Don't listen to what doomsayers are trying to tell you. Read the info on google about the b-61.
No one ever said MAD was the only way to have a nuclear war. In fact, most scenarios favored a short-term exchange followed by a reconcillation period.
Tactical nukes are a reality. They do have a use.
I can't remember when we (the US) adopted this tactic, but all of our nukes are intended to detonate at altitude. The theory is that the blast will cover more area anyway, and will be less likely to be deflected by large buildings or goegraphic features.
Anyway, after studying this tactic, we found that the fallout was reduced. Building better nukes further reduced the fallout. I don't know if it is just crap or what, but I have heard that a limited exchange would result in almost no fallout. After the inital gama-ray burst, the areas would be relatively safe to occupy. The only casualties would be the people who were incenerated, those who were unprotected from the gama-ray burst, and those that were burned too badly from direct exposure.
Of course, that could just be government BS.
I have heard of "lobbing" before. If you know the speed of the plane and the angle of the climb, it should be easy to calculate the distance of the "lob". The problem is that it is difficult to repeat the exact conditions repeatedly. One lob might be 7 miles, then next might be 7.5 miles.
I know some of you don't think that a few thousand feet would matter for a nuke, but most smaller tactical nukes are used to take out a specific target. The yeild can be as low as a few hundred kilotons or as high as a few megatons. Missing a deep bunker by a few hundred meters with a low-yeild nuke would mean a lot of collateral damage with almost no effect on the target.
If you are interested in reading more about tactical mukes, do a google for B-61. These are what the Air Force uses today. Or would have/will use(d) in the proper situation. I think the original design purpose was to drop on formations of Soviet tanks in the event they mobilized on Western Europe.
Our hell(p)desk still sends out quarterly e-mails with a subject of "Virus - Do Not Open". The mail has a read-recipt rule applied. We usually get about 90% of the targeted list opening the mail.
Then some poor hell(p)desk soul has to call every person on the list and politely tell them not to open strange e-mails. The funny thing is that the schmuck who does the calling is usually the first person in our Network Control Center who opened the e-mail.
We also do an annual "Hi, I work in the NCC, can I have your password" type program. About 20% of the people we call will give it us easily. About 1% follow the proper procedure of calling the cops to report an attempted break-in.
Plus it is SO easy to get dudes to hook you up with free stuff.
Cut the UPC bar code in half and send each company one of the havles. All they need is the bar code, so if it is readable, they should have no qualms.
You could also try to have the store charged with fradulent advertising. If they publish a rebate that you cannot possibly collect on, then the FTC or other local consumer rights groups should get involved.
This is the coolest thing since TTYQuake...
They way arround that requires people stand up and put themselves on the line for what they belive in...
:( In order to add some power to it, make sure you have several hundred people there waiting to be arrested. If it doesn't get on the news, you WILL lose.
Just call the cops on yourself and tell them you are waiting in the bushes of the mayor/governor/judge's house. Once arrested, ask if they will also arrest the property owner. If they refuse, then the local buisness owners can file a lawsuit agianst the city for selective prosicution.
Of course, you'd still be in jail
I'd just rig a switch over the fileserver. Flip the switch and a magnesium flare ignites a small packet of powdered aluminum over the hard drive. Isn't thermite wonderful?
You might get in trouble for destroying evidince, but if you planned it right, they'd never know there was a WAP in the basement.
You cannot, at least in the US, be required to assist the cops in collecting evidince agianst you. If you wanted, you could say to the judge that the encrypted stuff would prove you had been doing something illegal. At that point, the equipment would be locked away until the cops figure some way into it.
You might never see your hard drive agian, but at least you wouldn't be in jail.
On a side note, if the cops suspect that the hard drive of one computer is evidince, then they will keep every peice of computer-related equipment you own. A friend of mine had 3 computers, 2 monitors, a printer, a digital camera, and other related stuff taken. They even took a binder of his licensed software and his frickin Game Boy Advanced. All this was so they could analyse a hard disk on one of the computers.
Moral? Expect the cops to coerce you by seizing everything you own.
Ok, don't think I'm going off on you, cuz I'm not:
I am so tired of people telling me what I need as opposed to what I want. You know the type. "You don't NEED a SUV, just buy a minivan." "You don't NEED a 500w power supply, 350w is more than enough." "You don't NEED dual procs, a single, faster, proc is more economical."
I have some requirements about my home PC. One of those is that I should never like the machine I use at work more than the machine I use at home. I like the snappiness of dual procs I like the ability to play a game while I rip a DVD. I like it when Gentoo slams through an emerge.
If someone has the money to pick up a Mobo, dual Zeons, and an assload of RAM, either be happy for them or shut the hell up.
Why not use Memtestx86? I know it boots off a floppy most of the time, but there is no reason you couldn'y compile it natively under *BSD.
I wonder how long it would take to test all that RAM?
I know my first test would be to install Neverwinter Nights and/or Unreal Tournament 2003 into a RAM drive...
Uuh, I'm not sure which country you are from, but you can't just say "you are not doing it right. go home". You have to document, over time, the lack of quality.
Doing anything less would open us up to a lawsuit.
I think most people will agree that a MoBo or a hard drive makes a system. If you replace either of those components, a reinstall is nescessary. I have seen people upgrade their mobo while keeping the same OS, but they had al kinds of problems until a reinstall was done.
A processor/memory upgrade is trivial, you don't even need to change drivers. Modem, sound card, video card, or a new cdrom might be a little more complicated, but adding a modem does not mean you have a new computer.
In any event, it is a moot point. Your OEM license only exists for the curent configuration of the PC as it came out of the box. Try repartitioning your hard drives and then getting tech support. Basicly, once you open the case, your agreement with the vendor is void.
I have reread your comment several times, and I'm not sure if I should disagree, or agree.
First off, dongle, cd check, product key, all these things are trivial to circumvent. There is no technological frontier of copy protection. There is a binary with a loop that checks for a valid device. This binary loop stands out like a sore thumb in a hex editor. It is easy to take one JMP and redirect it past the loop. If you don't belive it is easy, just look at some of the Cracker FAQs. I'm not saying it is as easy as falling out of bed, but it definately is easier than designing a copy protection scheme in the first place.
Second, copy protection is like snake-oil of the gaming industry. You have companies with names like SafeDisk and WriteBlock. You have people writing huge databases for online product activation. Think about how much it costs MS just to run their call center to process activation. Think about how much Activision paid in royalties to SafeDisk. And for what? Just so I can spend all of 30 seconds at GameCopyWorld do download a no-cd crack.
About 3 nights ago, I was hanging at a friend's house for some gaming. His copy of WinXP crapped out on him. It took 20 minutes on a long-distance call from Tokyo to Washington to get his crap working agian. Oddly enough, my "leaked" serial code has worked perfectly since the day I downloaded it.
My local ISP just started to roll out DSL. Our current service is 56k dialup limited to 90 hours per month. We pay about $30 for that.
The new DSL is 1.5mbps "best effort". They have not mentioned any download caps, but they will probably be on the way soon. The worst part of the TOS is the restriction on NAT/PAT.
They say that they can detect how many computers are on a network. For each computer, you have to pay an additional $60 for the exact same bandwidth. They don't even give you another modem for the extra $60.
Anyway, how do you think they are detecting NAT/PAT? Is there any way to stop this detection? I had planned on running Gentoo or *BSD as a firewall, but paying more money for the exact same thing seems harsh to me.
What you say about the LaserJets is true. About 3 months ago, I was adding paper to the try of my LJ4. As I pulled out the tray, several black plastic peices fell out. I was worried for a while, but that mofo is still printing as well as the day it was new.
Hell, I'll probably retire before these LJ4s...
I'd rather have the RIAA sue me than have the Mafia dissappear me...
The problem is in the definition of distribution. Does making a copy of your MP3s for a friend constitute distribution? Does having a shared hard drive (while not actively advertising) constitute distribution? Does leaving your CD of Eminen on your dresser for your roomate to borrow constitute distribution? Does installing Kazaa and allowing it to open a share constitute distribution? Does programming a tool to list the filenames and locations of shared hard drives on your LAN constitute distribution?
How about fair use? You can take a quote from a book to use in a paper as long as you attribute it to that book. Making a copy of the entire book to give away may be illegal. Making a copy of an entire CD to give away may be illegal, but making one MP3 of a song on that CD probably constitutes fair use.