And probably not even earlier that retail if you know the owner of a small game store who will be getting boxed versions a day or two before the oficial release date.
If the official release date on steam and retail is the same, retail buyers may even have working copies before steam users... Assuming the boxed version doesn't require steam to authenticate before it'll start, otherwise Valve could hold back the retail buyers until the official date (and simultaneously royally piss off a lot of people.)
Any decent SMPSU these days will be rated from 110V AC through to 250V AC (which ends up at around 340V DC internally here) but can go somewhat above or below. At least all the decent ones I've seen in the UK can ayway.
All the ones I've encountered work by taking the line voltage, rectifying and smoothing it and then chopping the DC at high frequency and feeding that into a transformer. The secondaries of the transformer are then rectified and smoothed again and fed to the rest of the box except for one winding which is fed back to the fequency generator on the primary side to control the transformer input frequency. This means that SMPSUs can handle a very wide range of voltages simply by modifying the frequency at which the primary winding of the main transformer is powered.
Completely different domain though. With console games the hardware is known, fixed and stable - you can implement copy protections schemes on one playstation and be sure it'll work on any other correctly functioning playsation (although degrading disc mechanisms cause problems...) You can't do that on a PC. It didn't inconvenience playstation users because they have to leave the disc in for all games and, if the playstation isn't breaking, it will work. On a PC, quite apart fromt he objections to haivng the CD in when the game is alreayd on the drive, many CD copy protection schemes won't work with some makes of drive, the schemes cause problems with other software and all sorts of other problems.
I don't think you'll ever find a PC game copy protection scheme that stood up as long as Spyro and didn't have any problems on a wide range of machines.
May I strongly suggest you actually read up on what Scott Ritter and Hans Blix have said about the efficacy or otherwise of inspectors in Iraq? I think you'll find that his view is quite antithetical to yours and that, according to UN inspectors, they had effectively disarmed 90 to 95% of the country.
At least in the UK (where I have themost experience fo computer laws), attempting to gain unauthorised access to a machine is a criminal offense under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, even conspiracy to do it is an offense. This is true whether you are a UK national or not - if you attack a machine in the UK and a report is passed to the police and the police investigation identifies you then the minute you set foot on British soil you could be arrested and prosecuted under the act (significant offenses may even result in extradition). I know several other countries have similar laws, I expect the US has as well.
Otherwise you'll find people that shine at work but then arribe home and hardly do anything but sit there staring the walls.
To some groups that side effect alone would be positively wounderous: the dream will finally have become reality - a passive, docile workforce of robots doing work for the masters.
I wonder where I can get pills for clinical cynicism...
Good rule, if it wasn't for a couple of problems - for a start this is AOL users, not exactly the group most renouned for net-savvyness and reluctance to click every link in sight. Even the length of the URL isn't an indicator with services like shorturl, and I could write a two line perl script that could turn an innocuous looking URL into a redirect to something much nastier (and the chances are it'd work so fast they wouldn't even notice).
URL length isn't really a good measure of safety, nor is the link the browser displays (which can be obscured with javascript in most cases anyway)
I assume you mean the Principality of Sealand, the old WW2 artillery fortress just north of the Thames estuary and 7 miles form the UK coast?
Re:Is this really a suprise?
on
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
2. The can spam law requires law enforcement to track down spammers. Honestly - does anyone think Johnny Law is going to be going through those mail headers looking for the true source of spam? Lets be honest, the first chinese IP and they quit.
The problem is that the most famous spammers, the ones responsible for the majority of the spam, make absolutely no attempt to hide what they are doing. Hell, if they prosecuted Alan Ralsky (who even slashdot readers managed to pin down a while ago, without access to many resources the police would have) then there would be a dramatic message sent to the spammers. Ralsky has given numerous interviews and has admitted what he does repeatedly yet he still walks free. Why?
(oh, and a google search will show you that, at least last year, only 6% of spam is Chinese , 58% was American...)
Provided that anyone who wants to engage in said vigilante practices passes "Basic intepretation of email headers 101". Every few months I get bounces for emails sent using my email in the From: While I sure as Eris didn't send them, anyone who doesn't know how to interpret headers properly won't know that. Sure, anyone who knows how to counterattack is probably going to know how to interpret headers, but I know the basic laws of human stupidity too well to trust in that fact.
I'm all behind wiping spammers off the face of the net (as painfully as possible) and then flinging their screaming corpses into the inner rings of hell but if the vigilantes don't do it right a lot of DSL customers with zombie boxes are going to find they own a smoking pile of electronics. Of course, that would reduce the problem but I doubt it'd make many friends...
You don't know much about publishing do you? All big publishers do that: think music industry only worse because book publishers have had a lot longer to practice at it.
And when those companies are the media you have a big problem on your hands: how do you get accurate reports on issues that would have negative effects of companies from the media when the media relies on the adverts from those very companies to stay alive?
"Ever worked on a magazine launch? The first and only real questions are: who will advertise with in product / Will it be read by people whom advertisers want to reach?" -- Nick Taylor, Guardian Spark magazine editor.
Set up virus scanners at the ISP level - any mail that passes through an ISP's MTA gets scanned for viruses, double-extensioned attachments that would indicate possible worm payload (ie: anything that Windows will auto execute) should be bounced back to the sender with an "Unable to relay due to potential virus infection, see [website] for why we blocked this" error with instructions on how to fix it. Of course, that won't kill all routes but it'll guard a lot of people.
Next block windows RPC ports at the router level, don't even route traffic between subscriber lines within the ISP network - I'm on Zen and, while Zen block access to windows ports from outside the network, once one machine inside is infected it spreads like mad. Some two thirds of my firewall logs are hits from infected machines owned by other zen subscribers. If people need to share files with remote machines they should use tunnels or VPN.
Finally ISPs should also periodically portscan at least ports 0 to 1024 on subscriber machines and email those running machines without a firewall informing them that they are running a vulnerable box and provide instructions for how to lock it down. Those who fail two months of portscans without providing a valid reason why or start generating virus traffic are sandboxed with restricted email and web access to ISP instructions for how to get out of the sandbox.
Of course, none of this is actually going to happen because ISPs will see it as likely to scare people off.
Sony R&D almost certainly would not have missed the general populace if it was just Sony in the picture. Sony's problems aren't their researchers or engineers who, IME, are some of the best - it's the influence Sony Entertainment (which deals with the media side of things- films, music, games etc) on the design decisions that causes all the problems. I have no doubt whatsoever that, left to themselves, Sony's designers would have produced something that could handle mp3, several other formats and given the ipod some real competition.
But with the entertainment division and their lawyers jumping up and down about restricting the consumer's choice, the need for DRM and so on, they keep removing features, restricting things...
I really, really wish Sony would ditch SE, but they aren't likely to:/
Did anyone take it from him by force? No, the author pretends that this humanity does not exist.
And that may also be the point he is trying to make - that by creating a society like that it could destroy what we take to be our humanity.
Call it a poor author thrashing at the edges of the Singularity.
But yeah, I agree with you otherwise, this one doesn't sound like one I will have on my shelves. I can think of enough depressing things that could and probably will happen without some half-baked attempt by someone to make "literature" out of it.
So would probably 90% of drivers if this was used on motorways. Nobody drives at 70 on motorways these days, even some of the big trucks go over the speed limit - last time I was on the M6 the average speed of the vehicles on there was probably 75, get rid of the trucks and pretty much every car was doing 80 or more. Except near the bridges with speed cameras and the roadworks near Lancaster of course.
Or at least God do something to them. Going off their current inexcusable behaviour, bless isn't the top of the list for what I'd like God to do to them though.
dunno about rest of the/. croud, but I hear you John. My next rig will have no Creative products in it.
Damn right. My opinion of creative kit has been declining rather rapidly recently, combine that with a move like this and Creative can shove their products so far up where the sun doesn't shine that people with think their mouths are hardware dispensers.
Bah, Creative will be... *gets out a black notebook*... 8th against the wall come the revolution.
Nope, doesn't work. It'd be wonderful if it did, but.. well, just look at XHTML 1.1/CSS2 and tell me how many browsers you think will handle pages written in them correctly. The site I'm building can only be valid XHTML1.1/CSS2 when delivered to Mozilla or Firefox (although I've got to test it with Knoq/Safari yet). Opera doesn't (or didn't inthe last version I grabbed) support id attributes in object elements and IE... <shudder> Even if you code to older standards support is patchy at best, especially in IE which in places expects practically prehistoric versions of some standards.
And even when browser do all support the standards you're using, they are somewhat liberal in their interpretation of them, especially when it omes to margins, padding, border sizes and whitespace in general.
In short: coding to the standards is a bit like navigating a minefield in the dark with a map of the mine locations drawn by a guy with amnesia. If that is all you rely on, you are going to end up doing the biggest splits you'll ever do in your life.
Slashdot Mirror
And probably not even earlier that retail if you know the owner of a small game store who will be getting boxed versions a day or two before the oficial release date.
If the official release date on steam and retail is the same, retail buyers may even have working copies before steam users... Assuming the boxed version doesn't require steam to authenticate before it'll start, otherwise Valve could hold back the retail buyers until the official date (and simultaneously royally piss off a lot of people.)
Any decent SMPSU these days will be rated from 110V AC through to 250V AC (which ends up at around 340V DC internally here) but can go somewhat above or below. At least all the decent ones I've seen in the UK can ayway.
All the ones I've encountered work by taking the line voltage, rectifying and smoothing it and then chopping the DC at high frequency and feeding that into a transformer. The secondaries of the transformer are then rectified and smoothed again and fed to the rest of the box except for one winding which is fed back to the fequency generator on the primary side to control the transformer input frequency. This means that SMPSUs can handle a very wide range of voltages simply by modifying the frequency at which the primary winding of the main transformer is powered.
I'm sorry, but us speed freaks know not what this "too fast" thing you speak of is. ;)
Completely different domain though. With console games the hardware is known, fixed and stable - you can implement copy protections schemes on one playstation and be sure it'll work on any other correctly functioning playsation (although degrading disc mechanisms cause problems...) You can't do that on a PC. It didn't inconvenience playstation users because they have to leave the disc in for all games and, if the playstation isn't breaking, it will work. On a PC, quite apart fromt he objections to haivng the CD in when the game is alreayd on the drive, many CD copy protection schemes won't work with some makes of drive, the schemes cause problems with other software and all sorts of other problems.
I don't think you'll ever find a PC game copy protection scheme that stood up as long as Spyro and didn't have any problems on a wide range of machines.
May I strongly suggest you actually read up on what Scott Ritter and Hans Blix have said about the efficacy or otherwise of inspectors in Iraq? I think you'll find that his view is quite antithetical to yours and that, according to UN inspectors, they had effectively disarmed 90 to 95% of the country.
A good start would be this and this
Of course, this is just more leftie-liberal-commie-european-anti-american trash to you I expect.
At least in the UK (where I have themost experience fo computer laws), attempting to gain unauthorised access to a machine is a criminal offense under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, even conspiracy to do it is an offense. This is true whether you are a UK national or not - if you attack a machine in the UK and a report is passed to the police and the police investigation identifies you then the minute you set foot on British soil you could be arrested and prosecuted under the act (significant offenses may even result in extradition). I know several other countries have similar laws, I expect the US has as well.
Replying to my own post:
s/wounderous/wonderous/ obviously...
Otherwise you'll find people that shine at work but then arribe home and hardly do anything but sit there staring the walls.
To some groups that side effect alone would be positively wounderous: the dream will finally have become reality - a passive, docile workforce of robots doing work for the masters.
I wonder where I can get pills for clinical cynicism...
If it's a mile long, don't click on it.
Good rule, if it wasn't for a couple of problems - for a start this is AOL users, not exactly the group most renouned for net-savvyness and reluctance to click every link in sight. Even the length of the URL isn't an indicator with services like shorturl, and I could write a two line perl script that could turn an innocuous looking URL into a redirect to something much nastier (and the chances are it'd work so fast they wouldn't even notice).
URL length isn't really a good measure of safety, nor is the link the browser displays (which can be obscured with javascript in most cases anyway)
I assume you mean the Principality of Sealand, the old WW2 artillery fortress just north of the Thames estuary and 7 miles form the UK coast?
2. The can spam law requires law enforcement to track down spammers. Honestly - does anyone think Johnny Law is going to be going through those mail headers looking for the true source of spam? Lets be honest, the first chinese IP and they quit.
The problem is that the most famous spammers, the ones responsible for the majority of the spam, make absolutely no attempt to hide what they are doing. Hell, if they prosecuted Alan Ralsky (who even slashdot readers managed to pin down a while ago, without access to many resources the police would have) then there would be a dramatic message sent to the spammers. Ralsky has given numerous interviews and has admitted what he does repeatedly yet he still walks free. Why?
(oh, and a google search will show you that, at least last year, only 6% of spam is Chinese , 58% was American...)
Provided that anyone who wants to engage in said vigilante practices passes "Basic intepretation of email headers 101". Every few months I get bounces for emails sent using my email in the From: While I sure as Eris didn't send them, anyone who doesn't know how to interpret headers properly won't know that. Sure, anyone who knows how to counterattack is probably going to know how to interpret headers, but I know the basic laws of human stupidity too well to trust in that fact.
I'm all behind wiping spammers off the face of the net (as painfully as possible) and then flinging their screaming corpses into the inner rings of hell but if the vigilantes don't do it right a lot of DSL customers with zombie boxes are going to find they own a smoking pile of electronics. Of course, that would reduce the problem but I doubt it'd make many friends...
You don't know much about publishing do you? All big publishers do that: think music industry only worse because book publishers have had a lot longer to practice at it.
The result is the advertisers run the companies.
And when those companies are the media you have a big problem on your hands: how do you get accurate reports on issues that would have negative effects of companies from the media when the media relies on the adverts from those very companies to stay alive?
You can't.
Medialens ended up discussing this with one of the Guardian editors in April:
"Ever worked on a magazine launch? The first and only real questions are: who will advertise with in product / Will it be read by people whom advertisers want to reach?" -- Nick Taylor, Guardian Spark magazine editor.
It also restricts you to playing the game at night-time, which is also needed for sleeping. This cuts out your weekend play.
;)
You mean you don't have your machines in the basement and aren't nocturnal?!
What sort of slashdot reader are you?!!
What do you suggest we do about that?
Set up virus scanners at the ISP level - any mail that passes through an ISP's MTA gets scanned for viruses, double-extensioned attachments that would indicate possible worm payload (ie: anything that Windows will auto execute) should be bounced back to the sender with an "Unable to relay due to potential virus infection, see [website] for why we blocked this" error with instructions on how to fix it. Of course, that won't kill all routes but it'll guard a lot of people.
Next block windows RPC ports at the router level, don't even route traffic between subscriber lines within the ISP network - I'm on Zen and, while Zen block access to windows ports from outside the network, once one machine inside is infected it spreads like mad. Some two thirds of my firewall logs are hits from infected machines owned by other zen subscribers. If people need to share files with remote machines they should use tunnels or VPN.
Finally ISPs should also periodically portscan at least ports 0 to 1024 on subscriber machines and email those running machines without a firewall informing them that they are running a vulnerable box and provide instructions for how to lock it down. Those who fail two months of portscans without providing a valid reason why or start generating virus traffic are sandboxed with restricted email and web access to ISP instructions for how to get out of the sandbox.
Of course, none of this is actually going to happen because ISPs will see it as likely to scare people off.
Sony R&D almost certainly would not have missed the general populace if it was just Sony in the picture. Sony's problems aren't their researchers or engineers who, IME, are some of the best - it's the influence Sony Entertainment (which deals with the media side of things- films, music, games etc) on the design decisions that causes all the problems. I have no doubt whatsoever that, left to themselves, Sony's designers would have produced something that could handle mp3, several other formats and given the ipod some real competition.
:/
But with the entertainment division and their lawyers jumping up and down about restricting the consumer's choice, the need for DRM and so on, they keep removing features, restricting things...
I really, really wish Sony would ditch SE, but they aren't likely to
Did anyone take it from him by force? No, the author pretends that this humanity does not exist.
And that may also be the point he is trying to make - that by creating a society like that it could destroy what we take to be our humanity.
Call it a poor author thrashing at the edges of the Singularity.
But yeah, I agree with you otherwise, this one doesn't sound like one I will have on my shelves. I can think of enough depressing things that could and probably will happen without some half-baked attempt by someone to make "literature" out of it.
So would probably 90% of drivers if this was used on motorways. Nobody drives at 70 on motorways these days, even some of the big trucks go over the speed limit - last time I was on the M6 the average speed of the vehicles on there was probably 75, get rid of the trucks and pretty much every car was doing 80 or more. Except near the bridges with speed cameras and the roadworks near Lancaster of course.
Bah.
Or at least God do something to them. Going off their current inexcusable behaviour, bless isn't the top of the list for what I'd like God to do to them though.
dunno about rest of the /. croud, but I hear you John. My next rig will have no Creative products in it.
Damn right. My opinion of creative kit has been declining rather rapidly recently, combine that with a move like this and Creative can shove their products so far up where the sun doesn't shine that people with think their mouths are hardware dispensers.
Bah, Creative will be... *gets out a black notebook*... 8th against the wall come the revolution.
WTF am I doing here on Slashdot!?
/.ers jealous?
Making things up in an attempt to make other
The iLoo? Oh, wait, that was Microsoft...
Nope, doesn't work. It'd be wonderful if it did, but .. well, just look at XHTML 1.1/CSS2 and tell me how many browsers you think will handle pages written in them correctly. The site I'm building can only be valid XHTML1.1/CSS2 when delivered to Mozilla or Firefox (although I've got to test it with Knoq/Safari yet). Opera doesn't (or didn't inthe last version I grabbed) support id attributes in object elements and IE... <shudder> Even if you code to older standards support is patchy at best, especially in IE which in places expects practically prehistoric versions of some standards.
And even when browser do all support the standards you're using, they are somewhat liberal in their interpretation of them, especially when it omes to margins, padding, border sizes and whitespace in general.
In short: coding to the standards is a bit like navigating a minefield in the dark with a map of the mine locations drawn by a guy with amnesia. If that is all you rely on, you are going to end up doing the biggest splits you'll ever do in your life.
But at least it cuts downthe work needed to idenitfy the culprit - just round up all the Igors and question them!