Or simply some cracks. The 3 day/3 play thing is enforced by the software and some metadata. There's no encryption of the songs going on. It makes me wonder if they're secretly leaving the door wide open for that to be disabled on mass. Who knows, maybe it really will be that simple. There are certainly people tearing them apart looking for holes as we speak...
There is the remote/fm tuner add-on. You get a little remote to pause/play, tinker with volume, etc. It comes with some a new set of 1st gen headphones with a shorter cord (makes sense with the remote). A radio option shows up in your menu when it's connected where you can set your presets and such. My headphones wires were getting loose from all the abuse and needed replacing so I grabbed this. So I've got the FM for the gym and a remote for easy access while snowboarding. I tried it out today for my first day on the hill and it did well enough as a remote. Down side is it's $50 which is steep but really, who cares about $50 these days:)
Just sayin the nano and video ipods do have FM. It's just sold as an add-on.
Small and tight vs. large and open. I don't really see why you're making this comparison. What gameplay is Gears of War sacrificing? Are they not laying out a map and then adjusting the detail to suit as always? If some comparison has to be made between the companies, I think Halo 3 vs. UT2007 would make more sense since that's sure to have some larger open environments for Onslaught and such. Gears is tight by design, not because it's encumbered by flashy graphics. The company can, and does, approach both kinds of gameplay. Gears has dynamic loading so just because what's onscreen won't be huge open fields, but (imho) satisfying mid-sized 'arenas', it doesn't mean the maps are small overall (and therefore not immersive?).
That said, I fully expect Halo 3 to take Halo 2 to the next level and give us all more Halo goodness. I expect to see both of these blockbuster titles to be very good at what they do.
I think every single developer at Microsoft understands that no code is perfect and there will be vulnerabilities. The vast majority of these exploits are still showing up in old legacy code and not the new stuff. Plus, they know that there will, at some point, be a new wave of vulnerabilities like when XSS became popularized and much of the new "more secure than ever" code will be just as vulnerable to those kinds of attacks as anyone else's code. You say they fail to realize that they won't catch everything but don't acknowledge that by doing JUST THAT, they reduced default functionality of IE on the latest version of windows (win server 2003), preventing this bug from being exploitable in a default-settings IE. They're reducing attack vectors bit by bit with every new release. It's a major priority. That's why the latest wasn't vulnerable. Even if this bug still shipped in Vista, I would bet that even with ActiveX enabled, it probably wouldn't be exploitable thanks to improvements such as reduced privileges. Claiming that MS has learned nothing, admits nothing, or does nothing is simply wrong.
You might want to try hunting down one of the live developers and posting on their blog or emailing them directly. Support really isn't going to help you a whole lot.
Lack of use outside of college groups might have something to do with the fact that it has only been open to everyone for a week or two. As for being useless, I'm just not going to address that.
I'm currently using six machines solely to myself between work and personal use. If I were acused of specific infringement, I could easily submit the drive from another machine (assuming that the accusation was true)... I don't see how that evidence is even admissable. Add on friends who use their laptops on my wireless network... I think it all just gets back to the point that there really isn't any proof. Using IPs are certainly going to be accurate most of the time but that's a long shot from proof. I still don't understand how they get away with all this.
I imagine that they will change their tactics. More deals to deliver bundled music subscription services with internet access, for example. Or perhaps we'll see something like myspace clean up in the next few years. Really, how long does it take to steal market share online?
This is why I love the optimoz mouse gestures so much, right-left-right and it's closed. There's a hundred different solutions and that just happens to be the one I use. The colourful trail is an eye-catching plus as well. When it comes to getting people interested in firefox, tricks like that get people's attention.
Or with finite resources, they'd rather focus on the worst areas and rotate their efforts rather than expend their entire efforts on one small chunk of land.
I think that is essentially what is happening at the hardware level. It's slowing down so it's easier to pick up the signal on the other end. Longer pulses are easier to pick up with a weak signal and noise. But at the higher levels (TCP, IP, etc), it works the same regardless of the underlying transport. We don't want to change TCP so much of the work going on for wireless focuses on the protocol that carries the packets, or the smaller frames of whatever size the 802.11_ go by. I'm not very familiar with any of the specifics there but if you drop by a computer science reading room and leaf through some wireless journals/conference articles, you're going to see a whole ton of research playing around with the variables.
But also, keep in mind that if you decide repeating packets is cool and use more bandwidth, that's less that's going to be available for your neighbor's wifi network. We all share the same spectrum so I'd have to imagine that any agreed upon protocols will be very minimalist and nice to other traffic. You need to leave gaps for other machines to speak up since it's system of random delays (for everything else, I'm assuming wifi too).
If you're interested in this stuff, take a computer science networking class that digs into the protocols. It's actually pretty interesting how the delays, retransmits, etc work. Or just get your fill looking around online or from a text, just might be a little dry that way.
What this means to me... Now why would they offer DRM-free only on a customized song? Clearly what they're thinking is that hey, if we're trying to sell someone a stupid trick, they're going to want to show their friends. There's no point if you can't. I don't need a copy of Jessica singing my name. It's not as if it was recorded with me in mind, just recorded for popular names. Oh how personal and wonderful that would be! Hah. If they locked it down, idiots couldn't MSN it to their friends to show off with their cool trick. In a sense, they're acknowledging that the point of this track IS to pirate it. Go figure.
Don't expect their "advocacy" to spread. I, for one, am very very sceptical.
I think part of the reason why this is a "big deal" is that Facebook is VERY popular. One stat I read was that 85% of university students in the US have facebook accounts, a large percentage of which are very active. At my university, UBC, it's very popular. When you and your friends start using it, it really is beneficial. It's not just some gimmick. It really is used to get the word out about events, contact people you meet around campus, with friends, etc. I would be pretty pissed off if my university targeted me in a such a way as to limit my social involvement. Everyone has different reasons but I chose to move into the dorms and dedicate a few years of my life to university for the social experience. I've loved it all. It just feels VERY wrong to me that the school would impose ugly social restrictions on their students.
UBC, I should say, seems very open and relaxed. There are huge demonstrations around the year on tons of issues on campus: gay/lesbian/etc, anti-abortion, peace, etc etc. I was also a social coordinator on our computer science student exec. I always had support of the faculty/school when it came to using our buildings and such to host beer gardens, bands, etc. So yea, having had such a great experience, I really do feel it's a big deal. We need organizations to know that it's not okay to limit the freedom of the students.
I suppose one difference is drinking age is 18/19 in Canada vs. 21 in the US and facebook hosts a lot of party photos. This isn't like college humour. I'm sure the vast majority of people are okay with what's posted or uses the untag feature to remove their name from the photo. And asking the poster to remove a photo works too. I think Kent State would be met a lot less resistance if they had restrictions such as "no public photos of intoxication." If all you've got in your profile is photos with your team at some championship, how would that hurt their image?
Again, I'm going to have to disagree. I was saying you don't have to do network analysis because the crash report utility is predictable and dependable. When you view the details of what's being sent, that's what's getting sent. It doesn't hide information, hence kicking open Etherial every time isn't really necessary when you can just view the report in the UI.
Your example of an uninitialized buffer doesn't make much sense. If we were talking about your unix crashdumps, that would be an issue. We're not. What's at issue is a stack trace. You'd need a pretty convoluted example to get uninitialized buffer data into a stack trace and be able to interpret it on the other end. A stack trace is a list of function calls, not data. I really don't see how leaks of that sort could happen.
I'll take you at your word that you have some debugging experience. The windows crash util isn't sending images of the application's memory (crashdumps as you called them). Therefore situations such as your boeing/airbus CAD example aren't possible. Say you're fiddling around in AutoCAD and things go south while extruding some plines. About all the windows crash util is going to report is that there was a crash that occurred in the extrude function, called through by whatever mechanism you used to call it, say a custom toolbar button you added, and platform details. The CAD data you're working on would not be sent. It's also anonymous so you couldn't target an individual and look up their crash reports.
Of course, it's still a case-by-case tool which gives you the option to say no in those cases. I just prefer to say yes in all the other cases rather than creating policy around the extreme case (the DoD example). The point of sending in these crash reports is so that companies like autodesk get productive feedback on their apps. For all we know, they've been able to eliminate 80 or 90% of crashes from the pre/early-XP releases thanks to aggregated crash reports passed along from Microsoft's utility.
In any case, AutoDesk finds this kind of information useful because they've implemented their own crash report utility with a similar goal as what's MS is pushing where reports dig up solutions and notify users when patches become available. Since it's their app, they can send additional information which they know isn't going to contain sensitve user data, eg the number of lines in the drawing. Here's the link.
Um, sugar's a good start when it comes to basic survival. There's nothing unhealthy about a glass of orange juice. Do you think 112 cals/glass is going to give you diabetes? Limiting yourself to one glass every two weeks sounds anorexic, not health conscious... Not to be hostel but come on... are we not being a wee bit paranoid? Hell, water it down a little if you don't think your body is up to the challenge of 21 grams of sugar. I need energy in my system to have a clear head. A good well rounded meal with plenty of real fruit/veg juices and milk really helps me feel good. Limiting yourself to drinking water and vitamin pills all day seems silly to me. I really only go for water when at the gym/pool where I wouldn't be able to stomach the sweet. Mind you, something more watered down like the odd gatorade/whatever can really hit the spot there too.
But yea, lots of water is great. Clearly 3 litres of a thick sweet orange juice would be really pushing it. I'm just saying that cutting back to the point where you're essentially removing juice from your diet is extreme. I think most nutritionists would disagree with you there.
Um, you can go through the complete report before it's sent in. The crash report util is a program. It does the same thing every time. It harvests the same standard information and stack traces in the same way every time, no matter what the program is that crashes. You can use a network analyser to verify that it's sending what it says it's sending. Trust me, people do check. What is it exactly that you can't know? It's not magic.
If you're not a programmer, I'll just say that stack traces contain very little in the way of data and a whole lot in the way of how a program got to the point of failure. The simple solution is not to submit a report when you were actively doing something that contained sensitive information just in case. If a billing tool for your MMO crashes while trying to submit your account info, bad idea. Of course, if your favourite game crashes when it tries playing certain kind of sound effect on your cheap embedded laptop sound, maybe the developer would rather you submit that trace so they have stats telling them it should be a priority because 1500 people are all having trouble playing on that configuration. Of course, anyone with access to the submitted information on the other end is legally bound to keep it entirely private, not use it for marketing, product comparisons, etc. It's strictly for finding and fixing common bugs to make our software better. But hey, if the next time half-life crashes on you, you can be sure that by not submitting the stack trace, you've ensured "some big brother like the NSA" won't be using your "crash reports for espionage."
Haha. Thanks, you took one for the team. It frustrates me to no end that people just can't bring themselves up to a level where they can actually empathise with the developers. Mostly, I just assume that they're kids and hope they'll eventually learn. I try not to think of the masses of adults who don't, and will never, "get it." It's much better to think of those people as 14 year olds so I don't get angry.
I think everyone wants Episode 2 to be amazing. Valve isn't trying to make a 22-episode season here. What would be the point in releasing a 3-part game on a weekly schedule? Ugh. They'd just release it all at once. Packaging games costs money too. No publisher would want a game that has a one week shelf life. The online distribution model is completely untested as far as supporting weekly episodic game content. Maybe one day. I can see myself being very happy with one of these HL2 chapters per week for the duration of the game. But that would be extremely difficult to pull off. You can't whip off one of these chapters in a week no matter what your team looks like. Having a pipeline with a fine enough grain of control to be releasing episodes at a one a week rate while still in development is simply something I wouldn't bet money on. We're not filming TV. We have to accept that it's only feasible to make large amounts of linear content with a large team working in parallel, not a large team working sequentially one hour at a time.
I couldn't agree with you more about the quality of the Steam application. It's ugly. Thankfully when I finished writing finals for three courses today (phew!), I had a wonderful experience buying and playing E1. It downloaded fairly quickly at around 200-400kb or so. The rate moved around quite a bit which was a little odd. I'm on a uni line during summer term so it'll take whatever can fit through the 10mbit port in my wall. But my amusement over the strange up and down rate didn't bother me. I started the dl this morning in anticipation of finishing exams for this evening. I played through the whole episode and very much enjoyed myself.
I like the model. It's easy to justify a $20 buy as a small reward for yourself. It's like going out to a movie.
I used to go through hell with steam in the 1+ year ago range. Clearly they still have work to do. I'm crossing my fingers that I won't have more crashing/infinite loop (100% cpu) issues crop up on me. For such a short game and a new pricing model, any technical glitches really are a show-stopper. Hopefully we'll see real gains in the robustness of steam as they continue to develop the platform.
I don't know how much espionage you're going to be carrying out with a stack trace. That's the bulk of the actual content in those reports. Plus they do get back to the major 3rd party developers, which improves the quality of the software industry in general. *shrug*
I watched a Google TechTalk on global warming a month or two back and found it extremely interesting. In fact, I browse the tech talks whenever I find I've got a little too much free time. There's a lot of great stuff in there.
The USB key is surprising. Any USB key should be able to hit a few MB/second, unless it's utterly crap. I've never come across anything that slow. Although, finally seeing the speed of the transfer suddenly does make us painfully aware of how slow some things are. It's a bit of a shock when you download at 600-800kb/s in your dorm but get arsed copying with busy hard drives due to thrashing and such. I've long been used to doing things such as extracting files from one hard drive to the other to drastically increase speed by avoiding disk seeks (thrashing). It's a new way to measure and notice when things aren't going too smoothly. I'm 50:50 on it. When I notice something is going slow, this will just tell me HOW slow which is as much frustrating as it is useful. We'll see:)
Memory usage for applications should remain about on par with XP. There's a new graphics model but that should more or less be a constant difference between XP and Vista. For example, I wouldn't expect Photoshop to use a significantly different amount of RAM. The noticeable difference would only be in the relatively constant differences between XP's and Vista's overhead (graphics, memory management, etc).
That's not to say that the operating system won't use more memory. I hope it does. I'm all for dumping an extra ton of RAM against the new graphics engine. The snappier the better. Lets cache as much as possible while not under heavy load. And well, if they can't write it to scale effectively, I'd rather it be a hog and force us to buy ram than run sluggishly all the time. To their credit, they're giving us everything we need to expand our options with 64-bit addressing more (>2GB) of RAM and ReadyBoost for caching pagefile data on some flash devices. The speculation/reports that it might be expanded to caching such files on a network device in some later iteration would also be very interesting. It's interesting and very cool technology. Although some of it is bound to overlap with what hard disk manufacturers are doing. Also handy for saving battery if we can spin down disks on those hybrid drives. Good stuff all around on the memory front, in my opinion.
And just a personal observation from beta 2 without much direct side-by-side comparison to back it up.. Your ram does take a hit, you can't do as much with as little. But that said, considering that windows now jumps up above 512mb in use rather quickly, it doesn't feel as bad as XP under the same load. For example, if I open up a bunch of applications, I'd say 700mb of memory/page usage on Vista would feel like 500 on XP. At least that's my feeling after switching OSes. Also, that's on my laptop which doesn't support the Aero interface. (My desktop does though, but that's 2GB ram so no comment, that had damn well better (and does) snap:)
On the security popups front, I don't think it really matters if people get used to clicking through them. I think MS's thoughts is that people WILL get used to them and pass through them very quickly when going into the control panel and such. It's the context in which they appear that needs to grab your attention. If suddenly you get one when reading your email or suddenly on a webpage, you know something is wrong. You don't have to read the dialogs and or spend time deliberating. It just needs to feel wrong when it shows up randomly. If they're very well keyed to configuration events, I think that will happen naturally.
And last point of my own, the IE team has actually been impressing me. I've been making a point of using it on my vista installs where I typically use firefox (and thanks google for the nice little sync util). Especially with the new font, it feels pretty solid. It feels very simple without my web developer, dom inspector, mouse gestures, adblock, etc extensions that I love so much in firefox.. but they're making rapid progress. They're making useful strides with RSS. I'm unconvinced of their hyping of the new presentation layer. I'll have to see it myself to really ge
It sounds like you're missing video drivers. Obviously you know you're missing sound drivers. There is a completely new sound stack in Vista which would prevent old sound drivers from working. Considering you're using a sound blaster card, I would guess that Windows Update would be able to locate a driver for you. I don't think beta 2 ships with much in the way of sound drivers but Win Update houses a considerable number of the missing drivers.
As for your firewall/spyware/av support comments, I would first recommend giving the windows firewall and defender a shot. Hopefully those two will mitigate the need for antivirus as we're expecting IE7+ and the new firewall to do a better job than the XP generation. I've seen reports of anti-virus products that are vista compatible. But for the moment, I'm not worrying about an anti-virus on my vista installs. Like another poster pointed out, it's just not going to be targeted so it would be unlikely to get hit by any new wave of worm/exploit right off the bat.
Some good feedback though! It's good to hear about media center as it's something I don't use. You know, college kid. I bought a dell 24" ws lcd back around November and have pretty well retired my TV, except for live sports. For me, that'll be over in the next week anyways. Go Edmonton Oilers! You can bounce back from 2-0!... hrm... maybe:)
Or perhaps the appropriate codecs are missing. I haven't had any problems playing common formats on vista in media player. I just grabbed the most common codecs from doom9.
Slashdot Mirror
Or simply some cracks. The 3 day/3 play thing is enforced by the software and some metadata. There's no encryption of the songs going on. It makes me wonder if they're secretly leaving the door wide open for that to be disabled on mass. Who knows, maybe it really will be that simple. There are certainly people tearing them apart looking for holes as we speak...
There is the remote/fm tuner add-on. You get a little remote to pause/play, tinker with volume, etc. It comes with some a new set of 1st gen headphones with a shorter cord (makes sense with the remote). A radio option shows up in your menu when it's connected where you can set your presets and such. My headphones wires were getting loose from all the abuse and needed replacing so I grabbed this. So I've got the FM for the gym and a remote for easy access while snowboarding. I tried it out today for my first day on the hill and it did well enough as a remote. Down side is it's $50 which is steep but really, who cares about $50 these days :)
Just sayin the nano and video ipods do have FM. It's just sold as an add-on.
Small and tight vs. large and open. I don't really see why you're making this comparison. What gameplay is Gears of War sacrificing? Are they not laying out a map and then adjusting the detail to suit as always? If some comparison has to be made between the companies, I think Halo 3 vs. UT2007 would make more sense since that's sure to have some larger open environments for Onslaught and such. Gears is tight by design, not because it's encumbered by flashy graphics. The company can, and does, approach both kinds of gameplay. Gears has dynamic loading so just because what's onscreen won't be huge open fields, but (imho) satisfying mid-sized 'arenas', it doesn't mean the maps are small overall (and therefore not immersive?).
That said, I fully expect Halo 3 to take Halo 2 to the next level and give us all more Halo goodness. I expect to see both of these blockbuster titles to be very good at what they do.
I think every single developer at Microsoft understands that no code is perfect and there will be vulnerabilities. The vast majority of these exploits are still showing up in old legacy code and not the new stuff. Plus, they know that there will, at some point, be a new wave of vulnerabilities like when XSS became popularized and much of the new "more secure than ever" code will be just as vulnerable to those kinds of attacks as anyone else's code. You say they fail to realize that they won't catch everything but don't acknowledge that by doing JUST THAT, they reduced default functionality of IE on the latest version of windows (win server 2003), preventing this bug from being exploitable in a default-settings IE. They're reducing attack vectors bit by bit with every new release. It's a major priority. That's why the latest wasn't vulnerable. Even if this bug still shipped in Vista, I would bet that even with ActiveX enabled, it probably wouldn't be exploitable thanks to improvements such as reduced privileges. Claiming that MS has learned nothing, admits nothing, or does nothing is simply wrong.
Actually, Windows Vista has dramatically optimized the experience.
You no longer need the "+ r"
Split screen, system link, or live are your options
You might want to try hunting down one of the live developers and posting on their blog or emailing them directly. Support really isn't going to help you a whole lot.
Lack of use outside of college groups might have something to do with the fact that it has only been open to everyone for a week or two. As for being useless, I'm just not going to address that.
I'm currently using six machines solely to myself between work and personal use. If I were acused of specific infringement, I could easily submit the drive from another machine (assuming that the accusation was true)... I don't see how that evidence is even admissable. Add on friends who use their laptops on my wireless network... I think it all just gets back to the point that there really isn't any proof. Using IPs are certainly going to be accurate most of the time but that's a long shot from proof. I still don't understand how they get away with all this.
I imagine that they will change their tactics. More deals to deliver bundled music subscription services with internet access, for example. Or perhaps we'll see something like myspace clean up in the next few years. Really, how long does it take to steal market share online?
This is why I love the optimoz mouse gestures so much, right-left-right and it's closed. There's a hundred different solutions and that just happens to be the one I use. The colourful trail is an eye-catching plus as well. When it comes to getting people interested in firefox, tricks like that get people's attention.
Or with finite resources, they'd rather focus on the worst areas and rotate their efforts rather than expend their entire efforts on one small chunk of land.
I think that is essentially what is happening at the hardware level. It's slowing down so it's easier to pick up the signal on the other end. Longer pulses are easier to pick up with a weak signal and noise. But at the higher levels (TCP, IP, etc), it works the same regardless of the underlying transport. We don't want to change TCP so much of the work going on for wireless focuses on the protocol that carries the packets, or the smaller frames of whatever size the 802.11_ go by. I'm not very familiar with any of the specifics there but if you drop by a computer science reading room and leaf through some wireless journals/conference articles, you're going to see a whole ton of research playing around with the variables.
But also, keep in mind that if you decide repeating packets is cool and use more bandwidth, that's less that's going to be available for your neighbor's wifi network. We all share the same spectrum so I'd have to imagine that any agreed upon protocols will be very minimalist and nice to other traffic. You need to leave gaps for other machines to speak up since it's system of random delays (for everything else, I'm assuming wifi too).
If you're interested in this stuff, take a computer science networking class that digs into the protocols. It's actually pretty interesting how the delays, retransmits, etc work. Or just get your fill looking around online or from a text, just might be a little dry that way.
What this means to me... Now why would they offer DRM-free only on a customized song? Clearly what they're thinking is that hey, if we're trying to sell someone a stupid trick, they're going to want to show their friends. There's no point if you can't. I don't need a copy of Jessica singing my name. It's not as if it was recorded with me in mind, just recorded for popular names. Oh how personal and wonderful that would be! Hah. If they locked it down, idiots couldn't MSN it to their friends to show off with their cool trick. In a sense, they're acknowledging that the point of this track IS to pirate it. Go figure.
Don't expect their "advocacy" to spread. I, for one, am very very sceptical.
I think part of the reason why this is a "big deal" is that Facebook is VERY popular. One stat I read was that 85% of university students in the US have facebook accounts, a large percentage of which are very active. At my university, UBC, it's very popular. When you and your friends start using it, it really is beneficial. It's not just some gimmick. It really is used to get the word out about events, contact people you meet around campus, with friends, etc. I would be pretty pissed off if my university targeted me in a such a way as to limit my social involvement. Everyone has different reasons but I chose to move into the dorms and dedicate a few years of my life to university for the social experience. I've loved it all. It just feels VERY wrong to me that the school would impose ugly social restrictions on their students.
UBC, I should say, seems very open and relaxed. There are huge demonstrations around the year on tons of issues on campus: gay/lesbian/etc, anti-abortion, peace, etc etc. I was also a social coordinator on our computer science student exec. I always had support of the faculty/school when it came to using our buildings and such to host beer gardens, bands, etc. So yea, having had such a great experience, I really do feel it's a big deal. We need organizations to know that it's not okay to limit the freedom of the students.
I suppose one difference is drinking age is 18/19 in Canada vs. 21 in the US and facebook hosts a lot of party photos. This isn't like college humour. I'm sure the vast majority of people are okay with what's posted or uses the untag feature to remove their name from the photo. And asking the poster to remove a photo works too. I think Kent State would be met a lot less resistance if they had restrictions such as "no public photos of intoxication." If all you've got in your profile is photos with your team at some championship, how would that hurt their image?
Again, I'm going to have to disagree. I was saying you don't have to do network analysis because the crash report utility is predictable and dependable. When you view the details of what's being sent, that's what's getting sent. It doesn't hide information, hence kicking open Etherial every time isn't really necessary when you can just view the report in the UI.
= 123112&id=7047344&linkID=2475323
Your example of an uninitialized buffer doesn't make much sense. If we were talking about your unix crashdumps, that would be an issue. We're not. What's at issue is a stack trace. You'd need a pretty convoluted example to get uninitialized buffer data into a stack trace and be able to interpret it on the other end. A stack trace is a list of function calls, not data. I really don't see how leaks of that sort could happen.
I'll take you at your word that you have some debugging experience. The windows crash util isn't sending images of the application's memory (crashdumps as you called them). Therefore situations such as your boeing/airbus CAD example aren't possible. Say you're fiddling around in AutoCAD and things go south while extruding some plines. About all the windows crash util is going to report is that there was a crash that occurred in the extrude function, called through by whatever mechanism you used to call it, say a custom toolbar button you added, and platform details. The CAD data you're working on would not be sent. It's also anonymous so you couldn't target an individual and look up their crash reports.
Of course, it's still a case-by-case tool which gives you the option to say no in those cases. I just prefer to say yes in all the other cases rather than creating policy around the extreme case (the DoD example). The point of sending in these crash reports is so that companies like autodesk get productive feedback on their apps. For all we know, they've been able to eliminate 80 or 90% of crashes from the pre/early-XP releases thanks to aggregated crash reports passed along from Microsoft's utility.
In any case, AutoDesk finds this kind of information useful because they've implemented their own crash report utility with a similar goal as what's MS is pushing where reports dig up solutions and notify users when patches become available. Since it's their app, they can send additional information which they know isn't going to contain sensitve user data, eg the number of lines in the drawing. Here's the link.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID
*shurg* - ymmv...
Um, sugar's a good start when it comes to basic survival. There's nothing unhealthy about a glass of orange juice. Do you think 112 cals/glass is going to give you diabetes? Limiting yourself to one glass every two weeks sounds anorexic, not health conscious... Not to be hostel but come on... are we not being a wee bit paranoid? Hell, water it down a little if you don't think your body is up to the challenge of 21 grams of sugar. I need energy in my system to have a clear head. A good well rounded meal with plenty of real fruit/veg juices and milk really helps me feel good. Limiting yourself to drinking water and vitamin pills all day seems silly to me. I really only go for water when at the gym/pool where I wouldn't be able to stomach the sweet. Mind you, something more watered down like the odd gatorade/whatever can really hit the spot there too.
. html
But yea, lots of water is great. Clearly 3 litres of a thick sweet orange juice would be really pushing it. I'm just saying that cutting back to the point where you're essentially removing juice from your diet is extreme. I think most nutritionists would disagree with you there.
Source: http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-B00001-01c20Vr
Um, you can go through the complete report before it's sent in. The crash report util is a program. It does the same thing every time. It harvests the same standard information and stack traces in the same way every time, no matter what the program is that crashes. You can use a network analyser to verify that it's sending what it says it's sending. Trust me, people do check. What is it exactly that you can't know? It's not magic.
If you're not a programmer, I'll just say that stack traces contain very little in the way of data and a whole lot in the way of how a program got to the point of failure. The simple solution is not to submit a report when you were actively doing something that contained sensitive information just in case. If a billing tool for your MMO crashes while trying to submit your account info, bad idea. Of course, if your favourite game crashes when it tries playing certain kind of sound effect on your cheap embedded laptop sound, maybe the developer would rather you submit that trace so they have stats telling them it should be a priority because 1500 people are all having trouble playing on that configuration. Of course, anyone with access to the submitted information on the other end is legally bound to keep it entirely private, not use it for marketing, product comparisons, etc. It's strictly for finding and fixing common bugs to make our software better. But hey, if the next time half-life crashes on you, you can be sure that by not submitting the stack trace, you've ensured "some big brother like the NSA" won't be using your "crash reports for espionage."
Haha. Thanks, you took one for the team. It frustrates me to no end that people just can't bring themselves up to a level where they can actually empathise with the developers. Mostly, I just assume that they're kids and hope they'll eventually learn. I try not to think of the masses of adults who don't, and will never, "get it." It's much better to think of those people as 14 year olds so I don't get angry.
;)
I think everyone wants Episode 2 to be amazing. Valve isn't trying to make a 22-episode season here. What would be the point in releasing a 3-part game on a weekly schedule? Ugh. They'd just release it all at once. Packaging games costs money too. No publisher would want a game that has a one week shelf life. The online distribution model is completely untested as far as supporting weekly episodic game content. Maybe one day. I can see myself being very happy with one of these HL2 chapters per week for the duration of the game. But that would be extremely difficult to pull off. You can't whip off one of these chapters in a week no matter what your team looks like. Having a pipeline with a fine enough grain of control to be releasing episodes at a one a week rate while still in development is simply something I wouldn't bet money on. We're not filming TV. We have to accept that it's only feasible to make large amounts of linear content with a large team working in parallel, not a large team working sequentially one hour at a time.
Oh, and mod the parent up
I couldn't agree with you more about the quality of the Steam application. It's ugly. Thankfully when I finished writing finals for three courses today (phew!), I had a wonderful experience buying and playing E1. It downloaded fairly quickly at around 200-400kb or so. The rate moved around quite a bit which was a little odd. I'm on a uni line during summer term so it'll take whatever can fit through the 10mbit port in my wall. But my amusement over the strange up and down rate didn't bother me. I started the dl this morning in anticipation of finishing exams for this evening. I played through the whole episode and very much enjoyed myself.
I like the model. It's easy to justify a $20 buy as a small reward for yourself. It's like going out to a movie.
I used to go through hell with steam in the 1+ year ago range. Clearly they still have work to do. I'm crossing my fingers that I won't have more crashing/infinite loop (100% cpu) issues crop up on me. For such a short game and a new pricing model, any technical glitches really are a show-stopper. Hopefully we'll see real gains in the robustness of steam as they continue to develop the platform.
I don't know how much espionage you're going to be carrying out with a stack trace. That's the bulk of the actual content in those reports. Plus they do get back to the major 3rd party developers, which improves the quality of the software industry in general. *shrug*
I watched a Google TechTalk on global warming a month or two back and found it extremely interesting. In fact, I browse the tech talks whenever I find I've got a little too much free time. There's a lot of great stuff in there.
3 523196174&q=google+climate
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=222606157
The USB key is surprising. Any USB key should be able to hit a few MB/second, unless it's utterly crap. I've never come across anything that slow. Although, finally seeing the speed of the transfer suddenly does make us painfully aware of how slow some things are. It's a bit of a shock when you download at 600-800kb/s in your dorm but get arsed copying with busy hard drives due to thrashing and such. I've long been used to doing things such as extracting files from one hard drive to the other to drastically increase speed by avoiding disk seeks (thrashing). It's a new way to measure and notice when things aren't going too smoothly. I'm 50:50 on it. When I notice something is going slow, this will just tell me HOW slow which is as much frustrating as it is useful. We'll see :)
:)
Memory usage for applications should remain about on par with XP. There's a new graphics model but that should more or less be a constant difference between XP and Vista. For example, I wouldn't expect Photoshop to use a significantly different amount of RAM. The noticeable difference would only be in the relatively constant differences between XP's and Vista's overhead (graphics, memory management, etc).
That's not to say that the operating system won't use more memory. I hope it does. I'm all for dumping an extra ton of RAM against the new graphics engine. The snappier the better. Lets cache as much as possible while not under heavy load. And well, if they can't write it to scale effectively, I'd rather it be a hog and force us to buy ram than run sluggishly all the time. To their credit, they're giving us everything we need to expand our options with 64-bit addressing more (>2GB) of RAM and ReadyBoost for caching pagefile data on some flash devices. The speculation/reports that it might be expanded to caching such files on a network device in some later iteration would also be very interesting. It's interesting and very cool technology. Although some of it is bound to overlap with what hard disk manufacturers are doing. Also handy for saving battery if we can spin down disks on those hybrid drives. Good stuff all around on the memory front, in my opinion.
And just a personal observation from beta 2 without much direct side-by-side comparison to back it up.. Your ram does take a hit, you can't do as much with as little. But that said, considering that windows now jumps up above 512mb in use rather quickly, it doesn't feel as bad as XP under the same load. For example, if I open up a bunch of applications, I'd say 700mb of memory/page usage on Vista would feel like 500 on XP. At least that's my feeling after switching OSes. Also, that's on my laptop which doesn't support the Aero interface. (My desktop does though, but that's 2GB ram so no comment, that had damn well better (and does) snap
On the security popups front, I don't think it really matters if people get used to clicking through them. I think MS's thoughts is that people WILL get used to them and pass through them very quickly when going into the control panel and such. It's the context in which they appear that needs to grab your attention. If suddenly you get one when reading your email or suddenly on a webpage, you know something is wrong. You don't have to read the dialogs and or spend time deliberating. It just needs to feel wrong when it shows up randomly. If they're very well keyed to configuration events, I think that will happen naturally.
And last point of my own, the IE team has actually been impressing me. I've been making a point of using it on my vista installs where I typically use firefox (and thanks google for the nice little sync util). Especially with the new font, it feels pretty solid. It feels very simple without my web developer, dom inspector, mouse gestures, adblock, etc extensions that I love so much in firefox.. but they're making rapid progress. They're making useful strides with RSS. I'm unconvinced of their hyping of the new presentation layer. I'll have to see it myself to really ge
It sounds like you're missing video drivers. Obviously you know you're missing sound drivers. There is a completely new sound stack in Vista which would prevent old sound drivers from working. Considering you're using a sound blaster card, I would guess that Windows Update would be able to locate a driver for you. I don't think beta 2 ships with much in the way of sound drivers but Win Update houses a considerable number of the missing drivers.
... hrm... maybe :)
As for your firewall/spyware/av support comments, I would first recommend giving the windows firewall and defender a shot. Hopefully those two will mitigate the need for antivirus as we're expecting IE7+ and the new firewall to do a better job than the XP generation. I've seen reports of anti-virus products that are vista compatible. But for the moment, I'm not worrying about an anti-virus on my vista installs. Like another poster pointed out, it's just not going to be targeted so it would be unlikely to get hit by any new wave of worm/exploit right off the bat.
Some good feedback though! It's good to hear about media center as it's something I don't use. You know, college kid. I bought a dell 24" ws lcd back around November and have pretty well retired my TV, except for live sports. For me, that'll be over in the next week anyways. Go Edmonton Oilers! You can bounce back from 2-0!
Or perhaps the appropriate codecs are missing. I haven't had any problems playing common formats on vista in media player. I just grabbed the most common codecs from doom9.
Not if you know where to buy them! ;)