There are allegations as well that CCP intentionally did this to drive up the price of PLEX (and in fact, just about every resource in the game)... which has happened.
Er.. instead of them just buying stuff off the market, to the same effect? Or are you saying they're breaking their rules to avoid breaking their rules? And is your 'has happened' actually the one time they did the exact opposite, with legitimate PLEX stocks, to their loss, to foil a playerbase-harming PLEX monopoly attempt?
And CCP has colluded with players before to give valuable assets out -- and admitted to this.
Tiny bit of context missing there, like what happened to that game admin when CCP caught him, seven *years* ago, and *why* it's never happened since.
WoW client works fine under wine (tad better than under Windows imho).
Really? And what is the major improvement/difference, besides running under wine/in linux?
Swap performance and VM handling, frankly. It's better at not putting things in swap it shouldn't, and quickly getting things off swap it needs. Generally less lumpy if you aren't swimming in memory like I'm not.
I also get the added benefit of instantly switching in and out of the game with virtual desktops, and being able to shut down all unnecessary systems and programs, and SIGSTOP/hibernate large things like firefox so they sink entirely out of memory until I call them back, and I have total scripting and file control over all my addons and logs and things.
Also, crashes won't take out the box, and if things get really gnarly, I log in behind my GUI remotely and shoot things. For some games that are going under due to game corruption, flicking to the CLI, Kill, restart, can get the game back before the server has given up on your connection. WAY faster than Windows.
It's vaguely familiar, but since no two circuits are *truly* identical at the analog layer, *and* change as the temperature changes, people used digital instead where 'mostly 0' is still '0' and 'mostly 1' is still '1' regardless. Otherwise you can't mass produce them.
Of more interest is people using analog-alike bitstreams, where the average number of 1's vs 0's in a random stream is the amplitude of the analog wave. They then blend the input streams together to produce the output stream. I've mostly seen this done by Royal Holloway University to produce neural chips that *don't* need squillions of interconnections - they just blend probability streams. Looks like people are playing with optical ones now too. Why not put a story up about that instead?
Er, no. A MitM attack is easy against people who don't protect against a MitM attack. If you want to protect yourself, you can. This is Crypto 101.
Instead of trying to win a crypto war against the geeks of Google, China will just walk into a Chinese Google DataCentre, wave a badge, and swipe all the machines for whatever reason they want to pull out of their arse.
They will autopsy and reverse engineer them at their leisure, give the tech to Baidu. and then sue Google for patent infringement of Baidu intellectual property, and win.
While we're here, does anyone know any reason for believing Google *is* evil? I ask people on occasion, but they're never able to point out anything rational, they just point into the darkness and tell me what *might* be out there...
And here I was thinking that 3D would be unpiratable, since the masses wouldn't have 3D TV's, and the cinemas would be safe and the movie industry would live happily ever after making 3D films, then selling the 2D version on globally released DVD (beating the pirates to market).
3 Days later I get an alert to my phone at 2am to tell me Nelson is not responding to ping. WTF is Nelson?
I can top that. Imagine being rung at a groggy 3AM by a chap (with an impeccable upperclass English accent) who tells you, in all seriousness, that Elvis is dead and could you do something about it please?
When you recover, try and convince the insistent non-technical gentleman that you have never heard of Elvis and maybe he has the wrong hotline.
Due to your intervention, the same village will now receive 40% less laptops for the same budget, and experience viruses, BSOD's and Windows bit-rot.
They will become educated in the three R's (Reboot, Reinstall, Reformat and these devices don't come with CD drives).
Of course, you are going to ensure that the 'productivity' software is fully 'compatible' with the Linux software, aren't you.
But at least you won't get any competition from any emerging 3rd world IT industries, eh? Because developing on these platforms will be *so* cheap and easy. Who knows, you may force them to become amoral and pirate all your software in order to get anything done, instead of sharing GPL'd code and helping each other totally legally and morally.
And of course you are well known for writing secure, resource efficient software that doesn't have memory leaks, and Linux is not. (For instance, my house firewall is definitely not a Pentium 75 with 64Mb of memory with an uptime of years).
After all, you have to use the right tool for the job, and they exist for you, not vice versa. Their needs are your needs.
Don't worry, if you're feeling guilty just get the Gates Foundation charity to cut their country a check. All better!
By the way, aren't you canning XP soon? I hope they have their upgrade path sorted.
ISPs: You gave your customers huge broadband connections, and now they're using them, and it's costing you money to buy more from your suppliers.
Disney etc: It costs you money to market your brands on the Internet, because your ISP's/Peers are charging you for your bandwidth, but your sites are huge, and full of multimedia things, and aren't designed to cache (because you need the Page Impressions for your budget).
Disney etc: You need money to expand an infrastructure capable of delivering DVD quality video and audio. You also need the money to combat the pirates who are using the expanding infrastructure to stream DVD quality video and audio.
AT&T etc: Well, you can do whatever you like. Let's see them try to supply their users broadband addiction without your backbones. The problem though, is this 'free market' thing. If you start gouging, people might use another supplier. However, if you got exclusive peering deals with www.disney.com, *cha*CHING*!!
Users: You want a connection to the internet, but your friend has a connection with a bigger number that you don't understand, so you want one too! In the meantime you use 1% of it, but it DOES let you download DVD's really easily, which is lucky, otherwise you might have bought them!
Look, the internet is going to eat itself, and there's nothing you can do to stop it, because you're CAUSING it, and you don't WANT to stop.
Sit back, blame the guy next to you for having no willpower, and thank God this kind of problem doesn't happen in the real world, because we'd all die.
(Mustn't forget to fill my tank)
How would it deal with your neighbours stereo, or washing machine? Would you be locked out of the house when the Jones' do their undies?
Or maybe it guards a lab full of vibrating machinery...
Now, you could record this quite trivially, and while you couldn't use it to open the same door twice, what about the second door? Would it know that?
You can remotely record *and* replay with the right kit, or just mangle the knocks of anything trying to enter.
Why is this ID stuff so difficult?
What I want, is an RFID watch *strap* (I wanna choose the watch, ta) that takes a PIN of your choice, and a door handle that uses the force of turning to generate the power for the RFID signal. No batteries/external power, ta.
Or better, standardise an RFID pouch on the inside of watch straps and mass produce disposable RFID chips you program once with whatever you like via a handheld type-pad. Everyone wins.
Naturally the Feds will bug the type-pads, but hey ho.
Apologies, pished, but after someone spotted that there was more RNA interacting in the body than DNA it was messenger for; why aren't people noting that we already run bio-computation devices.
Forget the why, we're already lousy at that bit. Why not? If there's a gain for little loss, nature tends to grasp and experiment along those courses. An RNA computer that computes and records in next-gen DNA is an ultimatley sensible thing for Nature to do. Not that hard either.
Never mind the gigantic neural hash lookup algorithm that we call intuition...
Humans annoy me. They won't accept there's a question *until* they have an answer.
You're absolutely right... or would be *if* that was a TiVo. But it isn't...
TiVo put in thumbs up/down buttons to train it to what you like, Amazon stylee. It then checks against a database at TiVo HQ and finds things other people watch who like what you like, then it records them when it has nothing to do.
Also, and don't underestimate this bit.. It all *just works*. No farting around. Shortcuts for common stuff. Execellent and I meand EXCELLENT remote. Seamless updating.
In short, Quality.
That's why I still have a TiVo, even though I could make a PVR. I can't make a *better* PVR.
Is it just me, or is this Google==BOOGEYMAN! stuff popping up more than you'd expect? I mean, I actually read the paper and concluded 'Is that it? I've heard this eight times already!'
No I don't *reaally* think this is an evil plot to paint Google black and make the public reflexively stab it (easy as it would be to do), but after seeing http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/02/01 I can't help wondering how long we've got left before it is.
BigBad corporations have PR spin-shield generators to bog down any attacks on their operations. Unfortunately, Google will have to install exactly the same grade of shielding to deflect unjustified attacks. (Have you *seen* the blast radius of a false paedo/rape accusation? It's larger than if it were true!)
However, as soon as they install the PR shields, people will point and yell "You have something to hide!!!". They can't win.
Well, I actually trust Google. Sue me! They're just too young to have been corrupted so fast. China sucked, yup. Now ask the Chinese people what they would have prefered. Censored Google or no Google? Now criticise Google again.
No I'm not a planted Google astroturfer *sigh*. (and no, there's no such thing! Dammit!)
Aha! I can instantly prove you wrong by listing the number of innovative software startup companies that never came into existance because they knew the water was too full of patents!
Oh, waitasec.
Never mind, I'm sure you can come up with a valid comparison of a US without software patents, to a US with them, to show me why you must be right.
I was also looking for a voice recorder, and found they'd all become mp3 players while I wasn't looking.
I eventually bought the iRiver iFP-395T as it began to stand out of the pack on my checklist.
The clincher was its ability to record *directly as mp3*. Most other devices on the market record to wav format which is very VERY fat in comparison. This means the 512Mb version can store about 36 hours of audio, which will probably outlast the battery itself for continuous recording. It will also allow me plenty of time to get back to any PC or laptop that understands a generic USB storage device to unburden it. It also has the line-in socket if you have a fancy mic.
Other goodies:
- Ogg support. - Linux support (even for it's alternate proprietary filesystem firmware). - Full configuration options for pretty much everything. - Small/light/looks funky. - Belt and arm (jogging) clips. - It *will* survive a heavy drop that any HD based device will *not*.
All I really need now is one of those 3cm long USB adapter cables the Creative Muvo 2 comes with, so I can add it to my keyrings (Hint to manufacturers!), removing the only minor annoyance there is: forgetting the cable to plug it into a laptop/PC.
Hows about Prior Art bounties? (sounds so obvious it's probably in another comment round here somewhere)
Examiner takes a patent, if he rejects it, fair enough. If he approves it, but shouldn't have because of prior art, you can dish the dirt, pop the patent and collect a percentage of the patent application fee from the Patent Office.
You'd probably need to pay a small fee tho to stab at the patent to prevent feedback loops of bottomfeeders.
Oh, and pay the examiner a bonus if they find the prior art first, coz they just saved the Patent Office money.
Catch? It would take an act of God to get anyone to implement it, and Greed is God. After all, snatching the brainchildren of America and selling them as prostitutes to Big Business keeps a large number somewhere, large, or somesuch equally noble goal.
Hey, USPTO, if I patent every possible combination of DNA, can I have your firstborn?:-)
Funnily enough though, I still have hope for this one (I should have amended my posts last line).
You can lose a few angels (or coincide their attacks) and dump that nuclear robot episode without much loss. The world could still make sense. Bye Bye Pen-Pen
I just despair when film makers cut plot blindly and the film ceases to make any sense anymore as people do things for no believable reason at all.
BUT Gainax are involved, so people who actually care might be guarding Shinji and co. I just don't know how much film conversion experience they have. After all, compared to anime, the 'real world' sucks;-)
I just want to help, but I can't. So I'll sit here and worry, and dream about how it might be done believably.
It *will* be better than Alita though. I can't see any evidence that Hollywood understands her psychology at all. Never mind heavy-body, high-speed combat physics.
Slashdot Mirror
So gift-vouchers for services aren't worth anything to you?
Useful post. But why the tinfoil?
There are allegations as well that CCP intentionally did this to drive up the price of PLEX (and in fact, just about every resource in the game)... which has happened.
Er.. instead of them just buying stuff off the market, to the same effect?
Or are you saying they're breaking their rules to avoid breaking their rules?
And is your 'has happened' actually the one time they did the exact opposite, with legitimate PLEX stocks, to their loss, to foil a playerbase-harming PLEX monopoly attempt?
And CCP has colluded with players before to give valuable assets out -- and admitted to this.
Tiny bit of context missing there, like what happened to that game admin when CCP caught him, seven *years* ago, and *why* it's never happened since.
Also after SCO - no lawfirm will be nearly as stupid as SCO's..
You mean represent an insanely deluded client who throws all of their money away at them?
The *lawfirms* would *fight* for that chance!
WoW client works fine under wine (tad better than under Windows imho).
Really? And what is the major improvement/difference, besides running under wine/in linux?
Swap performance and VM handling, frankly. It's better at not putting things in swap it shouldn't, and quickly getting things off swap it needs. Generally less lumpy if you aren't swimming in memory like I'm not.
I also get the added benefit of instantly switching in and out of the game with virtual desktops, and being able to shut down all unnecessary systems and programs, and SIGSTOP/hibernate large things like firefox so they sink entirely out of memory until I call them back, and I have total scripting and file control over all my addons and logs and things.
Also, crashes won't take out the box, and if things get really gnarly, I log in behind my GUI remotely and shoot things. For some games that are going under due to game corruption, flicking to the CLI, Kill, restart, can get the game back before the server has given up on your connection. WAY faster than Windows.
It's vaguely familiar, but since no two circuits are *truly* identical at the analog layer, *and* change as the temperature changes, people used digital instead where 'mostly 0' is still '0' and 'mostly 1' is still '1' regardless. Otherwise you can't mass produce them.
Of more interest is people using analog-alike bitstreams, where the average number of 1's vs 0's in a random stream is the amplitude of the analog wave. They then blend the input streams together to produce the output stream. I've mostly seen this done by Royal Holloway University to produce neural chips that *don't* need squillions of interconnections - they just blend probability streams. Looks like people are playing with optical ones now too. Why not put a story up about that instead?
Why would the Iranian Cybercafe Army want to blow up Chinese dissidents? Besides, everyone knows it was the Illuminati.
Er, no. A MitM attack is easy against people who don't protect against a MitM attack. If you want to protect yourself, you can. This is Crypto 101.
Instead of trying to win a crypto war against the geeks of Google, China will just walk into a Chinese Google DataCentre, wave a badge, and swipe all the machines for whatever reason they want to pull out of their arse.
They will autopsy and reverse engineer them at their leisure, give the tech to Baidu. and then sue Google for patent infringement of Baidu intellectual property, and win.
While we're here, does anyone know any reason for believing Google *is* evil? I ask people on occasion, but they're never able to point out anything rational, they just point into the darkness and tell me what *might* be out there...
And here I was thinking that 3D would be unpiratable, since the masses wouldn't have 3D TV's, and the cinemas would be safe and the movie industry would live happily ever after making 3D films, then selling the 2D version on globally released DVD (beating the pirates to market).
...
And then they go and gut the golden goose
3 Days later I get an alert to my phone at 2am to tell me Nelson is not responding to ping. WTF is Nelson?
I can top that. Imagine being rung at a groggy 3AM by a chap (with an impeccable upperclass English accent) who tells you, in all seriousness, that Elvis is dead and could you do something about it please?
When you recover, try and convince the insistent non-technical gentleman that you have never heard of Elvis and maybe he has the wrong hotline.
If I ever find out who named that system...
Are you really trying to defend Windows portability by saying a defunct OS was once ported to a dead chip?
Thank you Microsoft.
Due to your intervention, the same village will now receive 40% less laptops for the same budget, and experience viruses, BSOD's and Windows bit-rot.
They will become educated in the three R's (Reboot, Reinstall, Reformat and these devices don't come with CD drives).
Of course, you are going to ensure that the 'productivity' software is fully 'compatible' with the Linux software, aren't you.
But at least you won't get any competition from any emerging 3rd world IT industries, eh? Because developing on these platforms will be *so* cheap and easy. Who knows, you may force them to become amoral and pirate all your software in order to get anything done, instead of sharing GPL'd code and helping each other totally legally and morally.
And of course you are well known for writing secure, resource efficient software that doesn't have memory leaks, and Linux is not.
(For instance, my house firewall is definitely not a Pentium 75 with 64Mb of memory with an uptime of years).
After all, you have to use the right tool for the job, and they exist for you, not vice versa. Their needs are your needs.
Don't worry, if you're feeling guilty just get the Gates Foundation charity to cut their country a check. All better!
By the way, aren't you canning XP soon? I hope they have their upgrade path sorted.
Disney etc: It costs you money to market your brands on the Internet, because your ISP's/Peers are charging you for your bandwidth, but your sites are huge, and full of multimedia things, and aren't designed to cache (because you need the Page Impressions for your budget).
Disney etc: You need money to expand an infrastructure capable of delivering DVD quality video and audio. You also need the money to combat the pirates who are using the expanding infrastructure to stream DVD quality video and audio.
AT&T etc: Well, you can do whatever you like. Let's see them try to supply their users broadband addiction without your backbones. The problem though, is this 'free market' thing. If you start gouging, people might use another supplier. However, if you got exclusive peering deals with www.disney.com, *cha*CHING*!!
Users: You want a connection to the internet, but your friend has a connection with a bigger number that you don't understand, so you want one too! In the meantime you use 1% of it, but it DOES let you download DVD's really easily, which is lucky, otherwise you might have bought them!
Look, the internet is going to eat itself, and there's nothing you can do to stop it, because you're CAUSING it, and you don't WANT to stop.
Sit back, blame the guy next to you for having no willpower, and thank God this kind of problem doesn't happen in the real world, because we'd all die. (Mustn't forget to fill my tank)
You think I'm kidding?
How would it deal with your neighbours stereo, or washing machine? Would you be locked out of the house when the Jones' do their undies?
Or maybe it guards a lab full of vibrating machinery...
Now, you could record this quite trivially, and while you couldn't use it to open the same door twice, what about the second door? Would it know that?
You can remotely record *and* replay with the right kit, or just mangle the knocks of anything trying to enter.
Why is this ID stuff so difficult?
What I want, is an RFID watch *strap* (I wanna choose the watch, ta) that takes a PIN of your choice, and a door handle that uses the force of turning to generate the power for the RFID signal. No batteries/external power, ta.
Or better, standardise an RFID pouch on the inside of watch straps and mass produce disposable RFID chips you program once with whatever you like via a handheld type-pad. Everyone wins.
Naturally the Feds will bug the type-pads, but hey ho.
Anyone would think this was difficult!!
Apologies, pished, but after someone spotted that there was more RNA interacting in the body than DNA it was messenger for; why aren't people noting that we already run bio-computation devices.
Forget the why, we're already lousy at that bit. Why not? If there's a gain for little loss, nature tends to grasp and experiment along those courses. An RNA computer that computes and records in next-gen DNA is an ultimatley sensible thing for Nature to do. Not that hard either.
Never mind the gigantic neural hash lookup algorithm that we call intuition...
Humans annoy me. They won't accept there's a question *until* they have an answer.
Pfah!
*Hic*
You're absolutely right... or would be *if* that was a TiVo. But it isn't...
TiVo put in thumbs up/down buttons to train it to what you like, Amazon stylee. It then checks against a database at TiVo HQ and finds things other people watch who like what you like, then it records them when it has nothing to do.
Also, and don't underestimate this bit.. It all *just works*. No farting around. Shortcuts for common stuff. Execellent and I meand EXCELLENT remote. Seamless updating.
In short, Quality.
That's why I still have a TiVo, even though I could make a PVR. I can't make a *better* PVR.
TiVo UK still exists, operates, services, updates, rocks... but for some inexplicable reason one piece of the puzzle is now missing...
The Hardware...
What on *earth* is going on at TiVo UK?
Which deal with which devil leaves the UK market uncontested like this?!
It's one of those things you wonder...
Is it just me, or is this Google==BOOGEYMAN! stuff popping up more than you'd expect?
I mean, I actually read the paper and concluded 'Is that it? I've heard this eight times already!'
No I don't *reaally* think this is an evil plot to paint Google black and make the public reflexively stab it (easy as it would be to do), but after seeing http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/02/01 I can't help wondering how long we've got left before it is.
BigBad corporations have PR spin-shield generators to bog down any attacks on their operations.
Unfortunately, Google will have to install exactly the same grade of shielding to deflect unjustified attacks.
(Have you *seen* the blast radius of a false paedo/rape accusation? It's larger than if it were true!)
However, as soon as they install the PR shields, people will point and yell "You have something to hide!!!".
They can't win.
Well, I actually trust Google. Sue me!
They're just too young to have been corrupted so fast.
China sucked, yup. Now ask the Chinese people what they would have prefered. Censored Google or no Google?
Now criticise Google again.
No I'm not a planted Google astroturfer *sigh*.
(and no, there's no such thing! Dammit!)
"... you're trapped down a mineshaft?"
Damn straight! He'd get his ass kicked, nuke IBM, and outlaw computers!
Haliburton will get the contract to construct the National Debt Abacus...
Aha! I can instantly prove you wrong by listing the number of innovative software startup companies that never came into existance because they knew the water was too full of patents!
Oh, waitasec.
Never mind, I'm sure you can come up with a valid comparison of a US without software patents, to a US with them, to show me why you must be right.
Not true! I'm forced to leave to forage at night, as the food disorientator doesn't take notes...
I was also looking for a voice recorder, and found they'd all become mp3 players while I wasn't looking.
:
;-)
I eventually bought the iRiver iFP-395T as it began to stand out of the pack on my checklist.
The clincher was its ability to record *directly as mp3*.
Most other devices on the market record to wav format which is very VERY fat in comparison.
This means the 512Mb version can store about 36 hours of audio, which will probably outlast the battery itself for continuous recording.
It will also allow me plenty of time to get back to any PC or laptop that understands a generic USB storage device to unburden it.
It also has the line-in socket if you have a fancy mic.
Other goodies
- Ogg support.
- Linux support (even for it's alternate proprietary filesystem firmware).
- Full configuration options for pretty much everything.
- Small/light/looks funky.
- Belt and arm (jogging) clips.
- It *will* survive a heavy drop that any HD based device will *not*.
All I really need now is one of those 3cm long USB adapter cables the Creative Muvo 2 comes with, so I can add it to my keyrings (Hint to manufacturers!), removing the only minor annoyance there is: forgetting the cable to plug it into a laptop/PC.
I'm eyeing gutted Muvo2 shells on ebay
Hows about Prior Art bounties? (sounds so obvious it's probably in another comment round here somewhere)
:-)
Examiner takes a patent, if he rejects it, fair enough.
If he approves it, but shouldn't have because of prior art, you can dish the dirt, pop the patent and collect a percentage of the patent application fee from the Patent Office.
You'd probably need to pay a small fee tho to stab at the patent to prevent feedback loops of bottomfeeders.
Oh, and pay the examiner a bonus if they find the prior art first, coz they just saved the Patent Office money.
Catch? It would take an act of God to get anyone to implement it, and Greed is God.
After all, snatching the brainchildren of America and selling them as prostitutes to Big Business keeps a large number somewhere, large, or somesuch equally noble goal.
Hey, USPTO, if I patent every possible combination of DNA, can I have your firstborn?
Funnily enough though, I still have hope for this one (I should have amended my posts last line).
;-)
You can lose a few angels (or coincide their attacks) and dump that nuclear robot episode without much loss. The world could still make sense. Bye Bye Pen-Pen
I just despair when film makers cut plot blindly and the film ceases to make any sense anymore as people do things for no believable reason at all.
BUT Gainax are involved, so people who actually care might be guarding Shinji and co.
I just don't know how much film conversion experience they have.
After all, compared to anime, the 'real world' sucks
I just want to help, but I can't.
So I'll sit here and worry, and dream about how it might be done believably.
It *will* be better than Alita though.
I can't see any evidence that Hollywood understands her psychology at all. Never mind heavy-body, high-speed combat physics.
I hope I'm wrong. I fear I'm right.