Any online game that allows a savegame hack to affect online play violates the "do not trust the client... EVER." mantra.
Violating that mantra almost always leads to crap multiplayer with rampant cheating for one reason or another. When I first saw Crysis' description of why they separated DX10 players from DX9 (more powerful systems to perform physics calculations on, implying that world physics was *offloaded to the client*) I was worried that multiplayer was going to have some cheating problems. Boy was I right... I played multiplayer for about a week then uninstalled Crysis. It's NOT good when someone can change one XML file and make their pistol bullets do 9999999 damage and their vehicles immune to all weapons fire.
Those web accelerators are hokey BS anyway. Many games run well in WINE - what game are you specifically trying to run? There are plenty of Atari and Nintendo emulators for Linux Flash runs in Linux, although admittedly it's a major resource hog compared to Flash for Windows Don't know about Opera 10. I'm happy with Firefox myself. RealPlayer - who the heck uses that any more? MP4 video - Um, there's probably 10 different ways to play this back in Linux, definately 2 ways without any doubt. Most common are mplayer and xine.
Thanks for the info. Yeah, most of the restrictions seem to be technical "niche stuff we haven't bothered to implement support for" as opposed to "we're explicitly blocking X to sell our own stuff".
Hulu is notorious for their anti-set-top-box stance. BBC iPlayer seems a bit more open in their attitudes.
Re:Oh great, Sony
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That's because MSN was blocking competitors to one of their products.
Hulu, on the other hand, doesn't seem to offer any "set-top-box" solutions currently, and has consistently blocked anything from the "set-top-box" category whenever possible.
Re:Oh great, Sony
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Net Neutrality applies to service providers delivering content, not the content providers themselves.
Re:Oh great, Sony
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, Hulu is known to block anyone who attempts to display Hulu on a television (as opposed to a PC monitor).
Yes, the distinction is blurry, but it had nothing to do with MS. Hulu has a long history of blocking anyone who implements a "set top box" method of accessing Hulu.
Re:Oh great, Sony
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It depends on exactly which business unit within Sony they are teaming up with.
I recently broke down and bought a PS3 for two reasons: Blu-Ray, and Final Fantasy XIII. I made some interesting discoveries: 1) Compatible with any USB storage device. Compare to "no third party" locking of Xbox360 proprietary memory. (Wii uses SDHC I think?) 2) You don't have to buy an Eye Toy for the camera. Supposedly any UVC compliant USB camera will work. 3) Same for USB headsets 4) Same for Bluetooth headsets 5) Same for keyboards/mice for browsing and chat 6) Want a bigger hard drive? Put in any 2.5" SATA drive 7) Media playback is UPnP based and supports quite a few formats (MKV being the most notable exception). I can use the PS3 as a MythTV frontend!
That said, TFA talks about Hulu. Knowing Hulu, they will actively take measures to block out this new effort. See their intentional blocking of the PS3 as an example. (Now to view Hulu video on PS3, you need PlayOn or rtmpdump 2.x + ffmpeg + MediaTomb).
Most people would probably accept a delay in VOD in return for better performance/quality - Buffer the video, and start a new "stream" every 10-15 minutes.
Kind of like how a lot of PPV movies are shown on a schedule.
Maybe if this router has improved multicast support and SOMEONE ACTUALLY TURNS IT ON, it might make a difference.
Increased backbone capacity or downstream capacity isn't nearly as much of a threat to Hollywood as multicast would be... It would allow torrents to be VERY rapidly seeded to multiple peers. You could still use "classic" BT techniques for filling in the holes, but if the initial seed were done as multicast, you'd get lots of distrubuted seeds up and running very quickly.
Similarly, for most video streaming services (legit or not), the bottleneck is at the server itself. If a company did "live" streaming with multicast, their costs/server requirements would be far less.
"The price of optics may have been coming down, not necessarily at Moore's Law speeds because the physics and market pressures are different, but that's also not going to show up in the 322 Tbps shiny marketing number either." The optical networking industry was making HUGE leaps in the late 1990s in terms of capacity. The problem is they leapt way beyond what the market needed - why buy equipment to push more through one fiber when you have hundreds of dark fibers? Then the tech industry bubble burst and the optical networking companies (Corning, JDSU, etc) were in some REALLY sever pain.
There just isn't nearly as much money going into backbones these days because the last mile and even the edges aren't improving very fast.
Yup. Eliminate modal dispersion and you still have standard optical dispersion. (Think prisms)
It's possible to correct for optical dispersion with two lengths of fiber that has dispersion properties that cancel each other out, but past that you start running into other more esoteric barriers.
A perfect example of how Mag hasn't done any innovation or design work since the creation of their original lights.
How the FUCK can you have a gigantic chunk of aluminum and fuck up your thermal management so badly that your emitter/power supply circuitry overheats!
I tried streaming to my PS3 for the first time last night. No buffering problems, no obvious compression artifacts.
Yeah, it was limited to stereo, but so are half my TV recordings until I can fix a small bug in MythTV. (5.1 channel AC3 is being misreported in the stream info as 2 channel for Fox and NBC recordings, causing the PS3 to decode it and output it as PCM instead of passthrough.)
Yeah you can detect that SOMETHING is there, but how do you determine whether that something is supposed to be there or not?
If you assume all "somethings" are not supposed to be there, you'll have a worse situation than UAC with users being prompted all the time and getting conditioned to click "yes".
After reading the article, it seems no different from doing an offline scan using ClamAV from a LiveCD except maybe slightly more convenient. You boot a "secure" detection mechanism in place of whatever is normally operating on the machine.
The hooks needed to do it as described (which implies a hypervisor-esque antivirus/antimalware solution) would provide malware authors new vectors with which to attack systems, potentially vectors that would allow malware to escape from the likes of an "antivirus on LiveCD" solution.
Nearly every smartphone on the planet works as follows, as far as GPS: 1) Included app requires data at all times and (frequently) costs EXTRA on top of the data plan 2) For nearly every smartphone platform, someone sells a standalone package that allows for storage of maps on an SD/MicroSD card or (in the case of TomTom on the iPhone) internal memory.
Every recent smartphone I know of with GPS capability is capable of full standalone GPS reception with the phone portion of the device completely disabled.
Last I checked, Tracfone was a reseller of either AT&T or T-Mobile's network. i.e. they were GSM-based. Get a SIM and stick it in an unlocked smartphone. Just use wifi for the data stuff.
If you want unlimited data in two countries, you're going to pay. If you choose a primary country, you can get unlimited data there and prepaid-with-voice-only in the other country.
Given a choice between a $4.50 "old release" HD "rental" and a $1 new release RedBox DVD (oh, and some RedBoxes have Blu-Ray), I'll take the $1 DVD for instant gratification.
Given a choice between two $4.50 "old release" HD "rentals" and a 2-disc Netflix plan - I'll take the Netflix plan, which will easily get a lower "rental" price per month, plus there's Netflix Instant Streaming.
At $17.99 for older movies, it's WORSE than buying a Blu-Ray.
Most older movies have gotten down to $10-15 at Wally World, and I managed to even find some 2-packs (admittedly of made-for-TV movies) for $10.
I worry that this might affect Netflix streaming to the PS3 though - Netflix's prices blow Sony's "rental" prices away. A 2-disc Netflix sub is only slightly more expensive than two "old release" HD "rentals".
My experience is that overall (there are occasional exceptions), if a vendor is consistently offering better prices than NewEgg across the board, there's a good chance you are going to have LOTS of fun if anything goes wrong with the transaction.
I once ordered a video card from a vendor that beat NewEgg's prices by a pretty decent amount. NEVER AGAIN. The card was defective on arrival, and the return process was HELL. The vendor immediately tried to pawn me off to PNY, and of course PNY said to contact the vendor for the first 30 days.
So yeah, NewEgg is not the cheapest, but they're the cheapest reputable vendor with acceptable customer service there is. (Not that I would call NewEgg's CS merely acceptable, it is better described as excellent.)
Also, as another person said, if you do the "individual component shop-around", you'll lose any cost advantages when those multiple vendors nail you for shipping.
Your PayPal account is probably, like the GPs and mine, broken somehow.
I've had a bank account linked for years, and starting this year they started rejecting PayPal transfer requests from the account. (I haven't had a chance to call the bank about this yet.)
I tried to add another bank account, but PayPal's confirmation system is apparently broken. There are a LOT of people reporting not seeing their confirmation deposits. I know the routing number and account number are correct as I've successfully linked 3-4 other services to that account in a similar fashion.
It's just another example of PayPal sucking.
(I've never tried to execute a PayPal order from NewEgg, I avoid PP whenever possible, so it's pretty much for eBay transactions and occasional purchases of "obscure" stuff like group buys of circuit boards.)
That is nice to know... Yeah, it's line-frequency stuff (typically seen in offices/stores) that really bothers him.
That said, if someone bans incandescents, I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried to cost-cut and start producing line-frequency-flicker CFLs. (On the other hand, that would probably fail Energy Star power factor guidelines...)
Since he's looking for some gaming performance, I'd reccommend bumping it up slightly.
GPU: 9800GT, GTS250, and GT240 are right now some of the better deals. The GT240 is the slowest of the bunch, but it's quite respectable and has significantly lower power consumption. I'd reccommend that. CPU: One of the lower end Core 2 Quads is a good bet. Motherboard: Don't be afraid of integrated graphics if it's possible to disable it. My ex's desktop (built last summer) had a Gigabyte G31-based motherboard that was about $60 and got great reviews on Newegg.
You should be able to hit under $500 for a complete system at this point.
They're still selling a lot of the "pre-core-iWhatever" CPUs though, and the naming scheme for those was just absolutely awful.
Celeron was universally "crap", and it was worse that it was next to impossible to determine which architecture it was. But you could at least have an "avoid Celeron" rule when shopping.
Then Intel just HAD to resurrect the fucking "Pentium" name to describe low-end Core 2 CPUs... That made shopping for Intel CPUs a total nightmare. Was the "Pentium" a POS, or a half decent CPU? You needed a microscope to tell.
Similarly, I get the impression that even within the i3/5/7 series there's already a bit of "weirdness" hidden beyond just the "two different socket types for i7" situation.
Nvidia is at least semi-consistent with their schemes, within a given generation, an increased second digit is better. The annoying things are: Starting with the 9000 series, NVidia started taking some of the "stragglers" from the previous generation and marking them with a new model number from the new generation. (9800GT = 8800GT, GTS250 = slightly upclocked G92 chipset and not actually a GT200-series chipset...)
Slashdot Mirror
Any online game that allows a savegame hack to affect online play violates the "do not trust the client... EVER." mantra.
Violating that mantra almost always leads to crap multiplayer with rampant cheating for one reason or another. When I first saw Crysis' description of why they separated DX10 players from DX9 (more powerful systems to perform physics calculations on, implying that world physics was *offloaded to the client*) I was worried that multiplayer was going to have some cheating problems. Boy was I right... I played multiplayer for about a week then uninstalled Crysis. It's NOT good when someone can change one XML file and make their pistol bullets do 9999999 damage and their vehicles immune to all weapons fire.
Those web accelerators are hokey BS anyway.
Many games run well in WINE - what game are you specifically trying to run?
There are plenty of Atari and Nintendo emulators for Linux
Flash runs in Linux, although admittedly it's a major resource hog compared to Flash for Windows
Don't know about Opera 10. I'm happy with Firefox myself.
RealPlayer - who the heck uses that any more?
MP4 video - Um, there's probably 10 different ways to play this back in Linux, definately 2 ways without any doubt. Most common are mplayer and xine.
Thanks for the info. Yeah, most of the restrictions seem to be technical "niche stuff we haven't bothered to implement support for" as opposed to "we're explicitly blocking X to sell our own stuff".
Hulu is notorious for their anti-set-top-box stance. BBC iPlayer seems a bit more open in their attitudes.
That's because MSN was blocking competitors to one of their products.
Hulu, on the other hand, doesn't seem to offer any "set-top-box" solutions currently, and has consistently blocked anything from the "set-top-box" category whenever possible.
Net Neutrality applies to service providers delivering content, not the content providers themselves.
Actually, Hulu is known to block anyone who attempts to display Hulu on a television (as opposed to a PC monitor).
Yes, the distinction is blurry, but it had nothing to do with MS. Hulu has a long history of blocking anyone who implements a "set top box" method of accessing Hulu.
It depends on exactly which business unit within Sony they are teaming up with.
I recently broke down and bought a PS3 for two reasons: Blu-Ray, and Final Fantasy XIII. I made some interesting discoveries:
1) Compatible with any USB storage device. Compare to "no third party" locking of Xbox360 proprietary memory. (Wii uses SDHC I think?)
2) You don't have to buy an Eye Toy for the camera. Supposedly any UVC compliant USB camera will work.
3) Same for USB headsets
4) Same for Bluetooth headsets
5) Same for keyboards/mice for browsing and chat
6) Want a bigger hard drive? Put in any 2.5" SATA drive
7) Media playback is UPnP based and supports quite a few formats (MKV being the most notable exception). I can use the PS3 as a MythTV frontend!
That said, TFA talks about Hulu. Knowing Hulu, they will actively take measures to block out this new effort. See their intentional blocking of the PS3 as an example. (Now to view Hulu video on PS3, you need PlayOn or rtmpdump 2.x + ffmpeg + MediaTomb).
Most people would probably accept a delay in VOD in return for better performance/quality - Buffer the video, and start a new "stream" every 10-15 minutes.
Kind of like how a lot of PPV movies are shown on a schedule.
Maybe if this router has improved multicast support and SOMEONE ACTUALLY TURNS IT ON, it might make a difference.
Increased backbone capacity or downstream capacity isn't nearly as much of a threat to Hollywood as multicast would be... It would allow torrents to be VERY rapidly seeded to multiple peers. You could still use "classic" BT techniques for filling in the holes, but if the initial seed were done as multicast, you'd get lots of distrubuted seeds up and running very quickly.
Similarly, for most video streaming services (legit or not), the bottleneck is at the server itself. If a company did "live" streaming with multicast, their costs/server requirements would be far less.
"The price of optics may have been coming down, not necessarily at Moore's Law speeds because the physics and market pressures are different, but that's also not going to show up in the 322 Tbps shiny marketing number either."
The optical networking industry was making HUGE leaps in the late 1990s in terms of capacity. The problem is they leapt way beyond what the market needed - why buy equipment to push more through one fiber when you have hundreds of dark fibers? Then the tech industry bubble burst and the optical networking companies (Corning, JDSU, etc) were in some REALLY sever pain.
There just isn't nearly as much money going into backbones these days because the last mile and even the edges aren't improving very fast.
Yup. Eliminate modal dispersion and you still have standard optical dispersion. (Think prisms)
It's possible to correct for optical dispersion with two lengths of fiber that has dispersion properties that cancel each other out, but past that you start running into other more esoteric barriers.
A perfect example of how Mag hasn't done any innovation or design work since the creation of their original lights.
How the FUCK can you have a gigantic chunk of aluminum and fuck up your thermal management so badly that your emitter/power supply circuitry overheats!
http://candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?t=119665&highlight=mag-led
I tried streaming to my PS3 for the first time last night. No buffering problems, no obvious compression artifacts.
Yeah, it was limited to stereo, but so are half my TV recordings until I can fix a small bug in MythTV. (5.1 channel AC3 is being misreported in the stream info as 2 channel for Fox and NBC recordings, causing the PS3 to decode it and output it as PCM instead of passthrough.)
Yeah you can detect that SOMETHING is there, but how do you determine whether that something is supposed to be there or not?
If you assume all "somethings" are not supposed to be there, you'll have a worse situation than UAC with users being prompted all the time and getting conditioned to click "yes".
After reading the article, it seems no different from doing an offline scan using ClamAV from a LiveCD except maybe slightly more convenient. You boot a "secure" detection mechanism in place of whatever is normally operating on the machine.
The hooks needed to do it as described (which implies a hypervisor-esque antivirus/antimalware solution) would provide malware authors new vectors with which to attack systems, potentially vectors that would allow malware to escape from the likes of an "antivirus on LiveCD" solution.
The majority of current smartphones don't have firmware-locking of the "true GPS" hardware.
Some Crackberries might still do it, no Windows Mobile devices do, I am fairly certain no Android devices do.
Nearly every smartphone on the planet works as follows, as far as GPS:
1) Included app requires data at all times and (frequently) costs EXTRA on top of the data plan
2) For nearly every smartphone platform, someone sells a standalone package that allows for storage of maps on an SD/MicroSD card or (in the case of TomTom on the iPhone) internal memory.
Every recent smartphone I know of with GPS capability is capable of full standalone GPS reception with the phone portion of the device completely disabled.
Last I checked, Tracfone was a reseller of either AT&T or T-Mobile's network. i.e. they were GSM-based. Get a SIM and stick it in an unlocked smartphone. Just use wifi for the data stuff.
If you want unlimited data in two countries, you're going to pay. If you choose a primary country, you can get unlimited data there and prepaid-with-voice-only in the other country.
Given a choice between a $4.50 "old release" HD "rental" and a $1 new release RedBox DVD (oh, and some RedBoxes have Blu-Ray), I'll take the $1 DVD for instant gratification.
Given a choice between two $4.50 "old release" HD "rentals" and a 2-disc Netflix plan - I'll take the Netflix plan, which will easily get a lower "rental" price per month, plus there's Netflix Instant Streaming.
At $17.99 for older movies, it's WORSE than buying a Blu-Ray.
Most older movies have gotten down to $10-15 at Wally World, and I managed to even find some 2-packs (admittedly of made-for-TV movies) for $10.
I worry that this might affect Netflix streaming to the PS3 though - Netflix's prices blow Sony's "rental" prices away. A 2-disc Netflix sub is only slightly more expensive than two "old release" HD "rentals".
Someone didn't bother to RTFA...
My experience is that overall (there are occasional exceptions), if a vendor is consistently offering better prices than NewEgg across the board, there's a good chance you are going to have LOTS of fun if anything goes wrong with the transaction.
I once ordered a video card from a vendor that beat NewEgg's prices by a pretty decent amount. NEVER AGAIN. The card was defective on arrival, and the return process was HELL. The vendor immediately tried to pawn me off to PNY, and of course PNY said to contact the vendor for the first 30 days.
So yeah, NewEgg is not the cheapest, but they're the cheapest reputable vendor with acceptable customer service there is. (Not that I would call NewEgg's CS merely acceptable, it is better described as excellent.)
Also, as another person said, if you do the "individual component shop-around", you'll lose any cost advantages when those multiple vendors nail you for shipping.
Your PayPal account is probably, like the GPs and mine, broken somehow.
I've had a bank account linked for years, and starting this year they started rejecting PayPal transfer requests from the account. (I haven't had a chance to call the bank about this yet.)
I tried to add another bank account, but PayPal's confirmation system is apparently broken. There are a LOT of people reporting not seeing their confirmation deposits. I know the routing number and account number are correct as I've successfully linked 3-4 other services to that account in a similar fashion.
It's just another example of PayPal sucking.
(I've never tried to execute a PayPal order from NewEgg, I avoid PP whenever possible, so it's pretty much for eBay transactions and occasional purchases of "obscure" stuff like group buys of circuit boards.)
That is nice to know... Yeah, it's line-frequency stuff (typically seen in offices/stores) that really bothers him.
That said, if someone bans incandescents, I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried to cost-cut and start producing line-frequency-flicker CFLs. (On the other hand, that would probably fail Energy Star power factor guidelines...)
Since he's looking for some gaming performance, I'd reccommend bumping it up slightly.
GPU: 9800GT, GTS250, and GT240 are right now some of the better deals. The GT240 is the slowest of the bunch, but it's quite respectable and has significantly lower power consumption. I'd reccommend that.
CPU: One of the lower end Core 2 Quads is a good bet.
Motherboard: Don't be afraid of integrated graphics if it's possible to disable it. My ex's desktop (built last summer) had a Gigabyte G31-based motherboard that was about $60 and got great reviews on Newegg.
You should be able to hit under $500 for a complete system at this point.
They're still selling a lot of the "pre-core-iWhatever" CPUs though, and the naming scheme for those was just absolutely awful.
Celeron was universally "crap", and it was worse that it was next to impossible to determine which architecture it was. But you could at least have an "avoid Celeron" rule when shopping.
Then Intel just HAD to resurrect the fucking "Pentium" name to describe low-end Core 2 CPUs... That made shopping for Intel CPUs a total nightmare. Was the "Pentium" a POS, or a half decent CPU? You needed a microscope to tell.
Similarly, I get the impression that even within the i3/5/7 series there's already a bit of "weirdness" hidden beyond just the "two different socket types for i7" situation.
Nvidia is at least semi-consistent with their schemes, within a given generation, an increased second digit is better. The annoying things are:
Starting with the 9000 series, NVidia started taking some of the "stragglers" from the previous generation and marking them with a new model number from the new generation. (9800GT = 8800GT, GTS250 = slightly upclocked G92 chipset and not actually a GT200-series chipset...)