"Just suppose for a moment that he did it in one take. Or they did multiple takes, but didn't take a break or change costume. Given that Data only ever changes costume to play a character on the holodeck (or pose for a kidnapper), this is not implausible.
I mean, why would you shoot the scene more than once? Why would you change visors, unless there was something visually wrong with it, in which case, it wouldn't be that one that was "worn in the scene". It's not like a jacket worn for a stunt which might damage it. It's an accessory worn for a sedentary, non violent, game.
I'm sure Mr Spiner would be aware of whether they changed visors mid-scene, or shot the scene over more than a single filming session.
It's about compression (audio) not compression (data) ; it's the loudness war again. It's something important though.
You can still hear most of the dynamic range on a well encoded MP3 or Vorbis file, IMHO. If it's present in the first place, that is.
Never mind discussing whether FLAC or MP3 or OGG are the best ; what does it matter if the master has already been sabotaged by marketing, compressed to sound "loud" so that it gets instant attention on the radio? Yeah, sure, it gets attention ; the same way a fire alarm or a fog horn does, by inflicting an ear-cringing reflex.
"Compression is a necessary evil. The artists I know want to sound competitive. You don't want your track to sound quieter or wimpier by comparison. We've raised the bar and you can't really step back." -- Butch Vig, producer and Garbage mastermind Yes, this man truly is a mastermind.... of garbage.
I've only been using is a short while, but I was delighted to find that the file manager in Ubuntu lets me mount CIFS/SMB (windows), NFS, SFTP, FTP (and probably a few others) as folders. This beside Windows which only allows CIFS/SMB.
I see this as sarcastic, rather than trollish. I'm sure the iPhone costs nowhere near the sticker price to manufacture. I'm also sure it's rather more than 10 dollars. I've seen an estimate at around $250 (for the 4GB version), which means they are selling it at a handsome profit even before you factor in network contracts.
I think this is less of an issue with the Wii because the input device moves with you. With the PC you are craning your neck while you keep your hands on the keyboard. With the Wii, it's almost difficult NOT to move the input device in sympathy with what you're doing onscreen.
Alas, shutter glasses(a polarized screen with an LCD shutter) and cross-polarized glasses don't play with LCD displays, because LCD uses polarization to turn the pixels on and off. LCD latencies are also a little high for shutter glasses.
They only work with DLP projectors (uses little mirrors), CRTs, plasma, and upcoming display technologies like Field Effect Displays and LED displays. Obviously there are a lot of display technologies that do work there, but LCD is a very popular technology for widescreen TV and of course, for PC monitors.
Either way you do it, you also have to double the grunt of your rendering system (or half your graphical complexity), and you need specific software support to get it right (you can go a long way with a driver that knows it's rendering for stereoscopy and just produces the correct eye POVs, but the glitches you get in the foreground and HUD are only tolerated by enthusiasts.). With shuttering you need glasses. With cross polarization you need to double the number of display elements (by having two displays or a special display with double the horizontal resolutions). Used in POV applications, all of these technologies are a one-user gig.
Stereo "Wii-D" will probably never happen ; half the audience have an incompatible display device, the system does not have an enormous excess of GPU grunt. Stereo3D would only be common with one of the following display devices...
* Personal head-mounted 3D display (probably VRD goggles)
* Large area wide aspect flatpanel displays with inherent stereo 3D support built in at the factory (which means basically doubling the vertical rez and making a special polarized filter for the screen).... an no-one is going to build the latter until there are plenty of mainstream 3D apps to support the market.
The parallax effect that Johnny Lee demonstrates conveniently exploits the tendency of the human brain to "fill in the gaps" ; I'd be intrigued to see how convincing it really is.
As another poster points out, head tracking really isn't very well received for the PC, because the PC is an inherently static device. You can move your head, but your hands have to remain fixated on the keyboard / mouse. The Wii has an advantage here because the input device moves around with you. Several times during Zelda I got up from my chair and started moving almost involuntarily, my whole body was immersed in the game. I would never have tried that on the PC ; when I feel the urge there it probably just contributes to my neck tension.
If the static, 3rd person POV of Zelda can make this gamer rise up and move, a game armed with a head tracking linked POV would be compulsively immersive, even without stereoscopic 3D.
Aside from the fact that the gaming business is now bigger than Hollywood ever was, the main problem here is exposure of minors to content that could be deemed corrupting.
The game industry has adopted the same solution as the film industry - they rate their product according to age group. The difference is that the ratings are circumvented far more often.
Parents think the word "Game" and their internal association is probably something like "Monopoly". Despite the obvious flaws in the idea that games are like movies, they are very similar in the level of emotionally involving content they can contain. If anything, games can involve you far more emotionally, because they cast you as a protagonist. I had serious qualms about offing little girls in BioShock, even though I knew intellectually that they were nothing but a digital asset in a game database.
I don't think the games of my youth were a contributor to violent behaviour, but who would equate knocking a few pixel squares into each other with real-world violence? Modern game media represents real-world situations with increasing fidelity, and I wouldn't be surprised if the game equivalent of a "video nasty" was responsible for at least a few wet bedsheets if not some more disturbing turns of behaviour.
But the solution is not to ban mature content in games, the solution is to assist the content provider in giving their recommended restriction levels a little more teeth ; if only by engaging in the same kind of marketing campaigns that are common enough to raise awareness of film certification.
Oh, acknowledged, I've seen some real monstrosities written that way too. In this particular case though, the arguments are limited to quibbles about queries (confirmed by reading further down). GEMS is a separate application ; it would be trivial to demonstrate that an election system based on VBA was insecure, because the macros are available as source in the database file.
The text of the PDF requires them to release "every file.. that ends with the extension 'gbf' or 'mdb', and the password for 'gbf' files." It also mentions that the data has been scrutineered with Access.
The arguments about an Access database being a "program" are probably related to the ability of MDB to contain queries (aka stored procedures).
GBF files are encrypted / compressed MDB files. The dockit claims that "a gbf file can only be created and opened by the GEMS program", but I suspect it unpacks them to a temporary file somewhere before it opens them up with the normal library.
Other little GEMS (sorry, couldn't resist the pun)...
* "Microsoft has warned against using the mdb format for some critical applications, such as election management software."
* Each expert witness endorsed a statement that the GEMS software has significant security flaws.
I don't think so.. on my MythTV box, I always run as root ; but the only time I log into it is to do sysadmin, so that's reasonable. It doesn't have a desktop environment, just a single application (MythTV) that runs on a bare X server.
It got up my nose slightly when I installed Ubuntu on my desktop and I needed to supply a password to perform admin tasks, and type "sudo" before admin commands in a terminal, but on the whole, it achieves the desired effect ; it makes you actually consider what you are doing before doing it.
I *do* habitually run Windows as Admin, because if you are a developer it's a pain in the arse not to. But I don't pick up malware of any kind because I don't download software from untrusted sources, use IE, or open unknown email attachments. Once in a while I install anti-malware and run it. And scan it from the Linux instance on the same box as well.
Will Linux newbie users infect their systems with huge amounts of malware? Well, I don't think so.
* As people noted, there isn't a huge amount of desktop malware around NOW because the Windows target is so much bigger.
* The vast majority of software installed on desktop distributions of Linux is done using a package manager. Any package manager worth it's salt will be operating out of a reputable source, with checksum verification.
* The vast majority of software that the average user uses has an equivalent in the official package repositories.
On the other hand, nothing is foolproof and there an awful lot of fools out there, like my sister in law who infected her machine with 427 nasties by believing things she saw in IE.
Microsoft still host the service packs for Win2k, even if they are not making new ones. nLite will roll service packs and security updates in as well as (most) drivers.
It looks like the way this works is by having a separate metabase from MS, and downloading the updates from their hosting pages instead of Windows Update. So as long as MS keep hosting Win2k files, this should continue to work, even if Windows update for Win2k gets turned off (not sure, haven't booted Win2k in months). You could presumably just rip the metadata and download ALL updates for Win2k, thus creating an installer which has updated components for all occasions, and not just the updates that you actually use (which is what you'll get by default if you run this on an installed workstation).
One problem I can see is that with enough updates, the installer might exceed the size of a CDROM. You could burn the image to a DVD, or you could buy a cheap flash thumb (1-2GB is ludicrously cheap these days) and use that. Or just make a "master" on disk and cut it down more with nLite for specific purposes.
12) Don't use Internet Explorer (any version - the people who tell you IE7 is 'okay' are idiots).
Put some hardware in between your machine and the Internet at large. Being behind even a simple NAT box will help enormously. I find these two to be the crux of it ;.NET is actually useful and won't impede normal operations because it doesn't even load unless you load an app that uses it.
Don't install components you don't use (like IIS). Turn off unnecessary system services. If you have good digital hygiene habits, don't bother with an antivirus. If you have a tidy filesystem, don't bother with indexing (Google Desktop is better anyway).
The main Windows problem is the profusion of services, in terms of both security and bloat. Some ISPs now routinely block some of the more vunerable ports, but this is the major reason to be behind a NAT, regardless of which OS you run. A router runs a small OS and only necessary services, all of which are expected to be attacked and coded cautiously.
IE vulnerabilities are the worst ; my sister-in-law infected her PC with 427 nasties just by clicking on things. Had to nuke the disc from orbit ; it was the only way to be sure. She now runs Ubuntu. No complaints yet.
Get yourself a copy of nLite and slipstream the OEM SATA driver into a new install CD. This is what I had to do to get Win2k running on my new hardware.
Sadly, this requires access to a working OS... but if you have access to a second Windows machine with a CD Burner, it should be fine.
I'd love to see the Culture solution implemented ; indulge in a heinous crime against a person, and a sentient machine is tasked to follow you around for the rest of your life to stop you doing it again.
Lets people know that you are a murderer/sex offender/whatever ; you could presumably have different models or colours for differentiating between plain killers, nonces, etc. Megans' law satisfied.
Prevents you from ever doing it again. Obviously desirable.
Turns you into a social pariah. Because few people will want to hang out with you, even if the drone is going to prevent any harm to them. Thus provides a visible, tangible element of punishment.
Prevents you from being unjustly murdered by someone jumping to conclusions about your criminal record, because the drone will either intervene, or at least provide excellent evidence of who did it (and thus a deterrent to anyone not willing to take the punishment).
'tis a shame it requires enormous advances in AI and engineering though.
.. but the pond scum^W^Wmanagement. You know, that stuff that rises to the top, so far above the rest so as not to be troubled by the smells and clamouring of the hoi-polloi?
They won't have the first clue. They'll just see the ISO certification from their cosy leather chair, and add *their* rubber stamp to the list.
My/boot is on a separate filesystem, and isn't even in the fstab. It gets mounted briefly by grub when it loads the kernel, and the only other time it gets mounted is _manually_ when I'm upgrading my kernel.
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"Just suppose for a moment that he did it in one take. Or they did multiple takes, but didn't take a break or change costume. Given that Data only ever changes costume to play a character on the holodeck (or pose for a kidnapper), this is not implausible.
I mean, why would you shoot the scene more than once? Why would you change visors, unless there was something visually wrong with it, in which case, it wouldn't be that one that was "worn in the scene". It's not like a jacket worn for a stunt which might damage it. It's an accessory worn for a sedentary, non violent, game.
I'm sure Mr Spiner would be aware of whether they changed visors mid-scene, or shot the scene over more than a single filming session.
You can still hear most of the dynamic range on a well encoded MP3 or Vorbis file, IMHO. If it's present in the first place, that is.
Never mind discussing whether FLAC or MP3 or OGG are the best ; what does it matter if the master has already been sabotaged by marketing, compressed to sound "loud" so that it gets instant attention on the radio? Yeah, sure, it gets attention ; the same way a fire alarm or a fog horn does, by inflicting an ear-cringing reflex. "Compression is a necessary evil. The artists I know want to sound competitive. You don't want your track to sound quieter or wimpier by comparison. We've raised the bar and you can't really step back."
-- Butch Vig, producer and Garbage mastermind Yes, this man truly is a mastermind
I've only been using is a short while, but I was delighted to find that the file manager in Ubuntu lets me mount CIFS/SMB (windows), NFS, SFTP, FTP (and probably a few others) as folders. This beside Windows which only allows CIFS/SMB.
I see this as sarcastic, rather than trollish. I'm sure the iPhone costs nowhere near the sticker price to manufacture. I'm also sure it's rather more than 10 dollars. I've seen an estimate at around $250 (for the 4GB version), which means they are selling it at a handsome profit even before you factor in network contracts.
It would probably deform due to barrel acceleration. A shaped charge would be better, as it can produce a sharp stab despite being a stumpy lump.
.. not hydraulic
I'm not sure a just government can exist for very long. The problem with consolidating power is that like shit, it draws flies.
I think this is less of an issue with the Wii because the input device moves with you. With the PC you are craning your neck while you keep your hands on the keyboard. With the Wii, it's almost difficult NOT to move the input device in sympathy with what you're doing onscreen.
Alas, shutter glasses(a polarized screen with an LCD shutter) and cross-polarized glasses don't play with LCD displays, because LCD uses polarization to turn the pixels on and off. LCD latencies are also a little high for shutter glasses.
... an no-one is going to build the latter until there are plenty of mainstream 3D apps to support the market.
They only work with DLP projectors (uses little mirrors), CRTs, plasma, and upcoming display technologies like Field Effect Displays and LED displays. Obviously there are a lot of display technologies that do work there, but LCD is a very popular technology for widescreen TV and of course, for PC monitors.
Either way you do it, you also have to double the grunt of your rendering system (or half your graphical complexity), and you need specific software support to get it right (you can go a long way with a driver that knows it's rendering for stereoscopy and just produces the correct eye POVs, but the glitches you get in the foreground and HUD are only tolerated by enthusiasts.). With shuttering you need glasses. With cross polarization you need to double the number of display elements (by having two displays or a special display with double the horizontal resolutions). Used in POV applications, all of these technologies are a one-user gig.
Stereo "Wii-D" will probably never happen ; half the audience have an incompatible display device, the system does not have an enormous excess of GPU grunt. Stereo3D would only be common with one of the following display devices...
* Personal head-mounted 3D display (probably VRD goggles)
* Large area wide aspect flatpanel displays with inherent stereo 3D support built in at the factory (which means basically doubling the vertical rez and making a special polarized filter for the screen).
The parallax effect that Johnny Lee demonstrates conveniently exploits the tendency of the human brain to "fill in the gaps" ; I'd be intrigued to see how convincing it really is.
As another poster points out, head tracking really isn't very well received for the PC, because the PC is an inherently static device. You can move your head, but your hands have to remain fixated on the keyboard / mouse. The Wii has an advantage here because the input device moves around with you. Several times during Zelda I got up from my chair and started moving almost involuntarily, my whole body was immersed in the game. I would never have tried that on the PC ; when I feel the urge there it probably just contributes to my neck tension.
If the static, 3rd person POV of Zelda can make this gamer rise up and move, a game armed with a head tracking linked POV would be compulsively immersive, even without stereoscopic 3D.
Aside from the fact that the gaming business is now bigger than Hollywood ever was, the main problem here is exposure of minors to content that could be deemed corrupting.
The game industry has adopted the same solution as the film industry - they rate their product according to age group. The difference is that the ratings are circumvented far more often.
Parents think the word "Game" and their internal association is probably something like "Monopoly". Despite the obvious flaws in the idea that games are like movies, they are very similar in the level of emotionally involving content they can contain. If anything, games can involve you far more emotionally, because they cast you as a protagonist. I had serious qualms about offing little girls in BioShock, even though I knew intellectually that they were nothing but a digital asset in a game database.
I don't think the games of my youth were a contributor to violent behaviour, but who would equate knocking a few pixel squares into each other with real-world violence? Modern game media represents real-world situations with increasing fidelity, and I wouldn't be surprised if the game equivalent of a "video nasty" was responsible for at least a few wet bedsheets if not some more disturbing turns of behaviour.
But the solution is not to ban mature content in games, the solution is to assist the content provider in giving their recommended restriction levels a little more teeth ; if only by engaging in the same kind of marketing campaigns that are common enough to raise awareness of film certification.
This technology is less vulnerable to scratches because the data layers are inside the disk, not on the surface underneath a thin layer of paint.
Oh, acknowledged, I've seen some real monstrosities written that way too. In this particular case though, the arguments are limited to quibbles about queries (confirmed by reading further down). GEMS is a separate application ; it would be trivial to demonstrate that an election system based on VBA was insecure, because the macros are available as source in the database file.
The text of the PDF requires them to release "every file .. that ends with the extension 'gbf' or 'mdb', and the password for 'gbf' files." It also mentions that the data has been scrutineered with Access.
The arguments about an Access database being a "program" are probably related to the ability of MDB to contain queries (aka stored procedures).
GBF files are encrypted / compressed MDB files. The dockit claims that "a gbf file can only be created and opened by the GEMS program", but I suspect it unpacks them to a temporary file somewhere before it opens them up with the normal library.
Other little GEMS (sorry, couldn't resist the pun)...
* "Microsoft has warned against using the mdb format for some critical applications, such as election management software."
* Each expert witness endorsed a statement that the GEMS software has significant security flaws.
I don't think so.. on my MythTV box, I always run as root ; but the only time I log into it is to do sysadmin, so that's reasonable. It doesn't have a desktop environment, just a single application (MythTV) that runs on a bare X server.
It got up my nose slightly when I installed Ubuntu on my desktop and I needed to supply a password to perform admin tasks, and type "sudo" before admin commands in a terminal, but on the whole, it achieves the desired effect ; it makes you actually consider what you are doing before doing it.
I *do* habitually run Windows as Admin, because if you are a developer it's a pain in the arse not to. But I don't pick up malware of any kind because I don't download software from untrusted sources, use IE, or open unknown email attachments. Once in a while I install anti-malware and run it. And scan it from the Linux instance on the same box as well.
Will Linux newbie users infect their systems with huge amounts of malware? Well, I don't think so.
* As people noted, there isn't a huge amount of desktop malware around NOW because the Windows target is so much bigger.
* The vast majority of software installed on desktop distributions of Linux is done using a package manager. Any package manager worth it's salt will be operating out of a reputable source, with checksum verification.
* The vast majority of software that the average user uses has an equivalent in the official package repositories.
On the other hand, nothing is foolproof and there an awful lot of fools out there, like my sister in law who infected her machine with 427 nasties by believing things she saw in IE.
.. in the States, at least, even porn that _looks_ like child porn is illegal, regardless of the age of the "actress".
Or... try autopatcher. Hunt around in the forum. :-)
Microsoft still host the service packs for Win2k, even if they are not making new ones. nLite will roll service packs and security updates in as well as (most) drivers.
A quick search turns up Windzupdate.
It looks like the way this works is by having a separate metabase from MS, and downloading the updates from their hosting pages instead of Windows Update. So as long as MS keep hosting Win2k files, this should continue to work, even if Windows update for Win2k gets turned off (not sure, haven't booted Win2k in months). You could presumably just rip the metadata and download ALL updates for Win2k, thus creating an installer which has updated components for all occasions, and not just the updates that you actually use (which is what you'll get by default if you run this on an installed workstation).
One problem I can see is that with enough updates, the installer might exceed the size of a CDROM. You could burn the image to a DVD, or you could buy a cheap flash thumb (1-2GB is ludicrously cheap these days) and use that. Or just make a "master" on disk and cut it down more with nLite for specific purposes.
Put some hardware in between your machine and the Internet at large. Being behind even a simple NAT box will help enormously. I find these two to be the crux of it ;
Don't install components you don't use (like IIS). Turn off unnecessary system services. If you have good digital hygiene habits, don't bother with an antivirus. If you have a tidy filesystem, don't bother with indexing (Google Desktop is better anyway).
The main Windows problem is the profusion of services, in terms of both security and bloat. Some ISPs now routinely block some of the more vunerable ports, but this is the major reason to be behind a NAT, regardless of which OS you run. A router runs a small OS and only necessary services, all of which are expected to be attacked and coded cautiously.
IE vulnerabilities are the worst ; my sister-in-law infected her PC with 427 nasties just by clicking on things. Had to nuke the disc from orbit ; it was the only way to be sure. She now runs Ubuntu. No complaints yet.
Get yourself a copy of nLite and slipstream the OEM SATA driver into a new install CD. This is what I had to do to get Win2k running on my new hardware.
Sadly, this requires access to a working OS... but if you have access to a second Windows machine with a CD Burner, it should be fine.
I'll second that.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS.aspx
I'd love to see the Culture solution implemented ; indulge in a heinous crime against a person, and a sentient machine is tasked to follow you around for the rest of your life to stop you doing it again.
Lets people know that you are a murderer/sex offender/whatever ; you could presumably have different models or colours for differentiating between plain killers, nonces, etc. Megans' law satisfied.
Prevents you from ever doing it again. Obviously desirable.
Turns you into a social pariah. Because few people will want to hang out with you, even if the drone is going to prevent any harm to them. Thus provides a visible, tangible element of punishment.
Prevents you from being unjustly murdered by someone jumping to conclusions about your criminal record, because the drone will either intervene, or at least provide excellent evidence of who did it (and thus a deterrent to anyone not willing to take the punishment).
'tis a shame it requires enormous advances in AI and engineering though.
Forced bundling is, indeed, illegal in Europe.
Meh, responsibility nothing. If your product is selling off the shelves, why waste money on advertising?
.. but the pond scum^W^Wmanagement. You know, that stuff that rises to the top, so far above the rest so as not to be troubled by the smells and clamouring of the hoi-polloi?
They won't have the first clue. They'll just see the ISO certification from their cosy leather chair, and add *their* rubber stamp to the list.
My /boot is on a separate filesystem, and isn't even in the fstab. It gets mounted briefly by grub when it loads the kernel, and the only other time it gets mounted is _manually_ when I'm upgrading my kernel.