And the kicker is, players do talk about strange "bugs", even ask us to fix them, but none of them actually goes so far as to discover those eggs. Maybe they will now after reading this post:)
An easter egg is a fair amount different than a prize offering burried deep in an EULA. People generally will find easter eggs 1 of 3 ways: 1) by searching specifically for an easter egg because they think there is one there for some reason 2) completely by accident 3) after being told exactly how to find it by someone else who found it through methods 1, 2 or
Finding a prize in an EULA is a little easier since people really should be reading legal contracts before signing them with the next button. Not very many people are just going to randomly search for easter eggs in software, since that's just a waste of time, and equally few people will investigate bugs fully enough to find an easter egg by mistake.
However, AMystery is wrong, because the origional owner is forbidded to transfer accounts by the Terms of Use. Having the account transfered from you from the origional CD Purchaser and then calling and making a stink is likely to put you in a worse position, as then you WILL have violated something (Terms of Use) whereas right now he hasn't violated anything (but he's unable to make a new account because Blizzard won't let him). IANAL, but I'd say either collect a bunch of people in this possition and consider sueing, or take them to small claims court, as they probably won't show and you'll win by default.
As the poster stated, however, you can't change all of the information in the account. You can replace their credit card information with your own, but you can't change everything. For instance, I don't believe you can change the First/Last name combo you give them, but I could be mistaken.
The original owner needs to transfer the account to you, then, once the terms that the actual purchaser of the CD agreed to have been fulfilled, you can call and make as big a stink as you want.
RTFA, you can't transfer accounts. Transfering accounts is a violation of Section 1E of their Terms of Use.
...and it doesn't hold water. The monthly fee is for maintenance of the systems and resources you continue to use and the base code still cost something to develop. I've seen places that give away the client code for free and wasn't that impressed (Lineage, Jumpgate) compared to something that cost money like EQ or Dark Age of Camelot.
I'm pretty sure all of those games did cost money at some point, but later became available for free. It's just part of the MMORPG life cycle. Origional they charge $50/copy + monthly fee, and eventually they're either free download or $10 in store with 1 month included. It's simply maximizing profit: sell to people at $50 when enough people are willing to pay that much, and then lower the price to get those who weren't willing to pay $50 up front until you're giving it away and only charging maintenance...
Biometrically, the same situation plays out more like: contact the bank. "OK, sir, we're turning that PIN off. What new PIN would you like? *clicky-clicky* OK, you can start using it right away".
Interesting thought. I was always thinking Card+Biometric+Pin, but I suppose the card really isn't all that nessicary...
So you produce that grass that stops growing after 2" - it gets used everywhere - it's genes get out so it competes with and mixes with the general gene-pool for grasses around the world. Maybe because it needs less nutrients (since it's only renewing itself instead of actively growing) - so it out-performs all other grasses.
Grass around the world stops growing - ruminants have nothing to eat - so they strip the leaves off every bush and tree - then they die. Six months later, we all die of starvation.
I don't think your situation is very probable. The grass in my yard (not sure what kind, but it's a nice turf) grows much more than 2" before it stops, but it does this other really neat thing before it stops, too. It seeds. At it's natural full hieght, the grass grows a little, I don't know what you call it, seedy thingy that polinates with other grass that is at it's full height and then it seeds.
Now, nobody wants a yard full of 2" grass with these ugly seed pods on them. Any grass that grows 2" and stops would have to be engineered so that it DOESN'T seed in the second generation, which isn't that difficult to do (seedless watermellons??) The company would simply sell the seeds form the first generation and there really wouldn't be any worry of cross pollination, since there's no pollen.
I really don't see how they could market a short growth grass that was capable of producing pollen. It would just mean that people would have to mow their lawns even shorter (to cut off the seed pods) and that wouldn't save anyone any time at all.
YOU CAN NEVER HAVE A BANK ACCOUNT, ATM/DEBIT CARD OR CREDIT CARD FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.
The person you're replying to, and the people before him, have pretty much all agreed that Biometrics would be used with passwords, not seperate from them. You could still have a bank account, and even still use your same finger or iris. Someone stealing your identity by getting a hold of your finger print just means that now there are two people who can access your ATM account if they both know your PIN, you and the person who stole your identy last time, ie you're in the exact same position you are in today.
If the industry were to switch to biometrics, it would mean someone couldn't simply watch me enter my pin, but would also need to get a copy of my finger print somehow, which isn't impossible, but is more difficult than getting a PIN.
The world would be a better and cheaper place if every cat owner adopted a feral cat instead of a custom-engineered or purebred one.
The world would be a better and cheaper place if people would F@KSDing spade and neuter their cats (which if you check you're link, is what they recommend...), then there wouldn't BE a feral cat problem. Personally, I think it should be illegal to own a pet that isn't fixed without a breeders license.
Oh, and feral cat's are scary. In case you don't know, they are in fact feral. Yes, it would be great if more people adopted them, but most people aren't capable of caring for feral animals. I've seen so many abused and neglected animals returned repeatedly to the shelter because they didn't get along with the other pets or, even once, "didn't match the furniture," and most of these animals were quite tame and docile. I just don't think the average person could handle a feral cat, unfortunately.
And you wonder why the Siberian is hypoallergenic? It doesn't have the chemical in it's saliva that produces dander About a year ago there was a blurb in "What's New" in Popular Science that talked about how they've compared the Siberian to other cats and have identified the gene that causes the dander-causing chemical and have even begun testing it's removal, but progress was being slowed by animal rights groups...
This article isn't really worth your time. The blurb really says it all. His only really good idea is that genetic engineering could be useful closer to home, but his examples are really nothing more than wishful impossibilities.
For example: Surely some genetic feature of a non-deciduous tree could be implanted in maples so that one may enjoy all the reds and yellows but not the stupefying task of raking and cleaning out gutters. In the spring, the leaves could turn green again and the cycle would repeat so that a sense of seasonal change isn't lost, only my backache.
He obviously understands the process by which die, causing them to turn colors and fall off, since he knows that if leaves don't die and turn colors then plants would loose devastating amounts of water durring the winter period. However, he somehow wants those leaves to come back to life when spring hits. I don't care how many genes shift around, it's going to take nothing more than voodoo magic to both kill the leaves so they change color, and make them come back to life.
The best you could do is get a nice waxy coating on the leaves so they can stay green all year without drying the tree out, or make them stick tighter to the brances so they fall off slowly throughout the winter rather than all at once in the fall, with stragglers falling out like loose teeth as new leaves budded underneith them.
From this point the article goes completely downhill. He doesn't even mention actual possibilities, like removing the gene that causes cat to produce dander people are allergic to (something that already is recieving lots of research money.)
Obviously this relates because of the native Apple Frontend, but is there any other reason this is in the apple section of slashdot? This project is still primarily a linux toy, is it not? (real question).
IF they write/pick the OS/software for the Cell appliances correctly I could see it making some headway as a desktop replacement.
Which is the key, exactly. As Linus wrote in one of his linked form posts (from the blurb) it's gonna be a pain to program general purpose for those vector units (SPEs).
However, judging from the main review, it doesn't look like the PowerPC Element was casterated too much. It looks like it'll suffer from Pentium4 syndrome (boosting the frequency doesn't do as much as it used to) so it might not be as good as an equally clocked Power5 based processor, but I think you're looking too much at the SPEs when considering whether or not it'll compete with the x86 and Power5.
Right now, there aren't x86 and Power5 chips at 4+Ghz, and looking at Intel and AMD's roadmaps, there probably won't be for quite a while. Even if this thing is horribly inefficient for general tasks, it'll be great for Graphical/Video work, great for Physics/Scientific work, and probably at least as fast for everything else as a single core P4 3.8Ghz (which does a better job melting candles than it does holding them, most of the time).
Besides, 256 GFlops in single-prec. [realworldtech.com] can't be too bad either...can it?
Unfortunately single precision number ignore certain rounding conventions in order to boost the speed. You'll get super fast single precision results, but they won't be as acurate as on other systems. Probably won't matter for physics rendering in a video game (Sony's Emotion Engine did the same thing) but it could make a big difference when applied to general purpose situations.
Just because they aren't manufacturing anymore doesn't mean they're exiting the business entirely. There just might not be a "Transmetta" anymore. Instead there will be something like an "Intel Pentium 5 using lowerpower Transmetta Technology" (well probably not, but you get the idea.)
Transmetta will be doing R&D for low power processors for years to come, I'm quite sure.
I keep looking around expecting to see a school of their lawyers circling, biding their time until before a patent law suit frenzy.
I'd be more worried about that if they DIDN'T use Rambus's technology. Rambus can't sue someone who's licensing their tech... they can only sue someone they THINK is using tech too similar to theirs without licensing it. If cell used some sort of DDR or maybe an inhouse memory tech instead, maybe then Rambus would try to sue.
Your not safer by assuming this information is used for your safety. Your personal rights, freedoms are being violated. You are innocent until proven guilty and your history and or driving records should not become government property and used to estimate or forecast your innocence or guilt.
They already are. Police officers ruitienly call in your drivers license to get your history. The only thing this will mean is that offers won't have to call your information into the station to find your history (which also means they might forgo that step, and somone could store a clean history onto the license hopping to get off with more warnings... I don't really think putting the history on the card solve more problems then it causes
That being said, I think it's important not to get too excited about it... it's hard to say if it will live up to everything that people have written about it. I'm a bit skeptical. Until I see some production units doing amazing things, I'm cautiously optimistic
I'm a little bit concerned about the PowerPC Element. The article states that it's not simply a Power5 derivative, but a core designed for high mhz at the cost of per stage logic depth. To quote the author: "The result is a processing core that operates at a high frequency with relatively low power consumption, and perhaps relatively poorer scalar performance compared to the beefy POWER5 processor core."
The means the PPE in the CELL @ 4Ghz will not perform as well as a Power5 would could it reach 4Ghz (but since the CELL has 8 SPEs, I would hope it performs better as a whole than a POWER5 at the same frequency). It would be interesting to know at what frequency the two are similar, but since the PPE is integrated into an extended system, this isn't something that can ever really be benchmarked.
This article is kind of a let down. There's NO benchmark results!
From the article: After having performed all of the tests and compiled the results, there were quite a few surprises that I think will challenge a few tightly-held assumptions in regards to which operating systems are fast and which aren't. In the next article, I'll present the results for all six operating systems.
Slashdot Mirror
And the kicker is, players do talk about strange "bugs", even ask us to fix them, but none of them actually goes so far as to discover those eggs. Maybe they will now after reading this post :)
An easter egg is a fair amount different than a prize offering burried deep in an EULA. People generally will find easter eggs 1 of 3 ways:
1) by searching specifically for an easter egg because they think there is one there for some reason
2) completely by accident
3) after being told exactly how to find it by someone else who found it through methods 1, 2 or
Finding a prize in an EULA is a little easier since people really should be reading legal contracts before signing them with the next button. Not very many people are just going to randomly search for easter eggs in software, since that's just a waste of time, and equally few people will investigate bugs fully enough to find an easter egg by mistake.
It runs on IE, and the average /. reader won't touch that with a bargepole
For those slashdot users who would touch IE if they had a barge pole:
General Purpose 6-12 ft extension pole
Avery Push Pole (for water use)
RTFA yourself, he explicitly said he wasn't trying to transfer an account--he was trying to set up a new account.
Thank you Sherlock Holmes. Apparently you are unable to read the text I quoted from the person I was replying to. AMystery said "The original owner needs to transfer the account to you, then, once the terms that the actual purchaser of the CD agreed to have been fulfilled, you can call and make as big a stink as you want."
However, AMystery is wrong, because the origional owner is forbidded to transfer accounts by the Terms of Use. Having the account transfered from you from the origional CD Purchaser and then calling and making a stink is likely to put you in a worse position, as then you WILL have violated something (Terms of Use) whereas right now he hasn't violated anything (but he's unable to make a new account because Blizzard won't let him). IANAL, but I'd say either collect a bunch of people in this possition and consider sueing, or take them to small claims court, as they probably won't show and you'll win by default.
As the poster stated, however, you can't change all of the information in the account. You can replace their credit card information with your own, but you can't change everything. For instance, I don't believe you can change the First/Last name combo you give them, but I could be mistaken.
The original owner needs to transfer the account to you, then, once the terms that the actual purchaser of the CD agreed to have been fulfilled, you can call and make as big a stink as you want.
RTFA, you can't transfer accounts. Transfering accounts is a violation of Section 1E of their Terms of Use.
...and it doesn't hold water. The monthly fee is for maintenance of the systems and resources you continue to use and the base code still cost something to develop. I've seen places that give away the client code for free and wasn't that impressed (Lineage, Jumpgate) compared to something that cost money like EQ or Dark Age of Camelot.
I'm pretty sure all of those games did cost money at some point, but later became available for free. It's just part of the MMORPG life cycle. Origional they charge $50/copy + monthly fee, and eventually they're either free download or $10 in store with 1 month included. It's simply maximizing profit: sell to people at $50 when enough people are willing to pay that much, and then lower the price to get those who weren't willing to pay $50 up front until you're giving it away and only charging maintenance...
Secondly, the game is not available in stores due to Blizzard's cutting back on new users due to server issues.
Slowing sales = Fewer new users joining
Refusing second hand sales (might) = no net users joining
Perhaps this is just a continuation of their server issues
Someone should maintain a cache of links to the Orbitz site. Just a list in an html with all of the non-member accessible URIs you can find.
;)
Since non-members aren't bound by this agreement, it'd be interesting to see what actions (if any) they would take.
Biometrically, the same situation plays out more like: contact the bank. "OK, sir, we're turning that PIN off. What new PIN would you like? *clicky-clicky* OK, you can start using it right away".
Interesting thought. I was always thinking Card+Biometric+Pin, but I suppose the card really isn't all that nessicary...
So you produce that grass that stops growing after 2" - it gets used everywhere - it's genes get out so it competes with and mixes with the general gene-pool for grasses around the world. Maybe because it needs less nutrients (since it's only renewing itself instead of actively growing) - so it out-performs all other grasses.
Grass around the world stops growing - ruminants have nothing to eat - so they strip the leaves off every bush and tree - then they die. Six months later, we all die of starvation.
I don't think your situation is very probable. The grass in my yard (not sure what kind, but it's a nice turf) grows much more than 2" before it stops, but it does this other really neat thing before it stops, too. It seeds. At it's natural full hieght, the grass grows a little, I don't know what you call it, seedy thingy that polinates with other grass that is at it's full height and then it seeds.
Now, nobody wants a yard full of 2" grass with these ugly seed pods on them. Any grass that grows 2" and stops would have to be engineered so that it DOESN'T seed in the second generation, which isn't that difficult to do (seedless watermellons??) The company would simply sell the seeds form the first generation and there really wouldn't be any worry of cross pollination, since there's no pollen.
I really don't see how they could market a short growth grass that was capable of producing pollen. It would just mean that people would have to mow their lawns even shorter (to cut off the seed pods) and that wouldn't save anyone any time at all.
YOU CAN NEVER HAVE A BANK ACCOUNT, ATM/DEBIT CARD OR CREDIT CARD FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.
The person you're replying to, and the people before him, have pretty much all agreed that Biometrics would be used with passwords, not seperate from them. You could still have a bank account, and even still use your same finger or iris. Someone stealing your identity by getting a hold of your finger print just means that now there are two people who can access your ATM account if they both know your PIN, you and the person who stole your identy last time, ie you're in the exact same position you are in today.
If the industry were to switch to biometrics, it would mean someone couldn't simply watch me enter my pin, but would also need to get a copy of my finger print somehow, which isn't impossible, but is more difficult than getting a PIN.
There is no singular perfect security solution.
The world would be a better and cheaper place if every cat owner adopted a feral cat instead of a custom-engineered or purebred one.
The world would be a better and cheaper place if people would F@KSDing spade and neuter their cats (which if you check you're link, is what they recommend...), then there wouldn't BE a feral cat problem. Personally, I think it should be illegal to own a pet that isn't fixed without a breeders license.
Oh, and feral cat's are scary. In case you don't know, they are in fact feral. Yes, it would be great if more people adopted them, but most people aren't capable of caring for feral animals. I've seen so many abused and neglected animals returned repeatedly to the shelter because they didn't get along with the other pets or, even once, "didn't match the furniture," and most of these animals were quite tame and docile. I just don't think the average person could handle a feral cat, unfortunately.
And you wonder why the Siberian is hypoallergenic? It doesn't have the chemical in it's saliva that produces dander About a year ago there was a blurb in "What's New" in Popular Science that talked about how they've compared the Siberian to other cats and have identified the gene that causes the dander-causing chemical and have even begun testing it's removal, but progress was being slowed by animal rights groups...
This article isn't really worth your time. The blurb really says it all. His only really good idea is that genetic engineering could be useful closer to home, but his examples are really nothing more than wishful impossibilities.
For example:
Surely some genetic feature of a non-deciduous tree could be implanted in maples so that one may enjoy all the reds and yellows but not the stupefying task of raking and cleaning out gutters. In the spring, the leaves could turn green again and the cycle would repeat so that a sense of seasonal change isn't lost, only my backache.
He obviously understands the process by which die, causing them to turn colors and fall off, since he knows that if leaves don't die and turn colors then plants would loose devastating amounts of water durring the winter period. However, he somehow wants those leaves to come back to life when spring hits. I don't care how many genes shift around, it's going to take nothing more than voodoo magic to both kill the leaves so they change color, and make them come back to life.
The best you could do is get a nice waxy coating on the leaves so they can stay green all year without drying the tree out, or make them stick tighter to the brances so they fall off slowly throughout the winter rather than all at once in the fall, with stragglers falling out like loose teeth as new leaves budded underneith them.
From this point the article goes completely downhill. He doesn't even mention actual possibilities, like removing the gene that causes cat to produce dander people are allergic to (something that already is recieving lots of research money.)
But does the backend work on the mac as well? As I understand it the front end is just the interface that plays shows recorded by the backend.
I don't know. Put it in the apple category, but I'm disagree that the primary category should be Apple.
Just my opinion, I guess.
Obviously this relates because of the native Apple Frontend, but is there any other reason this is in the apple section of slashdot? This project is still primarily a linux toy, is it not? (real question).
IF they write/pick the OS/software for the Cell appliances correctly I could see it making some headway as a desktop replacement.
Which is the key, exactly. As Linus wrote in one of his linked form posts (from the blurb) it's gonna be a pain to program general purpose for those vector units (SPEs).
However, judging from the main review, it doesn't look like the PowerPC Element was casterated too much. It looks like it'll suffer from Pentium4 syndrome (boosting the frequency doesn't do as much as it used to) so it might not be as good as an equally clocked Power5 based processor, but I think you're looking too much at the SPEs when considering whether or not it'll compete with the x86 and Power5.
Right now, there aren't x86 and Power5 chips at 4+Ghz, and looking at Intel and AMD's roadmaps, there probably won't be for quite a while. Even if this thing is horribly inefficient for general tasks, it'll be great for Graphical/Video work, great for Physics/Scientific work, and probably at least as fast for everything else as a single core P4 3.8Ghz (which does a better job melting candles than it does holding them, most of the time).
Besides, 256 GFlops in single-prec. [realworldtech.com] can't be too bad either...can it?
Unfortunately single precision number ignore certain rounding conventions in order to boost the speed. You'll get super fast single precision results, but they won't be as acurate as on other systems. Probably won't matter for physics rendering in a video game (Sony's Emotion Engine did the same thing) but it could make a big difference when applied to general purpose situations.
Transmeta isn't doing the low heat processors anymore. Quoted from http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050105-4501 .html .
Just because they aren't manufacturing anymore doesn't mean they're exiting the business entirely. There just might not be a "Transmetta" anymore. Instead there will be something like an "Intel Pentium 5 using lowerpower Transmetta Technology" (well probably not, but you get the idea.)
Transmetta will be doing R&D for low power processors for years to come, I'm quite sure.
I keep looking around expecting to see a school of their lawyers circling, biding their time until before a patent law suit frenzy.
I'd be more worried about that if they DIDN'T use Rambus's technology. Rambus can't sue someone who's licensing their tech... they can only sue someone they THINK is using tech too similar to theirs without licensing it. If cell used some sort of DDR or maybe an inhouse memory tech instead, maybe then Rambus would try to sue.
Your not safer by assuming this information is used for your safety. Your personal rights, freedoms are being violated. You are innocent until proven guilty and your history and or driving records should not become government property and used to estimate or forecast your innocence or guilt.
They already are. Police officers ruitienly call in your drivers license to get your history. The only thing this will mean is that offers won't have to call your information into the station to find your history (which also means they might forgo that step, and somone could store a clean history onto the license hopping to get off with more warnings... I don't really think putting the history on the card solve more problems then it causes
That being said, I think it's important not to get too excited about it... it's hard to say if it will live up to everything that people have written about it. I'm a bit skeptical. Until I see some production units doing amazing things, I'm cautiously optimistic
I'm a little bit concerned about the PowerPC Element. The article states that it's not simply a Power5 derivative, but a core designed for high mhz at the cost of per stage logic depth. To quote the author: "The result is a processing core that operates at a high frequency with relatively low power consumption, and perhaps relatively poorer scalar performance compared to the beefy POWER5 processor core. "
The means the PPE in the CELL @ 4Ghz will not perform as well as a Power5 would could it reach 4Ghz (but since the CELL has 8 SPEs, I would hope it performs better as a whole than a POWER5 at the same frequency). It would be interesting to know at what frequency the two are similar, but since the PPE is integrated into an extended system, this isn't something that can ever really be benchmarked.
Oh wow! You mean there were too links in the summary.
Hee-haw! Hee-haw!
From what I gathered in the article he never GAVE benchmark results? Where the hell did all of what you posted come from?
From the article:
In the next article, I'll present the results for all six operating systems.
This article is kind of a let down. There's NO benchmark results!
From the article:
After having performed all of the tests and compiled the results, there were quite a few surprises that I think will challenge a few tightly-held assumptions in regards to which operating systems are fast and which aren't. In the next article, I'll present the results for all six operating systems.