They mention that it's ".. the car begins to significantly exceed the speed limit for the road.."
The key word here is in bold. Doing 200 in a 50 zone? Not ok. The brief burst to 60 or 65 to avoid a swerve into your lane (total time elapsed, 1.3s + reaction time)? Probably fine.
No need to be reactionary, just trying to take the dumb out of dumb drivers.
The less humans are in the system, the more we can weed out mistakes. I'd rather have a car hit me because of a malfuction than an old man who happened to have a heart attack and slam on the gas into me. At least I know that once the malfuction is corrected, it's not going to happen again!
"Why isn't half of slashdot lining up to attack the report's methodology?
Answer:"
Because ITWorld doesn't appear to link to the actual report. How am I supposed to critique such a study when I don't even know at what significance level they conducted their survey at? 5%? 1%? Did they do their testing of means correctly? I can't tell you, because there's nothing to test.
Or were you only interested in random posts where people argued back and forth, with no supporting data or standard statistics tests to back anything up? A whole bunch of hot air and blah?
It does when you consider that California is the only US state that seems to understand that it's a good idea to be as friendly to your neighbour as possible.
By removing the money from Larry (who is super rich, and an extreme outlier on an income histogram) and giving it to a charity (instead of other rich, white men who also own the company), the poor folks whe live below poverty, and other people who desperately need help, stand a chance to see some of it.
In the US to understand, the entire system of government is built up in favour of letting a few rich people run the country and play as tiny gods, while everyone else fights over the scraps. California is becoming enough to the left that they're almost like Alberta (Canada's far-right) in terms of their social setup!
Slackware's been a staunch supporter of the project since day one. Back in the Slackware 3.x and 4.x days, KDE 1.x was available, and I used it. It sure beat bare X11 with a window manager.
Slackware's maintainers made the decision to include Gnome, and I used that for a while, too (especially as the KDE 2.x was slower and more memory intensive). It had neat advanced features, but wasn't as stable as KDE.
Finally, as the KDE 3 branch has matured, I've been using it. Slackware packages keep being available, as Pat is a bg supporter, and I can keep on the bleeding edge via Swaret. After the way Gnome 2.x turned out, reversing over a decade of button ordering for me, I'm glad that Pat also made the decision to dump Gnome from the past couple of versions of Slackware. How is that not pushing KDE?
The fallout from the GTK+ button reordering is still something I have to put up with, though, since things like FireFox on Win32 systems have the wrong button ordering now! Good thing I use KDE on the desktop and MacOSX on my laptop:)
Obviously Hemos saw this post, and was so shocked by the slagging on Slashdot going on in its own forums, that he took the time to build a time machine and avert this disaster!
That we still remember the past any other way is just an artifact of the time travel device used. Hemos, we salute you!
Then let's talk about all the Xbox360 stories posted in the last week. Microsoft has paid a lot of money to ensure that they get headlines everywhere. All news is good news, as long as the name is spelt right./. has obliged by posting between 3-6 stories per day about the Xbox360.
Unlike Jon Katz, there is no nice option to say that I don't want MS's spamvertisements on my/. view. They keep shoving the stories in the Xbox 1 category!
Steve: We have many sequels for your Xbox 360 launch! Bill: How many sequels? Steve: Many sequels, many! Bill: Steve, would you say I have a plethora of sequels? Steve: Yes, Bill. You have a plethora. Bill: Steve, what is a plethora?
"Women and men are different. I know that is not a popular opinion, but the boobies and the having kids thing kinda comes to mind."
That's a nice, provable biological difference.
"Maybe I'm just traditional or old fashioned, but I see women/females as being more nurturing, emotional, and less competitive and authoritarian than men."
Now, is that a product of biology, or a product of the surroundings in which a woman is raised? You don't know. No one does.
Women and men are equivalent in every sense that matters. To say that someone is aggresive because they have a penis is the same thing as saying someone is pleasant because they have a vagina. To say that someone is good with money because they are a jew, or that someone is less intelligent because they are black -- these are all features of a theory called essentialism. Essentialism says that someone is a certain way because of their biology, not their own free will, their experiences, or how they were raised.
I think we should take a serious look at how women are raised and how we expect them to behave (Google search for pleasant; note how the 2nd hit is for a doll maker called "American Girl"!), rather than use biological means to justify differences. Essentialism is a lie that people like Adolf Hitler used to justify terrible attrocities. For you to pipe up in support of essentialism is a mark of how little you have researched your own opinions.
They do a good thing when they re-release their old titles in a form I can buy without infringing on their copyright.
However, releasing several versions of the same thing with slight changes smacks of money-grabbing tactics. If Strider was as important to me as JamesO, I'd think about downloading the ROM for an emulator, rather than spending more money on a PSP version of something I already own. Doubly so since the PSP controls themselves feel cheap and shoddy compared to a good, solid Xbox controller, or the MadCatz classic-NES style PS2 controller.
Capcom did the same thing when they released the MegaMan collection for GC and PS2, and stuck the poor GC customers with the exact-opposite control scheme than would be good: the big A button is for shooting, and the tiny B button is for jumping. If you're holding a MegaBuster charge, you're going to have troubles hitting the jump button without occasionally releasing this (and sliding without use of the dedicated slide button is difficult). No options for changing the controls were included.
Misue of computer systems is covered under Criminal Code of Canada:
* 342.1(1) Unauthorized use of computer The punishment for breaking this law is up to 10 years in prison, or is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction (leading to increased jail time).
* 430(1.1) Mischief in relation to data The punishment for breaking this law is up to 10 years in prison, or is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction (leading to increased jail time).
I made the mistake of buying a Sony VEGA TV as a stop-gap replacement for an old 27" that was dying a sad death. Here is what I had:
TV 1 -- component in didn't work. TV 2 -- degaus circuit didn't work. TV 3 -- tube out of focus, and colour bleeding. Original store would not take return (London Drugs) claiming I was just lying. Warantee work took 3 weeks, and did not fully fix it. Sony store would not take return.
Yes, indeed. Some nice folks posted up and down the Sony stories a few days ago about it, and the nice mods rated them up.
I am probably only one of hundreds who have this on their info page: " Inoshiro's Recent Submissions Title Datestamp Sony spyware in breach of LGPL. 15:35 11th November, 2005 Rejected"
By now, there should be some real followup info. Is the EFF going to sue? No one knew what was going on there last week. I hope they've finalized a plan of action this week!
As you point out, BGE has many good points and rough points.
I'd point out that you can beat the game with about 4-5 hours of work, tops. It has 3 large dungeon-style areas, and a dozen or so sub-levels that are interesting. Now, if it had double the number of large areas, and a proper second-half to its story, I'd say it'd be right up there. Add in skipable cutscenes (I really, really hate being forced to sit through repeated screenings), and remove some of the other minor nits, and you have a solid game.
It feels to me like the developers were forced to drop this one out the door for the holiday season. It didn't work; I bought it some months later new for CAD $9. I felt it wasn't worth that because the game was unfinished deep inside. 3 major levels. That's it. The ending is a huge tease for the sequel that won't get made, too! It's obvious they wanted to generate interest, but then they rushed what they had out the door, and tried to say it ruled when it was merely Ok.
"How many people know about this? Nobody! I never read about it anywhere. I invented it myself years ago,.."
Turn to page 55 of your OS design and implementation by Tanenbaum. See where he says, "For a discussion of Dekker's algorithm, see Dijkstra (1965)."? How do you get through a proper comp sci honours degree to the point where you can take a masters and then a PhD without reading Dijkstra?
How about you crack open that copy of Operating Systems (4th ed) by William Stallings, which has a discussion of concurrency and Dekker's on pages 208-213? How can you get past a 2nd/3rd-year introductory operating systems class without having gone over this topic?
You are a troll. A troll preying on the fact that most of the moderators here have no idea about computer science, and have not taken a wiff of a real operatings systems class.
For the record, Peterson's algorithm (published in 1981) is a much simpler solution to your problem. It's on page 56 of the Tanenbaum book, and also discussed in Stallings on page 213. There's a new 5th edition of the Stallings book, but the index will take you to the correct chapter/page in short order.
"NEC TurboGrafx-16 - Anybody remember the launch hype for this platform? No? That's because NEC couldn't market their way out of a paper bag. (Well, at least not in North America.)"
I'd say you're more likely to be right since the TG16 didn't fare so well, but I do remember being pretty interested in it -- until I heard about the SNES.
Is this gaming experience worth the combined investments of the console plus the game? That's a system-seller.
For my, I bought an Xbox for Jet Set Radio Future. I loved JSR on the Dreamcast (although it wasn't a system seller for me there), and I was really looking forward to playing the crap out of its sequel. So for me, the cost of JSRF was around 400$ -- 300$ for the Xbox, 70$ for the game, and taxes.
Compare this to people like Zonk who talk about upgrading their PC to play a new game, like getting a 700$ US 7800GT for FEAR. It's the same idea, it's just that in the console world, you don't rebuy the same console within a window of a certain number of years (otherwise you pull a Sega and put out too many things at the same time), and you can be sure that the games will run reasonably well (Doom 3 on Xbox = sexy).
"That said, don't forget that this is "free." If you own Halo or Halo 2 and buy an XBox 360 (and with Halo 3 coming some day, many fans (and most all of the hard core will), you get this visual upgrade for free."
This must be some new use of the word "free" I'm not familiar with.
WEP is trivially breakable. Sniff the air for long enough to brute the WEP package, spoof one of the recorded MACs you heard while sniffing, and you're in. WEP uses a home-rolled encryption that's weak.
"WEP is vulnerable because of relatively short IVs and keys that remain static. The issues with WEP don't really have much to do with the RC4 encryption algorithm. With only 24 bits, WEP eventually uses the same IV for different data packets. For a large busy network, this reoccurrence of IVs can happen within an hour or so. This results in the transmission of frames having keystreams that are too similar. If a hacker collects enough frames based on the same IV, the individual can determine the shared values among them, i.e., the keystream or the shared secret key. This of course leads to the hacker decrypting any of the 802.11 frames."
WPA does not use such a thing. The new WPAv2 uses even better AES! Check out how it works.
Nintendo saying no to WPA basically means I will never use my DS at home since I'd have to setup another wireless basestation and a DMZ to allow it to access the net. I will not compromise my wireless network security for a toy.
ATI's drivers which already barely compile on 32-bit Linux flat out don't work on 64-bit Linux.
When 2.6.12 was current some months back, I wanted to run my computer in 64-bit mode. ATI's drivers, which WARN everywhere on 2.6.11 would not compile period on 2.6.12. Rolling back to 2.6.11 and such managed to get it to compile, but accelerated rendering just did not happen. Same configs that worked in 32-bit mode for X!
ATI doesn't seem to have the money for their driver developers to do real testing, so I don't have the money for their cards. I bought myself a nice GeForce 6800 as my upgrade for my old GeForce 2MX (which had earned its keep since 2001), and the Radeon 8500 was tossed into my parts pile.
People are going to make mistakes, whether it be malicious, idiocy, or the warm coating of ignorance, they will do things that can potentially harm others. There are laws against most of the things people can do to harm others, but not yet on the Internet.
Why is this? Why must I put up with having my cable modem constantly being scanned? Why, when there is nothing happening on my system, can I generate a several-meg tcpdump log that contains hundreds of scans that keep a constant noise-floor of traffic going?
People are dumb. The government should have laws to protect me from dumb people as much as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
They mention that it's ".. the car begins to significantly exceed the speed limit for the road .."
The key word here is in bold. Doing 200 in a 50 zone? Not ok. The brief burst to 60 or 65 to avoid a swerve into your lane (total time elapsed, 1.3s + reaction time)? Probably fine.
No need to be reactionary, just trying to take the dumb out of dumb drivers.
The less humans are in the system, the more we can weed out mistakes. I'd rather have a car hit me because of a malfuction than an old man who happened to have a heart attack and slam on the gas into me. At least I know that once the malfuction is corrected, it's not going to happen again!
"Why isn't half of slashdot lining up to attack the report's methodology?
Answer:"
Because ITWorld doesn't appear to link to the actual report. How am I supposed to critique such a study when I don't even know at what significance level they conducted their survey at? 5%? 1%? Did they do their testing of means correctly? I can't tell you, because there's nothing to test.
Or were you only interested in random posts where people argued back and forth, with no supporting data or standard statistics tests to back anything up? A whole bunch of hot air and blah?
"This whole charity thing does not make sense."
It does when you consider that California is the only US state that seems to understand that it's a good idea to be as friendly to your neighbour as possible.
By removing the money from Larry (who is super rich, and an extreme outlier on an income histogram) and giving it to a charity (instead of other rich, white men who also own the company), the poor folks whe live below poverty, and other people who desperately need help, stand a chance to see some of it.
In the US to understand, the entire system of government is built up in favour of letting a few rich people run the country and play as tiny gods, while everyone else fights over the scraps. California is becoming enough to the left that they're almost like Alberta (Canada's far-right) in terms of their social setup!
"(the most expensive needing 16 quarters) to play... i wonder why I never see anyone playing the games."
You do? Seems kinda obvious to me...
Slackware's been a staunch supporter of the project since day one. Back in the Slackware 3.x and 4.x days, KDE 1.x was available, and I used it. It sure beat bare X11 with a window manager.
:)
Slackware's maintainers made the decision to include Gnome, and I used that for a while, too (especially as the KDE 2.x was slower and more memory intensive). It had neat advanced features, but wasn't as stable as KDE.
Finally, as the KDE 3 branch has matured, I've been using it. Slackware packages keep being available, as Pat is a bg supporter, and I can keep on the bleeding edge via Swaret. After the way Gnome 2.x turned out, reversing over a decade of button ordering for me, I'm glad that Pat also made the decision to dump Gnome from the past couple of versions of Slackware. How is that not pushing KDE?
The fallout from the GTK+ button reordering is still something I have to put up with, though, since things like FireFox on Win32 systems have the wrong button ordering now! Good thing I use KDE on the desktop and MacOSX on my laptop
Obviously Hemos saw this post, and was so shocked by the slagging on Slashdot going on in its own forums, that he took the time to build a time machine and avert this disaster!
That we still remember the past any other way is just an artifact of the time travel device used. Hemos, we salute you!
Then let's talk about all the Xbox360 stories posted in the last week. Microsoft has paid a lot of money to ensure that they get headlines everywhere. All news is good news, as long as the name is spelt right. /. has obliged by posting between 3-6 stories per day about the Xbox360.
/. view. They keep shoving the stories in the Xbox 1 category!
Unlike Jon Katz, there is no nice option to say that I don't want MS's spamvertisements on my
Well, certainly less crime, less of a health care cost, and better quality of living would be the big ones.
Plus, you know, not being part of a country which is very violent and aggressive.
Steve: We have many sequels for your Xbox 360 launch!
Bill: How many sequels?
Steve: Many sequels, many!
Bill: Steve, would you say I have a plethora of sequels?
Steve: Yes, Bill. You have a plethora.
Bill: Steve, what is a plethora?
"Women and men are different. I know that is not a popular opinion, but the boobies and the having kids thing kinda comes to mind."
That's a nice, provable biological difference.
"Maybe I'm just traditional or old fashioned, but I see women/females as being more nurturing, emotional, and less competitive and authoritarian than men."
Now, is that a product of biology, or a product of the surroundings in which a woman is raised? You don't know. No one does.
Women and men are equivalent in every sense that matters. To say that someone is aggresive because they have a penis is the same thing as saying someone is pleasant because they have a vagina. To say that someone is good with money because they are a jew, or that someone is less intelligent because they are black -- these are all features of a theory called essentialism. Essentialism says that someone is a certain way because of their biology, not their own free will, their experiences, or how they were raised.
I think we should take a serious look at how women are raised and how we expect them to behave (Google search for pleasant; note how the 2nd hit is for a doll maker called "American Girl"!), rather than use biological means to justify differences. Essentialism is a lie that people like Adolf Hitler used to justify terrible attrocities. For you to pipe up in support of essentialism is a mark of how little you have researched your own opinions.
They do a good thing when they re-release their old titles in a form I can buy without infringing on their copyright.
However, releasing several versions of the same thing with slight changes smacks of money-grabbing tactics. If Strider was as important to me as JamesO, I'd think about downloading the ROM for an emulator, rather than spending more money on a PSP version of something I already own. Doubly so since the PSP controls themselves feel cheap and shoddy compared to a good, solid Xbox controller, or the MadCatz classic-NES style PS2 controller.
Capcom did the same thing when they released the MegaMan collection for GC and PS2, and stuck the poor GC customers with the exact-opposite control scheme than would be good: the big A button is for shooting, and the tiny B button is for jumping. If you're holding a MegaBuster charge, you're going to have troubles hitting the jump button without occasionally releasing this (and sliding without use of the dedicated slide button is difficult). No options for changing the controls were included.
Misue of computer systems is covered under Criminal Code of Canada:
* 342.1(1) Unauthorized use of computer
The punishment for breaking this law is up to 10 years in prison, or is guilty
of an offence punishable on summary conviction (leading to increased jail time).
* 430(1.1) Mischief in relation to data
The punishment for breaking this law is up to 10 years in prison, or is guilty
of an offence punishable on summary conviction (leading to increased jail time).
So it's totally actionable in a few countries.
I made the mistake of buying a Sony VEGA TV as a stop-gap replacement for an old 27" that was dying a sad death. Here is what I had:
TV 1 -- component in didn't work.
TV 2 -- degaus circuit didn't work.
TV 3 -- tube out of focus, and colour bleeding. Original store would not take return (London Drugs) claiming I was just lying. Warantee work took 3 weeks, and did not fully fix it. Sony store would not take return.
Sony products are cheaply made crap.
Yes, indeed. Some nice folks posted up and down the Sony stories a few days ago about it, and the nice mods rated them up.
I am probably only one of hundreds who have this on their info page:
"
Inoshiro's Recent Submissions
Title Datestamp
Sony spyware in breach of LGPL. 15:35 11th November, 2005 Rejected "
By now, there should be some real followup info. Is the EFF going to sue? No one knew what was going on there last week. I hope they've finalized a plan of action this week!
As you point out, BGE has many good points and rough points.
I'd point out that you can beat the game with about 4-5 hours of work, tops. It has 3 large dungeon-style areas, and a dozen or so sub-levels that are interesting. Now, if it had double the number of large areas, and a proper second-half to its story, I'd say it'd be right up there. Add in skipable cutscenes (I really, really hate being forced to sit through repeated screenings), and remove some of the other minor nits, and you have a solid game.
It feels to me like the developers were forced to drop this one out the door for the holiday season. It didn't work; I bought it some months later new for CAD $9. I felt it wasn't worth that because the game was unfinished deep inside. 3 major levels. That's it. The ending is a huge tease for the sequel that won't get made, too! It's obvious they wanted to generate interest, but then they rushed what they had out the door, and tried to say it ruled when it was merely Ok.
"How many people know about this? Nobody! I never read about it anywhere. I invented it myself years ago, .."
Turn to page 55 of your OS design and implementation by Tanenbaum. See where he says, "For a discussion of Dekker's algorithm, see Dijkstra (1965)."? How do you get through a proper comp sci honours degree to the point where you can take a masters and then a PhD without reading Dijkstra?
How about you crack open that copy of Operating Systems (4th ed) by William Stallings, which has a discussion of concurrency and Dekker's on pages 208-213? How can you get past a 2nd/3rd-year introductory operating systems class without having gone over this topic?
You are a troll. A troll preying on the fact that most of the moderators here have no idea about computer science, and have not taken a wiff of a real operatings systems class.
For the record, Peterson's algorithm (published in 1981) is a much simpler solution to your problem. It's on page 56 of the Tanenbaum book, and also discussed in Stallings on page 213. There's a new 5th edition of the Stallings book, but the index will take you to the correct chapter/page in short order.
"Bad: Woman rights remarks"
Yeah, I hate hearing about women's sufrage too. We should end it.
"NEC TurboGrafx-16 - Anybody remember the launch hype for this platform? No? That's because NEC couldn't market their way out of a paper bag. (Well, at least not in North America.)"
Is that why this post gave it a 5/5?
I'd say you're more likely to be right since the TG16 didn't fare so well, but I do remember being pretty interested in it -- until I heard about the SNES.
"For that matter, why arent there Flash versions of new games in the older styles?"
You mean like Alien Homonid? Or did you want a 2D game like Viewtiful Joe? The problem is that these are not sellers. People do not buy them.
Is this gaming experience worth the combined investments of the console plus the game? That's a system-seller.
For my, I bought an Xbox for Jet Set Radio Future. I loved JSR on the Dreamcast (although it wasn't a system seller for me there), and I was really looking forward to playing the crap out of its sequel. So for me, the cost of JSRF was around 400$ -- 300$ for the Xbox, 70$ for the game, and taxes.
Compare this to people like Zonk who talk about upgrading their PC to play a new game, like getting a 700$ US 7800GT for FEAR. It's the same idea, it's just that in the console world, you don't rebuy the same console within a window of a certain number of years (otherwise you pull a Sega and put out too many things at the same time), and you can be sure that the games will run reasonably well (Doom 3 on Xbox = sexy).
There's an ex-leader of the FSIN who said that he felt the Germans were good people for killing millions of jews.
He was jailed and lost the Order of Canada because of it. He's a racist native, and this pretty much ended his career.
"That said, don't forget that this is "free." If you own Halo or Halo 2 and buy an XBox 360 (and with Halo 3 coming some day, many fans (and most all of the hard core will), you get this visual upgrade for free."
This must be some new use of the word "free" I'm not familiar with.
Where do I get my "free" Xbox 360?
WEP is trivially breakable. Sniff the air for long enough to brute the WEP package, spoof one of the recorded MACs you heard while sniffing, and you're in. WEP uses a home-rolled encryption that's weak.
"WEP is vulnerable because of relatively short IVs and keys that remain static. The issues with WEP don't really have much to do with the RC4 encryption algorithm. With only 24 bits, WEP eventually uses the same IV for different data packets. For a large busy network, this reoccurrence of IVs can happen within an hour or so. This results in the transmission of frames having keystreams that are too similar. If a hacker collects enough frames based on the same IV, the individual can determine the shared values among them, i.e., the keystream or the shared secret key. This of course leads to the hacker decrypting any of the 802.11 frames."
WPA does not use such a thing. The new WPAv2 uses even better AES! Check out how it works.
Nintendo saying no to WPA basically means I will never use my DS at home since I'd have to setup another wireless basestation and a DMZ to allow it to access the net. I will not compromise my wireless network security for a toy.
ATI's drivers which already barely compile on 32-bit Linux flat out don't work on 64-bit Linux.
When 2.6.12 was current some months back, I wanted to run my computer in 64-bit mode. ATI's drivers, which WARN everywhere on 2.6.11 would not compile period on 2.6.12. Rolling back to 2.6.11 and such managed to get it to compile, but accelerated rendering just did not happen. Same configs that worked in 32-bit mode for X!
ATI doesn't seem to have the money for their driver developers to do real testing, so I don't have the money for their cards. I bought myself a nice GeForce 6800 as my upgrade for my old GeForce 2MX (which had earned its keep since 2001), and the Radeon 8500 was tossed into my parts pile.
Why do people drive drunk?
Why do people speed?
Why do people not signal their lane changes?
People are going to make mistakes, whether it be malicious, idiocy, or the warm coating of ignorance, they will do things that can potentially harm others. There are laws against most of the things people can do to harm others, but not yet on the Internet.
Why is this? Why must I put up with having my cable modem constantly being scanned? Why, when there is nothing happening on my system, can I generate a several-meg tcpdump log that contains hundreds of scans that keep a constant noise-floor of traffic going?
People are dumb. The government should have laws to protect me from dumb people as much as possible.