Wait a minute. Don't confuse OS user security with Digital Rights Management. One is a sensible, vital function of operating systems to secure data and prevent access where such access is desired (for instance, not running as root to prevent inadvertant or malicious access to critical parts of the OS, like the kernel).
The other, DRM, is a superfluous attempt by the RIAA and MPAA and various lobby groups to enforce an artificial restraint on what people can and cannot do with what is fundamentally a particular configuration of 1's and 0's - limited generally to music and video data files.
It is easy to confuse them, because groups like Sony BMG, under the guise of the latter (DRM) have managed to compromise hundreds of thousands of instances of the former (OS Security) by installing a rootkit on Windows machines.
No, see, the really cool thing about DHCP is that you can actually configure it tightly enough that you can run with reservations only, lock down which DNS, WINS, gateway etc get provided to clients, all that kind of handy stuff. That's what we like to call "controlled and managed".
For the first person to patent a small, sturdy, wallet sized faraday cage that you can use to carry your ID cards around in so they don't get "chatty". You could put a clasp and hinges on it to open it upon request.
Or are they going to make it illegal for you to be selective about who gets to spy on your personal details?
Actually I was just thinking that while this might be a great premise for an online game, it is possibly not a great premise for a MMORPG. World of Warcraft, and Everquest, both borrow heavily from many facets of the fantasy and horror genres.
This game is, presumably, going to try and be viable for the same business model as WoW, but by cutting out all the facets of fantasy and all the facets of horror - zombies only!
WoW has a lot of content and that content is multiplied by the playability and replayability aspects of the range of races and classes in the game.
I don't see how such a game with a small point of view could come quite as close. I would get bored of it pretty quick! And certainly wouldn't want to pay a monthly fee.
Bzzzt fail. Some good points from the parent - but, the pagefile thing is just wrong.
Windows will run fine without a pagefile. In fact it does run much better. I've disabled my pagefile and home and left it that way for quite some time.
Some applications, Photoshop being one of them, absolutely require Windows to be running a pagefile. These applications account for less than 5% of the software that an "avid gamer" would be running.
The only proviso is that you must provide more than enough RAM for your system to ever need, or you are going to run into problems when you try and allocate more memory than you actually have.
Perhaps the parent tried disabling his swapfile when he only had 128MB of RAM?
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer
on
World of Queuecraft
·
· Score: 1
I play both GW and WoW. GW isn't an MMORPG, it simply isn't. It's a great game but that isn't the point. Guild Wars was deliberately designed to minimise the number of concurrent players. The vast majority of the time you are limited to 8 players in a PvE instance. Because everything is instanced you can just farm out the load wherever you want! The whole system works dynamically because it is cut into small instanced chunks. You want to go solo adventuring, you get your own tiny instance all to yourself. You want to go adventuring and run into friends or strangers? Too bad, you can't. The world is just too fragmented for it to be considered "Massively Multiplayer". I really like the artwork though. The graphics engine is awesome. It's just content limited, and AreaNet are understandably on a budget. Doing a great job, though, and I will definately look into Chapter 2.
World of Warcraft is trying to create a more open world where you can run into friends or enemies anywhere you travel to. Instances are the exception rather than the rule. That's actually a really awesome way to play and it's the biggest reason for the game being as much fun as it is. But it's costly, too, in terms of the back end resources you need to run the game, and present a "seamless" world to travel in.
Yeah, that Battlestar Galactica thing they have on TV is just tripe, what happened to the robot monkey dog in a suit? And the little kid? And what's with crossdressing Starbuck??
If anyone here bothered to even watch the movies, you might have picked up that although the Jedi understand there is a general correlation between the presence of midichlorians and force sensitivity, no-where did they say that "Midichlorian count(x) = Force Power(y)". Qui-Gonn said himself he had no idea what Anakins midichlorian count meant, just that it was significant.
Considering you have a very high tech future society, you should understand that they would be advanced enough to the point where they could understand that the Force isn't "magic" per sei, so much as Yoda says, an energy field that surrounds living things. It's ridiculous to believe there could be such a thing as the Force without getting a few scientists to have a look at it. Turns out a simple symbiotic organism (mammals have many, many little animals inside them doing all sorts of stuff) bears a small degree of correlation to force sensitivity. Heck, as far as we know it might not even be causal - the sensitivity to the Force, the energy field that life creates etc, draws the midichlorians to the wielder.
Star Wars is science fiction (even if it is bad science).
Seriously, i'm waiting for someone to give good benchmarks on these- especially testing for Warcraft. Now that it has a new Universal Binary I can't wait to see how it holds up against a modern windows machine.
Someone once said, on Slashdot of course, that Mac users were more technically astute than Windows users. Power users, if you will. Above we see more evidence to the contrary.
But seriously - the Macintel gear can't hold up against a modern Windows machine. Why not?
Because your modern Windows machine will traditionally have a more powerful AMD processor. AMD's solutions, even the mobile ones, outperform Intel consistently at low prices. It'll possibly have more RAM, better integrated graphics, and so on. Moreso - it will be customisable and easy to optimise the hardware for gaming purposes. (We're talking laptops here, generic x86 desktops will have even more power than your generic Mac).
But I agree - I also can't wait to see how it holds up. I want to see the look on the Mac fanboy's faces when they realise that just because they have an x86, it's still a Mac and they paid way more money for less computing power than the regular Windows and Linux guys do.
Amazingly, TFA did not mention what Blizzard are really doing to "solve" the problem both in Europe and the US:
They're closing the doors on servers.
Some older servers have had new character creation locked indefinately. On Friday, Blizzard announced they would re-open about 36 of the closed servers - yesterday, they unlocked two or three then announced they would keep the rest locked!
This is typical of Blizzard customer service - on a near constant basis they make commitments to the paying customer base, then they blow right past them.
What is even more incomprehensible about the lockout is that it doesn't address lag issues, network congestion issues, or do anything about the servers that are already full beyond the capacity of the hardware to support.
For people who aren't sure of what issues they're trying to fix, these are the crunchers:
1) Queue times - the servers can't handle the number of people trying to log on during peak times, so they queue for half an hour. 2) Character retrieval lag - Once you've logged in, you get a screen prompting you to choose which of your characters to play. This has been known to take up to an hour to come up. 3) In game loot lag - While playing, most things run smoothly - but if you're in combat, doing mail or auction house stuff, moving items around can take over 60 seconds for each item.
Blizzards solution to the problem? Prevent new characters from being made.
What's happened? The designers made all the classes the same so it would be easier for them to balance out the numbers? Fantastic.
Remind me not to sign up for this one!
Games need to be complex and unbalanced in all sorts of different areas. The difference between one class and another class, and all the varied strengths and weaknesses are what defines the RPG genre. They need to be unbalanced because that way you can, as a player, feel good about your strengths in the areas that you're strongest in. Weaknesses are a vital driver for team play, because classes complement each other to make a much stronger whole than the sum of the parts.
Otherwise, if everyone is the same, you're playing unreal tournament.
The positions of the keys don't actually change all that much, so what you get is a slightly different advertised function.
So, let's look at the reality of this keyboard:
Scenario 1 You're playing an FPS. You look down at the keyboard to see what button crouch is. This keyboard will not save you from not knowing where the keys you mapped are, because glancing down takes your attention from the enemy running right up to you. You die.
Scenario 2 You're playing an FPS. You're in a team situation. You will win easily with careful co-ordination. You need to alert other team members of a slight divergence from the plan as a small enemy squad sneaks up on your demolitions guy from behind. Your typing comes out all messed up because you replaced all the qwerty keys with bling-oriented playskool arrow keys and a picture of a hot elf chick. You die.
Yeah, I bought an XBox and use it as a HTPC for streaming media and stuff. For a joke I got some games and played them, and it's remarkable just how little you can do with a controller.
The keyboard and mouse is ubiquitous - whether Mac, Linux or Windows it works the same way (although the Apple mouse does very little without a keyboard to replicate the functionality of the right mouse button, flame away Mac users). Console controllers are all different! They use wacky combinations of buttons and analog sticks and D-pads. Game developers often don't bother following conventions with the controllers even on the same consoles, either.
One thing is for sure - the console controllers just don't give the same degree of control as the good old kb+mouse combo.
Like the parent said - we don't have much in the way of FPS or RTS on consoles in the same way that we don't have a lot of word processors and PDF writers for mobile phones. The device simply isn't designed or fit for purpose. (Admittedly, FPS's do work on consoles but almost always require an auto-aim feature, and do not compare favourably to FPS on a PC).
Which means it would also need to hold image information internally. All those pretty pictures for each of the keys needs to be stored somewhere and then processed a little before being sent to the right one of the 140 displays. Just like having 140 video card outputs on your PC. Would the keyboard supply and render the images or would they be pushed through the drivers from the OS of the system the keyboard is plugged into? In which case, I would imagine that a normal PS/2 connector is not going to cut the mustard, it would clearly need a USB interface or better - but the more complex the drivers on the back end, the worse it becomes for any open source uses for this device.
It is good that you implicitly trust even second hand comments from Steve Jobs.
You are an excellent customer.
Please send me your contact details, I have many business proposals for you, and I have also acquired the sum of NINE MILLION US DOLLARS in currency that is currently held in a secure offshore bank account...
But seriously, did it even cross your mind that much like Microsoft, Apple is quite capable of spinning raw lies at consumers to keep them buying?
Actually, iTunes doesn't ask you if it can spy on you, although the evidence that it is is quite easy to spot. It also doesn't tell you exactly how much information it's sending, all you have to go on is that it knows who you are and what music you listen to.
In order for this to be not classified as spyware, it should be opt-in.
Instead, Apple chose profit and spying over customer protection and good faith.
No, according to the claim it *IS* gathering data about you. It's gathering all sorts of personally identifying information about you, and the music you listen to, by default, without asking you.
Then it sends it all to the Apple HQ or wherever.
Jobs admits it.
Here comes the spin. He *claims* that they throw it out.
At this point in time, given they've essentially snuck spyware onto, heck, every Mac and PC running iTunes in the world, I'm as willing to trust Apple as much as I am Sony.
Because remember, Sony, much like Jobs, claimed their software wasn't harmful, wasn't doing anything bad, and they delete all the data that's personal... yeah right. And GWB doesn't have the NSA spy secretly on US citizens.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
Ahh, so the Sony Rootkit is also completely legitimate, because a discerning consumer would have done what Mark did and analyse network traffic and installation activities to determine whether it was a rootkit or not, and accepted or denied that activity based on their own preferences.
There are some ergonomic damage issues with this, though. I often spend most of my time typing looking at the screen rather than the keyboard. If my fingerplacing gets really messed up I might peek at the board but that's it. My monitor is usually set up in a position where I can see it without straining my neck.
Spending all day looking down at my keyboard though? That's got to do some damage, right?
Wow, a whole plethora of companies that photoshop keyboards and produce bogus release dates for vapourware!
Having said that, this is vapourware that people genuinely seem to want. I certainly would love one, if it were possible.
Certainly, the finished product would be wildly different from the photoshops we see on the websites.
Can you imagine the power consumption? Not to mention possibly needing a cooling fan (the thing would need some kind of internal processor). The whole thing would generate quite a bit of heat, too. This is your keyboard we're talking about! It's hot, noisy, you have to reboot it every now and then, too.
There's certainly grind for fissure armour, but given that some of the fissure armour looks the same as 15K armour, and has exactly the same stats, I really really wouldn't class it as much of a reward.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a minute. Don't confuse OS user security with Digital Rights Management. One is a sensible, vital function of operating systems to secure data and prevent access where such access is desired (for instance, not running as root to prevent inadvertant or malicious access to critical parts of the OS, like the kernel).
The other, DRM, is a superfluous attempt by the RIAA and MPAA and various lobby groups to enforce an artificial restraint on what people can and cannot do with what is fundamentally a particular configuration of 1's and 0's - limited generally to music and video data files.
It is easy to confuse them, because groups like Sony BMG, under the guise of the latter (DRM) have managed to compromise hundreds of thousands of instances of the former (OS Security) by installing a rootkit on Windows machines.
No, see, the really cool thing about DHCP is that you can actually configure it tightly enough that you can run with reservations only, lock down which DNS, WINS, gateway etc get provided to clients, all that kind of handy stuff. That's what we like to call "controlled and managed".
For the first person to patent a small, sturdy, wallet sized faraday cage that you can use to carry your ID cards around in so they don't get "chatty". You could put a clasp and hinges on it to open it upon request.
Or are they going to make it illegal for you to be selective about who gets to spy on your personal details?
This is amazing. Am I the only guy here who actually likes controlling his network in an orderly and well managed manner?
Maybe, just maybe, I don't want devices jumping onto my network and configuring themselves any way they like.
Actually I was just thinking that while this might be a great premise for an online game, it is possibly not a great premise for a MMORPG. World of Warcraft, and Everquest, both borrow heavily from many facets of the fantasy and horror genres.
This game is, presumably, going to try and be viable for the same business model as WoW, but by cutting out all the facets of fantasy and all the facets of horror - zombies only!
WoW has a lot of content and that content is multiplied by the playability and replayability aspects of the range of races and classes in the game.
I don't see how such a game with a small point of view could come quite as close. I would get bored of it pretty quick! And certainly wouldn't want to pay a monthly fee.
Bzzzt fail. Some good points from the parent - but, the pagefile thing is just wrong.
Windows will run fine without a pagefile. In fact it does run much better. I've disabled my pagefile and home and left it that way for quite some time.
Some applications, Photoshop being one of them, absolutely require Windows to be running a pagefile. These applications account for less than 5% of the software that an "avid gamer" would be running.
The only proviso is that you must provide more than enough RAM for your system to ever need, or you are going to run into problems when you try and allocate more memory than you actually have.
Perhaps the parent tried disabling his swapfile when he only had 128MB of RAM?
I play both GW and WoW. GW isn't an MMORPG, it simply isn't. It's a great game but that isn't the point. Guild Wars was deliberately designed to minimise the number of concurrent players. The vast majority of the time you are limited to 8 players in a PvE instance. Because everything is instanced you can just farm out the load wherever you want! The whole system works dynamically because it is cut into small instanced chunks. You want to go solo adventuring, you get your own tiny instance all to yourself. You want to go adventuring and run into friends or strangers? Too bad, you can't. The world is just too fragmented for it to be considered "Massively Multiplayer". I really like the artwork though. The graphics engine is awesome. It's just content limited, and AreaNet are understandably on a budget. Doing a great job, though, and I will definately look into Chapter 2.
World of Warcraft is trying to create a more open world where you can run into friends or enemies anywhere you travel to. Instances are the exception rather than the rule. That's actually a really awesome way to play and it's the biggest reason for the game being as much fun as it is. But it's costly, too, in terms of the back end resources you need to run the game, and present a "seamless" world to travel in.
Yeah, that Battlestar Galactica thing they have on TV is just tripe, what happened to the robot monkey dog in a suit? And the little kid? And what's with crossdressing Starbuck??
I bet you hated Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, too. That had CGI in it.
But seriously, did you read any of the article? Genndy is directing, not doing art. Those are actually different jobs in filmmakingland!
If anyone here bothered to even watch the movies, you might have picked up that although the Jedi understand there is a general correlation between the presence of midichlorians and force sensitivity, no-where did they say that "Midichlorian count(x) = Force Power(y)". Qui-Gonn said himself he had no idea what Anakins midichlorian count meant, just that it was significant.
Considering you have a very high tech future society, you should understand that they would be advanced enough to the point where they could understand that the Force isn't "magic" per sei, so much as Yoda says, an energy field that surrounds living things. It's ridiculous to believe there could be such a thing as the Force without getting a few scientists to have a look at it. Turns out a simple symbiotic organism (mammals have many, many little animals inside them doing all sorts of stuff) bears a small degree of correlation to force sensitivity. Heck, as far as we know it might not even be causal - the sensitivity to the Force, the energy field that life creates etc, draws the midichlorians to the wielder.
Star Wars is science fiction (even if it is bad science).
I misread that as a "Hot Coffee" table... that would be just bizarre.
Seriously, i'm waiting for someone to give good benchmarks on these- especially testing for Warcraft. Now that it has a new Universal Binary I can't wait to see how it holds up against a modern windows machine.
Someone once said, on Slashdot of course, that Mac users were more technically astute than Windows users. Power users, if you will. Above we see more evidence to the contrary.
But seriously - the Macintel gear can't hold up against a modern Windows machine. Why not?
Because your modern Windows machine will traditionally have a more powerful AMD processor. AMD's solutions, even the mobile ones, outperform Intel consistently at low prices. It'll possibly have more RAM, better integrated graphics, and so on. Moreso - it will be customisable and easy to optimise the hardware for gaming purposes. (We're talking laptops here, generic x86 desktops will have even more power than your generic Mac).
But I agree - I also can't wait to see how it holds up. I want to see the look on the Mac fanboy's faces when they realise that just because they have an x86, it's still a Mac and they paid way more money for less computing power than the regular Windows and Linux guys do.
Amazingly, TFA did not mention what Blizzard are really doing to "solve" the problem both in Europe and the US:
They're closing the doors on servers.
Some older servers have had new character creation locked indefinately.
On Friday, Blizzard announced they would re-open about 36 of the closed servers - yesterday, they unlocked two or three then announced they would keep the rest locked!
This is typical of Blizzard customer service - on a near constant basis they make commitments to the paying customer base, then they blow right past them.
What is even more incomprehensible about the lockout is that it doesn't address lag issues, network congestion issues, or do anything about the servers that are already full beyond the capacity of the hardware to support.
For people who aren't sure of what issues they're trying to fix, these are the crunchers:
1) Queue times - the servers can't handle the number of people trying to log on during peak times, so they queue for half an hour.
2) Character retrieval lag - Once you've logged in, you get a screen prompting you to choose which of your characters to play. This has been known to take up to an hour to come up.
3) In game loot lag - While playing, most things run smoothly - but if you're in combat, doing mail or auction house stuff, moving items around can take over 60 seconds for each item.
Blizzards solution to the problem? Prevent new characters from being made.
What's happened? The designers made all the classes the same so it would be easier for them to balance out the numbers? Fantastic.
Remind me not to sign up for this one!
Games need to be complex and unbalanced in all sorts of different areas. The difference between one class and another class, and all the varied strengths and weaknesses are what defines the RPG genre. They need to be unbalanced because that way you can, as a player, feel good about your strengths in the areas that you're strongest in. Weaknesses are a vital driver for team play, because classes complement each other to make a much stronger whole than the sum of the parts.
Otherwise, if everyone is the same, you're playing unreal tournament.
But Blizzard have locked 20 or so servers so that new players can't create characters.
They're citing the reason as "alleviating load so they can fix latency problems".
What it really means is that people who've finally paid up to play don't get to log on. Pretty nasty stuff.
Yeah, the whole keyboard is a gimmick.
The positions of the keys don't actually change all that much, so what you get is a slightly different advertised function.
So, let's look at the reality of this keyboard:
Scenario 1
You're playing an FPS. You look down at the keyboard to see what button crouch is. This keyboard will not save you from not knowing where the keys you mapped are, because glancing down takes your attention from the enemy running right up to you. You die.
Scenario 2
You're playing an FPS. You're in a team situation. You will win easily with careful co-ordination. You need to alert other team members of a slight divergence from the plan as a small enemy squad sneaks up on your demolitions guy from behind. Your typing comes out all messed up because you replaced all the qwerty keys with bling-oriented playskool arrow keys and a picture of a hot elf chick. You die.
This keyboard is a bad idea.
Yeah, I bought an XBox and use it as a HTPC for streaming media and stuff. For a joke I got some games and played them, and it's remarkable just how little you can do with a controller.
The keyboard and mouse is ubiquitous - whether Mac, Linux or Windows it works the same way (although the Apple mouse does very little without a keyboard to replicate the functionality of the right mouse button, flame away Mac users). Console controllers are all different! They use wacky combinations of buttons and analog sticks and D-pads. Game developers often don't bother following conventions with the controllers even on the same consoles, either.
One thing is for sure - the console controllers just don't give the same degree of control as the good old kb+mouse combo.
Like the parent said - we don't have much in the way of FPS or RTS on consoles in the same way that we don't have a lot of word processors and PDF writers for mobile phones. The device simply isn't designed or fit for purpose. (Admittedly, FPS's do work on consoles but almost always require an auto-aim feature, and do not compare favourably to FPS on a PC).
Which means it would also need to hold image information internally. All those pretty pictures for each of the keys needs to be stored somewhere and then processed a little before being sent to the right one of the 140 displays. Just like having 140 video card outputs on your PC. Would the keyboard supply and render the images or would they be pushed through the drivers from the OS of the system the keyboard is plugged into? In which case, I would imagine that a normal PS/2 connector is not going to cut the mustard, it would clearly need a USB interface or better - but the more complex the drivers on the back end, the worse it becomes for any open source uses for this device.
It is good that you implicitly trust even second hand comments from Steve Jobs.
You are an excellent customer.
Please send me your contact details, I have many business proposals for you, and I have also acquired the sum of NINE MILLION US DOLLARS in currency that is currently held in a secure offshore bank account...
But seriously, did it even cross your mind that much like Microsoft, Apple is quite capable of spinning raw lies at consumers to keep them buying?
Actually, iTunes doesn't ask you if it can spy on you, although the evidence that it is is quite easy to spot. It also doesn't tell you exactly how much information it's sending, all you have to go on is that it knows who you are and what music you listen to.
In order for this to be not classified as spyware, it should be opt-in.
Instead, Apple chose profit and spying over customer protection and good faith.
No, according to the claim it *IS* gathering data about you. It's gathering all sorts of personally identifying information about you, and the music you listen to, by default, without asking you.
Then it sends it all to the Apple HQ or wherever.
Jobs admits it.
Here comes the spin. He *claims* that they throw it out.
At this point in time, given they've essentially snuck spyware onto, heck, every Mac and PC running iTunes in the world, I'm as willing to trust Apple as much as I am Sony.
Because remember, Sony, much like Jobs, claimed their software wasn't harmful, wasn't doing anything bad, and they delete all the data that's personal... yeah right. And GWB doesn't have the NSA spy secretly on US citizens.
Ahh, so the Sony Rootkit is also completely legitimate, because a discerning consumer would have done what Mark did and analyse network traffic and installation activities to determine whether it was a rootkit or not, and accepted or denied that activity based on their own preferences.
Thanks trollman(tm)!
There are some ergonomic damage issues with this, though. I often spend most of my time typing looking at the screen rather than the keyboard. If my fingerplacing gets really messed up I might peek at the board but that's it. My monitor is usually set up in a position where I can see it without straining my neck.
Spending all day looking down at my keyboard though? That's got to do some damage, right?
Wow, a whole plethora of companies that photoshop keyboards and produce bogus release dates for vapourware!
Having said that, this is vapourware that people genuinely seem to want. I certainly would love one, if it were possible.
Certainly, the finished product would be wildly different from the photoshops we see on the websites.
Can you imagine the power consumption? Not to mention possibly needing a cooling fan (the thing would need some kind of internal processor). The whole thing would generate quite a bit of heat, too. This is your keyboard we're talking about! It's hot, noisy, you have to reboot it every now and then, too.
There's certainly grind for fissure armour, but given that some of the fissure armour looks the same as 15K armour, and has exactly the same stats, I really really wouldn't class it as much of a reward.