I was under the impression that the domain registration lapsed, Panix had changed addresses and not bothered to update the domain registry people, so they were uncontactable for the seven days after the domain expired and therefore it was put up in the open. That's what I read the first time this article was submitted to Slashdot anyway.
Why on earth is it a "hijack" (which makes it sound like a criminal offense) when a company doesn't care enough about it's domain name to keep the registry informed of how they can be contacted for administrative purposes, and then complains when they lose the domain? I understand the people who picked up the newly-unowned domain had no idea that it was in use and promptly returned it when they found out who previously owned it. Hardly a hijacking or a terrorist act to me.
Shouldn't this article be more like "Inept ISP forgets to reregister domain: Doesn't bother keeping it's address and phone number with registrar."
Anyone who is a Panix customer... maybe you should think about signing up with a more competent ISP, rather than one who blames it's own lack of dilligence on terrorists and hijackers.
It's hard to do a "TNG" version for Galactica. The rag-tag fleet had no way to make new ships or build a "Galactica 1701-D". Richard Hatch wanted to do this but the studios continually turned down the idea. Although, part of your wish has come true, as Richard Hatch appears as a criminal leader in one episode for a potentially recurring role.
I also enjoyed the 70's TV show, although it has dated quite severely.
The new series has continaual references to the technology of the 70's series, but that technology is simply referred to as the first Cylon war, 40 years in the colonial past. Nobody has seen cylons since they looked like toasters. The new Cylons are more of what we should see from a science fiction AI race with the expectations we have in this century. The Cylon ships have no pilots, rather a cybernetic organism wired into the hull. The other cylon models have also been created with very specific purposes, not least of which is espionage and infiltration. It is rather hard to infiltrate a human colony when you're big, shiny, metal and with a glowing red eye, don't you think?
Starbuck is female in the series but the character is still quite similar, but more down to earth and credible. It's credibility that makes a good show. Having a character with the loose sexual behaviour from the 70's just wouldn't cut it with the audience of today, and frankly she's better looking than Faceman from the A*Team.
It sounds to me like you've given it up before you gave it a chance.. that's fine, but don't ruin other people's viewing pleasure with your own inaccuracies and uninformed bias.
Actually, a lot of people have. As a matter of fact, so many people have heard of Bittorrent that the series is facing both incredibly high popularity and incredibly low ratings, as people download it, watch it, and don't tune in when it finally airs.
I know that the TV stations should air shows globally at the same or very similar times to preserve their business model and fight "piracy", but at the same time the community should support the studios making decent shows and tune in even if they've already seen it.
Storyline is really important! But it depends on the game. The FF series probably has a great storyline, but the gameplay has always bugged me as a serious PC RPG player. NFS2U has no story whatsoever, but it's a lot of fun to play because the graphics are okay and the racing is a lot of fun.
System Shock and SS2 had pretty average graphics and gameplay, even for their time... but the storyline and atmosphere is amazing.
Some games don't need a storyline. Some games don't need great graphics. Some games don't necessarily need great gameplay (if the story and graphics make up for that). Some games don't need graphics, storyline, gameplay or even taste to be fun! (For an hour or so)(Postal 2 anyone?)
But certainly, the point seems to be being missed more often than hit lately.
I've played through HL2 and DooM3 now. I think the gameplay in HL2 is better, but not as good as it was in HL. DooM3 did get repetitive but the atmosphere, while different, was conveyed better than HL2. In HL2, so many things were just... not right. For starters, there were many areas, like security towers with guards, that had no ladders! How did the guards get up there? Also, HL2 had the same problem that the HL2 advocates were laughing at DooM3 for... monsters "appearing" out of nowhere behind you all the time. Not as often in HL2, but it did happen. At least in DooM3, there was a flimsy excuse for it, they were teleported in from Hell. HL2 just had monsters stuck in places for no real reason than to "make you fight". Everything in the original Half Life was there for a good reason, it all made sense! In HL2, they lost that message.
While we're talking atmosphere, HL2 just didn't cut it. I've played Devastation and similar games, and HL2 doesn't come up with anything more novel than that, we've all seen trashed up old city environments before. DooM3... well the parts in Hell made my skin crawl. Genuinely creepy.
Let's talk graphics. Half Life 2 had some awful lighting effects... sometimes I'd shine a torch in a room and it would shed no light whatsoever, othertimes it would be blinding. It's pretty obvious the graphics are a bit cludged. DooM3 had incredibly realistic lighting, you could see shadows in all the right places, and some of the effects were very dramatic and inspiring. Sure, DooM3 needed more grunt for the superior graphics engine, but what price should we expect to pay for progress? I'm looking forward to Quake 4, Raven has made some brilliant games in the past and that coupled with the DooM3 engine will be unstoppable.
Yep... unfortunately in the game, some soft armours go up to at least 20 and hard armours are of course higher than that. Lower reflexes are not penalising enough to balance out the fact that someone can empty a clip from an M16 into you and you can shrug it off.
Essentially RTals tried to make Cyberpunk like a fantasy game, where the heroes are very hard to kill. In Cyberpunk, life is cheap, money is priceless.
It is hard to be a hero when anyone can pick up a Desert Eagle or equivalent and take the hero down.
Did you ever play the game? With armour stacking rules, you've made some seriously foolish choices if you could be hurt by something as small as a Deagle. D20 modern is much more lethal.
Except the system was invariably unplayable because of the stacking armour system.
You could easily and cheaply buy and wear enough armour to make you invulnerable to any weapon smaller than a 7.62 calibre round, and even then it would take several clips from such a weapon to seriously hurt you. They do not appear to have modified this in the new release.
I recommend D20:Modern, and possibly the Blood and Guts:Modern Military books.
No, because OOo is trying to write the results of that question (no matter which way you answer) to an area of the filesystem/registry which is locked down to administrators only.
It's unfortunate that the developers of OOo wrote the application this way. But, since it's open source, it should be quite easy to fix, and I anticipate a fix is probably right around the corner.
According to the article, he just said he wouldn't infect anyone with spyware or send spam to anyone... *unless* they had ever visited any of his websites or if he had "prior business dealings" with them. From a spammer, "prior business dealings" probably means "are on my email spam target list somewhere".
I think it is quite possible that they will release Linux playback capabilities for the specific reason that Linux was used as a justification for DeCSS technology existing in the first place. DVD Jon couldn't play a disk he owned on Linux, so he made it so that he could. It just happens that action broke a law in the USA somewhere, thus causing an international incident, as precious US dollars were under threat.
Shame it was Dune 2000 that pioneered the genre. But it was a Westwood game so we'll let that slide. Having said that, the other games were quite lackluster.
C&C Generals is excellent fun in multiplayer, because of the large number of factions in Zero Hour (12 playable sides).
My group is also enjoying Battle for Middle Earth which is based on the Generals engine, and likewise it is quite enjoyable.
The same engine is being used for a new Red Alert game, which will hopefully be as successful as Generals was.
Simply put, it would be a bad business decision to drop it.
1) Everyone starts using Firefox. 2) Everyone realises you can get Firefox on Linux! 3) Bill Gates hangs around outside your house asking if you have any spare change for this new OS he's thinking of.
I'm still yet to see a console game that has intellectually exceeded any PC game to date. Equalled - almost (most console -> PC ports tend to be "improved" by the conversion with added functionality).
So many console games nowadays are so childish they give Pong a run for its money.
Having said that, mouse and keyboard functionality is being built into the PS3 and Xbox2, so the difference between PC and console is blurring. The existing consoles do have support, but when we see games that come out for consoles requiring a mouse (or at least using the competitive edge that a mouse provides over analog sticks), it'll be fun to watch the market change.
This may be a surprise, but I was not actually serious about Windows 3.11 or using OS/2. I'm sorry you didn't pick up on my little joke there.
What disturbed me about the article is that the same points he was applying to Linux regarding security also applied to Win3.11 and OS/2. It's obscure, therefore it's secure. This is foolish and dangerous thinking. It's exactly the same kind of justifications Microsoft uses for selling their OS.
Linux is more secure simply because the open source nature of the software enables any security holes to be fixed quicker.
A more useful test would be to observe how quickly the box would be compromised if the assailants were specifically targetting the box and knew exactly which OS it was running, what patch level, and had the correct tools available to use it.
Suggesting that Linux is secure because Windows hacking tools don't work on it is madness. We can make better arguments than this, surely?
Because that path leads to the dark side. Once you start down that path, forever will it control your destiny.
But seriously, that's like not filling out your TPS reports. Pragmatically it doesn't seem like fun but you need to take quality assurance and correct procedures and practices into account, or it will bite you hard down the track.
Namely, don't *hide* your vulnerabilities, *fix* your vulnerabilities. That's why I started this whole rant. Linux shouldn't be secure because people don't know anything about it/don't bother hacking it, Linux should be secure because it's secure.
That the Pentium-M isn't optimised at all for what they were benchmarking (apart from some stuff compiled with a non-commercial intel C compiler).
While I'll be one of the first to put my boot into intel and their behind-the-market sloppy overpriced inefficient CPUs, it would be at least fair to do it on a reasonably even playing field.
Except you forgot the 11Mb Java download that is mandatory when you install Opera. Firefox just works. I'll add that in. You also forgot to award points to Firefox for having fewer rendering problems than Opera. Sneaky. Is this typical of advocates of closed source software?
Opera - Closed Source Firefox - Open Source Firefox: 1 Opera: 0
Opera - Fast Firefox - Not as fast Firefox: 2 Opera: 1
Opera - Very large initial footprint (> 11MB inc Java) Firefox - Tiny footprint Firefox: 3 Opera: 1
Opera - Very long time between updates and releases Firefox - Fixed and updated with the speed of the open source communities non-sleeping programming hordes Firefox: 4 Opera: 1
Opera - Little setup required on first install Firefox - Plugins and configuration needs to be done before you get all the functionality you want Firefox: 4 Opera: 2
Opera - Blocks popups Firefox - Blocks popups and with adblock plugin, everything else you don't want to see Firefox: 5 Opera: 2
Opera - Rendering problems on some pages Firefox - Fewer rendering problems than Opera but more than IE (bad microsoft) Firefox: 6 Opera: 2
Opera - You must have Suns Java installed for it to work Firefox - Doesn't need Java at all, on Windows or Linux or anything else you might install it on. Firefox: 7 Opera: 2
Slashdot Mirror
I was under the impression that the domain registration lapsed, Panix had changed addresses and not bothered to update the domain registry people, so they were uncontactable for the seven days after the domain expired and therefore it was put up in the open. That's what I read the first time this article was submitted to Slashdot anyway.
Why on earth is it a "hijack" (which makes it sound like a criminal offense) when a company doesn't care enough about it's domain name to keep the registry informed of how they can be contacted for administrative purposes, and then complains when they lose the domain? I understand the people who picked up the newly-unowned domain had no idea that it was in use and promptly returned it when they found out who previously owned it. Hardly a hijacking or a terrorist act to me.
Shouldn't this article be more like "Inept ISP forgets to reregister domain: Doesn't bother keeping it's address and phone number with registrar."
Anyone who is a Panix customer... maybe you should think about signing up with a more competent ISP, rather than one who blames it's own lack of dilligence on terrorists and hijackers.
It's hard to do a "TNG" version for Galactica. The rag-tag fleet had no way to make new ships or build a "Galactica 1701-D". Richard Hatch wanted to do this but the studios continually turned down the idea. Although, part of your wish has come true, as Richard Hatch appears as a criminal leader in one episode for a potentially recurring role.
I also enjoyed the 70's TV show, although it has dated quite severely.
The new series has continaual references to the technology of the 70's series, but that technology is simply referred to as the first Cylon war, 40 years in the colonial past. Nobody has seen cylons since they looked like toasters. The new Cylons are more of what we should see from a science fiction AI race with the expectations we have in this century. The Cylon ships have no pilots, rather a cybernetic organism wired into the hull. The other cylon models have also been created with very specific purposes, not least of which is espionage and infiltration. It is rather hard to infiltrate a human colony when you're big, shiny, metal and with a glowing red eye, don't you think?
Starbuck is female in the series but the character is still quite similar, but more down to earth and credible. It's credibility that makes a good show. Having a character with the loose sexual behaviour from the 70's just wouldn't cut it with the audience of today, and frankly she's better looking than Faceman from the A*Team.
It sounds to me like you've given it up before you gave it a chance.. that's fine, but don't ruin other people's viewing pleasure with your own inaccuracies and uninformed bias.
Actually, a lot of people have. As a matter of fact, so many people have heard of Bittorrent that the series is facing both incredibly high popularity and incredibly low ratings, as people download it, watch it, and don't tune in when it finally airs.
I know that the TV stations should air shows globally at the same or very similar times to preserve their business model and fight "piracy", but at the same time the community should support the studios making decent shows and tune in even if they've already seen it.
Storyline is really important! But it depends on the game. The FF series probably has a great storyline, but the gameplay has always bugged me as a serious PC RPG player. NFS2U has no story whatsoever, but it's a lot of fun to play because the graphics are okay and the racing is a lot of fun.
System Shock and SS2 had pretty average graphics and gameplay, even for their time... but the storyline and atmosphere is amazing.
Some games don't need a storyline. Some games don't need great graphics. Some games don't necessarily need great gameplay (if the story and graphics make up for that). Some games don't need graphics, storyline, gameplay or even taste to be fun! (For an hour or so)(Postal 2 anyone?)
But certainly, the point seems to be being missed more often than hit lately.
I've played through HL2 and DooM3 now. I think the gameplay in HL2 is better, but not as good as it was in HL. DooM3 did get repetitive but the atmosphere, while different, was conveyed better than HL2. In HL2, so many things were just... not right. For starters, there were many areas, like security towers with guards, that had no ladders! How did the guards get up there? Also, HL2 had the same problem that the HL2 advocates were laughing at DooM3 for... monsters "appearing" out of nowhere behind you all the time. Not as often in HL2, but it did happen. At least in DooM3, there was a flimsy excuse for it, they were teleported in from Hell. HL2 just had monsters stuck in places for no real reason than to "make you fight". Everything in the original Half Life was there for a good reason, it all made sense! In HL2, they lost that message.
While we're talking atmosphere, HL2 just didn't cut it. I've played Devastation and similar games, and HL2 doesn't come up with anything more novel than that, we've all seen trashed up old city environments before. DooM3... well the parts in Hell made my skin crawl. Genuinely creepy.
Let's talk graphics. Half Life 2 had some awful lighting effects... sometimes I'd shine a torch in a room and it would shed no light whatsoever, othertimes it would be blinding. It's pretty obvious the graphics are a bit cludged. DooM3 had incredibly realistic lighting, you could see shadows in all the right places, and some of the effects were very dramatic and inspiring. Sure, DooM3 needed more grunt for the superior graphics engine, but what price should we expect to pay for progress? I'm looking forward to Quake 4, Raven has made some brilliant games in the past and that coupled with the DooM3 engine will be unstoppable.
Yep... unfortunately in the game, some soft armours go up to at least 20 and hard armours are of course higher than that. Lower reflexes are not penalising enough to balance out the fact that someone can empty a clip from an M16 into you and you can shrug it off.
Essentially RTals tried to make Cyberpunk like a fantasy game, where the heroes are very hard to kill. In Cyberpunk, life is cheap, money is priceless.
It is hard to be a hero when anyone can pick up a Desert Eagle or equivalent and take the hero down.
Did you ever play the game? With armour stacking rules, you've made some seriously foolish choices if you could be hurt by something as small as a Deagle. D20 modern is much more lethal.
Except the system was invariably unplayable because of the stacking armour system.
You could easily and cheaply buy and wear enough armour to make you invulnerable to any weapon smaller than a 7.62 calibre round, and even then it would take several clips from such a weapon to seriously hurt you. They do not appear to have modified this in the new release.
I recommend D20:Modern, and possibly the Blood and Guts:Modern Military books.
You spelled Monkey Wonk-Wonk wrong!
The parent didn't use the term "Monkey Wonk-Wonk" in his post.
At least your consistent.
It should be "you're" (you are) instead of "your" (your property, your cat, your house).
Be nice, he's a mac user. He probably thinks his computer, instead of a G4 or G5 running OS 9 or OS X, is "Grape".
No, because OOo is trying to write the results of that question (no matter which way you answer) to an area of the filesystem/registry which is locked down to administrators only.
It's unfortunate that the developers of OOo wrote the application this way. But, since it's open source, it should be quite easy to fix, and I anticipate a fix is probably right around the corner.
According to the article, he just said he wouldn't infect anyone with spyware or send spam to anyone... *unless* they had ever visited any of his websites or if he had "prior business dealings" with them. From a spammer, "prior business dealings" probably means "are on my email spam target list somewhere".
You have a point, actually.
I think it is quite possible that they will release Linux playback capabilities for the specific reason that Linux was used as a justification for DeCSS technology existing in the first place. DVD Jon couldn't play a disk he owned on Linux, so he made it so that he could. It just happens that action broke a law in the USA somewhere, thus causing an international incident, as precious US dollars were under threat.
Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
Gothic III
Those would be some of the best games to come out, well, ever, for PC. When and if they do.
Shame it was Dune 2000 that pioneered the genre. But it was a Westwood game so we'll let that slide. Having said that, the other games were quite lackluster.
C&C Generals is excellent fun in multiplayer, because of the large number of factions in Zero Hour (12 playable sides).
My group is also enjoying Battle for Middle Earth which is based on the Generals engine, and likewise it is quite enjoyable.
The same engine is being used for a new Red Alert game, which will hopefully be as successful as Generals was.
Star Wars: Rebellion had a simplistic 3D space combat system on a fleet scale. The game didn't go down well, but every Warsy fan I know liked it.
Find a $100 TV and a $200 TV.
Print the label for the $100 TV, stick it onto the $200TV. Buy the TV at Walmart A.
Lose receipt.
Remove fake label.
Take TV to Walmart B. Refund for $200 (or $200 gift certificate).
Go to Walmart C. Buy two $200 TV's for $100 each...
Simply put, it would be a bad business decision to drop it.
1) Everyone starts using Firefox.
2) Everyone realises you can get Firefox on Linux!
3) Bill Gates hangs around outside your house asking if you have any spare change for this new OS he's thinking of.
So that they can keep the cute dog in the TV show sitcom alive for all 30 seasons.
What I can't wait for is when Fluffy Clone #2726A flips out and eats the cute wisecracking kid.
Bet they can't clone him....
Unfortunately for "serious" gamers, this is true.
I'm still yet to see a console game that has intellectually exceeded any PC game to date. Equalled - almost (most console -> PC ports tend to be "improved" by the conversion with added functionality).
So many console games nowadays are so childish they give Pong a run for its money.
Having said that, mouse and keyboard functionality is being built into the PS3 and Xbox2, so the difference between PC and console is blurring. The existing consoles do have support, but when we see games that come out for consoles requiring a mouse (or at least using the competitive edge that a mouse provides over analog sticks), it'll be fun to watch the market change.
This may be a surprise, but I was not actually serious about Windows 3.11 or using OS/2. I'm sorry you didn't pick up on my little joke there.
What disturbed me about the article is that the same points he was applying to Linux regarding security also applied to Win3.11 and OS/2. It's obscure, therefore it's secure. This is foolish and dangerous thinking. It's exactly the same kind of justifications Microsoft uses for selling their OS.
Linux is more secure simply because the open source nature of the software enables any security holes to be fixed quicker.
A more useful test would be to observe how quickly the box would be compromised if the assailants were specifically targetting the box and knew exactly which OS it was running, what patch level, and had the correct tools available to use it.
Suggesting that Linux is secure because Windows hacking tools don't work on it is madness. We can make better arguments than this, surely?
Because that path leads to the dark side. Once you start down that path, forever will it control your destiny.
But seriously, that's like not filling out your TPS reports. Pragmatically it doesn't seem like fun but you need to take quality assurance and correct procedures and practices into account, or it will bite you hard down the track.
Namely, don't *hide* your vulnerabilities, *fix* your vulnerabilities. That's why I started this whole rant. Linux shouldn't be secure because people don't know anything about it/don't bother hacking it, Linux should be secure because it's secure.
That the Pentium-M isn't optimised at all for what they were benchmarking (apart from some stuff compiled with a non-commercial intel C compiler).
While I'll be one of the first to put my boot into intel and their behind-the-market sloppy overpriced inefficient CPUs, it would be at least fair to do it on a reasonably even playing field.
Except you forgot the 11Mb Java download that is mandatory when you install Opera. Firefox just works. I'll add that in. You also forgot to award points to Firefox for having fewer rendering problems than Opera. Sneaky. Is this typical of advocates of closed source software?
Opera - Closed Source
Firefox - Open Source
Firefox: 1 Opera: 0
Opera - $$$
Firefox - Free beer, Free speech
Firefox: 2 Opera: 0
Opera - Fast
Firefox - Not as fast
Firefox: 2 Opera: 1
Opera - Very large initial footprint (> 11MB inc Java)
Firefox - Tiny footprint
Firefox: 3 Opera: 1
Opera - Very long time between updates and releases
Firefox - Fixed and updated with the speed of the open source communities non-sleeping programming hordes
Firefox: 4 Opera: 1
Opera - Little setup required on first install
Firefox - Plugins and configuration needs to be done before you get all the functionality you want
Firefox: 4 Opera: 2
Opera - Blocks popups
Firefox - Blocks popups and with adblock plugin, everything else you don't want to see
Firefox: 5 Opera: 2
Opera - Rendering problems on some pages
Firefox - Fewer rendering problems than Opera but more than IE (bad microsoft)
Firefox: 6 Opera: 2
Opera - You must have Suns Java installed for it to work
Firefox - Doesn't need Java at all, on Windows or Linux or anything else you might install it on.
Firefox: 7 Opera: 2