Except these dimwits DO treat RFIDs as trustable. Not 'evil', just dumb. RFID reader is an insecure input device like any other, and you don't even need physical access to use it. But it seems nobody thought of preparing a barcode that could crash the cash register, recording a magnetic card that would infect the security system, etc. Some devices are thought to be too simple to mean danger - wrongly. I remember some old Atari games that would crash or misbehave if you'd open the joystick and pressed "left" and "right" simultaneously. I burnt electronics of a RC toy car by telling it to go forward and back at the same time. Got a motorbike to run backward by starting the engine by pushing it backwards. Managed to crash my cell phone by buffer overflow at battery load level sensor (it WAS a software failure!) Got a CD tray to stop halfway by simultaneously pressing the eject key and sending eject commands from the computer.
A toggle switch can be ballanced in the middle position. A pushbutton can be softly pressed make a spark-gap. Unconnected lines can be shorted. Even a single-bit input device cannot be trusted.
"Eurotech's WWPC (wrist-worn PC) runs Linux or Windows, offers a wealth of standard PC interfaces (WLAN, Bluetooth, IrDA, USB, SD-card, etc), and has patented technology that puts the device to sleep when the user drops their arm."
"This girl is smart and pretty, has nice round, firm breasts, likes oral, anal, takes it between the tits, and best of all, her herpes cause bumps in her vagina, provides extra stimulation during intercourse."
All this is nice and pretty against nausea but will get you fragged in FPS and dead in Silent Hill really fast. The front line is not a place for sick people!;)
What about this guy who trashed his car by -purposedly- driving into an overtaking vehicle because his reflexes from the game (some violent car race) he was playing before kicked in and he -could- do that?
This would be the case if con artists were really con -artists-, and poor unsuspecting victims were normal unsuspecting victims. But here the gap between honest sellers and the scammers is too wide. These are two different worlds. If there was a problem telling one kind apart from the other, sure the cheaters would hurt the trade. But if you're going to buy a house, you ask the sacramental "can I see it first?" and the seller's reaction is the most obvious identification with 0% chance of failure. If you fail to ask this question, you're the one to blame. You took a big gulp from unidentified bottle, while driving, without even trying to smell if it's alcohol (or poison) first.
Oh, but why? Responsible buyers buy from responsible sellers in a responsible manner, and can recognize a scam long before they get involved. This sector of market is stable. Idiots buy from scammers. This sector of market is unstable, but who gives a shit?
I'm not sure about the origins of the following quote, but I certainly love it: "I'm not saying there should be capital punishment for stupidity, but why won't we remove all the warning labels and let the problem solve itself?"
Likely it's so with the "standard install". I've picked "Expert Install" because I didn't want all my data partitions deleted, thankyouverymuch, and it normally asked for root password during the install process, set it correctly and I used su - with root password quite a few times already, not quite fond of installing things with wrong ownerships.
> The problem here is that the main user password (Ubuntu doesn't have a root password)
WTF? Sure normal main user can do more than plain user in other setups (e.g. is a sudoer by default) but there indeed is a root account with root password, and on occasions like un-self-recoverable filesystem failure at boot you're prompted for root password to repair the filesystem by running fsck with the right parameters manually. If you disabled root account by then, you need to mess with some liveCD then.
What magazines lack is a "crap" column. Most reviews rate games with 70-100%, but most of these games deserve this rating. It's just that games rating lower don't get reviewed - they get very little press at all. The editors play a little, decide this is a shit, don't bother writing a review and taking up space in the magazine, then move on to the next title that is more interesting.
People complain about how many bad games are released nowadays but they forget shitty games were like 80% of the market ALWAYS. Thing it, they got forgotten and we don't remember them anymore. You remember Zork and HHGTTG from Infocom, but you forget a dozen of more medicore games they released. You remember Revenge Of The Mutant Camels, but where's Herbert's Dummy Run? Quake is there, a dozen of Quake knockoffs is forgotten. And press rarely bothered to mention them too.
Though I agree - we're at a crisis moment. Making a game to be of quality comparable with the market leaders is way out of reach of small developer groups. And big players want to play it safe, so they dump innovation. There's fewer good new games than there would be at any moment of the gaming history in the past. And magazines write reviews comparing games to the average. Quake 4 is still at upper 95% of the quality of currently available titles, it's just the quality of currently available titles is at about half the level the quality was in times of Quake 3.
I once set Q3Arena to deathmatch, one of the void maps, against bots. 300 of them. Frag limit bumped to something like 500 and it wasn't much. The game was completely crazy but incredibly fun. With some luck you lived 10 or 15 seconds, the trick was not to not be killed but to frag at least two before you get fragged. The saw glove appeared to be extremely good weapon because at a good location you could run through a row of 30 or so bots shooting each others' backs, and get 30 frags in a row.
The problem? It was running at about 5 FPS. Now I'd like to get a card that would enable this kind of gameplay at reasonable speed. Crowded cities, armies of troopers, hordes of demons. Power in numbers, not detail. Completely new gameplay style. Screw high degree of reality, allow me to perform a multi-kill of 40 with one shot.
I looked at this and I thought, "so what, how many fps do kids need in their games anyways?"
Nope, the right question is "how many polygons at 30FPS." In some games more polygons = more detailed models. I don't give a shit. In other games more polygons = more enemies on screen at the same time. And that's when fun really begins!
They would mean more people getting a taste of a different poison and breaking out of the the lock-in. Short-term profit, long-term loss. Using a proprietary socket for your hardware may cause some people to choose an alternative but for most cases it means they will buy your accessories and not competition's.
If you read an article about the PC boot process (been on/. long time ago), you'd see the drudgery of climbing up the ladder of legacies to bootstrap a PC with BIOS. Even if you have two dual-core Athlons 64, you start with a single CPU in 286-compatiblity mode. You need to climb all the way up, starting with ancient 8-bit instructions to enable 16-bit, get out of the 640K memory limitations, floating math co-processor, pull all the hardware from legacy compatiblity modes (all gfx cards by default start in CGA mode, year 1981) enable all extras that were not supported by 486 and similar, and slowly, slowly crawl your way up to a level where a dual 64-bit CPU is a dual 64-bit CPU, not a hyper-overclocked 386.
Basic mouse support will be added in Service Pack 1. Mouse buttons will be supported in SP2 scheduled for 2012. For now you can use the beta version of keyboard interface or stable punchcard input.
For now the problems to be solved is authenticating the mice with the system as a part of increased security, so that no mice from unreliable vendors would be installable. In case of a 3rd party non-approved mouse your system and house will be remotely locked down and the whole block napalmed under the rules of DMCA and Patriot act. So far the system is being beta-tested to remove all false positives, the bugs hindered progress but opened career positions in Microsoft for many new brave beta-testers.
Supporting EFI would be supporting competition. Incentive to abandon Microsoft. "I want a computer that's good for gaming and graphics. Either PC or the new Intel Mac, which I'd dual boot, OS X for gfx, Vista for games."
EFI supported: "So, supposedly Mac is better for gfx than PC, let's try it... Wow, this OS X rocks and Vista sucks. I'm gonna get a PS3 for games and drop Vista altogether, staying with OS X." EFI not supported: "Well, there is Photoshop for Vista and no games for OS X, so I'd better buy a PC so I have both games and photoshop. Well, it sucks, but I bet OS X would suck just the same if I ever tried it."
...and the remaining 130% of statistics are made up on the spot. My system was awfully slow, with specs similar to the ones you described. Especially load times, and whenever any disk activity happened. Bottleneck? Motherboard chipset drivers, the disks were working in some goddamn PIO mode eating up a big chunk of CPU time and being slow as hell. Drivers installed, disks work fine, everything speeded up.
The problem with PCs is that they contain mothaloads of legacy hardware and they default to using it - anything newer usually has to be switched on by some program. So if you get dual Athlon64, still if you run a vanilla i386-compiled program, you have an equivalent of one 386 3GHZ CPU, not 2 3-GHZ 64-bit athlons. On the plus side, it will run very cool, you can spin down the CPU fan even;)
yeah, keep starting the CD every few minutes, freezing the game, and generally keeping it some 30% below its normal speed capacities. Even mosr of the legitimate users downloaded the crack.
Well, some 15 years ago my phone number was 5933. By now it would be 0146268933 (after morphing through 215933, 265933, 6268933 and needing to notify everyone of the change.) 4 years ago I dumped the landline and got a cellphone, amongst all advantages (bills including) it has a shorter number. If the progress goes in wrong direction, time to change the baseline of the "progress" and move on to alternatives.
OOo may be 10 years behind MSO, but MSO is 10 years ahead of whatever would most sophisticated users need.
The answer is simple: Private users, small firms, medium-sized firms: OOo. Cost of ownership, fulfilling all needs. Big firms: MSO. OOo doesn't fulfill their needs, cost of custom solutions too big. Huge firms: Custom-modified OOo tailored to their needs. (after all, it's open source. You can't modify MSO because you don't have the sources.)
So if OOo grabs 90% of the market and MSO retains the remaining 10%, I'm perfectly fine with it:)
Slashdot Mirror
Except these dimwits DO treat RFIDs as trustable.
Not 'evil', just dumb. RFID reader is an insecure input device like any other, and you don't even need physical access to use it. But it seems nobody thought of preparing a barcode that could crash the cash register, recording a magnetic card that would infect the security system, etc. Some devices are thought to be too simple to mean danger - wrongly. I remember some old Atari games that would crash or misbehave if you'd open the joystick and pressed "left" and "right" simultaneously. I burnt electronics of a RC toy car by telling it to go forward and back at the same time. Got a motorbike to run backward by starting the engine by pushing it backwards. Managed to crash my cell phone by buffer overflow at battery load level sensor (it WAS a software failure!) Got a CD tray to stop halfway by simultaneously pressing the eject key and sending eject commands from the computer.
A toggle switch can be ballanced in the middle position. A pushbutton can be softly pressed make a spark-gap. Unconnected lines can be shorted. Even a single-bit input device cannot be trusted.
"Eurotech's WWPC (wrist-worn PC) runs Linux or Windows, offers a wealth of standard PC interfaces (WLAN, Bluetooth, IrDA, USB, SD-card, etc), and has patented technology that puts the device to sleep when the user drops their arm."
"This girl is smart and pretty, has nice round, firm breasts, likes oral, anal, takes it between the tits, and best of all, her herpes cause bumps in her vagina, provides extra stimulation during intercourse."
Sorry, I just didn't remember the source, honestly!
;)
(still doesn't beat one on bash.org.pl where a guy was refused shopping service in an online shop because his second name was too short
All this is nice and pretty against nausea but will get you fragged in FPS and dead in Silent Hill really fast. ;)
The front line is not a place for sick people!
What about this guy who trashed his car by -purposedly- driving into an overtaking vehicle because his reflexes from the game (some violent car race) he was playing before kicked in and he -could- do that?
This would be the case if con artists were really con -artists-, and poor unsuspecting victims were normal unsuspecting victims. But here the gap between honest sellers and the scammers is too wide. These are two different worlds. If there was a problem telling one kind apart from the other, sure the cheaters would hurt the trade. But if you're going to buy a house, you ask the sacramental "can I see it first?" and the seller's reaction is the most obvious identification with 0% chance of failure. If you fail to ask this question, you're the one to blame. You took a big gulp from unidentified bottle, while driving, without even trying to smell if it's alcohol (or poison) first.
Oh, but it IS easier!
Russian Roulette is easier than Bingo too.
Oh, but why? Responsible buyers buy from responsible sellers in a responsible manner, and can recognize a scam long before they get involved. This sector of market is stable. Idiots buy from scammers. This sector of market is unstable, but who gives a shit?
I'm not sure about the origins of the following quote, but I certainly love it:
"I'm not saying there should be capital punishment for stupidity, but why won't we remove all the warning labels and let the problem solve itself?"
> So they call me as they need the password for the isp access, "penis",
If you tried this on my system, it wouldn't work, it would say your password is too short.
*raises paw*
Likely it's so with the "standard install". I've picked "Expert Install" because I didn't want all my data partitions deleted, thankyouverymuch, and it normally asked for root password during the install process, set it correctly and I used su - with root password quite a few times already, not quite fond of installing things with wrong ownerships.
> The problem here is that the main user password (Ubuntu doesn't have a root password)
WTF?
Sure normal main user can do more than plain user in other setups (e.g. is a sudoer by default) but there indeed is a root account with root password, and on occasions like un-self-recoverable filesystem failure at boot you're prompted for root password to repair the filesystem by running fsck with the right parameters manually. If you disabled root account by then, you need to mess with some liveCD then.
What magazines lack is a "crap" column. Most reviews rate games with 70-100%, but most of these games deserve this rating. It's just that games rating lower don't get reviewed - they get very little press at all. The editors play a little, decide this is a shit, don't bother writing a review and taking up space in the magazine, then move on to the next title that is more interesting.
People complain about how many bad games are released nowadays but they forget shitty games were like 80% of the market ALWAYS. Thing it, they got forgotten and we don't remember them anymore. You remember Zork and HHGTTG from Infocom, but you forget a dozen of more medicore games they released. You remember Revenge Of The Mutant Camels, but where's Herbert's Dummy Run? Quake is there, a dozen of Quake knockoffs is forgotten. And press rarely bothered to mention them too.
Though I agree - we're at a crisis moment. Making a game to be of quality comparable with the market leaders is way out of reach of small developer groups. And big players want to play it safe, so they dump innovation. There's fewer good new games than there would be at any moment of the gaming history in the past. And magazines write reviews comparing games to the average. Quake 4 is still at upper 95% of the quality of currently available titles, it's just the quality of currently available titles is at about half the level the quality was in times of Quake 3.
I once set Q3Arena to deathmatch, one of the void maps, against bots. 300 of them. Frag limit bumped to something like 500 and it wasn't much. The game was completely crazy but incredibly fun. With some luck you lived 10 or 15 seconds, the trick was not to not be killed but to frag at least two before you get fragged. The saw glove appeared to be extremely good weapon because at a good location you could run through a row of 30 or so bots shooting each others' backs, and get 30 frags in a row.
The problem? It was running at about 5 FPS.
Now I'd like to get a card that would enable this kind of gameplay at reasonable speed. Crowded cities, armies of troopers, hordes of demons. Power in numbers, not detail. Completely new gameplay style. Screw high degree of reality, allow me to perform a multi-kill of 40 with one shot.
I looked at this and I thought, "so what, how many fps do kids need in their games anyways?"
Nope, the right question is "how many polygons at 30FPS."
In some games more polygons = more detailed models. I don't give a shit.
In other games more polygons = more enemies on screen at the same time. And that's when fun really begins!
They would mean more people getting a taste of a different poison and breaking out of the the lock-in. Short-term profit, long-term loss. Using a proprietary socket for your hardware may cause some people to choose an alternative but for most cases it means they will buy your accessories and not competition's.
the dogfight here.
(ok, you need lots of imagination. And I need a few gp)
If you read an article about the PC boot process (been on /. long time ago), you'd see the drudgery of climbing up the ladder of legacies to bootstrap a PC with BIOS.
Even if you have two dual-core Athlons 64, you start with a single CPU in 286-compatiblity mode. You need to climb all the way up, starting with ancient 8-bit instructions to enable 16-bit, get out of the 640K memory limitations, floating math co-processor, pull all the hardware from legacy compatiblity modes (all gfx cards by default start in CGA mode, year 1981) enable all extras that were not supported by 486 and similar, and slowly, slowly crawl your way up to a level where a dual 64-bit CPU is a dual 64-bit CPU, not a hyper-overclocked 386.
That would run on XBox2 controller.
Basic mouse support will be added in Service Pack 1. Mouse buttons will be supported in SP2 scheduled for 2012. For now you can use the beta version of keyboard interface or stable punchcard input.
For now the problems to be solved is authenticating the mice with the system as a part of increased security, so that no mice from unreliable vendors would be installable. In case of a 3rd party non-approved mouse your system and house will be remotely locked down and the whole block napalmed under the rules of DMCA and Patriot act. So far the system is being beta-tested to remove all false positives, the bugs hindered progress but opened career positions in Microsoft for many new brave beta-testers.
Supporting EFI would be supporting competition. Incentive to abandon Microsoft.
"I want a computer that's good for gaming and graphics. Either PC or the new Intel Mac, which I'd dual boot, OS X for gfx, Vista for games."
EFI supported:
"So, supposedly Mac is better for gfx than PC, let's try it... Wow, this OS X rocks and Vista sucks. I'm gonna get a PS3 for games and drop Vista altogether, staying with OS X."
EFI not supported:
"Well, there is Photoshop for Vista and no games for OS X, so I'd better buy a PC so I have both games and photoshop. Well, it sucks, but I bet OS X would suck just the same if I ever tried it."
...and the remaining 130% of statistics are made up on the spot.
;)
My system was awfully slow, with specs similar to the ones you described. Especially load times, and whenever any disk activity happened.
Bottleneck? Motherboard chipset drivers, the disks were working in some goddamn PIO mode eating up a big chunk of CPU time and being slow as hell. Drivers installed, disks work fine, everything speeded up.
The problem with PCs is that they contain mothaloads of legacy hardware and they default to using it - anything newer usually has to be switched on by some program. So if you get dual Athlon64, still if you run a vanilla i386-compiled program, you have an equivalent of one 386 3GHZ CPU, not 2 3-GHZ 64-bit athlons.
On the plus side, it will run very cool, you can spin down the CPU fan even
yeah, keep starting the CD every few minutes, freezing the game, and generally keeping it some 30% below its normal speed capacities. Even mosr of the legitimate users downloaded the crack.
Well, some 15 years ago my phone number was 5933. By now it would be 0146268933 (after morphing through 215933, 265933, 6268933 and needing to notify everyone of the change.) 4 years ago I dumped the landline and got a cellphone, amongst all advantages (bills including) it has a shorter number.
If the progress goes in wrong direction, time to change the baseline of the "progress" and move on to alternatives.
OOo may be 10 years behind MSO, but MSO is 10 years ahead of whatever would most sophisticated users need.
:)
The answer is simple:
Private users, small firms, medium-sized firms: OOo. Cost of ownership, fulfilling all needs.
Big firms: MSO. OOo doesn't fulfill their needs, cost of custom solutions too big.
Huge firms: Custom-modified OOo tailored to their needs. (after all, it's open source. You can't modify MSO because you don't have the sources.)
So if OOo grabs 90% of the market and MSO retains the remaining 10%, I'm perfectly fine with it