Console is cheaper. Console gaming is more expensive - for the very reason you mentioned: More expensive games. If you want to buy 1-2 games a year, console may be the choice. But then switching to 0 games a year is a better choice.
2. Every game is guaranteed to work. Except for scratched DVDs. I heard this one way too often. Harddisks don't get scratched as often. And you can make backups. And there's a dozen of troubleshooting steps you can take to get the game to work. If your XBOX game ceases to work for some reason, you're screwed.
3. You needn't tweak, optimize, or otherwise fiddle with a console game to make it look good. You can't make your game look any better. You're stuck with certain level and the only possible upgrade is to buy a PC. With a good gfx card, PC blows XBOX out of the water. Of course consoles have better bang for the buck, but you're stuck with what you got.
4. Lots of console exclusives to choose from. Pick your poison. This all will be available for PC in 3 years through emulation. From ALL the consoles. Plus usually you get "[console X] AND PC" so the total for PC is much better than for any single console. For one console exclusive there are three or so "And PC" ones. For EACH of the consoles. Plus quite a few PC-exclusives.
5. Xbox Live. Are we talking Console or Xbox? Besides, thank you very much, I've heard enough of the XBOX
6. Backwards compatibility. When I upgraded from Windows 98 SE to WinXP, I lost the ability to play some of my favorite classic games. And when you upgraded from XBOX to XBOX360? Or from SNES to Playstation? Or from...
Currently I play all these on PC, using emulation. And I can always double-boot or multi-boot to any system I want. Or run Dosbox. Or even WINE. Backwards compatibility is a VERY rare animal for consoles. And cross-platform compatibility is nonexistent. In the meantime, you have to dig up a really antique game to be unable to come up with a current setup unable to run it.
7. Virus, adware, and spyware free. No porn, no viruses. 'Nuff said.
No porn. 'Nuff said.
8. Games look better in high-def...from the couch. Your assumptions are wrong. I don't care if the device under the desk is a console or PC if it does what I need it to do. And I can alt-tab and find a webpage with a hint to the game I'm playing if I got stuck.
9. Controllers are more comfortable than gaming with a keyboard and mouse. A console-like controller for PC costs like $10. And has all the functionalities of the console one. But you really don't want to use one when you play first person shooters. I really feel for poor misguided kids who think XBOX controller is better than a mouse+keyboard to play HALO. And I cuss at games that try to emulate console interface (Hi, Oblivion!) by digging every frigging option 3 levels down a menu and providing you with 6 assignable hotkeys. Most popular Oblivion mod for PC? BTMod, interface rewrite to make it less XBOX-like.
10. Controller innovation. PC is here usually a step behind consoles. And generally nobody found anything better than mouse+keyboard for FPS games yet, and it's going to stay that way.
11. Multifunction If you pay your $399, you get a game console and a DVD player. It can hardly do anything else. If you want to surf the net, or get some work done, or write a letter, you need a PC. So the choice is: not PC or console. The choice is PC plus console or just PC. And I prefer to spend my money to beef up my PC because the extra investment will be useful not only for gaming.
Is there on the market any format that supports and actually uses more than 24 FPS? Any movies that don't blur, don't show "ghosts" or such on rapid movement? AFAIK all the source tapes of the movies are in 24 frames per second, so no matter how much you improve resolution, the framerate will suck.
The problem is the license doesn't only state linking illegal - it has separate clauses about logical dependency too.
The rule of thumb is: "Does it make sense without the non-free piece?" - if it can run a free replacement instead of the non-free program, be used as a standalone tool of somewhat limited functionality or otherwise function usefully without the non-free piece, it's okay. But if the proprietary/non-free element is essential to functioning of given program and its lack causes major functions of the program to cease working, it can't be GPL'd, linked or not.
This is a very slippery ground though. That's for example why binary-only kernel modules cause so much controversy - RMS says that allowing distribution of kernel with hooks for loading these is violation of GPL. Linus claims otherwise. Programs like Xine are legally GPL because they don't care whether codecs they load are free or not, but GNU status of Captive, read-write NTFS filesystem for Linux using WinXP ntfs.sys is doubtful.
and worse off, a GPL software cannot be dependent on non-GPL software. The GPL requires that all components of the program are to be Free - you can't legally build a GPL'd frontend to a proprietary or otherwise non-GPL-compatibile backend.
Therefore all these thousands of the cd tools depending on cdrecord would either have to change the license (and abandonning GPL is not easy and in many cases just impossible) or be stuck with the old (last GPL'd) version of cdrecord.
It may be spread uniformly in the intergallactic space, meaning it's useless with density under a gram per cubic kilometer. Or it may form denser formations at distances that are useless. I mean, we're harnessing power of only one star out of a whole universe of them...
It really seems like you didn't play Morrowind. It had all these problems addressed. Ocean around the world - infinite size. And while there are MILES of unused but graphically correct terrain outside the walls, the walls themselves prevent you from doing reasonable things. Tried sneaking around Silorn to snipe the necromancers from the hill top? Bummer, wall. Tried approaching the ruin with black bow bandits from behind? Sorry, wall. Tried to snipe the bandit at the rudder of Bloated Float? Sorry, invisible wall right ACROSS the ship. They are obnoxious and way too tightly placed.
Limits are here as long as computers are. Excuse me but in -this- situation what you say is total bullshit. I installed "borderless cyrodiil" mod and ride all my way from Anvil to Leyawinn in straight line, through vast forests and mountains of Elsweyr and Valenwood. Terrains inaccessible without the mod. All the mod does is removing the invisible wall around Cyrodiil. These limits are artificial limitations of player freedom, not limits of available resources.
As for unkillable NPCs and non-unlockable doors, this is simply a bad practice, a crutch used in games where the authors are too lazy to fine-tune the game so that given task was simply too difficult for the players to pull off.
In case of theft there's usually much more evidence than the stolen wares. The wares only prove you're either of 4: thief, fence, uncautious buyer (from the thief), framed. 2 guilty, 2 innocent. It's up to the invastigators to find out which one and that's where the rest of the evidence kicks in. If you outright say "he gave it to me" it limits the options to thief, framed. Now given enough proof of burglary - fingerprints in places where they should not be, witnesses and alibis of both sides, criminal records, consistency of interrogation results.
In extreme case you can walk into someone's house, pick something moderately expensive up and walk out and with enough cheek simply get out of court innocent. But this takes lots of time and skill and quite a bit of money and works only once, maybe twice. OTOH treating this rule lightly especially with connection to "campaigns" like "war on drugs" leads to extremely easy framing anyone. Just drop a few bags of pot into their property them anonymously tip the police, and voila, instant guilty.
What happened to "Innocent until proven guilty"? Why do -I- have to prove the mp3 in my mp3 player is legal? Why can't my word suffice? Shouldn't RIAA have to prove I obtained it illegally? They say I got it from p2p. I say I ripped it off a legal CD I misplaced later. Until they -prove- I actually downloaded it from p2p I should be innocent, shouldn't I?
Basically there are only a three games that leave you freer than Oblivion does: Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind
Basically, you have no idea what "old school" RPGs are. The ones that were running on Amiga, like Ambermoon where after the first short cutscene you are free to explore about 80% of the world (huge! getting lost in the forests WAS an option!) and start out with quests in any city, or one where for first 3 months of the gameplay time you don't even get a hint of the main quest, all the time picking various odd jobs to earn basic living, like some of classics like Fallout - there are dozens of games that did offer more freedom. The problem with Oblivion though is that it most visibly is capable of giving you huge freedom, but it artificially limits it. The invisible walls around places that "the player is not supposed to be in", limit on amount of cash the seller is ready to offer for an item (Morrowind's "barter" option gone), caps on skills and attributes, spectator mode where controls are taken away from you, strict quest requirements (the questgiver MUST acknowledge you finished a quest before you can proceed with another of the questline, you must follow questgiver's suggestions or the environment will punish you - invisible wall on the arrow's route, unkillable NPC), and essentially... the entirely random content of dungeons? What freedom is it to choose one of 40 forts if each of them contains essentially the same stuff?
My god, this sounds like soviet propaganda. What kind of moron modded this insightful?
Let's see the lies: old school - linear, simple quests, nearly no puzzles, essentially hack&slash. Yeah, old-school like Nethack. spoonfed plot - each journal entry spoon-feds you the next step to perform, NO THINKING. depth - things you're told to do are simply foolish! freedom - invisible walls, non-openable doors and scripted events that make you cry from frustration as you helplessly watch some fool getting killed and can do nothing, because the game took controls away from you craftmanship - horrible bugs, hopeless AI, shallow scenario The sheer amount - about 1/4 of what was in the previous part, Morrowind. Almost every quest is an engaging and entertaining narrative - except of these boring stuffers. Most of quests are "kill X" or "fetch X". You go save some Jumbo Potatoes kidnapped by evil ogre or find 5 parts of machinery in 5 bandit camps scattered in the wilderness to gain access to moons' powers. gameplay - it's all about killing monsters and NPCs. The environment is interesting and the quests try to tell some story from time to time, but it always boils down to killing someone to pick some McGuffin and bring it to the quest giver. new dungeons and shirnes - sorry, but they differ only in layout. All loot is random, the enemies are location-specific (fairy creatures|undead|bandits|necromancers|vampires|gob lins) and vary with your level but are entirely random too, and there's absolutely no point in visiting new dungeons, because they contain exactly the same loot and challenges as old dungeons (which respawn after 3 days game time).
Friends were doing a thesis on 3D image capture using 2 USB webcams, in paralell with my thesis, so we often exchanged ideas and progress details. They researched the topic of the cameras VERY deeply and one conclusion is ALL WEBCAMS SUCK. The most expensive and advanced models on the market (about 2000% the price of the cheapest) have about 40% better parameters than the cheapest ones. They just come with fancy software and SDK for them exists at all. But they have just the same distorting sucky optics, they have just the same impossible to tune parameters like exposition or focus, they have the same sucky 640x480 resolution and framerate rarely exceeding 24, plus built-in undisablablable compression that makes image processing a big pain in the neck. Either go for industrial quality cameras (expensive) or just pick standard video cameras instead.
The administrator is afraid the user will encrypt critical company information, holding it ransom or simply forgetting password, and any kind of dangerous and non-job-related data (say, illegal porn) creating danger for the company and making it impossible to verify and find for the administrator. Quotas don't solve the problem because the user should be able to create arbitrarily big files as long as they are job-related, or at least deemed harmless by the administrator. An encrypted volume to which the admin has no access cannot be deemed harmless.
and create file-hosted TrueCrypt volumes on the system.
Fill whole partition with a single file, mount the file as a volume, ignore the physical partition, use the file-hosted volume. The difference between this and encrypting a partition or a harddisk by the user from admin's point of view is moot.
Users will -always- be able to create file-based encrypted partitions (loopback filesystems) using 3rd party software, no matter what -you- use. The way to go is to use truecrypt, then deal with these through company policy and control; you can't prohibit it technically, you must prohibit it legally. Control, deal with violators through disciplinary means.
Hint: none at all is stolen by stoners, because it's freaking useless to them.
Hint: Quite a bit is stolen by stoners (per account of a friend farmer who planted a nice field of hemp and got just dry trampled ground) because a significant percent of stoners are clueless morons who don't know better.
I picked it because this is what I had at hand. I know it's horrible for this task, but it simply IS. I didn't want to use a made-up or very obscure example. Of course a hash that helps to reconstruct the file placing certain visible restrains would be much better.
There are only 2^128 possible hashes, and the number of possible kernel executables is vastly larger than that. Not really. Of course if you took that dummy brute-force approach you'd come up with a large number of completely bogus kernel-like files from which some could match. But if you took the "informed guess" approach, you'd limit the number to number of versioned kernels x number of possible.config setups x number of compilers. The resulting number would be possibly somewhat greater than 2^128 but then you put additional restrains: the info didn't say it's some unusual kernel (it would likely say that if it was) so discard all obscure architectures and odd hardware and modules. Then start from most likely, most recent versions of kernel and compiler and move down the probability tree picking more obscure setups. There are maybe 2^20 of "vanilla kernels" floating around the market and the match would be within them.
sha1sum is a very bad hash for this purpose too, because it doesn't in any way indicate approaching the right solution. You have only 1-bit "correct/incorrect" flag. A hash that gets "more similar" if you change your solution in good direction would be much better.
that's one piece, but not necessarily - "lossy" nature of human mind compression can be overcome by "additional checks".
Lossy relational/dictionary based compression is the base. You hardly ever remember text by order of letters or sound of voice reading it. You remember the meaning of a sentence, plus optionally some rough pattern (like voice rhythm) to reproduce the exact text from rewording the meaning. So you understand meaning of sentence, store it as relation to known meanings (pointers to other entries!) then when recalling, you put it back in words, and for exact citation you try to match possible wordings against remembered pattern.
So imagine this: the compressor analyzes a sentence lexically, spots regularities and irregularities, transforms the sentence into a relational set of tokens containing the meaning of the sentence, which are small and easy to store, unambigiously describe the meaning of the sentence but don't contain exact wording. Then an extra checksum of the text of the sentence is added.
Decompressor tries to build a sentence that reflects given idea according to rules of grammar, picking different synonyms, word ordering and such, and then brute-forcing or otherwise matching against the checksum to find which of the created sentences matches exactly.
Look, the best compressor in the world: sha1sum/boot/vmlinuz 647fb0def3809a37f001d26abe58e7f900718c46/boot/vmlinuz
Linux kernel compressed to set: { string: "647fb0def3809a37f001d26abe58e7f900718c46", info: "it's a Linux kernel for i386" }
You just need to re-create afile that matches the md5sum and still follows the rules of a Linux kernel. It is extremely unlikely any other file that can be recognized as some kind of Linux kernel and matches. Of course there are countless blocks of data that still match, but very few will follow the ruleset of "ELF kernel executable" structure which can be deduced numerically. So theoretically you could use the hash to rebuild THE kernel just by brute-force creating random files and checking them if they match both the hash and "general properties of a kernel".
The problem obviously lies in unrealistic "brute force" part. The subset of possible rebuilds of the data must be heavily limited. You can do this by lossy compression that allows for limited "informed guess" results - ones that make sense in context of a linux kernel - style, compiler optimizations, use of macros transformed into repeatable binary code. And have the original analysed using the same methods before compression, storing all inconsistencies with the model separately.
So the compression file would consist of: - a set of logical tokens describing meaning of given piece of data (in relation to the rest of "knowledge base" - a set of exceptions (where logic fails) - a checksum or other pattern allowing to verify an exact match.
Most of lossy compressions are meant to obfuscate the lost data. If you use one that instead allows for rebuilding lost data according to certain limited ruleset ("informed guess" + verification) you'd get a lossless compression of comparable efficiency.
> but I didn't see anything on img.4chan.org/b/ to backup your statements.
for the simple reason threads on/b/ are extremely short-lived. They get "marked for deletion (old)" in about a hour but most of them die off long before that - usual lifespan of a thread doesn't exceed 15 minutes. That's why/b/ can get away with posting some stuff that definitely wouldn't survive elsewhere - before any authorities can react, the offending post is long gone. You either save what you want to keep or request it and others post it. Revive that girl's thread and you'll see it was not fantasy - it's not kept on server, but on users' harddrives and in users' minds.
Proxies have been forever, and have been the problem forever. But mass access to the Internet and real problems resulting from it happen now. Proxies and blocking access are just a small countermeasure...
A story of yesterday night: - anonymous at/b/[NSFW] finds a way to find separate private user profiles on Photobucket in the recent[possible NSFW] directory. - more/b/tards embark on a quest for more amateur porn by watching this page. - they find about 80 pics of a girl naked, masturbating. - they find out more about that girl, including her myspace and Xanga profiles. - They find out she's 15. Making essentially the pics of her very illegal. - They post the pics wherever they can, her school, her friends. - She deletes the pics and the profiles, but the profiles are in caches, the pics already packed on Rapidshare[NSFW, NSFH, and highly illegal!] - They contact her, fill her up on the story with lots of lies including that her boyfriend was the one who published the pics. - Her profile on myspace gets ".-*forever loved*-." header. Rumors of her suicide start popping up. Quite likely she's dead by now.
Now of course a proxy-blocking firewall wouldn't help here. But let's see: web 2.0 sites made this possible - forum, photo sharing, file sharing, profile site. Unlimited access to the net for the kid and for reckles teens from/b/. Wouldn't happen if not that. Think of your own reflections. It's not about proxies. It's about kids with access to what they shouldn't be able to access.
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1. It's cheaper.
Console is cheaper. Console gaming is more expensive - for the very reason you mentioned: More expensive games. If you want to buy 1-2 games a year, console may be the choice. But then switching to 0 games a year is a better choice.
2. Every game is guaranteed to work.
Except for scratched DVDs. I heard this one way too often. Harddisks don't get scratched as often. And you can make backups. And there's a dozen of troubleshooting steps you can take to get the game to work. If your XBOX game ceases to work for some reason, you're screwed.
3. You needn't tweak, optimize, or otherwise fiddle with a console game to make it look good.
You can't make your game look any better. You're stuck with certain level and the only possible upgrade is to buy a PC. With a good gfx card, PC blows XBOX out of the water. Of course consoles have better bang for the buck, but you're stuck with what you got.
4. Lots of console exclusives to choose from. Pick your poison.
This all will be available for PC in 3 years through emulation. From ALL the consoles. Plus usually you get "[console X] AND PC" so the total for PC is much better than for any single console. For one console exclusive there are three or so "And PC" ones. For EACH of the consoles. Plus quite a few PC-exclusives.
5. Xbox Live.
Are we talking Console or Xbox?
Besides, thank you very much, I've heard enough of the XBOX
6. Backwards compatibility. When I upgraded from Windows 98 SE to WinXP, I lost the ability to play some of my favorite classic games.
And when you upgraded from XBOX to XBOX360?
Or from SNES to Playstation?
Or from...
Currently I play all these on PC, using emulation. And I can always double-boot or multi-boot to any system I want. Or run Dosbox. Or even WINE.
Backwards compatibility is a VERY rare animal for consoles. And cross-platform compatibility is nonexistent. In the meantime, you have to dig up a really antique game to be unable to come up with a current setup unable to run it.
7. Virus, adware, and spyware free. No porn, no viruses. 'Nuff said.
No porn. 'Nuff said.
8. Games look better in high-def...from the couch.
Your assumptions are wrong. I don't care if the device under the desk is a console or PC if it does what I need it to do. And I can alt-tab and find a webpage with a hint to the game I'm playing if I got stuck.
9. Controllers are more comfortable than gaming with a keyboard and mouse.
A console-like controller for PC costs like $10. And has all the functionalities of the console one. But you really don't want to use one when you play first person shooters. I really feel for poor misguided kids who think XBOX controller is better than a mouse+keyboard to play HALO.
And I cuss at games that try to emulate console interface (Hi, Oblivion!) by digging every frigging option 3 levels down a menu and providing you with 6 assignable hotkeys.
Most popular Oblivion mod for PC? BTMod, interface rewrite to make it less XBOX-like.
10. Controller innovation.
PC is here usually a step behind consoles. And generally nobody found anything better than mouse+keyboard for FPS games yet, and it's going to stay that way.
11. Multifunction
If you pay your $399, you get a game console and a DVD player. It can hardly do anything else. If you want to surf the net, or get some work done, or write a letter, you need a PC. So the choice is: not PC or console. The choice is PC plus console or just PC. And I prefer to spend my money to beef up my PC because the extra investment will be useful not only for gaming.
Is there on the market any format that supports and actually uses more than 24 FPS? Any movies that don't blur, don't show "ghosts" or such on rapid movement? AFAIK all the source tapes of the movies are in 24 frames per second, so no matter how much you improve resolution, the framerate will suck.
This sounds so redundant...
Too bad it's illegal in Spain.
The problem is the license doesn't only state linking illegal - it has separate clauses about logical dependency too.
The rule of thumb is: "Does it make sense without the non-free piece?" - if it can run a free replacement instead of the non-free program, be used as a standalone tool of somewhat limited functionality or otherwise function usefully without the non-free piece, it's okay. But if the proprietary/non-free element is essential to functioning of given program and its lack causes major functions of the program to cease working, it can't be GPL'd, linked or not.
This is a very slippery ground though. That's for example why binary-only kernel modules cause so much controversy - RMS says that allowing distribution of kernel with hooks for loading these is violation of GPL. Linus claims otherwise. Programs like Xine are legally GPL because they don't care whether codecs they load are free or not, but GNU status of Captive, read-write NTFS filesystem for Linux using WinXP ntfs.sys is doubtful.
and worse off, a GPL software cannot be dependent on non-GPL software. The GPL requires that all components of the program are to be Free - you can't legally build a GPL'd frontend to a proprietary or otherwise non-GPL-compatibile backend.
Therefore all these thousands of the cd tools depending on cdrecord would either have to change the license (and abandonning GPL is not easy and in many cases just impossible) or be stuck with the old (last GPL'd) version of cdrecord.
So, am I going to shell out big bucks to watch commercials, listen to other people's conversations, and then sit through a B-grade flick? Hell no.
SOOOO much agreed!
So where's the torrent?
It may be spread uniformly in the intergallactic space, meaning it's useless with density under a gram per cubic kilometer. Or it may form denser formations at distances that are useless. I mean, we're harnessing power of only one star out of a whole universe of them...
It really seems like you didn't play Morrowind. It had all these problems addressed. Ocean around the world - infinite size. And while there are MILES of unused but graphically correct terrain outside the walls, the walls themselves prevent you from doing reasonable things. Tried sneaking around Silorn to snipe the necromancers from the hill top? Bummer, wall. Tried approaching the ruin with black bow bandits from behind? Sorry, wall. Tried to snipe the bandit at the rudder of Bloated Float? Sorry, invisible wall right ACROSS the ship. They are obnoxious and way too tightly placed.
Limits are here as long as computers are.
Excuse me but in -this- situation what you say is total bullshit. I installed "borderless cyrodiil" mod and ride all my way from Anvil to Leyawinn in straight line, through vast forests and mountains of Elsweyr and Valenwood. Terrains inaccessible without the mod. All the mod does is removing the invisible wall around Cyrodiil. These limits are artificial limitations of player freedom, not limits of available resources.
As for unkillable NPCs and non-unlockable doors, this is simply a bad practice, a crutch used in games where the authors are too lazy to fine-tune the game so that given task was simply too difficult for the players to pull off.
In case of theft there's usually much more evidence than the stolen wares. The wares only prove you're either of 4: thief, fence, uncautious buyer (from the thief), framed. 2 guilty, 2 innocent. It's up to the invastigators to find out which one and that's where the rest of the evidence kicks in. If you outright say "he gave it to me" it limits the options to thief, framed. Now given enough proof of burglary - fingerprints in places where they should not be, witnesses and alibis of both sides, criminal records, consistency of interrogation results.
In extreme case you can walk into someone's house, pick something moderately expensive up and walk out and with enough cheek simply get out of court innocent. But this takes lots of time and skill and quite a bit of money and works only once, maybe twice. OTOH treating this rule lightly especially with connection to "campaigns" like "war on drugs" leads to extremely easy framing anyone. Just drop a few bags of pot into their property them anonymously tip the police, and voila, instant guilty.
Same here.
What happened to "Innocent until proven guilty"?
Why do -I- have to prove the mp3 in my mp3 player is legal? Why can't my word suffice? Shouldn't RIAA have to prove I obtained it illegally?
They say I got it from p2p. I say I ripped it off a legal CD I misplaced later. Until they -prove- I actually downloaded it from p2p I should be innocent, shouldn't I?
Basically there are only a three games that leave you freer than Oblivion does: Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind
Basically, you have no idea what "old school" RPGs are. The ones that were running on Amiga, like Ambermoon where after the first short cutscene you are free to explore about 80% of the world (huge! getting lost in the forests WAS an option!) and start out with quests in any city, or one where for first 3 months of the gameplay time you don't even get a hint of the main quest, all the time picking various odd jobs to earn basic living, like some of classics like Fallout - there are dozens of games that did offer more freedom. The problem with Oblivion though is that it most visibly is capable of giving you huge freedom, but it artificially limits it. The invisible walls around places that "the player is not supposed to be in", limit on amount of cash the seller is ready to offer for an item (Morrowind's "barter" option gone), caps on skills and attributes, spectator mode where controls are taken away from you, strict quest requirements (the questgiver MUST acknowledge you finished a quest before you can proceed with another of the questline, you must follow questgiver's suggestions or the environment will punish you - invisible wall on the arrow's route, unkillable NPC), and essentially... the entirely random content of dungeons? What freedom is it to choose one of 40 forts if each of them contains essentially the same stuff?
My god, this sounds like soviet propaganda. What kind of moron modded this insightful?
b lins) and vary with your level but are entirely random too, and there's absolutely no point in visiting new dungeons, because they contain exactly the same loot and challenges as old dungeons (which respawn after 3 days game time).
Let's see the lies:
old school - linear, simple quests, nearly no puzzles, essentially hack&slash. Yeah, old-school like Nethack.
spoonfed plot - each journal entry spoon-feds you the next step to perform, NO THINKING.
depth - things you're told to do are simply foolish!
freedom - invisible walls, non-openable doors and scripted events that make you cry from frustration as you helplessly watch some fool getting killed and can do nothing, because the game took controls away from you
craftmanship - horrible bugs, hopeless AI, shallow scenario
The sheer amount - about 1/4 of what was in the previous part, Morrowind.
Almost every quest is an engaging and entertaining narrative - except of these boring stuffers. Most of quests are "kill X" or "fetch X". You go save some Jumbo Potatoes kidnapped by evil ogre or find 5 parts of machinery in 5 bandit camps scattered in the wilderness to gain access to moons' powers.
gameplay - it's all about killing monsters and NPCs. The environment is interesting and the quests try to tell some story from time to time, but it always boils down to killing someone to pick some McGuffin and bring it to the quest giver.
new dungeons and shirnes - sorry, but they differ only in layout. All loot is random, the enemies are location-specific (fairy creatures|undead|bandits|necromancers|vampires|go
Friends were doing a thesis on 3D image capture using 2 USB webcams, in paralell with my thesis, so we often exchanged ideas and progress details. They researched the topic of the cameras VERY deeply and one conclusion is ALL WEBCAMS SUCK. The most expensive and advanced models on the market (about 2000% the price of the cheapest) have about 40% better parameters than the cheapest ones. They just come with fancy software and SDK for them exists at all. But they have just the same distorting sucky optics, they have just the same impossible to tune parameters like exposition or focus, they have the same sucky 640x480 resolution and framerate rarely exceeding 24, plus built-in undisablablable compression that makes image processing a big pain in the neck.
Either go for industrial quality cameras (expensive) or just pick standard video cameras instead.
The administrator is afraid the user will encrypt critical company information, holding it ransom or simply forgetting password, and any kind of dangerous and non-job-related data (say, illegal porn) creating danger for the company and making it impossible to verify and find for the administrator. Quotas don't solve the problem because the user should be able to create arbitrarily big files as long as they are job-related, or at least deemed harmless by the administrator. An encrypted volume to which the admin has no access cannot be deemed harmless.
and create file-hosted TrueCrypt volumes on the system.
Fill whole partition with a single file, mount the file as a volume, ignore the physical partition, use the file-hosted volume. The difference between this and encrypting a partition or a harddisk by the user from admin's point of view is moot.
Users will -always- be able to create file-based encrypted partitions (loopback filesystems) using 3rd party software, no matter what -you- use. The way to go is to use truecrypt, then deal with these through company policy and control; you can't prohibit it technically, you must prohibit it legally. Control, deal with violators through disciplinary means.
1200 sheets of peper per acre per year timber=14.2 hemp=1200 which one would you decide to grow?
Grammar of this sentence suggests too much hemp.
Hint: none at all is stolen by stoners, because it's freaking useless to them.
Hint: Quite a bit is stolen by stoners (per account of a friend farmer who planted a nice field of hemp and got just dry trampled ground) because a significant percent of stoners are clueless morons who don't know better.
I picked it because this is what I had at hand. I know it's horrible for this task, but it simply IS. I didn't want to use a made-up or very obscure example. Of course a hash that helps to reconstruct the file placing certain visible restrains would be much better.
There are only 2^128 possible hashes, and the number of possible kernel executables is vastly larger than that. .config setups x number of compilers. The resulting number would be possibly somewhat greater than 2^128 but then you put additional restrains: the info didn't say it's some unusual kernel (it would likely say that if it was) so discard all obscure architectures and odd hardware and modules. Then start from most likely, most recent versions of kernel and compiler and move down the probability tree picking more obscure setups. There are maybe 2^20 of "vanilla kernels" floating around the market and the match would be within them.
Not really. Of course if you took that dummy brute-force approach you'd come up with a large number of completely bogus kernel-like files from which some could match. But if you took the "informed guess" approach, you'd limit the number to number of versioned kernels x number of possible
sha1sum is a very bad hash for this purpose too, because it doesn't in any way indicate approaching the right solution. You have only 1-bit "correct/incorrect" flag. A hash that gets "more similar" if you change your solution in good direction would be much better.
that's one piece, but not necessarily - "lossy" nature of human mind compression can be overcome by "additional checks".
/boot/vmlinuz /boot/vmlinuz
Lossy relational/dictionary based compression is the base. You hardly ever remember text by order of letters or sound of voice reading it. You remember the meaning of a sentence, plus optionally some rough pattern (like voice rhythm) to reproduce the exact text from rewording the meaning. So you understand meaning of sentence, store it as relation to known meanings (pointers to other entries!) then when recalling, you put it back in words, and for exact citation you try to match possible wordings against remembered pattern.
So imagine this: the compressor analyzes a sentence lexically, spots regularities and irregularities, transforms the sentence into a relational set of tokens containing the meaning of the sentence, which are small and easy to store, unambigiously describe the meaning of the sentence but don't contain exact wording. Then an extra checksum of the text of the sentence is added.
Decompressor tries to build a sentence that reflects given idea according to rules of grammar, picking different synonyms, word ordering and such, and then brute-forcing or otherwise matching against the checksum to find which of the created sentences matches exactly.
Look, the best compressor in the world:
sha1sum
647fb0def3809a37f001d26abe58e7f900718c46
Linux kernel compressed to set: { string: "647fb0def3809a37f001d26abe58e7f900718c46", info: "it's a Linux kernel for i386" }
You just need to re-create afile that matches the md5sum and still follows the rules of a Linux kernel. It is extremely unlikely any other file that can be recognized as some kind of Linux kernel and matches. Of course there are countless blocks of data that still match, but very few will follow the ruleset of "ELF kernel executable" structure which can be deduced numerically. So theoretically you could use the hash to rebuild THE kernel just by brute-force creating random files and checking them if they match both the hash and "general properties of a kernel".
The problem obviously lies in unrealistic "brute force" part. The subset of possible rebuilds of the data must be heavily limited. You can do this by lossy compression that allows for limited "informed guess" results - ones that make sense in context of a linux kernel - style, compiler optimizations, use of macros transformed into repeatable binary code. And have the original analysed using the same methods before compression, storing all inconsistencies with the model separately.
So the compression file would consist of:
- a set of logical tokens describing meaning of given piece of data (in relation to the rest of "knowledge base"
- a set of exceptions (where logic fails)
- a checksum or other pattern allowing to verify an exact match.
Most of lossy compressions are meant to obfuscate the lost data. If you use one that instead allows for rebuilding lost data according to certain limited ruleset ("informed guess" + verification) you'd get a lossless compression of comparable efficiency.
Before you were born:
Now:
All in bright colors, syntax highlighting, autocomplete and autocorrect, and whatnot.
Sure it "could have been" done before. But only now it is actually in use.
> but I didn't see anything on img.4chan.org/b/ to backup your statements.
/b/ are extremely short-lived. They get "marked for deletion (old)" in about a hour but most of them die off long before that - usual lifespan of a thread doesn't exceed 15 minutes. That's why /b/ can get away with posting some stuff that definitely wouldn't survive elsewhere - before any authorities can react, the offending post is long gone. You either save what you want to keep or request it and others post it. Revive that girl's thread and you'll see it was not fantasy - it's not kept on server, but on users' harddrives and in users' minds.
for the simple reason threads on
Proxies have been forever, and have been the problem forever. But mass access to the Internet and real problems resulting from it happen now. Proxies and blocking access are just a small countermeasure...
/b/[NSFW] finds a way to find separate private user profiles on Photobucket in the recent[possible NSFW] directory. /b/tards embark on a quest for more amateur porn by watching this page.
/b/. Wouldn't happen if not that.
A story of yesterday night:
- anonymous at
- more
- they find about 80 pics of a girl naked, masturbating.
- they find out more about that girl, including her myspace and Xanga profiles.
- They find out she's 15. Making essentially the pics of her very illegal.
- They post the pics wherever they can, her school, her friends.
- She deletes the pics and the profiles, but the profiles are in caches, the pics already packed on Rapidshare[NSFW, NSFH, and highly illegal!]
- They contact her, fill her up on the story with lots of lies including that her boyfriend was the one who published the pics.
- Her profile on myspace gets ".-*forever loved*-." header. Rumors of her suicide start popping up. Quite likely she's dead by now.
Now of course a proxy-blocking firewall wouldn't help here.
But let's see: web 2.0 sites made this possible - forum, photo sharing, file sharing, profile site.
Unlimited access to the net for the kid and for reckles teens from
Think of your own reflections. It's not about proxies. It's about kids with access to what they shouldn't be able to access.