folks who have been playing FPS games over a decade on the PC and stopped for the same reasons I did: DRM problems, cheating, constant expense of upgrades, people acting like assholes, server admins booting good players because they suspect a cheater when their score is good but are absent when someone is really cheating and causing people to leave in droves, etc.
Are you kidding? Online FPS DRM hasn't changed since counterstrike. None of the big multiplayer FPSs that came out last year even needed the CD in the drive.
Your upgrade point is good, online console games suffer from a complete lack of admins so when someone is cheating, nothing happens (immediately, after a while they get banned, just like with punkbuster and VAC)
The rest of your points are still a problem on consoles.
If the seal is valid you can click on it and get an information page about the site.
If you get a page about another site or the seal isn't a link then the site isn't legitimate.
A faked verisign seal on a web site is a great clue that they're not the right people to shop with. It also makes spotting phishing sites a lot easier.
Are you kidding? One of my biggest gripes about beryl when I used it was how much longer it took to switch between desktops. Bind Alt-w and Alt-q to changing desktop to the left and right and be done with it.
Admittedly compiz does make it easier to find windows but if you've got that many windows on one screen it's probably because you're not using virtual desktops enough.
Really? I do CS and did (or will do) all those things (except database tuning) and most of the modules involved coursework.
The CIS students did some business and management modules and missed out on C, Lisp, a lot of the maths and compilers. It certainly didn't seem like a good deal to me, but then I have no interest in business.
Actually, the wiimote is somewhat limiting in it's tracking capabilities (but fortunately in a way that isn't usually apparent). The wiimote can't tell whether or not it's looking at the sensor bar from the side or not, when you move the wiimote left or right, the two lights appear to get closer together in the same way as if you'd moved it further away from the television.
Since the wiimote is usually used from roughly in front of the TV as a pointing device, this isn't usually a problem.
I would expect that you'd get some odd effects with Johnny Lee's head tracking application if you turn your head and look at the screen out of the corner of your eye. One possible fix would be to add a third led to form a triangle with the other two.
The ISP has to carry your bandwidth whether they're serving the content or not. If your traffic is leaving their network, it costs them more.
P2P does distribute the cost over all users. You can only distribute as fast as your connection allows it and you will receive in proportion to how much you distribute. However, the ISP is still having to pay for the bandwidth you actually use (since they sell you "unlimited" access but usually pay their provider by the gigabyte).
Lets consider two systems (bittorrent and usenet) in the following scenario: A is a content provider who wants to publish a file. B and C are customers of an ISP, Q who both want to download A's file.
Bittorrent: A creates a torrent, uploads it to a public tracker, B, C and a whole lot of other people (using different ISPs) all download the torrent file and start leaching A's file. Assuming B and C are both considerate users with a 1:1 share ratio, Q will have to pay for enough bandwidth to cover four times the size of A's file.
Usenet: A uploads their file to a newsgroup. Q's news server downloads the message(s) sent by A containing their file. B and C both download A's file from the Q's news server. Here Q additionally has to maintain a news server and still has to provide the bandwidth for B and C to download the file from it once each (although this traffic stays within their own network so the cost is minimal). Q also has to pay for the bandwidth to download the file once (from an external news server).
Using usenet, Q has only has to pay their provider a quarter of what they would have to pay if B and C use bittorrent. Whether this is enough to offset the cost of running a news server depends on how many users download the content.
Here's a more specific example: let A be ubuntu.com which provides access to the ubuntu software repository and let B and C be ubuntu users who regularly download software from the ubuntu repository. It makes sense for Q to mirror the ubuntu repository and let B and C download from there instead. This gives B and C a better experience (the server is closer and hence faster) and reduces Q's bandwidth bill.
Virgin Media (despite all their failings) actually have an ubuntu repository and run newsgroups (but probably only because they inherited them from ntl who inherited them from blueyonder).
Another example where a local mirror (since that's essentially what an ISP's news server is) might be beneficial is with the BBC iPlayer service where a limited amount of content needs to be distributed among a large group of users.
I agree with all your points about an ISP news server being a single point of failure. A P2P system copes much better with the loss of a random node (bittorrent before trackerless torrents excepted).
However, a dedicated news server can take advantage of the fact that some parts of the network are faster than others. My line is limited to 8Mb/s. Even assuming I could upload at that speed, I can only send data at 8Mb/s.
Since the ISP owns and has set up the network, they can set up the news server so that it has more bandwidth.
Assuming A is the news server and has a 100MBit connection to the rest of the ISPs network and has the data and B and C both want it, A can serve data to both B and C at the same time (as well as ten other people).
I don't know what sort of topology an ISPs network typically has. At the outer most edges, it is a star (with all the customer's lines meeting at the exchange). In an ideal situation, placing a news server at the center of the star halves the bandwidth required for distribution compared to a P2P solution. Additionally, it gives the ISP more flexibility, they can more easily find the best way of routing usenet data and place news servers in the most efficient points of their network.
There is no reason that the Bittorrent-esqe way of splitting a file into "blocks" couldn't be implemented in a client server model as well. Already, many download managers will resume an HTTP download and there's no technical reason that the same thing shouldn't be possible on usenet.
But if ISPs really wanted to solve this problem, they could set up their server with better retention time and access and advertise their service better.
Blueyonder had a very good newsgroup setup which fortunately still works after Virgin Media inherited it.
You're missing the point. This article is ISPs introducing bandwidth limits due to some users using "too much" of their unlimited bandwidth. This is mostly a problem for ISPs because they have to pay for all the traffic they direct out of their own network.
Running a news sever allows the ISP to download all the messages once from remote news servers and then only distribute them to customers within their own network.
If you'd installed XP on your old computer, you'd have found it as horribly bloated and slow as the early adopters (although probably not as bloated and slow as vista).
FYI, Windows 2000 was also great but most people seem to have missed it as it was aimed at businesses.
Interesting but I'd have like to have seen a comparison with some non-gaming gear.
Is there any advantage of a Logitech MX500 mouse over a no-brand office mouse? What about keyboards?
I like my Saitek Eclipse II (it looks so nice) but will it give me any gaming advantage over the Genius K627 (boring thing) it replaced?
Re:Second person shooter
on
Second Person
·
· Score: 1
If I remember rightly, playing as the second player in Zone of the Enders is like that. The camera stays behind player one, who you're trying to kill, but always looks towards you.
Several RDP Connections open to misc servers Which won't consume nearly as much bandwidth as bittorrent
FTP upload/download with several threads Which will likely have constant traffic all the time they are open, unlike bittorrent where nodes get choked and unchoked
Your fancy 2.0 website constantly calling home to "create a richer experience" Which makes lots of short lived connections regularly, unlike bittorrent which tends to keep connections for as long as both peers are up
Constant updates on your versioning software (as SVN) generating quite the traffic Possibly, but wouldn't that only be to one (or a few) servers?
Your machine searching for networked PCs Which if you're local would use some sort of broadcast and never leave the local network. If you're checking that remote hosts are still up then that's probably just some regular ping packets.
Browsing networked machines for some archived filed Almost certainly only on a local network
Outlook syncing Possibly, I don't know anything about outlook's syncing
An open IM with serveral conversations Most IM programs pass messages through a central server unless you're sending files.
VPN connection to client hosting network Possibly, but probably only one connection
While I admit that there may be other activities which may have similar traffic patterns, I certainly wouldn't rely on encryption to being the silver bullet that stops ISPs throttling torrents.
I am well aware that there is nothing illegal about bittorrent and if you read my post again, you'll see that I never mentioned legality. I merely commented that using encryption does not automatically hide the fact that you are using P2P as the parent was suggesting.
However, BitTorrent and P2P in general do have some quite specific traits. Since they all rely on connecting to other peers to download, you can easily guess that someone's using bittorrent because they have ~40 open connections, most of which aren't doing much. Encryption does nothing to help this.
After a quick read of the paper, it seems like another use for data collected in a similar way to their Cityware project (although there's no mention of data being shared between the two, they seem to use similar techniques to log bluetooth device encounters).
The crux of their argument seems to be "you can infer personal relationships by looking at which people spend time together in different places," along with a lot of stuff about how the raw data can be analysed to discern this. I can see how this could provide useful information in a prison setting where participation is enforced rather than optional, probably using RFID rather than bluetooth.
Cityware is a project looking at links between social networks online and in real life. They have created a facebook application which allows you to track who you're most in contact with around their base stations in real life (I know there's several around the Bath Uni campus). It works to an extent but is mostly limited by who happens to have bluetooth on and has gaps in their timetable at the same time.
More worrying is how else this data can be used. Last semester I, as part of a group of students, developed a prototype application for a smart phone which would scan for bluetooth devices, look up the facebook profiles of any which were known to Cityware and display a list of people, with a photograph, on the phone's screen. It could also log where you'd met certain people using GPS and store this on a remote database.
Didn't we have this once? I think we called it newsgroups or something?
While this idea is nice, it doesn't account for the diversity and size of the files shared by P2P. It's not feasible for ISPs to hold a copy of every torrent piece that comes through their network.
We thought of that, we called them bookmarks. Make one for every commonly visited site and they get stored in a file which you can take with you. In fact, I believe there some effort going into a project to allow you to store your bookmarks on a server somewhere and grab them from any computer.
I don't use windows much but when using a new linux computer I copy across my.vimrc and.bash_profile and I'm all set (for important stuff at least).
I don't want 'mail', I want 'webmail.bath.ac.uk' which is what I'm typing in.
I am typing a url in the url bar because a url is a unique identifier for a web page, it's the way that page is identified and isn't ambiguous.
Why should I want to type in 'mail' let my computer guess that I really want webmail.bath.ac.uk, and have me confirm that when I know I where I want to go?
Did you completely fail to read anything I said? I'll put it on one line so it doesn't get lost.
I only type urls in the url bar so it's unhelpful if it matches things which are not in the url.
That's it, that's my only problem with the awesome bar, the way it looks is fine. If it could only match at the start of the domain or sub-domain like Firefox 2 does that would be even better.
Slashdot Mirror
Ibex is shorter
Ibex has an x and is therefore inherently more awesome
Ibex is more memorable
No it doesn't, it prevents you from creating hardware which will only run approved binaries and distributing approved free software binaries for it.
Being able to improve the software doesn't mean shit if you can't run your improved version in a useful way.
Are you kidding? Online FPS DRM hasn't changed since counterstrike. None of the big multiplayer FPSs that came out last year even needed the CD in the drive.
Your upgrade point is good, online console games suffer from a complete lack of admins so when someone is cheating, nothing happens (immediately, after a while they get banned, just like with punkbuster and VAC)
The rest of your points are still a problem on consoles.
do they offer tracking?
Yes they did.
If the seal is valid you can click on it and get an information page about the site.
If you get a page about another site or the seal isn't a link then the site isn't legitimate.
A faked verisign seal on a web site is a great clue that they're not the right people to shop with. It also makes spotting phishing sites a lot easier.
Are you kidding? One of my biggest gripes about beryl when I used it was how much longer it took to switch between desktops. Bind Alt-w and Alt-q to changing desktop to the left and right and be done with it. Admittedly compiz does make it easier to find windows but if you've got that many windows on one screen it's probably because you're not using virtual desktops enough.
Really? I do CS and did (or will do) all those things (except database tuning) and most of the modules involved coursework.
The CIS students did some business and management modules and missed out on C, Lisp, a lot of the maths and compilers. It certainly didn't seem like a good deal to me, but then I have no interest in business.
Actually, the wiimote is somewhat limiting in it's tracking capabilities (but fortunately in a way that isn't usually apparent). The wiimote can't tell whether or not it's looking at the sensor bar from the side or not, when you move the wiimote left or right, the two lights appear to get closer together in the same way as if you'd moved it further away from the television.
Since the wiimote is usually used from roughly in front of the TV as a pointing device, this isn't usually a problem.
I would expect that you'd get some odd effects with Johnny Lee's head tracking application if you turn your head and look at the screen out of the corner of your eye. One possible fix would be to add a third led to form a triangle with the other two.
The ISP has to carry your bandwidth whether they're serving the content or not. If your traffic is leaving their network, it costs them more.
P2P does distribute the cost over all users. You can only distribute as fast as your connection allows it and you will receive in proportion to how much you distribute. However, the ISP is still having to pay for the bandwidth you actually use (since they sell you "unlimited" access but usually pay their provider by the gigabyte).
Lets consider two systems (bittorrent and usenet) in the following scenario:
A is a content provider who wants to publish a file.
B and C are customers of an ISP, Q who both want to download A's file.
Bittorrent:
A creates a torrent, uploads it to a public tracker, B, C and a whole lot of other people (using different ISPs) all download the torrent file and start leaching A's file.
Assuming B and C are both considerate users with a 1:1 share ratio, Q will have to pay for enough bandwidth to cover four times the size of A's file.
Usenet:
A uploads their file to a newsgroup. Q's news server downloads the message(s) sent by A containing their file. B and C both download A's file from the Q's news server.
Here Q additionally has to maintain a news server and still has to provide the bandwidth for B and C to download the file from it once each (although this traffic stays within their own network so the cost is minimal). Q also has to pay for the bandwidth to download the file once (from an external news server).
Using usenet, Q has only has to pay their provider a quarter of what they would have to pay if B and C use bittorrent. Whether this is enough to offset the cost of running a news server depends on how many users download the content.
Here's a more specific example: let A be ubuntu.com which provides access to the ubuntu software repository and let B and C be ubuntu users who regularly download software from the ubuntu repository. It makes sense for Q to mirror the ubuntu repository and let B and C download from there instead. This gives B and C a better experience (the server is closer and hence faster) and reduces Q's bandwidth bill.
Virgin Media (despite all their failings) actually have an ubuntu repository and run newsgroups (but probably only because they inherited them from ntl who inherited them from blueyonder).
Another example where a local mirror (since that's essentially what an ISP's news server is) might be beneficial is with the BBC iPlayer service where a limited amount of content needs to be distributed among a large group of users.
I agree with all your points about an ISP news server being a single point of failure. A P2P system copes much better with the loss of a random node (bittorrent before trackerless torrents excepted).
However, a dedicated news server can take advantage of the fact that some parts of the network are faster than others. My line is limited to 8Mb/s. Even assuming I could upload at that speed, I can only send data at 8Mb/s.
Since the ISP owns and has set up the network, they can set up the news server so that it has more bandwidth.
Assuming A is the news server and has a 100MBit connection to the rest of the ISPs network and has the data and B and C both want it, A can serve data to both B and C at the same time (as well as ten other people).
I don't know what sort of topology an ISPs network typically has. At the outer most edges, it is a star (with all the customer's lines meeting at the exchange). In an ideal situation, placing a news server at the center of the star halves the bandwidth required for distribution compared to a P2P solution. Additionally, it gives the ISP more flexibility, they can more easily find the best way of routing usenet data and place news servers in the most efficient points of their network.
There is no reason that the Bittorrent-esqe way of splitting a file into "blocks" couldn't be implemented in a client server model as well. Already, many download managers will resume an HTTP download and there's no technical reason that the same thing shouldn't be possible on usenet.
But if ISPs really wanted to solve this problem, they could set up their server with better retention time and access and advertise their service better.
Blueyonder had a very good newsgroup setup which fortunately still works after Virgin Media inherited it.
You're missing the point. This article is ISPs introducing bandwidth limits due to some users using "too much" of their unlimited bandwidth. This is mostly a problem for ISPs because they have to pay for all the traffic they direct out of their own network.
Running a news sever allows the ISP to download all the messages once from remote news servers and then only distribute them to customers within their own network.
If you'd installed XP on your old computer, you'd have found it as horribly bloated and slow as the early adopters (although probably not as bloated and slow as vista).
FYI, Windows 2000 was also great but most people seem to have missed it as it was aimed at businesses.
Interesting but I'd have like to have seen a comparison with some non-gaming gear.
Is there any advantage of a Logitech MX500 mouse over a no-brand office mouse? What about keyboards?
I like my Saitek Eclipse II (it looks so nice) but will it give me any gaming advantage over the Genius K627 (boring thing) it replaced?
If I remember rightly, playing as the second player in Zone of the Enders is like that. The camera stays behind player one, who you're trying to kill, but always looks towards you.
It is exactly that sort of arrogant mindset that can get you into trouble.
Here's a tip: If your estranged wife dies unexpectedly and your lawyer advises you not to testify, don't testify.
I assume it's meant to be pronounced guh-nu-sense.
While I admit that there may be other activities which may have similar traffic patterns, I certainly wouldn't rely on encryption to being the silver bullet that stops ISPs throttling torrents.
I am well aware that there is nothing illegal about bittorrent and if you read my post again, you'll see that I never mentioned legality. I merely commented that using encryption does not automatically hide the fact that you are using P2P as the parent was suggesting.
However, BitTorrent and P2P in general do have some quite specific traits. Since they all rely on connecting to other peers to download, you can easily guess that someone's using bittorrent because they have ~40 open connections, most of which aren't doing much. Encryption does nothing to help this.
After a quick read of the paper, it seems like another use for data collected in a similar way to their Cityware project (although there's no mention of data being shared between the two, they seem to use similar techniques to log bluetooth device encounters).
The crux of their argument seems to be "you can infer personal relationships by looking at which people spend time together in different places," along with a lot of stuff about how the raw data can be analysed to discern this. I can see how this could provide useful information in a prison setting where participation is enforced rather than optional, probably using RFID rather than bluetooth.
Cityware is a project looking at links between social networks online and in real life. They have created a facebook application which allows you to track who you're most in contact with around their base stations in real life (I know there's several around the Bath Uni campus). It works to an extent but is mostly limited by who happens to have bluetooth on and has gaps in their timetable at the same time.
More worrying is how else this data can be used. Last semester I, as part of a group of students, developed a prototype application for a smart phone which would scan for bluetooth devices, look up the facebook profiles of any which were known to Cityware and display a list of people, with a photograph, on the phone's screen. It could also log where you'd met certain people using GPS and store this on a remote database.
Didn't we have this once? I think we called it newsgroups or something?
While this idea is nice, it doesn't account for the diversity and size of the files shared by P2P. It's not feasible for ISPs to hold a copy of every torrent piece that comes through their network.
We thought of that, we called them bookmarks. Make one for every commonly visited site and they get stored in a file which you can take with you. In fact, I believe there some effort going into a project to allow you to store your bookmarks on a server somewhere and grab them from any computer.
.vimrc and .bash_profile and I'm all set (for important stuff at least).
I don't use windows much but when using a new linux computer I copy across my
Yet another person who has missed my point.
I don't want 'mail', I want 'webmail.bath.ac.uk' which is what I'm typing in.
I am typing a url in the url bar because a url is a unique identifier for a web page, it's the way that page is identified and isn't ambiguous.
Why should I want to type in 'mail' let my computer guess that I really want webmail.bath.ac.uk, and have me confirm that when I know I where I want to go?
Did you completely fail to read anything I said? I'll put it on one line so it doesn't get lost.
I only type urls in the url bar so it's unhelpful if it matches things which are not in the url.
That's it, that's my only problem with the awesome bar, the way it looks is fine. If it could only match at the start of the domain or sub-domain like Firefox 2 does that would be even better.