I stand (or more accurately "sit") corrected. That is true, Arar happened under the Liberals (who most recently have been rather conservative themselves mind you). I will agree that Harper is being less toady-like than I expected to be honest, but I am certain when the news gets out down the road we will see their true colours.
My point was simply that I don't believe being in Canada saves you at all from being prosecuted under US law. I think this government will be more than willing to hand someone over if requested. Having lived under them for many years, and having been forced to find officials I can vote for in good conscience, I have lost respect for most Canadian politicians. Trudeau (whom I respected but disagreed with much of the time), Joe Who (whom I respect and like, but dislike the party policies of) and Sven Robinson (who I can't vote for where I am) are the only ones that come to mind at the moment. Harper I have disliked since I first heard of him and don't trust an inch. Jack Leighton - well *possibly*, I don't know him well enough yet.
No, that doesn't matter. I am sure that my govt will happily deport him if the **AA asks them to. We seem to bend over backwards for the US at this point, and for the **AA in particular, just look at the politician they bought recently up here. A Conservative government here in Canada turns us into a mere appendage of the US Government, compliant to their will most of the time. Hell, we just paid out 10 mil in damages to a Canadian Citizen we happily fingered for the US Dept of Homeland security so they could ship him to Syria to be tortured for a year or so even though there was no evidence he supported terrorism. I have no doubt that violating DRM (which is surely as Evil(tm) as terrorism in the eyes of the **AA, in fact they probably want to equate the two) will be sufficient to get this guy exported to some country for torture as well:)
"Government for the corporations, by the corporations, for the benefit of all corporations..." or something to that effect.
I am sure this is just an effort on Oracle's part to capture as much of the low end database market as they can, then offer a seemless, supported upgrade to Oracle's DBMS for those who reach the limits of mysql or who start needing requirements that mysql can't support. This lets them continue to bombard customers with reasons to upgrade, while still getting support contract money from them. If the mysql community benefits from this, I am sure its just an accidental byproduct of a marketing and sales effort and nothing more.
Yes, I am in the same boat. The *only* reason I run Windows XP at the moment is because I play games - titles that are not available for Linux at all - without that I would be running Linux as my desktop without hesitation. The problem for me is simply that I cannot adapt to playing console games (even if the titles I want to play, all MMORPGs - were available for a console that is). Until such time as OSS can somehow pry the games companies out of lapdancing for Microsoft only, or the games companies themselves wake up and start developing for the Mac or Linux as well as Windows (which Microsoft will break arms to prevent of course), I am stuck. When XP stops being able to run games, I guess I have to give up playing them.
Yes, I think rather logically we can assume that when the price of purchasing a movie for download from a commercial service reaches its perceived value, people will choose to purchase the legal version rather than obtain an illegal copy. I think a lot of so-called piracy is really people looking at the cost of purchasing a new release of a movie on DvD (up here in Canada probably between $25 and $29 Cdn) when they think they will watch it once or twice, then add it to the stack collecting dust, and the chance to download it for free, then delete it once they are done watching it - or possibly burn it to DvD and let it collect dust in their office instead of the living room.
The breakpoint is the perceived value, the point where it becomes advantageous enough to pay the couple of bucks and get the legal copy, rather than download an illegal copy. With the legal copy you will probably get other features as well, not necessarily available on the illegal copy.
Right now, most movies are simply not worth the price being asked for them, whatever the studios might like to think they can charge. If they lower their prices (I think around $5 or so would be reasonable) and their expected profits, they will garner more sales and see less piracy I expect.
The problem is they are too used to having their customers by the short and curlies, and they are too used to just *squeezing* whenever they want more money. They now think its a right - not a privalege - to sell to their customers, and they are jealously trying to guard that monopolistic right to vacuum our wallets. Unfortunately for them their Castle walls are built of sand, and the whole thing is crumbling down on them. I think Piracy isn't a problem of people wanting things for free, its an indicator that the prices for music and movies are artificially inflated. The new methods of exchanging information electronically now have radically changed the market and there *nothing they can do about it*. As a Nun once said to the Pope (regarding the issue of Women becoming Priests someday), "You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube":P
...and thats the only reason I am using it. I like to play games, and the *only* platform the games I like to play are available on is MS Windows in some variety. MS knows this, they have been working diligently to ensure that developing games for Windows is as easy as it can be (DirectX, XNA or whatever its called), and as long as they have that chokehold on the gaming industry, many people will end up running Windows even if they would prefer to run something else.
Yes, I could buy a top end Mac, and dual boot it with XP when I want to play - or I can continue to use my current hardware, save a bundle of money and just suffer with Windows.
I really wish more developers would choose to support the Mac or Linux, so that I would have an option, but they don't see it worth the cost of porting (and MS has ensured its not worth the cost by getting them to rely on their proprietary DirectX). Until then my only apparent option for MMORPGS (the games I play) is World of Warcraft, which quite frankly sucks. I really wish the Justice Department in the US had specified that libraries for interoperability like DirectX *must* be made publically available by Microsoft as part of the "slap-on-the-wrist" settlement that MS Bribery no doubt bought them. Instead, they have continued to secure their monopoly at least in this very important area.
The option of playing on a console doesn't appeal to me - and the games I want are not available there in any case. Emulation on Linux is apparently functional but spotty from all I have read, and I don't care to pay the Cedega tax on top of paying a monthly fee for the game.
To be honest, I think if you could break MSes control over gaming it would go a long way towards breaking their monopoly. Theres been plenty of work done on addressing the business side of the house with Open Offce etc, but gaming has been more or less ignored with the exception of Cedega.
I am quite serious. Windows Vista will be going all over the world in some form or another, I would think it was remiss of them if the NSA *didn't* tell MS that they were adding a backdoor to Vista and hand them the code. I bet they will be more cautious about placing it than the last time they added one, but it will be there. I am sure in compensation they help MS tighten up the rest of the security to ensure foreign governments can't crack it as effectively as the NSA.
I am sure this will be modded paranoid, or humourous, but I am actually quite serious. The NSA's job is to spy on foreigners that might be a threat to the US (and now it seems on US citizens as well, given Echelon and all that), so would it be in the US government's national interest to let the Vista OS go out of the country without testing it to make sure its crypto was up to standard - and that the NSA had a way through that crypto if needs be? I don't think so. Oh, and I am a Canadian not a US citizen:P
I don't think the typical user wants to be bothered learning to use a piece of software, they are focused on the task they have to accomplish. If your software easily facilitates that task, with the minimal (preferably zero) learning curve, then they think its a good program, if it obfuscates that task, requires more extensive learning, or simply doesn't perform in the manner they expect it to, then its a bad program. Rightly so in most cases. Its only those in highly technical fields - or computer programmers etc - that usually need software with any real complex functionality. For those individuals, the cost of the learning curve (time and effort) is worthwhile if its more efficient that some other method of accomplishing some complex process or processes (time and effort).
Most programs seem to come with more bells and whistles than they need to, but then I guess they are trying to provide all the tools that I *might* be looking for in one package. I have never used more than about 10% of the features in any office suite for instance, mostly I just want to present a document containing well formatted text in the font I want.
The only place I appreciate complex software is in the areas where it suits my needs - a good IDE, Editor, graphic and sound manipulation software, and the Games I play. Outside of that most software is more hassle than its worth and I resent having to learn to use new programs just to achieve one tiny task.
I think the answer is coming in individual devices that serve specific functions and don't try to go beyond those functions. My cellphone has no camera, no email, no web-browser etc, but it does let me talk and receive calls. Thats all I need it to do. If I wanted the bells and whistles I woulda shelled out $350 Cdn for a Razor:P
So Did Jesus walk on water using cornstarch?
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5 Strangest Materials
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· Score: 1, Interesting
It was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the demo of the people running over the water like that...
As a gamer you don't really have any choice. MS has locked up the game development market, virtually no one develops for any other PC OS, and now they are attempting to extend that into the platform market with the XBOX 360 - a much harder sell I am sure given the presence of competition.
On the desktop though, they have no competition. Until games companies start developing their titles for multiple OSes, this isn't gonna change, and MS has all the PC Gamers by the short and curlies with a good firm grip. By making game development *easy* on the PC, DX10, their new free game-development IDE (Whatever its called), and similar strategies, they ensure developers develop for MS Windows only. I am sure if a major developer decided to develop for other OSes as well, we would start seeing DirectX problems crop up as MS introduced them (they have done that sort of thing in the past after all, and DOJ investigation and lawsuits notwithstanding they don't seem to have changed their tactics at all, and why should they? Its not like they get punished if they abuse their monopoly.)
So whether or not I like it, I will eventually be forced to purchase Vista for my system solely because I play games. Yes, I could be playing WOW on a Mac I realize, but WOW sucks and I have no desire to play it. I can't think of another MMORPG title out there (the only style of game I really play these days) that is available on a different platform. MS has made it too convenient to develop for Windows (and its the major market by far to be fair), and at the same time made it far more difficult to develop for any other platform. Very clever on their part I admit, but I do resent their domination of the PC gaming market intensely.
Yes, yes, I could be running many titles under Cedega and some distro of Linux. I have yet to hear any good experiences with that though, its almost always along the lines of "Well it works kinda, but not for this and that, and don't even try this" etc from most people who post about it. When I play a game I do want to play the whole thing.
If I could play City of Heroes/City of Villains on the Mac, or the upcoming Lord of the Rings Online or Conan: Hyborean Adventures when they are released, I would seriously consider switching over to the Mac, but I know thats not going to happen, so until then, or until I give up games, MS has my soul, like it or not.
I have not experienced this firsthand when I was in Military Signals, but I have certainly been told it can happen - by my instructors, in class and apparently in all seriousness. Its pretty rare but evidently some signals can survive up in the ionosphere for extremely long periods of time. The example they mentioned was having heard message traffic over HF that apparently dated from an exercise shortly after WWII, but received in the late 80's sometime.
I know I have heard a signal I sent, bounce right around the earth and come back to our receiver a few mins later. I also remember picking up a signal on Military frequences in Northern Ontario (I was in the Canadian Military) that originated down in Florida, evidently on a Taxi transmitter, judging by the conversation I had with the guy when I asked him to leave our channel.
Radio is fascinating stuff, its a shame its losing its popularity to the Internet and computers, because its still a very neat and geeky technology.
These two MMPORG titles, although not released this year have both received significant improvements and additions and continue to be the best of MMORPG designs and gameplay IHHO. Challenging missions, excellent tactical combat, good group dynamics, excellent NPC AI, and incredible character creation and costuming system. I am still enjoying these games immensely. Sure, they are not the beall and endall of gaming, but they are excellent titles and very entertaining if you want to relax and engage in some good PvE combat. They also represent some of the best *designed* MMORPG games I have ever played. The developers listen to the players and usually enact good changes and improvements to the game.
Yes, sadly the purpose of a drug company and drug research is not to help people and cure diseases, its to pad the bottom line of the drug company shareholders. But then its like any corporation, no matter how well meaning its members might be, its purpose is to run roughshod over the lives of its customers and suck as much cash out of their hands and into its owner's/shareholder's pockets, period.
If they develop a full blown cure, or an injectable immunization system or whatever, you can bet it will cost a lot, at least at first. I would hope that the various Governments of the world would have the balls to stand up and legislate a reasonable cap on the price for such a solution, given the huge diabetic population we currently have. Yes, I am type II Diabetic myself, and I would love a cure or a solution. Yes, I fully expect to be forced to pay through the nose for any such solution though.
Hey, if Bill Gates is looking for a good way to spend his charity money, perhaps he could be convinced to buy the patent on this "cure" when it emerges and put it into the public domain?:)
I have a friend who used to do architectural blueprints by hand, and was the only one left in his office who made them that way. He was far, far faster than the guys using the CAD systems to draft up plans. The only time he was slower was when a change to a plan had to be made and they could update just the specific section and reprint it and he was stuck with redrawing the whole thing.
With regards to the article, I wouldn't miss CW all that much. I had to take a year of it when I was in the Canadian Forces, and never ever used it in earnest during a 10 year career as a military communicator. People used to dread being ordered to "move to alternate means" (meaning break out the key and start working in morse), and it was amazing how many keys were suddenly "broken" when they had checked out just fine when the det was deployed.
I would enjoy getting into HAM I think, but for the expense of buying the equipment etc. I don't think I recall all that much about radio operations at the moment - other than voice proceedure which I am sure never leaves you - and I am sorry to say I don't really recall my morse all that well despite hundreds of hours in the simulators listening to it and sending it.
I did meet guys who worked morse all the time, and some of them could listen to it and hear not the code character by character, but entire *sentances* at a time.
One example I just read about somewhere (possibly on/. not sure) is the use of Javascript and frames to capture username/password information for Phishers. So instead of making a false webpage and linking to it, they make a set of invisible frames that display the real website and say your bank account login page - then use JS to pull the values from those fields when you enter your data. I haven't looked into whether or not this is possible mind you, just read someone commenting that it was en vogue at the moment.
I am currently building a AJAX-ish application as a hobby (basically an SVG based napoleonic combat simulator that we can use to fight napoleonic battles in a Napoleonic Campaign management program a friend is working on). I am constantly considering how it could be fucked up by someone with a will to do so and trying to build in checks to ensure that everything the client does can be validated on the server end before I do anything with it. I imagine it will take several passes and many improvements to try to harden this up to ensure we maintain some level of security.
Personally, I think its time for another environment to be specced out, something that replaces both ActiveX (which I would never use) and Javascript (which I reluctantly use) that permits client side activity in an environment that is specifically designed to avoid insecurities (built in form validation functions etc). I haven't looked into XUL yet and that might help me in many ways. Thats a future project:)
What matters with an MMORPG is how long the minimum session is effectively. In City of Heroes/City of Villains, I can pop on and play 1 mission on a character in about 20 mins or so. I can pick up the character and be in a mission in less than ~1 min I would bet, a bit longer if I need/want to find a group first of course. The action is quick, varied enough, challenging (and you can set the challenge rating to harder levels if its too easy), and most of all fun. Its particularly fun when you get a good working group of friends together and take on something really challenging as a group. These factors make it a casual friendly game
Star Wars Galaxies on the other hand, is a real Sandbox game, despite the recent dumbing down of the entire game, particularly if you play a crafter as I do. As a result although I can log in for a few mins to check my harvesters or vendors, actually getting anything practical accomplished (ie making new crafted items and putting them up for sale), or playing on my alt combat character (which I seldom do), requires me to know that I have at least an hour's time in advance, because everything you do requires other actions or preparations etc. I am also fairly social in SWG, so I get a lot of tells in game and spend a lot of time just chatting with people to keep up with events and coordinate activities.
I don't even consider the notion of playing a game that would last less than 30 hours. I can't see justifying spending the money on something so short lived. Now, games with high replay value I might consider I suppose, but if I can't spend literally hundreds of hours on it over time, whats the point in getting invested in it? I have played City of Heroes since release, City of Villains since beta, and SWG since release - each with a few months break here and there. Prior to those I played Dark Age of Camelot for 2.5 years, prior to that 8 months of EQ. Each game satisfies a different style of gaming for me. I have spent hundreds, probably thousands of hours playing these games so far. Since my wife plays with me, we seldom watch TV and prefer online games. The only TV shows I can recall watching in the last year are Heroes the Series, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. For me online games have replaced the passive entertainment of television. Not much of a step up but they are at least more active mentally. This of course gives the impression that this is all I do and thats not the case. I still find plenty of time to hold down 2 PT jobs, code projects and get together with friends etc.
Ah I hadn't thought of this (but then I don't Phish), do Mozilla or IE7 warn the user if they browse an SSL address through frames? If not then they should...
Its a neat (flash based sadly) tool allowing you to identify which heads of various corporations are also heads of other corporations and see the web of power and influence they exert. I am sure these individuals don't think of themselves as the defacto government, but I think they are rapidly becoming it.
The core evil to my mind, the main mistake, was in allowing a corporation to have legal status as a type of individual - a "corporate entity" as such. In this role it ends up having more rights than a citizen, and that makes it superior to a citizen in some sense.
Ah the beloved days of BBSing and running a Fidonet feed for message forums - I also maintained one for PODS for that matter - and the joy of phoning long distance over a 2400 baud modem to download several hundred messages each night. I quickly upgraded to a 14.4 though it cost me dearly to do so, but even that didn't save me from $200+ phone bills every month. I think in all the time I ran a BBS, I got a total of $160 donated to me in total.
Well, CCCP never actuallly stood for "Central Comittee of the Communist Party" in any case, thats a misinterpretation. The "C" is the Cyrillic alphabet "/S/" sound and the "P" is the Cyrillic "/R/" sound, so you would pronounce this abbreviation in Russian as "Ess Ess Ess Air", and it stood for "Soyuz Sovyetski Sotsialisticheski Ryespublik" meaning "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics".
Yet I have read a couple of studies that concluded that typical browser users are resistant to scrolling and show a tendancy to lose interest in the contents of a page if they are forced to scroll. So while you might argue that its easy enough to do, depending on your user, you might want to avoid it if possible. Breaking a long article up into chunks can make it a bit easier to digest and perhaps less intimidating to the viewer, it can help divide a subject into more manageable seeming segments etc. I think that is the real reason you see many articles broken up into distinct segments displayed on seperate webpages, rather that just the opportunity to present more advertising, although that may well be a factor of course.
As for color, black text on a white background works better than any other color combination apparently. We have settled on this combination due to centuries of trial and error and I am sure if some other combination worked better we would all be using blue ink on orange paper or whatever combination worked best in the end. Its a matter of making the writing visually distinct and contrasting it with the page while not overly straining the eyes. If other combinations were more effective don't you think the publishing industry would have switched to them by now? Now, admittedly with a CRT we are talking active color sources, not passive reflective surfaces, so I am sure that makes a difference and results in higher eye strain. I look forward to new types of visual display that rely on different means to display their images in the future.
Yep, or better yet ask the political parties that run in the elections to contribute their support for the project. Why not see who *really* believes in fair democratic voting? ")
Would you support and even recommend the creation of an open-source competition to create a reliable and verifiable open-source voting machine system design (software and hardware) that would be run along the lines of the Ansari-X Prize project? I.E. Getting various organizations to put up money for a competition to develop such a machine along with the software to manage it, so that private individuals or corporations could work to develop such a system, and the result would be freely available world-wide to anyone seeking a reliable and affordable machine.
The primary goal would be a reliable voting system, the secondary objective would be to bring in such a system at an affordable cost so that it can more easily be implemented anywhere by any government or organization.
Given the importance of evoting machines to the reliability of Democratic elections, such a project would seem to be a perfect target for this sort of competition, and I can't see any downsides to it that would make such a project a poor idea. Making the requirements include open source software would seem to preclude a lot of potential problems with regards to the security of any voting system, making the requirements include the fact that the design must also be open-source and thus manufacturable by anyone also eliminates many potential problems it seems to me. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the concept...
Despite its may faults and its slow fall from grace as a fantastic and innovative game to a derivitive unoriginal and badly implemented immitation of World of Warcraft (without any of the polish), I still love SWG, mostly because I am a crafter 99% of the time there. The crafting, while also degenerated considerably, is still entertaining and I enjoy making things and selling them.
I have worked my way up to a highpoint of 80m credits in my possession without ever a) buying any off of Ebay which smacks of cheating, or b) ever having a decent combat character who was capable of making a ton of money off of loot in the NGE (the current iteration of the game). I have played SWG off and on since day 2 (you couldn't log in on day 1 at all), and it continues to satisfy some itch.
Its a shame that they have reduced the game to its current state, but I still find it worth playing at least in my own small segment of the game. I have mastered 19 of the 32 original professions on my main character, and tried out every form of crafting to be had in game except the medical and bio-engineer crafting (now removed from the game in any case). Its all good:)
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I stand (or more accurately "sit") corrected. That is true, Arar happened under the Liberals (who most recently have been rather conservative themselves mind you). I will agree that Harper is being less toady-like than I expected to be honest, but I am certain when the news gets out down the road we will see their true colours.
My point was simply that I don't believe being in Canada saves you at all from being prosecuted under US law. I think this government will be more than willing to hand someone over if requested. Having lived under them for many years, and having been forced to find officials I can vote for in good conscience, I have lost respect for most Canadian politicians. Trudeau (whom I respected but disagreed with much of the time), Joe Who (whom I respect and like, but dislike the party policies of) and Sven Robinson (who I can't vote for where I am) are the only ones that come to mind at the moment. Harper I have disliked since I first heard of him and don't trust an inch. Jack Leighton - well *possibly*, I don't know him well enough yet.
No, that doesn't matter. I am sure that my govt will happily deport him if the **AA asks them to. We seem to bend over backwards for the US at this point, and for the **AA in particular, just look at the politician they bought recently up here. A Conservative government here in Canada turns us into a mere appendage of the US Government, compliant to their will most of the time. Hell, we just paid out 10 mil in damages to a Canadian Citizen we happily fingered for the US Dept of Homeland security so they could ship him to Syria to be tortured for a year or so even though there was no evidence he supported terrorism. I have no doubt that violating DRM (which is surely as Evil(tm) as terrorism in the eyes of the **AA, in fact they probably want to equate the two) will be sufficient to get this guy exported to some country for torture as well :)
"Government for the corporations, by the corporations, for the benefit of all corporations..." or something to that effect.
I am sure this is just an effort on Oracle's part to capture as much of the low end database market as they can, then offer a seemless, supported upgrade to Oracle's DBMS for those who reach the limits of mysql or who start needing requirements that mysql can't support. This lets them continue to bombard customers with reasons to upgrade, while still getting support contract money from them. If the mysql community benefits from this, I am sure its just an accidental byproduct of a marketing and sales effort and nothing more.
Yes, I am in the same boat. The *only* reason I run Windows XP at the moment is because I play games - titles that are not available for Linux at all - without that I would be running Linux as my desktop without hesitation. The problem for me is simply that I cannot adapt to playing console games (even if the titles I want to play, all MMORPGs - were available for a console that is). Until such time as OSS can somehow pry the games companies out of lapdancing for Microsoft only, or the games companies themselves wake up and start developing for the Mac or Linux as well as Windows (which Microsoft will break arms to prevent of course), I am stuck. When XP stops being able to run games, I guess I have to give up playing them.
Yes, I think rather logically we can assume that when the price of purchasing a movie for download from a commercial service reaches its perceived value, people will choose to purchase the legal version rather than obtain an illegal copy. I think a lot of so-called piracy is really people looking at the cost of purchasing a new release of a movie on DvD (up here in Canada probably between $25 and $29 Cdn) when they think they will watch it once or twice, then add it to the stack collecting dust, and the chance to download it for free, then delete it once they are done watching it - or possibly burn it to DvD and let it collect dust in their office instead of the living room.
:P
The breakpoint is the perceived value, the point where it becomes advantageous enough to pay the couple of bucks and get the legal copy, rather than download an illegal copy. With the legal copy you will probably get other features as well, not necessarily available on the illegal copy.
Right now, most movies are simply not worth the price being asked for them, whatever the studios might like to think they can charge. If they lower their prices (I think around $5 or so would be reasonable) and their expected profits, they will garner more sales and see less piracy I expect.
The problem is they are too used to having their customers by the short and curlies, and they are too used to just *squeezing* whenever they want more money. They now think its a right - not a privalege - to sell to their customers, and they are jealously trying to guard that monopolistic right to vacuum our wallets. Unfortunately for them their Castle walls are built of sand, and the whole thing is crumbling down on them. I think Piracy isn't a problem of people wanting things for free, its an indicator that the prices for music and movies are artificially inflated. The new methods of exchanging information electronically now have radically changed the market and there *nothing they can do about it*. As a Nun once said to the Pope (regarding the issue of Women becoming Priests someday), "You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube"
...and thats the only reason I am using it. I like to play games, and the *only* platform the games I like to play are available on is MS Windows in some variety. MS knows this, they have been working diligently to ensure that developing games for Windows is as easy as it can be (DirectX, XNA or whatever its called), and as long as they have that chokehold on the gaming industry, many people will end up running Windows even if they would prefer to run something else.
Yes, I could buy a top end Mac, and dual boot it with XP when I want to play - or I can continue to use my current hardware, save a bundle of money and just suffer with Windows.
I really wish more developers would choose to support the Mac or Linux, so that I would have an option, but they don't see it worth the cost of porting (and MS has ensured its not worth the cost by getting them to rely on their proprietary DirectX). Until then my only apparent option for MMORPGS (the games I play) is World of Warcraft, which quite frankly sucks. I really wish the Justice Department in the US had specified that libraries for interoperability like DirectX *must* be made publically available by Microsoft as part of the "slap-on-the-wrist" settlement that MS Bribery no doubt bought them. Instead, they have continued to secure their monopoly at least in this very important area.
The option of playing on a console doesn't appeal to me - and the games I want are not available there in any case. Emulation on Linux is apparently functional but spotty from all I have read, and I don't care to pay the Cedega tax on top of paying a monthly fee for the game.
To be honest, I think if you could break MSes control over gaming it would go a long way towards breaking their monopoly. Theres been plenty of work done on addressing the business side of the house with Open Offce etc, but gaming has been more or less ignored with the exception of Cedega.
I am quite serious. Windows Vista will be going all over the world in some form or another, I would think it was remiss of them if the NSA *didn't* tell MS that they were adding a backdoor to Vista and hand them the code. I bet they will be more cautious about placing it than the last time they added one, but it will be there. I am sure in compensation they help MS tighten up the rest of the security to ensure foreign governments can't crack it as effectively as the NSA.
:P
I am sure this will be modded paranoid, or humourous, but I am actually quite serious. The NSA's job is to spy on foreigners that might be a threat to the US (and now it seems on US citizens as well, given Echelon and all that), so would it be in the US government's national interest to let the Vista OS go out of the country without testing it to make sure its crypto was up to standard - and that the NSA had a way through that crypto if needs be? I don't think so. Oh, and I am a Canadian not a US citizen
I don't think the typical user wants to be bothered learning to use a piece of software, they are focused on the task they have to accomplish. If your software easily facilitates that task, with the minimal (preferably zero) learning curve, then they think its a good program, if it obfuscates that task, requires more extensive learning, or simply doesn't perform in the manner they expect it to, then its a bad program. Rightly so in most cases. Its only those in highly technical fields - or computer programmers etc - that usually need software with any real complex functionality. For those individuals, the cost of the learning curve (time and effort) is worthwhile if its more efficient that some other method of accomplishing some complex process or processes (time and effort).
:P
Most programs seem to come with more bells and whistles than they need to, but then I guess they are trying to provide all the tools that I *might* be looking for in one package. I have never used more than about 10% of the features in any office suite for instance, mostly I just want to present a document containing well formatted text in the font I want.
The only place I appreciate complex software is in the areas where it suits my needs - a good IDE, Editor, graphic and sound manipulation software, and the Games I play. Outside of that most software is more hassle than its worth and I resent having to learn to use new programs just to achieve one tiny task.
I think the answer is coming in individual devices that serve specific functions and don't try to go beyond those functions. My cellphone has no camera, no email, no web-browser etc, but it does let me talk and receive calls. Thats all I need it to do. If I wanted the bells and whistles I woulda shelled out $350 Cdn for a Razor
It was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the demo of the people running over the water like that...
As a gamer you don't really have any choice. MS has locked up the game development market, virtually no one develops for any other PC OS, and now they are attempting to extend that into the platform market with the XBOX 360 - a much harder sell I am sure given the presence of competition.
On the desktop though, they have no competition. Until games companies start developing their titles for multiple OSes, this isn't gonna change, and MS has all the PC Gamers by the short and curlies with a good firm grip. By making game development *easy* on the PC, DX10, their new free game-development IDE (Whatever its called), and similar strategies, they ensure developers develop for MS Windows only. I am sure if a major developer decided to develop for other OSes as well, we would start seeing DirectX problems crop up as MS introduced them (they have done that sort of thing in the past after all, and DOJ investigation and lawsuits notwithstanding they don't seem to have changed their tactics at all, and why should they? Its not like they get punished if they abuse their monopoly.)
So whether or not I like it, I will eventually be forced to purchase Vista for my system solely because I play games. Yes, I could be playing WOW on a Mac I realize, but WOW sucks and I have no desire to play it. I can't think of another MMORPG title out there (the only style of game I really play these days) that is available on a different platform. MS has made it too convenient to develop for Windows (and its the major market by far to be fair), and at the same time made it far more difficult to develop for any other platform. Very clever on their part I admit, but I do resent their domination of the PC gaming market intensely.
Yes, yes, I could be running many titles under Cedega and some distro of Linux. I have yet to hear any good experiences with that though, its almost always along the lines of "Well it works kinda, but not for this and that, and don't even try this" etc from most people who post about it. When I play a game I do want to play the whole thing.
If I could play City of Heroes/City of Villains on the Mac, or the upcoming Lord of the Rings Online or Conan: Hyborean Adventures when they are released, I would seriously consider switching over to the Mac, but I know thats not going to happen, so until then, or until I give up games, MS has my soul, like it or not.
I have not experienced this firsthand when I was in Military Signals, but I have certainly been told it can happen - by my instructors, in class and apparently in all seriousness. Its pretty rare but evidently some signals can survive up in the ionosphere for extremely long periods of time. The example they mentioned was having heard message traffic over HF that apparently dated from an exercise shortly after WWII, but received in the late 80's sometime.
I know I have heard a signal I sent, bounce right around the earth and come back to our receiver a few mins later. I also remember picking up a signal on Military frequences in Northern Ontario (I was in the Canadian Military) that originated down in Florida, evidently on a Taxi transmitter, judging by the conversation I had with the guy when I asked him to leave our channel.
Radio is fascinating stuff, its a shame its losing its popularity to the Internet and computers, because its still a very neat and geeky technology.
These two MMPORG titles, although not released this year have both received significant improvements and additions and continue to be the best of MMORPG designs and gameplay IHHO. Challenging missions, excellent tactical combat, good group dynamics, excellent NPC AI, and incredible character creation and costuming system. I am still enjoying these games immensely. Sure, they are not the beall and endall of gaming, but they are excellent titles and very entertaining if you want to relax and engage in some good PvE combat. They also represent some of the best *designed* MMORPG games I have ever played. The developers listen to the players and usually enact good changes and improvements to the game.
Yes, sadly the purpose of a drug company and drug research is not to help people and cure diseases, its to pad the bottom line of the drug company shareholders. But then its like any corporation, no matter how well meaning its members might be, its purpose is to run roughshod over the lives of its customers and suck as much cash out of their hands and into its owner's/shareholder's pockets, period.
:)
If they develop a full blown cure, or an injectable immunization system or whatever, you can bet it will cost a lot, at least at first. I would hope that the various Governments of the world would have the balls to stand up and legislate a reasonable cap on the price for such a solution, given the huge diabetic population we currently have. Yes, I am type II Diabetic myself, and I would love a cure or a solution. Yes, I fully expect to be forced to pay through the nose for any such solution though.
Hey, if Bill Gates is looking for a good way to spend his charity money, perhaps he could be convinced to buy the patent on this "cure" when it emerges and put it into the public domain?
I have a friend who used to do architectural blueprints by hand, and was the only one left in his office who made them that way. He was far, far faster than the guys using the CAD systems to draft up plans. The only time he was slower was when a change to a plan had to be made and they could update just the specific section and reprint it and he was stuck with redrawing the whole thing.
With regards to the article, I wouldn't miss CW all that much. I had to take a year of it when I was in the Canadian Forces, and never ever used it in earnest during a 10 year career as a military communicator. People used to dread being ordered to "move to alternate means" (meaning break out the key and start working in morse), and it was amazing how many keys were suddenly "broken" when they had checked out just fine when the det was deployed.
I would enjoy getting into HAM I think, but for the expense of buying the equipment etc. I don't think I recall all that much about radio operations at the moment - other than voice proceedure which I am sure never leaves you - and I am sorry to say I don't really recall my morse all that well despite hundreds of hours in the simulators listening to it and sending it.
I did meet guys who worked morse all the time, and some of them could listen to it and hear not the code character by character, but entire *sentances* at a time.
One example I just read about somewhere (possibly on /. not sure) is the use of Javascript and frames to capture username/password information for Phishers. So instead of making a false webpage and linking to it, they make a set of invisible frames that display the real website and say your bank account login page - then use JS to pull the values from those fields when you enter your data. I haven't looked into whether or not this is possible mind you, just read someone commenting that it was en vogue at the moment.
:)
I am currently building a AJAX-ish application as a hobby (basically an SVG based napoleonic combat simulator that we can use to fight napoleonic battles in a Napoleonic Campaign management program a friend is working on). I am constantly considering how it could be fucked up by someone with a will to do so and trying to build in checks to ensure that everything the client does can be validated on the server end before I do anything with it. I imagine it will take several passes and many improvements to try to harden this up to ensure we maintain some level of security.
Personally, I think its time for another environment to be specced out, something that replaces both ActiveX (which I would never use) and Javascript (which I reluctantly use) that permits client side activity in an environment that is specifically designed to avoid insecurities (built in form validation functions etc). I haven't looked into XUL yet and that might help me in many ways. Thats a future project
What matters with an MMORPG is how long the minimum session is effectively. In City of Heroes/City of Villains, I can pop on and play 1 mission on a character in about 20 mins or so. I can pick up the character and be in a mission in less than ~1 min I would bet, a bit longer if I need/want to find a group first of course. The action is quick, varied enough, challenging (and you can set the challenge rating to harder levels if its too easy), and most of all fun. Its particularly fun when you get a good working group of friends together and take on something really challenging as a group. These factors make it a casual friendly game
Star Wars Galaxies on the other hand, is a real Sandbox game, despite the recent dumbing down of the entire game, particularly if you play a crafter as I do. As a result although I can log in for a few mins to check my harvesters or vendors, actually getting anything practical accomplished (ie making new crafted items and putting them up for sale), or playing on my alt combat character (which I seldom do), requires me to know that I have at least an hour's time in advance, because everything you do requires other actions or preparations etc. I am also fairly social in SWG, so I get a lot of tells in game and spend a lot of time just chatting with people to keep up with events and coordinate activities.
I don't even consider the notion of playing a game that would last less than 30 hours. I can't see justifying spending the money on something so short lived. Now, games with high replay value I might consider I suppose, but if I can't spend literally hundreds of hours on it over time, whats the point in getting invested in it? I have played City of Heroes since release, City of Villains since beta, and SWG since release - each with a few months break here and there. Prior to those I played Dark Age of Camelot for 2.5 years, prior to that 8 months of EQ. Each game satisfies a different style of gaming for me. I have spent hundreds, probably thousands of hours playing these games so far. Since my wife plays with me, we seldom watch TV and prefer online games. The only TV shows I can recall watching in the last year are Heroes the Series, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. For me online games have replaced the passive entertainment of television. Not much of a step up but they are at least more active mentally. This of course gives the impression that this is all I do and thats not the case. I still find plenty of time to hold down 2 PT jobs, code projects and get together with friends etc.
Ah I hadn't thought of this (but then I don't Phish), do Mozilla or IE7 warn the user if they browse an SSL address through frames? If not then they should...
This seems like a good opportunity to mention "They Rule" located here:
They Rule
Its a neat (flash based sadly) tool allowing you to identify which heads of various corporations are also heads of other corporations and see the web of power and influence they exert. I am sure these individuals don't think of themselves as the defacto government, but I think they are rapidly becoming it.
The core evil to my mind, the main mistake, was in allowing a corporation to have legal status as a type of individual - a "corporate entity" as such. In this role it ends up having more rights than a citizen, and that makes it superior to a citizen in some sense.
Ah the beloved days of BBSing and running a Fidonet feed for message forums - I also maintained one for PODS for that matter - and the joy of phoning long distance over a 2400 baud modem to download several hundred messages each night. I quickly upgraded to a 14.4 though it cost me dearly to do so, but even that didn't save me from $200+ phone bills every month. I think in all the time I ran a BBS, I got a total of $160 donated to me in total.
Well, CCCP never actuallly stood for "Central Comittee of the Communist Party" in any case, thats a misinterpretation. The "C" is the Cyrillic alphabet "/S/" sound and the "P" is the Cyrillic "/R/" sound, so you would pronounce this abbreviation in Russian as "Ess Ess Ess Air", and it stood for "Soyuz Sovyetski Sotsialisticheski Ryespublik" meaning "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics".
Yet I have read a couple of studies that concluded that typical browser users are resistant to scrolling and show a tendancy to lose interest in the contents of a page if they are forced to scroll. So while you might argue that its easy enough to do, depending on your user, you might want to avoid it if possible. Breaking a long article up into chunks can make it a bit easier to digest and perhaps less intimidating to the viewer, it can help divide a subject into more manageable seeming segments etc. I think that is the real reason you see many articles broken up into distinct segments displayed on seperate webpages, rather that just the opportunity to present more advertising, although that may well be a factor of course.
As for color, black text on a white background works better than any other color combination apparently. We have settled on this combination due to centuries of trial and error and I am sure if some other combination worked better we would all be using blue ink on orange paper or whatever combination worked best in the end. Its a matter of making the writing visually distinct and contrasting it with the page while not overly straining the eyes. If other combinations were more effective don't you think the publishing industry would have switched to them by now? Now, admittedly with a CRT we are talking active color sources, not passive reflective surfaces, so I am sure that makes a difference and results in higher eye strain. I look forward to new types of visual display that rely on different means to display their images in the future.
Yep, or better yet ask the political parties that run in the elections to contribute their support for the project. Why not see who *really* believes in fair democratic voting? ")
Would you support and even recommend the creation of an open-source competition to create a reliable and verifiable open-source voting machine system design (software and hardware) that would be run along the lines of the Ansari-X Prize project? I.E. Getting various organizations to put up money for a competition to develop such a machine along with the software to manage it, so that private individuals or corporations could work to develop such a system, and the result would be freely available world-wide to anyone seeking a reliable and affordable machine.
The primary goal would be a reliable voting system, the secondary objective would be to bring in such a system at an affordable cost so that it can more easily be implemented anywhere by any government or organization.
Given the importance of evoting machines to the reliability of Democratic elections, such a project would seem to be a perfect target for this sort of competition, and I can't see any downsides to it that would make such a project a poor idea. Making the requirements include open source software would seem to preclude a lot of potential problems with regards to the security of any voting system, making the requirements include the fact that the design must also be open-source and thus manufacturable by anyone also eliminates many potential problems it seems to me. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the concept...
well it had to be said didn't it?
Despite its may faults and its slow fall from grace as a fantastic and innovative game to a derivitive unoriginal and badly implemented immitation of World of Warcraft (without any of the polish), I still love SWG, mostly because I am a crafter 99% of the time there. The crafting, while also degenerated considerably, is still entertaining and I enjoy making things and selling them.
:)
I have worked my way up to a highpoint of 80m credits in my possession without ever a) buying any off of Ebay which smacks of cheating, or b) ever having a decent combat character who was capable of making a ton of money off of loot in the NGE (the current iteration of the game). I have played SWG off and on since day 2 (you couldn't log in on day 1 at all), and it continues to satisfy some itch.
Its a shame that they have reduced the game to its current state, but I still find it worth playing at least in my own small segment of the game. I have mastered 19 of the 32 original professions on my main character, and tried out every form of crafting to be had in game except the medical and bio-engineer crafting (now removed from the game in any case). Its all good