when you install Purify, it increases the installed count in IBM's system, and decreases it when you uninstall... I install Purify in a VMware virtual machine, snapshot it, uninstall Purify, and roll the virtual machine back to the snapshot. That way, Purify will work in the virtual machine, but IBM's servers will think I haven't used any of my licenses
Even better, you can repeat the rollback/uninstall process, and IBM will think you're using negative licenses!
Imagine being the idiot that used their full 20:23 length digitally remastered copy of "Yes, The Revealing Science of God", who's on dialup, and has to enter their password in order to change it.
Fortunately, I think the idea is to hash the file on the client side, and just send the hash. Which is something on the order of 32 bytes.
But the motion sensors by themselves are not the wiimote's main feature; the pointer is, which requires the sensor bar.
To take that a little further: The accelerometers in the Wiimote SUCK -- hence this new "MotionPlus" attachment they've got in the pipline. They're so bad, they're frequently an impediment to gameplay -- e.g., Wii Golf is pretty much unplayable, 'cause the accelerometers can't detect putts reliably.
Strangely enough, people keep choosing (A) and (B), under the amazing delusion that somehow if you make all the transactions really complicated -- shuffle the dollar bills around fast enough -- we can receive more value in health care than we pay out in actual money. Proof that the bitter lesson of TANSTAAFL has not been learned by most adults.
Yes, the system, viewed as a whole, is a net economic loss (if you ignore the benefit of keeping the workforce healthy). But individuals can and do receive more from health insurance than they put in. It's all about reducing individual risk, by spreading it over the larger group.
We pay into insurance policies because we want to make sure we won't die if we're the unlucky guy who ends up needing $200,000 worth of medical procedures.
I've only had one occasion to put my Disc Doctor to use, but I was pleased with the results.
I was playing a PS2 game when the cats bolted by, and snagged a cable, pulling the unit off its shelf. It hit the floor with the drive spinning, leaving an obvious gouge in the disk. The game refused to load; I attempted a few applications of toothpaste, testing the disk between each. Sometimes it got a little further in the load process; sometimes it made the problem worse.
I bought a disc doctor, ran it over the thing once, and all was good.
It leaves a visible wear pattern on the disc, however -- the thing apparently just grinds a thin, even layer off the disc surface. As such, I'd use it as only a last resort, but I definitely trust it more than toothpaste.
Similarly, I'm not using DVDs etc. for my server backup. A few years back, seeing how much my provider would charge me for a decent amount of backup space, I opted to get an additional server instead
It's important, when using this method, that your second server be in a separate datacenter.
Duplicating your data is only half of a backup plan. The other half is making sure that at least one of those duplicates is in a physically separate location.
There are many things that can conceivably take down entire datacenters -- theft, bankruptcy, utility outages, floods, fire, earthquakes...
While these things are somewhat unlikely, they *do* happen, and you don't want to lose years of work if they do.
the most widely used Battle.net cheats are actually licensed under the GNU GPL - there's even some kind of application framework for interacting with the game programmatically floating around on the web...
The MMO Asheron's Call, a contemporary of better-known Everquest, has had a framework like this for years, known as Decal.
Interestingly, the developers of asheron's call (Turbine) chose to embrace the 3rd party development community. As a result, players have used the framework to extend and improve the game client; many community improvements have eventually been rolled into the official client (e.g., showing the health/mana of your party members in a single panel, and allegiance-wide chat). Turbine even went as far as to hire several of the top decal plugin developers.
This has lead to a fairly unique game, with player-run bots running unattended trades, offering trade-skill services, and help new players with magical enhancements.
Of course, with all the positive contributions that enhance gameplay, there have been negative ones as well. Combat macroing became commonplace, allowing characters to advance without human intervention; at first this was more or less endorsed by Turbine, but a few years ago they finally ruled against running combat macros while away from the keyboard. To enforce this, they started giving basic Turing tests to players that were suspected of violating this rule.
It's been an interesting experiment. I definitely respect Turbine for *not* taking the Blizzard route, and banning players by the tens of thousands, and suing third party developers. Their philosophy that it's the developer's responsibility for creating exploitable bugs, and not the players' fault for exploiting them is certainly player friendly.
But at the end of the day, it's hard to say if it was all for the better, as the game slowly fades into obscurity, with subscription numbers a tenth of what they were at the game's peak. Those of us who played during the game's heyday certainly enjoyed the ride, but blizzard's aggressive anti-cheating stance may be necessary to building a billion-dollar a year revenue stream.
Yes but if they succeed then Google will remove the offending images and we will only be able to see their house as it appears from the public street, which is the way things should be.
They already did, when they first complained. This lawsuit is just a cash grab.
Cheap used laptops are great... provided they keep running.
I bought a used T40 a few months ago. Didn't last two months. My dad bought a used HP POS a month ago. Only lasted a few weeks.
You can get a real steal, but who knows how long the thing will last. For me, the inconvenience of having to deal with laptops crashing makes the greater expenditure of buying a new, reliable notebook well worth it -- even if it's lower spec than a used unit.
It does not reflect well on the software community that most people *still* do not know to do this for very large scale system designs.
This sort of knowledge gap exists in many arenas. A classic error in client-server software: never trust the client. So many "hacks" in online games boil down to the game server trusting the game client to obey the rules, when it's really the server's responsibility to handle all the rule enforcement.
So, yes, software developers as a group frequently fail to learn from those who came before them. In part, this probably has to do with existing education -- it seems like most college programs are always years behind the curve. There's also seems to be a large disconnect between the academic community and the rest; scientists can keep up to date on progress in the field reading academic journals and the like. Programmers, on the other hand, seem to disappear into corporations after college, where much of their knowledge becomes proprietary.
The lack of efficient knowledge sharing in our field is causing us to repeat the same mistakes for decades on end.
I'm getting really tired of people bashing apple as "locked down" with DRM. Last time I checked, it was the other guy who spent upwards of a decade re-engineering their entire os with the specific purpose of DRM
I generally agree that Apple is a pretty decent corporate citizen, but let's be honest here: they're the world's #1 retailer of DRM'd music.
Now, they had to make concessions to the RIAA to get popular artists' music, in a time when digital music distribution was totally unproven, and music piracy was on the rise... But apple's no white knight. They're definitely not aligned with the FSF's ideals, but they're not totally evil.
The biggest computer manufacturers are still selling machines in the $1000 price range. If you look inside, you'll see that these machines are typically mostly air inside
Yeah... have you ever tried working in one of the smaller cases?
When I met my wife, she had a compaq in a slightly smaller than average case. Unfortunately, making the case smaller meant that you had to take out the power supply to add a stick of RAM.
And of course, the closer you pack components, the more difficult cooling becomes. And manufacturing costs rise.
There is definitely something to be said for smaller cases in some contexts. But for anyone interested in building their own machines for cheap, and doing their own upgrades, big cases are still desirable.
And really, as much as I love your radio analogy, I have to contrast it with a car analogy: things keep getting packed in tighter and tighter under the hood, making maintenance that used to be simple take hours longer than it would have taken a '70s era car.
To a certain extent, I agree with you wholeheartedly -- for some applications, 1998's hardware is good enough, and it should come in small packages. The prime example of that is smartphones/PDAs. But for other applications, "big" and "overpowered" is exactly what I want.
It's about boxes around the TV and connectors on the back of it. I use my xbox to play DVDs. Sure I could get a DVD player for $30, but why would I want an extra remote, extra box, extra connection etc.
Allow me to emphasize:
I use my xbox to play DVDs
That's my point. You already have a DVD player. You only have one input on your TV? Buy a switch box.
Wow, talk about a strange corollary. Linux desktop adoption has nothing at all to do with Mac market share.
Is it really that much of a stretch to call OS X a heavily customized BSD distro? Hell, apple even markets it as UNIX-based
Have you played around on the command line on an OS X install? It runs bash, has a full set of CLI tools (find, grep, ssh, etc.), config files are in/etc/, you have to sudo to get anything done...
You could SSH in to one of these things, and not realize you were on a mac for several minutes. The/Applications and/Users dirs would probably give it away eventually.
*nix on the desktop is here. Granted, it's a proprietary commercial distro... But it's a step in the right direction, no?
That's the only feature missing on the Wii, in my opinion, anyway.
Really? At home, I've got two laptops, a desktop, a PlayStation 2, and a DVD/VCR combo -- all of which play DVDs. The fact that my Wii does not also play DVDs has not been an issue.
Hell, I didn't even find out that it doesn't play DVDs I read it on the 'net, months after having purchased my unit.
Are there really that many people who would purchase Wiis that don't already have a DVD player set up? When you can pick one up at Wal Mart for $40 or less...
IMO, the biggest thing working against the Wii is that it's being treated as a last-gen console by many developers. The Wii port of Guitar Hero 3 had graphics worse than the PS2 version of GH2. Rockband for Wii has no online capability whatsoever, even though GH3 had some, and GH4 is planned to have full online capability on Wii.
It seems like the development process these days is:
Develop original version for PS3/Xbox360
Backport to PS2, cutting out features and reduce graphical complexity
Port PS2 version to Wii
Which really shortchanges Wii owners. Yes, the console is far less capable by the PS3/Xbox360... but it's far more capable than the PS2. Try to fully utilize the hardware. Please.
But no company can make something and offer no help or support, period. That's not legal.
Really? What happened to selling things "as is"? What happened to the disclaimers that ship with lots of software? ("There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE"). Are the guys at OSDisc required to provide support for the linux distros they sell?
Yes, Vista is inferior to XP in many ways. Lots of new products are inferior to old products in many ways. If a company is done with a product, consumers do not have a right to force them to keep supplying it.
You're right, we have no right to force them to, but we have every right to let them know, loudly and publicly, that we really, really want them to.
It's not a matter of "We'll make whatever we damn well please, and you'll buy it because we tell you to". In a functioning market, producers respond to consumer demand. And consumers are demanding something other than vista.
So if Microsoft spends $1 billion on development, Apple probably needs to spend at least $500 million to keep up.
Forgive me if I have a little trouble taking that as a given. GUI operating systems really haven't changed that much in the last decade. Windows has changed even less, since Windows 2000. Microsoft has very little to show for however many billions of dollars they've poured in to Windows development since.
Let's also keep in mind that Mac OS is based largely on open source software, meaning that Apple can leave a significant amount of work up to a vast community of developers that they don't even have to pay.
Hell, for that matter, the Linux community seems to be doing a pretty good job of "keeping up" with Microsoft with very little capital expenditure.
My current philosophy is, 'Buy mac laptops, and build wintel desktops'. I built my last wintel desktop for about $400, with specs that greatly exceed those of the mac mini. But for the $1100 a macbook will run you, it's hard to do much better in the laptop market.
There are so many poorly designed laptops out there that will fail within a year of normal use.
CAPTCHA used to be an easy and useful way for Web administrators to authenticate users. Now it's an easy and useful way for malware authors and spammers to do their dirty work
This is misleadingly implies that CAPTCHA somehow enables spammers. On the contrary, broken CAPTCHA does not enable spammers to do anything they couldn't already do -- we're just back where we were before CAPTCHA.
And to be fair, CAPTCHA is still reducing the rate at which attackers are able to create accounts, keeping some smaller, less sophisticated players out of the game entirely, and protecting lower-value targets (e.g., most small-time bloggers with comment spam problems still see a drastic improvement when they set up CAPTCHA)
If everyone stopped using CAPTCHA, the spam problem would get noticeably worse.
One glitch in the summary: it don't work that way. Being able to have your own SL server doesn't get you access to Linden's grid. And that's what people want: to be on the grid with everybody else they know
RO, for those unfamiliar with it, is a relatively unremarkable Korean MMORPG. Someone wrote a server emulator, and it spread like wildfire. The slashdot crowd may be more familiar with this in the form of Ultimate Online shards
You're right, people do want community, but by and large, many are satisfied with, or even prefer, smaller communities, the likes of which can be found on 'private servers' or 'shards'.
If anything, SL is *more* susceptible to this problem, as the main game world doesn't really have anything scarce that can't be had on a shard.
I'm not sure that replacing JOVIAL code with C code is actually progress. If JOVIAL is anything like ALGOL 60, it's arguably a better programming language than C.
I'd imagine it's a lot easier to find experienced C developers than it is to find experienced JOVIAL developers, however.
The place where the crapiness of the motion sensing really shows is putting in golf game in Wii Sports. Putting requires pretty gentle movement, and it's 100% accelerometer controlled. The accelerometers just don't pick up movement very well at that level of force. Interestingly, I've found that it seems to work a little better if you reverse your swing. I'm not sure why.
At any rate, I'm hoping this new attachment will help with this -- and I hope they'll integrate it into future controllers.
The other place I've seen jumpiness was related to something odd going on with the IR detector. I've had an issue where, around 2 PM, in full sunlight, the wii-mote started picking up reflections from the IR LEDs on the sensor bar on the white walls of the room, causing the wiimote to get confused. Other than that issue, the sensor-bar based movement is great. It really shined in Elebits.
We get this pipe dream every few years - people talking about the "instant-on" computer. Sleep modes, wake modes, hibernation, etc.
I have an idea: grow a few seconds' worth of patience.
Hear, hear! I don't even know why they bothered developing processors after the 386, or anything faster than 1200 baud modems. They worked fine, it's just these damn kids were too impatient to wait 15 hours to download 50 megs, or 3 hours to render a single frame of Doom 3.
Now they want computers to boot faster? I happen to *like* the fact that it takes 15 minutes to get Vista up and running. Gives me a chance to take a nap, or brew some coffee.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, you can repeat the rollback/uninstall process, and IBM will think you're using negative licenses!
Fortunately, I think the idea is to hash the file on the client side, and just send the hash. Which is something on the order of 32 bytes.
To take that a little further:
The accelerometers in the Wiimote SUCK -- hence this new "MotionPlus" attachment they've got in the pipline. They're so bad, they're frequently an impediment to gameplay -- e.g., Wii Golf is pretty much unplayable, 'cause the accelerometers can't detect putts reliably.
Yes, the system, viewed as a whole, is a net economic loss (if you ignore the benefit of keeping the workforce healthy). But individuals can and do receive more from health insurance than they put in. It's all about reducing individual risk, by spreading it over the larger group.
We pay into insurance policies because we want to make sure we won't die if we're the unlucky guy who ends up needing $200,000 worth of medical procedures.
I've only had one occasion to put my Disc Doctor to use, but I was pleased with the results.
I was playing a PS2 game when the cats bolted by, and snagged a cable, pulling the unit off its shelf. It hit the floor with the drive spinning, leaving an obvious gouge in the disk. The game refused to load; I attempted a few applications of toothpaste, testing the disk between each. Sometimes it got a little further in the load process; sometimes it made the problem worse.
I bought a disc doctor, ran it over the thing once, and all was good.
It leaves a visible wear pattern on the disc, however -- the thing apparently just grinds a thin, even layer off the disc surface. As such, I'd use it as only a last resort, but I definitely trust it more than toothpaste.
It's important, when using this method, that your second server be in a separate datacenter.
Duplicating your data is only half of a backup plan. The other half is making sure that at least one of those duplicates is in a physically separate location.
There are many things that can conceivably take down entire datacenters -- theft, bankruptcy, utility outages, floods, fire, earthquakes...
While these things are somewhat unlikely, they *do* happen, and you don't want to lose years of work if they do.
The MMO Asheron's Call, a contemporary of better-known Everquest, has had a framework like this for years, known as Decal.
Interestingly, the developers of asheron's call (Turbine) chose to embrace the 3rd party development community. As a result, players have used the framework to extend and improve the game client; many community improvements have eventually been rolled into the official client (e.g., showing the health/mana of your party members in a single panel, and allegiance-wide chat). Turbine even went as far as to hire several of the top decal plugin developers.
This has lead to a fairly unique game, with player-run bots running unattended trades, offering trade-skill services, and help new players with magical enhancements.
Of course, with all the positive contributions that enhance gameplay, there have been negative ones as well. Combat macroing became commonplace, allowing characters to advance without human intervention; at first this was more or less endorsed by Turbine, but a few years ago they finally ruled against running combat macros while away from the keyboard. To enforce this, they started giving basic Turing tests to players that were suspected of violating this rule.
It's been an interesting experiment. I definitely respect Turbine for *not* taking the Blizzard route, and banning players by the tens of thousands, and suing third party developers. Their philosophy that it's the developer's responsibility for creating exploitable bugs, and not the players' fault for exploiting them is certainly player friendly.
But at the end of the day, it's hard to say if it was all for the better, as the game slowly fades into obscurity, with subscription numbers a tenth of what they were at the game's peak. Those of us who played during the game's heyday certainly enjoyed the ride, but blizzard's aggressive anti-cheating stance may be necessary to building a billion-dollar a year revenue stream.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/spore-porn
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=191255
I find this one particularly amusing in its simplicity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnUXnnH6sY0
They already did, when they first complained. This lawsuit is just a cash grab.
Cheap used laptops are great... provided they keep running.
I bought a used T40 a few months ago. Didn't last two months.
My dad bought a used HP POS a month ago. Only lasted a few weeks.
You can get a real steal, but who knows how long the thing will last. For me, the inconvenience of having to deal with laptops crashing makes the greater expenditure of buying a new, reliable notebook well worth it -- even if it's lower spec than a used unit.
This sort of knowledge gap exists in many arenas. A classic error in client-server software: never trust the client. So many "hacks" in online games boil down to the game server trusting the game client to obey the rules, when it's really the server's responsibility to handle all the rule enforcement.
So, yes, software developers as a group frequently fail to learn from those who came before them. In part, this probably has to do with existing education -- it seems like most college programs are always years behind the curve. There's also seems to be a large disconnect between the academic community and the rest; scientists can keep up to date on progress in the field reading academic journals and the like. Programmers, on the other hand, seem to disappear into corporations after college, where much of their knowledge becomes proprietary.
The lack of efficient knowledge sharing in our field is causing us to repeat the same mistakes for decades on end.
I generally agree that Apple is a pretty decent corporate citizen, but let's be honest here: they're the world's #1 retailer of DRM'd music.
Now, they had to make concessions to the RIAA to get popular artists' music, in a time when digital music distribution was totally unproven, and music piracy was on the rise... But apple's no white knight. They're definitely not aligned with the FSF's ideals, but they're not totally evil.
They're a business.
Sure, there's no requirement, but if they're not going to, I'm going to look for competitors that will.
You don't have to stick up for your customers, but they sure like it when you do.
Yeah... have you ever tried working in one of the smaller cases?
When I met my wife, she had a compaq in a slightly smaller than average case. Unfortunately, making the case smaller meant that you had to take out the power supply to add a stick of RAM.
And of course, the closer you pack components, the more difficult cooling becomes. And manufacturing costs rise.
There is definitely something to be said for smaller cases in some contexts. But for anyone interested in building their own machines for cheap, and doing their own upgrades, big cases are still desirable.
And really, as much as I love your radio analogy, I have to contrast it with a car analogy: things keep getting packed in tighter and tighter under the hood, making maintenance that used to be simple take hours longer than it would have taken a '70s era car.
To a certain extent, I agree with you wholeheartedly -- for some applications, 1998's hardware is good enough, and it should come in small packages. The prime example of that is smartphones/PDAs. But for other applications, "big" and "overpowered" is exactly what I want.
Allow me to emphasize:
That's my point. You already have a DVD player. You only have one input on your TV? Buy a switch box.
Is it really that much of a stretch to call OS X a heavily customized BSD distro? Hell, apple even markets it as UNIX-based
Have you played around on the command line on an OS X install? It runs bash, has a full set of CLI tools (find, grep, ssh, etc.), config files are in /etc/, you have to sudo to get anything done...
You could SSH in to one of these things, and not realize you were on a mac for several minutes. The /Applications and /Users dirs would probably give it away eventually.
*nix on the desktop is here. Granted, it's a proprietary commercial distro... But it's a step in the right direction, no?
Really? At home, I've got two laptops, a desktop, a PlayStation 2, and a DVD/VCR combo -- all of which play DVDs. The fact that my Wii does not also play DVDs has not been an issue.
Hell, I didn't even find out that it doesn't play DVDs I read it on the 'net, months after having purchased my unit.
Are there really that many people who would purchase Wiis that don't already have a DVD player set up? When you can pick one up at Wal Mart for $40 or less...
IMO, the biggest thing working against the Wii is that it's being treated as a last-gen console by many developers. The Wii port of Guitar Hero 3 had graphics worse than the PS2 version of GH2. Rockband for Wii has no online capability whatsoever, even though GH3 had some, and GH4 is planned to have full online capability on Wii.
It seems like the development process these days is:
Which really shortchanges Wii owners. Yes, the console is far less capable by the PS3/Xbox360... but it's far more capable than the PS2. Try to fully utilize the hardware. Please.
Really? What happened to selling things "as is"? What happened to the disclaimers that ship with lots of software? ("There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE"). Are the guys at OSDisc required to provide support for the linux distros they sell?
You're right, we have no right to force them to, but we have every right to let them know, loudly and publicly, that we really, really want them to.
It's not a matter of "We'll make whatever we damn well please, and you'll buy it because we tell you to". In a functioning market, producers respond to consumer demand. And consumers are demanding something other than vista.
Forgive me if I have a little trouble taking that as a given. GUI operating systems really haven't changed that much in the last decade. Windows has changed even less, since Windows 2000. Microsoft has very little to show for however many billions of dollars they've poured in to Windows development since.
Let's also keep in mind that Mac OS is based largely on open source software, meaning that Apple can leave a significant amount of work up to a vast community of developers that they don't even have to pay.
Hell, for that matter, the Linux community seems to be doing a pretty good job of "keeping up" with Microsoft with very little capital expenditure.
My current philosophy is, 'Buy mac laptops, and build wintel desktops'. I built my last wintel desktop for about $400, with specs that greatly exceed those of the mac mini. But for the $1100 a macbook will run you, it's hard to do much better in the laptop market.
There are so many poorly designed laptops out there that will fail within a year of normal use.
This is misleadingly implies that CAPTCHA somehow enables spammers. On the contrary, broken CAPTCHA does not enable spammers to do anything they couldn't already do -- we're just back where we were before CAPTCHA.
And to be fair, CAPTCHA is still reducing the rate at which attackers are able to create accounts, keeping some smaller, less sophisticated players out of the game entirely, and protecting lower-value targets (e.g., most small-time bloggers with comment spam problems still see a drastic improvement when they set up CAPTCHA)
If everyone stopped using CAPTCHA, the spam problem would get noticeably worse.
There's some truth to that, but with the hundreds of third-party Ragnarok Online servers out there, it's pretty clear that there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy to be "off the grid".
RO, for those unfamiliar with it, is a relatively unremarkable Korean MMORPG. Someone wrote a server emulator, and it spread like wildfire. The slashdot crowd may be more familiar with this in the form of Ultimate Online shards
You're right, people do want community, but by and large, many are satisfied with, or even prefer, smaller communities, the likes of which can be found on 'private servers' or 'shards'.
If anything, SL is *more* susceptible to this problem, as the main game world doesn't really have anything scarce that can't be had on a shard.
I'd imagine it's a lot easier to find experienced C developers than it is to find experienced JOVIAL developers, however.
The place where the crapiness of the motion sensing really shows is putting in golf game in Wii Sports. Putting requires pretty gentle movement, and it's 100% accelerometer controlled. The accelerometers just don't pick up movement very well at that level of force. Interestingly, I've found that it seems to work a little better if you reverse your swing. I'm not sure why.
At any rate, I'm hoping this new attachment will help with this -- and I hope they'll integrate it into future controllers.
The other place I've seen jumpiness was related to something odd going on with the IR detector. I've had an issue where, around 2 PM, in full sunlight, the wii-mote started picking up reflections from the IR LEDs on the sensor bar on the white walls of the room, causing the wiimote to get confused. Other than that issue, the sensor-bar based movement is great. It really shined in Elebits.
Hear, hear! I don't even know why they bothered developing processors after the 386, or anything faster than 1200 baud modems. They worked fine, it's just these damn kids were too impatient to wait 15 hours to download 50 megs, or 3 hours to render a single frame of Doom 3.
Now they want computers to boot faster? I happen to *like* the fact that it takes 15 minutes to get Vista up and running. Gives me a chance to take a nap, or brew some coffee.