That's 1.86bn items of software, not hardware. Quick envelope-maths goes pretty hard on the idea of having that much hardware, even if you include the PS units themselves.
[hint: if you can use VoIP to do what you would otherwise do with a POTS then why is POTS so expensive?]
Because the companies that set up the POTS system had capital investment in equipment, hire of however many hundreds of people you need to design and then set up an extensive network, maintenance costs (materials and salaries), overheads, overheads, overheads. And the company only survives if it makes a profit on those investments, and it only got funding in the first place because it convinced enough investors that it could make enough of a profit on the idea that it'd be able to pay them back lots of money. That's a fairly standard business model for a generic company.
On the other hand, Vonage is a parasitic company, that hitches a ride on existing infrastructure for which consumers are already paying someone else to maintain. They still have their own overheads (coders to design the thing, and the same payback to their own investors) but their scale of economy is hugely lower, requiring (other than their servers) no setup costs, no maintenance, and no ranks of people travelling out to fix a problem or break in the network every time a customer complains.
On your second point, calling 911 with your cell, you're also wrong. They can't pinpoint your location as accurately as a POTS line because you're not hardwired, but they know which tower you're currently getting your signal from, even so far that because you walk around with it in your pocket and if it's on it's connected and signalling (simply to get you connected to your network - and it HAS to, because otherwise a call to your number wouldn't be routable except by godzillagram). If you walk around with it in your pocket, you're *more* trackable than a POTS line, which perforce has to be left at home.
A more accurate analogy would then be to have the call signals marked with routing information, which is more static. Technically Vonage could organise a traceroute on an e911 call, and have the servers on that callroute correlated to a hardmap for location... they'd need effort in getting that information though, and since it's again the telcos that own the information about which server IP corresponds to which hardware location, it seems unlikely that they'll be able to get it.
The telcos put money in, and are making it back again for their investors. That's business. But they're not likely to yield to what to them is an upstart parasite which is undercutting them by using their own infrastructure anyway (assuming it's the telcos that own the internet hardware, as in the UK?).
On the comment "Billions and billions of devices that will serve these people", it seems to be unmentioned that (random estimate, not researched in any way) half of them will not be directly hooked into the interweb. Many of those are intended to be that way, since you want your layers of security, and that's why we have however many thousands of addresses in the range 10.0.0.[0-256]; technically they're using the same IP, but it doesn't matter because that IP is kept internally, and not in contact with the web.
IPv4 does not have enough numbers to give every single device its own unique IP. On the flip side... if we were locked into the system, it would still be workable.
The article last week was indeed about the same thing. But if you care to actually read this article, it's different - it's a question, to ask.slashdot.org, asking slashdotters how credible they believe last week's story is. Granted, the last article had a fair few comments in the same thought-threads, but this is a follow-up to last week's article rather than a duplicate.
Does your company have a separate IP for each computer? Because otherwise your IT Director has one (presumably fairly sizeable, but still single) pipe out to the 'net, and only needs one IP address. And on your subnet, you're really quite unlikely to need more IPs.
IPv4 may be running out on the net - but a lot of things can be centralised, and you can betcha there's a whole lot more than 256 10.0.0.xxx addresses in the world.
What are the chances that the term "IPv4 loyalists" includes those who just have no reason to make the effort to shift to the new system? Considering the number of [people, admins, even that amusing case where MS didn't patch its own servers] who don't even download security patches - the shift to a parallel system while the old system still works fine just isn't going to happen in droves.
I wonder how many of those 130 million are zombies. I also wonder how they track what counts as a 'user', especially with dynamic IPs, remote logins, and so on. "According to Bill Roper" is a little ungenerous with numerical credibility.
The problem with your 'solution' is that it's a lot easier for the police mentioned in the summary to locate noisemakers, and the gamers will be taken in for disturbance of the peace instead of gaming. It's not a good suggestion. However - with drinking, you get shut-ins, essentially turning the pub into a private function; well and above board so long as no-one new is let in and there aren't knockon problems like loud drunken staggerers when it all closes. The pub owner will ask people he doesn't know to leave, to avoid just that, and I suspect we'll find the same with gamers.
Tyranny is hardly the right word. Remember that this isn't electricity, or food, or even the communication of the phones themselves - this is entertainment. It's not possible to have a monopoly on entertainment. There's a large number of other music players available - in mp3 form and older, through minidisk, CD player, cassette player; radio. Apple may have a large market share, but there's simply no way for them to get a strangehold of any kind. On the phone side of things, the people who didn't get a ROKR got a different phone instead; remember that if every other person has an ipod (just taking these numbers from the article) - and remembering that the vast majority of those ipods will have been bought in the past year or two - then buying a phone that duplicates the functionality seems kinda redundant, unless you sell the ipod. I bet the phone doesn't have even 20GB of memory, either.
Apple is playing the style card with the ipod - they've managed to make it fashionable to have one, a mini one, a pink one, a nano one, whatever. But when it comes down to it, the ipod is entirely superfluous. It's entertainment, and there's simply too many other ways of being entertained - the popularity of the ipod is not due to any kind of necessity, it's due to fashion.
I'd love to assume that the +Funny mods are accurate in assuming you're being amusing, but it's too deadpan for me not to snag. Consider me successfully trolled if so...
Anyway, if you're being serious, here's a serious answer: wikipedia already has printing functionality; there's a print page link on every page, including the not-so-useful ones like lists and categories. The point of the article is that for those that don't have computers, paper versions will be made by printing companies and those made available to the developing world, just like the printing of a normal book.
I guess you can argue that at a given time a computer of any size will have a certain pattern of 0s and 1s that will cause it to behave in a predictable way (even though the prediction itself might take an incredibly long time to figure out), but we still have no clue whether that's true of biological systems too so I thought I'd leave that one out (and that's before we even get to things like http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_ id=73 where disconnected circuits can still affect the outcome by induction with nearby circuits...)
You can put a whole bunch of things in parallel - I'm sure computers with the 'intelligence' of a texas instruments scientific calculator could be paralleled hugely to create something that does even more teraflops... it just wouldn't be in a useful way. I know that analogy is flawed, but my point is that even Blue Gene/L is useless and dumb until someone smart comes along and puts a distilled level of their smartness (ie writes a program that mimics a process the person can do, just faster) onto it.
The damn thing is faster than the maximum speed of the human brain. Now THAT's saying something. The brain can control the individual muscles (in patterns it has practised) in precise and determined ways to run across a field and catch or throw a ball, while listening to and comprehending motions of atoms in the air (noise, speech (complicated!), changes in amplitude and understanding where multiple things are and how fast they're going in which directions), interpreting however many million pixels we get from the eyeball (and realising which ones are important and which ones aren't) while also negotiating the terrain and knowing where to get to to catch the frisbee and knowing how to catch it and and and etc etc - and can rapidly teach itself to learn something new that it can transfer and apply correctly to a previously unknown situation. That's "smart". The computer is able to do something it's been told how to do, over and over again, very very fast. It can learn, but only if a lot of effort has gone into teaching it how to learn, and it can only learn within the constraints visualised by the programmer.
By having huge numbers of layers of understanding between the interface and the machine code, the supercomputer can do 'smart' things incredibly fast. But it itself is not smart.
You can do this anyway. You click 'history', you click the most recent version, and it gives you a capture of the page at time of reading.
Self-correction: click the "permanent link" link in the toolbox on the left. One click.
Oh, and I'll just clarify my point on citing Wikipedia being more reliable than citing the web: this was only in the context that whoever is reading your paper would come to find the same information that you did rather than the information itself being canonically more reliable.
Makes it possible to cite a stable version of a wikipedia page in an academic work without it being completely screwed up at a later date. (They should be archived quarterly/yearly/whatever).
You can do this anyway. You click 'history', you click the most recent version, and it gives you a capture of the page at time of reading.
Yes, it's two clicks rather than one; but in the same way as citing a normal web page runs the risk of having that page change later. Google's cache is similar to this system but will be lost the next time the crawler crosses the page; in this way citing Wikipedia is more reliable than citing the web.
In response to your last point, it is the fault of the 'hapless individual' if they rely dogmatically on an editable webpage; more so since it's so easy to cross-check facts on the web once you know what they are. If you search for a fact from wikipedia, it should - other than in the most obscure areas - be findable on the web, as simply as googling for the fact. I'm a researcher myself, and I know damn well that if you only get one version it's fairly likely to be biased (whether by simple wording, by author viewpoint, or wherever the author read it from), missing small bits of information, and so on; if you're going to present ANY data as fact then more fool you if you didn't verify it first.
Technically not - unless his programs replicate in a way that makes each one look different.
Even when however many millions of computers were affected by {recent virus of your choice}, it was still only one virus author, not millions. Granted a virus can have a handful of collaborating authors; granted the malicious ones get through to the public eye more often. It's the perception of those numbers - the hacking the public sees - that has changed the meaning of hacking from 'editing things that you didn't write' to 'being malicious with software'. Check out the Jargon File for stories about this, and the open letter in one of the appendices that eventually failed to stop the change of meaning of the word.
To extend your analogy (a lot) - yes, we don't have security systems or guard dogs, unless you have your standard OSX firewall up or something like LittleSnitch active. But we're still far far better at having the company who sold us the building keeping coming back and strengthening the mortar, thickening the walls, and generally making it Difficult for people to break in. I was going to put something about strong windows, but that seems out of place. And hey, even the paintwork looks nice.
And that inbuilt security is free with your house. We don't have to pay a FUD security guard or his dogs to keep us safe; and at the moment, the best 'attempts' have been things like bombs cunningly designed as parcels. Anyone can write a malicious applescript, and if they can convince the user to open it then that's their virus. (oh yeah, they even beefed up the building reps with verification so we don't get fake security updates (Software-update update, about 8 months ago iirc))
It will be like a family living in a gated community where there's no crime - but the people who build our houses still know that crime exists and kindly do as much as they can for us. It's included in the original package, and keeps up the goodwill.
Why are there so many nice hackers in the world? Because some people believe in things like morals and society? Because not everyone is corrupt? Apart from anything else there's always the chance that if someone is a 'nice' hacker then they can act as a model for others, and will get a little return on their investment of time by coming across a warning next time instead of a Yes/Okay dialog against them.
People who don't want their friends/family affected, people who actually care about the world they live in. I'm surprised that you seem to believe that everyone would be malicious if they could.
Can I suggest putting up more normal resolution pictures for those of us who find the pictures cool, but have things like google maps if we want to look closer? I find the images very aesthetic but don't have any use for anything bigger than 1280x1024; while I'm sure there's fun to be had with zooming in and out of very high-res pictures, those of us who have played with earlier satellite imaging programs (especially since with google maps you can see down to 1m pixels in many places) wouldn't mind getting a smaller image - which would also put less of a load on your servers!
This is stupid.... Nobody that I can think of off the top of my head has ever charged another subscription for their expansion as well as their old version of the game.
If you actually RTFA, or even the slashdot version, you'll see that it's not. NC are combining the subscription for the two parts into the same one for the same price as the original subscription. The only cost is buying the expansion pack from the store.
What this actually means that if you don't want to play CoH any more and try out CoV instead, your CoH chars are still active for the entire duraction of your CoV play. Your payment scheme doesn't change; you can play both sides at once.
But are they intending to port it to new platforms? Nope. NCSoft has definitively said that they're not porting its current games to mac, even though the mac population of Lineage 1 was greater than proportional to (all mac users out of all computer users); Blizzard has gone the other way and actively ports all its titles to mac, and has done hugely well from it. Yes, they would have done hugely well anyway - but out of that 3 million, I bet there's a horde of mac users.
I realise that as the number of major players increases, their individual share would go down - but NCSoft have some good content, and so would be able to draw in a fair market share. Now would be a good time, with the WoW demand finally slowing and people looking around for What's New.
Don't let this turn into a mac vs PC thread. You know more players makes a better game, no matter what they're playing from!
I am a mac user. By the handy debug menu, I can pretend to use Windows IE (assuming the Mac IE I have somewhere around gets denied too); I also downloaded WMP at some point when mplayer and VLC decided not to be able to play the newest wmv files.
14. When will I get iMP on Mac & Linux?
Currently, our supplier is working towards supporting a Mac and Linux version.
However, having realised I'd jumped a step in the system, I found out that I can't get in anyway, because they're doing a trial first. Points:
1). I thought the whole point of p2p was to have more people able to carry the load? Tie that in with 2). With a trial of 1000 users, the chances are damn slim that two of them will pick the same program to watch while they're both online (hence nearly everything will be downloaded from the central server during the trial anyway. 3). In response to an earlier point about the 7-day limit - this is a workable idea, because the DRM on the program being 7 days long means that it can be downloaded at any point in those 7 days - whether from the server or others - and becomes inviable after that limit. That fits with the original intention of a week-limit on viewability.
Re:Starquake? We need a more... extreme name
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'Starquake' Cracks Star
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· Score: 3, Informative
Okay, Yikes. Missed this the first time round:
Of the known magnetars, four are called soft gamma repeaters, or SGRs, because they flare up randomly and release gamma rays. The flare on SGR 1806-20 unleashed about 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts of power.
10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 watts of power. No wonder my brain gave up trying to work out the numbers.
Starquake? We need a more... extreme name
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'Starquake' Cracks Star
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"Had this happened within 10 light-years of us, it would have severely damaged our atmosphere and possibly have triggered a mass extinction," said Bryan Gaensler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Just yesterday I was looking through a link from a/. article in May; while the solar wind is usually strong enough to push off the interstellar wind (think of it as the sum of solar winds from the rest of the galaxy) at a distance 94 times that of the distance from the Sun to Earth.
What's significantly impressive is that this explosion is strong enough to kick nearly multiple times as hard as the average of what the galaxy usually does to us.
(I'm not quite sure on this figure - the power of the wind from our sun should decrease as r^3, ditto the power from the starquake; if r goes down to 1/94, r^3 is reaching for a million?! This would imply the quake is nearly a million times as strong as the average wind from the galaxy; granted there's likely to be drastic fluid dynamics contortions and things that effectively cut that number down to something more 'sane' (depending on how sane you think it is to try to calculate stellar force magnitudes...), but you still have a figure significantly bigger than the entire galaxy!)
And then you get to the quote line from the article "We have observed an object only 20 kilometers across [12 miles], on the other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a tenth of a second than the Sun emits in 100,000 years."
combine that with the distance from us (50000 light years = 6 trillion miles = 10 trillion km) and the bit where it says it rotates on its axis every 7.5 seconds and has the strongest magnetic field in the known universe... wow.
Slashdot Mirror
That's 1.86bn items of software, not hardware. Quick envelope-maths goes pretty hard on the idea of having that much hardware, even if you include the PS units themselves.
[hint: if you can use VoIP to do what you would otherwise do with a POTS then why is POTS so expensive?]
Because the companies that set up the POTS system had capital investment in equipment, hire of however many hundreds of people you need to design and then set up an extensive network, maintenance costs (materials and salaries), overheads, overheads, overheads. And the company only survives if it makes a profit on those investments, and it only got funding in the first place because it convinced enough investors that it could make enough of a profit on the idea that it'd be able to pay them back lots of money. That's a fairly standard business model for a generic company.
On the other hand, Vonage is a parasitic company, that hitches a ride on existing infrastructure for which consumers are already paying someone else to maintain. They still have their own overheads (coders to design the thing, and the same payback to their own investors) but their scale of economy is hugely lower, requiring (other than their servers) no setup costs, no maintenance, and no ranks of people travelling out to fix a problem or break in the network every time a customer complains.
On your second point, calling 911 with your cell, you're also wrong. They can't pinpoint your location as accurately as a POTS line because you're not hardwired, but they know which tower you're currently getting your signal from, even so far that because you walk around with it in your pocket and if it's on it's connected and signalling (simply to get you connected to your network - and it HAS to, because otherwise a call to your number wouldn't be routable except by godzillagram). If you walk around with it in your pocket, you're *more* trackable than a POTS line, which perforce has to be left at home.
A more accurate analogy would then be to have the call signals marked with routing information, which is more static. Technically Vonage could organise a traceroute on an e911 call, and have the servers on that callroute correlated to a hardmap for location... they'd need effort in getting that information though, and since it's again the telcos that own the information about which server IP corresponds to which hardware location, it seems unlikely that they'll be able to get it.
The telcos put money in, and are making it back again for their investors. That's business. But they're not likely to yield to what to them is an upstart parasite which is undercutting them by using their own infrastructure anyway (assuming it's the telcos that own the internet hardware, as in the UK?).
On the comment "Billions and billions of devices that will serve these people", it seems to be unmentioned that (random estimate, not researched in any way) half of them will not be directly hooked into the interweb. Many of those are intended to be that way, since you want your layers of security, and that's why we have however many thousands of addresses in the range 10.0.0.[0-256]; technically they're using the same IP, but it doesn't matter because that IP is kept internally, and not in contact with the web.
IPv4 does not have enough numbers to give every single device its own unique IP. On the flip side... if we were locked into the system, it would still be workable.
The article last week was indeed about the same thing. But if you care to actually read this article, it's different - it's a question, to ask.slashdot.org, asking slashdotters how credible they believe last week's story is. Granted, the last article had a fair few comments in the same thought-threads, but this is a follow-up to last week's article rather than a duplicate.
Does your company have a separate IP for each computer? Because otherwise your IT Director has one (presumably fairly sizeable, but still single) pipe out to the 'net, and only needs one IP address. And on your subnet, you're really quite unlikely to need more IPs.
IPv4 may be running out on the net - but a lot of things can be centralised, and you can betcha there's a whole lot more than 256 10.0.0.xxx addresses in the world.
Can we ram IPv6 down everyone's throat? The market will retailiate and hit back.
Unless it's put forward in a firefox-type way, and people love it because it's different.
What are the chances that the term "IPv4 loyalists" includes those who just have no reason to make the effort to shift to the new system? Considering the number of [people, admins, even that amusing case where MS didn't patch its own servers] who don't even download security patches - the shift to a parallel system while the old system still works fine just isn't going to happen in droves.
I wonder how many of those 130 million are zombies. I also wonder how they track what counts as a 'user', especially with dynamic IPs, remote logins, and so on. "According to Bill Roper" is a little ungenerous with numerical credibility.
The problem with your 'solution' is that it's a lot easier for the police mentioned in the summary to locate noisemakers, and the gamers will be taken in for disturbance of the peace instead of gaming. It's not a good suggestion. However - with drinking, you get shut-ins, essentially turning the pub into a private function; well and above board so long as no-one new is let in and there aren't knockon problems like loud drunken staggerers when it all closes. The pub owner will ask people he doesn't know to leave, to avoid just that, and I suspect we'll find the same with gamers.
Tyranny is hardly the right word. Remember that this isn't electricity, or food, or even the communication of the phones themselves - this is entertainment. It's not possible to have a monopoly on entertainment. There's a large number of other music players available - in mp3 form and older, through minidisk, CD player, cassette player; radio. Apple may have a large market share, but there's simply no way for them to get a strangehold of any kind. On the phone side of things, the people who didn't get a ROKR got a different phone instead; remember that if every other person has an ipod (just taking these numbers from the article) - and remembering that the vast majority of those ipods will have been bought in the past year or two - then buying a phone that duplicates the functionality seems kinda redundant, unless you sell the ipod. I bet the phone doesn't have even 20GB of memory, either.
Apple is playing the style card with the ipod - they've managed to make it fashionable to have one, a mini one, a pink one, a nano one, whatever. But when it comes down to it, the ipod is entirely superfluous. It's entertainment, and there's simply too many other ways of being entertained - the popularity of the ipod is not due to any kind of necessity, it's due to fashion.
Hehehe... unfortunately, those 80 Opteron CPUs worked that out just before you did! The wonders of modern technology...
I'd love to assume that the +Funny mods are accurate in assuming you're being amusing, but it's too deadpan for me not to snag. Consider me successfully trolled if so...
Anyway, if you're being serious, here's a serious answer: wikipedia already has printing functionality; there's a print page link on every page, including the not-so-useful ones like lists and categories. The point of the article is that for those that don't have computers, paper versions will be made by printing companies and those made available to the developing world, just like the printing of a normal book.
I guess you can argue that at a given time a computer of any size will have a certain pattern of 0s and 1s that will cause it to behave in a predictable way (even though the prediction itself might take an incredibly long time to figure out), but we still have no clue whether that's true of biological systems too so I thought I'd leave that one out (and that's before we even get to things like http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_ id=73 where disconnected circuits can still affect the outcome by induction with nearby circuits...)
Smart? Depends on your definition of "smart".
You can put a whole bunch of things in parallel - I'm sure computers with the 'intelligence' of a texas instruments scientific calculator could be paralleled hugely to create something that does even more teraflops... it just wouldn't be in a useful way. I know that analogy is flawed, but my point is that even Blue Gene/L is useless and dumb until someone smart comes along and puts a distilled level of their smartness (ie writes a program that mimics a process the person can do, just faster) onto it.
The damn thing is faster than the maximum speed of the human brain. Now THAT's saying something. The brain can control the individual muscles (in patterns it has practised) in precise and determined ways to run across a field and catch or throw a ball, while listening to and comprehending motions of atoms in the air (noise, speech (complicated!), changes in amplitude and understanding where multiple things are and how fast they're going in which directions), interpreting however many million pixels we get from the eyeball (and realising which ones are important and which ones aren't) while also negotiating the terrain and knowing where to get to to catch the frisbee and knowing how to catch it and and and etc etc - and can rapidly teach itself to learn something new that it can transfer and apply correctly to a previously unknown situation. That's "smart". The computer is able to do something it's been told how to do, over and over again, very very fast. It can learn, but only if a lot of effort has gone into teaching it how to learn, and it can only learn within the constraints visualised by the programmer.
By having huge numbers of layers of understanding between the interface and the machine code, the supercomputer can do 'smart' things incredibly fast. But it itself is not smart.
Yet >:)
You can do this anyway. You click 'history', you click the most recent version, and it gives you a capture of the page at time of reading.
Self-correction: click the "permanent link" link in the toolbox on the left. One click.
Oh, and I'll just clarify my point on citing Wikipedia being more reliable than citing the web: this was only in the context that whoever is reading your paper would come to find the same information that you did rather than the information itself being canonically more reliable.
Makes it possible to cite a stable version of a wikipedia page in an academic work without it being completely screwed up at a later date. (They should be archived quarterly/yearly/whatever).
You can do this anyway. You click 'history', you click the most recent version, and it gives you a capture of the page at time of reading.
Yes, it's two clicks rather than one; but in the same way as citing a normal web page runs the risk of having that page change later. Google's cache is similar to this system but will be lost the next time the crawler crosses the page; in this way citing Wikipedia is more reliable than citing the web.
In response to your last point, it is the fault of the 'hapless individual' if they rely dogmatically on an editable webpage; more so since it's so easy to cross-check facts on the web once you know what they are. If you search for a fact from wikipedia, it should - other than in the most obscure areas - be findable on the web, as simply as googling for the fact. I'm a researcher myself, and I know damn well that if you only get one version it's fairly likely to be biased (whether by simple wording, by author viewpoint, or wherever the author read it from), missing small bits of information, and so on; if you're going to present ANY data as fact then more fool you if you didn't verify it first.
Technically not - unless his programs replicate in a way that makes each one look different. Even when however many millions of computers were affected by {recent virus of your choice}, it was still only one virus author, not millions. Granted a virus can have a handful of collaborating authors; granted the malicious ones get through to the public eye more often. It's the perception of those numbers - the hacking the public sees - that has changed the meaning of hacking from 'editing things that you didn't write' to 'being malicious with software'. Check out the Jargon File for stories about this, and the open letter in one of the appendices that eventually failed to stop the change of meaning of the word.
To extend your analogy (a lot) - yes, we don't have security systems or guard dogs, unless you have your standard OSX firewall up or something like LittleSnitch active. But we're still far far better at having the company who sold us the building keeping coming back and strengthening the mortar, thickening the walls, and generally making it Difficult for people to break in. I was going to put something about strong windows, but that seems out of place. And hey, even the paintwork looks nice.
And that inbuilt security is free with your house. We don't have to pay a FUD security guard or his dogs to keep us safe; and at the moment, the best 'attempts' have been things like bombs cunningly designed as parcels. Anyone can write a malicious applescript, and if they can convince the user to open it then that's their virus. (oh yeah, they even beefed up the building reps with verification so we don't get fake security updates (Software-update update, about 8 months ago iirc))
It will be like a family living in a gated community where there's no crime - but the people who build our houses still know that crime exists and kindly do as much as they can for us. It's included in the original package, and keeps up the goodwill.
Why are there so many nice hackers in the world? Because some people believe in things like morals and society? Because not everyone is corrupt? Apart from anything else there's always the chance that if someone is a 'nice' hacker then they can act as a model for others, and will get a little return on their investment of time by coming across a warning next time instead of a Yes/Okay dialog against them.
People who don't want their friends/family affected, people who actually care about the world they live in. I'm surprised that you seem to believe that everyone would be malicious if they could.
Can I suggest putting up more normal resolution pictures for those of us who find the pictures cool, but have things like google maps if we want to look closer? I find the images very aesthetic but don't have any use for anything bigger than 1280x1024; while I'm sure there's fun to be had with zooming in and out of very high-res pictures, those of us who have played with earlier satellite imaging programs (especially since with google maps you can see down to 1m pixels in many places) wouldn't mind getting a smaller image - which would also put less of a load on your servers!
This is stupid.... Nobody that I can think of off the top of my head has ever charged another subscription for their expansion as well as their old version of the game.
If you actually RTFA, or even the slashdot version, you'll see that it's not. NC are combining the subscription for the two parts into the same one for the same price as the original subscription. The only cost is buying the expansion pack from the store.
What this actually means that if you don't want to play CoH any more and try out CoV instead, your CoH chars are still active for the entire duraction of your CoV play. Your payment scheme doesn't change; you can play both sides at once.
But are they intending to port it to new platforms? Nope. NCSoft has definitively said that they're not porting its current games to mac, even though the mac population of Lineage 1 was greater than proportional to (all mac users out of all computer users); Blizzard has gone the other way and actively ports all its titles to mac, and has done hugely well from it. Yes, they would have done hugely well anyway - but out of that 3 million, I bet there's a horde of mac users.
I realise that as the number of major players increases, their individual share would go down - but NCSoft have some good content, and so would be able to draw in a fair market share. Now would be a good time, with the WoW demand finally slowing and people looking around for What's New. Don't let this turn into a mac vs PC thread. You know more players makes a better game, no matter what they're playing from!
I am a mac user. By the handy debug menu, I can pretend to use Windows IE (assuming the Mac IE I have somewhere around gets denied too); I also downloaded WMP at some point when mplayer and VLC decided not to be able to play the newest wmv files.
14. When will I get iMP on Mac & Linux?
Currently, our supplier is working towards supporting a Mac and Linux version.
However, having realised I'd jumped a step in the system, I found out that I can't get in anyway, because they're doing a trial first. Points:
1). I thought the whole point of p2p was to have more people able to carry the load? Tie that in with
2). With a trial of 1000 users, the chances are damn slim that two of them will pick the same program to watch while they're both online (hence nearly everything will be downloaded from the central server during the trial anyway.
3). In response to an earlier point about the 7-day limit - this is a workable idea, because the DRM on the program being 7 days long means that it can be downloaded at any point in those 7 days - whether from the server or others - and becomes inviable after that limit. That fits with the original intention of a week-limit on viewability.
Okay, Yikes. Missed this the first time round:
Of the known magnetars, four are called soft gamma repeaters, or SGRs, because they flare up randomly and release gamma rays. The flare on SGR 1806-20 unleashed about 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts of power.
10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 watts of power. No wonder my brain gave up trying to work out the numbers.
"Had this happened within 10 light-years of us, it would have severely damaged our atmosphere and possibly have triggered a mass extinction," said Bryan Gaensler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Just yesterday I was looking through a link from a /. article in May; while the solar wind is usually strong enough to push off the interstellar wind (think of it as the sum of solar winds from the rest of the galaxy) at a distance 94 times that of the distance from the Sun to Earth.
What's significantly impressive is that this explosion is strong enough to kick nearly multiple times as hard as the average of what the galaxy usually does to us.
(I'm not quite sure on this figure - the power of the wind from our sun should decrease as r^3, ditto the power from the starquake; if r goes down to 1/94, r^3 is reaching for a million?! This would imply the quake is nearly a million times as strong as the average wind from the galaxy; granted there's likely to be drastic fluid dynamics contortions and things that effectively cut that number down to something more 'sane' (depending on how sane you think it is to try to calculate stellar force magnitudes...), but you still have a figure significantly bigger than the entire galaxy!)
And then you get to the quote line from the article "We have observed an object only 20 kilometers across [12 miles], on the other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a tenth of a second than the Sun emits in 100,000 years."
combine that with the distance from us (50000 light years = 6 trillion miles = 10 trillion km) and the bit where it says it rotates on its axis every 7.5 seconds and has the strongest magnetic field in the known universe... wow.