There've been games about exchanging nukes before, but none of them were as popular as Defcon, and most of them didn't concentrate solely on nuclear exchange. I can't say if they were worse or better, since, not being a huge fan of Introversion's games, I never played Defcon.
Take Superpower for example. Besides conventional warfare, you could also enter nuclear mode in the game, and exchange some nukes with the nastier of your neighbors. If I recall correctly, the game also had a MAD-meter, which would be used to determine when you destroyed the world enough to end the game. Here's a screenshot. (link might not work if you send referers)
The downside to semi-private torrent sites is that users try to beat each other at seeding instead of seeding simply to make live easier for others. They'll download small files and seed them for ages, or try to download a torrent from multiple sources and networks in order to be the first in line to seed. The ratio scores that many of these sites implement make it actually hard to get a higher ratio for your average user, because of the saturation of seeders.
Seems to me that for every major game release out there, there's tons of pre-release hype generated by both the publisher, and the websites/magazines that end up reviewing the game. Screenshots, videos, interviews, all that serves to hype up the game. That hype often ends up being the reason for which people choose to buy the particular game. The whole pre-ordering system makes it even more common. Many people buy the game on the day it comes out, without paying too much attention to the reviews (many of which come later).
Besides using Linux, they also use off the shelf parts (like USB and Firewire within the robot to connect various parts to the computer). I assume that otherwise, they wouldn't use Windows, but would rather use custom-designed hardware and OS, which would certainly cost more.
Your other choice would be setting up ssh on your home machine, and then bringing putty with you on a thumbdrive (assuming the machines you're using are running Windows). You can also run ssh over a port like 443 or 80, to decrease the chances of it being blocked.
Many IRC networks just ban every Tor exitnode outright in fear of abuse. The list of exitnodes is available and it's not going to be hidden.
Modding a game might be legal, but at the same time, it would be illegal to include copyrighted content in the mod for that game. IANAL, but I imagine that in order to release anything set in the Halo universe (such as a movie, game, or even text fanfiction), you'd need permission from MS.
There are DRM-ed WMA playing portable devices and online download services. It's in MS's interest to keep the DRM doing what it's supposed to do. Otherwise, everyone goes to iPod and iTunes, and that's not what MS wants.
I recall that my Belkin router came with about 40 stickers on it, each one of them telling me to use the enclosed CD-Rom before using the router. Except that you don't actually have to use the CD to setup the router - it's only there to help users set up the router correctly via a wizard, as opposed to setting it up via the web interface.
I do hope that this won't mean that ap/router manufacturers will actually start forcing people to pop those useless cds in and then read through several screens of EULAs and warnings before letting them use the device.
So Joe Siegler is basically saying that the infinitely long developement process for DNF is going to continue as planned, and will be subject of jokes and speculations for many years to come... Good to know.
I think a better decision would be setting up something akin to the meta-moderation system here on slashdot. Instead of designating users to do the reviewing, why not let all users (or at least those that had an account for a while) review random edits from wikipedia. You could then assign higher weights to edits of users whose edits are often marked as incorrect/vandalizing in the moderation system, and make them come up more frequently on the not-so-random list of edits to review. That way, you'd keep control in hands of the contributors, and vandalizing edits of obscure pages would have better chances of being caught. Of course, such a system would not be perfect, but on the other hand, peer-review by a smaller group of people that you trust wouldn't be that perfect either.
This is what makes games like the Total War series fun... They emphasize strategy, and try to reduce more managerial tasks such as assigning individual workers to building a structure. Total War still remains realtime, however, it doesn't force you to micromanage anything, instead letting you control the big picture. Yes, you still have to make decisions in a timely manner, however, the outcome of the battle isn't determined by how efficently you wrestle with the interface, but rather, by your strategic decisions. IMHO, that's what an ideal RTS should be like - the outcome of the battle shouldn't be determined by who can more efficiently use the interface, and through it micromanage their base construction and armies, but rather, it should be determined by who makes better decisions throughout.
It is possible to create an RTS that forces the player to think instead of acting as fast as possible. However, the traditional RTS model is definately the most popular out there, and there isn't too much innovation in the genre.
Some banks actually issue scratch-off cards, that contain a bunch of authentication numbers. Each of those can be used only once, and they have to be used in order they are listed on the card. That way, even if the login data is stolen, no transaction can be done without intercepting the physical card... Sort of a one time pad scheme for transaction authentication. It's simple, cheap, but effective.
As far as I know, this is more popular in Europe, and few, if not none of the American banks use this system...
Ideally, a web browser on a public computer would be set up not to save any personal data, such as cookies, passwords, form entries, etc. Of course, in most cases it is not so, and such browser save cookies, and even passwords from the users... Fortunatelly, some browsers, like FF, have a convenient menu item that clears all personal data recorded by the user, and so it's possible to ensure that you leave no cookies or form entries behind, even if the browser is setup to allow them... Worst thing if the public computer runs IE, or some other browser where you have to dig in options screens to clear all your data. In many cases, such meddling with the browser is frowned upon by whoever is supposed to be watching over the computers.
Cellphones don't work when you're over the middle of an ocean. Satellites, on the other hand, can. Plus, I suspect it's easier to use a satellite connection for live TV, than to try and and pipe it over a cellphone network.
Besides, if you're flying over multiple countries, you need to get on several different cellphone networks, which means having to sign contracts with multiple providers if you wanna connect the entire plane, or having to worry about huge roaming charges. Not to mention cellphones don't work everywhere over land either, and in some regions, networks might be incapable of handling anything besides voice traffic.
Connexion probably didn't take off (pun intended) because of the costs invovled. You could pay for a landline connection for a month with what you had to pay for an entire flight of Internet access
I use an iriver H10 20GB (the US version). By default, it is a Plays-for-Sure, WMP supported device, and you can only use WMP to copy songs over to it (there's also a plugin for Winamp, but it's somewhat buggy). However, I can also boot the device into "emergency mode" where it becomes a normal USB mass storage device. I can then copy everything over, and resync the device's database using easyH10, an opensource app that can synchronise an H10 with the content on its harddrive, and even convert.pls and.m3u playlists to the internal format used by the device.
Now, this way of copying files is not supported by iriver, and easyH10 was built using information gathered from reverse engineering the H10 database structure. IIRC, a similar model can be used with some of the other iriver devices out of the box. Either way, it's a perfect way of synching files - you copy them over, and then you let a program sort the music out. EasyH10 is available for a variety of platforms, and I use it with both my Windows desktop and Ubuntu laptop. Playlist/database syncing shouldn't be an excuse for using a closed syncing protocol that's bound to get some people locked out.
I'd say that Ubuntu already has easier OS and app installation than Windows. You can run the installer from under the booted-up OS, and you can actually be using the system during the installation (to, for example, read some guides).
For apps, you have apt-get, the synaptic gui and even the simplified Add/Remove Applications proggy that Ubuntu (at least Dapper) provides by default. If you wanna install something, you mark it for installation and hit OK. Apt then downloads and installs everything for you, most of the time. No need to navigate to a website, find an installation proggy. Apt/synaptic will inform you what you need to make the app run, and handle everything by itself. It's easier than Windows, for Joe User: need a spreadsheet ap? Mark the checkbox and click apply.
On a laptop running GNOME, I configured the winkey to allow window dragging. Ie, when you hold down winkey, you can click anywhere on the window and drag it. Quite useful, as it makes it easier to use the touchpad.
The default functionality of the winkey under windows, that makes the Start menu pop up is certainly annoying, but if you can make use of the key for something else, it certainly becomes that much more useful.
The people who switch Tor nodes for every search they perform, so that later, then don't end up having articles written about them calling them weirdos and porn-freaks. Sheesh, what's wrong with horses?
And if it is so great and reliable, why are they using hot dogs and not this guys hand?
For the same reasons for which you don't use humans in car crashtests. All the safety features put in today's cars decrease the probability of the passengers/drivers sustaining heavy injuries in case of an accident, but they do not guarantee that you'll survive driving your car into a concrete wall at 80MPH. In fact, even though such safety features are present, you are still supposed to drive safely and be careful, and they're there for emergency situations.
Same thing with the saw. You're not supposed to try to saw off your hand (unless some homicidal manaiac actually devised a complicated plan to get you to saw it off, but that's besides the point). The safety features are there in case you make a mistake, and they decrease the chances of you sustaining an injury in such a situation.
3. Gaming stopped being so cartoony. When your game is based around someone really really realistic, like a random urban italian gangster, or Master Chief, it's a lot harder to make them distinctive than it is say a huge blue hedgehog. Master Chief or that guy from GTA3 may be really deeply written characters.. uh, I guess.. but they're not really visually distinctive and it would be very hard for them to be. When it comes down to it, Master Chief has to be just a guy in a military mech suit. There's only so many ways you can present that. And if you can't make someone visually distinctive, they can't be a mascot-- that's practically what a mascot is.
That's probably the main reason. When you have somewhat deeper storylines, that are somewhat more realistic (as in plausible), you cannot have distinct "mascots," same way you cannot have a "mascot" with a non-cartoon movie - you can have James Bond, a recognizable character from a series of movies, but I still wouldn't call him a mascot. On the other hand, you have something like Mickey Mouse, which could be called a mascot to all sorts of stuff that Disney does.
This would actually work with most of the modified cuecats... It allows typing in of barcodes, and that's essentially what a modded cuecat does. It'd probably be easier and more realiable than using a webcam, too.
Personally, I've been using my cuecat to catalog my DVD collection. There are some commercial apps out there that will read a barcode, look it up on several websites, and scrape the info about the particular DVD into a local database. With enough contributions to this barcodepedia website, it'd be possible to create something with similar usability - you could have entries for DVDs or music CDs with relevant info, available for instant fetching. In fact, it'd be somewhat like the service that cuecat was originally supposed to offer.
TFA states that the reason for the lawsuit is the fact that MS doesn't fully disclose what exactly the WGA tool does. Microsoft's description of the tool does not state that the tool will in fact report back to MS via the Internet, only that it will check the installation of windows and display a message if it find it non-"genuine." The user is not informed of what exactly the tool does, even if he has to consent to the installation of the tool.
Slashdot Mirror
There've been games about exchanging nukes before, but none of them were as popular as Defcon, and most of them didn't concentrate solely on nuclear exchange. I can't say if they were worse or better, since, not being a huge fan of Introversion's games, I never played Defcon.
Take Superpower for example. Besides conventional warfare, you could also enter nuclear mode in the game, and exchange some nukes with the nastier of your neighbors. If I recall correctly, the game also had a MAD-meter, which would be used to determine when you destroyed the world enough to end the game. Here's a screenshot. (link might not work if you send referers)
The downside to semi-private torrent sites is that users try to beat each other at seeding instead of seeding simply to make live easier for others. They'll download small files and seed them for ages, or try to download a torrent from multiple sources and networks in order to be the first in line to seed. The ratio scores that many of these sites implement make it actually hard to get a higher ratio for your average user, because of the saturation of seeders.
Seems to me that for every major game release out there, there's tons of pre-release hype generated by both the publisher, and the websites/magazines that end up reviewing the game. Screenshots, videos, interviews, all that serves to hype up the game. That hype often ends up being the reason for which people choose to buy the particular game. The whole pre-ordering system makes it even more common. Many people buy the game on the day it comes out, without paying too much attention to the reviews (many of which come later).
Too late.
Besides using Linux, they also use off the shelf parts (like USB and Firewire within the robot to connect various parts to the computer). I assume that otherwise, they wouldn't use Windows, but would rather use custom-designed hardware and OS, which would certainly cost more.
Your other choice would be setting up ssh on your home machine, and then bringing putty with you on a thumbdrive (assuming the machines you're using are running Windows). You can also run ssh over a port like 443 or 80, to decrease the chances of it being blocked.
Many IRC networks just ban every Tor exitnode outright in fear of abuse. The list of exitnodes is available and it's not going to be hidden.
Modding a game might be legal, but at the same time, it would be illegal to include copyrighted content in the mod for that game. IANAL, but I imagine that in order to release anything set in the Halo universe (such as a movie, game, or even text fanfiction), you'd need permission from MS.
There are DRM-ed WMA playing portable devices and online download services. It's in MS's interest to keep the DRM doing what it's supposed to do. Otherwise, everyone goes to iPod and iTunes, and that's not what MS wants.
I recall that my Belkin router came with about 40 stickers on it, each one of them telling me to use the enclosed CD-Rom before using the router. Except that you don't actually have to use the CD to setup the router - it's only there to help users set up the router correctly via a wizard, as opposed to setting it up via the web interface.
I do hope that this won't mean that ap/router manufacturers will actually start forcing people to pop those useless cds in and then read through several screens of EULAs and warnings before letting them use the device.
So Joe Siegler is basically saying that the infinitely long developement process for DNF is going to continue as planned, and will be subject of jokes and speculations for many years to come... Good to know.
I think a better decision would be setting up something akin to the meta-moderation system here on slashdot. Instead of designating users to do the reviewing, why not let all users (or at least those that had an account for a while) review random edits from wikipedia. You could then assign higher weights to edits of users whose edits are often marked as incorrect/vandalizing in the moderation system, and make them come up more frequently on the not-so-random list of edits to review. That way, you'd keep control in hands of the contributors, and vandalizing edits of obscure pages would have better chances of being caught. Of course, such a system would not be perfect, but on the other hand, peer-review by a smaller group of people that you trust wouldn't be that perfect either.
This is what makes games like the Total War series fun... They emphasize strategy, and try to reduce more managerial tasks such as assigning individual workers to building a structure. Total War still remains realtime, however, it doesn't force you to micromanage anything, instead letting you control the big picture. Yes, you still have to make decisions in a timely manner, however, the outcome of the battle isn't determined by how efficently you wrestle with the interface, but rather, by your strategic decisions. IMHO, that's what an ideal RTS should be like - the outcome of the battle shouldn't be determined by who can more efficiently use the interface, and through it micromanage their base construction and armies, but rather, it should be determined by who makes better decisions throughout.
It is possible to create an RTS that forces the player to think instead of acting as fast as possible. However, the traditional RTS model is definately the most popular out there, and there isn't too much innovation in the genre.
Some banks actually issue scratch-off cards, that contain a bunch of authentication numbers. Each of those can be used only once, and they have to be used in order they are listed on the card. That way, even if the login data is stolen, no transaction can be done without intercepting the physical card... Sort of a one time pad scheme for transaction authentication. It's simple, cheap, but effective.
As far as I know, this is more popular in Europe, and few, if not none of the American banks use this system...
Ideally, a web browser on a public computer would be set up not to save any personal data, such as cookies, passwords, form entries, etc. Of course, in most cases it is not so, and such browser save cookies, and even passwords from the users... Fortunatelly, some browsers, like FF, have a convenient menu item that clears all personal data recorded by the user, and so it's possible to ensure that you leave no cookies or form entries behind, even if the browser is setup to allow them... Worst thing if the public computer runs IE, or some other browser where you have to dig in options screens to clear all your data. In many cases, such meddling with the browser is frowned upon by whoever is supposed to be watching over the computers.
The door? You can't handle the door!
Cellphones don't work when you're over the middle of an ocean. Satellites, on the other hand, can. Plus, I suspect it's easier to use a satellite connection for live TV, than to try and and pipe it over a cellphone network.
Besides, if you're flying over multiple countries, you need to get on several different cellphone networks, which means having to sign contracts with multiple providers if you wanna connect the entire plane, or having to worry about huge roaming charges. Not to mention cellphones don't work everywhere over land either, and in some regions, networks might be incapable of handling anything besides voice traffic.
Connexion probably didn't take off (pun intended) because of the costs invovled. You could pay for a landline connection for a month with what you had to pay for an entire flight of Internet access
I use an iriver H10 20GB (the US version). By default, it is a Plays-for-Sure, WMP supported device, and you can only use WMP to copy songs over to it (there's also a plugin for Winamp, but it's somewhat buggy). However, I can also boot the device into "emergency mode" where it becomes a normal USB mass storage device. I can then copy everything over, and resync the device's database using easyH10, an opensource app that can synchronise an H10 with the content on its harddrive, and even convert .pls and .m3u playlists to the internal format used by the device.
Now, this way of copying files is not supported by iriver, and easyH10 was built using information gathered from reverse engineering the H10 database structure. IIRC, a similar model can be used with some of the other iriver devices out of the box. Either way, it's a perfect way of synching files - you copy them over, and then you let a program sort the music out. EasyH10 is available for a variety of platforms, and I use it with both my Windows desktop and Ubuntu laptop. Playlist/database syncing shouldn't be an excuse for using a closed syncing protocol that's bound to get some people locked out.
No, it doesn't. In fact you just need to pull the lever and push the door open.
I'd say that Ubuntu already has easier OS and app installation than Windows. You can run the installer from under the booted-up OS, and you can actually be using the system during the installation (to, for example, read some guides).
For apps, you have apt-get, the synaptic gui and even the simplified Add/Remove Applications proggy that Ubuntu (at least Dapper) provides by default. If you wanna install something, you mark it for installation and hit OK. Apt then downloads and installs everything for you, most of the time. No need to navigate to a website, find an installation proggy. Apt/synaptic will inform you what you need to make the app run, and handle everything by itself. It's easier than Windows, for Joe User: need a spreadsheet ap? Mark the checkbox and click apply.
On a laptop running GNOME, I configured the winkey to allow window dragging. Ie, when you hold down winkey, you can click anywhere on the window and drag it. Quite useful, as it makes it easier to use the touchpad.
The default functionality of the winkey under windows, that makes the Start menu pop up is certainly annoying, but if you can make use of the key for something else, it certainly becomes that much more useful.
The people who switch Tor nodes for every search they perform, so that later, then don't end up having articles written about them calling them weirdos and porn-freaks. Sheesh, what's wrong with horses?
Same thing with the saw. You're not supposed to try to saw off your hand (unless some homicidal manaiac actually devised a complicated plan to get you to saw it off, but that's besides the point). The safety features are there in case you make a mistake, and they decrease the chances of you sustaining an injury in such a situation.
This would actually work with most of the modified cuecats... It allows typing in of barcodes, and that's essentially what a modded cuecat does. It'd probably be easier and more realiable than using a webcam, too.
Personally, I've been using my cuecat to catalog my DVD collection. There are some commercial apps out there that will read a barcode, look it up on several websites, and scrape the info about the particular DVD into a local database. With enough contributions to this barcodepedia website, it'd be possible to create something with similar usability - you could have entries for DVDs or music CDs with relevant info, available for instant fetching. In fact, it'd be somewhat like the service that cuecat was originally supposed to offer.
TFA states that the reason for the lawsuit is the fact that MS doesn't fully disclose what exactly the WGA tool does. Microsoft's description of the tool does not state that the tool will in fact report back to MS via the Internet, only that it will check the installation of windows and display a message if it find it non-"genuine." The user is not informed of what exactly the tool does, even if he has to consent to the installation of the tool.