Depends on the license/contract I believe - I seem to remember that Hitachi(?) had a clause in their patent license with Rambus that if Rambus' patents ever got thrown out, Hitachi got their money back.
But I imagine that's tricky to get into a contract.
The importance of Portal is the the ART!? Are you kidding?
It has less story than most games. The areas are all virtually identical. There is only 1 way to interact with the environment.
I think it was Erik Satie who said that he considered a piece of his music to be complete not when he could think of no more notes to add, but when he could not think of any more notes to remove.
I actually registered so early I got a negative ID, but then I went and forgot the login details, curse it!
So now I'm stuck with this lousy 4 digit ID. But I pwn you all, n00bs.
Btw, if it's one thing I like best about low-ID threads, it's the idiots who get really fucking angry about people boasting about their low IDs. The reason I like it is that they're such dicks that they don't realise that none of us really care about our low IDs. It's funny that they get so MAD! when we're just joking around.
What, you mean the way they had a fucked bluetooth stack on XP for about 4 years, and didn't have a bluetooth device driver programme, so that every bluetooth driver has to have the lame "Continue anyway" dialog when installing?
BS. Sweetheart, the only time Windows ever booted in 5 seconds for me was when I installed a Linux distribution to dual boot and the installer resized the NTFS partition to something much, much, much smaller. That's the only time that phenomenon has ever happened to me, so no, you are not getting 5 second boot times with Windows.
Indeed. That's probably why the poster actually wrote:
It takes 5 seconds to start booting windows on my notebook, my PC is the same.
I worked with the Evangelists in Apple Developer Relations, and my direct personal experience tells me that you're full of shit.
No, he's not. The fact that some of those you've met were good does not mean it does not imply 'highly paid fanboy'. Or maybe you were questioning the 'highly paid' part:).
For balance, the only Apple Evangelist I ever had experience with was a Quickdraw 3D Evangelist. He was a clueless idiot. I asked him how they addressed the performance issue caused by QD3D lighting only working with full RGB, whereas DirectX supported a ramp mode for significant performance increase. He didn't have a fecking clue what I was talking about. At the time, that was actually a pretty basic bit of knowledge about the software renderers. I mentally turned off when he replied to that question with "Let's take this offline" (we were in a meeting with him, me, and 2 other people from my company).
He could run the QD3D demos for us, though. He was really good at that. He also demonstrated the plug-in renderer architecture they had developed, which was by far the most interesting thing I saw that day (spent the day at Cupertino talking to Apple people). It allowed NPR and toon-shading stuff, long before it became mainstream. He even had a demo that showed a model being rendered in a 'cave painting' style. Depressingly, no-one at Apple (and especially not the Evangelist) seemed to realise how cool it was (except the people who wrote it, maybe).
gmail hasn't brought anything to the table that wasn't there before.
Apart from a little thing I like to call "User interface that doesn't irritate the living fuck out of me." And almost instant searching of all my email.
Well, it was a small stock control system for a company that would have maybe 10-15 users. So awesome performance etc wasn't an requirement. It wasn't a website with thousands of users or anything. It just had to work and not be really slow (i.e. when we did the monthly report queries, I'd rather they took a few seconds than an hour). If I remember correctly, the Zope DB extensions didn't support the version of mySQL that allowed transactions (or some similar nonsense), so a lot of that wasn't an issue, even if we wanted it to be.
My point was, it was a stock control system, for crying out loud. People have been writing them for many years. Let's not 'innovate' ourselves into a corner for the sake of it. Hence, I tested the known working system (mysql) with typical data for typical use cases, and it worked fine (I didn't even have to set up specific indices to get decent performance). The other guy just tried to convince me with rhetoric that his way was better.
You remind me of an idiot I had to work with once (I'm not saying you're an idiot, just that you remind me of one).
Working on a fairly vanilla stock control app, we were arguing over whether to use mysql or the Zope database (the system was written in Zope - don't get me started). From my side, I favoured mysql as a known quantity, I had run tests/queries with data representing the accumulation of orders etc over number of years, and was happy it worked/performed well. The other guy just wanted to use Zope's DB because it was Zope, and had not done any tests at all (I was later to learn this was his MO).
At one stage, having run out of arguments, he pronounced "But...Innovation is the key!"
I'm fairly proud of the fact that I resisted the temptation to shout in his face "We're writing a fucking Stock Control system - get over yourself."
Our site is IE-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Our site is run by people who use IE, after all, and the vast majority of our readership use IE. We're certainly not opposed to supporting Firefox, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're not using IE, and you have Firefox, try using it - maybe it will work.
. OTOH, there are a lot of Wii owners with an interest in finding it, so it might not be infeasible to imagine a distributed computing project with many thousands of nodes cranking away for a year.
I don't want to worry you, but there's a possibility that cryptographers have thought of that.
the Xbox uses a 2048-bit encryption key - and that will be really hard to crack, even if it is theoretically possible to derive the private key from the public key. Via New Scientist: "Brian Gladman, an independent cryptography expert based in the UK, says the length of the key means there is an incredibly slim chance of finding it via brute force computing. According to RSA company, it would take a million Pentium 500MHz computers 100 billion years to run through all the possible solutions of a 1640-bit key. A 2048 bit key would be exponentially harder to crack.
...where the police are looking for a violent killer, and then their surveillance locates him, and they all breathe a sigh of relief, as they assume that's the hard part done - all they have to do now is arrest him.
I can't help thinking that there's a wee bit more work to do than just find out what encryption method is being used.
Then again, maybe your average slashdotter thinks that 'breaking encryption' is as easy as 'guessing the algorithm used':-).
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the license/contract I believe - I seem to remember that Hitachi(?) had a clause in their patent license with Rambus that if Rambus' patents ever got thrown out, Hitachi got their money back.
But I imagine that's tricky to get into a contract.
Yeah, good luck with that. Familiar with the phrase 'terminal velocity'..?
But of course:
Imagine that you're falling from a huge height, and you have the Portal gun, and you need to survive the fall. What would you do?Did you pay attention at all during the game?
Hint from the 'curious' eye:
"Hey, what's wrong with your legs?"The importance of Portal is the the ART!? Are you kidding?
It has less story than most games. The areas are all virtually identical. There is only 1 way to interact with the environment.
I think it was Erik Satie who said that he considered a piece of his music to be complete not when he could think of no more notes to add, but when he could not think of any more notes to remove.
Think on.
... it takes two cubes just to block one turret,The 'crouch' key is your friend. I mean, it's no weighted companion cube, but it's a good friend nonetheless.
...was the day Doc Brown completed the first test of his Time Machine.
What a bunch of geeks.
Your server has a monitor? How quaint :-)
I could equally fairly ask, what kind of idiot thinks there is an omnipotent, omnipresent being?
Any other spoilers you want to chuck in there while you're at it? Muppet.
That's actually quite sane compared to the fibre-optic cables that have gold-plated TOSLINK connectors. Yes, they do exist.
Aside: gosh, even Wikipedia's sample pic of a TOSLINK connector appears to be gold-plated.
Back off, man. I'm a scientist.
Funny, because anyone who uses the word 'lifestyle' without irony would surely be the first to buy an iPod? :-)
I actually registered so early I got a negative ID, but then I went and forgot the login details, curse it!
So now I'm stuck with this lousy 4 digit ID. But I pwn you all, n00bs.
Btw, if it's one thing I like best about low-ID threads, it's the idiots who get really fucking angry about people boasting about their low IDs. The reason I like it is that they're such dicks that they don't realise that none of us really care about our low IDs. It's funny that they get so MAD! when we're just joking around.
What, you mean the way they had a fucked bluetooth stack on XP for about 4 years, and didn't have a bluetooth device driver programme, so that every bluetooth driver has to have the lame "Continue anyway" dialog when installing?
You're right, that does kind of suck.
Indeed. That's probably why the poster actually wrote:
It takes 5 seconds to start booting windows on my notebook, my PC is the same.No, he's not. The fact that some of those you've met were good does not mean it does not imply 'highly paid fanboy'. Or maybe you were questioning the 'highly paid' part :).
For balance, the only Apple Evangelist I ever had experience with was a Quickdraw 3D Evangelist. He was a clueless idiot. I asked him how they addressed the performance issue caused by QD3D lighting only working with full RGB, whereas DirectX supported a ramp mode for significant performance increase. He didn't have a fecking clue what I was talking about. At the time, that was actually a pretty basic bit of knowledge about the software renderers. I mentally turned off when he replied to that question with "Let's take this offline" (we were in a meeting with him, me, and 2 other people from my company).
He could run the QD3D demos for us, though. He was really good at that. He also demonstrated the plug-in renderer architecture they had developed, which was by far the most interesting thing I saw that day (spent the day at Cupertino talking to Apple people). It allowed NPR and toon-shading stuff, long before it became mainstream. He even had a demo that showed a model being rendered in a 'cave painting' style. Depressingly, no-one at Apple (and especially not the Evangelist) seemed to realise how cool it was (except the people who wrote it, maybe).
Did they actually FtFF? :-)
You mean that it's annoying that you associate 'texture popping' with last-gen titles?
You keep using that sentence construction. I don't think it means what you think it means. :-)
Apart from a little thing I like to call "User interface that doesn't irritate the living fuck out of me." And almost instant searching of all my email.
Well, it was a small stock control system for a company that would have maybe 10-15 users. So awesome performance etc wasn't an requirement. It wasn't a website with thousands of users or anything. It just had to work and not be really slow (i.e. when we did the monthly report queries, I'd rather they took a few seconds than an hour). If I remember correctly, the Zope DB extensions didn't support the version of mySQL that allowed transactions (or some similar nonsense), so a lot of that wasn't an issue, even if we wanted it to be.
My point was, it was a stock control system, for crying out loud. People have been writing them for many years. Let's not 'innovate' ourselves into a corner for the sake of it. Hence, I tested the known working system (mysql) with typical data for typical use cases, and it worked fine (I didn't even have to set up specific indices to get decent performance). The other guy just tried to convince me with rhetoric that his way was better.
Not surprisingly, he lost the argument.
You remind me of an idiot I had to work with once (I'm not saying you're an idiot, just that you remind me of one).
Working on a fairly vanilla stock control app, we were arguing over whether to use mysql or the Zope database (the system was written in Zope - don't get me started). From my side, I favoured mysql as a known quantity, I had run tests/queries with data representing the accumulation of orders etc over number of years, and was happy it worked/performed well. The other guy just wanted to use Zope's DB because it was Zope, and had not done any tests at all (I was later to learn this was his MO).
At one stage, having run out of arguments, he pronounced "But...Innovation is the key!"
I'm fairly proud of the fact that I resisted the temptation to shout in his face "We're writing a fucking Stock Control system - get over yourself."
Great days.
Our site is IE-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Our site is run by people who use IE, after all, and the vast majority of our readership use IE. We're certainly not opposed to supporting Firefox, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're not using IE, and you have Firefox, try using it - maybe it will work.
As opposed to..?
I don't know if you've been keeping up, but an awful lot of vulnerabilities are triggered by providing 'just data' to the target.
I don't want to worry you, but there's a possibility that cryptographers have thought of that.
For example:
the Xbox uses a 2048-bit encryption key - and that will be really hard to crack, even if it is theoretically possible to derive the private key from the public key. Via New Scientist: "Brian Gladman, an independent cryptography expert based in the UK, says the length of the key means there is an incredibly slim chance of finding it via brute force computing. According to RSA company, it would take a million Pentium 500MHz computers 100 billion years to run through all the possible solutions of a 1640-bit key. A 2048 bit key would be exponentially harder to crack....where the police are looking for a violent killer, and then their surveillance locates him, and they all breathe a sigh of relief, as they assume that's the hard part done - all they have to do now is arrest him.
I can't help thinking that there's a wee bit more work to do than just find out what encryption method is being used.
Then again, maybe your average slashdotter thinks that 'breaking encryption' is as easy as 'guessing the algorithm used' :-).
You had 16 error codes available? Pah.
I once wrote an entire database system using only zeroes.