A lot of people are saying things like "ohhh, I wonder how long before emulators appear".
FYI, this is actually the 3rd hack like this to appear for the 360. There was a first hack, the KK (King Kong) exploit that got patched quickly, then in 2009 details for a JTAG hack were released. Because of this, there's quite a few 360's running unsigned code out there and plenty of emulators for them. MAME, SNES, Genesis/MD, I believe someone even ported Final Burn Alpha. Sadly the homebrew scene wasn't quite as rampant as the PS3 homebrew scene and neither had anything on the Xbox homebrew scene, but hopefully this will breathe new life into it.
Suffice to say, as a JTAG owner myself, it's worth it for being able to store and load all your games from a HDD. With most 360 games (full games, that is) clocking in at about 6.5GB, you don't even need a lot of space for a big collection.
Xell also creates a basic HTTP server, you can just browse your 360's IP address and you'll get a lovely site listing all your keys. It'll even let you download them in a.txt file.
There are already several emulators out there for the 360. This isn't the first time there's been an exploit to run unsigned code, in fact it's the 3rd by my count. The first wasn't all that prevalent and it was patched quickly, though. However, in 2009 an exploit was released allowing people to create what are now known as JTAG 360's, which do exactly the same thing as this exploit does. In fact, the video for this exploit shows it booting a basic Linux OS, that's a modified version of the JTAG hack.
I share this sentiment exactly. I have a 10 month old boy, we recently found that he's a little bit allergic to egg. Sometimes the jabs they give have egg in them. But you know what? Fuck it, he's still getting the jab in a couple of months time. They said the chances of him having a reaction to it are still pretty slim, but I'd rather if he was going to have a reaction, he did it in the presence of many qualified nurses and doctors, rather than contracting measles at a random interval in the future, whereby we might not be near any medical professionals. All because I know too many people are not vaccinating their kids, because they're fucking idiot.
This is a sore issue amongst my wife's family and ourselves. My wife and I are completely for vaccination, we're both reasonably intelligent adults and understand all the statistics and how some reports from a decade ago were complete and utter bullshit. However, her mother and aunt disagree. What makes this worse is that her aunt is a nurse, a community nurse that's supposed to promote vaccinations, but because her daughter is somewhat autistic, she doesn't trust them. I hope the guy who wrote that bullshit report, as well as every journalist who proliferated it, dies in a very painful death. Their actions, over the next few decades, could cause hundreds, maybe even thousands of people to die needlessly.
Since neither article gives a true size of Wikipedia (all languages), we need to do some estimates -
Only in June 2011, there have been more than 11 million edits in all Wikipedias and 3.6 million in the English version
If we extrapolate this, we could say that the English version accounts for about 1/4 of the entire Wiki database, so if there's 4million English Articles, there must be about 12million articles in total. This corroborates with the following statement:
[Wikipeida in total has] 8 billion words in 19 million articles in approximately 270 languages.[2] The English Wikipedia alone has over 2 billion words
Once again, English wiki is about 1/4 the size of the entire wiki, so anyone wanting to back just that up has a considerable task if it really is 100TB+.
Anyway, the same article has a table which lists that the English Wikipedia is made up of roughly 13,900,000 characters, if you presume that each of the 8billion words has an average length of 5 + 1 space. Using our estimate ratio of 1:4 for the total size, then that means all languages added together must be about 56,000,000 characters. Hell, let's call it 60,000,000. Anyhoo, we may as well also presume that Wiki is saving each character as a double-byte unicode character and give us a total of about 120,000,000 bytes. Of course, that's just the guts of each article, there's a lot of metadata to go with it. What the hell, let's double that number again and add some more rounding to get us 240,000,000 bytes. That's still not exactly a massive amount.
Of course, Wiki does contain lots of nice images, sounds and video, but do you really think that it has terabytes and terabytes of Video/images?
I'm surprised at how few/.ers trust Google not to mess up what is, essentially, everything Google stands for - search. The idea that people might abuse the +1 feature is so obvious that it goes without saying. I'm pretty sure Google realise this. Whatever they do, they won't jeopardise their leadership in the search market and even if they do, well you've always got Bing.
Not to mention the "copy path" button they've added. I found that a utility that did this ended up being one of the first things I installed on a new PC so I welcome this development.
Well most UI's only update every second or so anyway. If the transfer was going particularly quickly, all you'd see is (for example) 5.32% -> 10.41%. Even if the UI does update quickly, it's not much of an issue in the same way that clocks that show ms don't detract from being able to tell the time.
It's a minor thing, just something that I appreciate when working with slow transfers.
There is a difference between changing who you are and better showing off your good points. The thing is, we all have good and bad points about ourselves and first impressions are important. If someone's bad points come through right at the beginning, it's hard to see past them and since relationships are hard work, people don't want to waste their time.
It's no different than having a polished CV. A piece of paper doesn't change who you are, you'll still be the same person no matter what you write on it, or how you write it, but if you spend a little extra time and make sure it's as perfect as possible, you'll get a lot more interest. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that 95% of the rules of that "first message/first date" apply to job interviews.
I do agree though that you shouldn't change who you are, if you try to pretend you're something you're not, you're only going to end up with someone who's incompatible with yourself. I always found that being openly honest about yourself gets much better results anyway. "Hi there, my name's neoKushan, I'm not the best looking guy in the world, but I'm honest, somewhat intelligent and I have a big willy".
I would just like to say that not enough programs use decimal percentages these days. Going from 1% to 2% over the course of a few minutes makes it hard to estimate yourself without really paying attention to it, whereas going from 1.50% to 1.53% in a second or two gives me an instant glance as to the speed (And in my feeble brain, makes it feel like it's going faster).
The argument for that could be that while you're busy calculating the file sizes, you're starving the copy operation of bandwidth. Especially when you're using a Mechanical HDD, whereby two joint operations will more than half the overall speed as the mechanical side of things can't actually perform 2 things at once, meaning everything has to take turns.
Maintain a table of expected speeds for each storage device on the filesystem.
A table of "expected" speeds for each storage device? For one, the word "expected" leads to all sorts of problems. What's the "expected" speed of a hard drive? What about a badly fragmented Hard drive? What about a Hard Drive that's also being accessed by some other, unpredictable task? And what about a USB drive? How fast do you expect that to go? If you've ever used a couple of USB drives from different manufacturers, you'll know the difference between one and another is night and day. Is Microsoft supposed to keep a database of every sing USB device ever made, just to get an estimate that's slightly more accurate? How about devices that didn't quite exist when the OS was launched? And what about when you throw in things like the Chipset used on the machine, which can also have a drastic effect on speeds, as well as things like drivers? Who's going to maintain this table, who's going to keep it up to date, where should it be stored, how big do you think it would be? You're talking about gigabytes of data, the only way to realistically do it is to stream it from the internet. Nevermind that's another operation to perform, but for a lot of copy jobs, it'd probably take too long.
f it's reasonable for the device type, seek to the middle and end
And what if it's not reasonable? And how will you know in advance where the files are actually going to be stored? If it's a mechanical drive, you might end up with files all over the place, or you might get lucky and have them sequentially written. The point is, you just won't know until it's too late.
There are many, many ways to estimate something as "simple" as a copy operation, but due to the sheer number of variables there isn't a simple, sure-fire way to always be accurate. The best you can do is be somewhat accurate most of the time.
True, it isn't without its issues, but you don't need to have a teacher looking after the kids and it doesn't matter if you have 200 of them in the same room as they'll all be working independently. Plus, quite a lot of them won't necessarily need to go to the library because they'll have access at home, it's only the ones that don't which will need to.
I do wonder why more effort doesn't seem to be put into using Technology to help save money.
Sure, take your 4 day week. Does that mean the kids can't be given a website to go to, with their on personal login, that has a bunch of weekly tests and exams for them to do, that they can spend friday doing? Have set times, make them sit the "exam" at the same time as everyone else, effectively making it a "school day" without the school. Even if it's something simple like watching an educational video and occasionally interrupting to ask both education questions and questions to make sure they're actually paying attention. It's not a perfect idea, it sure as hell wouldn't beat having direct access to a teacher 5 days a week, but surely it's better than just not being in school on the friday.
It seems that technology in the classroom is constantly shunned, with people stating that computers distract kids more than they help, but maybe that's just because people haven't invested enough in them. Or maybe it's just a pipe dream.
Slightly off-topic, but back when CS:S (that's Counter Strike: Source to you web devs) came out, a few friends and I were messing around in our own server.
The Skybox partially works by having a miniturised version of the level (if I recall correctly, it's 16 times smaller) hidden from view. I can't remember the details about what this is for, something to do with light calculation or something, but we found out that if you teleport a player into that skybox, they'll appear in the level as an enormous CT or Terrorist (Think of it a bit like those VR missions from Metal Gear Solid 1, where you fought giant enemies). Much fun was had, particularly on those that either didn't expect to get teleported into the ether, or didn't expect the hostages to be defended by Godzilla.
...is something other reviewers seem to like: The Hacking.
I don't know why it's getting so much praise, because it's a total downer for me. The whole point of Deus ex, particularly when you play stealthy, is that it relies on skill. The skill to know what way to tackle a situation, the skill to avoid patrols and not get caught. However, the hacking comes down to chance, complete and utter chance. You can upgrade your skills all you want, but all this does is lower the chances of you getting caught. It's still entirely down to chance, though. It means that you may as well just save before hacking anything, go for it and if you fail, just reload. No skill required. It utterly takes away from it for me.
The original Deus Ex didn't really do a hacking minigame. As soon as you hacked anything, you were in, but you only had so much time to do what you wanted (more if you upgraded this skill), but at least this still took some skill, it still gave the impression of having to work quickly, to plan ahead what you want to do and practice doing it once you were in. It's such a shame the hacking element in Deus Ex: HR is more of a brute-force thing.
It really is very very similar to Deus Ex. so much so, you might find yourself thinking "Wait, so they haven't actually done anything new or original, they've just completely ripped off the first game". Then you realise how much you're enjoying it and don't want it to end, just like with the first game. Then you realise that 10 years of evolution in games has somehow brought us right back to where we were when the original Deus Ex came out. Truly, a game so far ahead of its time that the only game to match it would be its prequel.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people are saying things like "ohhh, I wonder how long before emulators appear".
FYI, this is actually the 3rd hack like this to appear for the 360. There was a first hack, the KK (King Kong) exploit that got patched quickly, then in 2009 details for a JTAG hack were released. Because of this, there's quite a few 360's running unsigned code out there and plenty of emulators for them. MAME, SNES, Genesis/MD, I believe someone even ported Final Burn Alpha. Sadly the homebrew scene wasn't quite as rampant as the PS3 homebrew scene and neither had anything on the Xbox homebrew scene, but hopefully this will breathe new life into it.
Suffice to say, as a JTAG owner myself, it's worth it for being able to store and load all your games from a HDD. With most 360 games (full games, that is) clocking in at about 6.5GB, you don't even need a lot of space for a big collection.
Xell also creates a basic HTTP server, you can just browse your 360's IP address and you'll get a lovely site listing all your keys. It'll even let you download them in a .txt file.
There are already several emulators out there for the 360. This isn't the first time there's been an exploit to run unsigned code, in fact it's the 3rd by my count. The first wasn't all that prevalent and it was patched quickly, though. However, in 2009 an exploit was released allowing people to create what are now known as JTAG 360's, which do exactly the same thing as this exploit does. In fact, the video for this exploit shows it booting a basic Linux OS, that's a modified version of the JTAG hack.
Guns are for defensive purposes, but in practice they're mainly used to shoot people.
The Xbox360's OS is a modification of the original Xbox OS, so technically it is also based on the Windows Kernel.
I share this sentiment exactly. I have a 10 month old boy, we recently found that he's a little bit allergic to egg. Sometimes the jabs they give have egg in them. But you know what? Fuck it, he's still getting the jab in a couple of months time. They said the chances of him having a reaction to it are still pretty slim, but I'd rather if he was going to have a reaction, he did it in the presence of many qualified nurses and doctors, rather than contracting measles at a random interval in the future, whereby we might not be near any medical professionals. All because I know too many people are not vaccinating their kids, because they're fucking idiot.
This is a sore issue amongst my wife's family and ourselves. My wife and I are completely for vaccination, we're both reasonably intelligent adults and understand all the statistics and how some reports from a decade ago were complete and utter bullshit. However, her mother and aunt disagree. What makes this worse is that her aunt is a nurse, a community nurse that's supposed to promote vaccinations, but because her daughter is somewhat autistic, she doesn't trust them. I hope the guy who wrote that bullshit report, as well as every journalist who proliferated it, dies in a very painful death. Their actions, over the next few decades, could cause hundreds, maybe even thousands of people to die needlessly.
Wikipedia currently has 3,711,110 articles in total in the English version alone.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Overview#How_big_is_Wikipedia.3F
Better Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons#Wikipedia
Since neither article gives a true size of Wikipedia (all languages), we need to do some estimates -
Only in June 2011, there have been more than 11 million edits in all Wikipedias and 3.6 million in the English version
If we extrapolate this, we could say that the English version accounts for about 1/4 of the entire Wiki database, so if there's 4million English Articles, there must be about 12million articles in total. This corroborates with the following statement:
[Wikipeida in total has] 8 billion words in 19 million articles in approximately 270 languages.[2] The English Wikipedia alone has over 2 billion words
Once again, English wiki is about 1/4 the size of the entire wiki, so anyone wanting to back just that up has a considerable task if it really is 100TB+.
Anyway, the same article has a table which lists that the English Wikipedia is made up of roughly 13,900,000 characters, if you presume that each of the 8billion words has an average length of 5 + 1 space. Using our estimate ratio of 1:4 for the total size, then that means all languages added together must be about 56,000,000 characters. Hell, let's call it 60,000,000. Anyhoo, we may as well also presume that Wiki is saving each character as a double-byte unicode character and give us a total of about 120,000,000 bytes. Of course, that's just the guts of each article, there's a lot of metadata to go with it. What the hell, let's double that number again and add some more rounding to get us 240,000,000 bytes. That's still not exactly a massive amount.
Of course, Wiki does contain lots of nice images, sounds and video, but do you really think that it has terabytes and terabytes of Video/images?
To be fair, I think you could fit all that into 64GB, providing you're not talking about HD quality.
I'm surprised at how few /.ers trust Google not to mess up what is, essentially, everything Google stands for - search.
The idea that people might abuse the +1 feature is so obvious that it goes without saying. I'm pretty sure Google realise this. Whatever they do, they won't jeopardise their leadership in the search market and even if they do, well you've always got Bing.
BigData - SimpleAlgorthim. Isn't that their motto or something?
Extract the file to a temp folder, copy all of the files into the first folder and a good GUI will leave each file highlighted for you to delete.
Not to mention the "copy path" button they've added. I found that a utility that did this ended up being one of the first things I installed on a new PC so I welcome this development.
Isn't space full of radiation as it is?
Well most UI's only update every second or so anyway. If the transfer was going particularly quickly, all you'd see is (for example) 5.32% -> 10.41%. Even if the UI does update quickly, it's not much of an issue in the same way that clocks that show ms don't detract from being able to tell the time.
It's a minor thing, just something that I appreciate when working with slow transfers.
I believe these days Windows doesn't give you that initial estimate anyway.
There is a difference between changing who you are and better showing off your good points. The thing is, we all have good and bad points about ourselves and first impressions are important. If someone's bad points come through right at the beginning, it's hard to see past them and since relationships are hard work, people don't want to waste their time.
It's no different than having a polished CV. A piece of paper doesn't change who you are, you'll still be the same person no matter what you write on it, or how you write it, but if you spend a little extra time and make sure it's as perfect as possible, you'll get a lot more interest. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that 95% of the rules of that "first message/first date" apply to job interviews.
I do agree though that you shouldn't change who you are, if you try to pretend you're something you're not, you're only going to end up with someone who's incompatible with yourself. I always found that being openly honest about yourself gets much better results anyway. "Hi there, my name's neoKushan, I'm not the best looking guy in the world, but I'm honest, somewhat intelligent and I have a big willy".
A Language that gives you head? Where do I sign up?!
I would just like to say that not enough programs use decimal percentages these days. Going from 1% to 2% over the course of a few minutes makes it hard to estimate yourself without really paying attention to it, whereas going from 1.50% to 1.53% in a second or two gives me an instant glance as to the speed (And in my feeble brain, makes it feel like it's going faster).
The argument for that could be that while you're busy calculating the file sizes, you're starving the copy operation of bandwidth. Especially when you're using a Mechanical HDD, whereby two joint operations will more than half the overall speed as the mechanical side of things can't actually perform 2 things at once, meaning everything has to take turns.
Maintain a table of expected speeds for each storage device on the filesystem.
A table of "expected" speeds for each storage device? For one, the word "expected" leads to all sorts of problems. What's the "expected" speed of a hard drive? What about a badly fragmented Hard drive? What about a Hard Drive that's also being accessed by some other, unpredictable task?
And what about a USB drive? How fast do you expect that to go? If you've ever used a couple of USB drives from different manufacturers, you'll know the difference between one and another is night and day. Is Microsoft supposed to keep a database of every sing USB device ever made, just to get an estimate that's slightly more accurate? How about devices that didn't quite exist when the OS was launched? And what about when you throw in things like the Chipset used on the machine, which can also have a drastic effect on speeds, as well as things like drivers? Who's going to maintain this table, who's going to keep it up to date, where should it be stored, how big do you think it would be? You're talking about gigabytes of data, the only way to realistically do it is to stream it from the internet. Nevermind that's another operation to perform, but for a lot of copy jobs, it'd probably take too long.
f it's reasonable for the device type, seek to the middle and end
And what if it's not reasonable? And how will you know in advance where the files are actually going to be stored? If it's a mechanical drive, you might end up with files all over the place, or you might get lucky and have them sequentially written. The point is, you just won't know until it's too late.
There are many, many ways to estimate something as "simple" as a copy operation, but due to the sheer number of variables there isn't a simple, sure-fire way to always be accurate. The best you can do is be somewhat accurate most of the time.
True, it isn't without its issues, but you don't need to have a teacher looking after the kids and it doesn't matter if you have 200 of them in the same room as they'll all be working independently. Plus, quite a lot of them won't necessarily need to go to the library because they'll have access at home, it's only the ones that don't which will need to.
I do wonder why more effort doesn't seem to be put into using Technology to help save money.
Sure, take your 4 day week. Does that mean the kids can't be given a website to go to, with their on personal login, that has a bunch of weekly tests and exams for them to do, that they can spend friday doing? Have set times, make them sit the "exam" at the same time as everyone else, effectively making it a "school day" without the school. Even if it's something simple like watching an educational video and occasionally interrupting to ask both education questions and questions to make sure they're actually paying attention. It's not a perfect idea, it sure as hell wouldn't beat having direct access to a teacher 5 days a week, but surely it's better than just not being in school on the friday.
It seems that technology in the classroom is constantly shunned, with people stating that computers distract kids more than they help, but maybe that's just because people haven't invested enough in them. Or maybe it's just a pipe dream.
Slightly off-topic, but back when CS:S (that's Counter Strike: Source to you web devs) came out, a few friends and I were messing around in our own server.
The Skybox partially works by having a miniturised version of the level (if I recall correctly, it's 16 times smaller) hidden from view. I can't remember the details about what this is for, something to do with light calculation or something, but we found out that if you teleport a player into that skybox, they'll appear in the level as an enormous CT or Terrorist (Think of it a bit like those VR missions from Metal Gear Solid 1, where you fought giant enemies). Much fun was had, particularly on those that either didn't expect to get teleported into the ether, or didn't expect the hostages to be defended by Godzilla.
...is something other reviewers seem to like: The Hacking.
I don't know why it's getting so much praise, because it's a total downer for me. The whole point of Deus ex, particularly when you play stealthy, is that it relies on skill. The skill to know what way to tackle a situation, the skill to avoid patrols and not get caught. However, the hacking comes down to chance, complete and utter chance. You can upgrade your skills all you want, but all this does is lower the chances of you getting caught. It's still entirely down to chance, though.
It means that you may as well just save before hacking anything, go for it and if you fail, just reload. No skill required. It utterly takes away from it for me.
The original Deus Ex didn't really do a hacking minigame. As soon as you hacked anything, you were in, but you only had so much time to do what you wanted (more if you upgraded this skill), but at least this still took some skill, it still gave the impression of having to work quickly, to plan ahead what you want to do and practice doing it once you were in. It's such a shame the hacking element in Deus Ex: HR is more of a brute-force thing.
The rest of the game is top notch, though.
It really is very very similar to Deus Ex. so much so, you might find yourself thinking "Wait, so they haven't actually done anything new or original, they've just completely ripped off the first game". Then you realise how much you're enjoying it and don't want it to end, just like with the first game.
Then you realise that 10 years of evolution in games has somehow brought us right back to where we were when the original Deus Ex came out. Truly, a game so far ahead of its time that the only game to match it would be its prequel.