* Halo 3 (standard retail SKU): £30
* Halo 3 ODST (standard retail SKU): £30
* Total cost: £60 (but includes whole extra ODST game on top)
His numbers are stupid. You can't factor XBox live in because it's not a Halo 3 only requirement anymore than your internet connection or electricity bill is so I've outright removed that as it's not a Halo 3 cost. I've separated it into two sections because Halo 3 ODST comes with all the map packs he listed. ODST is in itself a whole new game however, and I played through it this weekend- playing it on Legendary it gives a good 6 - 8hrs gameplay which is shorter than many games, but as long as others so having actually played it first hand now I disagree with the idea it's an expansion.
But here's where I really disagree that anything has changed, I bought Dawn of War and all the expansion backs, with 3 expansion packs at £20 and the original game at £30 it was more expensive. This hasn't changed either, I remember buying Warcraft III and it's expansion totalling up to a similar price to £60.
Really, I don't see the guy's point at all- MMO charges have been around since the UO days circa 1997, and charges for games like Halo 3 + addons aren't anymore expensive than games with addons have always been when you had to buy them as hard copies in shops.
For what it's worth I think in many cases the DLC options give you more for your money. I've bought games for 400 points on Live Arcade (which is about £3.50), these sorts of games would have been at least £5, but more like £10 or £15 in the shops before the DLC option came about.
I don't buy this guys argument, I do not believe games are more expensive now than they've ever been. You only have to look at the price the average PC game goes for- down from around £34.99 on average about 5 - 10 years ago, to around £24.99 on average now. MMO subscriptions I believe are on average about the same now as they have always been also.
The only thing I took away from this guys article is his revelation: "Hey wait, entertainment is actually costing me money?". What happened, did mum and dad stop buying him games and he suddenly had to start paying out his own pocket all of a sudden?
I do not have a problem with piracy because I accept it exists, my main income is from writing bespoke software on a permanent contract for an engineering firm. I write and update software as and how they need me to. I work for a living.
I do also write software in my spare time and sell it, however I have no expectation that everyone would or even should buy it. I don't expect someone to pay £30 for my software if they're only going to use it once or twice, because it's that type of program. I'd like them to buy it if they're going to use it more than that however, but if they don't they don't. So why do I even bother writing it? Because there's enough people out there who do buy it to net me thousands of pounds of extra income on top of my wage each year.
This is the model artists need to start following- if they want a guaranteed stream of money, start working for a living, do live performances, do concerts and so on. If that's not enough sure produce CDs and such, appreciate the extra income it brings in.
The reason this legislation focuses on the music industry is because they are the ones crying the hardest for exactly this reason- they do not want to have to work for a living, they want to be able to do a few weeks work and profit off it for life. There are some software developers in this situation too of course but they're fewer and further between. This is also the reason you see movie stars crying about piracy but do not see soap opera stars crying- because the latter work for a living, whilst the former only want to do a few years work to set them up for life.
You see, this is why I can't hate piracy, because all it's done is expose who the lazy amongst society are, no, not the pirates- those who actually see piracy as a problem. The only reason piracy would be a problem for you is if you depend on trying to make a living from doing next to no work and exploit the previous monopoly on distribution that the internet has done away with.
It just comes down to the fact the music industry has built itself around this lazy living more than anyone else, because music tracks are short they have to do very little work compared to even movie stars who at least have to put months, sometimes years into a film, whilst "artists" put a mere few weeks or a month or two into an album. Of course they like to think they work hard promoting it, but promoting your album is basically musician language for a free round the world trip.
You're quite right in that the software industry wont oppose this type of legislation because it does indeed provide an easy ride. But they've not been so vocal about it because they realise that it's not the end of the world, there's no point pissing your customers off when you can just adapt. Adapting is something the music industry apparently doesn't understand.
I'll admit I don't know the details of this case or US laws particularly well, but in general investigation into people like him, his arrest, and the court case, as well as the prison sentence cost money. A lot of money. Money that wont be repaid by anyone other than the tax payer. So it's not unreasonable for the tax paying public to somewhat appalled if someone is making an absolute fortune based on his contacts in a similar important position of trust in which he will be making a fortune.
Fair enough, you have an issue whereby you can't take money off someone whose poor once they've done their time for burglary or whatever, because it'll cost them more when they undoubtedly reoffend because they have little choice but to commit crime to pay off the charges. In the case of someone like this though who is clearly making a lot of money, it seems perfectly fair to bill him for some of the costs. 90% tax on income above say, $30k seems fair until the debt is repaid.
The problem is if you do nothing you give people the impression that this sort of crime is worth trying, because at the end of the day even if you get caught you'll still come out extremely well off. In the meantime the tax payer foots the bill for investigation, incarceration and so on. Ultimately the people committing the crime win, whilst the tax payers- mostly comprised of honest joes lose.
So why do you care about slow reboots being an issue if you're running high availability systems with fallback in the first place? The parent was complaining about slow reboots, the only reason they would be an issue is if you don't have any kind of setup to keep services up whilst one or more servers are down. Or did you not read the whole thread and simply took my comment out of context?
Not everywhere can afford redundant systems, and not every management team will authorise it which is presumably why the parent had an issue with slow reboots in the first place, else as I say, if they did then they wouldn't care about slow reboots to start with.
I'm still not sure why you think it's nonsense to patch when you need to patch either, rather than patching for patchings sake. It's basic common sense - especially as you can't guarantee a test on a stage server will be in anyway guaranteed to weed out any issues, but as I say the difference is it does require an admin to understand what the patches actually mean rather than simply assume that all patches should just go on without question. The distinction is important because an admin who understands what patch notes mean is also an admin that can foresee any issues or incompatibilities the patch might cause elsewhere.
Do you actually read the patches that come along on patch Tuesday or do you just mindlessly install them?
If you did the former, you'd see you don't actually need to install them and reboot every Tuesday, you could simply queue them up until there's a critical patch. Some you don't even need to install at all, if there's a critical flaw in IIS but you haven't got the IIS service enabled and never intend to, it's not worth rebooting the server over.
You're making the mistake a lot of bad admins make- assuming you need to install the latest and greatest the second it's there. You don't, you only need to install patches to fix issues you're having or to fix security flaws that actually effect you. Yes this means you actually need to understand security and be able to judge whether a particular security flaw is exploitable in your situation or not.
Regardless, what it comes down to is this, if you're having to reboot your servers more than a few times a year then you're not running a network as well as an IT professional really should do.
I can't think of anything more disasterous than having either an architect astronaut OR a duct tape programmer, well, except perhaps having both.
The problem is that architecture in itself helps speed up application development. An application that is just an unorganised mish-mash of code is going to cause massive delays when something needs to be changed and that's a key point - over-architecting means something will be extremely slow to produce, but likely be extremely easy to maintain, under-architecting means it'll be extremely quick to produce, but an absolute nightmare to maintain. A good developer can get the middle ground and enjoy the best of both worlds, ultimately ending up with a much better program, in a reasonable timeframe and that remains maintainable, saving massive amounts of time over the duct tape programmer's monstrosity in the long run.
That's because you don't want a server to just gloss over and ignore the fact your RAID array is fucked and data is being sent to oblivion and that sort of thing.
It doesn't take a long time just for the sake of taking a long time, it takes a long time to make sure everything is correct as it should be.
How often do you reboot your servers anyway? It shouldn't be more than a few times a year at most.
Vietnam and Afghanistan aren't good examples as in both cases a trained military were involved. This is especially the case in Vietnam where the NVA had MiG 17s, 19s and 21s as well as tanks and such also.
In Afghanistan the first time round with Russia, the Mujahideen had training from the US, support from Pakistan and so forth. The US supplied them with equipment and training like Stinger missiles. Similarly, in the current Afghan conflict the Taliban were still well equipped and well trained by the likes of Pakistan's ISI, coupled with training and equipment carried over from when the CIA was training and equipping them against the USSR.
Guerilla tactics used by trained combatants does not make them civilians. Regardless though, even in the case of these examples, the likes of the US and the USSR could've continued to fight the battles so a determined military could still win, this is particularly the case if it was even more brutal in it's tactics- see Burma's military junta or North Korea for an example. If you starve the population and control the food sources, they will either join you or remain too weak to fight. At best, vs. a determined military, even if you outnumber them all you can be is a pain in the arse, or simply hope they weren't as determined as they first thought they were when they went in. Hiding amongst the civilian population wont help you much if the civilian population are at risk of starvation, or the death of their family members if they don't give you up.
That's true if Demon's issues were limited to speed but they're not, they include billing errors, bad customer service, larger restrictions on what can be done on the connection - all this despite them charging more than most other ISPs to boot.
Yes, if you can get Demon, you can get many other ISPs. Demon used to be awesome, but has been wank for years.
Anyone still with them deserves what they get. If you didn't ditch this ISP a few years back it shouldn't come as a suprise. This isn't the first major screwup they've made, and they've made millions of minor screwups.
They used to have a tech support centre with proper IT staff manning it that really knew their stuff, then they outsourced to India and their call centre became horrific, it became useless. They were also taken over and suddenly put arbitrary un-advertised caps on your bandwidth usage after which they'd drop you to 128kbps for an entire month. Effectively if they felt like upping profit they'd just randomly select people claiming they'd gone over this magical un-advertised cap, refusing to say exactly what the cap was then drop you to pre-broadband speeds for a month or so to save them a fortune across all customers they did it to. Prices also went up around the same time service lowered in this manner.
I struggle to have any sympathy for remaining Demon customers, the company was gutted, all competent staff removed, customer service decreased, prices increased, product quality/features decreased. Why would anyone in their right mind stay with that kind of company?
Britain defeated Argentina in armed combat in the Falklands despite being 3000 miles from home and outnumbered at least 10 to 1 both in the air and on land.
So if one trained military force can defeat another trained military force at those odds, what makes you think a trained military force can't defeat an untrained civilian force at those odds?
How do you think Nazi German managed to take as much territory as they did? They certainly didn't have enough native population to control the much larger population of the countries they held at odds as bad as or worse than those you cite.
This is a notable point. I have to wonder sometimes what the real noise and reason for censorship in Germany of Nazi related material is- is it really about stemming and preventing a nazi uprising again, or is it actually about refusing to acknowledge or accept defeat of the nazis or nazi sentiment?
All too often these censorship laws seem to be used in support of the nazis- i.e. "this game is okay, as long as you aren't killing any Nazis in it".
Who exactly calls attention to these problems in Germany? I'd suggest anyone complaining about a swastika symbol being left in a game about killing nazis should be the first person you question about their real intentions.
"Of course, these are the same people that think the word playboy means rabbit and have no idea of the brand's link to the porn industry. Gotta love Asian culture."
It's not just asian culture, they've rebranded Playboy as a fashion brand in the West too. There's something basically messed up about 11 yr old girls running round with Playboy t-shirts on!
"As for neo-nazis, they're mostly just loonies. They're as useless as UFO fanatics or 9/11 conspiracy guys. They'll never be savvy enough to gain power anywhere."
I wish that were true. Sadly, by playing the "blame the immigrants" card, they're doing quite well in many places. The BNP whom are holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathisers in the UK got themselves two seats in Europe last European election and have some council seats, including one in London itself.
It's not just in Britain though, it's the same story in many European nations. Furthermore part the problem is that when you have other nations, such as Iran, with dictators in power which are no less hateful or dangerous than Hitler, and they fund terrorism as they do, and whilst you have groups like Al Qaeda trying to attack more liberal countries, then people in those countries are given reasons to hate those abroad, and hence allow groups like the BNP (i.e. neo-Nazi groups) too play on that anger and fear to recruit.
I think you misunderestimate the threat of them, and it's that complacency that got Germany to where they were in the 1930s. It's better to accept they're a threat and deal with them than pretend they're not and suffer the consequences as we have before.
So in other words they didn't optimise the binaries or content at all for lower RAM usage and CPU usage as is being discussed, they simply optimised the network protocol?
Well yes, of course- that's exactly what I said, some optimisation is still entirely relevant, but that's not the sort of optimisation being discussed here. Writing an efficient protocol is a completely different game to crafting code and content to be non-generic so as to optimise CPU/RAM usage at the expense of easy modification at a later date.
That's really where compression comes in rather than this kind of optimisation, because this kind of optimisation ultimately leads to reducing maintainability of the application such as including content directly in the executable rather than including code to load it from file when required.
I doubt for a second they really handcrafted it, else they'd never have got any patches done as they had to unmangle everything so they could even make changes. Saving bandwidth costs is one thing, but this level of optimisation would kill the product as it would be unmaintainable.
This is particularly true when as I say, they could just build a custom compression routing that compressed their data pretty well anyway (and almost certainly no less so than they'd save by manually trying to shrink content, and then compress it).
"At this point, the thing that would worry me most is that it's sounds like it's targeted at the US. So if some group in Afghanistan decides to take revenge for their war 2-3 decades ago (or N.K. attacks to prove they're cool, or...), then if this system enables the button the terrified guy at the button can fire back in defense... which would promptly attack the US because in panic he didn't realize that was who this was designed to defend against."
It will probably just make the missiles aim at their preset targets. From what I understand, since the end of the cold war, Russia and the US have both re-programmed a sizable amount of their missiles to not aim at each other, and in some cases to aim at more credible threats. I do not believe the system controls who is fired at, simply that the missiles are fired, what they are fired at depends on what they're programmed to hit. Right now I would not be suprised to hear that many of the Russia nukes on standby have been programmed to fire at other nations - and this ultimately probably includes the likes of, Pakistan, North Korea and such. I believe there was even an agreement such that Russia would have no nukes targetted towards Europe right now, as one of their recent threats in the Bush era missile shield argument was that it would mean Russia would abolish said agreement and aim nukes at Europe again.
The same reason you do any high level math like this, to figure out more, new math, because you might have to think up different ways of doing math to solve the problem at hand, or because when you do you might notice new patterns that are of relevance to solving other problems.
Ultimately any new techniques or patterns may be useful in themselves, or may go on to spawn other new techniques or patterns that are useful.
Math is a massive topic, and the more you explore it the more it grows, some of it is useful, some merely interesting to those with a mathematical mind, but it is experimentation with this practically useless math that often opens further doors to the practically useful. Sometimes the point is merely furthering math until the the point itself is found- that's how a fair bit of math has become useful overtime, the math came first, and then the application was realised after. Sometimes you need to stumble upon the solution first to know what problems it can fix!
I don't think he suggested absolute casualty rates are lower, his point seemed to be that overall a larger proportion of the world is living in peace, which is true.
Absolute figures are always going to increase as population increases, but that doesn't mean proportionally more of the world is in conflict. In fact apart from a few small skirmishes in South America, and in Asia, as well as some large skirmishes in Africa and the Middle East the world is much more peaceful.
As a basic example, if 4 areas are getting bombed and there are 100 people in each area, then 50 years later there's 400 people in each area but only one area is getting bombed that's a hell of a proportional improvement- sure 400 are still in conflict, but 1200 are also now living in peace.
Population will always increase, and certain areas, such as those with low important natural resources such as water will always be points of conflict for as long as there is no solution to the resource shortage. That has no relevance to the fact that in many other areas where conflicts were occuring for other reasons, or where the resource shortage issue has been resolved there are no longer conflicts.
So your point is correct, but it's also irrelevant in the context of whether or not the world is more peaceful in general, else by that logic we'd say the world would be a better place if there were far less people in it, but not a single one of them was living in peace.
Yes, and then you also wouldn't see games released for about 10 years too.
The kind of memory and CPU cycles you can free up by these kinds of optimizations, compared to the amount of memory and cycles available just makes it not even worth it. The amount of time required to do this level of optimisation on games of the size and complexity we have today would add many years to development time.
This coupled with the fact that compilers nowadays do a better job on the fly than most developers can anyway means it's really a pipe dream to have all your games completely and thoroughly hand optimised from start to finish, and amusingly you'd likely only see a couple of fps benefit, and maybe a few mb of memory savings. It's just not justifiable.
From a commercial standpoint it would be suicidal too, everyone else would be developing as normal, and by the time you'd finally released your perfectly hand optimised game, the optimisations would be irrelevant as your game would be 5 - 10 years old and everyone would've bought far more powerful PCs anyway.
If upgrading your PC is a problem, and you're not bothered about the above side effect of having games behind the times that hand optimisation of a complete game would cause, why not just buy last gen games rather than trying to play all the latest and greatest?
The fact is, those skills have been lost for a reason- they're just not important in modern game development where the pressure is on to produce ever more code and content than before and where that level of optimisation offers so little benefit when taken with the fact most game/renedering libraries (DirectX, OpenGL), and most compilers ensure this optimisation is done for you already where it matters. I certainly think we're at risk of losing low level programmers, and that's not a good thing, but this is certainly not an area where their loss matters- I'm more concerned about the loss of people who can do low level stuff to support reverse engineering of DRM, proprietary protocols and that sort of thing.
This is not to say games don't need optimisation at all, of course they do, there is still plenty of scope for that, but to hand craft each byte of content and machine code? Not worth it.
Well yes, that's kind of my point- they're taking more and more liberties with people's rights so the issues being defended are bigger and bigger problems. Realistically we should be fighting on all fronts, and ideally they'd have been stopped at that first step - using our resources, for their purposes so that we wouldn't even be at this step.
There's another point though of course, in that when we let them use our resources for DRM, and started concentrating purely on fair use, they also assumed it okay to start using our resources, including our bandwidth, to insert advertising into games which we've already paid for to increase profits, at the expense of our resources. This is even more of an issue for me nowadays personally, in an era of stricter bandwidth caps, where I have a 20gb allowance per month and if I break it (which I do) I have to pay extra per gb- I'm paying so that they can send me advertising in games and profit from it, do I see a discount on the price of the game? do I get a cut of the ad revenue? In letting that battle slip in favour of a bigger one, we've already lost that battle and it's seeped into other areas.
The game has been out in the Asian market quite a while already where it really has been a big success so far. The pre-order numbers are just for the Western market, so that's actually a really high pre-order figure compared to even past MMOs that have had high pre-orders but then still failed.
I think it's that- the extraordinarily high pre-order, coupled with the fact it's already a success in Asia that has people wondering if maybe this time we really are seeing the arrival of the next big MMO.
I think the issue is that they would pass on your details without making clear to users what was going on.
Joe Average finds a site he can use to get in touch with all his old friends, or keep in touch with family living abroad with ease and so on and signs up to it quickly and painlessly, he uses it for a year, in this time have discussed with friends what he likes to eat, what he likes to do. He is completely oblivious that all this data is being mined and passed on to advertising companies to use.
I understand what you're saying, but I don't think the above scenario is fair. A lot of people don't stop to think why Facebook exists and how it manages to exist without them having to pay anything, they probably think some nice guy on the internet has just knocked it together and kindly lets them use it as a kind of charity without realising it's a commercial entity whose interests are profit, and not giving their users free shit. If Facebook wanted to use an invasive ad system it should've been upfront about it in big fat bold letters, and most certainly should not try to hide it in the depths of some EULA or worse, not even mention it at all.
It's part of a bigger retreat I've noticed in the last decade or so in the geek community.
Another example is DRM, in the 90s I recall there being uproar from many geeks if a company would use your CPU cycles and your memory/disk space for their commercial interest like DRM does. Nowadays whilst DRM is still complained about, the argument seems to be based on what it stops you doing or how it can go wrong, there seems to have been a retreat from the fundamental argument that they are using your property for their interests.
Of course it sounds petty to argue about a company using a few kb on your system for some copy protection scheme or for their DRM on each of your music tracks because we have so much memory free, but that misses the point- if you retreat from your original point, you become forced to further and further give concessions where you shouldn't have to on privacy, on DRM, on whatever.
It's that slippery slope thing, if you give them an inch they'll take a mile, and that's what's happened on many issues. Things that used to be entirely unacceptable have become accepted and the frontline in the fight for our rights has been pushed back. I don't exactly know why this is but I suspect it's because when the geeks said "Don't you dare do that" and they did it anyway, not an awful lot actually happened in response. Perhaps it's just that we had successes like the iPod which were horribly locked down and DRM'd rising to popularity and nullifying the argument that anyone other than geeks gave a shit in the first place? Bluray becoming the winning HD format despite being far more DRM laden due to BD+ and so on? Coupled on a political level with the likes of George Bush and Tony Blair winning the elections in 2004 and 2005 respectively despite having proven themselves as being willing to take away our fundamental right to freedom in the name of preventing terrorists, er, taking away our fundamental right to freedom?
Either way it's quite sad. It amuses me now to see things like the anarchists cookbook being brought up in court trials and so on as a terrorist handbook- I don't think I knew anyone on the internet in the 90s who didn't have a copy of it, now it's being classed as basically "illegal literature".
Something definitely went wrong somewhere in the geek movement for privacy, freedom and rights.
I'm kind of intrigued to know how it effects someone selling software they've developed and sell online. If you sell a product online that's fine in all countries except say the US because of patent infringement there, then how exactly would the patent holder take action? As I understand it, you wouldn't have to put any technical measures in place to block US citizens because the only onus on you would be to satisfy the laws of your country, not pander to the laws of every country in the world from which someone may buy from you online? If a US citizen did buy from a European seller, with a European site, and a European payment handler to handle the transaction then would the patent holder (troll!) even have any real recourse? I'd imagine at worst they could try and get a US court order to have your site blocked as at least one state in the US did in the past with some gambling sites?
I guess what I'm a little puzzled about is how a bad law in one country, upheld by a patent troll friendly court in a specific state of that country, can be allowed to have worldwide repercussions, or whether it really even does have worldwide repercussions, and if it doesn't, whether the US runs the risk of pushing software companies abroad where they are freed from the hassle of patent trolls?
Slashdot Mirror
Just to translate into real UK prices we have FTA:
* Halo 3 (standard retail SKU): £30
* Heroic Map Pack (DLC): £7
* Legendary Map Pack (DLC): £7
* Mythic Map Pack (DLC): £7
* Total cost: £51
and here's the important point, OR:
* Halo 3 (standard retail SKU): £30
* Halo 3 ODST (standard retail SKU): £30
* Total cost: £60 (but includes whole extra ODST game on top)
His numbers are stupid. You can't factor XBox live in because it's not a Halo 3 only requirement anymore than your internet connection or electricity bill is so I've outright removed that as it's not a Halo 3 cost. I've separated it into two sections because Halo 3 ODST comes with all the map packs he listed. ODST is in itself a whole new game however, and I played through it this weekend- playing it on Legendary it gives a good 6 - 8hrs gameplay which is shorter than many games, but as long as others so having actually played it first hand now I disagree with the idea it's an expansion.
But here's where I really disagree that anything has changed, I bought Dawn of War and all the expansion backs, with 3 expansion packs at £20 and the original game at £30 it was more expensive. This hasn't changed either, I remember buying Warcraft III and it's expansion totalling up to a similar price to £60.
Really, I don't see the guy's point at all- MMO charges have been around since the UO days circa 1997, and charges for games like Halo 3 + addons aren't anymore expensive than games with addons have always been when you had to buy them as hard copies in shops.
For what it's worth I think in many cases the DLC options give you more for your money. I've bought games for 400 points on Live Arcade (which is about £3.50), these sorts of games would have been at least £5, but more like £10 or £15 in the shops before the DLC option came about.
I don't buy this guys argument, I do not believe games are more expensive now than they've ever been. You only have to look at the price the average PC game goes for- down from around £34.99 on average about 5 - 10 years ago, to around £24.99 on average now. MMO subscriptions I believe are on average about the same now as they have always been also.
The only thing I took away from this guys article is his revelation: "Hey wait, entertainment is actually costing me money?". What happened, did mum and dad stop buying him games and he suddenly had to start paying out his own pocket all of a sudden?
I'm a software developer.
I do not have a problem with piracy because I accept it exists, my main income is from writing bespoke software on a permanent contract for an engineering firm. I write and update software as and how they need me to. I work for a living.
I do also write software in my spare time and sell it, however I have no expectation that everyone would or even should buy it. I don't expect someone to pay £30 for my software if they're only going to use it once or twice, because it's that type of program. I'd like them to buy it if they're going to use it more than that however, but if they don't they don't. So why do I even bother writing it? Because there's enough people out there who do buy it to net me thousands of pounds of extra income on top of my wage each year.
This is the model artists need to start following- if they want a guaranteed stream of money, start working for a living, do live performances, do concerts and so on. If that's not enough sure produce CDs and such, appreciate the extra income it brings in.
The reason this legislation focuses on the music industry is because they are the ones crying the hardest for exactly this reason- they do not want to have to work for a living, they want to be able to do a few weeks work and profit off it for life. There are some software developers in this situation too of course but they're fewer and further between. This is also the reason you see movie stars crying about piracy but do not see soap opera stars crying- because the latter work for a living, whilst the former only want to do a few years work to set them up for life.
You see, this is why I can't hate piracy, because all it's done is expose who the lazy amongst society are, no, not the pirates- those who actually see piracy as a problem. The only reason piracy would be a problem for you is if you depend on trying to make a living from doing next to no work and exploit the previous monopoly on distribution that the internet has done away with.
It just comes down to the fact the music industry has built itself around this lazy living more than anyone else, because music tracks are short they have to do very little work compared to even movie stars who at least have to put months, sometimes years into a film, whilst "artists" put a mere few weeks or a month or two into an album. Of course they like to think they work hard promoting it, but promoting your album is basically musician language for a free round the world trip.
You're quite right in that the software industry wont oppose this type of legislation because it does indeed provide an easy ride. But they've not been so vocal about it because they realise that it's not the end of the world, there's no point pissing your customers off when you can just adapt. Adapting is something the music industry apparently doesn't understand.
I'll admit I don't know the details of this case or US laws particularly well, but in general investigation into people like him, his arrest, and the court case, as well as the prison sentence cost money. A lot of money. Money that wont be repaid by anyone other than the tax payer. So it's not unreasonable for the tax paying public to somewhat appalled if someone is making an absolute fortune based on his contacts in a similar important position of trust in which he will be making a fortune.
Fair enough, you have an issue whereby you can't take money off someone whose poor once they've done their time for burglary or whatever, because it'll cost them more when they undoubtedly reoffend because they have little choice but to commit crime to pay off the charges. In the case of someone like this though who is clearly making a lot of money, it seems perfectly fair to bill him for some of the costs. 90% tax on income above say, $30k seems fair until the debt is repaid.
The problem is if you do nothing you give people the impression that this sort of crime is worth trying, because at the end of the day even if you get caught you'll still come out extremely well off. In the meantime the tax payer foots the bill for investigation, incarceration and so on. Ultimately the people committing the crime win, whilst the tax payers- mostly comprised of honest joes lose.
So why do you care about slow reboots being an issue if you're running high availability systems with fallback in the first place? The parent was complaining about slow reboots, the only reason they would be an issue is if you don't have any kind of setup to keep services up whilst one or more servers are down. Or did you not read the whole thread and simply took my comment out of context?
Not everywhere can afford redundant systems, and not every management team will authorise it which is presumably why the parent had an issue with slow reboots in the first place, else as I say, if they did then they wouldn't care about slow reboots to start with.
I'm still not sure why you think it's nonsense to patch when you need to patch either, rather than patching for patchings sake. It's basic common sense - especially as you can't guarantee a test on a stage server will be in anyway guaranteed to weed out any issues, but as I say the difference is it does require an admin to understand what the patches actually mean rather than simply assume that all patches should just go on without question. The distinction is important because an admin who understands what patch notes mean is also an admin that can foresee any issues or incompatibilities the patch might cause elsewhere.
Do you actually read the patches that come along on patch Tuesday or do you just mindlessly install them?
If you did the former, you'd see you don't actually need to install them and reboot every Tuesday, you could simply queue them up until there's a critical patch. Some you don't even need to install at all, if there's a critical flaw in IIS but you haven't got the IIS service enabled and never intend to, it's not worth rebooting the server over.
You're making the mistake a lot of bad admins make- assuming you need to install the latest and greatest the second it's there. You don't, you only need to install patches to fix issues you're having or to fix security flaws that actually effect you. Yes this means you actually need to understand security and be able to judge whether a particular security flaw is exploitable in your situation or not.
Regardless, what it comes down to is this, if you're having to reboot your servers more than a few times a year then you're not running a network as well as an IT professional really should do.
Spot on.
I can't think of anything more disasterous than having either an architect astronaut OR a duct tape programmer, well, except perhaps having both.
The problem is that architecture in itself helps speed up application development. An application that is just an unorganised mish-mash of code is going to cause massive delays when something needs to be changed and that's a key point - over-architecting means something will be extremely slow to produce, but likely be extremely easy to maintain, under-architecting means it'll be extremely quick to produce, but an absolute nightmare to maintain. A good developer can get the middle ground and enjoy the best of both worlds, ultimately ending up with a much better program, in a reasonable timeframe and that remains maintainable, saving massive amounts of time over the duct tape programmer's monstrosity in the long run.
That's because you don't want a server to just gloss over and ignore the fact your RAID array is fucked and data is being sent to oblivion and that sort of thing.
It doesn't take a long time just for the sake of taking a long time, it takes a long time to make sure everything is correct as it should be.
How often do you reboot your servers anyway? It shouldn't be more than a few times a year at most.
Vietnam and Afghanistan aren't good examples as in both cases a trained military were involved. This is especially the case in Vietnam where the NVA had MiG 17s, 19s and 21s as well as tanks and such also.
In Afghanistan the first time round with Russia, the Mujahideen had training from the US, support from Pakistan and so forth. The US supplied them with equipment and training like Stinger missiles. Similarly, in the current Afghan conflict the Taliban were still well equipped and well trained by the likes of Pakistan's ISI, coupled with training and equipment carried over from when the CIA was training and equipping them against the USSR.
Guerilla tactics used by trained combatants does not make them civilians. Regardless though, even in the case of these examples, the likes of the US and the USSR could've continued to fight the battles so a determined military could still win, this is particularly the case if it was even more brutal in it's tactics- see Burma's military junta or North Korea for an example. If you starve the population and control the food sources, they will either join you or remain too weak to fight. At best, vs. a determined military, even if you outnumber them all you can be is a pain in the arse, or simply hope they weren't as determined as they first thought they were when they went in. Hiding amongst the civilian population wont help you much if the civilian population are at risk of starvation, or the death of their family members if they don't give you up.
That's true if Demon's issues were limited to speed but they're not, they include billing errors, bad customer service, larger restrictions on what can be done on the connection - all this despite them charging more than most other ISPs to boot.
Yes, if you can get Demon, you can get many other ISPs. Demon used to be awesome, but has been wank for years.
Anyone still with them deserves what they get. If you didn't ditch this ISP a few years back it shouldn't come as a suprise. This isn't the first major screwup they've made, and they've made millions of minor screwups.
They used to have a tech support centre with proper IT staff manning it that really knew their stuff, then they outsourced to India and their call centre became horrific, it became useless. They were also taken over and suddenly put arbitrary un-advertised caps on your bandwidth usage after which they'd drop you to 128kbps for an entire month. Effectively if they felt like upping profit they'd just randomly select people claiming they'd gone over this magical un-advertised cap, refusing to say exactly what the cap was then drop you to pre-broadband speeds for a month or so to save them a fortune across all customers they did it to. Prices also went up around the same time service lowered in this manner.
I struggle to have any sympathy for remaining Demon customers, the company was gutted, all competent staff removed, customer service decreased, prices increased, product quality/features decreased. Why would anyone in their right mind stay with that kind of company?
Really?
Britain defeated Argentina in armed combat in the Falklands despite being 3000 miles from home and outnumbered at least 10 to 1 both in the air and on land.
So if one trained military force can defeat another trained military force at those odds, what makes you think a trained military force can't defeat an untrained civilian force at those odds?
How do you think Nazi German managed to take as much territory as they did? They certainly didn't have enough native population to control the much larger population of the countries they held at odds as bad as or worse than those you cite.
This is a notable point. I have to wonder sometimes what the real noise and reason for censorship in Germany of Nazi related material is- is it really about stemming and preventing a nazi uprising again, or is it actually about refusing to acknowledge or accept defeat of the nazis or nazi sentiment?
All too often these censorship laws seem to be used in support of the nazis- i.e. "this game is okay, as long as you aren't killing any Nazis in it".
Who exactly calls attention to these problems in Germany? I'd suggest anyone complaining about a swastika symbol being left in a game about killing nazis should be the first person you question about their real intentions.
"Of course, these are the same people that think the word playboy means rabbit and have no idea of the brand's link to the porn industry. Gotta love Asian culture."
It's not just asian culture, they've rebranded Playboy as a fashion brand in the West too. There's something basically messed up about 11 yr old girls running round with Playboy t-shirts on!
"As for neo-nazis, they're mostly just loonies. They're as useless as UFO fanatics or 9/11 conspiracy guys. They'll never be savvy enough to gain power anywhere."
I wish that were true. Sadly, by playing the "blame the immigrants" card, they're doing quite well in many places. The BNP whom are holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathisers in the UK got themselves two seats in Europe last European election and have some council seats, including one in London itself.
It's not just in Britain though, it's the same story in many European nations. Furthermore part the problem is that when you have other nations, such as Iran, with dictators in power which are no less hateful or dangerous than Hitler, and they fund terrorism as they do, and whilst you have groups like Al Qaeda trying to attack more liberal countries, then people in those countries are given reasons to hate those abroad, and hence allow groups like the BNP (i.e. neo-Nazi groups) too play on that anger and fear to recruit.
I think you misunderestimate the threat of them, and it's that complacency that got Germany to where they were in the 1930s. It's better to accept they're a threat and deal with them than pretend they're not and suffer the consequences as we have before.
So in other words they didn't optimise the binaries or content at all for lower RAM usage and CPU usage as is being discussed, they simply optimised the network protocol?
Well yes, of course- that's exactly what I said, some optimisation is still entirely relevant, but that's not the sort of optimisation being discussed here. Writing an efficient protocol is a completely different game to crafting code and content to be non-generic so as to optimise CPU/RAM usage at the expense of easy modification at a later date.
That's really where compression comes in rather than this kind of optimisation, because this kind of optimisation ultimately leads to reducing maintainability of the application such as including content directly in the executable rather than including code to load it from file when required.
I doubt for a second they really handcrafted it, else they'd never have got any patches done as they had to unmangle everything so they could even make changes. Saving bandwidth costs is one thing, but this level of optimisation would kill the product as it would be unmaintainable.
This is particularly true when as I say, they could just build a custom compression routing that compressed their data pretty well anyway (and almost certainly no less so than they'd save by manually trying to shrink content, and then compress it).
"At this point, the thing that would worry me most is that it's sounds like it's targeted at the US. So if some group in Afghanistan decides to take revenge for their war 2-3 decades ago (or N.K. attacks to prove they're cool, or...), then if this system enables the button the terrified guy at the button can fire back in defense... which would promptly attack the US because in panic he didn't realize that was who this was designed to defend against."
It will probably just make the missiles aim at their preset targets. From what I understand, since the end of the cold war, Russia and the US have both re-programmed a sizable amount of their missiles to not aim at each other, and in some cases to aim at more credible threats. I do not believe the system controls who is fired at, simply that the missiles are fired, what they are fired at depends on what they're programmed to hit. Right now I would not be suprised to hear that many of the Russia nukes on standby have been programmed to fire at other nations - and this ultimately probably includes the likes of, Pakistan, North Korea and such. I believe there was even an agreement such that Russia would have no nukes targetted towards Europe right now, as one of their recent threats in the Bush era missile shield argument was that it would mean Russia would abolish said agreement and aim nukes at Europe again.
The same reason you do any high level math like this, to figure out more, new math, because you might have to think up different ways of doing math to solve the problem at hand, or because when you do you might notice new patterns that are of relevance to solving other problems.
Ultimately any new techniques or patterns may be useful in themselves, or may go on to spawn other new techniques or patterns that are useful.
Math is a massive topic, and the more you explore it the more it grows, some of it is useful, some merely interesting to those with a mathematical mind, but it is experimentation with this practically useless math that often opens further doors to the practically useful. Sometimes the point is merely furthering math until the the point itself is found- that's how a fair bit of math has become useful overtime, the math came first, and then the application was realised after. Sometimes you need to stumble upon the solution first to know what problems it can fix!
I don't think he suggested absolute casualty rates are lower, his point seemed to be that overall a larger proportion of the world is living in peace, which is true.
Absolute figures are always going to increase as population increases, but that doesn't mean proportionally more of the world is in conflict. In fact apart from a few small skirmishes in South America, and in Asia, as well as some large skirmishes in Africa and the Middle East the world is much more peaceful.
As a basic example, if 4 areas are getting bombed and there are 100 people in each area, then 50 years later there's 400 people in each area but only one area is getting bombed that's a hell of a proportional improvement- sure 400 are still in conflict, but 1200 are also now living in peace.
Population will always increase, and certain areas, such as those with low important natural resources such as water will always be points of conflict for as long as there is no solution to the resource shortage. That has no relevance to the fact that in many other areas where conflicts were occuring for other reasons, or where the resource shortage issue has been resolved there are no longer conflicts.
So your point is correct, but it's also irrelevant in the context of whether or not the world is more peaceful in general, else by that logic we'd say the world would be a better place if there were far less people in it, but not a single one of them was living in peace.
Yes, and then you also wouldn't see games released for about 10 years too.
The kind of memory and CPU cycles you can free up by these kinds of optimizations, compared to the amount of memory and cycles available just makes it not even worth it. The amount of time required to do this level of optimisation on games of the size and complexity we have today would add many years to development time.
This coupled with the fact that compilers nowadays do a better job on the fly than most developers can anyway means it's really a pipe dream to have all your games completely and thoroughly hand optimised from start to finish, and amusingly you'd likely only see a couple of fps benefit, and maybe a few mb of memory savings. It's just not justifiable.
From a commercial standpoint it would be suicidal too, everyone else would be developing as normal, and by the time you'd finally released your perfectly hand optimised game, the optimisations would be irrelevant as your game would be 5 - 10 years old and everyone would've bought far more powerful PCs anyway.
If upgrading your PC is a problem, and you're not bothered about the above side effect of having games behind the times that hand optimisation of a complete game would cause, why not just buy last gen games rather than trying to play all the latest and greatest?
The fact is, those skills have been lost for a reason- they're just not important in modern game development where the pressure is on to produce ever more code and content than before and where that level of optimisation offers so little benefit when taken with the fact most game/renedering libraries (DirectX, OpenGL), and most compilers ensure this optimisation is done for you already where it matters. I certainly think we're at risk of losing low level programmers, and that's not a good thing, but this is certainly not an area where their loss matters- I'm more concerned about the loss of people who can do low level stuff to support reverse engineering of DRM, proprietary protocols and that sort of thing.
This is not to say games don't need optimisation at all, of course they do, there is still plenty of scope for that, but to hand craft each byte of content and machine code? Not worth it.
Well yes, that's kind of my point- they're taking more and more liberties with people's rights so the issues being defended are bigger and bigger problems. Realistically we should be fighting on all fronts, and ideally they'd have been stopped at that first step - using our resources, for their purposes so that we wouldn't even be at this step.
There's another point though of course, in that when we let them use our resources for DRM, and started concentrating purely on fair use, they also assumed it okay to start using our resources, including our bandwidth, to insert advertising into games which we've already paid for to increase profits, at the expense of our resources. This is even more of an issue for me nowadays personally, in an era of stricter bandwidth caps, where I have a 20gb allowance per month and if I break it (which I do) I have to pay extra per gb- I'm paying so that they can send me advertising in games and profit from it, do I see a discount on the price of the game? do I get a cut of the ad revenue? In letting that battle slip in favour of a bigger one, we've already lost that battle and it's seeped into other areas.
The game has been out in the Asian market quite a while already where it really has been a big success so far. The pre-order numbers are just for the Western market, so that's actually a really high pre-order figure compared to even past MMOs that have had high pre-orders but then still failed.
I think it's that- the extraordinarily high pre-order, coupled with the fact it's already a success in Asia that has people wondering if maybe this time we really are seeing the arrival of the next big MMO.
I think the issue is that they would pass on your details without making clear to users what was going on.
Joe Average finds a site he can use to get in touch with all his old friends, or keep in touch with family living abroad with ease and so on and signs up to it quickly and painlessly, he uses it for a year, in this time have discussed with friends what he likes to eat, what he likes to do. He is completely oblivious that all this data is being mined and passed on to advertising companies to use.
I understand what you're saying, but I don't think the above scenario is fair. A lot of people don't stop to think why Facebook exists and how it manages to exist without them having to pay anything, they probably think some nice guy on the internet has just knocked it together and kindly lets them use it as a kind of charity without realising it's a commercial entity whose interests are profit, and not giving their users free shit. If Facebook wanted to use an invasive ad system it should've been upfront about it in big fat bold letters, and most certainly should not try to hide it in the depths of some EULA or worse, not even mention it at all.
It's part of a bigger retreat I've noticed in the last decade or so in the geek community.
Another example is DRM, in the 90s I recall there being uproar from many geeks if a company would use your CPU cycles and your memory/disk space for their commercial interest like DRM does. Nowadays whilst DRM is still complained about, the argument seems to be based on what it stops you doing or how it can go wrong, there seems to have been a retreat from the fundamental argument that they are using your property for their interests.
Of course it sounds petty to argue about a company using a few kb on your system for some copy protection scheme or for their DRM on each of your music tracks because we have so much memory free, but that misses the point- if you retreat from your original point, you become forced to further and further give concessions where you shouldn't have to on privacy, on DRM, on whatever.
It's that slippery slope thing, if you give them an inch they'll take a mile, and that's what's happened on many issues. Things that used to be entirely unacceptable have become accepted and the frontline in the fight for our rights has been pushed back. I don't exactly know why this is but I suspect it's because when the geeks said "Don't you dare do that" and they did it anyway, not an awful lot actually happened in response. Perhaps it's just that we had successes like the iPod which were horribly locked down and DRM'd rising to popularity and nullifying the argument that anyone other than geeks gave a shit in the first place? Bluray becoming the winning HD format despite being far more DRM laden due to BD+ and so on? Coupled on a political level with the likes of George Bush and Tony Blair winning the elections in 2004 and 2005 respectively despite having proven themselves as being willing to take away our fundamental right to freedom in the name of preventing terrorists, er, taking away our fundamental right to freedom?
Either way it's quite sad. It amuses me now to see things like the anarchists cookbook being brought up in court trials and so on as a terrorist handbook- I don't think I knew anyone on the internet in the 90s who didn't have a copy of it, now it's being classed as basically "illegal literature".
Something definitely went wrong somewhere in the geek movement for privacy, freedom and rights.
I'm kind of intrigued to know how it effects someone selling software they've developed and sell online. If you sell a product online that's fine in all countries except say the US because of patent infringement there, then how exactly would the patent holder take action? As I understand it, you wouldn't have to put any technical measures in place to block US citizens because the only onus on you would be to satisfy the laws of your country, not pander to the laws of every country in the world from which someone may buy from you online? If a US citizen did buy from a European seller, with a European site, and a European payment handler to handle the transaction then would the patent holder (troll!) even have any real recourse? I'd imagine at worst they could try and get a US court order to have your site blocked as at least one state in the US did in the past with some gambling sites?
I guess what I'm a little puzzled about is how a bad law in one country, upheld by a patent troll friendly court in a specific state of that country, can be allowed to have worldwide repercussions, or whether it really even does have worldwide repercussions, and if it doesn't, whether the US runs the risk of pushing software companies abroad where they are freed from the hassle of patent trolls?