Blue Dragon -- to be released in the US this summer -- is directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the original creator of Final Fantasy, who directed or produced every FF through FFX. The music is by Nobuo Uematsu, the composer of all the music in FF 1 through 9 and some of FFX. Neither of them were involved in FFXII nor are they involved in FFXIII. Blue Dragon is an XBox 360 exclusive.
I know a lot of people liked FFXII, and indeed I thought the gameplay was awesome, but I was disappointed by the story. Although intriguing in some ways, it was much thinner than in previous FF games, and lacked any sort of emotion. I'm hoping that the spirit of FF has gone with Sakaguchi and Uematsu and will return in Blue Dragon. This is also convenient because I have a 360 but really don't want to buy a PS3.:)
You might as well create your own traditional app so that you don't have to deal with compatibility and security issues with a multitude of browsers and platforms.
1) Dealing with compatibility issues between OS platforms is a whole lot harder than dealing with compatibility issues between browser platforms.
2) Security issues? Traditional apps don't even have security. If you ask your users to install your traditional app, you're effectively asking them to give you full rights to read and possibly destroy all their personal data (unless they protect it with multiple user accounts, which hardly anyone does even if they know how). Web apps, in contrast, are sandboxed. As a user, I will trust a web application over a stand-alone app any day.
In 1996, gay marriage was nowhere near as widely accepted as it is today. DOMA passed by 85-14 in the senate[1] and 342-67 in the house[2]. President Clinton -- a Democrat -- signed the bill into law.
As Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson has been a strong supporter of gay rights. He expanded New Mexico's civil rights laws to include sexual orientation, he extended health care benefits to same-sex partners of state employees, and he's on the record for supporting civil unions and gays in the military. In fact, he stopped DOMA-like legislation in NM by threatening to veto it.[3]
As for flag burning, Google turned up nothing about his position on this. Would you care to cite a source? I agree that a ban on flag burning would be ridiculous, but I also think it's pretty irrelevant to the big picture. Richardson's positions on Iraq, energy, foreign policy, trade, education, etc. are all dead-on and his record proves he can get things done. His ability and willingness to engage in diplomacy even with our enemies -- and his experience in doing just that -- is exactly what we need right now. Besides, flag burning has been affirmed as a constitutional right, and an amendment would obviously never be passed, much less ratified.
Meanwhile, other politicians won't even tell us their policies. Compare the "issues" section of Richardson's site with Barack Obama's or Hillary Clinton's. Notice how Richardson's site is full of specific action items whereas Obama's and Hillary's are full of wishy-washy "This is bad, but I can fix it. Really I can." statements.
Err... Google is constantly working on improving the quality of results, but they don't announce those improvements because (1) the details are closely-guarded secrets, (2) the changes aren't really visible (just improved ranking), and (3) there are too many to announce.
I did have a blog cluster in the results, it was 3 lines - maybe it was removed or disabled - but I did see it.
Oh, I see. You're talking about the bottom onebox (the blog links at the bottom of the page). That's actually not new. Currently, that will only appear at the bottom, never in the middle of the results. (Similarly, seeing images at the top or bottom isn't new, even though many news articles seem to think it is. It's only blending of books, news, maps, and video that are new.)
Also, in addition to the news cluster, I took any result with a time/date stamp next to it to be a news result.
Nope. Web results have had time/date stamps for a long time. I'm actually not sure why it is only some of the results that have them, though.
The search results don't look any different than they did before, except when news, maps, or video results are blended in. But even those are pretty straightforward. Can you explain the "clumsy and unintuitive" comment a little more?
The tabs have moved from being directly above the search box (where there wasn't enough space for them) to being on the top bar... a whole, like, inch away from where they were before. Or are you specifically complaining about the home page, where the distance is further? Personally I never look at the homepage, since I just type stuff into the Firefox search box, but hey...
The query [halo 3 beta] only brings up one news cluster. The rest of the results are just your standard web results. Blogsearch is not yet part of Universal Search.
Every "no-cd" game crack every made? What, are the l33t crackerz mad skillz too far beyond you? I doubt it.
As I said in my original post, those don't count. They usually come down to modifying a single branch instruction, which is not difficult. Adding new code is difficult.
Third-party level editors for the early FPS games like Doom? Technically I guess that modifies the reverse-engineered data rather than the code. Still, not too big a step to add code mods to handle new data types.
Reverse-engineering a data format and adding to it is a hell of a lot easier than adding new logic to a binary.
Its tough to name more significant mods. Why would anyone spend the time when they can't legally redistribute the changed code?
You can legally redistribute your patch. People make and distribute game mods all the time. People can and do produce binary patches on old NES games like Super Mario Bros. 3, but NES games are much simpler than modern software and even then people have only managed to modify data tables and make very minor logic changes. If it were reasonably possible to add significant new logic to compiled binaries, people would be doing it. But they aren't.
Have you ever even tried to do what you are claiming is so easy?
I can find the appropriate place in your machine code to insert my functions and then distribute the modified versions to my friends. That's 90% of the GPL right there... And the right redistribute everything is probably more valuable than being able to see your sloppy undocumented source code anyway.
You're kidding, right? Can you point to any significant improvement made to a binary-only program ever by this method? Surely if it is reasonably easy to do, people would have done it, right? (No, copy protection cracks don't count; those don't add new features.)
More specifically, Croquet runs every simulation locally. Everyone's executing on a computer, so if you give them all the same inputs at the same time, then you get the same results. This uses only local processing. The only thing that travels over the wire is the inputs: You type a key. I move my mouse. The other guy clicks.
If this is not, in fact, how Croquet works, then they should update their documentation.
I'm assuming: 1) The amount of bandwidth and computational resources needed to support one user are roughly proportional to the number of other users in that user's vicinity (e.g. the number of other users which are visible and thus need to be updated in the user's client). 2) The average number of users in the vicinity of any one other user is roughly constant.
Point (2) can be achieved by growing the world as the number of users increases, which should only require O(n) resources (on the server) to do.
With these assumptions, I see the server being O(n) and each client being O(1), for a total of O(n).
OTOH, no one, here at least, has presented any reason to think that having network traffic that is O(n^2) in the number of users makes Croquet worse than Second Life.
It makes Croquet incapable of handling player counts as large as Second Life. If your goal is to create an MMO environment, Croquet would clearly be inferior. If your goal is something else, maybe not.
If N users each send packets at a constant rate R, then the number of packets received by the router is N*R. Since the router forwards every packet received to all users, the number of packets *sent* is then N*N*R. It's O(N^2).
Also, if we assume the total resources needed to run the simulation is O(N), and each user is running their own copy, then the total computing resources being used is O(N^2). More importantly, since a typical client machine is certainly far less powerful than a typical MMO serving cluster, and since it has to do other computationally-intensive things like render graphics, it's clear that this strategy cannot scale to typical MMO player counts.
Err... I'm afraid not. Take a look at Croquet's design. It's an old fashion P2P protocol in which each user forwards only their inputs (e.g. keypresses) over the network to other users. Every user must run the full simulation locally, making total network traffic and resource usage O(n^2) with the number of users.
This cannot scale to more than a handful of users. Croquet's design is fundamentally incapable of being "massively multiplayer". I would say that that makes it not "a better choice than Second Life" in quite a few cases.
(Never mind the fact that Second Life is a huge, proven, production system with hundreds of thousands of users whereas Croquet is an academic experiment.)
Some Googling finds that 100% of Swiss males in a certain age range are required to join the military and are required to keep their military-issued assault rifle at home. Switzerland also has very strict gun control laws. Several of the top search results seem to be refuting the idea that Switzerland is a good example for the pro-gun argument.
By not taking the curvature of the earth into account with these directions, they have made your swim much longer than it needs to be
Indeed. Noting this, [Congressional subcommittee chair Brad] Miller was quoted as saying, "To use a straight line path across the map when greater circular paths are shorter without some explanation as to why appears to be fundamentally dishonest."
Some people (like me) get pleasure from work. It's kind of like a video game, except the puzzles are much more complex and interesting and the rewards are much more tangible.
I don't expect you to think like me, so don't tell me that I should think like you.
In user-space, the malware can only run when the user who was infected by it is logged in,
On Unix, it's pretty easy to run a process that does not die when the user logs out. I actually don't know to what extent this is possible on Windows.
and only will survive reboots if it places a shortcut to itself in the Startup folder. And it'll be very obvious there.
Or the registry, where only experienced users know to look. (Yes, there is a per-user run-on-startup section of the registry.)
And on unix, there are any number of scripts that run on login, including xinitrc, bashrc, bash_profile, etc. It would be very easy to hite something in there that even experienced users would never notice.
Plus, a user-mode trojan wont be able to bypass anti-virus, anti-spyware, or firewalls.
Generally, anti-virus and anti-spyware programs can only protect you against known malware. Otherwise, it would have too many false positives and people will learn to ignore it.
Firewalls which require you to explicitly grant network access to each program are the kind of program-level security that I'd advocating. However, the UI needs to be improve a lot.
Plus a user-mode malware doesnt have access to raw sockets, so is fairly limited in its ability to do DDoS attacks.
OK, this will prevent some kinds of DDoS attacks. But it won't do anything about many other kinds of malicious internet activity.
A good firewall, leave the machine on auto-patch, and dont run as admin, and your box will be pretty much untouchable. If you then stop using IE altogether (to avoid drive-by downloads/installs), you're going to be largely impervious to data-leakage as well.
You also have to resolve never to install any software from random third parties which you don't necessarily trust. Oh, and you have to not use Firefox, because it has vulnerabilities too. Oh, and don't forget about all the lesser programs out there like Acrobat Reader, which often have vulnerabilities which are quite exploitable but no one pays attention to.
Basically you can't run anything that:
Was downloaded from untrusted internet sites.
Talks to untrusted internet sites.
Reads data files downloaded from untrusted internet sites.
But the internet is useless if you can only visit trusted sites!
User-level security can only protect users from each other. Desktop machines are usually single-user. Therefore, user security is protecting nothing except operating system and program files, which can be trivially replaced by re-installing them. Most users would consider their personal document much more important, yet these are not protected! User security will not stop a virus from searching your home directory for your tax return and mailing it off to some identity theft. Nor will it stop a virus from accessing the internet to launch DDoS attacks, send spam, or reproduce.
Yet, Microsoft and Unix users alike continue to insist that it does some good. Why? All it does is make life more difficult as you constantly have to switch between user and admin to install programs.
We need to move to a model of program-level security, where every program you run is granted only permissions to do the things you actually want it to do. And we need to develop a user interface which can automatically figure out what permissions you want to grant to programs (e.g. if you select a file from the file->open dialog, then it should grant the program permission to read that file). See Capability-based security.
Slashdot Mirror
Blue Dragon -- to be released in the US this summer -- is directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the original creator of Final Fantasy, who directed or produced every FF through FFX. The music is by Nobuo Uematsu, the composer of all the music in FF 1 through 9 and some of FFX. Neither of them were involved in FFXII nor are they involved in FFXIII. Blue Dragon is an XBox 360 exclusive.
:)
I know a lot of people liked FFXII, and indeed I thought the gameplay was awesome, but I was disappointed by the story. Although intriguing in some ways, it was much thinner than in previous FF games, and lacked any sort of emotion. I'm hoping that the spirit of FF has gone with Sakaguchi and Uematsu and will return in Blue Dragon. This is also convenient because I have a 360 but really don't want to buy a PS3.
LOL, Firefox on a DS. That's funny. Opera, sure, but not Firefox.
If any of this software you claim to run on your DS actually exists, please do provide some links.
1) Dealing with compatibility issues between OS platforms is a whole lot harder than dealing with compatibility issues between browser platforms.
2) Security issues? Traditional apps don't even have security. If you ask your users to install your traditional app, you're effectively asking them to give you full rights to read and possibly destroy all their personal data (unless they protect it with multiple user accounts, which hardly anyone does even if they know how). Web apps, in contrast, are sandboxed. As a user, I will trust a web application over a stand-alone app any day.
In 1996, gay marriage was nowhere near as widely accepted as it is today. DOMA passed by 85-14 in the senate[1] and 342-67 in the house[2]. President Clinton -- a Democrat -- signed the bill into law.
As Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson has been a strong supporter of gay rights. He expanded New Mexico's civil rights laws to include sexual orientation, he extended health care benefits to same-sex partners of state employees, and he's on the record for supporting civil unions and gays in the military. In fact, he stopped DOMA-like legislation in NM by threatening to veto it.[3]
As for flag burning, Google turned up nothing about his position on this. Would you care to cite a source? I agree that a ban on flag burning would be ridiculous, but I also think it's pretty irrelevant to the big picture. Richardson's positions on Iraq, energy, foreign policy, trade, education, etc. are all dead-on and his record proves he can get things done. His ability and willingness to engage in diplomacy even with our enemies -- and his experience in doing just that -- is exactly what we need right now. Besides, flag burning has been affirmed as a constitutional right, and an amendment would obviously never be passed, much less ratified.
Meanwhile, other politicians won't even tell us their policies. Compare the "issues" section of Richardson's site with Barack Obama's or Hillary Clinton's. Notice how Richardson's site is full of specific action items whereas Obama's and Hillary's are full of wishy-washy "This is bad, but I can fix it. Really I can." statements.
I never said I took offense (I don't). I was just commenting that your jokes don't make sense. Do you have tourettes or something?
I have ADD, and your posts just don't make any sense. Making non sequitur arguments is not a symptom of ADD. Do you even know what it is?
Err... Google is constantly working on improving the quality of results, but they don't announce those improvements because (1) the details are closely-guarded secrets, (2) the changes aren't really visible (just improved ranking), and (3) there are too many to announce.
I did have a blog cluster in the results, it was 3 lines - maybe it was removed or disabled - but I did see it.
Oh, I see. You're talking about the bottom onebox (the blog links at the bottom of the page). That's actually not new. Currently, that will only appear at the bottom, never in the middle of the results. (Similarly, seeing images at the top or bottom isn't new, even though many news articles seem to think it is. It's only blending of books, news, maps, and video that are new.)
Also, in addition to the news cluster, I took any result with a time/date stamp next to it to be a news result.
Nope. Web results have had time/date stamps for a long time. I'm actually not sure why it is only some of the results that have them, though.
The search results don't look any different than they did before, except when news, maps, or video results are blended in. But even those are pretty straightforward. Can you explain the "clumsy and unintuitive" comment a little more?
The tabs have moved from being directly above the search box (where there wasn't enough space for them) to being on the top bar... a whole, like, inch away from where they were before. Or are you specifically complaining about the home page, where the distance is further? Personally I never look at the homepage, since I just type stuff into the Firefox search box, but hey...
The query [halo 3 beta] only brings up one news cluster. The rest of the results are just your standard web results. Blogsearch is not yet part of Universal Search.
The changes were live at some datacenters when the announcement was made and should finish rolling out today.
As I said in my original post, those don't count. They usually come down to modifying a single branch instruction, which is not difficult. Adding new code is difficult.
Reverse-engineering a data format and adding to it is a hell of a lot easier than adding new logic to a binary.
You can legally redistribute your patch. People make and distribute game mods all the time. People can and do produce binary patches on old NES games like Super Mario Bros. 3, but NES games are much simpler than modern software and even then people have only managed to modify data tables and make very minor logic changes. If it were reasonably possible to add significant new logic to compiled binaries, people would be doing it. But they aren't.
Have you ever even tried to do what you are claiming is so easy?
You're kidding, right? Can you point to any significant improvement made to a binary-only program ever by this method? Surely if it is reasonably easy to do, people would have done it, right? (No, copy protection cracks don't count; those don't add new features.)
OK, you can have your 1GB of RAM, but now you are trying to sort the entire internet.
:)
Welcome to Google.
The page I linked to says precisely this:
If this is not, in fact, how Croquet works, then they should update their documentation.
I'm assuming:
1) The amount of bandwidth and computational resources needed to support one user are roughly proportional to the number of other users in that user's vicinity (e.g. the number of other users which are visible and thus need to be updated in the user's client).
2) The average number of users in the vicinity of any one other user is roughly constant.
Point (2) can be achieved by growing the world as the number of users increases, which should only require O(n) resources (on the server) to do.
With these assumptions, I see the server being O(n) and each client being O(1), for a total of O(n).
It makes Croquet incapable of handling player counts as large as Second Life. If your goal is to create an MMO environment, Croquet would clearly be inferior. If your goal is something else, maybe not.
If N users each send packets at a constant rate R, then the number of packets received by the router is N*R. Since the router forwards every packet received to all users, the number of packets *sent* is then N*N*R. It's O(N^2).
Also, if we assume the total resources needed to run the simulation is O(N), and each user is running their own copy, then the total computing resources being used is O(N^2). More importantly, since a typical client machine is certainly far less powerful than a typical MMO serving cluster, and since it has to do other computationally-intensive things like render graphics, it's clear that this strategy cannot scale to typical MMO player counts.
Err... I'm afraid not. Take a look at Croquet's design. It's an old fashion P2P protocol in which each user forwards only their inputs (e.g. keypresses) over the network to other users. Every user must run the full simulation locally, making total network traffic and resource usage O(n^2) with the number of users.
This cannot scale to more than a handful of users. Croquet's design is fundamentally incapable of being "massively multiplayer". I would say that that makes it not "a better choice than Second Life" in quite a few cases.
(Never mind the fact that Second Life is a huge, proven, production system with hundreds of thousands of users whereas Croquet is an academic experiment.)
Some Googling finds that 100% of Swiss males in a certain age range are required to join the military and are required to keep their military-issued assault rifle at home. Switzerland also has very strict gun control laws. Several of the top search results seem to be refuting the idea that Switzerland is a good example for the pro-gun argument.
By not taking the curvature of the earth into account with these directions, they have made your swim much longer than it needs to be
Indeed. Noting this, [Congressional subcommittee chair Brad] Miller was quoted as saying, "To use a straight line path across the map when greater circular paths are shorter without some explanation as to why appears to be fundamentally dishonest."
Some people (like me) get pleasure from work. It's kind of like a video game, except the puzzles are much more complex and interesting and the rewards are much more tangible.
I don't expect you to think like me, so don't tell me that I should think like you.
On Unix, it's pretty easy to run a process that does not die when the user logs out. I actually don't know to what extent this is possible on Windows.
Or the registry, where only experienced users know to look. (Yes, there is a per-user run-on-startup section of the registry.)
And on unix, there are any number of scripts that run on login, including xinitrc, bashrc, bash_profile, etc. It would be very easy to hite something in there that even experienced users would never notice.
Generally, anti-virus and anti-spyware programs can only protect you against known malware. Otherwise, it would have too many false positives and people will learn to ignore it.
Firewalls which require you to explicitly grant network access to each program are the kind of program-level security that I'd advocating. However, the UI needs to be improve a lot.
OK, this will prevent some kinds of DDoS attacks. But it won't do anything about many other kinds of malicious internet activity.
You also have to resolve never to install any software from random third parties which you don't necessarily trust. Oh, and you have to not use Firefox, because it has vulnerabilities too. Oh, and don't forget about all the lesser programs out there like Acrobat Reader, which often have vulnerabilities which are quite exploitable but no one pays attention to.
Basically you can't run anything that:
But the internet is useless if you can only visit trusted sites!
HP Labs even put one together as a retrofit for Windows.
:) ). It's a gigantic hack, of course, but works surprisingly well.
Yes, "Polaris". I run it on my machine (closed beta; I know the authors
User-level security can only protect users from each other. Desktop machines are usually single-user. Therefore, user security is protecting nothing except operating system and program files, which can be trivially replaced by re-installing them. Most users would consider their personal document much more important, yet these are not protected! User security will not stop a virus from searching your home directory for your tax return and mailing it off to some identity theft. Nor will it stop a virus from accessing the internet to launch DDoS attacks, send spam, or reproduce.
Yet, Microsoft and Unix users alike continue to insist that it does some good. Why? All it does is make life more difficult as you constantly have to switch between user and admin to install programs.
We need to move to a model of program-level security, where every program you run is granted only permissions to do the things you actually want it to do. And we need to develop a user interface which can automatically figure out what permissions you want to grant to programs (e.g. if you select a file from the file->open dialog, then it should grant the program permission to read that file). See Capability-based security.