I text "x just won!" A red light comes on in an operations room at the NSA. The operator verifies that it's illegal information. He looks up my cell number in a police database and forwards my name and number to the SEC quick response team. They search their ticket order database for credit card payment information corresponding to my name. There are 2 Brian Gordons at the game, so a technician dashes down to the video surveillance command. He hunches over an open workstation at the back of the room and calls up seating plans for the stadium and the camera coverage layout. He brings up a still frame from the correct camera. He can't tell exactly what he's looking at so he opens a 3D model of the stadium, counts off the seats to find my seat number, and zooms out toward the camera's position. He switches between the still frame window and the 3D model window until they match up perfectly. He registers a video stream from the video processing cluster since it hasn't been offloaded to storage yet. He connects to the stream, seeing a live feed from that camera. He sshes into the cluster and with a few quick commands to the stream server navigates to the exact time of the text. He zooms in, but my seat is too far from the camera to get a clear image. He has an idea- he'll try to see if the TV cameras passed over that section. He sshes into the producer's control workstation and downloads the XML cache of the camera location control software. The archive was never closed for writing so it's corrupt but WinRAR extracts most of the control commands. He filtered out every command except those 10 seconds around the call. There were about 100 files. He opened them all, and went through one by one. 11 files in, he finds a camera whose origin position and origin angle look down on E section. The HD stream hasn't been encoded for storage yet so he dumps the raw data for that camera, for that 1-minute interval around the call. At around 70MB per frame, it takes a few minutes to become available on the stream server. He streams it, manually seeks until it swings into the proper angle, and zooms in tightly on my seat. Sure enough, I'm texting. So it's definitely that Brian Gordon. He dashes back up to the quick response center and quickly opens a security ticket, assigning the E section attendants and marking it Immediate Alert so it will send them a text. They get the alert, containing my seat number. They spot me.
Why would the SEC rather see stiffer news competition than $3 billion in their account? Or why would CBS rather see high ticket sales? Your post makes no sense
Honestly, can you even think of a stupider question? How is this even an issue? Just name each machine with an ID and put the information in a spreadsheet somewhere. It's not a complicated problem.
the Southeastern Conference (SEC) is expected to release a final version of its new media policy
That's nice. I'm releasing a new policy that anyone who says my name 3 times has to send me a $100 check.
So what if they release a policy? It's not like they have any sort of legal standing to enforce it. What are they going to do, stop selling you tickets?
But announcing stuff you're going to have to pay for before the game is even released?!
Well it's not like the developers just wake up one morning a few months after release and decide to do DLC. If they have plans to sell DLC after release, why not announce it?
Also I agree that mouse/keyboard is a much better control scheme. "Hold the stick until the cursor gets to where you want it, then let go" can't even compare to the precision of directly mapping movement on the mousepad to movement on the screen.
Don't forget the excellent Phun physics sim. Check out some of the things that are possible.. the standard environment is powerful enough to support rockets and springs, but it's also fully scriptable.
You do get a discounted price, in the form of added value. Since we're on the topic of Steam, let's talk about that. Yes for the same price you can get the game on disk, but with the disk version do you get free updates forever? This is non-trivial; a huge part of the TF2 experience is the regular patches adding new content and tweaking the game. Check out the release notes for just Thursday's update. This isn't even a class update! Also you can leverage your
in this day and age of instantaneous distribution, I don't see why I should have to pay the same price
to download your games anywhere you want, as many times as you want, without carrying around a library of DVDs with you. You get further value added through community features too that you typically don't get from just buying a disk. Steam community lets you IM your Steam friends, see what game they're playing, join them on that server, join groups with similar interests, join group chat, see what your group-members are playing and join them, see gameplay stats for friends and groupmates.. and you can get screen-corner notifications if you want for a friend joining a game, or a group announcement, or a friend request.. and not only from the Steam application but also from the steam overlay app which can be brought up over any game.. these features cost money to maintain, and you get them for free.
The relative power / lack of power of each platform has nothing to do with the publishers financial decision to charge on one platform vs. the other
Yes it does. The PC is an open platform. You can do whatever you want. The console is locked down tight and you can only get content by paying Microsoft.
Also TF2 on the PC is delivered by Valve itself through Steam, but on the xbox it's delivered through Microsoft. On the PC you downloaded the whole game in the first place and by running Steam you expect to automatically receive updates, but on the xbox you only buy a disk, and Microsoft can say "if you want extras you have to pay".
I don't even understand why people would buy TF2 on a console anyway. Updates are such a mess compared with Steam (and you have to pay extra), you have to play on a controller (useless for first-person shooters), and the community is small. Also you can't use the huge base of custom maps and skins and custom sounds and custom models that the community has built. And you play in some pathetic TV resolution, subpar even in HD. I don't have any sympathy.
all you need is get the word out via marketing. So let someone make a nice site, and let someone else throw out good advertisement.
On what budget? On whose time? Who's going to design an attractive ad? Who's going to make your attractive website? Who's going to compare ad prices (and pricing models) across sites and ad networks that you've never even heard of? Authors write. Publishers have deep pockets for advertising (bootstrapping sales from a $100 advertising budget is not an option because your product has a limited life cycle), they know graphic designers, they know how to market a book, and they know how effective different types of ad campaigns are and how to get good prices. And a publisher might be able to get you on paper: huge cost but it's a market you'd otherwise be missing. Also you need an editor; a writer is just being unrealistic if she thinks she doesn't need an outside perspective. Grammar checking by people who actually know when to use the past subjunctive or the present indicative mood, yes, but also people who can tell you you're overdoing an easy section or not explaining something clearly enough.
Selling an ebook from your personal website? Have fun with your 1 sale a month. What, do you expect word of mouth to advertise for you? "Hey dude check out this libffi book on some guy's website!" Unless you're on Amazon or O'Reilly, you're not going to get exposure.
Nah, removing the ooxml code is easy. Telling your customers "all of the documents you've saved since 2006 won't be readable by new installations" is the hard part. This is a non-story, we all know obviously they can take the code out, but it doesn't help their users who have docx documents.
Maybe they could offer a downloadable component like they have for old versions of Word?
Since always?... What are you even talking about? Games are written against the API, and then that API is implemented in hardware. That's what video cards are: efficient implementations of DirectX.
Would you rather the card decide the API and require games to support hundreds of different interfaces?
Slashdot Mirror
I text "x just won!" A red light comes on in an operations room at the NSA. The operator verifies that it's illegal information. He looks up my cell number in a police database and forwards my name and number to the SEC quick response team. They search their ticket order database for credit card payment information corresponding to my name. There are 2 Brian Gordons at the game, so a technician dashes down to the video surveillance command. He hunches over an open workstation at the back of the room and calls up seating plans for the stadium and the camera coverage layout. He brings up a still frame from the correct camera. He can't tell exactly what he's looking at so he opens a 3D model of the stadium, counts off the seats to find my seat number, and zooms out toward the camera's position. He switches between the still frame window and the 3D model window until they match up perfectly. He registers a video stream from the video processing cluster since it hasn't been offloaded to storage yet. He connects to the stream, seeing a live feed from that camera. He sshes into the cluster and with a few quick commands to the stream server navigates to the exact time of the text. He zooms in, but my seat is too far from the camera to get a clear image. He has an idea- he'll try to see if the TV cameras passed over that section. He sshes into the producer's control workstation and downloads the XML cache of the camera location control software. The archive was never closed for writing so it's corrupt but WinRAR extracts most of the control commands. He filtered out every command except those 10 seconds around the call. There were about 100 files. He opened them all, and went through one by one. 11 files in, he finds a camera whose origin position and origin angle look down on E section. The HD stream hasn't been encoded for storage yet so he dumps the raw data for that camera, for that 1-minute interval around the call. At around 70MB per frame, it takes a few minutes to become available on the stream server. He streams it, manually seeks until it swings into the proper angle, and zooms in tightly on my seat. Sure enough, I'm texting. So it's definitely that Brian Gordon. He dashes back up to the quick response center and quickly opens a security ticket, assigning the E section attendants and marking it Immediate Alert so it will send them a text. They get the alert, containing my seat number. They spot me.
"Excuse me sir, please come with us."
You pay with a credit card? You're a famous blogger?
Why would the SEC rather see stiffer news competition than $3 billion in their account? Or why would CBS rather see high ticket sales? Your post makes no sense
Men running around a field doesn't have anything to do with education anyway.
It's all fun and games until someone gets ahold of some Tolkien.
I laughed out loud. Using the IP address as the hostname? Genius.
I wouldn't go anywhere in public without my phone. Certainly not into a teeming mass of thousands of people. It's just an obvious safety precaution.
And that's saying something.
Honestly, can you even think of a stupider question? How is this even an issue? Just name each machine with an ID and put the information in a spreadsheet somewhere. It's not a complicated problem.
That's nice. I'm releasing a new policy that anyone who says my name 3 times has to send me a $100 check.
So what if they release a policy? It's not like they have any sort of legal standing to enforce it. What are they going to do, stop selling you tickets?
Do you need any more proof that the government needs strong regulative powers?
Given: ZFC
Prove: Fermat's Last Theorem
This exam has a time limit of 2 hours. Begin.
Well it's not like the developers just wake up one morning a few months after release and decide to do DLC. If they have plans to sell DLC after release, why not announce it?
Also I agree that mouse/keyboard is a much better control scheme. "Hold the stick until the cursor gets to where you want it, then let go" can't even compare to the precision of directly mapping movement on the mousepad to movement on the screen.
Don't forget the excellent Phun physics sim. Check out some of the things that are possible.. the standard environment is powerful enough to support rockets and springs, but it's also fully scriptable.
You do get a discounted price, in the form of added value. Since we're on the topic of Steam, let's talk about that. Yes for the same price you can get the game on disk, but with the disk version do you get free updates forever? This is non-trivial; a huge part of the TF2 experience is the regular patches adding new content and tweaking the game. Check out the release notes for just Thursday's update. This isn't even a class update! Also you can leverage your
to download your games anywhere you want, as many times as you want, without carrying around a library of DVDs with you. You get further value added through community features too that you typically don't get from just buying a disk. Steam community lets you IM your Steam friends, see what game they're playing, join them on that server, join groups with similar interests, join group chat, see what your group-members are playing and join them, see gameplay stats for friends and groupmates.. and you can get screen-corner notifications if you want for a friend joining a game, or a group announcement, or a friend request.. and not only from the Steam application but also from the steam overlay app which can be brought up over any game.. these features cost money to maintain, and you get them for free.
Yes it does. The PC is an open platform. You can do whatever you want. The console is locked down tight and you can only get content by paying Microsoft.
You have no idea how stupid you sound.
Also TF2 on the PC is delivered by Valve itself through Steam, but on the xbox it's delivered through Microsoft. On the PC you downloaded the whole game in the first place and by running Steam you expect to automatically receive updates, but on the xbox you only buy a disk, and Microsoft can say "if you want extras you have to pay".
I don't even understand why people would buy TF2 on a console anyway. Updates are such a mess compared with Steam (and you have to pay extra), you have to play on a controller (useless for first-person shooters), and the community is small. Also you can't use the huge base of custom maps and skins and custom sounds and custom models that the community has built. And you play in some pathetic TV resolution, subpar even in HD. I don't have any sympathy.
On what budget? On whose time? Who's going to design an attractive ad? Who's going to make your attractive website? Who's going to compare ad prices (and pricing models) across sites and ad networks that you've never even heard of? Authors write. Publishers have deep pockets for advertising (bootstrapping sales from a $100 advertising budget is not an option because your product has a limited life cycle), they know graphic designers, they know how to market a book, and they know how effective different types of ad campaigns are and how to get good prices. And a publisher might be able to get you on paper: huge cost but it's a market you'd otherwise be missing. Also you need an editor; a writer is just being unrealistic if she thinks she doesn't need an outside perspective. Grammar checking by people who actually know when to use the past subjunctive or the present indicative mood, yes, but also people who can tell you you're overdoing an easy section or not explaining something clearly enough.
Selling an ebook from your personal website? Have fun with your 1 sale a month. What, do you expect word of mouth to advertise for you? "Hey dude check out this libffi book on some guy's website!" Unless you're on Amazon or O'Reilly, you're not going to get exposure.
But you can open a docx as an archive and see each resource. It works with winrar (everything works in winrar) and probably 7zip too.
Nah, removing the ooxml code is easy. Telling your customers "all of the documents you've saved since 2006 won't be readable by new installations" is the hard part. This is a non-story, we all know obviously they can take the code out, but it doesn't help their users who have docx documents.
Maybe they could offer a downloadable component like they have for old versions of Word?
Also, what does this mean for openoffice?
You sound like you're condoning murder and insubordination.
Since always?... What are you even talking about? Games are written against the API, and then that API is implemented in hardware. That's what video cards are: efficient implementations of DirectX.
Would you rather the card decide the API and require games to support hundreds of different interfaces?
Because they didn't use the real laser. It was just to test the aiming system.
Yeah, you don't need "authorization" to build something patented. It's only when you use it for profit.