Happening a little sooner than I thought, but the trend has clearly been going in this direction for a long time now. Just one year ago I stopped buying 3.5" HDDs a year ago in favor of a combination of (short stroked) 2.5" drives and SSDs. I already use only SSDs in all the workstations and laptops, the HDDs are only used by the servers now.

Now it is looking like I will probably not buy any more HDDs at all, ever again, even for the servers. That is going to do wonders for hardware life and maintenance costs.

It's a bit strange having a pile of brand-new perfectly working 1TB and 2TB 3.5" HDDs still in their static bags, unopened, in my spare drawer that I will likely never use again.

I wonder how long it will take case makers to start giving us 2.5"-only hot swap options without all the 3.5" crap taking up room. Of course, there are some already... I mean for it to become the predominant case style.

-Matt

I agree that the people who do it for a job have more reason to cheat. You get almost nothing out of cheating in games for recreation.

On occasion, I used to play on servers that allowed cheats. When I played with them, the experience was interesting at first, but inevitably got boring very fast. In the end, all you do is remove the work done to generate good levels and turn it into a super-flat experience where your ping, cpu, and possibly your actual aim/weapon skill matters. If there are auto aim or other weapon hacks, there isn't even the weapon skill.

So, it gets boring. Especially against other people with the same hacks. It is probably marginally more entertaining when you are playing against people who don't have hacks and don't know that you have them.

However, ultimately, what is the point of playing a game if you don't actually play the game? There are people out there who enjoy trolling, but I can't see that being as interesting as trying to beat other people on a well-designed map.

Getting hacks is easy, although using them covertly is dangerous due to VAC and possible bans. For all of that, it's just a waste of your time, other than perhaps to understand a little of the mechanics of how the game works and how hackers might be using hacks on you.

Even if you don't do it professionally (i.e., compete in tournaments) you can still benefit financially from the cheats.

So that's a good motivator - you obviously cannot play in a controlled environment like the final tournament, but if you can get "up there" in the local tournament, you can end up being a local celebrity and get various low-level sponsorships and other things. Do it well enough that you make a name for yourself so you can get on YouTube and get paid for videos on topics not related to what you're cheating in and you're in a good spot.

You may not be able to get the $5M grand prize in a tournament (that requires work), but you can probably make a half-decent living on sponsorships, content sales and other things, without doing too much, either.

Here's THE answer. Google [name of game] hacks. Download the hacking utilities that everyone else is using. Look at what directory it installs to or what DLLs go where. Have the game check for those files in the next patch. Permanently ban everyone with the hack installed and ban them from Steam so basically those cheating pieces of shit aren't allowed to play video games anymore.

Trust me, those things aren't static. And I'm sure Valve already does that - they purchase the cheats (cheats at this level are sold on a subscription basis) and they ensure that simple measures to detect them don't work.

Yes, it can also include rootkits, or transparent network proxies, DLLs and executables whose name changes every load to avoid detection, etc.

And I'm sure SteamOS will make things worse as wasn't kernel hacking "encouraged" for being an open system? Doesn't take a genius to realize if you can replace the kernel, you can easily break any anti-cheat system. (And userspace can do zilch about it since the kernel can easily lie).

Part of the problem is that it is very difficult to tell a player using hacks from a player who is simply good at playing the game. I remember, a long time ago (10+ years) my brother was a counter-strike player who specialized in head shots. He was very good at it, but standing behind him while he played there were numerous occasions where he got kicked off a server due to players thinking he was cheating. He wasn't. I was standing right there behind him.

I think the only real solution is to video yourself playing the game so other players can see (after the match) that you were not using any cheats or hacks. Either that or play at an official location with monitors and public hardware.

-Matt

I agree with you, but I also agree with his idea that information should be set free. We The People enable, protect, and to a large part even pay for the production of mass media content due to Hollywood's and Big Music's creative accounting practices which show them losing money or breaking even on clearly profitable media. And the same goes for the telecommunications infrastructure: We The People largely paid for that, not just by paying for services but actually through government grants and the like, and it's used against us to milk us of every possible cent while providing the lowest possible standard of service. The fact that we still pay more to send calls across town than to send them across the country is just ridiculous and it's based on legislation bought by the telecoms industry.

Bullcrap. No one believes in "information should be free" because otherwise they're all hypocrites.

I mean, if information should be free, then where's his banking information? Passwords, transits, account numbers, etc? That's information, it should be free. Likewise identity card information, photos, alarm codes and key details to his mansion.

Now, it's true the content industries of the US have screwed people many times over, but let's not confuse "I want my content for free" with "information should be free". Or even "Copyright should be eliminated" (which a lot of people aren't for, either).

I'm sure even open-source advocates don't even want that - because free information means that their precious copyleft is invalid as well. I mean, if Linux is supposed to be free, then I should be free to do anything I want with it, without restrictions.

And yes without copyright, the GPL is useless (the GPL is a true license in that if you don't agree, you get basic legal rights granted by legislation. If you do agree, though, you get additional rights, unlike most licenses which seek to reduce your legal rights).

There is currently quite a bit of hysteria from some consumers in the BluRay field over it because apparently 100% of the people upset about it have kids who ruin their discs and now they "can't make copies". I say that with sarcasm. Well, you can make copies, you just can't make BluRay copies. Non-BluRay players are not required to detect or honor Cinavia, so ripping your BluRays and making MKVs out of them without conversion works fine. Even most BluRay players will happily play such files without checking for Cinavia.

Actually, a lot of Blu-Ray players and media players in North America DO check for Cinevia, even if the source is no longer Blu-Ray. A lot of players outside do not, however, including many cheap Chinese ones.

Back so Sony, one could wonder if it's a bit much just for a single movie, since Sony Pictures dropped the Steve Jobs movie recently.

On a more serious note, one wonders if it's the result of poor security practices. After all, just a few years ago Sony suffered a major breach of their Playstation Network servers, and now their entire Sony Pictures group is out of commission. Could just be a case of corporate poor security practices.

Or maybe someone's just wanting the PS4 master key.

$1000 is way too much. I can build one for $300 that can take off, take (waypoint/altitude) mission off an Android device or PC (wireless). Navigate all on its own, trigger a few relays or servos (to do what ever) come back and land. Fly time around 17-20 minutes with a payload of 500g and a total weight of say 1.5 kg.

Well, $1000 is a nice limit showing how functional and automated/autonomous these drones are. Commercial ones are around $1000, and Arducopters can be built from $300-800 depending on all the features desired.

Contrast this to an RC helicopter where the hobby ones are barely able to be bought for $1000 - when you have $400 radios and receivers, $200 engines, $300 kits, $100 gyros, etc (rough pricing). And there's a pilot in the loop - no such autopilot as on a drone.

It's just like lasers - they're so cheap they're in "idiot" territory which is why the FAA and others are cracking down.

Did it just become cool to call every unmanned aircraft a drone, after we started murdering people with them?

No one called toy helicopters drones 8 years ago. No one.

Because a modern quadrotor is much more functional than an RC helicopter.

There is so much electronics in one that they literally do fly themselves. Push a button and they lift themselves off the ground and hover there automatically - something that no RC helicopter can do without continuous input by the pilot.

So while you fly an RC helicopter, you pretty much just direct a drone - want it to move forward? You command it forward and it obeys (even figuring out "forward" - yes, a modern drone can determine which way you're pointed and determine that to be forward regardless of orientation).

And drones with this capability cost under $1000.

It's also why we see more incidents around - learning to fly is a skill and you generally have to practice it (with both time and cost). With a drone, you push the button that says "Fly" and short of sudden gusts of wind or eddies, they sit there in the air waiting for your command.

And yes, there are projects that turn RC helicopters into drones, but they generally are far more expensive and limited. Quadrotors require a computer anyways due to their instabilities so it doesn't take much more effort to add in flying software.

It will be interesting to see if Apple becomes more charitable under Cook. Jobs was pretty stingy that way (very stingy in his perosnal life, but I think Apple unde rhim did do a few charitable contributions)

Apple has become more charitable under Cook. An employee perk is that Apple will match donations up to $10,000 or so per year to an employee's charity.

Now, Jobs himself we don't know the extent of his charity - his records of public philanthropy are generally scant, though it's possible that Jobs himself requested the donations be kept anonymous (probably for marketing reasons to keep charities from trying to raise funds under his name or to promote the fact that "famous Steve Jobs donates here" in their records).

One nit: Tesla has not yet solved the recharge time problem. Sure, you can drive cross-country in a Tesla, but if you value your time, it's not nearly as convenient as doing so in a regular ICE car. But they're doing their darnedest to make it better.

If you value your time over every thing else, including safety, you mean.

So yeah, if you're the kind who'll do a 3 day drive non-stop, you'd probably go ICE (then again, if you really valued your time, you might consider flying - either commercially or general aviation). But those people generally are rare and most normal people do want to stop to stretch legs and eat outside of the car, which means easily a 30-40 minute stop at a rest stop which is an ideal time to charge up.

Apple attacked Samsung for using the same elements that Apple stole from others, Samsung attacked back with *real* patents to back themselves up.

Except both were real patents. Apple's patents were Design Patents which cover ornamental designs unique to the covered item. Samsung's patents were FRAND licensed Utility Patents.

And yes, if you want people to learn about computers, you gotta learn all about IP law because it's complex and tricky.

Samsung made a phone that did violate Apple's design patents - which are purely for decorative purposes (rounded slab with grid of icons). In fact, you can't have any utility in a design patent - because the features are ornamental, slight non-functional changes can be made to not violate the patent. (And face it, when all the reviews of the Galaxy S (the original one) all said "It's an iPhone clone", you know you're in trouble. Especially since no other Android device gets that mention).

Samsung fought back using FRAND patents that earned it considerable consternation and censure by the EU and the DoJ who promised to look into the issue should Samsung actually proceed. And South Korea, too, Samsung's home turf.

It should be noted Google tried to do the same and also got shot down using Motorola's patents - FRAND patents simply have lesser protection due to their special status.

Economic impact would be probably close to zero.

It depends on who blinks first. If the site that's broken is highly reliant on Chinese traffic (and it ISN'T hosted in China), then likely they'll cave and use another CDN. The economic impact to the site owners is probably greater than trying to ride it out hoping China would change its policies. (And many other countries - why is it China is singled out for its firewall, when most countries have similar setups?)

If the site has little Chinese traffic, they likely wouldn't notice.

Edgecast will probably the loser out in all this.

Motorola did produce a HCMOS version of the 68000 and related cpus. e.g. the 68hc000 and friends, which I used extensively. HCMOS was billed as a 'fast' version of CMOS, trading off some current draw for speed. As people might remember, HCMOS pulls and pushes about the same (though the ground paths are rated higher). About 50 ohms to either rail, more capacitive than resistive so current draw ran more inline with the frequency and you could use 1M pull-down resistors on the tri-state busses and the logic was pretty bullet proof in terms of noise and reflections.

I really loved HCMOS, and hated TTL, but eventually advanced ttl beat it out (at least for the pin interface logic).

-Matt

Interrupts worked fine. It was bus errors (i.e. for off-chip memory protection and/or mapping units) that were a problem. The 68010 fixed that particular issue if I recall. I'm guessing later 68008's also did but I dunno. Doesn't matter since he isn't running with any memory protection.

You could in fact run a real multi-tasking OS on the 68000. I was running one of my own design for my telemetry projects. It didn't have memory mapping but it did have memory protection via an external static ram, 8:1 selector, and some logic. It managed around 20-30 processes.

And, strangely enough, you could also run a RTOS because the 68000 had wonderful prioritized interrupts. Back then, of course, real time response was required for handling serial ports and things like that.

-Matt

Er, I meant 8:1 selector (the R/~W bit was fed into one of the select inputs). The function code logic was used to selectively enable/disable the memory protection unit, so supervisor accesses bypassed it while user accesses did not. Which is good because it wouldn't have been able to boot otherwise.

Another use for the FC logic is to speed up the auto-vector code. The 68K had wonderful asynchronous interrupt logic. You basically had 8 priority levels and you could feed your I/O chips into a simple 8:3 priority selector and feed the result into the interrupt priority level pins on the cpu. The 68K would then do an interrupt vector acquisition bus cycle to get the vector (or you could tell it to generate an internal vector). Every once in a while the async logic would screw up and we'd get an uninitialized interrupt vector but the code to deal with that was trivial, and since it was all level logic the hardware would sort it out soon enough and calculate the correct IPL to request from the bus.

The autovectors are slow, though... it was far better to generate vectors from a ram (if I remember right). The FC logic could be used to force the access to the ram or the eprom (since the address lines I think were all 1's except for three bits defining the priority level being fetched, or something like that).

In contrast, even to this day Intel STILL can't get their interrupt logic to work properly. Even the MSI-X logic is broken in a lot of chipsets. Yuch. So much ridiculous and unnecessary complexity with Intel interrupt handling with all the idiotic IOAPIC and LAPIC sub-processors with non-deterministic reaction times and serialization problems and other stupid stuff. The motorola interrupt logic was a dream in comparison.

-Matt