Comment Re:Wrong solution (Score 1) 1073
> The problem is American popular culture, which exalts stupidity and is savagely anti-intellectual.
s/American/the world's/
Comment Re:If it's so interesting... (Score 1) 169
$ host www.cisco.com
www.cisco.com is an alias for www.cisco.com.akadns.net.
www.cisco.com.akadns.net is an alias for geoprod.cisco.com.akadns.net.
geoprod.cisco.com.akadns.net is an alias for www.cisco.com.edgekey.net.
www.cisco.com.edgekey.net is an alias for www.cisco.com.edgekey.net.globalredir.akadns.net.
www.cisco.com.edgekey.net.globalredir.akadns.net is an alias for e144.cd.akamaiedge.net.
e144.cd.akamaiedge.net has address 88.221.32.170
And Akamai has their head firmly in the sand, and doesn't do IPv6, afaik.
Comment Re:Serious question (Score 1) 168
Dead simple. A side-effect from going to x64, is that the quantity of General Purpose Registers in the CPU doubles (from 8 to 16). Twice more space for the compiler to put stuff in temporarily. That's akin to juggler suddenly getting four hands instead of two. Or a car, with 8 wheels instead of... hm, nevermind. The result is 10-15% speed-up for most operations. Also, there is the possibility to just use SSE whenever you need FP math, not having to bother supporting FPU fallbacks. More speed-up, when decoding and scaling images and the like. Anyways, read more about it at wikipedia.
How APB's Persistent World Will Work 33
Edge Magazine recently sat down with David Jones, creative director for Realtime Worlds, the studio behind upcoming action MMO APB. He spends some time talking about their thinking behind the game, and he also gets into how their persistent online worlds will work. Quoting:
"... you absolutely want 'moments' in the game. Even if it's just for thirty minutes, you want people to become celebrities — OJ Simpson on TV with the police chasing after him: you want those kind of moments in the game. We can't create them, so it's about what mission can ultimately lead to those kinds of experiences. We have what we call heat mechanics in the game, so if a criminal has just been on a complete rampage, recklessly blowing stuff up and killing people, heat builds up until eventually we unlock him to every single enforcer on the server. It's not part of their missions, it's just that this guy has become number one wanted and everyone has the authority to take him down. That's a fun mechanic from both sides; everybody who's a criminal is going to want to reach that and if you're on a mission for the enforcers you'll see that guy and wonder whether you should break away to get him. You get a lot of compound stuff which we never planned for, because it's a hundred real players interacting in ways we don't expect."
Comment Lineage II in the US? (Score 2, Interesting) 256
Lineage II seems to have nowhere near WoW's popularity in the US. Given that Aion is done by the same company and is viewed by many as a LA2's "more/bigger/better", would it see the same fate?
Comment Re:Good luck! (Score 1) 104
You realize the term toon has existed since the early days of MUDs, MOOs, and MUX's, right?
But still, currently it is used almost exclusively (by some) in the WoW crowd, while other MMO's players refer to their characters, well... as "characters", or maybe "avatars".
Comment Re:Lol wut? (Score 1) 280
You know that Opera does something right, when there is a whole Firefox extension named ImgLikeOpera (translation: "listen fscking Firefox, just handle the fscking images like my favorite Opera did"): https://addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/addon/1672
It allows to browse with images disabled, or load cached images only, and selectively download only the images you want with right-click -> Load image. This is Very Important when you pay $0.2 per megabyte, or $1 per hour of internet connection, like it was for a LONG time in Russia/CIS.
The extension was authored by a Russian guy. I have been using Opera from version 3.6 to 9.11, but some time ago decided to use only Free Software as much as possible, and migrated to Iceweasel (Firefox).
It allows to browse with images disabled, or load cached images only, and selectively download only the images you want with right-click -> Load image. This is Very Important when you pay $0.2 per megabyte, or $1 per hour of internet connection, like it was for a LONG time in Russia/CIS.
The extension was authored by a Russian guy. I have been using Opera from version 3.6 to 9.11, but some time ago decided to use only Free Software as much as possible, and migrated to Iceweasel (Firefox).
Opera Dominates CNET Survey of "Underdog" Web Browsers 173
An anonymous reader writes "Whether you consider Opera an underdog browser or not, it came out on top in a feature on CNet this weekend. It was up against 'underdog Web browsers' Camino, K-Meleon, Shiira and Arora in a piece loosely aimed at determining whether these browsers are yet ready to steal significant numbers of users from Firefox, Safari, IE etc. Interesting most to me, however, is that it transpires that Shiira, the Mac browser from Japan, is one of the fastest browsers on the planet, beating the original Chrome v1.0, Firefox 3.5 and more in its benchmark tests."
Twitter Offline Due To DDoS 398
The elusive Precision dropped a submission in my lap about a DDoS taking down Twitter running on CNet. It's been down for several hours, no doubt wreaking havoc on the latest hawtness in social networking. Won't someone please think of the tweeters? Word is that both Facebook & LiveJournal have been having problems this AM as well.
Bell Starts Hijacking NX Domain Queries 310
inject_hotmail.com writes "Bell Canada started hijacking non-existent domains (in the same manner as Rogers), redirecting NX-response queries to themselves, of course. Before opting-out, you get their wonderfully self-promoting and self-serving search page. When you 'opt-out,' your browser receives a cookie (isn't that nice) that tells them that you don't want the search page. It will still use their broken DNS server's non-NX response, but it will show a 'Domain Not Found' mock-up page that they (I surmise) tailor to your browser-agent string. During the opt-out process, they claim to be interested in feedback, but provide no method on that page (or any other page within the 'domainnotfound.ca' site) to contact them with complaints. They note that opting-in is 'recommended' (!), and that 'In order for opt-out to work properly, you need to accept a "cookie" indicating that you have opted out of this service. If you use a program that removes cookies, you will have to repeat this opt-out process when the cookie is deleted. The cookie placed on your computer will contain the site name: "www.domainnotfound.ca."' Unfortunately most Bell Internet users won't understand the difference between their true NX domain response, and Bell's injected NX response."
Submission + - OpenBitTorrent, a DMCA-Resistant Torrent Tracker (openbittorrent.com)
rm writes: "There seemed to be no open, independent and stable BitTorrent trackers out there, so some hackers decided to create OpenBitTorrent, a free for anyone to use and (supposedly) a stable tracker. As a nice bonus, since the new tracker does not know or care what it is tracking, it is very likely to be completely immune to DMCA takedown requests: the authors make it very clear that they do not host or index for searching the content or any torrent files, do not keep logs of downloaders' IP addresses and can not block any files from being distributed using their tracker. Also, it looks like ThePirateBay has recently started to use OpenBitTorrent as a secondary tracker for all its torrents."
CentOS Project Administrator Goes AWOL 492
An anonymous reader writes "Lance Davis, the main project administrator for CentOS, a popular free 'rebuild' of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, appears to have gone AWOL. In an open letter from his fellow CentOS developers, they describe the precarious situation the project has been put in. There have been attempts to contact him for some time now, as he's the sole administrator for the centos.org domain, the IRC channels, and apparently, CentOS funds. One can only hope that Lance gets in contact with them and gets things sorted out."
Feds May Soon Be Allowed To Use Cookies 181
fast66 writes "The White House may lift its policy barring federal Web sites from tracking users' online behavior. In place since 2000, the cookie policy issued by the Office of Management and Budget was intended to protect citizen privacy but has sparked criticism — even from White House officials — for hampering citizen outreach. On Friday, Bev Godwin, the director of online resources and interagency development at the White House's new media office, blogged on the White House Web site, 'We want to use cookies for good, not evil' — and invited the public to comment on cookies through various online channels, including the Office of Science and Technology Policy blog."
Stock Market Manipulation By Millisecond Trading 624
cfa22 writes "Nice piece in the NY Times today on ultra-fast trading on the NYSE and other markets. The 'algos' that make autonomous trading decisions have to be fast, but I wonder: Is network speed ever a bottleneck? Can anyone with inside experience with millisecond trading provide some details for the curious among us regarding hardware architectures and networking used for such trading systems?" According to the article, high-frequency traders generated about $21 billion in profits last year.
Unusual Physics Engine Game Ported To Linux 117
christian.einfeldt writes "Halloween has come early for Linux-loving gamers in the form of the scary Penumbra game trilogy, which has just recently been ported natively to GNU-Linux by the manufacturer, Frictional Games. The Penumbra games, named Overture, Black Plague and Requiem, are first-person survival horror and physics puzzle games which challenge the player to survive in a mine in Greenland which has been taken over by a monstrous infection/demon/cthulhu-esque thing. The graphics, sounds, and plot are all admirable in a scary sort of way. The protagonist is an ordinary human with no particular powers at all, who fumbles around in the dark mine fighting zombified dogs or fleeing from infected humans. But the game is remarkable for its physics engine — rather than just bump and acquire, the player must use the mouse to physically turn knobs and open doors; and the player can grab and throw pretty much anything in the environment. The physics engine drives objects to fly and fall exactly as one would expect. The porting of a game with such a deft physics engine natively to Linux might be one of the most noteworthy events for GNU-Linux gamers since the World of Goo Linux port."
