Comment Re:Eww.. (Score 1) 266
Well? Did he find it?
Well? Did he find it?
Correction: Russian territory. This was done in 1918 to keep the Germans from getting stockpiles at the port cities. It can be considered a footnote in history for the West, but it is a sore point for Russia, and adds to the "US cannot be trusted" sentiment.
The US invaded Russia territory post WWI (Arkangel and Murmansk, for example.) The territory wasn't held for long, and the US actually kept the Japanese from invading around that timeframe, but this is something still imprinted on the Russian psyche.
NWN 1 to me (and this is IMHO, so take it for what it is worth; little to none) is a must have. However, I would also take in all the hundreds of very good player written modules as well. The OC for the game was more of a primer on how to write modules right than a decent game in itself. SoU and HotU had decent scripts, but I would say that the top tier player written content (with the CEP and CTP) was some of the best I've played. A number of persistent worlds were outstanding as well.
NWN2 to a lesser extent. The graphics are better, but one couldn't do as much with the toolset.
Of course, the precursors to that, BG1, BG2, are a must.
Going backwards from there, the old Wizardrys and most of the old Ultimas are classics. Ultima 1-6 are timeless, but 7 afterward are sort of like Metallica post-"Black" album... same genre, but really different works with little to do with the previous except name.
Wizardry 1-3 are also classics. I'd probably go for an Apple 2 emulator and the images for them as opposed to the DOSBox version, but that is just me.
Another one is a game that wasn't that popular, but it was interesting for the time. Deathlord from EA. It was like the Ultima series... but was a lot harder, and had quite a large world to do stuff in.
Even though Itanium is all but dead, I did like the fact that you had 128 GP registers to play with. One could do all the loads in one pass, do the calculations, then toss the results back into RAM. The amd64 architecture is a step in the right direction, and I'd say that even though it was considered a stopgap measure at the time, it seems to have been well thought out.
With Moore's law flattening out, the pendulum might end up swinging back that way.
Right now, for a lot of tasks, we have CPU to burn, so the ISA doesn't really matter as much as it did during the 680x0 era.
But who knows... Rock's law may put the kibosh on Moore's law eventually, so we might end up seeing speed improvements ending up being either better cooling (so clock speeds can be cranked up), or adding more and more special purpose cores [1]. At this point, it might be that having code optimized by a compiler for a certain ISA may be the way of developing again.
[1]: High-power CPUs, low-energy CPUs, GPUs, FPUs, FPGAs, and even going from there, CPUs intended for I/O (MIPS.) It might be that we might have a custom core just to run the OS's kernel, another to run security sensitive code, and still others for applications.
Why does the FBI get involved? is it because the events span multiple states, or because the banks have so much clout? If this had happened to google or microsoft, for example, would the FBI get involved?
Or just have the V2V set to check if the speed limit was exceeded in "x" amount of time and automatically send the ticket. Or have it log if someone stopped with the tip 1-2 cm past a stop line, and send another citation, etc.
Unless it is implemented right, it will be ripe for abuse, just like the red light cameras which have no yellow, or will briefly flash red, enough to pop a picture, then go back to green.
Of course, when the bad guys start messing around with V2V, it will be even worse, especially when someone starts transmitting "rear-end collision is imminent, slam brakes on NOW" on the highway to vehicles" at random times.
I've found SELinux useful. Yes, it can be a pain, but if the device is Internet facing or in the DMZ, it can do a lot to contain a security breach. As always, it can be shut off with a single command, but it is a layer of security that is generally worth having if at all possible. That way, even if the Web server has an exploit, an attacker manages to get into its context, then get root... they still are limited to the directories the Web server is allowed into. It isn't perfect, but it does help.
Unfortunately, the days of a static UNIX that stays the same are long gone. Security issues, feature demands [1], need to configure large numbers of hosts at once, and other items push vendors like RedHat to do updates.
[1]: One of those is having machines boot faster, thus moving to systemd, upstart, or another mechanism to allow asynchronous starting/stopping.
It's a great idea... until technology progresses just a bit further, and these cameras are equipped with facial recognition, GPS and data capabilities, and all tied into a giant back-end database tracking exactly who was where at what time...
You think the surveillance state is creepy now, wait until every cop is a roving track-your-location bot. The reasons for it now are reasonable, and I have no problem with cops having video of their encounters with people. But give it a decade or two (maybe less) and it could be come a very creepy bad thing.
It is still kind of hard to get a sense of what this project is. To be honest, I didn't even fully get it until I'd managed to get it installed and play with it a little. This is my understanding of the project, someone who is more closely involved can probably correct any errors I might be making here.
MediaGoblin is a backend system for hosting "media". Part of the big idea is that "media" potentially includes any kind of thing you want to host. It's first incarnation was really just for photos/still images (like piwigo or gallery), but now also handles video, audio, "raw" images, PDF,
MediaGoblin's main purpose is to take uploaded media and catalog it, tag it, generate "thumbnail"images, and perform any additional processing needed (such as producing legally-free format media for streaming and/or download - this IS a GNU-affiliated project after all.) It also handles authentication, access control, generation of the HTML for the pages that present the media, and so on. It is NOT (really) the frontend - they assume you have your own webserver. (There is a minimal python web-server script included can be used but it's not really intended for more than basic testing.
There is currently a focus on developing federation, meaning people can run their own individual hosts with their own login accounts, but be able to use and share media between different hosts without needing separate accounts on all of them. This will make it easy to spread out the hosting and mirroring of media across different servers in different places, which will be useful for load-spreading (like bittorrent) and for "censorship-resistance". (For a large organization with a worldwide spread of MediaGoblin instances, it could be like a Streisand-effect amplifier...)
The buzzword version of the description goes something like this: it's a unified (because this one system handles more or less all types of "content"), decentralized (because multiple independent servers can allow data-sharing and authentication with each other to prevent loss of one server from stopping access to media), federated (that's the buzzword for "one server can be told to trust another server's authentication" thing) system for hosting any "content" (or "media" if you prefer) that you want.
The short version is that it does the same sort of thing as flickr(/piwigo/gallery/picasa...), youtube(/vimeo, etc), soundcloud(/jamendo etc), wordpress, and various others, but it does it all in one interface in a way that the owners have control over so that (for example) some buttnugget can't shut off your video by just telling Google that the sound of birds in the background of your video is pirated music.
It'll currently mostly be of interest to people who are capable of operating their own servers rather than "end-users", though it seems obvious that the expectation is that people will end up using this system to set up hosting for said "end-users", whether for the general public or for use by members of some organization or other. I could imagine a university using it for inter-departmental or inter-campus media sharing and hosting, or an activist organization setting up federated instances in several countries for storing and sharing media, or a commercial start-up basing a multi-media Jamendo-style hosting company on the platform, for example.
My personal opinion: in its current state it's still too difficult install to be worthwhile for, say, a photo-gallery site (piwigo was a much simpler install on my existing webserver), but I don't know of anything similar for hosting video, audio, etc. (I suspect some projects for each on exist, I just don't know of them), and if I wanted to host several of these media types it might be worth it. My main complaints right now are that audio support is limited to offering "webm [v1] audio" (Vorbis audio in a limited Matroska container) as the output format (it can accept any kind of audio as input that gstreamer can handle i.e. just about anything), which is pretty well supported in browsers but not really widely used for audio files. (I'd like to see at least.opus support.
Windows has the ability to stash login credentials securely, but on Linux, this functionality isn't present, so having the browser "pack its own parachute" with its own encryption would be nice.
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
