Posts by Michael H.

Vyatta does open source networking with a mean streak

Weak

"It's nice to see that Vyatta isn't relying on open source's alleged good name along as it tries to carve out a prominent place in the networking realm. More young companies should have the guts to kick their rivals where it counts."

Unfortunately passe marketing tricks are about all Vyatta has going for them (and no I don't work for a gear vendor).

Their entire product line is based around commodity PC hardware. Performance is horrid compared to gear from any real vendor, where traffic is switched at a hardware level using dedicated ASICs.

The whitepaper on their site favorably compares the performance of a modern PC to an old, small Cisco router designed to route T1s (1.5mbit/s), something even a 486 could handle.

Apparently this means they "beat cisco."

Additonally there's really nothing their product offers that a competent administrator with a copy of FreeBSD couldn't brew up in an hour or two.

There is no way CPU based switching can handle the traffic of a Cisco 6500. There's a reason Real ISPs use Real Hardware, and not just off the shelf Dell boxes to route their traffic, and it's not because they don't have "super magic open source Vyatta software."

Hacking WoW and the pursuit of knowledge

Blizzard isn't exactly an upstanding corporate citizen

If you look at the history between Blizzard and their customers that do things they don't like (i.e. don't play the game in a normal way -- try to reverse engineer it, develop new content and gameplay, etc.), you'll find a long series of legal intimidation tactics.

Blizzard and their overenthusiastic legal team are really the RIAA of the computer gaming industry. They have no reservations about using legal threats and scare tactics, sending lawyers to peoples' homes, DMCA notices to people who reverse engineered parts of the game, etc.

They were also one of the first few companies to cause DMCA case law, in the Bnetd case ( http://www.eff.org/IP/Emulation/Blizzard_v_bnetd/ ). Strange thing is, people still seem to love them. The players (angry at people exploiting fundamentally broken game mechanics) jump up and down in joy as Blizzard tramples all over peoples' rights and sets dangerous legal precedent. I guess games and e-loot are Serious Business.

Sony apologies over virtual cathedral firefight

"Church-led education efforts"

I wonder what the 'Church-led education efforts to fight gun crime in the city' are? More anti-gun propaganda that they want Sony to fund?

"It's the guns and the video games that turn sweet innocent youth into drug dealers and gang members! Stay away from them kids, or Satan will get hold of you!"

Online games turn British man into hero

Nothing to see here, move along

"He could have saved a lot of time and pain if he had just gone about his business."

He took it upon himself to attempt to do a good deed, and got himself injured. I'm sure he knew that was a possibility going in.

Why is everyone criticizing him for it? Who cares if it was $25k, $2, or a candy bar. Have people been so beaten into passivity that they're unable to stand up to criminals any more? Isn't there any worth in saying "no, that's not ok and we're not going to stand for it?"

It's not about whether it was worth getting hurt; that's entirely up to him alone, not a bunch of Internet commentators stating that they don't feel it's worth /their/ time to stand up to criminals. It's about the precedent set by saying "go ahead and rob us, we're not going to do anything." Armed robbery a victimless crime? Even if it's simply from the perspective of being insured, that doesn't mean the money just magically comes out of nowhere. Insurance premiums go up and people end up paying one way or another. When you simply let criminals go about their business unhindered everyone becomes a victim. It's great that people here might be too cowardly to do their bit to make the world a better place, but the pure audacity to criticize those try to is disgusting.