Except that content is going widescreen as well. When you're watching widescreen material, your "32 inch display" is effectively the size of a 29 inch widescreen. Jumping to a 34 inch widescreen will actually increase your viewing area by a third—more than the diagonal measurement would imply.
And because sandboxes tend to leak. VBScript, ActiveX, Flash, Adobe, and Javascript have all had their fair share of vulnerabilities.
Apple is committed to only running signed code on their handhelds. That way, if a regular app is discovered to be malicious, Apple can blacklist it. But how does Apple blacklist malicious third-party unsigned code that another application—say, a Flash player—executes? The best they could do is blacklist the Flash player itself, disabling all the perfectly benign Flash apps and pissing off millions of people.
Now, you may argue that "the user" should have control over what code their phone executes. And in the case of Slashdotters, you're probably right. But normal, non-savvy users don't understand technical warnings. They don't comprehend that executing a tiny bit of malicious code can hand their entire computer over to an attacker, and that there may be no way to undo the damage. They should not be put in a position where they can they can screw up their system with a tap of a "yes" button, for the same reason that cars should not have a "disable emissions controls, gain ten horsepower" switch and skyscrapers should not have a shiny red button that says "collapse building." Curiosity killed the cat, as they say; no matter how well-intentioned the user may be, dancing pigs win out in the end.
So long as Apple provides a means for people who know what they're doing to run custom code—anyone can buy a developer key for about the cost of one month's phone bill—I won't complain about Apple making it harder for ignorant people to do stupid things.
One of ELF's favourtie tactics is driving metal spikes into trees so that when a logger tries to cut the tree down the chain on the chain saw breaks and injures the logger.
Burning AM towers alone may not people, but ELF has injured plenty of civilians in the past.
Tree spiking is a form of sabotage which involves hammering a metal rod or other material (commonly ceramic) into a tree trunk in order to discourage logging. A metal saw blade hitting an embedded spike could break or shatter, making it uneconomic to fell those trees. Tree spiking is condemned by opponents as eco-terrorism as they claim it is potentially dangerous to loggers or mill-workers, although only one injury resulting from tree spiking has been recorded, occurring in a sawmill with poor safety practices.
In advocating for the legitimacy of of tree spiking, Foreman claimed - naively, some might argue - that injury to workers was unlikely because of the safety measures in place to protect workers in large timber mills. Because of the "remote" risk of injury to chainsaw operators associated with spiking the base of trees, Foreman recommended against using this particular form of spiking. Nonetheless, tree spiking was seized upon by the logging industry as evidence of a violent agenda behind radical environmentalism. In 1987, when an employee of logging company Louisiana-Pacific was seriously injured by a bandsaw blade which shattered when it struck a 60 penny nail, company president Harry Merlo dubbed the incident "terrorism in the name of environmental goals". While Earth First! was condemned by state officials and the media, it later emerged that the chief suspect, against whom no charges were laid, was a 50 year old "survivalist" with no connection to Earth First!
911 times a billion? Are you saying that IE is responsible for 9/11/01 now? Intriguing idea....
Yes, well, that's the sort of mediocre conspiracy theory I'd expect from you non-creative garbage.
Any truly paranoid expert will tell you the attacks were planned by Zionist Freemason Nazi Illegal Immigrants with H1B Terrorist Visas and carried out by trained fleas.
It's still a bit hard to believe that they can create logic gates 18 times the diameter of a silicon atom—and only 7.5 times the atomic lattice spacing in silicon crystal. Time will tell.
I don't have a problem with innovation. I have a problem with companies that spend all their time on "penis envy" products rather than creating anything particularly new and innovative.
Remember the "muscle car" era? When innovation and safety took a back seat (cough) to squeezing out a few more horsepower than the competition? We seem to be going through the "muscle mouse" era, where companies are focusing on evolutionary change at the expense of revolutionary change.
Think about what's happened with mice over the past decade. Sure, the ergonomics have improved a bit. Wireless mice work better—longer battery life, more reliable signals. Sensors can track on more surfaces, and have a higher resolution. Oh, and on a few models you can really spin your scroll wheel now. Granted, that's more improvement than the keyboard has seen, but it's still pretty pathetic.
It's not like there aren't plenty of ways you could re-design a mouse. I'll let my imagination loose for a second: Why do we still have scroll *wheels*? Why not add an integrated trackball, like a scaled-up version of Apple's scroll ball? While you're at it, put a second ball where the thumb would rest. Now you could pan and scroll in any direction, while manipulating windows or other objects with your thumb, both independently of your "cursor". It would be like multi-touch for your mouse. Or you could just give your wrist a break for a while and use the mouse as a nice trackball. While you're at it, add a button or two for your ring finger and pinky to press. Add the latest haptics tech, so you can feel feedback as you use your mouse - a tactile grid and guidelines as you work in a design program, for example, or even a way to subtly "feel" your way through blocks of code. Articulate the frame a bit, so that the you can make the mouse wider or narrower to fit your hand properly. Add touch-sensitive pads to the buttons, so your mouse knows exactly where and how hard you click. Etc., etc., etc. And make these sorts of features standard across the product line, so that software developers don't dismiss them.
I'm not saying that any of those ideas are especially great. Most of them are probably rubbish. The point is that there are a million ideas out there waiting to be tried, yet manufacturers aren't even attempting to be creative anymore. Logitech and Microsoft spend endless amounts of money hot-rodding a design that's already more than a decade old, where the significant problems have all been solved, just so that they can keep selling you the "new hotness" year after year. They spare nary a dime to work on anything brilliant, new, and revolutionary.
Also, no I don't use a mouse pad and I don't want to need one. Talk about pointless.
Do yourself a favor and buy yourself a Xtrac pad; they're the best bang for the buck I've found. For ten bucks you can have a good sized surface that's far smoother than your average desktop. If you're the type that moves your mouse all over your desk, get the Ripper XXL - it's a freaking meter wide (and half a meter high) and it only costs $25. You can put your keyboard and stuff on it and still have room to move your mouse all over the place. They're both quite thin and won't slide around or get in the way. Trust me—once you've tried a decent pad, you won't go back. And it has nothing to do with tracking; a good pad will let your mouse glide smoothly with just enough friction for fine movement. Using a mouse on your desk feels like sanding wood by comparison. And, as a side effect, you'll probably start wondering what the big deal is about the latest sensor technology.
For all the things they've been able to get mice to track on, it still sucks to move a mouse on anything other than an engineered mousing surface. This new sensor may be a good feature for notebook mice that will be used on who-knows-what, but buying a premium gaming mouse for it's ability to track on crappy surfaces makes about as much sense as buying a Formula One car for its off-road handling.
And if anyone says "but it's better!": Today's well-made mice track fantastically well on a proper surface. They're already, for practical purposes, perfect. Yes, admittedly, there are people whose Logitech or Microsoft mice track poorly. But those people fall into two groups: (a) those who aren't using a pad at all, and (b) those who are using a horrible made-when-men-were-men-and-mice-had-balls pad they had lying around. Logitech and Microsoft would be better off just throwing in a proper mouse pad—and there are some excellent, relatively cheap cloth pads—than endlessly making slightly better sensors just so that people's cursors jump a bit less while they're scraping their mice back and forth on horrible surfaces.
(And if Microsoft and Logitech had half as much innovation in materials as they do in optics, their mice would move like air hockey pucks by now.)
Why are all of these robots configured to work in a squatting position?
* lower center of balance * better shock absorption * "neutral" position more centered in range of motion
Humans don't walk that way because we have very long (and weak) legs relative to our body size and we'd exert too much energy keeping our muscles tense. But most other animals keep their legs in a "crouched" position all the time. Examine some skeletons.
I'm not dismissing the seriousness of the exploit, just pointing out that there are tons of ways to exploit a computer you have physical access to. You could swap keyboards when someone isn't looking. You could hook up one of the tinier keyloggers. Or you could attack the computer itself in any number of ways.
The moral is: If you want to protect against knowledgeable, determined attackers, don't let them touch your PC.
Unless you also have some hidden program on the computer to flash the keyboard and later download the data (in which case you could just log the keys by software), you'd need to physically remove the keyboard, flash it with a keylogging BIOS, return the keyboard, then later retrieve the keyboard to get the logged keys.
And, as they say, physical access is root access. There are an unlimited number of ways someone could compromise your computer if they are given access to the hardware and firmware. This hack is just further proof of that.
Let's also remember that people desire the "limited" Wii far more than the 360. Shane's point is that Gamers aren't just looking for "Crysis in full glory". They want creative ideas, like the Wii. And creativity doesn't happen with the predictability of hardware generations.
It's fitting, though, that Microsoft would decide to be Innovative by doing exactly what Nintendo did a few years ago.
If this was an olympic size pool (50m x 25m, 2:1 aspect ratio) it would make some sense, but according to TFA the pool is 33m x 25m, 4:3 aspect ratio—or 5:4 ratio if you go by the imperial dimensions listed (108ft x 85ft), which curiously don't match the metric ones.
Either way, it's not *that* much longer one direction than the other. Seems silly to make the change, and even sillier to get one's knickers in a twist about it.
Somebody, a long time ago, (in a galaxy very, very close) realized that (a) you could have longer strings with less overhead and (b) sometimes you're reading streaming input and don't know ahead of time where the data will end. Having null-terminated strings was very useful when CPU cycles were expensive, registers were expensive, and buffered data was expensive.
The better question is "Who's the fscking idiot who would use a null-terminator, (on a short string, no less,) in a situation where security is paramount, and not even bother to check for poisoned nulls??!!?"
Slashdot Mirror
No I can't.
It's purely coincidental that Software Freedom Day happens to also be Talk Like a Pirate Day... Right?
Ever tried screenshotting a DVD movie window on a Mac?
Yeah, I did a bunch of them a few days ago: screencapture -i ~/Desktop/dvd.png
You place multiplayer capabilities at #374? Seriously?
Yeah, totally. Half-life, Zelda, Splinter Cell, and Super Mario Bros. would have been so much better as MMOs.
(/me stops typing before I start to sound like Gabe.)
Except that content is going widescreen as well. When you're watching widescreen material, your "32 inch display" is effectively the size of a 29 inch widescreen. Jumping to a 34 inch widescreen will actually increase your viewing area by a third—more than the diagonal measurement would imply.
You can use this handy calculator to compare screens for yourself.
And because sandboxes tend to leak. VBScript, ActiveX, Flash, Adobe, and Javascript have all had their fair share of vulnerabilities.
Apple is committed to only running signed code on their handhelds. That way, if a regular app is discovered to be malicious, Apple can blacklist it. But how does Apple blacklist malicious third-party unsigned code that another application—say, a Flash player—executes? The best they could do is blacklist the Flash player itself, disabling all the perfectly benign Flash apps and pissing off millions of people.
Now, you may argue that "the user" should have control over what code their phone executes. And in the case of Slashdotters, you're probably right. But normal, non-savvy users don't understand technical warnings. They don't comprehend that executing a tiny bit of malicious code can hand their entire computer over to an attacker, and that there may be no way to undo the damage. They should not be put in a position where they can they can screw up their system with a tap of a "yes" button, for the same reason that cars should not have a "disable emissions controls, gain ten horsepower" switch and skyscrapers should not have a shiny red button that says "collapse building." Curiosity killed the cat, as they say; no matter how well-intentioned the user may be, dancing pigs win out in the end.
So long as Apple provides a means for people who know what they're doing to run custom code—anyone can buy a developer key for about the cost of one month's phone bill—I won't complain about Apple making it harder for ignorant people to do stupid things.
One of ELF's favourtie tactics is driving metal spikes into trees so that when a logger tries to cut the tree down the chain on the chain saw breaks and injures the logger.
Burning AM towers alone may not people, but ELF has injured plenty of civilians in the past.
Sorry, but... [Citation Needed].
From Wikipedia:
From SourceWatch:
I'm guessing "security nightmare" really means "getting the CEO to stop using 12345 as his password."
911 times a billion? Are you saying that IE is responsible for 9/11/01 now? Intriguing idea....
Yes, well, that's the sort of mediocre conspiracy theory I'd expect from you non-creative garbage.
Any truly paranoid expert will tell you the attacks were planned by Zionist Freemason Nazi Illegal Immigrants with H1B Terrorist Visas and carried out by trained fleas.
aluminium
Oh dear lord, not this again.
The atomic radius of Si is 111pm, or ~0.1 nm.
It's still a bit hard to believe that they can create logic gates 18 times the diameter of a silicon atom—and only 7.5 times the atomic lattice spacing in silicon crystal. Time will tell.
Well, it has make a lot of people very angry.
I don't have a problem with innovation. I have a problem with companies that spend all their time on "penis envy" products rather than creating anything particularly new and innovative.
Remember the "muscle car" era? When innovation and safety took a back seat (cough) to squeezing out a few more horsepower than the competition? We seem to be going through the "muscle mouse" era, where companies are focusing on evolutionary change at the expense of revolutionary change.
Think about what's happened with mice over the past decade. Sure, the ergonomics have improved a bit. Wireless mice work better—longer battery life, more reliable signals. Sensors can track on more surfaces, and have a higher resolution. Oh, and on a few models you can really spin your scroll wheel now. Granted, that's more improvement than the keyboard has seen, but it's still pretty pathetic.
It's not like there aren't plenty of ways you could re-design a mouse. I'll let my imagination loose for a second: Why do we still have scroll *wheels*? Why not add an integrated trackball, like a scaled-up version of Apple's scroll ball? While you're at it, put a second ball where the thumb would rest. Now you could pan and scroll in any direction, while manipulating windows or other objects with your thumb, both independently of your "cursor". It would be like multi-touch for your mouse. Or you could just give your wrist a break for a while and use the mouse as a nice trackball. While you're at it, add a button or two for your ring finger and pinky to press. Add the latest haptics tech, so you can feel feedback as you use your mouse - a tactile grid and guidelines as you work in a design program, for example, or even a way to subtly "feel" your way through blocks of code. Articulate the frame a bit, so that the you can make the mouse wider or narrower to fit your hand properly. Add touch-sensitive pads to the buttons, so your mouse knows exactly where and how hard you click. Etc., etc., etc. And make these sorts of features standard across the product line, so that software developers don't dismiss them.
I'm not saying that any of those ideas are especially great. Most of them are probably rubbish. The point is that there are a million ideas out there waiting to be tried, yet manufacturers aren't even attempting to be creative anymore. Logitech and Microsoft spend endless amounts of money hot-rodding a design that's already more than a decade old, where the significant problems have all been solved, just so that they can keep selling you the "new hotness" year after year. They spare nary a dime to work on anything brilliant, new, and revolutionary.
Also, no I don't use a mouse pad and I don't want to need one. Talk about pointless.
Do yourself a favor and buy yourself a Xtrac pad; they're the best bang for the buck I've found. For ten bucks you can have a good sized surface that's far smoother than your average desktop. If you're the type that moves your mouse all over your desk, get the Ripper XXL - it's a freaking meter wide (and half a meter high) and it only costs $25. You can put your keyboard and stuff on it and still have room to move your mouse all over the place. They're both quite thin and won't slide around or get in the way. Trust me—once you've tried a decent pad, you won't go back. And it has nothing to do with tracking; a good pad will let your mouse glide smoothly with just enough friction for fine movement. Using a mouse on your desk feels like sanding wood by comparison. And, as a side effect, you'll probably start wondering what the big deal is about the latest sensor technology.
For all the things they've been able to get mice to track on, it still sucks to move a mouse on anything other than an engineered mousing surface. This new sensor may be a good feature for notebook mice that will be used on who-knows-what, but buying a premium gaming mouse for it's ability to track on crappy surfaces makes about as much sense as buying a Formula One car for its off-road handling.
And if anyone says "but it's better!": Today's well-made mice track fantastically well on a proper surface. They're already, for practical purposes, perfect. Yes, admittedly, there are people whose Logitech or Microsoft mice track poorly. But those people fall into two groups: (a) those who aren't using a pad at all, and (b) those who are using a horrible made-when-men-were-men-and-mice-had-balls pad they had lying around. Logitech and Microsoft would be better off just throwing in a proper mouse pad—and there are some excellent, relatively cheap cloth pads—than endlessly making slightly better sensors just so that people's cursors jump a bit less while they're scraping their mice back and forth on horrible surfaces.
(And if Microsoft and Logitech had half as much innovation in materials as they do in optics, their mice would move like air hockey pucks by now.)
I know Mac users are whiny enough, but don't they have a Wine equivalent yet?
Considering WineHQ's tagline is "Run Windows applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X", I'd have to say yes.
Why are all of these robots configured to work in a squatting position?
* lower center of balance
* better shock absorption
* "neutral" position more centered in range of motion
Humans don't walk that way because we have very long (and weak) legs relative to our body size and we'd exert too much energy keeping our muscles tense. But most other animals keep their legs in a "crouched" position all the time. Examine some skeletons.
I'm not dismissing the seriousness of the exploit, just pointing out that there are tons of ways to exploit a computer you have physical access to. You could swap keyboards when someone isn't looking. You could hook up one of the tinier keyloggers. Or you could attack the computer itself in any number of ways.
The moral is: If you want to protect against knowledgeable, determined attackers, don't let them touch your PC.
Unless you also have some hidden program on the computer to flash the keyboard and later download the data (in which case you could just log the keys by software), you'd need to physically remove the keyboard, flash it with a keylogging BIOS, return the keyboard, then later retrieve the keyboard to get the logged keys.
And, as they say, physical access is root access. There are an unlimited number of ways someone could compromise your computer if they are given access to the hardware and firmware. This hack is just further proof of that.
Oh, and don't let anyone lend you their keyboard.
Oh, you and your wild anachronisms. Next you'll be telling us they played D&D in ancient Rome!
Please read this before posting.
Oh shucks, too late.
Let's also remember that people desire the "limited" Wii far more than the 360. Shane's point is that Gamers aren't just looking for "Crysis in full glory". They want creative ideas, like the Wii. And creativity doesn't happen with the predictability of hardware generations.
It's fitting, though, that Microsoft would decide to be Innovative by doing exactly what Nintendo did a few years ago.
If this was an olympic size pool (50m x 25m, 2:1 aspect ratio) it would make some sense, but according to TFA the pool is 33m x 25m, 4:3 aspect ratio—or 5:4 ratio if you go by the imperial dimensions listed (108ft x 85ft), which curiously don't match the metric ones.
Either way, it's not *that* much longer one direction than the other. Seems silly to make the change, and even sillier to get one's knickers in a twist about it.
Somebody, a long time ago, (in a galaxy very, very close) realized that (a) you could have longer strings with less overhead and (b) sometimes you're reading streaming input and don't know ahead of time where the data will end. Having null-terminated strings was very useful when CPU cycles were expensive, registers were expensive, and buffered data was expensive.
The better question is "Who's the fscking idiot who would use a null-terminator, (on a short string, no less,) in a situation where security is paramount, and not even bother to check for poisoned nulls??!!?"
The technique involves sending only one unusual text character
Let me guess: "Q". Damned "Q".
Well, the American shopping mall is a strange and exotic place. Few can fathom its mysteries.