Say what you will about Star Wars Episode III, it sure teaches us a great lesson about democracy. ("no such thing as 'temporary powers'"). I love that they chose to make the evil Galactic Empire we love to hate from the original movies arise out of essentially the same political situation as the U.S. is in now.
how can a single account be used to crash an entire market like that?
It wasn't a single account. The exchange was hacked and the email addresses and password hashes of all users was posted online. In addition, a single account was drained. In response to this, the site was closed temporarily, and by the look of it, a number of the other major Bitcoin exchanges (TradeHill) have also stopped trading. It's not hard to see how something like this can shake up the economy a lot.
This isn't a fundamental problem with Bitcoin, but it is a huge problem for the system in its current state. The current state of affairs is that nearly all trades are taking place on this MtGox site, so what you have is a supposedly-decentralised currency that is, in effect, just another centralised currency controlled by one site. I would imagine after today, and with the added press that other exchanges such as TradeHill is getting, that we'll see much less concentration around single exchanges, and therefore the currency will become decentralised as was originally planned.
Wasn't the claim that Bitcoin would have a stable value and that no single entity could play games with the exchange rate?
It was never claimed to have a stable value, but yes, no single entity should have this much power. It should be controlled by the market.
Once again, Richard Stallman, zany as he is, predicted all of this fourteen years ago. The Right to Read may be one of the most spot-on predictions of future technology I have ever read.
In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.
Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.
Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.
I have to agree. I'm about halfway through. The rape victims part was simply offensive and shouldn't have been in the game. Everything else is quite a lot better than expected. Obviously something about this game has rubbed reviewers the wrong way -- perhaps it isn't a good career move to be recommending a game that lets you carry around poop. But I read the Ars article, and I can say that this game in no way deserves to be called "barely playable", or an "unplayable, glitchy, ugly, offensive mess". It's a reasonably fun game that is an entirely fitting sequel to Duke 3D, and has far more diverse environments and gameplay than the barely distinguishable sludge that's come out in the past few years.
And I really hate when reviewers think they're clever when the only thing they write under "the good" is "the game doesn't last very long." At least do your readers a favour and list the handful of good points about the game under your "the good" heading. I would direct readers who actually want a considered opinion to read the PC Gamer review, which gave the game 80%, and I felt was quite reasonable.
It isn't part of the ecosystem of the web. A PDF is still designed for the old world, where books had pages and were standalone entities. PDFs can be linked to, but they can't be linked into; this PDF has about 10 articles, and you can't show me a URL for a particular article or subsection. PDFs are designed for a particular page size. If you try to view them on a small screen, you have to zoom out and then the text is too small. HTML is designed to be device-independent, and the text flows to fit the device.
Also the PDF doesn't appear to be accessible from the e-G8 site at all on a PC without faking your User-Agent string. Providing a Flash and a PDF version but not providing any links to the PDF is just as good as just providing a Flash version.
My complaint is that this was made by someone who doesn't "get" what the Internet is all about. For anybody else, that would be no big deal, but this has been made by people who are claiming a stake in the future of the Internet, yet they can't even think to commission someone to use the standard tools of the medium. Their first three preferences for publishing this thing were, in order, 1. an iPhone app, 2. a Flash page turner, 3. a PDF. On the Internet, we publish in HTML.
The point isn't that the format is proprietary, and whether or not it's available as a Flash or a PDF or an iPhone app, it doesn't matter. Whether or not an advanced user could somehow extract all of the text isn't the issue. The issue is that this isn't how the web works. The real web is about resources. Lots of individual resources, with their own URLs, which allow incoming links, and preferably, with lots of outgoing links as well.
I should be able to refer to a specific article within that document on my blog with a blue underlined piece of text that takes my reader directly to the article in question. The article should be readable on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and Kindle (and everything else). Text in the article should be selectable and copyable; I shouldn't have to run pdftotext or even know what that is. A blind person should be able to use a standard screen reader.
That is how the web was always supposed to work, and that is how it mostly does work. It isn't as pretty as an animated page turn, but it is universally accessible. If this were any other article, it wouldn't be an issue, just a dumb web site. But this is the most public, official, government-run attempt to discuss the future of the Internet, and it’s being run by people who are completely unaware of what the Internet is or how it works (socially, as well as technically). (So much so, that when confronted with this problem, the organiser admitted that maybe Flash wasn't the best format, but the only other solution he could think of was an "app for that" app.)
Under all circumstances are "micro-commits" a good idea. The only reason not to commit in small increments is if you are working on something that will break your code until it's finished. For that, you should be using a branch, and doing micro-commits on the branch, then finally merge the branch back when you're done.
Why? The main reason is that if something is broken ("huh? That was working before, now it isn't!"), you will be able to go back and bisect. Find the last commit where it was working and the first commit where it was broken. Now to figure out what broke it. Would you rather that commit be a few dozen lines which are all closely related to the same thing ("of course, it was the froobler that broke"), or a multi-thousand line diff that changed every conceivable part of the program, messed around with indentation, and generally has no common theme to the changes, and has a commit log "done for the day; committing" ("wow, I have no idea what that commit did")? The answer for all projects of all sizes is the former.
In particular, a new feature and a bug fix should never appear together in a commit. New features are often large, and often introduce new bugs, but bug fixes should be careful and small. That way, you separate out the fixes from the potential problems. Also in open source it's important for bug fixes to have independent commits, because distro maintainers will often cherry-pick the fixes for immediate distribution, but they don't want to distribute the new features as well.
If you're implying that.NET meets the above criteria, it doesn't.
Firstly, a lot of people, myself included, are wary of Mono due to Microsoft's historically negative stance towards open source and accusations of patent infringement by the open source community. There's an ongoing debate about that now which I don't want to get into, but suffice to say that forcing all web browsers to adopt.NET will not sit well with a lot of the free software people. It's also extremely Windows-centric (as you would imagine, being a virtual machine designed for Windows only). But leaving that one aside....NET is far too bloated to be the standard scripting language of the web. If you notice one thing JS and Lua have in common is they are extremely small and have extremely lightweight libraries. JS has a few dozen built-in functions and a handful of built-in types, and everything else you must bring along yourself (such as jQuery). Compare that to.NET, whose standard library has hundreds of classes and even the latest "compact" runtime (4.0) is 54 MB. Also,.NET may be available on non-Windows operating systems, but it isn't on any smartphones that I know of, and Apple will certainly fight against implementing it.
Lastly, it isn't there yet. Incorporating it into the browser like JS is would require careful definition of a subset of the standard library to make available on the browser, as well as an interface to all of the standard and upcoming HTML5 browser features.
Can I offer an alternative suggestion? How about we DON'T replace JavaScript with <insert favourite scripting language here>. Okay, part of the problem with web scripting is that we're using JavaScript, which sucks. But the majority of the problem is that we're using a programming language at all. We've just reinvented the biggest, clunkiest wheel on the planet.
Look at the number of projects that are taking programming code, or in some cases bytecode, and compiling it up to JavaScript (GWT, Pyjamas, Emscripten, CoffeeScript, and the rest). If we replace JS for Lua, we'll need to write a new generation of tools to compile everybody's programming language into Lua. Can we please have a standardised low-level virtual machine (hint) that will run in all browsers, which all languages can target, so we don't have to go through the ridiculous hoop of taking, in many cases, low-level statically typed code, throwing away all the type information and converting it into high-level dynamic scripting code, and then having the browser optimise the hell out of it and try to figure out the types? Google's PNaCl is apparently going to get the ball rolling on this, with LLVM.
It is one thing to show you can program. Doing a couple of Code Jam questions demonstrates in-the-small programming ability. But it doesn't show anything relating to large or medium-scale system design, testing, revision control practices and teamwork.
Yes, the Nintendo example isn't a very good one because it's based on physical plastic that can deteriorate, and there's not much you can do about it. That's a physical limitation though, not an artificial one like the DRM servers. A better example is all of the PC games that were released between 1980 and whenever the hell all this DRM started getting serious (2005ish?). All of those games came on disks and CDs which have probably deteriorated, but I could have backed them up and certainly others did (and I consider it within my rights to download online copies of games that I purchased but my media has deteriorated). And they still (mostly) work on modern PCs, especially thanks to DOSBox. But the same can never happen to some of these DRM games.
A great example: I have just started playing King's Quest thanks to GOG.com, from 1984. This game is 27 years old, yet it still runs perfectly -- not the original disk, but a byte-perfect copy of the original disk. Do you think in 2038 (assuming all machines haven't gone crazy and think it's 1970) that I'll still be able to play StarCraft II or Portal 2? It seems like a long long time into the future, so far that we don't need to worry about it, but the fact that I'm still interested in playing a 27-year-old game maybe indicates that people then will want to play our games. Steam (for example) isn't going away any time soon. I'm not worried about soon, I'm worried about later.
I'm worried that 50 years from now, we'll look back on gaming history and there'll be a huge wealth of historical classics from 1980--2005, and then this huge gaping hole in history from 2005--?? where there are no games left, due to the overreaching copyright police.
The point is that we don't know how to tell the difference between the Sonys and the "rest of the industry". When Ubisoft's servers were having trouble last year, you could have said "Don't lay Ubisoft's stupidity on the rest of the industry. I use PSN and they don't have these sort of problems." And then Sony got hacked.
As consumers, we really don't know what goes on inside the black box of Sony PSN or Blizzard Battle.net or Valve Steam. And Sony isn't a small-time company either, so you can't just use the size of the company as an indicator.
The real problem is that the current approach to gaming is architecturally flawed. There is a centralised single point of failure which the customer has no control or choice over. Some centralised systems are necessary, but in the case of gaming (optional multiplayer matchmaking or MMOs aside) this is an entirely artificial single point of failure which is present only to protect the company from its customers. This is the entire industry's doing; all companies that employ centralised activation are guilty of doing it, not just the ones that have fucked up so far (Sony).
He stated the rich variety of industrial purposes for moon rocks. "With these moon rocks, we can make almost any surface conduct portals," said Schmitt, announcing his partnership with Aperture Science CEO Cave Johnson.
Maybe manufacturers should be required by law to write "Made with Slave Labor" on the package (or similar wording). After all, egg cartons are required by law to include "Cage Eggs" if they were laid under abusive conditions, and this creates a market for the more expensive "Free Range Eggs" cartons. Why should we not protect humans with similar laws? Then we'll see how it affects sales of the more expensive brands that are made in countries with proper working conditions.
Then again, they do contain the wording "Made in China"; perhaps that has the same meaning. But not the same ring to it.
"Unfortunately, folkloric heritage is not regulated by international norms or by intellectual property rights," Marina Primenko, the creator of the Ukrainian map, said.
Yes, very unfortunate. Because we need more historical culture to be tied up in intellectual property rights so rich people can sue other people who reference it.
But he said Tim Berners-Lee was wrong. All of those complaints you make about the web are web designers going against Berners-Lee's original vision for the web. The most important aspect of Berners-Lee's web is the URL, which precisely identifies resources. The hyperlink displays the URL of the place you're going to go to. All of this link obfuscation (the JavaScript, the Flash), that isn't the way it was supposed to be.
But things aren't getting worse. They are getting better. Web designers are finally understanding how the web should work. Flash is being replaced with JavaScript. URLs are becoming more descriptive, and where JavaScript is used, it's usually an event handler on a link with a proper URL (I would say largely thanks to tabbed browsing; where the middle click takes the link URL, not the JavaScript).So in a world where the web works the way Berners-Lee described (which I would say we are going towards), what exactly is the problem?
Honest question: When you say people are vetting the cracks by comparing EXEs, I assume you mean they run the crack on the EXE, then use a hex editor to compare the original EXE and the cracked one, to ensure that the cracked EXE is just a few bytes off and contains no malware.
So how do you know that the EXE you need to download (the crack itself) does not contain malware? Are you verifying that as well?
Even once the crack has been released and checked by other crackers, how do I know if I go to a random site and download it that I am getting the same crack? They don't typically use signed binaries.
Sure, people may not have died because of the release, but he did absolutely nothing to make sure that wasn't the case first. Without care being taken with actions like these, even the best of intentions can backfire into something that no one could ever dream of. I think his point could have easily been made with less material, more carefully selected.
He didn't have to make sure he wasn't releasing life-threatening information -- he entrusted WikiLeaks to do that, and by the looks of it, they did a pretty good job. They worked with news organisations to censor the material and release it in small, manageable quantities. WikiLeaks, not Bradley Manning, are responsible in this operation for ensuring no lives are lost.
If anybody is killed because of the leaks, it will be on the conscience of both WikiLeaks and Manning. But given that nobody has yet, I'd say Bradley was responsible in entrusting the documents to WikiLeaks and not merely dropping it all on a public server.
There was a period, in the late nineties and most of the 2000s that every game had to have multiplayer to be cool. You would be hard-pressed to find a game from that era that didn't have a multiplayer mode, even if it was just tacked on, buggy as hell and unbalanced. Even Myst had a multiplayer spin-off! That was a time when we started seeing multiplayer-only games, like Quake III and Unreal Tournament.
These days I think it has become acceptable to release games without multiplayer. Games have become more cinematic (whether you think that's a good thing is debatable) and I think it's now okay to say "this is a cinematic game; you play it for the single player." Possibly credit goes to Valve, for releasing the Orange Box which interestingly had both single and multiplayer components, but they were entirely separate. It featured two massively acclaimed single-player only games, and one massively acclaimed multiplayer only game. Couple that with all the new indie games like Braid which wouldn't make sense in multiplayer.
I had the same reaction to the Facebook / Twitter thing, but perhaps (judging by screenshots) they are making a more general infrastructure, a bit like Android has.
If (and this is just speculation) you can (using XML or something) register a website with a certain set of features, and it's customizable, that would be good. For example, there could be a "share photo" service, and you can use XML to register a number of websites as offering that service. So I could register, Facebook, Flickr, Twitpic, etc. And then when I drag a photo onto the paper plane icon, it says "share via..." and I can choose any of those sites. In addition, I could use XML to add a site-specific menu (such as the Facebook menu pictured), with a "mail" item that shows how many unread mails I have. This could work for Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
If they build a general service-oriented framework, and not just "Facebook and Twitter integration", then it could be a useful feature.
There is, but unfortunately it's called a "patent". You do what Google did with WebM -- obtain all the patents you can, then grant a "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable... patent license". Then it's effectively open to everyone, and cannot be patented.
Slashdot Mirror
Say what you will about Star Wars Episode III, it sure teaches us a great lesson about democracy. ("no such thing as 'temporary powers'"). I love that they chose to make the evil Galactic Empire we love to hate from the original movies arise out of essentially the same political situation as the U.S. is in now.
It wasn't a single account. The exchange was hacked and the email addresses and password hashes of all users was posted online. In addition, a single account was drained. In response to this, the site was closed temporarily, and by the look of it, a number of the other major Bitcoin exchanges (TradeHill) have also stopped trading. It's not hard to see how something like this can shake up the economy a lot.
This isn't a fundamental problem with Bitcoin, but it is a huge problem for the system in its current state. The current state of affairs is that nearly all trades are taking place on this MtGox site, so what you have is a supposedly-decentralised currency that is, in effect, just another centralised currency controlled by one site. I would imagine after today, and with the added press that other exchanges such as TradeHill is getting, that we'll see much less concentration around single exchanges, and therefore the currency will become decentralised as was originally planned.
It was never claimed to have a stable value, but yes, no single entity should have this much power. It should be controlled by the market.
Steam puts a rootkit on your system?
Once again, Richard Stallman, zany as he is, predicted all of this fourteen years ago. The Right to Read may be one of the most spot-on predictions of future technology I have ever read.
I have to agree. I'm about halfway through. The rape victims part was simply offensive and shouldn't have been in the game. Everything else is quite a lot better than expected. Obviously something about this game has rubbed reviewers the wrong way -- perhaps it isn't a good career move to be recommending a game that lets you carry around poop. But I read the Ars article, and I can say that this game in no way deserves to be called "barely playable", or an "unplayable, glitchy, ugly, offensive mess". It's a reasonably fun game that is an entirely fitting sequel to Duke 3D, and has far more diverse environments and gameplay than the barely distinguishable sludge that's come out in the past few years.
And I really hate when reviewers think they're clever when the only thing they write under "the good" is "the game doesn't last very long." At least do your readers a favour and list the handful of good points about the game under your "the good" heading. I would direct readers who actually want a considered opinion to read the PC Gamer review, which gave the game 80%, and I felt was quite reasonable.
It isn't part of the ecosystem of the web. A PDF is still designed for the old world, where books had pages and were standalone entities. PDFs can be linked to, but they can't be linked into; this PDF has about 10 articles, and you can't show me a URL for a particular article or subsection. PDFs are designed for a particular page size. If you try to view them on a small screen, you have to zoom out and then the text is too small. HTML is designed to be device-independent, and the text flows to fit the device.
Also the PDF doesn't appear to be accessible from the e-G8 site at all on a PC without faking your User-Agent string. Providing a Flash and a PDF version but not providing any links to the PDF is just as good as just providing a Flash version.
My complaint is that this was made by someone who doesn't "get" what the Internet is all about. For anybody else, that would be no big deal, but this has been made by people who are claiming a stake in the future of the Internet, yet they can't even think to commission someone to use the standard tools of the medium. Their first three preferences for publishing this thing were, in order, 1. an iPhone app, 2. a Flash page turner, 3. a PDF. On the Internet, we publish in HTML.
The point isn't that the format is proprietary, and whether or not it's available as a Flash or a PDF or an iPhone app, it doesn't matter. Whether or not an advanced user could somehow extract all of the text isn't the issue. The issue is that this isn't how the web works. The real web is about resources. Lots of individual resources, with their own URLs, which allow incoming links, and preferably, with lots of outgoing links as well.
I should be able to refer to a specific article within that document on my blog with a blue underlined piece of text that takes my reader directly to the article in question. The article should be readable on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and Kindle (and everything else). Text in the article should be selectable and copyable; I shouldn't have to run pdftotext or even know what that is. A blind person should be able to use a standard screen reader.
That is how the web was always supposed to work, and that is how it mostly does work. It isn't as pretty as an animated page turn, but it is universally accessible. If this were any other article, it wouldn't be an issue, just a dumb web site. But this is the most public, official, government-run attempt to discuss the future of the Internet, and it’s being run by people who are completely unaware of what the Internet is or how it works (socially, as well as technically). (So much so, that when confronted with this problem, the organiser admitted that maybe Flash wasn't the best format, but the only other solution he could think of was an "app for that" app.)
Under all circumstances are "micro-commits" a good idea. The only reason not to commit in small increments is if you are working on something that will break your code until it's finished. For that, you should be using a branch, and doing micro-commits on the branch, then finally merge the branch back when you're done.
Why? The main reason is that if something is broken ("huh? That was working before, now it isn't!"), you will be able to go back and bisect. Find the last commit where it was working and the first commit where it was broken. Now to figure out what broke it. Would you rather that commit be a few dozen lines which are all closely related to the same thing ("of course, it was the froobler that broke"), or a multi-thousand line diff that changed every conceivable part of the program, messed around with indentation, and generally has no common theme to the changes, and has a commit log "done for the day; committing" ("wow, I have no idea what that commit did")? The answer for all projects of all sizes is the former.
In particular, a new feature and a bug fix should never appear together in a commit. New features are often large, and often introduce new bugs, but bug fixes should be careful and small. That way, you separate out the fixes from the potential problems. Also in open source it's important for bug fixes to have independent commits, because distro maintainers will often cherry-pick the fixes for immediate distribution, but they don't want to distribute the new features as well.
If you're implying that .NET meets the above criteria, it doesn't.
Firstly, a lot of people, myself included, are wary of Mono due to Microsoft's historically negative stance towards open source and accusations of patent infringement by the open source community. There's an ongoing debate about that now which I don't want to get into, but suffice to say that forcing all web browsers to adopt .NET will not sit well with a lot of the free software people. It's also extremely Windows-centric (as you would imagine, being a virtual machine designed for Windows only). But leaving that one aside... .NET is far too bloated to be the standard scripting language of the web. If you notice one thing JS and Lua have in common is they are extremely small and have extremely lightweight libraries. JS has a few dozen built-in functions and a handful of built-in types, and everything else you must bring along yourself (such as jQuery). Compare that to .NET, whose standard library has hundreds of classes and even the latest "compact" runtime (4.0) is 54 MB. Also, .NET may be available on non-Windows operating systems, but it isn't on any smartphones that I know of, and Apple will certainly fight against implementing it.
Lastly, it isn't there yet. Incorporating it into the browser like JS is would require careful definition of a subset of the standard library to make available on the browser, as well as an interface to all of the standard and upcoming HTML5 browser features.
Can I offer an alternative suggestion? How about we DON'T replace JavaScript with <insert favourite scripting language here>. Okay, part of the problem with web scripting is that we're using JavaScript, which sucks. But the majority of the problem is that we're using a programming language at all. We've just reinvented the biggest, clunkiest wheel on the planet.
Look at the number of projects that are taking programming code, or in some cases bytecode, and compiling it up to JavaScript (GWT, Pyjamas, Emscripten, CoffeeScript, and the rest). If we replace JS for Lua, we'll need to write a new generation of tools to compile everybody's programming language into Lua. Can we please have a standardised low-level virtual machine (hint) that will run in all browsers, which all languages can target, so we don't have to go through the ridiculous hoop of taking, in many cases, low-level statically typed code, throwing away all the type information and converting it into high-level dynamic scripting code, and then having the browser optimise the hell out of it and try to figure out the types? Google's PNaCl is apparently going to get the ball rolling on this, with LLVM.
It is one thing to show you can program. Doing a couple of Code Jam questions demonstrates in-the-small programming ability. But it doesn't show anything relating to large or medium-scale system design, testing, revision control practices and teamwork.
Yes, the Nintendo example isn't a very good one because it's based on physical plastic that can deteriorate, and there's not much you can do about it. That's a physical limitation though, not an artificial one like the DRM servers. A better example is all of the PC games that were released between 1980 and whenever the hell all this DRM started getting serious (2005ish?). All of those games came on disks and CDs which have probably deteriorated, but I could have backed them up and certainly others did (and I consider it within my rights to download online copies of games that I purchased but my media has deteriorated). And they still (mostly) work on modern PCs, especially thanks to DOSBox. But the same can never happen to some of these DRM games.
A great example: I have just started playing King's Quest thanks to GOG.com, from 1984. This game is 27 years old, yet it still runs perfectly -- not the original disk, but a byte-perfect copy of the original disk. Do you think in 2038 (assuming all machines haven't gone crazy and think it's 1970) that I'll still be able to play StarCraft II or Portal 2? It seems like a long long time into the future, so far that we don't need to worry about it, but the fact that I'm still interested in playing a 27-year-old game maybe indicates that people then will want to play our games. Steam (for example) isn't going away any time soon. I'm not worried about soon, I'm worried about later.
I'm worried that 50 years from now, we'll look back on gaming history and there'll be a huge wealth of historical classics from 1980--2005, and then this huge gaping hole in history from 2005--?? where there are no games left, due to the overreaching copyright police.
The point is that we don't know how to tell the difference between the Sonys and the "rest of the industry". When Ubisoft's servers were having trouble last year, you could have said "Don't lay Ubisoft's stupidity on the rest of the industry. I use PSN and they don't have these sort of problems." And then Sony got hacked.
As consumers, we really don't know what goes on inside the black box of Sony PSN or Blizzard Battle.net or Valve Steam. And Sony isn't a small-time company either, so you can't just use the size of the company as an indicator.
The real problem is that the current approach to gaming is architecturally flawed. There is a centralised single point of failure which the customer has no control or choice over. Some centralised systems are necessary, but in the case of gaming (optional multiplayer matchmaking or MMOs aside) this is an entirely artificial single point of failure which is present only to protect the company from its customers. This is the entire industry's doing; all companies that employ centralised activation are guilty of doing it, not just the ones that have fucked up so far (Sony).
He stated the rich variety of industrial purposes for moon rocks. "With these moon rocks, we can make almost any surface conduct portals," said Schmitt, announcing his partnership with Aperture Science CEO Cave Johnson.
Maybe manufacturers should be required by law to write "Made with Slave Labor" on the package (or similar wording). After all, egg cartons are required by law to include "Cage Eggs" if they were laid under abusive conditions, and this creates a market for the more expensive "Free Range Eggs" cartons. Why should we not protect humans with similar laws? Then we'll see how it affects sales of the more expensive brands that are made in countries with proper working conditions.
Then again, they do contain the wording "Made in China"; perhaps that has the same meaning. But not the same ring to it.
Yes, very unfortunate. Because we need more historical culture to be tied up in intellectual property rights so rich people can sue other people who reference it.
But he said Tim Berners-Lee was wrong. All of those complaints you make about the web are web designers going against Berners-Lee's original vision for the web. The most important aspect of Berners-Lee's web is the URL, which precisely identifies resources. The hyperlink displays the URL of the place you're going to go to. All of this link obfuscation (the JavaScript, the Flash), that isn't the way it was supposed to be.
But things aren't getting worse. They are getting better. Web designers are finally understanding how the web should work. Flash is being replaced with JavaScript. URLs are becoming more descriptive, and where JavaScript is used, it's usually an event handler on a link with a proper URL (I would say largely thanks to tabbed browsing; where the middle click takes the link URL, not the JavaScript).So in a world where the web works the way Berners-Lee described (which I would say we are going towards), what exactly is the problem?
Honest question: When you say people are vetting the cracks by comparing EXEs, I assume you mean they run the crack on the EXE, then use a hex editor to compare the original EXE and the cracked one, to ensure that the cracked EXE is just a few bytes off and contains no malware.
So how do you know that the EXE you need to download (the crack itself) does not contain malware? Are you verifying that as well?
Even once the crack has been released and checked by other crackers, how do I know if I go to a random site and download it that I am getting the same crack? They don't typically use signed binaries.
He didn't have to make sure he wasn't releasing life-threatening information -- he entrusted WikiLeaks to do that, and by the looks of it, they did a pretty good job. They worked with news organisations to censor the material and release it in small, manageable quantities. WikiLeaks, not Bradley Manning, are responsible in this operation for ensuring no lives are lost.
If anybody is killed because of the leaks, it will be on the conscience of both WikiLeaks and Manning. But given that nobody has yet, I'd say Bradley was responsible in entrusting the documents to WikiLeaks and not merely dropping it all on a public server.
I don't know why they didn't do quicksort. That would have been a much more interesting dance to watch, because they would all be dancing in parallel.
There was a period, in the late nineties and most of the 2000s that every game had to have multiplayer to be cool. You would be hard-pressed to find a game from that era that didn't have a multiplayer mode, even if it was just tacked on, buggy as hell and unbalanced. Even Myst had a multiplayer spin-off! That was a time when we started seeing multiplayer-only games, like Quake III and Unreal Tournament.
These days I think it has become acceptable to release games without multiplayer. Games have become more cinematic (whether you think that's a good thing is debatable) and I think it's now okay to say "this is a cinematic game; you play it for the single player." Possibly credit goes to Valve, for releasing the Orange Box which interestingly had both single and multiplayer components, but they were entirely separate. It featured two massively acclaimed single-player only games, and one massively acclaimed multiplayer only game. Couple that with all the new indie games like Braid which wouldn't make sense in multiplayer.
I'll head over and flag "Fix Released" on Bug #1 then...
I had the same reaction to the Facebook / Twitter thing, but perhaps (judging by screenshots) they are making a more general infrastructure, a bit like Android has.
If (and this is just speculation) you can (using XML or something) register a website with a certain set of features, and it's customizable, that would be good. For example, there could be a "share photo" service, and you can use XML to register a number of websites as offering that service. So I could register, Facebook, Flickr, Twitpic, etc. And then when I drag a photo onto the paper plane icon, it says "share via ..." and I can choose any of those sites. In addition, I could use XML to add a site-specific menu (such as the Facebook menu pictured), with a "mail" item that shows how many unread mails I have. This could work for Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
If they build a general service-oriented framework, and not just "Facebook and Twitter integration", then it could be a useful feature.
Well there are other alternatives. Like Internet Explorer 9 or Opera 11.
There is, but unfortunately it's called a "patent". You do what Google did with WebM -- obtain all the patents you can, then grant a "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable ... patent license". Then it's effectively open to everyone, and cannot be patented.