I think the shorter lines of text and indentation do make it much easier to follow the text and spend less brain power trying to keep your place and more brain power on understanding the text... or thinking about pr0ns.
But the real benefactor of a system like this would be handheld devices that have narrow screens. On those devices the formatting doesn't waste as much space as it would on a typical web browser.
I also think there might be some lessons here that could be used to find a better way of formatting web pages to make them more readable.
That being said, this kid sounds like a fuckin nut job.
Excellent knee-jerk reaction for someone having absolutely no context for the writing.
If you made judgement on the writing alone, all of 4chan would be in jail. Look, the kid could have written it specifically to see how the teacher would react, he could have written it to explore things that disturb him in a manner that is safe, he could have been writing it as a joke, or perhaps he wrote it specifically to be disturbing and to invoke that feeling in the reader. Isn't part of art (whether it's writing, painting, sculpture, whatever) to invoke emotion in the reader/viewer?
Your kind of reaction, done with very limited information on the situation, is a perfect example of what's wrong in the world. This need for immediate gratification, in this case by passing judgement so you can now move on to the next topic and not bother with this again.
"AI isn't so much unappreciated as nonexistent. Most of what counts as AI in the games industry is actually a bunch of 'if/then' statements. If a computer character doesn't learn something for itself then the programmer must have told it what to do, and anything that does exactly what it's told and nothing else is not intelligent. This is changing, and neural networks and other learning systems are beginning to creep in. But games programmers tend to devalue the phrase 'artificial intelligence."
First, a neural network is more of the same "if/else" logic as any other AI engine. It's only different in how the AI processes it's input. Sounds more to me like a programmer/theorist who's pissed at all the tricks in existence that can emulate (fairly well) basic intelligence without the use of any "classical" system like a neural network.
Furthermore, neural-network-based AIs would have to come pre-programmed. This means a neural network that starts at a certain level of development rather than a blank slate. Should bad guys have to learn when and how to fire a gun while you're playing the game? It'd make for some boring encounters.
Furthermore, most games are quite linear. There's a story to tell and you can't really insert many uncontrollable variables into a linear system and still be able to maintain consistent play experiences for your users.
Remove client-side scripting. All of it. ActiveScript, JavaScript, etc. None of it is critical to the operation of the web, and it's the primary route of attack on the client side of the browser.
Plugins? Embedded objects? I'd say kill them too. If not, browsers should find a way to sandbox each embedded object so that if there is malicious code in it, it can't get outside of the box it's in.
Unfortunately none of these options would ever be taken seriously. Too much work has been done in these areas to throw away. And more and more websites are growing dependent on these features such that disabling them on the client-side on your own will kill your access to those sites.
The Genii is out of the bottle.
And while a movement to simplify websites that targets developers would be some means to make headway in this futile fight, most are too busy tripping over themselves with the latest and greatest "Web 2.0" to care.
...despite your insistence that it was obvious. XBox and PS3 are, currently, neck to neck graphically.
Which should tell you a great deal. Look at FFXII. This is a PS2 game. Look at its graphics compared to early PS2 games. It's like night and day.
Developers have had more time to work with XBox 360 than the PS3. More time to figure out where power can be squeezed out of the hardware to pull off better looking graphics. Give it another year. The comparison will be night and day.
a bit quick to call it "Blind Faith" isn't it? this wasn't some in-depth paper on his theory of the origin of the universe. it's just a high overview of a working theory he's yet to publish. in fact it may take years, if ever, before he comes out with all the reasoning behind the idea.
it's like a demo at GDC. you get the basic idea of how the game works, but can it do everything they claim it will on release? you don't know. so you either believe them or wait and see.
I wonder how CBS's official use of YouTube is going to play a part in the trial. Viacom may already have lost as they are putting their own content up on YouTube. Might YouTube's user agreement open up their content for others to post?
Every time we go through a new set of releases the same topics keep coming up. This one is expensive, this one is cheap, this one is innovative, this one has poor launch titles, etc.. And if history has taught us anything it's that the arguments made now won't reflect the reality six months from now.
The PS3 has had a terrible launch and I think it's pretty obvious the project was rushed. There's little there that would attract a casual gamer to the PS3. The people buying right now are scalpers, hard-core gamers, and the moms and dads who buy from the scalpers because junior insists on having the latest and greatest gadget regardless of it's merits.
However, in a six months to a year we'll see some amazing games come out for the platform that make use of Cell's full potential. That is when the PS3 will make it's real run. Stock supplies will be up, the price of the console will be down, and a lot more people will have HD-capable televisions that will benefit from the PS3's Blu-ray drive and HD output. There will probably be a better general understanding of HD as well, with many more HD-DVD/Blu-ray drives on the market, perhaps convincing people that PS3 price tag is worth it after all (when they see the cost of a standalone player).
Of course these "industry insiders" say they're going the way of the Wii at launch, but I'll bet anything they all have a PS3 within a year.
Sounds like this is more a concentration of sociology than a new science. Furthermore I don't think this "science" is going to prove much we don't already know. The web is just another means of communication through which millions of different communities have been built upon.
Furthermore I think it's needlessly focused on "web". It should be "Internet" not "web". There are many more social networks in non-web environments like MMORPGs, or IRC, or newsgroups, etc..
To be honest this initiative comes off a little bit narrow.
Procedure for stable Firefox 2: Export bookmarks as a file, Uninstall, Delete profile, cache and installation directories/files. Install, import bookmarks from file but import no other settings, make settings (none undocumented), do not install themes, use only current extensions and a minimum of them. Works perfectly.
Wouldn't it be nice if the FF install handled all that for you?
Platform independence is a myth. IE is not FireFox is not Safari is not iCab is not Lynx. Each has quirks and each web app will need to be programmed to handle each one of those quirks. Eventually it'll be a different web app for each browser which starts to look a lot like what we've got now with different apps for different hardware architectures.
We've tried this platform-independence idea before. It was called JAVA and despite all the promises we're still running a vast majority of architecture-dependent software.
"2.0" apps are dependent on JavaScript. JavaScript compromises the browser. We will eventually find it in every "best computing practice" paper to disable JavaScript within the browser. We're already seeing this, the use of JavaScript as a means to attack and spread is growing and will continue to grow as "2.0" becomes more popular. There will be a backlash and as JavaScript is removed from the browsing platform by more and more users the usefulness of these "2.0" apps will disappear.
Data. Who owns it? If it's on your USB drive or your CD or your HD then you own it. But what about those spreadsheets you developed with that "2.0" spreadsheet application?
Convenience comes at a price. With all your data stored in a "2.0" application you can access it from anywhere you find an internet connection. You can take your mainframe on the road. Sweet. But what happens when the construction company working on the building next to the data center of the service provider for your "2.0" app accidentally cuts the lines? Well now your company.. and a few thousand others go in the dark. And you become powerless to resolve the situation.
Security. All aspects. Vulnerabilities in the web app. Vulnerabilities in the client platform. Information management. Privacy. It's a nightmare.
Which is why, like JAVA before, "2.0" bubble will burst.
The CSS/rendering engine they've been using since IE4 is still around. They keep patching it with every release to try and bring it up to spec. However the underlying reason for all the layout bugs still remain.
It's called hasLayout and it's created many problems over the years. It's still there in IE7 and there are new bugs relating to hasLayout in IE7 as demonstrated here.
Adding my 2 cents. I've been managing Bb installations for two separate institutions for the past three years. One institution took their basic license because they were a small college and didn't have the need, or money, for the higher priced (enterprise) packages.
Since we're dealing with grades and other personal information the first thing I set about was running it over SSL. \
Nope. Can't do it. Blackboard's basic license does not support SSL. You would think it'd be a non-issue. That the communication channel would be separate from the application and one should not impact the other. Turns out that the way links are generated on-the-fly inside Bb will assume a non-SSL channel and return full URLs (http://my.college.edu/...) not relative URLs.
I talked to the Bb rep about this and spent considerable time on the phone pointing out the problem and how it should be a big deal given that they're dealing with private student information. In the end I was told you had to either buy the enterprise license or go without SSL.
So I setup Apache as an SSL proxy to Blackboard. It worked fine and didn't violate the license. But every time I had a problem (and there were many with this POS) the first thing I was told to do was to disable the SSL proxy because they wouldn't operate on it otherwise, even if it was obviously not something related to SSL. Then they'd ask for the admin password so they could login and work on the machine.
So here they are, the company that makes this product, forcing me to allow them to access the administration piece over the internet in cleartext.
The complete lack of care for security continues to this day.
And even on an enterprise licnese there are still problems. For example there are areas where javascript is used to validate certain form fields. The javascript had hard-coded URL strings it would check against. If you were using SSL, this validation would fail and the form wouldn't work because the code was trying to compare "http://...." to "https://....". I had to go in and edit the application myself to correct the bug. It took them 1 month to get a tech to look at the bug and confirm it. Then another month to fix it. Then another 3 months until they finally released a patch that contained the fix.
Oh, and here's a great piece. They're using a third-party PERL interpreter that is no longer being supported as the company that made it went out of business. Well it turns out this particular piece of software is buggy and has a knack for not properly ending strings with a null character so you can to find garbage dumped on your screen from time to time. The recommended solution? Create a scheduled task to restart the services every night. Brilliant.
It's the biggest piece of crap in the business. The only reason it's got any popularity at all is because it was one of the first LMSes and many jumped on to use it. Now they're locked into a buggy system and can't escape. Others then come along and choose the product because there are so many other institutions already using it. And once you're using it you're locked in. Faculty tend to shy away from change and (in my experience) CIOs aren't keen on spending money to help educate faculty, staff and the students on how to use a new product. Even if that new solution is free.
I thoroughly enjoyed those percentages you either pulled out of your ass, or were delivered, Joseph Smith style, on a stone tablet from heaven.
2 points for trolling, but the person you responded to is a lot more correct than you seem to realize. The vast majority of issues with CSS stem from IE's broken box model. Because IE has the largest market share most designers target this platform first. Then, through testing or user feedback, it's discovered the page doesn't work the same way (even perhaps broken to the point that it is unusable) in every other browser.
Why is this? It's because IE and Netscape 4 were developed (for the most part) prior to the CSS1 spec's finalization. But enough was known about CSS at the time that little bits of CSS were supported. The spec comes out, Microsoft sees they've misinterpreted the box model for CSS, but rather than fix it and break all existing pages, they keep their own box model. This is somewhat fixed in later versions of IE with the concept of quirks versus standard mode rendering. But then lacking support in other CSS-2 properties like min/max-width and an intentional breaking of the overflow property has continued to create problems.
And all of that without considering the "real" bugs that are in there such as IE's hasLayout bug which has and will continue to break the wills of would-be CSS designers for a few more years at least.
As a backup system, this would be a great idea. So if any leads get cut for whatever reason (explosion in cargo hold cuts lines to the elevators, for example) you'd still have some mechanism to maintain control. But I wouldn't rely on a solely wireless system.
Of course if you have the kind of damage that would cut electrical lines, you'll probably have lost hydraulics as well which isn't going to be fixed with a wireless network.
So I am afraid this jet car is actually a bit pathetic. It's no more powerful than the (street legal, normally drivable) VW Bugatti, which costs about the same, and it is less powerful than a suitable modded tractor engine.
The Bugatti Veyron retails for over a million dollars. This guy paid the cost of a VW Beetle and 250g more. So we're looking at under $300k for the whole deal. He could build three and still have enough cash left over for a more sensible car, like a Porsche, with the $$ it'd take to buy a Veyron.
Although I have to say I think the Bugatti would be a helluva lot more fun.
As someone else mentioned, I think they are still a victim of their own success. Sure it's been over a year since launch, but they were expecting 250,000 subscribers and got 6,000,000.
Then Blizzard should not have distributed 6 million copies of the game. They've brought this upon themselves. Open beta consisted of a very small user base (relative to what it is now). So the kind of resource pressures they face now were never realistically tested pre-release. So really, the first (and it seems, current) adopters of the game became part of a second beta test of sorts. And I'll grant Blizzard that they were caught off guard but they've had almost 2 years to get things right and they still haven't managed it. And regardless of their known problems they continued to distribute more and more copies of the game. They should have shown a bit more restraint after initial release but they went all-in and now we're stuck with what we have.
The big problem is that customers, especially those who've been around since release, will be reluctant to leave even if the service drops further. Reasons being addiction and the loss of investment on the time spent playing the game.
I think WoW could go completely offline for a week and come back with a very minimal loss of its user-base. They don't have the motivation to do better.
It is so dirty because HTML is not fine in the first place. Many JS on the page usually just compensates for HTML incapability of providing good widget set and rich controls. I don't like JS, and I think that controls such as trees, popups etc. is a MUST for web markup.
You're making the assumption web pages should provide a good widget set and rich controls.
It's like complaining your car can't fly unless you bolt a pair of wing to it. You car wasn't meant to fly and neither was HTML meant to provide an application interface. It was always about structuring information in a simple, easy to understand way and to include hypertext ideas into the structuring format.
*Script, Flash, JAVA, etc... these all run counter to the original design of the web. But who's going to complain? And why would a browser developer not include these extra features if it'll help boost the browser's overall market share?
Browsers are being turned into hardware-independant application platforms, which they were never meant to be.
In fact, no virus or worm has *ever* exploited a vulnerability before a critical update was released!
Are you just not reading anything else this past week? We've got an exploit in the wild using a vulnerability that MS has yet to publish a critical update for.
And how do you think Microsoft ever finds out about these vulnerabilities? They find them because third-parties discover and publish information, sometimes including example code, on these vulnerabilities. In those cases you see exploits well before the critical update hits.
And, last but not least, some vulnerabilities are found through honeypots being targetted by exploits completely unknown until the packet dumps and system are analyzed.
Exploits in the wild before a critical update for Windows happens all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the shorter lines of text and indentation do make it much easier to follow the text and spend less brain power trying to keep your place and more brain power on understanding the text... or thinking about pr0ns.
But the real benefactor of a system like this would be handheld devices that have narrow screens. On those devices the formatting doesn't waste as much space as it would on a typical web browser.
I also think there might be some lessons here that could be used to find a better way of formatting web pages to make them more readable.
That being said, this kid sounds like a fuckin nut job.
Excellent knee-jerk reaction for someone having absolutely no context for the writing.
If you made judgement on the writing alone, all of 4chan would be in jail. Look, the kid could have written it specifically to see how the teacher would react, he could have written it to explore things that disturb him in a manner that is safe, he could have been writing it as a joke, or perhaps he wrote it specifically to be disturbing and to invoke that feeling in the reader. Isn't part of art (whether it's writing, painting, sculpture, whatever) to invoke emotion in the reader/viewer?
Your kind of reaction, done with very limited information on the situation, is a perfect example of what's wrong in the world. This need for immediate gratification, in this case by passing judgement so you can now move on to the next topic and not bother with this again.
It's just silly.
"AI isn't so much unappreciated as nonexistent. Most of what counts as AI in the games industry is actually a bunch of 'if/then' statements. If a computer character doesn't learn something for itself then the programmer must have told it what to do, and anything that does exactly what it's told and nothing else is not intelligent. This is changing, and neural networks and other learning systems are beginning to creep in. But games programmers tend to devalue the phrase 'artificial intelligence."
First, a neural network is more of the same "if/else" logic as any other AI engine. It's only different in how the AI processes it's input. Sounds more to me like a programmer/theorist who's pissed at all the tricks in existence that can emulate (fairly well) basic intelligence without the use of any "classical" system like a neural network.
Furthermore, neural-network-based AIs would have to come pre-programmed. This means a neural network that starts at a certain level of development rather than a blank slate. Should bad guys have to learn when and how to fire a gun while you're playing the game? It'd make for some boring encounters.
Furthermore, most games are quite linear. There's a story to tell and you can't really insert many uncontrollable variables into a linear system and still be able to maintain consistent play experiences for your users.
I wonder if this guy has seen Spore.
Remove client-side scripting. All of it. ActiveScript, JavaScript, etc. None of it is critical to the operation of the web, and it's the primary route of attack on the client side of the browser.
Plugins? Embedded objects? I'd say kill them too. If not, browsers should find a way to sandbox each embedded object so that if there is malicious code in it, it can't get outside of the box it's in.
Unfortunately none of these options would ever be taken seriously. Too much work has been done in these areas to throw away. And more and more websites are growing dependent on these features such that disabling them on the client-side on your own will kill your access to those sites.
The Genii is out of the bottle.
And while a movement to simplify websites that targets developers would be some means to make headway in this futile fight, most are too busy tripping over themselves with the latest and greatest "Web 2.0" to care.
Kurt is up in heaven now.
...despite your insistence that it was obvious. XBox and PS3 are, currently, neck to neck graphically.
Which should tell you a great deal. Look at FFXII. This is a PS2 game. Look at its graphics compared to early PS2 games. It's like night and day.
Developers have had more time to work with XBox 360 than the PS3. More time to figure out where power can be squeezed out of the hardware to pull off better looking graphics. Give it another year. The comparison will be night and day.
a bit quick to call it "Blind Faith" isn't it? this wasn't some in-depth paper on his theory of the origin of the universe. it's just a high overview of a working theory he's yet to publish. in fact it may take years, if ever, before he comes out with all the reasoning behind the idea.
it's like a demo at GDC. you get the basic idea of how the game works, but can it do everything they claim it will on release? you don't know. so you either believe them or wait and see.
I wonder how CBS's official use of YouTube is going to play a part in the trial. Viacom may already have lost as they are putting their own content up on YouTube. Might YouTube's user agreement open up their content for others to post?
Every time we go through a new set of releases the same topics keep coming up. This one is expensive, this one is cheap, this one is innovative, this one has poor launch titles, etc.. And if history has taught us anything it's that the arguments made now won't reflect the reality six months from now.
The PS3 has had a terrible launch and I think it's pretty obvious the project was rushed. There's little there that would attract a casual gamer to the PS3. The people buying right now are scalpers, hard-core gamers, and the moms and dads who buy from the scalpers because junior insists on having the latest and greatest gadget regardless of it's merits.
However, in a six months to a year we'll see some amazing games come out for the platform that make use of Cell's full potential. That is when the PS3 will make it's real run. Stock supplies will be up, the price of the console will be down, and a lot more people will have HD-capable televisions that will benefit from the PS3's Blu-ray drive and HD output. There will probably be a better general understanding of HD as well, with many more HD-DVD/Blu-ray drives on the market, perhaps convincing people that PS3 price tag is worth it after all (when they see the cost of a standalone player).
Of course these "industry insiders" say they're going the way of the Wii at launch, but I'll bet anything they all have a PS3 within a year.
Sounds like this is more a concentration of sociology than a new science. Furthermore I don't think this "science" is going to prove much we don't already know. The web is just another means of communication through which millions of different communities have been built upon.
Furthermore I think it's needlessly focused on "web". It should be "Internet" not "web". There are many more social networks in non-web environments like MMORPGs, or IRC, or newsgroups, etc..
To be honest this initiative comes off a little bit narrow.
Procedure for stable Firefox 2: Export bookmarks as a file, Uninstall, Delete profile, cache and installation directories/files. Install, import bookmarks from file but import no other settings, make settings (none undocumented), do not install themes, use only current extensions and a minimum of them. Works perfectly.
Wouldn't it be nice if the FF install handled all that for you?
Platform independence is a myth. IE is not FireFox is not Safari is not iCab is not Lynx. Each has quirks and each web app will need to be programmed to handle each one of those quirks. Eventually it'll be a different web app for each browser which starts to look a lot like what we've got now with different apps for different hardware architectures.
We've tried this platform-independence idea before. It was called JAVA and despite all the promises we're still running a vast majority of architecture-dependent software.
"2.0" apps are dependent on JavaScript. JavaScript compromises the browser. We will eventually find it in every "best computing practice" paper to disable JavaScript within the browser. We're already seeing this, the use of JavaScript as a means to attack and spread is growing and will continue to grow as "2.0" becomes more popular. There will be a backlash and as JavaScript is removed from the browsing platform by more and more users the usefulness of these "2.0" apps will disappear.
Data. Who owns it? If it's on your USB drive or your CD or your HD then you own it. But what about those spreadsheets you developed with that "2.0" spreadsheet application?
Convenience comes at a price. With all your data stored in a "2.0" application you can access it from anywhere you find an internet connection. You can take your mainframe on the road. Sweet. But what happens when the construction company working on the building next to the data center of the service provider for your "2.0" app accidentally cuts the lines? Well now your company.. and a few thousand others go in the dark. And you become powerless to resolve the situation.
Security. All aspects. Vulnerabilities in the web app. Vulnerabilities in the client platform. Information management. Privacy. It's a nightmare.
Which is why, like JAVA before, "2.0" bubble will burst.
The CSS/rendering engine they've been using since IE4 is still around. They keep patching it with every release to try and bring it up to spec. However the underlying reason for all the layout bugs still remain.
It's called hasLayout and it's created many problems over the years. It's still there in IE7 and there are new bugs relating to hasLayout in IE7 as demonstrated here.
Adding my 2 cents. I've been managing Bb installations for two separate institutions for the past three years. One institution took their basic license because they were a small college and didn't have the need, or money, for the higher priced (enterprise) packages.
Since we're dealing with grades and other personal information the first thing I set about was running it over SSL. \
Nope. Can't do it. Blackboard's basic license does not support SSL. You would think it'd be a non-issue. That the communication channel would be separate from the application and one should not impact the other. Turns out that the way links are generated on-the-fly inside Bb will assume a non-SSL channel and return full URLs (http://my.college.edu/...) not relative URLs.
I talked to the Bb rep about this and spent considerable time on the phone pointing out the problem and how it should be a big deal given that they're dealing with private student information. In the end I was told you had to either buy the enterprise license or go without SSL.
So I setup Apache as an SSL proxy to Blackboard. It worked fine and didn't violate the license. But every time I had a problem (and there were many with this POS) the first thing I was told to do was to disable the SSL proxy because they wouldn't operate on it otherwise, even if it was obviously not something related to SSL. Then they'd ask for the admin password so they could login and work on the machine.
So here they are, the company that makes this product, forcing me to allow them to access the administration piece over the internet in cleartext.
The complete lack of care for security continues to this day.
And even on an enterprise licnese there are still problems. For example there are areas where javascript is used to validate certain form fields. The javascript had hard-coded URL strings it would check against. If you were using SSL, this validation would fail and the form wouldn't work because the code was trying to compare "http://...." to "https://....". I had to go in and edit the application myself to correct the bug. It took them 1 month to get a tech to look at the bug and confirm it. Then another month to fix it. Then another 3 months until they finally released a patch that contained the fix.
Oh, and here's a great piece. They're using a third-party PERL interpreter that is no longer being supported as the company that made it went out of business. Well it turns out this particular piece of software is buggy and has a knack for not properly ending strings with a null character so you can to find garbage dumped on your screen from time to time. The recommended solution? Create a scheduled task to restart the services every night. Brilliant.
It's the biggest piece of crap in the business. The only reason it's got any popularity at all is because it was one of the first LMSes and many jumped on to use it. Now they're locked into a buggy system and can't escape. Others then come along and choose the product because there are so many other institutions already using it. And once you're using it you're locked in. Faculty tend to shy away from change and (in my experience) CIOs aren't keen on spending money to help educate faculty, staff and the students on how to use a new product. Even if that new solution is free.
It's a joke. The whole company is a joke.
I thoroughly enjoyed those percentages you either pulled out of your ass, or were delivered, Joseph Smith style, on a stone tablet from heaven.
2 points for trolling, but the person you responded to is a lot more correct than you seem to realize. The vast majority of issues with CSS stem from IE's broken box model. Because IE has the largest market share most designers target this platform first. Then, through testing or user feedback, it's discovered the page doesn't work the same way (even perhaps broken to the point that it is unusable) in every other browser.
Why is this? It's because IE and Netscape 4 were developed (for the most part) prior to the CSS1 spec's finalization. But enough was known about CSS at the time that little bits of CSS were supported. The spec comes out, Microsoft sees they've misinterpreted the box model for CSS, but rather than fix it and break all existing pages, they keep their own box model. This is somewhat fixed in later versions of IE with the concept of quirks versus standard mode rendering. But then lacking support in other CSS-2 properties like min/max-width and an intentional breaking of the overflow property has continued to create problems.
And all of that without considering the "real" bugs that are in there such as IE's hasLayout bug which has and will continue to break the wills of would-be CSS designers for a few more years at least.
As a backup system, this would be a great idea. So if any leads get cut for whatever reason (explosion in cargo hold cuts lines to the elevators, for example) you'd still have some mechanism to maintain control. But I wouldn't rely on a solely wireless system.
Of course if you have the kind of damage that would cut electrical lines, you'll probably have lost hydraulics as well which isn't going to be fixed with a wireless network.
So I am afraid this jet car is actually a bit pathetic. It's no more powerful than the (street legal, normally drivable) VW Bugatti, which costs about the same, and it is less powerful than a suitable modded tractor engine.
The Bugatti Veyron retails for over a million dollars. This guy paid the cost of a VW Beetle and 250g more. So we're looking at under $300k for the whole deal. He could build three and still have enough cash left over for a more sensible car, like a Porsche, with the $$ it'd take to buy a Veyron.
Although I have to say I think the Bugatti would be a helluva lot more fun.
What about White Wolf?
They've got a bit going on as well, especially as they're in the middle of releasing books for their new Mage series.
As someone else mentioned, I think they are still a victim of their own success. Sure it's been over a year since launch, but they were expecting 250,000 subscribers and got 6,000,000.
Then Blizzard should not have distributed 6 million copies of the game. They've brought this upon themselves. Open beta consisted of a very small user base (relative to what it is now). So the kind of resource pressures they face now were never realistically tested pre-release. So really, the first (and it seems, current) adopters of the game became part of a second beta test of sorts. And I'll grant Blizzard that they were caught off guard but they've had almost 2 years to get things right and they still haven't managed it. And regardless of their known problems they continued to distribute more and more copies of the game. They should have shown a bit more restraint after initial release but they went all-in and now we're stuck with what we have.
The big problem is that customers, especially those who've been around since release, will be reluctant to leave even if the service drops further. Reasons being addiction and the loss of investment on the time spent playing the game.
I think WoW could go completely offline for a week and come back with a very minimal loss of its user-base. They don't have the motivation to do better.
IMO, this is indeed a Good Thing (TM).
But it's limited to headings and short sentences. You wouldn't publish an entire article using SIFr. So what font are you using for the article text?
Why would you want to do this though?
Why would a man want to be bound, gagged, and spanked while being called a "dirty boy".
er.
Nevermind.
It is so dirty because HTML is not fine in the first place. Many JS on the page usually just compensates for HTML incapability of providing good widget set and rich controls. I don't like JS, and I think that controls such as trees, popups etc. is a MUST for web markup.
You're making the assumption web pages should provide a good widget set and rich controls.
It's like complaining your car can't fly unless you bolt a pair of wing to it. You car wasn't meant to fly and neither was HTML meant to provide an application interface. It was always about structuring information in a simple, easy to understand way and to include hypertext ideas into the structuring format.
*Script, Flash, JAVA, etc... these all run counter to the original design of the web. But who's going to complain? And why would a browser developer not include these extra features if it'll help boost the browser's overall market share?
Browsers are being turned into hardware-independant application platforms, which they were never meant to be.
In fact, no virus or worm has *ever* exploited a vulnerability before a critical update was released!
Are you just not reading anything else this past week? We've got an exploit in the wild using a vulnerability that MS has yet to publish a critical update for.
And how do you think Microsoft ever finds out about these vulnerabilities? They find them because third-parties discover and publish information, sometimes including example code, on these vulnerabilities. In those cases you see exploits well before the critical update hits.
And, last but not least, some vulnerabilities are found through honeypots being targetted by exploits completely unknown until the packet dumps and system are analyzed.
Exploits in the wild before a critical update for Windows happens all the time.
did you ever see the pictures of the money people microwave? they have obvious burn marks where the chips supposedly are.
That's been debunked. See here and here.
There are no RFID tags in Andrew Jackson's eye.
It is not stated in the EULA that this rootkit will be installed, plus there's no way to uninstall it through add.remove programs.
You can contact Sony directly and they will send you tools to remove the DRM software.
The F-Secure blog talks a little about this. It appears their removal software installs ActiveX controls.. just really messed up.