Furthermore, I was able to find the group policy setting that forces you to authenticate instead of merely confirm every action.
You can do that for Administration accounts, yes. However, you may not be aware that requesting authentication with a super user's credentials is the normal UAC behaviour for limited users.
Personally, I set up two accounts on my computer: an Administrator account, where I turned off UAC prompting, and a personal limited account that I mostly use. When I log in as the Administrator, it means I plan to do a bunch of admin things and don't want to be nagged - I provide one password when I log in, and that's it. If I find I have a need to do something admin-ey while I'm using my standard account, UAC just prompts me to type in my super user's name & password, and it escalates me for the duration on the operation. Very much like Linux & OSX desktops.
It's only annoying when an app installer is written to create Start Menu/Desktop icons only for the user who's running the installer, and doesn't offer an "all users" option. In those cases I sometimes have to copy the relevant files from the super user's profile to my actual working profile.
On the other hand, the Dutch *did* have a colonial empire at one time, extremely competent traders, and still have one of the world's most important seaports. So technical and mercantile advantages do go quite a long way.
The killing off of major characters and showing the more noble side of previously loathed villains is an interesting subversion of the usual predictable fantasy tropes. I think that's part of its appeal to me - it reads more like a history, and less like another iteration of the "Monomyth of the Hero". Or at least it would, if our history books and documentaries didn't usually reduce the real world's personalities to fantasy-esque narrative caricatures.
On the other hand, The Song of Ice & Fire's non-compliance with what Pratchett calls Narrative Causality can certainly put readers off. Personally I just wish the story would continue, and at some point, actually *wrap up*; a story that never ends is just unsatisfying. Also, when you have such a huge, sprawling work with such long gaps between volumes, by the time the next part comes out you have no hope of remembering who most of the characters are or what took place in the earlier books!
Newer software is better performing? If only that were generally true. Newer software is almost always *more capable*, but better performance from any given upgrade is far from guaranteed, even in the world of FOSS.
I installed SRWare Iron the other day. According to the publishers, it's basically a Chrome de-Googlified with a few other downstream tweaks (eg using a slightly newer version of WebKit). It seems to run all right, but I'm still typing this on Firefox because Adblock trumps Chrome/Iron's performance & user interface design advantages.
I *like* Chrome/Iron, and when it gets a decent extensibility model I think it'll tear a huge hole in Firefox's market share - but until then, it's going to be not much more than a cool tech demo.
He wasn't fired in an email from a private address; he was fired because the management found out about the email he sent privately from his (non-company) gmail account.
not many users care about the difference between 10ms and 100ms (unless it stacks of course).
Actually, not many humans can tell the difference between 10ms and 100ms. According to the MIT user interface design course lecture notes, psychological studies have shown that delay times below about 100ms are generally perceived as instantaneous.
So yeah, it's not worth quibbling over a few ms here and there - but it's hella worthwhile getting an operation down from, say, 500 ms to 100 ms.
I'm pretty sure he's joking... but that said, it would be good for sharing custom maps & game assets between multiple players on a server, without hammering the server's bandwidth too much. If it were implemented in an appropriately hands-off, transparent fashion, anyway.
Hmm. They obviously didn't account for the actual load; I had thought it was due to failing to account for piracy, but now that you mention it, I suppose 100,000 legitimate copies is not an unreasonable number for the opening month of a new game (although probably far higher than what they actually expected). Having that load arrive earlier than the game's actual street date probably didn't help matters, either.
I guess my point is that it's not hard to imagine that the architecture they had *would* have handled the load of all the reasonably expectable sales. So I think it's hard to say that the 9 pirate users hitting the server for each actual paid-for-copy had nothing to do with its inability to handle the load. You're absolutely correct that 100,000 legitimate sales would have been just as bad for the infrastructure, but that seems a high number of early sales for a frankly small-fish game to my ignorant self. You're likewise correct that they should never have set up their server architecture that way, and they agree.
Well, the person they're interviewing is in fact a representative of the Demigod company, so of course they're going to ask him about it.
Also, they took responsibility for the pirates hampering the game for the legit users... but didn't exactly say that the server problems weren't the fault of the pirates. They said that they shouldn't have configured their game so that the large number of pirate copies (which they say they should have anticipated) affected the gameplay experience of the paying customers.
In short: they state that the problem was caused by pirates, but that they shouldn't have allowed the pirate copies to fuck up the experience for their paying customers; piracy is inevitable and should be planned for; and that pirate copies are usually not lost sales. Their biggest regret was that some customers who pre-ordered were left feeling like chumps when the pirates got copies first thanks to Gamestop. All in all, a very astute and correct analysis of the situation, I think.
The next payload will be whatever North Korea decides to put in the rocket, and the expertise from peaceful rockets is amazingly useful for building missiles.
Actually, I think the payload of this mission was indeed a communications package. Specifically, the rocket launch was sending a message to the South Koreans, Japanese and Americans, and that message was "You'd better keep those aid packages coming." Given how succesful it has been, I'm sure no further launches are necessary.
North Korea is an expert in international blackmail. I'm sure that their image as a crazy rogue state with a twitchy trigger finger is carefully crafted to make sure that their political elite get to keep their cushy lifestyle at the international community's expense, while the bulk of its population scrapes by on whatever the crippled Juche "economy" can manage to produce.
The same year that is the "Year of Linux on the Desktop", will also be the "Year of Malware on Linux". Computer crime is profitable, and if Linux were to dominate the market, then it would definitely be targeted.
Maybe malware will be _slightly_ less prevalent than currently (and profits slightly diminished). But Linux (and OS-X) aren't so much more secure than Windows that they would be invulnerable to the hordes of clueless users/admins that "Year of the Linux Desktop" implies. The huge majority of Windows pwnage has the root cause "operator error".
Fair enough. On the other hand, when you're using a newer, larger laptop with a 1400x1050 or larger screen... those extra pixels are valuable target space for mouse actions. Screen widgets have been more or less continuously increasing in pixel count ever since GUIs were invented, because larger targets are more usable... provided that the screen offers enough real estate to fit everything that's necessary.
There's a FOSS program called Synergy which basically acts as a virtual switch-box, with the switching action triggered by moving the mouse pointer off the side of the desktop. Basically, it lets you control multiple computers as if they were multiple monitors on a single computer. (Obviously each computer has its own taskbar, or equivalents). It's very awesome, although it obviously relies on the computers being networked.
There are proprietary equivalents as well, which appear a bit more polished, but the value they added didn't seem worth the price to me.
As an agnostic I beg to differ. Being agnostic means not having firm belief in any particular religion. It doesn't mean disbelieving in any, or all of them. Agnostics accept that what others believe may be true, and tend to fight for their right to believe it. Atheists can be just as rabid as any other religious fundamentalist.
Actually, that's not quite what agnosticism is. What you've described is more religious liberalism, without personal commitment to any one doctrine.
Agnosticism is the belief that it is impossible to know god; ie, the existence or otherwise of god or gods is unprovable. Gnosis is a Greek word meaning, roughly, "knowledge" or "enlightenment". The prefix a- indicates the absence of something, like in the words apolitical or amoral. So "agnostic" means "without knowledge/enlightenment", specifically applied to the sense of knowledge of the existence of gods, and the traditional definition of the philosophy extends to saying that such knowledge is logically impossible.
This is not a new situation. The car industry discovered that it was impossible to build cars without cross licensing between all the major manufacturers in the 1950s.
Thus creating a nice high barrier to entry to protect the incumbent oligarchs. Further evidence that the current patent regime is certainly not good for the quality of the market.
So, apparently IE's overall performance isn't too bad even if their rendering accuracy and Javascript performance are not too great. I can believe that.
However: they didn't benchmark IE vs. Firefox with Adblock for overall page draw speed. For obvious reasons, I should think: it's incredible how slow to load many ads are. I can't imagine any version of IE without an ad blocker would ever be able to beat FF + Adblock Plus on a typical web page for load speed!
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Furthermore, I was able to find the group policy setting that forces you to authenticate instead of merely confirm every action.
You can do that for Administration accounts, yes. However, you may not be aware that requesting authentication with a super user's credentials is the normal UAC behaviour for limited users.
Personally, I set up two accounts on my computer: an Administrator account, where I turned off UAC prompting, and a personal limited account that I mostly use. When I log in as the Administrator, it means I plan to do a bunch of admin things and don't want to be nagged - I provide one password when I log in, and that's it. If I find I have a need to do something admin-ey while I'm using my standard account, UAC just prompts me to type in my super user's name & password, and it escalates me for the duration on the operation. Very much like Linux & OSX desktops.
It's only annoying when an app installer is written to create Start Menu/Desktop icons only for the user who's running the installer, and doesn't offer an "all users" option. In those cases I sometimes have to copy the relevant files from the super user's profile to my actual working profile.
The Netherlands, also, is very short on rocks.
On the other hand, the Dutch *did* have a colonial empire at one time, extremely competent traders, and still have one of the world's most important seaports. So technical and mercantile advantages do go quite a long way.
Data compression, eh?
The second edition should just consist of a reference to the first edition and a delta patch of changes to apply. :)
Yes. You paid for those books. That means that George R R Martin worked for you.
He has no obligation to continue doing so, however.
The killing off of major characters and showing the more noble side of previously loathed villains is an interesting subversion of the usual predictable fantasy tropes. I think that's part of its appeal to me - it reads more like a history, and less like another iteration of the "Monomyth of the Hero". Or at least it would, if our history books and documentaries didn't usually reduce the real world's personalities to fantasy-esque narrative caricatures.
On the other hand, The Song of Ice & Fire's non-compliance with what Pratchett calls Narrative Causality can certainly put readers off. Personally I just wish the story would continue, and at some point, actually *wrap up*; a story that never ends is just unsatisfying. Also, when you have such a huge, sprawling work with such long gaps between volumes, by the time the next part comes out you have no hope of remembering who most of the characters are or what took place in the earlier books!
Newer software is better performing? If only that were generally true. Newer software is almost always *more capable*, but better performance from any given upgrade is far from guaranteed, even in the world of FOSS.
I installed SRWare Iron the other day. According to the publishers, it's basically a Chrome de-Googlified with a few other downstream tweaks (eg using a slightly newer version of WebKit). It seems to run all right, but I'm still typing this on Firefox because Adblock trumps Chrome/Iron's performance & user interface design advantages.
I *like* Chrome/Iron, and when it gets a decent extensibility model I think it'll tear a huge hole in Firefox's market share - but until then, it's going to be not much more than a cool tech demo.
He wasn't fired in an email from a private address; he was fired because the management found out about the email he sent privately from his (non-company) gmail account.
In Win 7, MS Paint uses the ribbon interface.
Actually, not many humans can tell the difference between 10ms and 100ms. According to the MIT user interface design course lecture notes, psychological studies have shown that delay times below about 100ms are generally perceived as instantaneous.
So yeah, it's not worth quibbling over a few ms here and there - but it's hella worthwhile getting an operation down from, say, 500 ms to 100 ms.
I'm pretty sure he's joking... but that said, it would be good for sharing custom maps & game assets between multiple players on a server, without hammering the server's bandwidth too much. If it were implemented in an appropriately hands-off, transparent fashion, anyway.
What about the 02 supply, though?
Hmm. They obviously didn't account for the actual load; I had thought it was due to failing to account for piracy, but now that you mention it, I suppose 100,000 legitimate copies is not an unreasonable number for the opening month of a new game (although probably far higher than what they actually expected). Having that load arrive earlier than the game's actual street date probably didn't help matters, either.
I guess my point is that it's not hard to imagine that the architecture they had *would* have handled the load of all the reasonably expectable sales. So I think it's hard to say that the 9 pirate users hitting the server for each actual paid-for-copy had nothing to do with its inability to handle the load. You're absolutely correct that 100,000 legitimate sales would have been just as bad for the infrastructure, but that seems a high number of early sales for a frankly small-fish game to my ignorant self. You're likewise correct that they should never have set up their server architecture that way, and they agree.
Well, the person they're interviewing is in fact a representative of the Demigod company, so of course they're going to ask him about it.
Also, they took responsibility for the pirates hampering the game for the legit users... but didn't exactly say that the server problems weren't the fault of the pirates. They said that they shouldn't have configured their game so that the large number of pirate copies (which they say they should have anticipated) affected the gameplay experience of the paying customers.
In short: they state that the problem was caused by pirates, but that they shouldn't have allowed the pirate copies to fuck up the experience for their paying customers; piracy is inevitable and should be planned for; and that pirate copies are usually not lost sales. Their biggest regret was that some customers who pre-ordered were left feeling like chumps when the pirates got copies first thanks to Gamestop. All in all, a very astute and correct analysis of the situation, I think.
I grant this post a +1 Interesting no-moderation. Sorry, all out of points. :(
The next payload will be whatever North Korea decides to put in the rocket, and the expertise from peaceful rockets is amazingly useful for building missiles.
Actually, I think the payload of this mission was indeed a communications package. Specifically, the rocket launch was sending a message to the South Koreans, Japanese and Americans, and that message was "You'd better keep those aid packages coming." Given how succesful it has been, I'm sure no further launches are necessary.
North Korea is an expert in international blackmail. I'm sure that their image as a crazy rogue state with a twitchy trigger finger is carefully crafted to make sure that their political elite get to keep their cushy lifestyle at the international community's expense, while the bulk of its population scrapes by on whatever the crippled Juche "economy" can manage to produce.
Well, if it's Royal, surely it should be a "we"Pod rather than an iPod or onePod?
Indeed.
The same year that is the "Year of Linux on the Desktop", will also be the "Year of Malware on Linux". Computer crime is profitable, and if Linux were to dominate the market, then it would definitely be targeted.
Maybe malware will be _slightly_ less prevalent than currently (and profits slightly diminished). But Linux (and OS-X) aren't so much more secure than Windows that they would be invulnerable to the hordes of clueless users/admins that "Year of the Linux Desktop" implies. The huge majority of Windows pwnage has the root cause "operator error".
Fair enough. On the other hand, when you're using a newer, larger laptop with a 1400x1050 or larger screen... those extra pixels are valuable target space for mouse actions. Screen widgets have been more or less continuously increasing in pixel count ever since GUIs were invented, because larger targets are more usable... provided that the screen offers enough real estate to fit everything that's necessary.
There's a FOSS program called Synergy which basically acts as a virtual switch-box, with the switching action triggered by moving the mouse pointer off the side of the desktop. Basically, it lets you control multiple computers as if they were multiple monitors on a single computer. (Obviously each computer has its own taskbar, or equivalents). It's very awesome, although it obviously relies on the computers being networked.
There are proprietary equivalents as well, which appear a bit more polished, but the value they added didn't seem worth the price to me.
As an agnostic I beg to differ. Being agnostic means not having firm belief in any particular religion. It doesn't mean disbelieving in any, or all of them. Agnostics accept that what others believe may be true, and tend to fight for their right to believe it. Atheists can be just as rabid as any other religious fundamentalist.
Actually, that's not quite what agnosticism is. What you've described is more religious liberalism, without personal commitment to any one doctrine.
Agnosticism is the belief that it is impossible to know god; ie, the existence or otherwise of god or gods is unprovable. Gnosis is a Greek word meaning, roughly, "knowledge" or "enlightenment". The prefix a- indicates the absence of something, like in the words apolitical or amoral. So "agnostic" means "without knowledge/enlightenment", specifically applied to the sense of knowledge of the existence of gods, and the traditional definition of the philosophy extends to saying that such knowledge is logically impossible.
Damn straight. The logo would look cool, too.
Dr. Manhattan said: :->
If I have free will, I don't need to worry about it. If I don't have free will, there's no point in worrying about it.
Well, you'd know...
This is not a new situation. The car industry discovered that it was impossible to build cars without cross licensing between all the major manufacturers in the 1950s.
Thus creating a nice high barrier to entry to protect the incumbent oligarchs. Further evidence that the current patent regime is certainly not good for the quality of the market.
So, apparently IE's overall performance isn't too bad even if their rendering accuracy and Javascript performance are not too great. I can believe that.
However: they didn't benchmark IE vs. Firefox with Adblock for overall page draw speed. For obvious reasons, I should think: it's incredible how slow to load many ads are. I can't imagine any version of IE without an ad blocker would ever be able to beat FF + Adblock Plus on a typical web page for load speed!