Between Google and the German government, I'd be much more concerned about what the German government might do with that data; their history is, shall we say, less than stellar.
No, because we Germans know quite well that our government (or our politicians, for that matter) are plain stupid, whereas some really smart asses work at Google.;)
On a more serious note: most of what you mentioned stems either from EU regulations (data retention, i.e.) or is common practice in other EU countries as well.
Not that I like all of it, but some things sound much more scary than they are in practice. Mandatory ID, for example. I just came back from a ten day vacation trip to the U.S.A. In these 10 days, I had to show my ID more often to non-officials (sales stuff, etc.) than I ever had to do in my whole life in Germany to officials (police, etc.) which are allowed to ask you for your ID without any reason whatsorever, let alone non-officials.
And while you find it amusing that we accept mandatory registration, I, for example, find it amusing that a U.S. citizen has to register himself in order to be able to carry out his most basic democratic right: voting.
I wish that was true, but it's not. At least not on this broad terms. Given certain circumstances (the crime must be a crime in Germany as well, the right to a fair trial, no danger of being tortured and such), a German citizen can be extradite to other EU countries and international courts
Biometrics rely on unique (but not unfakeable) biological traits of a person, [...] - they however rely on custom hardware to get this biological data (e.g. fingerprint scanners) - which makes them wholly unsuitable for the web.
Biometrics is perhaps the worst choice for any access level protection. Biometrics might be helpful in identifying a person, but should never be used to grant/verify access to systems. As you said: biometric attributes are not unfakeable. And that's the very reason to not use them: once compromised, you can change a password. But you can't change your fingerprints or eye iris (or whatever they come up with).
Not everyone likes strategy games, not everyone likes winning at a cost of someone else losing.
I find killing other players truly boring. Perhaps that's what you meant with your above statement. That's why I played EVE for a few weeks and than quit.... Oh! Hold on! I'm still here after 2,5 years, enjoying EVE as much as in the beginning.
You *can* enjoy EVE, even if you're absolutely anti-PvP. And *this* is what EVE truly distinguishes form other MMOs in my opinion. The problem (or advantage, depends on where you look at it from) is: EVE isn't for the impatient ones. You can't grind your skill levels away and some of the more interesting non-PvP activities (Invention, Exploration) *do* require quite a some skills or bit of money (trading). That requires some patience and/or grinding in the beginning, but at the same time it keeps those "I need to win a game within 14 days" type of players away.
Rather, he simply supported a bunch of generic programs that arguably had a role in the creation of the internet.
Cerf and Kahn have to say the following about that matter:
But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to
our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time. [...]
The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. [...]
He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept.
Pascal was intended to be a learning language and I consider it to be quite good at it. It enforces good programming practice while at the same time it "spells out" things, which makes it easier for kids to understand. For example BEGIN/END brackets are easier to grok for kids than {}, showing the principal of code blocks better.
Even simple data acquisition applications are good for online applications, anything that can fit in a form based approach for example, and are just as simple to use as a VB application [...]
No, they're not. Because they're not fast enough. We're still using an old DOS application in our company. Wathcing the people using this application is amazing. They know this application so well, that they're able to key in stuff in advance, without the need to look at the screen. Due to the DOS inherent keyboard buffering, their speed's amazing. It will take a long time until browser based applications can provide such a speed.
Yes, presentation is fine with a browser, but that's really it. We have tons of web based applications. And while in theory they should have no prerequisits than a browser, reality is different. App A requires IE6, app B Java x.x while app C requires Java y.y while app D needs popups enabled. So, while you don't have to install the application itself on the workstation, you only exchanged that for installing (and keeping current) the foundation for all those web apps.
I do agree that native applications are nicer than web applications [...]
However what we have discovered is that (1) web applications are easier to write, [...]
We as developers shouldn't think about the ease of coding, but the ease of usage. You had it right in your first sentence. Web apps are fine for "once a day, five minute" kind of jobs. Or administrative tools like a web interface to a router, for example, where you spend 2 hours once to configure it and afterwards seldom touch it again. But that business app, that is used 8 hours a day, is a PITA for a user if it's a web app. We serve the user, not the other way around.
Exactly, and don't get me started on Windows Explorer. I sometimes have to do tech support, and it blows my mind how difficult it is to get people to the most fucking important program on the computer. Why there isn't a 'Browse Files' up on the XP start menu along with 'Internet' and 'Email' I have no idea.
I mean, you could tell them to double click on the "My computer" icon on their desktop...
This is exactly what MS recommends the users to do. Two problems that arise here: You and I now know that this format will close down soon and we both are able to do just this, if we bought from there. My father surely doesn't get "the memo", hence no chance for him to prepare his files.
Second, and this is another nice evil twist to this story, according to German copyright laws, you're not allowed to do so! MS might recommend all they want, they can't "recommend" a law away.
This clearly shows how stupid both DRM and current copyright laws are.
Heh, I can't believe people are actually taking this seriously. "Going magenta." Whoever is playing them must be tickled a delightful shade of-- well, you know.;)
(German here) Unfortunately this is really serious. They've done that a couple of years ago in Germany as well.
So even a "Hello World!" app for a browser goes through at least 10 layers of code, and that's in an ideal situation.
I wholeheartedly agree. See, even the article points out the major flaw:
If you look at how the Web was originally designed, it was an application with static Web pages as data. Now, it has become a platform for hosting all kinds of important data and businesses [...]
Let's rephrase this: "If you look at how the web was originally designed, it was an application to present information.". I'm not a native English speaker, but even in today's dictionaries, the verb "to browse" implies an interactive, but still passive action.
Look where we are nowerdays. The browser, never designed to be a tool to manipulate data, has become the universal GUI for data interaction. By doing so, it has reintroduced all the shitty crap and we developers have thrown over board in the last decades:
Slow response times. Once due to slow machines and poor bandwidth, although we nowerdays do have the "power", instead of coding a well designed and behaving client/server application we'd rather spite out a shitload of HTML at a browser. Sort a table on a different column? Yeah, just go ahead, throw another query at the server, let the user waste another 10 secs. for the response. With a proper desktop application, the resorting would be done in memory within a blink of an eye.
Consistent user interface. We've come a long way down until most of the applications had their GUIs designed in such a way that a user wasn't forced to learn a new application from scratch, but could instead expect to find "Copy" and "Paste" beneath the "Edit" menu item. Than we started with browser based apps. But instead that we remembered the lessons on UI, we started the same crap all over again. Each and every (web) application has its own UI design.
Limiting to point & click. Any decent employee who uses an application in his every day job, while sooner or later learn how to quickly navigate his application by keystrokes. It's simply faster than using the mouse to navigate around. What Do we offer them with browser based applications? Pasck to point & click, forcing them (and their companies) to waste an awful lot of time (=money) by taking away keyboard navigation.
Circumventing the above stated limitations by introducing "Rich Thin Clients" and VMs. Now, this has to be the most ridiculous thing of them all. The slow response time get "optimized" by frameworks like AJAX that use a ton of Javascript code to enhance responsiveness of the browser. To give the user back the (desktop) feature we took him away in the first place by forcing him into using a browser instead of a decent application in his day-to-day job, we give him an application implemented in Java or ActiveX or similar crap, which runs on top of the browser. Folks, I beg your pardon! You can't be serious with this!
Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of places where browser based applications do make sense: Configuring a router, playing a casual game and things like that. But any application that is used eight hours a day can't be implemented as efficient in a browser as in a desktop application.
Also, the platform independence and "zero deployment" is a nice myth, in my experience. That application requires Java VM 1.4.x, this one 1.5.x, the next one will only work with that browser flavor or version, while the fourth requires popups to be enabled. There goes the one real advantage for using a browser: a quick and easy way to launch an application and get some things done. Yes, we might not need to install an application. But instead we now need to go around and configure VMs and browser so that the "zero deployment" application actually works.
But you know what? I spend about 40 hours a year gaming. It takes 15 minutes to buy a Wii and some controllers and 10 more to ask to the Wii nerd at Walmart what doesn't suck. That's it. 25 minutes invested. When I want to play games, I DON'T want to piss around installing an OS, patches, making sure Direct X version 18.4 is installed, blah ablah ablah abl h.
I'm a passionate gamer since the old DOS days. And while back then I often need to fiddle around with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to get that last 1KB conventional memory that this game needed in order to start, I had never ever to do something specially to play a Windows game other than to install it. And I'm *not* owning some kind of high end PC.
OK, that might because the games I prefer (RPGs, simulations like CIV) don't just rely on their "pretty" graphics in order to be good games, so I can easly turn off all those graphical bells & whistles, if I feel the game's to slow. But than again: If the game play isn't good enough to be fun when it's played with medium or low quality graphic settings, it might also not that much more fun with all the glorious, shiny graphic effects turned on.
They always make me take off my shoes, as I always wear boots. No problem here, so far. But what really annoys me, is the fact that they always are trying to be too polite (no kidding). Knowing that they'll ask me to take my boots of, I immediately offer this myself to save them and me some time. Most of the time, my offer is declined in the first place. Then they scan me with their metal detectors, the alarm goes off (Biker Boots with two metal rings, sure the alarm is going to fire) and then they ask me to take my boots off. Now, wasn't exactly that my initial offer?
Guitar Hero 1: Gibson SG controller.
Guitar Hero 2: Gibson Explorer controller.
Guitar Hero 3: Gibson Les Paul controller.
Plus the fact that every single guitar modelled in every single game is a Gibson, I'm pretty sure they endorsed these games and I have no idea what the hell they think they're doing throwing this patent around now.
I have a slight suspision what might have happened here:
Gibson: "Now, folks, we hear that you're about to make GH4. What Gibson guitar will you use this time to model the controller after? And how much money do you pay us this time for the guitar and the logo?" Activision: "See, now that GH is a brand itself, we don't need that logo or those guitar models from you anymore. We'll do our own thing this time." Gibson: *Shakes fist, sends its lawyers down to the basement where all the old patents are stored* "Await our written answer to this!"
Not only can I deny the holocaust happened (which by the way I am not, I have been to Dachau) but I can say what I want, when I want, without fear of the law.
Come over here to Germany and try to do that in the public. You'll find yourself in front of a judge pretty soon. See what happened to Ernst Zündel, for example.
Sad as it is, this seems the way it actually works. For years workers in Germany have refrained from wage raises (which in real is a decrease in income, taking inflation into account) in order to "strengthen and support the land's economy". At the same time managament wages were raised by several hundert percent.
And unlike WOW, it is trully *massive* MORPG. Just one (per continnent, i think) server.
No, it's just *one* server for the whole world (ignoring the Chinese only server for a moment, that CCP licensed away ca. two years ago, which doesn't seem to work out that well).
As a poster on/. you should know that any additional unneeded overhead is a waste of time and resources. Cleaning up the old messy legacy code is always a good idea and makes it mauch easier to implement future enhancements.
There are some religious people who do horrible things because of their religion -- the Crusades, terrorism, etc. And there are some good people who do good things because of their religion -- Martin Luther King, Gandhi, etc. And there are atheists who do horrible things anyway -- Stalin, China, etc.
All of which makes it very hard to argue for or against religion based on what the religious do.
No, it's quite easy to argue against religions. You just did so. As you've explained, you don't need religion to do good or bad. It works perfectly without religion. So religion is nothing more than an additional, unneeded layer. Get rid off it, and the world would just be fine.
If you (or someone else) *really* intents to hurt them, than don't go for masses, because as someone pointed out earlier, those registrations cost them nothing.
Go for trademarks/copyrighted terms instead. Best possibility: you are the owner/holder of the trademark/copyright. You can immediately go into action and sue them. Otherwise try notifying the owner.
Slashdot Mirror
No, because we Germans know quite well that our government (or our politicians, for that matter) are plain stupid, whereas some really smart asses work at Google. ;)
On a more serious note: most of what you mentioned stems either from EU regulations (data retention, i.e.) or is common practice in other EU countries as well.
Not that I like all of it, but some things sound much more scary than they are in practice. Mandatory ID, for example. I just came back from a ten day vacation trip to the U.S.A. In these 10 days, I had to show my ID more often to non-officials (sales stuff, etc.) than I ever had to do in my whole life in Germany to officials (police, etc.) which are allowed to ask you for your ID without any reason whatsorever, let alone non-officials.
And while you find it amusing that we accept mandatory registration, I, for example, find it amusing that a U.S. citizen has to register himself in order to be able to carry out his most basic democratic right: voting.
No wonder. White Wolf was acquired by CCP, makers of EVE Online.
I wish that was true, but it's not. At least not on this broad terms. Given certain circumstances (the crime must be a crime in Germany as well, the right to a fair trial, no danger of being tortured and such), a German citizen can be extradite to other EU countries and international courts
These days, T2 BPCs are invented. There aren't any new T2 BPOs distributed anymore.
Biometrics is perhaps the worst choice for any access level protection. Biometrics might be helpful in identifying a person, but should never be used to grant/verify access to systems. As you said: biometric attributes are not unfakeable. And that's the very reason to not use them: once compromised, you can change a password. But you can't change your fingerprints or eye iris (or whatever they come up with).
I find killing other players truly boring. Perhaps that's what you meant with your above statement. That's why I played EVE for a few weeks and than quit .... Oh! Hold on! I'm still here after 2,5 years, enjoying EVE as much as in the beginning.
You *can* enjoy EVE, even if you're absolutely anti-PvP. And *this* is what EVE truly distinguishes form other MMOs in my opinion. The problem (or advantage, depends on where you look at it from) is: EVE isn't for the impatient ones. You can't grind your skill levels away and some of the more interesting non-PvP activities (Invention, Exploration) *do* require quite a some skills or bit of money (trading). That requires some patience and/or grinding in the beginning, but at the same time it keeps those "I need to win a game within 14 days" type of players away.
Cerf and Kahn have to say the following about that matter:
Source
Pascal was intended to be a learning language and I consider it to be quite good at it. It enforces good programming practice while at the same time it "spells out" things, which makes it easier for kids to understand. For example BEGIN/END brackets are easier to grok for kids than {}, showing the principal of code blocks better.
No, they're not. Because they're not fast enough. We're still using an old DOS application in our company. Wathcing the people using this application is amazing. They know this application so well, that they're able to key in stuff in advance, without the need to look at the screen. Due to the DOS inherent keyboard buffering, their speed's amazing. It will take a long time until browser based applications can provide such a speed.
Yes, presentation is fine with a browser, but that's really it. We have tons of web based applications. And while in theory they should have no prerequisits than a browser, reality is different. App A requires IE6, app B Java x.x while app C requires Java y.y while app D needs popups enabled. So, while you don't have to install the application itself on the workstation, you only exchanged that for installing (and keeping current) the foundation for all those web apps.
I don't know why this got modded "Insightful"
We as developers shouldn't think about the ease of coding, but the ease of usage. You had it right in your first sentence. Web apps are fine for "once a day, five minute" kind of jobs. Or administrative tools like a web interface to a router, for example, where you spend 2 hours once to configure it and afterwards seldom touch it again. But that business app, that is used 8 hours a day, is a PITA for a user if it's a web app. We serve the user, not the other way around.
I mean, you could tell them to double click on the "My computer" icon on their desktop ...
This is exactly what MS recommends the users to do. Two problems that arise here: You and I now know that this format will close down soon and we both are able to do just this, if we bought from there. My father surely doesn't get "the memo", hence no chance for him to prepare his files.
Second, and this is another nice evil twist to this story, according to German copyright laws, you're not allowed to do so! MS might recommend all they want, they can't "recommend" a law away.
This clearly shows how stupid both DRM and current copyright laws are.
(German here) Unfortunately this is really serious. They've done that a couple of years ago in Germany as well.
German Wiki entry on Magenta
German Wiki entry on Deutsche Telekom, menioning their law suits re. Magenta
I wholeheartedly agree. See, even the article points out the major flaw:
Let's rephrase this: "If you look at how the web was originally designed, it was an application to present information.". I'm not a native English speaker, but even in today's dictionaries, the verb "to browse" implies an interactive, but still passive action.
Look where we are nowerdays. The browser, never designed to be a tool to manipulate data, has become the universal GUI for data interaction. By doing so, it has reintroduced all the shitty crap and we developers have thrown over board in the last decades:
Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of places where browser based applications do make sense: Configuring a router, playing a casual game and things like that. But any application that is used eight hours a day can't be implemented as efficient in a browser as in a desktop application.
Also, the platform independence and "zero deployment" is a nice myth, in my experience. That application requires Java VM 1.4.x, this one 1.5.x, the next one will only work with that browser flavor or version, while the fourth requires popups to be enabled. There goes the one real advantage for using a browser: a quick and easy way to launch an application and get some things done. Yes, we might not need to install an application. But instead we now need to go around and configure VMs and browser so that the "zero deployment" application actually works.
They basically do.
I'm a passionate gamer since the old DOS days. And while back then I often need to fiddle around with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to get that last 1KB conventional memory that this game needed in order to start, I had never ever to do something specially to play a Windows game other than to install it. And I'm *not* owning some kind of high end PC.
OK, that might because the games I prefer (RPGs, simulations like CIV) don't just rely on their "pretty" graphics in order to be good games, so I can easly turn off all those graphical bells & whistles, if I feel the game's to slow. But than again: If the game play isn't good enough to be fun when it's played with medium or low quality graphic settings, it might also not that much more fun with all the glorious, shiny graphic effects turned on.
They always make me take off my shoes, as I always wear boots. No problem here, so far. But what really annoys me, is the fact that they always are trying to be too polite (no kidding). Knowing that they'll ask me to take my boots of, I immediately offer this myself to save them and me some time. Most of the time, my offer is declined in the first place. Then they scan me with their metal detectors, the alarm goes off (Biker Boots with two metal rings, sure the alarm is going to fire) and then they ask me to take my boots off. Now, wasn't exactly that my initial offer?
Yes. At least in Germany. Here, you, the purchaser, need to able to reed the EULA/ToS before even buying the software.
I have a slight suspision what might have happened here:
Gibson: "Now, folks, we hear that you're about to make GH4. What Gibson guitar will you use this time to model the controller after? And how much money do you pay us this time for the guitar and the logo?"
Activision: "See, now that GH is a brand itself, we don't need that logo or those guitar models from you anymore. We'll do our own thing this time."
Gibson: *Shakes fist, sends its lawyers down to the basement where all the old patents are stored* "Await our written answer to this!"
Come over here to Germany and try to do that in the public. You'll find yourself in front of a judge pretty soon. See what happened to Ernst Zündel, for example.
Here, fixed that for you.
Sad as it is, this seems the way it actually works. For years workers in Germany have refrained from wage raises (which in real is a decrease in income, taking inflation into account) in order to "strengthen and support the land's economy". At the same time managament wages were raised by several hundert percent.
No, it's just *one* server for the whole world (ignoring the Chinese only server for a moment, that CCP licensed away ca. two years ago, which doesn't seem to work out that well).
As a poster on /. you should know that any additional unneeded overhead is a waste of time and resources. Cleaning up the old messy legacy code is always a good idea and makes it mauch easier to implement future enhancements.
No, it's quite easy to argue against religions. You just did so. As you've explained, you don't need religion to do good or bad. It works perfectly without religion. So religion is nothing more than an additional, unneeded layer. Get rid off it, and the world would just be fine.
If you (or someone else) *really* intents to hurt them, than don't go for masses, because as someone pointed out earlier, those registrations cost them nothing.
Go for trademarks/copyrighted terms instead. Best possibility: you are the owner/holder of the trademark/copyright. You can immediately go into action and sue them. Otherwise try notifying the owner.