The old way wasn't that different, really: you pay to see the movie, and in return you get to take a copy of it out of the theater with you, encoded in your brain with a highly abstract lossy codec.
When you rip rented movies you're just using a better codec and space-shifting the bits from your brain to your flash drive.
Personally I don't see a problem with it either way especially if you aren't distributing derived works.
Agreed: horrible. I loved NWN but I couldn't even stand playing NWN2 long enough to get my party to Neverwinter. I've certainly learned my lesson about preordering games based on their reputation.
I have a high-end dual-core PC with GF7900. With all the graphical effects turned up to the max the game looks barely passable for 2006 (except maybe for the terrible textures and icons), but runs like a slideshow, and the cursor lags so it's impossible to click on anything.
With all effects turned off the frame rate is tolerable, but the game looks even worse than the original NWN did -- maybe about as good as Baldur's Gate 2.
And the inventory icons -- how the hell did they manage to screw that up? They are all identically colored and shaped 16-by-16 pixel blobs on a huge ugly grid. I'm just a programmer but even I know that humans recognize icons by their shape and color. How is it possible that their art director wasn't aware of this? (See World of Warcraft for icon-based inventory done right, or just give up and use a list-based system like Oblivion's, which was perfectly acceptable.)
Sponges are multicellular creatures by some definitions (they have supercellular organization and partially differentiated tissues), but in other ways are still more like colonies of single-celled creatures (you can split a sponge into pieces, or even mash it up into paste, and the bits will reassemble into new sponges).
I'm a grey goo skeptic as well, but only because I think it is unlikely for practical reasons, not impossible for theoretical reasons. The comparison of Grey Goo with naturally evolved microbes ("Green Goo") misses the point that the man- (or machine-) designed nanobots can explore areas of design space that are blocked to natural selection, perhaps by being hidden behind local minima in the fitness landscape.
A well known example of such a feature (albeit on the macro device scale) is an eye with telescopic vision: an engineer can produce this feature trivially by placing one lense behind another and allowing the distance between them to vary. However, in spite of being independently evolved in the animal kingdom as many as a dozen times, no known animal eye has managed to find its way to this two-lense arrangement. Neither has any gradient-descent-constrained simulation of eye evolution managed to achieve this configuration (to the best of my admittedly-amateur knowledge).
(For those unfamiliar with the "local minimum" problem, it's this: a creature with, say, a misshapen doubled-up lense would be outcompeted by its already-extant fully-sighted peers long before its hypothetical future descendants could have time to happen upon the further refinements needed to implement the long-term-superior telescoping design.)
In the nano realm, there may well be enough yet-unknown technological tricks left in the bag to make sunlight-powered dirt-eating replicators a theoretical possibility.
But I wouldn't lose any sleep over the possibility, either.
Average IQ is indeed rising world wide but it's not at all clear that it's due to the world being "so complicated now it selects against those who can't cope." There are multiple competing theories explaining the Flynn Effect of which by far the most credible, IMO, is that the largest cause has been improved early childhood nutrition due to the spread of modern farming techniques.
I don't know if the GP was kidding or not, but there's nothing that far-fetched about the idea of a Java version of Google Earth. In fact it'd probably work fine through OpenGL, albeit less smoothly than the native client.
Java has improved a lot since 1997. In particular it has had accelerated 3d support for a while now. If you have a recent version of Java installed you can play a 3d Java MMORPG right now just by clicking here. (I'm not endorsing the quality of this particular MMORPG, which I was able to confuse badly just by moving the mouse wheel, but it does illustrate my point about Java 3d support.)
"Wikis only give a voice to the last person who spoke."
This is only true if each new contributor completely replaces the page with new content, wholly uninfluenced by whatever was present before. In practice this never happens: other than the crudest forms of obvious vandalism, which are quickly reverted, article evolution tends to be gradual. Pick any article at random and scroll through its history, or save time by just watching this well-done animation by John Udell.
Wikipedia is huge, and it is actually relatively easy to slip vandalism into the less-traveled, low-traffic backwater articles. If it happens to make it off the bottom of recent changes it can sit for weeks or months until someone happens to notice it, especially if it's subtle.
I don't think the point was that the contents of a particular character's mind somehow prevented reality from changing, but rather that reality as a whole existed all at once and couldn't be changed at all, period. Once you knew that a certain effect had taken place, you also knew that it was going to be futile to attempt to remove its cause -- since if you were going to be able to do so, you would "already" have done so and would not have witnessed the effect.
Of course you are right about delusions, though. It didn't really hit me until I started reading up on the phenomenon of Holocaust denial just how fragile one's own knowledge of the past really is. If you are willing to assume a powerful enough conspiracy there is no limit to what you can believe, yet still be consistent with any amount of sensory evidence.
This is pretty nifty. It reminds me of the old GURPS time-travel rules supplement. Under those rules, time travel was possible, but it was not possible to change the past in a way inconsistent with your knowledge of the future -- the Game Master was instructed to thwart any such attempts by any means necessary, however unlikely. So, an organization of bad guys might try to take over ancient, remote civilizations where doing so would leave no evidence surviving into the present, while the good guys would go around recording as much information about history as possible in order to fix it in place, protecting it from the bad guys.
If you saw your buddy killed before your eyes, you would leave the scene immediately, and avoid examining the body in any way. Instead, you'd go get a dummy that looks like your buddy, then return to the time just before your buddy died, rescue him, and leave the dummy behind to "fool" your past self. I was delighted later on to see that in the game Chrono Trigger it was possible to use exactly this mechanism to save the life of one of the characters in spite of their onscreen "death".
FF has more little things that annoy me - is there an easy way to increase the size of the Google search box?
I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "easy", but you can adjust the size of the Google search bar by editing some CSS in your profile directory.
Sun has always strongly and actively discouraged the use of sun.* packages. These classes are part of Sun's implementation of the standard Java libraries (much as IBM's JDK includes some ibm.* packages handling analagous behind-the-scenes plumbing).
In contract, Microsoft actively encouraged the use of Microsoft-only language features (note: we aren't just talking utility classes here, but totally new syntax!), and in fact developers had to be especially careful to avoid using them unwittingly when using MS's development tools.
Due to buffer overflows in telnet(1), a malicious server or man-in-the-middle attack could allow execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking telnet(1). Noone should use telnet anymore. Please use ssh(1).
Where the patch adds, among a couple of other things, the ability to ignore certain kinds of environment variables:
- if ((ep = env_find(var)))
+ if ((ep = env_find(var))&&(!exported_only || ep->export))
It seems to me that this is about as detailed information as anyone could possibly ask for.
You missed his point. It's not important to guess the scheme -- a brute force cracking program will include all variations of "adjacent keys" schemes and dozens of other common schemes as well and still only need to try a tiny fraction of a percent of theoretical 2^56 search space before finding your password.
It's equivalent using a 10-digit combination lock but then choosing combinations that only ever differ in the initial digit.
Ahh, I see what you mean. Yes, it would be nice if everyone was willing and able to use XML correctly. But we have to work with the humans we have, not the humans we wish we had. In the real world people demonstrably will not take the time to specify metadata correctly even when it's made relatively easy to do so, and the richer the metadata vocabulary the less likely people are to use it properly.
To me, one of the lessons of Google's success is that the software is going to have to do a lot more than just meet the humans half way on this one. If you are going to end up with a soup of natural language documents no matter what you try to do, you may as well get good at searching it intelligently.
The metadata situation may not be that bad off.
Since at least this summer MediaWiki has had the ability to tag documents with multiple categories, which themselves can be tagged with multiple categories. And I thought every modern wiki kept a rich revision history of who changed what, when.
The article's comment about NetBSD being "insecure" raised my eyebrows, as well. NetBSD is not known for being particularly insecure, and the comment struck me as out-of-place and ill-informed.
But, I couldn't let this slide (even giving up my mod points): counting security advisories is just not a good way to judge the relative security of an OS, especially one of the more uncommon ones. SecurityFocus has no vulnerabilities listed for either MS-DOS or EROS, but few people would conclude that both operating systems were equally secure, or that MS-DOS's unblemished security record means it's more secure than OpenBSD (which has many dozens of vulnerabilites listed, most of which are advisories for bundled programs like Apache which OpenBSD nevertheless takes responsibility for).
Even worse, the more that people are believed to be using vulnerability lists to compare OSes, the more pressure vendors feel to improve their scores by sweeping security problems under the rug. Microsoft is notorious in this regard -- years after promising to make security their #1 focus, whenever they think they can get away with it they continue to hide known security bugs from sysadmins (who would be able to deploy work-arounds if they were told about the problems) in favor of silently sneaking the fixes into the next service pack many months later.
The car may well have suffered no malfunction, but the driver might still be telling the truth about the situation as he experienced it. When I read the original story the first possibility that came to my mind was pedal error, but this is just one possibility. I'll be interested to see what the investigation reveals.
An important goal of human interface design is to understand and reduce the probability of these rare-but-inevitable human errors.
It's always annoyed me that, at least outside the Unix world, it appears to be the cultural norm to do commercial or shareware releases of trivial bits of code I'd think twice about even signing my name to.
The Synergy developer's plight was moving when I read it: pirates have reverse engineered the license manager he is using and can generate things like 100 seat licenses at will. As a result the developer has abandoned the product.
But when I clicked through to see what Synergy actually was my sympathy evaporated. The damned thing is a single panel with three buttons on it, which can play/pause/rewind iTunes. The license enforcement code alone has to be more complex than the rest of it put together. And for this Saturday afternoon's worth of work the developer wants 5 Euros per copy.
You cannot use Fahrenheit 9/11 or the Da Vinci Code for primary source material. I see this too much.
If the GP had cited f911 to argue that Saudi Arabia is controlling the president with mind-control rays then you'd have a point. But, in f911 there are congressmen on-camera admitting that they themselves did not have time to read the PATRIOT act before passing it.
While one should always keep bias in mind when considering the source, that isn't a blank cheque to dismiss entirely any source which expresses an opinion you disagree with.
So why didn't you insert {{dubious}} or {{disputed}} tags after the material, note the problem on the talk page, and/or request peer review, rather than letting the information sit unchallenged until now?
I've been watching for a few months now, and Wikipedia does remarkably well once problems are brought to the attention of the community. But there are hundreds of thousands of articles, so the project relies readers like you to report when you encounter obscure pages with non-obvious accuracy problems.
I wish the browser id tag had never been put in. Devs would have no choice but to write to the standard.
I can appreciate the sentiment, believe me. Unfortunately, if there were no User-Agent strings, marketers, analysts and businesses would just have gathered the same data in other ways, such as surveys or software-based "Nielsen boxes" like Alexa.
The real problem was Microsoft's lock on default software distribution. Obscuring the usage statistics would not have affected the outcome of the browser war one way or another, including the use of clueless IE-only web developers as footsoldiers.
I prefer the BSD license myself, in part because the GPL is so prone to producing so much of this kind of tedious drama. But the fact is that if you include third-party GPL code in your product you must be willing to pay the price, and the FAQ you quoted all but comes right out and announces that GPL violation is taking place:
Q. What about the LGPL libraries you link with?
A. The source code is here if you wish to download it. The bugs I've fixed have already been submitted to the relevant bugzillas with patches.
Unless the source code they are making available includes the patches that were used to build the exact versions of these third-party GPL libraries that are linked with the binary they are distributing, this is a GPL violation.
The carefully-chosen, weaselly wording of the FAQ answer leaves little doubt that this is the case (although I can't tell for sure because their site is slashdotted into the ground at the moment).
It's very simple: the whole point of the GPL is to give users the right to learn about and modify the program they are using. If the source code they are making available can't be used to compile a Win32 binary with identical behavior to the binary they are distributing, including any nag screens and 30 day timeouts, then assuming they have linked with third-party GPL code, they are violating the GPL.
(Of course, if they wrote all the GPL'ed code themselves -- and were unusually scrupulous about requiring outside contributors to sign over the copyright on their contributions -- then the code is theirs and there is no issue. But I gather from elsewhere in the thread that this is not the case.)
The AC you're replying to isn't the most coherent writer around, judging by his somewhat.. enthusiastic.. posts elsewhere in the thread, so I'll try to clarify their scenario and answer your question for you.
In Java IOException is checked, meaning when SearchForKiller's search method opens the file it must either catch IOException itself (thereby promising to deal with it*) or declare that it too might throw the IOException when called. In the GP's example, the programmer evidently chose to declare and hence propagate the checked exception. So far so good.
Later, when the call to SearchForKiller is written into SearchManager, the programmer's IDE will remind them to deal with the exception (and the compiler will force them to even if they somehow forget). Since they are forced to think about the problem, they may conclude that they are better off catching the exception and logging it (perhaps saving enough information to retry the failed operation another time), rather than allowing a single missing file to cause an expensive and lengthy batch operation to abort.
In.NET, or even in Java using an unchecked exception, SearchForKiller would not have had to declare the IOException. From experience, unchecked exceptions fall through the cracks much, much more often.
For example, have a look at an example method whose contract documents both checked and unchecked exceptions (it's Example #2, WriteTextFile.setContents()).
A developer calling this setContents() method from a new initializeFile() method may reasonably choose not to handle the unchecked IllegalArgumentException thrown by setContents() when the file is a directory, since they know this will not occur in their current situation.
Later though, perhaps when initializeFile() is reused in a situation where the file argument is now derived from user-supplied data, the maintenance programmer is very unlikely to notice the lurking timebomb of an IllegalArgumentException when a directory is passed into initializeFile(). When this eventually happens it will probably propagate all the way up to a high-level application catchall, aborting the current operation or otherwise handling the error in a generic and suboptimal way.
Had setContents() instead used other subclasses of the checked IOException to report incorrect file type or permissions the end result would have been a more robust application overall.
* The compiler can't force you to keep your promise to deal intelligently with the error, but at least it can put the problem on your radar, power that a footnote in the documentation just doesn't have.
Slashdot Mirror
The old way wasn't that different, really: you pay to see the movie, and in return you get to take a copy of it out of the theater with you, encoded in your brain with a highly abstract lossy codec.
When you rip rented movies you're just using a better codec and space-shifting the bits from your brain to your flash drive.
Personally I don't see a problem with it either way especially if you aren't distributing derived works.
Agreed: horrible. I loved NWN but I couldn't even stand playing NWN2 long enough to get my party to Neverwinter. I've certainly learned my lesson about preordering games based on their reputation.
I have a high-end dual-core PC with GF7900. With all the graphical effects turned up to the max the game looks barely passable for 2006 (except maybe for the terrible textures and icons), but runs like a slideshow, and the cursor lags so it's impossible to click on anything.
With all effects turned off the frame rate is tolerable, but the game looks even worse than the original NWN did -- maybe about as good as Baldur's Gate 2.
And the inventory icons -- how the hell did they manage to screw that up? They are all identically colored and shaped 16-by-16 pixel blobs on a huge ugly grid. I'm just a programmer but even I know that humans recognize icons by their shape and color. How is it possible that their art director wasn't aware of this? (See World of Warcraft for icon-based inventory done right, or just give up and use a list-based system like Oblivion's, which was perfectly acceptable.)
I'll do better and show you an intermediate form: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponge
Sponges are multicellular creatures by some definitions (they have supercellular organization and partially differentiated tissues), but in other ways are still more like colonies of single-celled creatures (you can split a sponge into pieces, or even mash it up into paste, and the bits will reassemble into new sponges).
I'm a grey goo skeptic as well, but only because I think it is unlikely for practical reasons, not impossible for theoretical reasons. The comparison of Grey Goo with naturally evolved microbes ("Green Goo") misses the point that the man- (or machine-) designed nanobots can explore areas of design space that are blocked to natural selection, perhaps by being hidden behind local minima in the fitness landscape.
A well known example of such a feature (albeit on the macro device scale) is an eye with telescopic vision: an engineer can produce this feature trivially by placing one lense behind another and allowing the distance between them to vary. However, in spite of being independently evolved in the animal kingdom as many as a dozen times, no known animal eye has managed to find its way to this two-lense arrangement. Neither has any gradient-descent-constrained simulation of eye evolution managed to achieve this configuration (to the best of my admittedly-amateur knowledge).
(For those unfamiliar with the "local minimum" problem, it's this: a creature with, say, a misshapen doubled-up lense would be outcompeted by its already-extant fully-sighted peers long before its hypothetical future descendants could have time to happen upon the further refinements needed to implement the long-term-superior telescoping design.)
In the nano realm, there may well be enough yet-unknown technological tricks left in the bag to make sunlight-powered dirt-eating replicators a theoretical possibility.
But I wouldn't lose any sleep over the possibility, either.
Average IQ is indeed rising world wide but it's not at all clear that it's due to the world being "so complicated now it selects against those who can't cope." There are multiple competing theories explaining the Flynn Effect of which by far the most credible, IMO, is that the largest cause has been improved early childhood nutrition due to the spread of modern farming techniques.
Java has improved a lot since 1997. In particular it has had accelerated 3d support for a while now. If you have a recent version of Java installed you can play a 3d Java MMORPG right now just by clicking here. (I'm not endorsing the quality of this particular MMORPG, which I was able to confuse badly just by moving the mouse wheel, but it does illustrate my point about Java 3d support.)
Wikipedia is huge, and it is actually relatively easy to slip vandalism into the less-traveled, low-traffic backwater articles. If it happens to make it off the bottom of recent changes it can sit for weeks or months until someone happens to notice it, especially if it's subtle.
Of course you are right about delusions, though. It didn't really hit me until I started reading up on the phenomenon of Holocaust denial just how fragile one's own knowledge of the past really is. If you are willing to assume a powerful enough conspiracy there is no limit to what you can believe, yet still be consistent with any amount of sensory evidence.
If you saw your buddy killed before your eyes, you would leave the scene immediately, and avoid examining the body in any way. Instead, you'd go get a dummy that looks like your buddy, then return to the time just before your buddy died, rescue him, and leave the dummy behind to "fool" your past self. I was delighted later on to see that in the game Chrono Trigger it was possible to use exactly this mechanism to save the life of one of the characters in spite of their onscreen "death".
In contract, Microsoft actively encouraged the use of Microsoft-only language features (note: we aren't just talking utility classes here, but totally new syntax!), and in fact developers had to be especially careful to avoid using them unwittingly when using MS's development tools.
All of the OpenBSD updates on the page you linked to are in the form of source patches. If those are vague, what exactly would you consider precise?
Have a look at 014: SECURITY FIX: March 30, 2005, for example:
Where the patch adds, among a couple of other things, the ability to ignore certain kinds of environment variables:- if ((ep = env_find(var)))
+ if ((ep = env_find(var))&&(!exported_only || ep->export))
It seems to me that this is about as detailed information as anyone could possibly ask for.
It's equivalent using a 10-digit combination lock but then choosing combinations that only ever differ in the initial digit.
To me, one of the lessons of Google's success is that the software is going to have to do a lot more than just meet the humans half way on this one. If you are going to end up with a soup of natural language documents no matter what you try to do, you may as well get good at searching it intelligently.
What other kinds of metadata do you have in mind?
But, I couldn't let this slide (even giving up my mod points): counting security advisories is just not a good way to judge the relative security of an OS, especially one of the more uncommon ones. SecurityFocus has no vulnerabilities listed for either MS-DOS or EROS, but few people would conclude that both operating systems were equally secure, or that MS-DOS's unblemished security record means it's more secure than OpenBSD (which has many dozens of vulnerabilites listed, most of which are advisories for bundled programs like Apache which OpenBSD nevertheless takes responsibility for).
Even worse, the more that people are believed to be using vulnerability lists to compare OSes, the more pressure vendors feel to improve their scores by sweeping security problems under the rug. Microsoft is notorious in this regard -- years after promising to make security their #1 focus, whenever they think they can get away with it they continue to hide known security bugs from sysadmins (who would be able to deploy work-arounds if they were told about the problems) in favor of silently sneaking the fixes into the next service pack many months later.
An important goal of human interface design is to understand and reduce the probability of these rare-but-inevitable human errors.
In addition to being disturbingly phallic, Peng does not meet the original requirements.
The Synergy developer's plight was moving when I read it: pirates have reverse engineered the license manager he is using and can generate things like 100 seat licenses at will. As a result the developer has abandoned the product.
But when I clicked through to see what Synergy actually was my sympathy evaporated. The damned thing is a single panel with three buttons on it, which can play/pause/rewind iTunes. The license enforcement code alone has to be more complex than the rest of it put together. And for this Saturday afternoon's worth of work the developer wants 5 Euros per copy.
While one should always keep bias in mind when considering the source, that isn't a blank cheque to dismiss entirely any source which expresses an opinion you disagree with.
I've been watching for a few months now, and Wikipedia does remarkably well once problems are brought to the attention of the community. But there are hundreds of thousands of articles, so the project relies readers like you to report when you encounter obscure pages with non-obvious accuracy problems.
The real problem was Microsoft's lock on default software distribution. Obscuring the usage statistics would not have affected the outcome of the browser war one way or another, including the use of clueless IE-only web developers as footsoldiers.
The carefully-chosen, weaselly wording of the FAQ answer leaves little doubt that this is the case (although I can't tell for sure because their site is slashdotted into the ground at the moment).
It's very simple: the whole point of the GPL is to give users the right to learn about and modify the program they are using. If the source code they are making available can't be used to compile a Win32 binary with identical behavior to the binary they are distributing, including any nag screens and 30 day timeouts, then assuming they have linked with third-party GPL code, they are violating the GPL.
(Of course, if they wrote all the GPL'ed code themselves -- and were unusually scrupulous about requiring outside contributors to sign over the copyright on their contributions -- then the code is theirs and there is no issue. But I gather from elsewhere in the thread that this is not the case.)
In Java IOException is checked, meaning when SearchForKiller's search method opens the file it must either catch IOException itself (thereby promising to deal with it*) or declare that it too might throw the IOException when called. In the GP's example, the programmer evidently chose to declare and hence propagate the checked exception. So far so good.
Later, when the call to SearchForKiller is written into SearchManager, the programmer's IDE will remind them to deal with the exception (and the compiler will force them to even if they somehow forget). Since they are forced to think about the problem, they may conclude that they are better off catching the exception and logging it (perhaps saving enough information to retry the failed operation another time), rather than allowing a single missing file to cause an expensive and lengthy batch operation to abort.
In .NET, or even in Java using an unchecked exception, SearchForKiller would not have had to declare the IOException. From experience, unchecked exceptions fall through the cracks much, much more often.
For example, have a look at an example method whose contract documents both checked and unchecked exceptions (it's Example #2, WriteTextFile.setContents()).
A developer calling this setContents() method from a new initializeFile() method may reasonably choose not to handle the unchecked IllegalArgumentException thrown by setContents() when the file is a directory, since they know this will not occur in their current situation.
Later though, perhaps when initializeFile() is reused in a situation where the file argument is now derived from user-supplied data, the maintenance programmer is very unlikely to notice the lurking timebomb of an IllegalArgumentException when a directory is passed into initializeFile(). When this eventually happens it will probably propagate all the way up to a high-level application catchall, aborting the current operation or otherwise handling the error in a generic and suboptimal way.
Had setContents() instead used other subclasses of the checked IOException to report incorrect file type or permissions the end result would have been a more robust application overall.
* The compiler can't force you to keep your promise to deal intelligently with the error, but at least it can put the problem on your radar, power that a footnote in the documentation just doesn't have.