does it not rebutt the myth that if you have the code you can easily maintain and improve it yourself?
No more than the existence of Dell, eMachines, and other PC manufacturers rebuts the "myth" that if you have access to computer components, you can easily build and upgrade a computer yourself.
Do I get paid to be a part of the Expert Community?
Yes, the OpenLogic Rewards program pays Expert Community members upon successful resolution of an incident. OpenLogic charges enterprise for support. OpenLogic's internal technical support team resolves basic issues. OpenLogic, in turn, contracts with members of the community to resolve more complex issues.
"why not just pick another name? how hard can it be?"
Yeah. I found myself thinking of the naming history of Firefox.
It started out as Phoenix. (Actually it started out as "Mozilla Browser," but AFAIK that was never intended to be anything more than a working title.) It was a nice, symbolic name. Then the Phoenix BIOS company said, "we're making a browser, and we want you to change your name since we had it first."
So they put together a list of new possible names, kept coming back to Firebird -- which was a logical change from Phoenix -- and while they were aware of Firebird the database, they figured no one would confuse a database with a web browser.
Once they announced the name, of course the Firebird databse people and their fans complained. At first they refused to change the name again, but then they initiated a several-month-long search into a name they could use, getting lawyers to track down any potential conflicts so they could choose another name or negotiate with the other holders. They finally settled on Firefox... years after the project was first named.
Actually, this wouldn't make a difference. The idea stated here is that the universe has either (a) expanded and contracted many times or (b) expanded to nothingness and been replenished by a new big bang many times. (The article isn't clear on which.)
While this suggests the existence of a pre-Big-Bang universe, it does not suggest that the latest Big Bang took place any earlier than current estimates used for hte single-Big Bang theory.
So if there are problems with the speed of expansion post-Big Bang, this does nothing to solve them.
"All we can say is [the next big bang] won't be within the next 10 billion years." Good job, because if we were around we would instantly disintegrate into massless particles of light.
And you know how quickly that kind of thing can ruin your day!
What's funny is that right now, adults on MySpace lie about their age pretending to be minors. And not just the predatory ones.
Why?
Only minors are allowed to make their profile information or posts private.
So people who've decided they want to keep the MySpace social scene going but don't want prospective employers, or ex-girlfriends, or nosy relatives to see it just change their birthday, and they get the option to mark things as private.
1. I don't like Macs, Apple, or Steve Jobs. 2. I don't like anything that can't be tinkered with. 3. Boot Camp is an Apple Product. 4. By #1 and #2, anyone who likes any of the above is an idiot and/or brainwashed. 5. By #3 and #4, Boot Camp is for idiots.
While #5 may proceed logically from #3 and #4, #4 does not proceed from #1 or #2.
I'd say the author has a wonderful future ahead of him in either Slashdot trolling, talk radio, or writing about politics. Editing a computer magazine? Not so sure about that one.
The entire article is the author saying, "I'm not in the target audience for this product." I've seen these "I don't want this, so no one else should either" posts here on Slashdot, and they're usually labeled as trolls. Or +5 Insightful.
He probably is right about Boot Camp being intended to bring more Windows Users to the Mac side of the force. Too bad it's embedded in a steaming pile of vitriol. His disdain for Apple, Steve Jobs, and Mac users is so thick, you have to wonder how he managed to come up with any insight at all.
I think the main problems people have with it are:
1. The stated reason was to make Han seem less cold-blooded...but under the circumstances, it was pretty clearly a shoot-or-be-shot situation. Particularly in a rough-and-tumble frontier town, it was self-defense. 2. At that distance, how could Greedo possibly miss?
So the change didn't improve anything (even for the stated purpose) and it makes less sense than the original version. It amounts to a self-Bowdlerization of the film, like Spielberg converting guns to walkie-talkies in the re-release of E.T.
That's pretty much what I figured when I watched the Special Edition. He was a small-time boss when Han was working for him, then became big-time over the 2-3 years leading up to Return of the Jedi. Though I figured the weight gain was just Jabba getting older.
Then Episode I came out, with a full-sized, powerful Jabba at the pod race, destroying that theory...
(It also needs to be kept in mind that the tail-stepping wasn't in the original verion of the scene. They just came up with it as a way to reconcile the fact that Han walked around the stand-in with the fact that the later design for Jabba had a tail. Hey, why cut two seconds when you can come up with a technically fun but plotwise-dubious challenge instead!)
Let's face it, the dialogue in the original trilogy was just plain CHEESY!
Yep. I think it was Harrison Ford who reportedly said to Lucas, "You can write this #@$!, George, but you can't say it."
Not any better than the new stuff.
Actually, I'd disagree here. The old stuff was just as cheesy, but it had more life to it. Although that may have been as much in the delivery as in the writing.
there's not much bad acting in the new trilogy, not any more than any other movie
The new movies have taken a number of very good actors (Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor, and by reports even Hayden Christensen) and somehow gotten sub-par acting out of them. Compare Han/Leia with Anakin/Amidala in the middle movies. Which pairing has more chemistry? Which relationship seems more natural, and which seems shoehorned in because the plot requires it?
Even the space battles. As fascinating as it is to watch the details in the opening battle of Episode III, it doesn't have the emotional punch of the battle above Endor in Return of the Jedi.
Personally, I blame the director. A New Hope was directed by a young George Lucas who was full of energy and passion. It was cheesy, but his exuberance brought you along for the ride. Empire and Jedi were directed by people who knew what they were doing. The sequels were directed by a George Lucas who had mellowed with age and, most importantly, had not directed a movie in 18 years.
I think if Lucas had done everything else the same, but just let someone else direct the films, they would have turned out much better.
Disney used to have a standard 7-year cycle on which they would re-release their major cartoons. The idea was that 7 years was just the right amount of time to get an entirely new generation of kids in the target audience. When I was growing up in the 1980s, I saw more classic Disney movies in the theater than new ones.
The schedule has slackened a bit recently, though.
I think the most recent regular re-release was The Little Mermaid in 1997 (8 years from the original release, and nothing since). There was also an IMAX re-release of Beauty and the Beast in 2002 (11 years), in which they added an extra song, "Human Again," that had been written for the movie, but didn't get used until they put together the Broadway version.
I don't know why Disney stopped re-releasing their films, but the timing coincides suspiciously with the appearance of direct-to-video sequels.
the conversation with him is damn near the same conversation Han had with Greedo just a minute before.
That actually was my biggest problem with the way they restored the scene. It just doesn't add anything to the movie.
I always figured that back in 1977, when they realized they couldn't use the Jabba scene, they worked the most important bits of info into the Greedo scene. Maybe they shot pick-ups, maybe they just wrote new subtitles for Greedo. For the Special Edition, since they wanted to restore the scene with Jabba, they had two ways they could do so *and* use it to enhance the movie:
1. Change Greedo's dialogue so that Jabba's isn't redundant. 2. Change Jabba's dialogue and edit the footage so that it isn't redundant.
They don't have to worry about lip-syncing Greedo or Jabba. And they were animating Jabba from scratch, so they could do whatever they wanted. The only thing that would be a pain to change would be the footage of Han -- getting Harrison Ford to dub some dialogue, getting the animators to lip-sync the visuals like Contact did with Pres. Clinton -- and even that could be rearranged.
Instead, the scene they put in is virtually identical to the scene I remember seeing in one of those making-of specials, except that it had a CGI giant slug speaking Huttese instead of a guy in a mangy fur coat speaking English.
So, do you have any better suggestions, if not then I kindly ask you to ommit your views until you can add something to the cause.
OK. Here's one. Summary execution for spammers and their families. It would solve the problem more effectively than anything else we've got.
You don't have any better suggestions? Then don't you dare criticize this one!
Sorry for the Modest Proposal (I do not advocate killing people over spam!), but the point I'm trying to make is: it's entirely legitimate to criticize an idea without suggesting an alternative. Unless you're making a split-second decision, it's worth looking at the downside before you implement a plan. Sometimes you'll decide it's worth it, at least for now, and other times you'll decide you're better off going back to the drawing board.
Had BlueSecurity chosen to temporarily route their domain name to empty IP space, or to localhost, they could have mitigated the attack on their servers without offloading the problem onto someone else's network. Yes, they would still have been offline, but at least their servers wouldn't be melting, and Six Apart wouldn't have been taken down with them.
Now, I've read several articles on this, and it's not clear whether (a) Blue knew that the DDoS was targeting them by domain name (rather than by IP), or (b) whether they redirected their website before or after that phase of the DDoS started.
The way I see it -- assuming Blue did this with thir eyes open -- it's like deflecting a punch. You can deflect a punch so that it doesn't hit you, and deal with where it does hit later. Or, if you're in a kung fu movie, you can deflect the punch specifically so that it hits someone else instead. Pointing the domain name at Six Apart's network was deflecting the attack with the intention that someone else would get it.
Maybe they figured 6A had enough resources to handle it. (Hmm, anyone remember whether./ has ever been DDoSed?) Maybe they figured the attack wouldn't follow the DNS change. While Blue Security is not responsible for launching the attack, they are arguably responsible for where the attack ended up. And that's something that could be the target of a civil lawsuit, even though it's (probably) not a criminal offense.
Would Six Apart would want to sue? Would a judge accept the case? Would a jury would actually award them anything? Who knows.
To create a Somebody Else's Problem field? People are quite good at ignoring what they think isn't important (or what they don't want to recognize), so if you could find a way to convince people to ignore something, it would be just as effective as actual invisibility.
As others have pointed out, Mozilla does provide their own binary distributions of Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux. The vast majority of Firefox users are probably on Windows, which means incremental binary patches are a godsend in terms of time, bandwidth, and getting the masses to install security fixes.
With Linux, it depends entirely on whether you're using the Mozilla binary or your Linux distro's binary. If you want to run beta versions of Firefox, or if you want to keep current beyond what your distro provides (Mandriva 2006 still only has Firefox 1.0.x), Mozilla's binary is the simplest way to do it. Under those circumstances, you can't use your distro's package management system, but you can close the browser, log in as root, and run it once to get the update. (Or you can download the full package, log in as root, and install again. It's a matter of preference.)
I think the worst must be the Norton dialogs that pop up even when you have a full-screen game running, stealing focus and dropping you back to the desktop so that it can tell you that it just updated its virus definitions.
I *think* I've disabled all the notifications for things that it's going to do automatically anyway, but we'll see...
The short form of all this is that IE7 really DOES follow standards more closely than IE6...
Oh, yeah! Of course, the issue is twofold*: There are parts of the specs that IE6 implements incorrectly, and there are parts of the specs that IE6 doesn't implement at all. They've fixed some of the bugs, and they've added support for some of the missing chunks. There's still a lot of stuff that hasn't made it into IE7, but I personally can't wait until I can ignore IE6 and just code for IE7/Gecko/Opera/KHTML instead of Gecko/Opera/KHTML with a bunch of kludges for IE6.
One can hope that, a few years down the road, either IE8 will catch up to the rest on what's implemented, or IE will no longer be relevant. From a web developer's perspective, either outcome will be a win.
*(There's a third part of the issue, of course, which is that there's no defined spec for error correction, so every browser makes different assumptions when presented with invalid code.)
I understand that... I was replying to the "how can Netflix compete" question. For me, the fact that Netflix has a lot of stuff I want to watch that Blockbuster doesn't* outweighs the benefit of the in-store coupons. I don't make spur-of-the-moment rental choices very often, so it only amounts to spending an extra $3 once every two or three months.
*(Again, it all depends on what you want to watch. I've seen a couple of movies that Blockbuster has that Netflix doesn't. Someone in another thread pointed out that Blockbuster has the option of pulling from their old store stock, so they have some movies that have since gone out of print.)
It depends on what you like to watch, of course, but the last time I checked Blockbuster Online, their animation category had maybe 20-25% as many titles as Netflix's. One of the main things I've been renting through Netflix has been anime series, several of which aren't on Blockbuster's list (yet), so it's Netflix for me for the foreseeable future. When Blockbuster's selection catches up, I may revisit things. (Both services, of course, have a much bigger selection overall than a typical brick-and-mortar store.)
That said, the Netflix/Blockbuster Online model doesn't work very well for spur-of-the-moment "I want to watch this movie tonight" decisions, so I still have both a Blockbuster card and a local video store membership.
Slashdot Mirror
does it not rebutt the myth that if you have the code you can easily maintain and improve it yourself?
No more than the existence of Dell, eMachines, and other PC manufacturers rebuts the "myth" that if you have access to computer components, you can easily build and upgrade a computer yourself.
From the OpenLogic Community FAQ:
Add this model to the list of rebuttals to the "you can't make money on open-source" meme.
"why not just pick another name? how hard can it be?"
Yeah. I found myself thinking of the naming history of Firefox.
It started out as Phoenix. (Actually it started out as "Mozilla Browser," but AFAIK that was never intended to be anything more than a working title.) It was a nice, symbolic name. Then the Phoenix BIOS company said, "we're making a browser, and we want you to change your name since we had it first."
So they put together a list of new possible names, kept coming back to Firebird -- which was a logical change from Phoenix -- and while they were aware of Firebird the database, they figured no one would confuse a database with a web browser.
Once they announced the name, of course the Firebird databse people and their fans complained. At first they refused to change the name again, but then they initiated a several-month-long search into a name they could use, getting lawyers to track down any potential conflicts so they could choose another name or negotiate with the other holders. They finally settled on Firefox... years after the project was first named.
Actually, this wouldn't make a difference. The idea stated here is that the universe has either (a) expanded and contracted many times or (b) expanded to nothingness and been replenished by a new big bang many times. (The article isn't clear on which.)
While this suggests the existence of a pre-Big-Bang universe, it does not suggest that the latest Big Bang took place any earlier than current estimates used for hte single-Big Bang theory.
So if there are problems with the speed of expansion post-Big Bang, this does nothing to solve them.
And you know how quickly that kind of thing can ruin your day!
Or what? They'll arrest them? Superheroes are used to fighting other super-beings.
Exactly.
The ones who agree to work with the government are now authorized -- perhaps even obligated -- to take down those who don't.
this is news because Marvel is doing it
Anyone remember the Mutant Registration Act?
What the felderkarb is going on in this thread?
What's funny is that right now, adults on MySpace lie about their age pretending to be minors. And not just the predatory ones.
Why?
Only minors are allowed to make their profile information or posts private.
So people who've decided they want to keep the MySpace social scene going but don't want prospective employers, or ex-girlfriends, or nosy relatives to see it just change their birthday, and they get the option to mark things as private.
Stupid restriction --> Predictable results.
The logic of the piece appears to be thus:
1. I don't like Macs, Apple, or Steve Jobs.
2. I don't like anything that can't be tinkered with.
3. Boot Camp is an Apple Product.
4. By #1 and #2, anyone who likes any of the above is an idiot and/or brainwashed.
5. By #3 and #4, Boot Camp is for idiots.
While #5 may proceed logically from #3 and #4, #4 does not proceed from #1 or #2.
I'd say the author has a wonderful future ahead of him in either Slashdot trolling, talk radio, or writing about politics. Editing a computer magazine? Not so sure about that one.
The entire article is the author saying, "I'm not in the target audience for this product." I've seen these "I don't want this, so no one else should either" posts here on Slashdot, and they're usually labeled as trolls. Or +5 Insightful.
He probably is right about Boot Camp being intended to bring more Windows Users to the Mac side of the force. Too bad it's embedded in a steaming pile of vitriol. His disdain for Apple, Steve Jobs, and Mac users is so thick, you have to wonder how he managed to come up with any insight at all.
I think the main problems people have with it are:
1. The stated reason was to make Han seem less cold-blooded...but under the circumstances, it was pretty clearly a shoot-or-be-shot situation. Particularly in a rough-and-tumble frontier town, it was self-defense.
2. At that distance, how could Greedo possibly miss?
So the change didn't improve anything (even for the stated purpose) and it makes less sense than the original version. It amounts to a self-Bowdlerization of the film, like Spielberg converting guns to walkie-talkies in the re-release of E.T.
That's pretty much what I figured when I watched the Special Edition. He was a small-time boss when Han was working for him, then became big-time over the 2-3 years leading up to Return of the Jedi. Though I figured the weight gain was just Jabba getting older.
Then Episode I came out, with a full-sized, powerful Jabba at the pod race, destroying that theory...
(It also needs to be kept in mind that the tail-stepping wasn't in the original verion of the scene. They just came up with it as a way to reconcile the fact that Han walked around the stand-in with the fact that the later design for Jabba had a tail. Hey, why cut two seconds when you can come up with a technically fun but plotwise-dubious challenge instead!)
Let's face it, the dialogue in the original trilogy was just plain CHEESY!
Yep. I think it was Harrison Ford who reportedly said to Lucas, "You can write this #@$!, George, but you can't say it."
Not any better than the new stuff.
Actually, I'd disagree here. The old stuff was just as cheesy, but it had more life to it. Although that may have been as much in the delivery as in the writing.
there's not much bad acting in the new trilogy, not any more than any other movie
The new movies have taken a number of very good actors (Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor, and by reports even Hayden Christensen) and somehow gotten sub-par acting out of them. Compare Han/Leia with Anakin/Amidala in the middle movies. Which pairing has more chemistry? Which relationship seems more natural, and which seems shoehorned in because the plot requires it?
Even the space battles. As fascinating as it is to watch the details in the opening battle of Episode III, it doesn't have the emotional punch of the battle above Endor in Return of the Jedi.
Personally, I blame the director. A New Hope was directed by a young George Lucas who was full of energy and passion. It was cheesy, but his exuberance brought you along for the ride. Empire and Jedi were directed by people who knew what they were doing. The sequels were directed by a George Lucas who had mellowed with age and, most importantly, had not directed a movie in 18 years.
I think if Lucas had done everything else the same, but just let someone else direct the films, they would have turned out much better.
re-releases...of the classic Disney movies
Disney used to have a standard 7-year cycle on which they would re-release their major cartoons. The idea was that 7 years was just the right amount of time to get an entirely new generation of kids in the target audience. When I was growing up in the 1980s, I saw more classic Disney movies in the theater than new ones.
The schedule has slackened a bit recently, though.
I think the most recent regular re-release was The Little Mermaid in 1997 (8 years from the original release, and nothing since). There was also an IMAX re-release of Beauty and the Beast in 2002 (11 years), in which they added an extra song, "Human Again," that had been written for the movie, but didn't get used until they put together the Broadway version.
I don't know why Disney stopped re-releasing their films, but the timing coincides suspiciously with the appearance of direct-to-video sequels.
the conversation with him is damn near the same conversation Han had with Greedo just a minute before.
That actually was my biggest problem with the way they restored the scene. It just doesn't add anything to the movie.
I always figured that back in 1977, when they realized they couldn't use the Jabba scene, they worked the most important bits of info into the Greedo scene. Maybe they shot pick-ups, maybe they just wrote new subtitles for Greedo. For the Special Edition, since they wanted to restore the scene with Jabba, they had two ways they could do so *and* use it to enhance the movie:
1. Change Greedo's dialogue so that Jabba's isn't redundant.
2. Change Jabba's dialogue and edit the footage so that it isn't redundant.
They don't have to worry about lip-syncing Greedo or Jabba. And they were animating Jabba from scratch, so they could do whatever they wanted. The only thing that would be a pain to change would be the footage of Han -- getting Harrison Ford to dub some dialogue, getting the animators to lip-sync the visuals like Contact did with Pres. Clinton -- and even that could be rearranged.
Instead, the scene they put in is virtually identical to the scene I remember seeing in one of those making-of specials, except that it had a CGI giant slug speaking Huttese instead of a guy in a mangy fur coat speaking English.
So, do you have any better suggestions, if not then I kindly ask you to ommit your views until you can add something to the cause.
OK. Here's one. Summary execution for spammers and their families. It would solve the problem more effectively than anything else we've got.
You don't have any better suggestions? Then don't you dare criticize this one!
Sorry for the Modest Proposal (I do not advocate killing people over spam!), but the point I'm trying to make is: it's entirely legitimate to criticize an idea without suggesting an alternative. Unless you're making a split-second decision, it's worth looking at the downside before you implement a plan. Sometimes you'll decide it's worth it, at least for now, and other times you'll decide you're better off going back to the drawing board.
Had BlueSecurity chosen to temporarily route their domain name to empty IP space, or to localhost, they could have mitigated the attack on their servers without offloading the problem onto someone else's network. Yes, they would still have been offline, but at least their servers wouldn't be melting, and Six Apart wouldn't have been taken down with them.
./ has ever been DDoSed?) Maybe they figured the attack wouldn't follow the DNS change. While Blue Security is not responsible for launching the attack, they are arguably responsible for where the attack ended up. And that's something that could be the target of a civil lawsuit, even though it's (probably) not a criminal offense.
Now, I've read several articles on this, and it's not clear whether (a) Blue knew that the DDoS was targeting them by domain name (rather than by IP), or (b) whether they redirected their website before or after that phase of the DDoS started.
The way I see it -- assuming Blue did this with thir eyes open -- it's like deflecting a punch. You can deflect a punch so that it doesn't hit you, and deal with where it does hit later. Or, if you're in a kung fu movie, you can deflect the punch specifically so that it hits someone else instead. Pointing the domain name at Six Apart's network was deflecting the attack with the intention that someone else would get it.
Maybe they figured 6A had enough resources to handle it. (Hmm, anyone remember whether
Would Six Apart would want to sue? Would a judge accept the case? Would a jury would actually award them anything? Who knows.
To create a Somebody Else's Problem field? People are quite good at ignoring what they think isn't important (or what they don't want to recognize), so if you could find a way to convince people to ignore something, it would be just as effective as actual invisibility.
As others have pointed out, Mozilla does provide their own binary distributions of Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux. The vast majority of Firefox users are probably on Windows, which means incremental binary patches are a godsend in terms of time, bandwidth, and getting the masses to install security fixes.
With Linux, it depends entirely on whether you're using the Mozilla binary or your Linux distro's binary. If you want to run beta versions of Firefox, or if you want to keep current beyond what your distro provides (Mandriva 2006 still only has Firefox 1.0.x), Mozilla's binary is the simplest way to do it. Under those circumstances, you can't use your distro's package management system, but you can close the browser, log in as root, and run it once to get the update. (Or you can download the full package, log in as root, and install again. It's a matter of preference.)
many throw up a dialog that steals focus.
I think the worst must be the Norton dialogs that pop up even when you have a full-screen game running, stealing focus and dropping you back to the desktop so that it can tell you that it just updated its virus definitions.
I *think* I've disabled all the notifications for things that it's going to do automatically anyway, but we'll see...
The short form of all this is that IE7 really DOES follow standards more closely than IE6...
Oh, yeah! Of course, the issue is twofold*: There are parts of the specs that IE6 implements incorrectly, and there are parts of the specs that IE6 doesn't implement at all. They've fixed some of the bugs, and they've added support for some of the missing chunks. There's still a lot of stuff that hasn't made it into IE7, but I personally can't wait until I can ignore IE6 and just code for IE7/Gecko/Opera/KHTML instead of Gecko/Opera/KHTML with a bunch of kludges for IE6.
One can hope that, a few years down the road, either IE8 will catch up to the rest on what's implemented, or IE will no longer be relevant. From a web developer's perspective, either outcome will be a win.
*(There's a third part of the issue, of course, which is that there's no defined spec for error correction, so every browser makes different assumptions when presented with invalid code.)
I understand that... I was replying to the "how can Netflix compete" question. For me, the fact that Netflix has a lot of stuff I want to watch that Blockbuster doesn't* outweighs the benefit of the in-store coupons. I don't make spur-of-the-moment rental choices very often, so it only amounts to spending an extra $3 once every two or three months.
*(Again, it all depends on what you want to watch. I've seen a couple of movies that Blockbuster has that Netflix doesn't. Someone in another thread pointed out that Blockbuster has the option of pulling from their old store stock, so they have some movies that have since gone out of print.)
It depends on what you like to watch, of course, but the last time I checked Blockbuster Online, their animation category had maybe 20-25% as many titles as Netflix's. One of the main things I've been renting through Netflix has been anime series, several of which aren't on Blockbuster's list (yet), so it's Netflix for me for the foreseeable future. When Blockbuster's selection catches up, I may revisit things. (Both services, of course, have a much bigger selection overall than a typical brick-and-mortar store.)
That said, the Netflix/Blockbuster Online model doesn't work very well for spur-of-the-moment "I want to watch this movie tonight" decisions, so I still have both a Blockbuster card and a local video store membership.