You have to wonder as well how much of this fanboyism and fame in the pro-gaming circle would have an effect on those who face him? I mean, in real sports it is intimidating for teams to face famous opposition. If anything given that those at the very bleeding adge of pro-gaming seem to be either a) young, b) lacking in social skills and/or c) l33t - I'm sure intimidation, fear of failure and other pressures that these sort of competitions instil must be a bigger factor than in regular sports.
Would other players perform better against him if they didn't know who they were facing?
eSports also suffers from the stigma of being crushingly boring for any non-gamer to watch for the most part.
It's not really like a regular sport where any regular person can appreciate the athletic ability and skill of those playing it. Regular sports are more accessible too - by playing it yourself (and discovering how amateur you are by comparison to the pros) you gain a newfound appreciation of the achievements of those who can actually do it for a living. Contrast that with eSports - the barrier to entry is too high. You have to be computer literate for a start, something which is beyond the majority of people. It doesn't take much innate ability or pre-disposed knowledge to kick a football, hit a tennis ball, hit a baseball or dunk a basketball.
For the most part to any non-geek watching it eSports must just seem like "a load of flashing lights". No non-gamer would appreciate the significance in FPS of map dominance, using the right weapon at the right time, etc. It's "just flashing lights".
eSports will continue to be a niche sport that very few people care about not because it doesn't command the same level of intelligence or physical exertion as other sports, but simply because in pure marketing and entertainment terms it is stone dead.
Probably a bit of a cynical attitude, but in respect to attracting women - does it really matter what job you're doing if you're pulling down a 6 figure salary? I mean, money talks after all.
Another point to note is that this Fatality (I cant be bothered to l33t-ise his name) character is an exception to the norm. There are a finite number of people who are qualified enough to make a living out of it, and not unlike soccer players (or other sporting athletes) it's not like your average person can "just pick up the sport and become a pro".
This sort of story is about as valid as an exposé on some random professional sportsman.
Oddly enough, Sony is offering those who want to return the CDs the chance to download MP3 versions of the discs, but only after Sony has received the returned discs.
They probably want to determine what percentage of the people who were sufficiently outraged by XCP to go to the trouble of sending back the CD are interested in a MP3 version instead (and therefore the sort of people who would've probably tried circumventing said copy-protection in the first place) vs those who actually had genuine technical issues with it.
If it is necessary to reverse-engineer something thus breaking Sony's EULA in order to prove that Sony themselves broke the LGPL by including LAME MP3 code without the accompanying source... who is in the wrong?
If you hack into a website to prove that the company is storing customer details against the Data Protection Act (or whatever applies), are you suddenly in the right?
One thing I would say is that whilst the game is technically and graphically very good, the amount of micro-management required even with just two or three townships under your control on a map is too onerous.
The enemy AI, not unlike games like Command & Conquer, becomes fixated on constantly attacking you very early on in the game to the point where you barely have any other time free to do much else. This coupled with the fact that you have to manually create armies to defend your bases just adds to the frustration. You can assign your armies to defend certain structures, but any force that does not pass directly through this defensive circle is just left unchecked to wreak havoc. If an army manages to get past a group of archers, well.. they just sit back and watch them maraud through the town.
The collection of resource is another annoyance. You can have several storehouses (structures that store wood, grain and ore - required to feed your people/armies and build other structures) but invariably one will sit there near empty whilst the others are completely full up, even if they are placed adjacent to eachother. Again, managing this requires you to take time out and move resources around manually - something the AI is plainly incapable of doing.
It is also not always immediately obvious what the mouse is positioned over, and it can be frustratingly difficult to isolate something quite small when there are other objects that can be picked up in close proximity. Picking up individuals, for example, when your population is quite high can be annoying at times.
There are also a number of faults in how the A.I reacts to events. For example, you could position an armada of archers on your walls and towers, and if positioned correctly the enemy A.I will continue to send armies along a fixed path straight in the firing line. I counted at least 10 times where this occured (the A.I never seems to learn that its last brigade got massacred before even launching an attack themselves), before the A.I - I'm sure by chance - got blocked by an obstacle and was forced to take a different route.
Another key failing (although you could view this as intentional) is that it is difficult to earn "tribute" (essentially credits with which you can buy better structures) unless you follow the "good" path. Very early on in the game you are tasked with removing a boulder from someones garden, a task which - if you simply remove the rock - you are awarded a valuable amount of tribute. If you choose to disregard the persons cry for help, and instead throw them in the sea before depositing the rock on their house, you get nothing.
All in all, a disappointing game unless you are a fan of extreme micro-management and practically zero autonomy.
What interests me about EULAs like this are the vagueness of the terms.
"Monitor", for example, what is Blizzards intended definition of monitor? Obviously in the context of WoW it means it will look for known third-party WoW-hack fingerprints, but the semantics could equally mean it could scan your memory continuously to the point where your system degrades as a result. Is this permissable?
Strictly speaking, Windows itself would "mine" information fron the WoW process as part of its own internal memory/pagefile management system. Similarly at the very technical level Windows must assign processor timeslices in a manner that keeps the OS running smoothly. How can it do this without mining information from the WoW process?
My gut feeling with EULAs like this is that they are meant moreof as a deterrent to casual cheaters than as a legally binding document. It's feasible that people who would otherwise consider cheating might think twice if they thought Blizzard could (and would) be checking their PCs and would automatically cancel their accounts.
Newsflash: The vast majority of people who use computers ARE novices by our standards (by Slashdot standards, even "novice" is probably too gentle).
You could apply that same flawed argument against Microsoft to almost situation. I mean, if you're an experienced mechanic then a big Haynes car maintenance manual is probably "bloatware". I mean, who doesn't know how to unscrew the drain plug flange grommit from the 5th injector to release oil pressure? That's just Mechanics 101!
Relocating the keypad to the main body of the phone is "a good thing" in my opinion. As it is anyway the sheer size of the screen sucks the life out of the battery pretty sharpish if you start doing intensive things (watching videos, using Opera, etc). Also, it is already a decent aspect ratio - you wouldn't want the screen taking up the space the QWERTY keyboard occupies because it would look completely out of proportion.
Anyone who has used a P900 (ok, most people) will know that typing with the onscreen keyboard is significantly faster than the handwriting intepreter. Having the keyboard on the frame body itself means you can now use it completely one-handed.
I for one am definitely looking forward to this phone, and will upgrade my current P900 as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
It's not that a spec necessarly improves the quality of the software it just improves confidence that the people writting it have a clue about what they hope to acheive.
Hit the nail on the head.
Even if a technical specification doesn't totally reflect the final product, it inspires confidence that the development team behind it followed some sort of structure as well as hopefully demonstrating that the team has a full understanding of how the system works (for post-live support, etc).
Specification documents are the only thing in the company I work for that stops customers asking for functionality in the 11th hour of development, claiming that "they always meant that it would have that" or "I thought I mentioned that at the first meeting".
As companies go the one I work for is pretty lax with documentation, but they are very careful that all customer requirements are listed iteratively, and - more importantly - signed off on.
I have been in situations at work where for whatever reason a specification hasn't been drawn up for a customer; its either been left to informal emails or in the worst cases word-of-mouth/notes written in an initial meeting. In my experience these often end up running on past their deadline as the customer requests more and more esoteric functionality, or design and presentation tweaks that covertly require additional functionality, etc.
As a rule of thumb as a die-hard programmer I hate documentation, particularly detailed technical specifications which constrict my creativity. That said, where it is necessary I absolutely see the need for it - how else can you constrain the customer to what they originally asked for?
The key thing is that in most cases they just cool the CPU (as the logistics of trying to cool a card in a slot on a motherboard with limited access to the core/memory make other cooling near impossible). Most extremists run "A/C cooling" on their CPUs and water cooling on their graphics cards, Northbridge chips, etc.
You could in theory A/C the entire contents of the case, which would presumably work up until the point that you switched it off - at which point, I'm presuming, condensation would appear on everything that was previously generating heat. Condensation = death for computers.
Microsoft also has the luxury of having only to make an announcement about this, and nothing more. They can just as easily "reassess the market conditions" at a later date and get behind Blu-ray. Since the initial X360 won't even have an HD-DVD drive anyway, it's a non-issue for them.
Sony doesn't have this luxury - they've already bought into the technology wholesale.
Clearly this announcement smacks more of a desire to pour cold water on Blu-ray as a viable long term replacement for DVD than it does anything else. Or maybe I'm just being overly sceptical.:)
I meant in ratings terms it is equivalent, we just happen to call our "15 years or older" rating "15".. my point is that your M rating would be equivalent to our 15, if AO is the same as our 18+.
The crazy thing about GTA:SA is that speaks volumes about the differences in cultures between the US and other countries.
For example, here in the UK, GTA:SA - and its predecessors - got an 18 rating straight off the bat. That's the highest rating ELSPA (The Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association, equivalent to your ESRB/IEMA) gives to video games over here. I guess its functionally equivalent to your AO rating.
Although I'm not an expert on classifications I'm sure it earnt its 18 rating here due to the strong content - extreme violence, grand theft auto, prostitution and so on. The fact that some time down the line a hidden pixellated simulated sex mode was unlocked was just icing on the cake - the game was already strictly limited to adults anyway.
I am presuming therefore that your M (17+) rating is equivalent to our 15 rating, which presumably means you are quite happy for 15 year old American youths to play out scenes where they can mug people, shoot cops, steal cars, use the services of prostitutes and so forth - but God forbid they see some pixellated nudity and crudely simulated sexual acts.
Will someone please think of the children! (and give them some guys to protect themselves while you're at it)
Something I really liked which resonated with me for quite a while was how in Quake if a monster got hit by another monster inadvertently, it turned its attention away from you and tried to attack the thing that hit it. A monster-on-monster fight then ensued with the strongest winning out.
I think the reason it struck a chord with me was that it was behaviour that I hadn't seen before. Prior to that every FPS I had played followed a very formulaic "monster sees player, monster attacks player, player or monster dies". Hardly intelligent behaviour.
Max Payne is also something that stuck out - again not really from AI in the strictest sense of the word, more the simulation of realistic behaviour - like Quake. Come across two baddies and they start talking about how badass you are, and how they really don't want to come across you.
All scripted of course, but wouldn't it be great if their fear and dialogue was based on how accurate/infamous you currently were? Maybe if you weren't that accurate or often got hit they could joke about you, or something.
I am of the opinion that AI in games is not just about improving how monsters attack you, but the perception of them as living entities with self-preservation, their own agendas, etc.
Re:Software doesn't need to be Open Source on Linu
on
Linux Feels Growing Pains
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You make a very good point.
People seem to draw the conclusion that because Linux is principally open source, that no enterprise level support exists for it, and any application that runs on it is automatically free by association.
I run into this sort of thinking frequently at work, with management looking agast when I mention that, for example, CAs ARCserve for Linux *actually costs money* to licence. Fortunately since we've been buying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its associated support agreements) they've started to realise that it is just as enterprise-friendly as Windows.
I think people misunderstand the concerns of most businesses as well. Whilst cost is usually a driver, in my experience companies I've dealt with have had no problems spending money (often more than they need to) on Windows solutions simply because there is a perception that the full weight of Microsoft is behind it. As someone else remarked, no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
I have no problem with people hating Microsoft for its anti-competitive or other questionable practices, if it truly goes against their core principals.
The people I have a problem with are those that blindly abuse Microsoft simply because it appears to be the "done thing". I particularly find it amusing when people who have probably pirated Windows anyway complain about "huge bugs", the resolution of which is far beyond their comprehension or technical ability.
Some people fail to grasp that fixing bugs in something as monolithic as Windows is not a case of editing activex.c and changing a few lines of code. Any fixes have to be extensively tested against lab kits to ensure that they will apply on every conceivable bit of kit that people run Windows alongside. Incompatibility with Norton Antivirus, for example, is a "bugette" for most programs but is a show-stopping, front page news story for Windows & Microsoft.
Not to mention the fact that something as big as Windows will have bugs proportionate to the number of lines of code and code complexity. I don't care who you are - whether you're Microsoft or the Apache Software Foundation (or any other OSS-friendly.org) - bugs are a fact of life in complex code.
Anyway, getting back to my point - I have nothing but respect for people who choose to slate Microsoft for the things it has done in the past which are questionable (if not legally, then ethically) - whilst exclusively using Linux or another non-Windows OS.
It's those who jump on the anti-MS bandwagon at every opportunity, whilst playing the latest DirectX-powered game on Windows XP, with hardware that they installed and had running in a matter of minutes with Windows abstracted "Add New Hardware" functionality that annoy me.
FWIW I run both Linux and Windows at home, as desktops and am a sysadmin running both OS at work. So, I'm pretty impartial:)
Actually their research is valuable from a holistic point of view, and I'd argue that it is the MPAA/RIAA that is subverting P2P by doing what it's doing.
People who download music and videos illegitimately may be breaking the Law, but they are not subverting the P2P mechanism by doing so. The MPAA/RIAA are, and this represents a bigger technological obstacle to P2P as a medium than illegal files do.
This research attempts to address "the problem" of a single entity being able to corrupt the P2P mechanism and dilute confidence in the files on it. It could equally be a disgruntled ex-company employee or a rival company who could pollute the files of another entity for its own ends.
I once came across this particular "gem" in a system I was tasked with taking on from a defunct software house:/* TODO: Fix to work after 1999 */
The system in question was a financial brokerage tool which, needless to say, had plenty of chunks of code that subtracted and added arbitrary numbers to 2-digit years before reconstituting it again. What made it worse was that instead of using established library functions (it was written in Perl), or even custom written functions, these mistakes were repeated and duplicated hundreds of times throughout the codebase.
To be fair the author had the foresight (laziness?) to comment all of the sections which weren't Y2K compliant with "TODO" comments, which made it marginally easier to fix.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised these AIM worms haven't yet integrated with those award-winning AI bots used to fool other humans (e.g. Jabberwacky or ALICE).
Having said that, when I asked Jabberwacky "Is this a virus?" it said "Well, I hope so." Not very reassuring..
Good point.
You have to wonder as well how much of this fanboyism and fame in the pro-gaming circle would have an effect on those who face him? I mean, in real sports it is intimidating for teams to face famous opposition. If anything given that those at the very bleeding adge of pro-gaming seem to be either a) young, b) lacking in social skills and/or c) l33t - I'm sure intimidation, fear of failure and other pressures that these sort of competitions instil must be a bigger factor than in regular sports.
Would other players perform better against him if they didn't know who they were facing?
eSports also suffers from the stigma of being crushingly boring for any non-gamer to watch for the most part.
It's not really like a regular sport where any regular person can appreciate the athletic ability and skill of those playing it. Regular sports are more accessible too - by playing it yourself (and discovering how amateur you are by comparison to the pros) you gain a newfound appreciation of the achievements of those who can actually do it for a living. Contrast that with eSports - the barrier to entry is too high. You have to be computer literate for a start, something which is beyond the majority of people. It doesn't take much innate ability or pre-disposed knowledge to kick a football, hit a tennis ball, hit a baseball or dunk a basketball.
For the most part to any non-geek watching it eSports must just seem like "a load of flashing lights". No non-gamer would appreciate the significance in FPS of map dominance, using the right weapon at the right time, etc. It's "just flashing lights".
eSports will continue to be a niche sport that very few people care about not because it doesn't command the same level of intelligence or physical exertion as other sports, but simply because in pure marketing and entertainment terms it is stone dead.
Probably a bit of a cynical attitude, but in respect to attracting women - does it really matter what job you're doing if you're pulling down a 6 figure salary? I mean, money talks after all.
Another point to note is that this Fatality (I cant be bothered to l33t-ise his name) character is an exception to the norm. There are a finite number of people who are qualified enough to make a living out of it, and not unlike soccer players (or other sporting athletes) it's not like your average person can "just pick up the sport and become a pro".
This sort of story is about as valid as an exposé on some random professional sportsman.
Oddly enough, Sony is offering those who want to return the CDs the chance to download MP3 versions of the discs, but only after Sony has received the returned discs.
They probably want to determine what percentage of the people who were sufficiently outraged by XCP to go to the trouble of sending back the CD are interested in a MP3 version instead (and therefore the sort of people who would've probably tried circumventing said copy-protection in the first place) vs those who actually had genuine technical issues with it.
Good market research for them really.
If it is necessary to reverse-engineer something thus breaking Sony's EULA in order to prove that Sony themselves broke the LGPL by including LAME MP3 code without the accompanying source... who is in the wrong?
If you hack into a website to prove that the company is storing customer details against the Data Protection Act (or whatever applies), are you suddenly in the right?
One thing I would say is that whilst the game is technically and graphically very good, the amount of micro-management required even with just two or three townships under your control on a map is too onerous.
The enemy AI, not unlike games like Command & Conquer, becomes fixated on constantly attacking you very early on in the game to the point where you barely have any other time free to do much else. This coupled with the fact that you have to manually create armies to defend your bases just adds to the frustration. You can assign your armies to defend certain structures, but any force that does not pass directly through this defensive circle is just left unchecked to wreak havoc. If an army manages to get past a group of archers, well.. they just sit back and watch them maraud through the town.
The collection of resource is another annoyance. You can have several storehouses (structures that store wood, grain and ore - required to feed your people/armies and build other structures) but invariably one will sit there near empty whilst the others are completely full up, even if they are placed adjacent to eachother. Again, managing this requires you to take time out and move resources around manually - something the AI is plainly incapable of doing.
It is also not always immediately obvious what the mouse is positioned over, and it can be frustratingly difficult to isolate something quite small when there are other objects that can be picked up in close proximity. Picking up individuals, for example, when your population is quite high can be annoying at times.
There are also a number of faults in how the A.I reacts to events. For example, you could position an armada of archers on your walls and towers, and if positioned correctly the enemy A.I will continue to send armies along a fixed path straight in the firing line. I counted at least 10 times where this occured (the A.I never seems to learn that its last brigade got massacred before even launching an attack themselves), before the A.I - I'm sure by chance - got blocked by an obstacle and was forced to take a different route.
Another key failing (although you could view this as intentional) is that it is difficult to earn "tribute" (essentially credits with which you can buy better structures) unless you follow the "good" path. Very early on in the game you are tasked with removing a boulder from someones garden, a task which - if you simply remove the rock - you are awarded a valuable amount of tribute. If you choose to disregard the persons cry for help, and instead throw them in the sea before depositing the rock on their house, you get nothing.
All in all, a disappointing game unless you are a fan of extreme micro-management and practically zero autonomy.
What interests me about EULAs like this are the vagueness of the terms.
"Monitor", for example, what is Blizzards intended definition of monitor? Obviously in the context of WoW it means it will look for known third-party WoW-hack fingerprints, but the semantics could equally mean it could scan your memory continuously to the point where your system degrades as a result. Is this permissable?
Strictly speaking, Windows itself would "mine" information fron the WoW process as part of its own internal memory/pagefile management system. Similarly at the very technical level Windows must assign processor timeslices in a manner that keeps the OS running smoothly. How can it do this without mining information from the WoW process?
My gut feeling with EULAs like this is that they are meant moreof as a deterrent to casual cheaters than as a legally binding document. It's feasible that people who would otherwise consider cheating might think twice if they thought Blizzard could (and would) be checking their PCs and would automatically cancel their accounts.
"Spaceballs" ? Hmm, that appears to be taken too..
Ok, so it's not the best press a company can get - but as the old saying goes, "Any publicity is good publicity".
Newsflash: The vast majority of people who use computers ARE novices by our standards (by Slashdot standards, even "novice" is probably too gentle).
You could apply that same flawed argument against Microsoft to almost situation. I mean, if you're an experienced mechanic then a big Haynes car maintenance manual is probably "bloatware". I mean, who doesn't know how to unscrew the drain plug flange grommit from the 5th injector to release oil pressure? That's just Mechanics 101!
If past history is anything to go by, they'll probably all end up getting highly paid security jobs.
Relocating the keypad to the main body of the phone is "a good thing" in my opinion. As it is anyway the sheer size of the screen sucks the life out of the battery pretty sharpish if you start doing intensive things (watching videos, using Opera, etc). Also, it is already a decent aspect ratio - you wouldn't want the screen taking up the space the QWERTY keyboard occupies because it would look completely out of proportion.
Anyone who has used a P900 (ok, most people) will know that typing with the onscreen keyboard is significantly faster than the handwriting intepreter. Having the keyboard on the frame body itself means you can now use it completely one-handed.
I for one am definitely looking forward to this phone, and will upgrade my current P900 as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
It's not that a spec necessarly improves the quality of the software it just improves confidence that the people writting it have a clue about what they hope to acheive.
Hit the nail on the head.
Even if a technical specification doesn't totally reflect the final product, it inspires confidence that the development team behind it followed some sort of structure as well as hopefully demonstrating that the team has a full understanding of how the system works (for post-live support, etc).
Specification documents are the only thing in the company I work for that stops customers asking for functionality in the 11th hour of development, claiming that "they always meant that it would have that" or "I thought I mentioned that at the first meeting".
As companies go the one I work for is pretty lax with documentation, but they are very careful that all customer requirements are listed iteratively, and - more importantly - signed off on.
I have been in situations at work where for whatever reason a specification hasn't been drawn up for a customer; its either been left to informal emails or in the worst cases word-of-mouth/notes written in an initial meeting. In my experience these often end up running on past their deadline as the customer requests more and more esoteric functionality, or design and presentation tweaks that covertly require additional functionality, etc.
As a rule of thumb as a die-hard programmer I hate documentation, particularly detailed technical specifications which constrict my creativity. That said, where it is necessary I absolutely see the need for it - how else can you constrain the customer to what they originally asked for?
Companies like Asetek and Extreme Prometeia already have PC systems like this.
The key thing is that in most cases they just cool the CPU (as the logistics of trying to cool a card in a slot on a motherboard with limited access to the core/memory make other cooling near impossible). Most extremists run "A/C cooling" on their CPUs and water cooling on their graphics cards, Northbridge chips, etc.
You could in theory A/C the entire contents of the case, which would presumably work up until the point that you switched it off - at which point, I'm presuming, condensation would appear on everything that was previously generating heat. Condensation = death for computers.
Microsoft also has the luxury of having only to make an announcement about this, and nothing more. They can just as easily "reassess the market conditions" at a later date and get behind Blu-ray. Since the initial X360 won't even have an HD-DVD drive anyway, it's a non-issue for them.
:)
Sony doesn't have this luxury - they've already bought into the technology wholesale.
Clearly this announcement smacks more of a desire to pour cold water on Blu-ray as a viable long term replacement for DVD than it does anything else. Or maybe I'm just being overly sceptical.
I meant in ratings terms it is equivalent, we just happen to call our "15 years or older" rating "15".. my point is that your M rating would be equivalent to our 15, if AO is the same as our 18+.
The crazy thing about GTA:SA is that speaks volumes about the differences in cultures between the US and other countries.
For example, here in the UK, GTA:SA - and its predecessors - got an 18 rating straight off the bat. That's the highest rating ELSPA (The Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association, equivalent to your ESRB/IEMA) gives to video games over here. I guess its functionally equivalent to your AO rating.
Although I'm not an expert on classifications I'm sure it earnt its 18 rating here due to the strong content - extreme violence, grand theft auto, prostitution and so on. The fact that some time down the line a hidden pixellated simulated sex mode was unlocked was just icing on the cake - the game was already strictly limited to adults anyway.
I am presuming therefore that your M (17+) rating is equivalent to our 15 rating, which presumably means you are quite happy for 15 year old American youths to play out scenes where they can mug people, shoot cops, steal cars, use the services of prostitutes and so forth - but God forbid they see some pixellated nudity and crudely simulated sexual acts.
Will someone please think of the children! (and give them some guys to protect themselves while you're at it)
Something I really liked which resonated with me for quite a while was how in Quake if a monster got hit by another monster inadvertently, it turned its attention away from you and tried to attack the thing that hit it. A monster-on-monster fight then ensued with the strongest winning out.
I think the reason it struck a chord with me was that it was behaviour that I hadn't seen before. Prior to that every FPS I had played followed a very formulaic "monster sees player, monster attacks player, player or monster dies". Hardly intelligent behaviour.
Max Payne is also something that stuck out - again not really from AI in the strictest sense of the word, more the simulation of realistic behaviour - like Quake. Come across two baddies and they start talking about how badass you are, and how they really don't want to come across you.
All scripted of course, but wouldn't it be great if their fear and dialogue was based on how accurate/infamous you currently were? Maybe if you weren't that accurate or often got hit they could joke about you, or something.
I am of the opinion that AI in games is not just about improving how monsters attack you, but the perception of them as living entities with self-preservation, their own agendas, etc.
You make a very good point.
People seem to draw the conclusion that because Linux is principally open source, that no enterprise level support exists for it, and any application that runs on it is automatically free by association.
I run into this sort of thinking frequently at work, with management looking agast when I mention that, for example, CAs ARCserve for Linux *actually costs money* to licence. Fortunately since we've been buying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its associated support agreements) they've started to realise that it is just as enterprise-friendly as Windows.
I think people misunderstand the concerns of most businesses as well. Whilst cost is usually a driver, in my experience companies I've dealt with have had no problems spending money (often more than they need to) on Windows solutions simply because there is a perception that the full weight of Microsoft is behind it. As someone else remarked, no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
Gone a bit OT there, but there you go.
I have no problem with people hating Microsoft for its anti-competitive or other questionable practices, if it truly goes against their core principals.
.org) - bugs are a fact of life in complex code.
:)
The people I have a problem with are those that blindly abuse Microsoft simply because it appears to be the "done thing". I particularly find it amusing when people who have probably pirated Windows anyway complain about "huge bugs", the resolution of which is far beyond their comprehension or technical ability.
Some people fail to grasp that fixing bugs in something as monolithic as Windows is not a case of editing activex.c and changing a few lines of code. Any fixes have to be extensively tested against lab kits to ensure that they will apply on every conceivable bit of kit that people run Windows alongside. Incompatibility with Norton Antivirus, for example, is a "bugette" for most programs but is a show-stopping, front page news story for Windows & Microsoft.
Not to mention the fact that something as big as Windows will have bugs proportionate to the number of lines of code and code complexity. I don't care who you are - whether you're Microsoft or the Apache Software Foundation (or any other OSS-friendly
Anyway, getting back to my point - I have nothing but respect for people who choose to slate Microsoft for the things it has done in the past which are questionable (if not legally, then ethically) - whilst exclusively using Linux or another non-Windows OS.
It's those who jump on the anti-MS bandwagon at every opportunity, whilst playing the latest DirectX-powered game on Windows XP, with hardware that they installed and had running in a matter of minutes with Windows abstracted "Add New Hardware" functionality that annoy me.
FWIW I run both Linux and Windows at home, as desktops and am a sysadmin running both OS at work. So, I'm pretty impartial
Actually their research is valuable from a holistic point of view, and I'd argue that it is the MPAA/RIAA that is subverting P2P by doing what it's doing.
People who download music and videos illegitimately may be breaking the Law, but they are not subverting the P2P mechanism by doing so. The MPAA/RIAA are, and this represents a bigger technological obstacle to P2P as a medium than illegal files do.
This research attempts to address "the problem" of a single entity being able to corrupt the P2P mechanism and dilute confidence in the files on it. It could equally be a disgruntled ex-company employee or a rival company who could pollute the files of another entity for its own ends.
If I had mod points I'd mod parent up - the article was a fascinating and informative read.
I once came across this particular "gem" in a system I was tasked with taking on from a defunct software house: /* TODO: Fix to work after 1999 */
The system in question was a financial brokerage tool which, needless to say, had plenty of chunks of code that subtracted and added arbitrary numbers to 2-digit years before reconstituting it again. What made it worse was that instead of using established library functions (it was written in Perl), or even custom written functions, these mistakes were repeated and duplicated hundreds of times throughout the codebase.
To be fair the author had the foresight (laziness?) to comment all of the sections which weren't Y2K compliant with "TODO" comments, which made it marginally easier to fix.