...assuming you have good competition in the market you are paying for.
Let's say Billy sets up a gaming review website and charges a small amount of money for each of his articles. If enough people like his articles, he could quite his job or take a part time job and spend all his time creating better content.
Now Billy starts overpricing his content and slacking off on the quality of his content. This is where Bob steps in. Bob sees he can give better quality content cheaper and make a living off of it. If Billy doesn't start producing better quality content, he's not going to get enough money anymore and go back to his day job.
This is basic economics (which a lot of Slashdotters seem to try to ignore), but on the Internet it's a little bit different. Unlike the real world, all the user has to do is click on over to another site and pay them if they have better quality content. This can cause some extreme competition and with money involved people will compete as hard as they can for the consumers money.
One of the reasons why Linux is so hard to support is that every distribution of Linux has a different set of standards. They have different directories to put config files in, and different formats for the config files. Distros come with different versions of libraries, some which break binary compatibility between versions. Different shells and window managers make it difficult to help a user install or configure something.
Linux distros need to start following some set of standards, mainly configuration standards that will allow people to help new users better at installing libraries and configuring the system. Until then, Linux is just fighting with itself and preventing commercial software from coming in.
Game programming is one of the top most difficult industries in computers. You need to create fast performing code that uses top of the line hardware that most users don't have yet. You also have to do all this in very small time spans. Games have a small turn around time due to the demand and competition and also the rate at which new hardware is phased out.
So what I am trying to say is that almost all game companies want people with industry experience that will prove that they have these capabilities. Graduating from college with a degree doesn't prove you are a whole lot better than most people, even if you come from a name school. If you have a sample game or something you did on your spare time then that might prove something about you. I've been applying to game companies for a while and the only response I get is to apply again after a few years when I have real industry experience.
I don't know if this works the same in a military setting but, if you have more money to spend on lawyers than the other people who are trying to change the licensing on your software then you can most likely prove your right and win the software back in court. If not you might as well give in to the opposition. This is pretty much how it works everywhere in America, and I'm assuming you are in the US.
Crackers used to use a coil of cables wrapped around the harddrive and hooked up to a 120V outlet and a lightswitch. Then if someone came into the house to confiscate the computer and hit the wrong light switch when entering the room, the 120 volts through the coil of cables would generate a massive electo magnetic field that would wipe out all the contents of the drive and be completely unrecoverable. Of course you might have a lot of melted wires on the drive too.
What I would like to see is a combination of both of these. For example when I am browsing around in a file manager, sometimes I want to just rightclick and delete a file or something simple. Other times I want to type in a script name to run on the file. I think the best way to do this would be to have a command line space on the bottom of the file manager. The command line space's working directory would be whatever the current working directory in the file manager is. Then I can do my gui stuff in the file manager, and then type in stuff on the bottom if I needed to. Basically a bash shell whos working directory stayed in synch with the file managers directory. It's the best of both worlds.
How does condeming the content of this site have anything to do with free speech?? Personally if these people really are sticking cats in jars then they should personally be crammed into a jar like so and the site taken off line. Now while I do believe in free speech, the problem with a site like this is that to take the picture would involve injuring an animal, and physically injuring animals to take an amusing photo is not free speech! If it was computer generated or faked properly then I don't really care if it's up or not if it makes a few people happy.
Also another problem with these kinds of sites is that even if this content was not intended to be real, there are always idiots in this world that will think it is real and really try it.
...as a typical slashdot posting would say. Now really DDoSing may be a simple thing to pull off but it's damaging and annoying to many people so why not arrest the little script kiddie? Maybe it will serve as an example to all the other kiddies out there. Saying that websites should be more secure instead of arresting crackers, script kiddies, etc is the same thing as saying we should be creating better bullet proof vest rather than arresting phsychotic gunmen.
Linux needs to stop fighting with itself
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 1
The first thing Linux needs to do is get a set of standards and stick with it. Too many distributions are too different. Many require their own configuration programs, directory structure and package managers. It makes going from one distro to another a huge chore in relearning the Linux distro. We can't have distributions branching off into multiple directions, we need to have a concerted effort and come up with standards so that all distributions work fundamentally the same. Instead of distros competeing with each other and working on their own projects and their own "standards", people should work together so that Linux can advance faster.
See with windows, every OS is the same, things like tech support, installing programs and helping new users do something is much easier on windows because everyone will know just how windows will work and how to get something done. With Linux you got different directory structures, different configuration program and config scripts, different package managers... How is someone suppose to help someone solve a problem in Linux when they can't even figure out how to get something to work on their distro!
Right now I'm doing a research project on cross platform development. One of the major reasons why companies don't create commercial products for linux is that they can't support the product on Linux systems do to the lack of standards and knowledge of Linux.
I guess one of the important issues that needs to be solved first is how our mental development is related to what we obtain genetically. That is if you clone two people from the exact same DNA, are they going to be exactly the same mentally, or are their mental characteristics determined by the environment they are brought up in?
This has been disputed many times over and over. The first real life case is where two twins were seperated a birth. Both grew up to be firefighters and had the same personality and active lifestyles. Neither of the two twins ever knew about the other one until late in their lives though. This shows that something in there mental characteristics was inherited from their genes. The second case is two more identical twins. Two identical twins were born and were exactly the same in all physical characteristics yet had completely different personalities. They were born at the exact same time from the same parent and so from the same genes, yet their personalities varied completely.
Both of these cases can probably be seen every day in identical twins. How many twins do you know of that have personalities that are identical, or completely opposite? So this brings me to my final question. If you clone someone from someone's genes, how do you know they are going to have the exact same personality just because they have the same genes? The only part that can be considered a "clone" is the very initial stages of life in the egg. Once the baby is born and starts to develop it's personality, it may then become a completely different person. I don't think people will lose their individuality when they create a clone of themselves any more than if they were born with an identical twin.
Although there are very basic mental characteristic inherited genetically, a person is still shaped by the enviroment they are brought up in more than anything they inherit mentally. A clone will just create an initial "skeleton" of a person. This skeleton will then evolve into whatever it wishes based on the world around it, and this world will be different from the world of the original person the clone was from.
We need another Cold War.
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 1
Well not exactly, but the reason America was so involved with the space program is because we were competeing with the Russians. The only way to get the government to do anything is to make our country look bad compared to others. Maybe if we had another super power someday that could compete with us in a space program, then our space program would start up again.
You know people who want porn are going to go out and get it somewhere, and as long as people are demanding it, people will be supplying it. You can't make porn go away. So if pedophiles want their child porn and can't get it virutally, then they are just going to get it through images of real children, just like they always have. It's better that pedophiles get it through virtual images rather than images of real children.
Dumb to you but what about other people?
on
Antitrust
·
· Score: 1
Most people, or at least most Americans, learn everything from movies and TV. This may be the only insight most people have into Open Source and Corperate practices, so even if it only shows a slight peek at how Open Source could help the world better and possibly corperate control over people, then maybe we should be supporting the movie and other such endeavors more.
Just look at the game Quake when it came out and after the source was released. Yes there was cheating when the source was closed, but there is a lot more cheating now that the source is open. There are ways to solve the problems if the source is open, but they would have been inefficient back in the days when Quake came out. Security is a tradeoff between performance and security. The higher the security the lower the performance of the product. In most products this is not a problem, but with a game that's designed to work over a modem, performance is critical.
Let's take and example from Quake. Quake sends extra data to a user for prediction purposes, like where a users location is even though the user is not suppose to see that person. This is so that if the user doesn't get a packet update with the other users location in time, then the users client side can predict where the other user will be and if he is about to pop out of a corner and be visible. Sure this data can be taken away from the user to prevent cheating, but then the performance of the game drops critically. The users have to be kept unaware that this information is available to them.
So what are some possible solutions? Well, not sending the data to the user is the best solution but then this will decrease performance. The users framerate and updates on what other people were doing would effectivly be limited by their ping time or modem speed. What about encrypting the data? Well, somewhere on the clients machine the user has to decrypt the data and perform calculations on it so the data is still available. How about hiding the data inside of a binary that the user does not have the source for and therefore does not know where to look for the data? This will prevent the user from finding the data while still allowing the client program access to the data, although only until the user gets smarts and finds where the data is hidden. This is a tradeoff between security and performance.
So what is the ultimate security protection? Well just have keystrokes sent to a server, then have the server render an image, a "screenshot" of the game, and then send it to the users machine to be drawn. This way no information is sent to the user except for an image which only the user can interpret. Is this very secure? Yes, but the level of performance would be horribly low. Somewhere a tradeoff has to be made between what information a user is allowed to see to increase performance and what information stays hidden.
That's just my splurge of the day, wonder if it makes sense...
When you put in your salary range put in the lowest possible range. You'll look less appealing to marketers if you have no money to give them. =) Also see if you can do the same thing with other questions on the form.
The biggest issue that needs to be addressed in development is to design the games to be platform independant. You will not get any developers to create games specifically for linux, you will have to get them to create games for both linux and windows at the same time, or at least port their game from windows. The problem this leads to is that developers are not going to rewrite their game twice, hence the creation of companies like Loki, so the best thing developers need to do is to write their game for multiple platforms at the same time, using cross platform libraries(SDL is a very popular one) or better design techniques. There is alot of FUD about cross platform development (extreme performance loss, difficulty in designing...). Currently there is an interesting college research project going on that gives alot of good information about this topic. The server for research project goes up and down a lot so keep trying...
Well LaTeX files can compile into nice looking.pdf files which are viewable on any platform, plus they look exactly the same on every platform. Postscript also prints out very nicely and can be handled by just about any printer and platform. LaTeX is all I use for all my papers and documents I need to write.
There's also XML. I'm not sure how portable and consistant documents look using XML but it's supposed to be a portable document format.
So what type of databases were broken into? MS, Oracle, etc... The articles always fail to mention this. If it's consistantly the same database then people might take a little more caution when using it or not use it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say Billy sets up a gaming review website and charges a small amount of money for each of his articles. If enough people like his articles, he could quite his job or take a part time job and spend all his time creating better content.
Now Billy starts overpricing his content and slacking off on the quality of his content. This is where Bob steps in. Bob sees he can give better quality content cheaper and make a living off of it. If Billy doesn't start producing better quality content, he's not going to get enough money anymore and go back to his day job.
This is basic economics (which a lot of Slashdotters seem to try to ignore), but on the Internet it's a little bit different. Unlike the real world, all the user has to do is click on over to another site and pay them if they have better quality content. This can cause some extreme competition and with money involved people will compete as hard as they can for the consumers money.
Making the ads bigger doesn't mean they're going to get through Mozillas image blocking or a webfilter any easier.
One of the reasons why Linux is so hard to support is that every distribution of Linux has a different set of standards. They have different directories to put config files in, and different formats for the config files. Distros come with different versions of libraries, some which break binary compatibility between versions. Different shells and window managers make it difficult to help a user install or configure something.
Linux distros need to start following some set of standards, mainly configuration standards that will allow people to help new users better at installing libraries and configuring the system. Until then, Linux is just fighting with itself and preventing commercial software from coming in.
Game programming is one of the top most difficult industries in computers. You need to create fast performing code that uses top of the line hardware that most users don't have yet. You also have to do all this in very small time spans. Games have a small turn around time due to the demand and competition and also the rate at which new hardware is phased out.
So what I am trying to say is that almost all game companies want people with industry experience that will prove that they have these capabilities. Graduating from college with a degree doesn't prove you are a whole lot better than most people, even if you come from a name school. If you have a sample game or something you did on your spare time then that might prove something about you. I've been applying to game companies for a while and the only response I get is to apply again after a few years when I have real industry experience.
I don't know if this works the same in a military setting but, if you have more money to spend on lawyers than the other people who are trying to change the licensing on your software then you can most likely prove your right and win the software back in court. If not you might as well give in to the opposition. This is pretty much how it works everywhere in America, and I'm assuming you are in the US.
M$ is just so used to buying companies that they didn't know how to sell Corel and ended up selling it at half the price.
Crackers used to use a coil of cables wrapped around the harddrive and hooked up to a 120V outlet and a lightswitch. Then if someone came into the house to confiscate the computer and hit the wrong light switch when entering the room, the 120 volts through the coil of cables would generate a massive electo magnetic field that would wipe out all the contents of the drive and be completely unrecoverable. Of course you might have a lot of melted wires on the drive too.
On a side note, are there any arguments against Free software that are actually more specific than "stifles innovation"?
I like spending money? And in Windows case, on lower quality products?
What I would like to see is a combination of both of these. For example when I am browsing around in a file manager, sometimes I want to just rightclick and delete a file or something simple. Other times I want to type in a script name to run on the file. I think the best way to do this would be to have a command line space on the bottom of the file manager. The command line space's working directory would be whatever the current working directory in the file manager is. Then I can do my gui stuff in the file manager, and then type in stuff on the bottom if I needed to. Basically a bash shell whos working directory stayed in synch with the file managers directory. It's the best of both worlds.
Also another problem with these kinds of sites is that even if this content was not intended to be real, there are always idiots in this world that will think it is real and really try it.
The first thing Linux needs to do is get a set of standards and stick with it. Too many distributions are too different. Many require their own configuration programs, directory structure and package managers. It makes going from one distro to another a huge chore in relearning the Linux distro. We can't have distributions branching off into multiple directions, we need to have a concerted effort and come up with standards so that all distributions work fundamentally the same. Instead of distros competeing with each other and working on their own projects and their own "standards", people should work together so that Linux can advance faster.
See with windows, every OS is the same, things like tech support, installing programs and helping new users do something is much easier on windows because everyone will know just how windows will work and how to get something done. With Linux you got different directory structures, different configuration program and config scripts, different package managers... How is someone suppose to help someone solve a problem in Linux when they can't even figure out how to get something to work on their distro!
Right now I'm doing a research project on cross platform development. One of the major reasons why companies don't create commercial products for linux is that they can't support the product on Linux systems do to the lack of standards and knowledge of Linux.
I guess one of the important issues that needs to be solved first is how our mental development is related to what we obtain genetically. That is if you clone two people from the exact same DNA, are they going to be exactly the same mentally, or are their mental characteristics determined by the environment they are brought up in?
This has been disputed many times over and over. The first real life case is where two twins were seperated a birth. Both grew up to be firefighters and had the same personality and active lifestyles. Neither of the two twins ever knew about the other one until late in their lives though. This shows that something in there mental characteristics was inherited from their genes. The second case is two more identical twins. Two identical twins were born and were exactly the same in all physical characteristics yet had completely different personalities. They were born at the exact same time from the same parent and so from the same genes, yet their personalities varied completely.
Both of these cases can probably be seen every day in identical twins. How many twins do you know of that have personalities that are identical, or completely opposite? So this brings me to my final question. If you clone someone from someone's genes, how do you know they are going to have the exact same personality just because they have the same genes? The only part that can be considered a "clone" is the very initial stages of life in the egg. Once the baby is born and starts to develop it's personality, it may then become a completely different person. I don't think people will lose their individuality when they create a clone of themselves any more than if they were born with an identical twin.
Although there are very basic mental characteristic inherited genetically, a person is still shaped by the enviroment they are brought up in more than anything they inherit mentally. A clone will just create an initial "skeleton" of a person. This skeleton will then evolve into whatever it wishes based on the world around it, and this world will be different from the world of the original person the clone was from.
Well not exactly, but the reason America was so involved with the space program is because we were competeing with the Russians. The only way to get the government to do anything is to make our country look bad compared to others. Maybe if we had another super power someday that could compete with us in a space program, then our space program would start up again.
I don't get it, why would they sell off their Linux division? Also, didn't Corel make a deal with MS lately...
You know people who want porn are going to go out and get it somewhere, and as long as people are demanding it, people will be supplying it. You can't make porn go away. So if pedophiles want their child porn and can't get it virutally, then they are just going to get it through images of real children, just like they always have. It's better that pedophiles get it through virtual images rather than images of real children.
Most people, or at least most Americans, learn everything from movies and TV. This may be the only insight most people have into Open Source and Corperate practices, so even if it only shows a slight peek at how Open Source could help the world better and possibly corperate control over people, then maybe we should be supporting the movie and other such endeavors more.
Just look at the game Quake when it came out and after the source was released. Yes there was cheating when the source was closed, but there is a lot more cheating now that the source is open. There are ways to solve the problems if the source is open, but they would have been inefficient back in the days when Quake came out. Security is a tradeoff between performance and security. The higher the security the lower the performance of the product. In most products this is not a problem, but with a game that's designed to work over a modem, performance is critical.
Let's take and example from Quake. Quake sends extra data to a user for prediction purposes, like where a users location is even though the user is not suppose to see that person. This is so that if the user doesn't get a packet update with the other users location in time, then the users client side can predict where the other user will be and if he is about to pop out of a corner and be visible. Sure this data can be taken away from the user to prevent cheating, but then the performance of the game drops critically. The users have to be kept unaware that this information is available to them.
So what are some possible solutions? Well, not sending the data to the user is the best solution but then this will decrease performance. The users framerate and updates on what other people were doing would effectivly be limited by their ping time or modem speed. What about encrypting the data? Well, somewhere on the clients machine the user has to decrypt the data and perform calculations on it so the data is still available. How about hiding the data inside of a binary that the user does not have the source for and therefore does not know where to look for the data? This will prevent the user from finding the data while still allowing the client program access to the data, although only until the user gets smarts and finds where the data is hidden. This is a tradeoff between security and performance.
So what is the ultimate security protection? Well just have keystrokes sent to a server, then have the server render an image, a "screenshot" of the game, and then send it to the users machine to be drawn. This way no information is sent to the user except for an image which only the user can interpret. Is this very secure? Yes, but the level of performance would be horribly low. Somewhere a tradeoff has to be made between what information a user is allowed to see to increase performance and what information stays hidden.
That's just my splurge of the day, wonder if it makes sense...When you put in your salary range put in the lowest possible range. You'll look less appealing to marketers if you have no money to give them. =) Also see if you can do the same thing with other questions on the form.
"During todays first test of the laser weilding 747, a freak accident occured and the DOJ headquarters was turned into a raging inferno..."
The biggest issue that needs to be addressed in development is to design the games to be platform independant. You will not get any developers to create games specifically for linux, you will have to get them to create games for both linux and windows at the same time, or at least port their game from windows. The problem this leads to is that developers are not going to rewrite their game twice, hence the creation of companies like Loki, so the best thing developers need to do is to write their game for multiple platforms at the same time, using cross platform libraries(SDL is a very popular one) or better design techniques. There is alot of FUD about cross platform development (extreme performance loss, difficulty in designing...). Currently there is an interesting college research project going on that gives alot of good information about this topic. The server for research project goes up and down a lot so keep trying...
Well LaTeX files can compile into nice looking .pdf files which are viewable on any platform, plus they look exactly the same on every platform. Postscript also prints out very nicely and can be handled by just about any printer and platform. LaTeX is all I use for all my papers and documents I need to write.
There's also XML. I'm not sure how portable and consistant documents look using XML but it's supposed to be a portable document format.
So what type of databases were broken into? MS, Oracle, etc... The articles always fail to mention this. If it's consistantly the same database then people might take a little more caution when using it or not use it at all.
So how did he get the card numbers? What kind of server was storing the CC numbers?
I'm confused now. Did Dune take place on Arrakkis or in Whooville?