I'm serious here. Did anyone feel any compassion for the people that Ender killed? No. They were cardboard cutouts of evil that existed solely so that Ender could overcome them as part of his character development. But not KNOW that he had killed them. Because Ender has to be innocent.
Yes, and the innocent boy wipes out an entire sentient species. Meanwhile his psychotic, megalomaniac brother brings about world peace but only as a means to seizing supreme world power for himself.
It's not about survival or teen nerd wish fulfillment, it's about how our much our intentions matter as compared to our actions.
There's a similar though smaller revolt going on over the changes to Yahoo's Fantasy Football. The nasty thing about the Fantasy Football changes is that they didn't roll them out until two weeks before the start of the season, after lots of people had already paid as much as $250 to join pro leagues.
Yahoo went so far as to post an announcement to every league that they won't be going back to the original format (but they really appreciate your comments!).
When I see vertical-takeoff-vertical-landing my first thought is Armadillo Aerospace and their years of work on those rockets. Now that Armadillo is largely mothballed, have some of their guys turned up at SpaceX?
Why? For e-commerce. Especially for products that are made to order, anything that cuts down on return rates ("this isn't what I thought I saw on the website") is worth putting some money into. I'm working on exactly this sort of project right now and we finally made the decision to cut 3D because support is so patchy.
End user support isn't the whole problem though. You also need 3D models with enough detail to look smooth but small enough to deliver over the web. If you can even get 3D models for a product they're usually the designer's CAD files which are huge and not easily converted to a format used by a gaming-type 3D engine.
The impact of this is actually pretty wide. Crypt_blowfish has been gaining popularity as a hashing algorithm in PHP thanks to Openwall's PHPass framework. Four years ago most PHP projects that I know were still using MD5 or SHA1 to hash passwords. Today those MD5 and SHA1 hashes can be brute-force cracked by free software running on a $200 GPU in a matter of days if not hours. So even a buggy version of Blowfish is still better by far.
So yeah, it's a wide-ranging bug but not a world breaking one. For starters it only affects passwords that use 8-bit characters, so passwords typed by anyone using a US-English keyboard still produce the same hashes as the correct Blowfish implementation.
For passwords of length n*4-1 (3, 7, 11, 15,...), 8-bit characters in certain positions will result in some characters being ignored by the hash function. This makes it possible (though still not easy) to produce a collision, i.e. multiple different passwords that result in the same hash.
It's bad, but I want to stress that using even a buggy crypt_blowfish for password hashing is still a quantum leap over the single-hashed MD5 or SHA1 that you were seeing literally everywhere in the PHP world just a few years ago.
Anyone care to speculate on the likelyhood of widespread blowfish use by public sites?
Wide. Many major PHP projects have been moving toward Openwall's PHPass algorithm that uses Blowfish as its preferred hashing algorithm. Note that even with this bug it's still better than the unsalted MD5 or SHA1 hashes that most projects were using previously. Today any of those old hashes can be brute-force cracked by a $200 GPU in about a day.
As a side note, it's unlikely that Firefox 4 final will pass the Acid3 test, despite this being a very popular demand amongst silly people who don't understand web development.
The Acid tests are demos, not unit tests of HTML compliance. I would rather see real progress in areas where FF is truly weak (like, say, the crappy SVG renderer) than worry about those last three pips on Acid3.
Except that his story isn't that hard to believe. I can remember busting out 20-page papers overnight when I was in college and I'm not a particularly fast writer. It's easy to imagine that someone with enough practice and motivation could churn out papers like this for a living.
Today I code web applications and I recognize the process he describes. He has essentially built a research paper "framework" that lets him quickly build products that fit a baseline set of requirements. In fact it sounds like he rarely even has to come up with a true finished product, essentially building one proof-of-concept after another. It's amazing how fast you can work when you honestly don't care about the details.
How many code geeks will spends hours and days and weeks over meaningless bullshit projects just because they can? This guy does the same thing with words and he found a way to get paid for it.
The writer of TFA clearly specializes in writing. He/she probably has a good academic prose style, and good research skills, along with a jstor subscription or nearby university library. Quite possibly, he did a liberal arts or social science degree, which gave him the necessary practice; but found the job market unexciting with those credentials.
Go back and read TFA. I'm saying this not to be an asshole but because it's genuinely fascinating.
The author states that:
* He went to college to be a writer and found out that there's more than one way to get paid for what you write.
* He uses mainly Wikipedia (for background), Amazon for the free pages, and Google Academics for the abstracts. Everything else he spins from educated guesswork and outright bullshit with lots and lots of filler.
* He doesn't edit his work at all, this helps him work faster and heads off requests for him to "dumb it down".
* His clients often thank him for making typos (presumably because it looks more authentic that way).
He's not producing high quality work for top honors, he's producing "good enough" work for the sake of graduating at all. It may pay to get A's but C's get degrees, etc.
I've said for years that not everybody needs a college degree. I would guess (I would hope) that this guy is helping along the raft of mediocre graduates who won't ever really use their degree except as resume fodder. Unfortunately this just devalues college degrees even more so that employers keep on requiring degrees for jobs that don't really need special training.
He's right about one thing, blame the colleges that are more interested in collecting tuition fees than in producing actual, competent scholars.
(TFA doesn't say if there were directions, like "Solve for the missing quantity in parentheses" or something like that.) I bet more people would have understood if they used something like x. Maybe they were trying to avoid "scary" variables for middle schoolers, but that's actually exactly when I remember learning what they were--if not, the year before.
Proper directions make all the difference.
When I was a kid math classes weren't on different tracks until middle school. Near the end of sixth grade I was given a test to see if I could handle the highest track which taught algebra. But of course, I had never seen algebra before so the test itself had to explain some basic concepts. Which it did. In surprisingly clear and simple language that had me solving for "x" in minutes. Each page introduced a new algebraic concept and I was eating it up.
The test was designed to be more work than a kid could finish in the time limit but I got pretty damn far. The irony is that I spent the next year in a basic algebra class that taught me very little I hadn't already learned from that tracking test.
I wish I still had that test. Whoever wrote it deserved a medal.
For Jimmy's Indie Brewz, locations 1, the wifi is probably just some router on a DSL line. Integrating a code system would either mean forking over $$$$ to his POS vendor, if they even offer that, or hoping that his cousin is one of those "linux hackers".
If Jimmy doesn't know how to run his WiFi then why is he trying to sell it? I know nothing about coffee; if I tried to sell coffee I would go bankrupt. Even if you "sell" WiFi access for free as a loss leader, it's still a product. Stick to products you understand or hire someone who knows the product you're trying to sell. That's Business 101.
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is a wretched book. Nobody but the hardest-core SF geek would give a shit about it today if David Peoples and Ridley Scott hadn't turned it into a movie that was 100x better. So just who is riding who's coattails?
It's not as if only PKD's brilliant, visionary mind could have come up with putting a number after the word "nexus" to make a cool-sounding name.
I finally got tired of the $75/month, the cable box meltdowns every three months (Scientific Atlanta FTL), and the generally craptastic quality of over-compressed video from Brighthouse. Six months ago I told them where to shove it and never looked back. Now I get TV series on DVD from Netflix, occasionally catch a new show on Hulu, and use some good ol' rabbit ears to get my local channels (which look great in over-the-air digital, better than they ever did through the cable).
Screw cable. I'm done with paying for a raft of crap I don't need to subsidize their other businesses. And I'm certainly done with their obsessive consumer lock-in.
It's a geek badge of honor. I own a few and I love them like my children (okay not really, maybe like my pets) but part of that comes from the effort I put in to scrounge them and clean them up myself. I do like the feel of typing on a Model M but what I love is the feeling of gravitas (figuratively and literally, it's really heavy).
Vintage hardware is neat but most of it is of no practical use today. Is there any other part of a 20-year-old computer that you could still use for day-to-day tasks? A Model M lets you feel old-school without actually having to live in the bad old days of floppy disks and 300 baud modems.
I type on my wife's Mac keyboard and it's fine. I type on a rubber dome keyboard at work and it does the job too. Maybe I would feel differently if my job required pumping out hundreds of thousands of words very quickly, but for most people (and, I suspect, most Model M owners) that's not the case.
Nostalgia is fun. It's okay to have a "throwback" keyboard if that's what you want. Not every technological choice we make has to be justified by greater efficiency or superior ergonomics. Relax and feel the Model M love.
I love Joss Whedon and I still carry a huge torch for Firefly but I watched two episodes of Dollhouse and they just weren't very good. The characters are totally one-dimensional, the action is boring and the dialogue isn't funny. Compared to Firefly it's hard to believe they came from the same guy.
And I'm sorry, but you lost me at the word "Terminator". I have zero interest in seeing yet another retread of that franchise. Find another stone to squeeze blood from.
Nintendo of America (NOA) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nintendo Co., Ltd. (NCL), of Kyoto, Japan. Also, NES stands for Nintendo Entertainment System, not the name of a company.
I can absolutely dig Nintendo's position on large-scale bootlegging, but isn't Nintendo a Japanese company? Let them ask their own country for help leaning on China. We already have enough people bitching about America acting like the world's policeman.
Lots and lots of Protestants don't take Genesis as literally historical either. That's a more common view among Anabaptists, most of whom don't consider themselves Protestant.
"Protestant" is not the same as "Not Catholic", as any Orthodox adherent would gladly tell you. Hell, "Catholic" doesn't even mean what you think it means. It's just an adjective meaning "whole" or "complete". I assume that you're using it to mean the Roman Catholic Church but this is a situation where the exact terms do matter.
Also, please don't confuse the ravings of a vocal and well-organized minority with the beliefs of the majority just because we're not all out in the streets fighting the culture wars. Some of us have more pressing matters to worry about, like keeping our jobs.
IAAAACAAPTYVM (I am an Anglican, a Catholic and a Protestant, thank you very much).
To use a/.-mandatory car analogy, make automobiles mandatory to go the the doctor's office, and you'll find unmaintained cars breaking down in the middle of the road all over, because the car hasn't been made that doesn't need tire replacement, oil-and-filter changes, and other periodic maintenance.
This isn't about making cars mandatory, it's about getting the government to build and maintain a road that goes to your house. You don't have to own a car but even if you don't the government will still maintain that road to your house. This is because at some point we all decided to use tax dollars to ensure that everyone who wants to own a car has the means to use it.
Same thing with the electricity, water, telephone. You aren't required to make use of it but government will ensure that you can make use of it at any time should you desire, and they will ensure that you don't get price gouged for living in a rural area or for using a non-Bell phone.
The days when Internet was a magical voodoo totem of the privileged few are far behind us. Millions of Americans are hooked on fast, always-on Internet access just as much as they have come to rely on telephones. It's time to stop pretending that net providers are justified in dragging their feet to roll out new service and then charging everyone an extra $15/month for it.
I too was quite happy with the OS X port until I had to type something longer than a page. Then I found out it will crash if you cut a loud fart or look at it funny. Now it's pretty much useless to me.
Why the hell is OO.o still missing support for SVG? Users have been bitching about this for years, literally. It was a Summer of Code project in 2007 and still, nothing.
Believe it or not, people actually tell me that they don't want OO.o because it doesn't have clip art. Too bad that there thousands of free clip art images out there but OO.o is too SVG-retarded to use them.
When we sat down together it turned out we had the same first and last names, our fathers and mothers had the same first and last names and the same middle initials...
After all if two people whose families have never met face to face could have so much in common in a little place like AR...
...can't think... too many jokes... all trying to get out at once...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm serious here. Did anyone feel any compassion for the people that Ender killed? No. They were cardboard cutouts of evil that existed solely so that Ender could overcome them as part of his character development. But not KNOW that he had killed them. Because Ender has to be innocent.
Yes, and the innocent boy wipes out an entire sentient species. Meanwhile his psychotic, megalomaniac brother brings about world peace but only as a means to seizing supreme world power for himself.
It's not about survival or teen nerd wish fulfillment, it's about how our much our intentions matter as compared to our actions.
There's a similar though smaller revolt going on over the changes to Yahoo's Fantasy Football. The nasty thing about the Fantasy Football changes is that they didn't roll them out until two weeks before the start of the season, after lots of people had already paid as much as $250 to join pro leagues.
Yahoo went so far as to post an announcement to every league that they won't be going back to the original format (but they really appreciate your comments!).
When I see vertical-takeoff-vertical-landing my first thought is Armadillo Aerospace and their years of work on those rockets. Now that Armadillo is largely mothballed, have some of their guys turned up at SpaceX?
Why? For e-commerce. Especially for products that are made to order, anything that cuts down on return rates ("this isn't what I thought I saw on the website") is worth putting some money into. I'm working on exactly this sort of project right now and we finally made the decision to cut 3D because support is so patchy.
End user support isn't the whole problem though. You also need 3D models with enough detail to look smooth but small enough to deliver over the web. If you can even get 3D models for a product they're usually the designer's CAD files which are huge and not easily converted to a format used by a gaming-type 3D engine.
But how is a $548.99 subsidy not illegal dumping?
The impact of this is actually pretty wide. Crypt_blowfish has been gaining popularity as a hashing algorithm in PHP thanks to Openwall's PHPass framework. Four years ago most PHP projects that I know were still using MD5 or SHA1 to hash passwords. Today those MD5 and SHA1 hashes can be brute-force cracked by free software running on a $200 GPU in a matter of days if not hours. So even a buggy version of Blowfish is still better by far.
So yeah, it's a wide-ranging bug but not a world breaking one. For starters it only affects passwords that use 8-bit characters, so passwords typed by anyone using a US-English keyboard still produce the same hashes as the correct Blowfish implementation.
For passwords of length n*4-1 (3, 7, 11, 15, ...), 8-bit characters in certain positions will result in some characters being ignored by the hash function. This makes it possible (though still not easy) to produce a collision, i.e. multiple different passwords that result in the same hash.
It's bad, but I want to stress that using even a buggy crypt_blowfish for password hashing is still a quantum leap over the single-hashed MD5 or SHA1 that you were seeing literally everywhere in the PHP world just a few years ago.
Anyone care to speculate on the likelyhood of widespread blowfish use by public sites?
Wide. Many major PHP projects have been moving toward Openwall's PHPass algorithm that uses Blowfish as its preferred hashing algorithm. Note that even with this bug it's still better than the unsalted MD5 or SHA1 hashes that most projects were using previously. Today any of those old hashes can be brute-force cracked by a $200 GPU in about a day.
Let me fix that for you:
As a side note, it's unlikely that Firefox 4 final will pass the Acid3 test, despite this being a very popular demand amongst silly people who don't understand web development.
The Acid tests are demos, not unit tests of HTML compliance. I would rather see real progress in areas where FF is truly weak (like, say, the crappy SVG renderer) than worry about those last three pips on Acid3.
Except that his story isn't that hard to believe. I can remember busting out 20-page papers overnight when I was in college and I'm not a particularly fast writer. It's easy to imagine that someone with enough practice and motivation could churn out papers like this for a living.
Today I code web applications and I recognize the process he describes. He has essentially built a research paper "framework" that lets him quickly build products that fit a baseline set of requirements. In fact it sounds like he rarely even has to come up with a true finished product, essentially building one proof-of-concept after another. It's amazing how fast you can work when you honestly don't care about the details.
How many code geeks will spends hours and days and weeks over meaningless bullshit projects just because they can? This guy does the same thing with words and he found a way to get paid for it.
The writer of TFA clearly specializes in writing. He/she probably has a good academic prose style, and good research skills, along with a jstor subscription or nearby university library. Quite possibly, he did a liberal arts or social science degree, which gave him the necessary practice; but found the job market unexciting with those credentials.
Go back and read TFA. I'm saying this not to be an asshole but because it's genuinely fascinating.
The author states that:
* He went to college to be a writer and found out that there's more than one way to get paid for what you write.
* He uses mainly Wikipedia (for background), Amazon for the free pages, and Google Academics for the abstracts. Everything else he spins from educated guesswork and outright bullshit with lots and lots of filler.
* He doesn't edit his work at all, this helps him work faster and heads off requests for him to "dumb it down".
* His clients often thank him for making typos (presumably because it looks more authentic that way).
He's not producing high quality work for top honors, he's producing "good enough" work for the sake of graduating at all. It may pay to get A's but C's get degrees, etc.
I've said for years that not everybody needs a college degree. I would guess (I would hope) that this guy is helping along the raft of mediocre graduates who won't ever really use their degree except as resume fodder. Unfortunately this just devalues college degrees even more so that employers keep on requiring degrees for jobs that don't really need special training.
He's right about one thing, blame the colleges that are more interested in collecting tuition fees than in producing actual, competent scholars.
(TFA doesn't say if there were directions, like "Solve for the missing quantity in parentheses" or something like that.) I bet more people would have understood if they used something like x. Maybe they were trying to avoid "scary" variables for middle schoolers, but that's actually exactly when I remember learning what they were--if not, the year before.
Proper directions make all the difference.
When I was a kid math classes weren't on different tracks until middle school. Near the end of sixth grade I was given a test to see if I could handle the highest track which taught algebra. But of course, I had never seen algebra before so the test itself had to explain some basic concepts. Which it did. In surprisingly clear and simple language that had me solving for "x" in minutes. Each page introduced a new algebraic concept and I was eating it up.
The test was designed to be more work than a kid could finish in the time limit but I got pretty damn far. The irony is that I spent the next year in a basic algebra class that taught me very little I hadn't already learned from that tracking test.
I wish I still had that test. Whoever wrote it deserved a medal.
For Jimmy's Indie Brewz, locations 1, the wifi is probably just some router on a DSL line. Integrating a code system would either mean forking over $$$$ to his POS vendor, if they even offer that, or hoping that his cousin is one of those "linux hackers".
If Jimmy doesn't know how to run his WiFi then why is he trying to sell it? I know nothing about coffee; if I tried to sell coffee I would go bankrupt. Even if you "sell" WiFi access for free as a loss leader, it's still a product. Stick to products you understand or hire someone who knows the product you're trying to sell. That's Business 101.
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is a wretched book. Nobody but the hardest-core SF geek would give a shit about it today if David Peoples and Ridley Scott hadn't turned it into a movie that was 100x better. So just who is riding who's coattails?
It's not as if only PKD's brilliant, visionary mind could have come up with putting a number after the word "nexus" to make a cool-sounding name.
I finally got tired of the $75/month, the cable box meltdowns every three months (Scientific Atlanta FTL), and the generally craptastic quality of over-compressed video from Brighthouse. Six months ago I told them where to shove it and never looked back. Now I get TV series on DVD from Netflix, occasionally catch a new show on Hulu, and use some good ol' rabbit ears to get my local channels (which look great in over-the-air digital, better than they ever did through the cable).
Screw cable. I'm done with paying for a raft of crap I don't need to subsidize their other businesses. And I'm certainly done with their obsessive consumer lock-in.
It's a geek badge of honor. I own a few and I love them like my children (okay not really, maybe like my pets) but part of that comes from the effort I put in to scrounge them and clean them up myself. I do like the feel of typing on a Model M but what I love is the feeling of gravitas (figuratively and literally, it's really heavy).
Vintage hardware is neat but most of it is of no practical use today. Is there any other part of a 20-year-old computer that you could still use for day-to-day tasks? A Model M lets you feel old-school without actually having to live in the bad old days of floppy disks and 300 baud modems.
I type on my wife's Mac keyboard and it's fine. I type on a rubber dome keyboard at work and it does the job too. Maybe I would feel differently if my job required pumping out hundreds of thousands of words very quickly, but for most people (and, I suspect, most Model M owners) that's not the case.
Nostalgia is fun. It's okay to have a "throwback" keyboard if that's what you want. Not every technological choice we make has to be justified by greater efficiency or superior ergonomics. Relax and feel the Model M love.
I love Joss Whedon and I still carry a huge torch for Firefly but I watched two episodes of Dollhouse and they just weren't very good. The characters are totally one-dimensional, the action is boring and the dialogue isn't funny. Compared to Firefly it's hard to believe they came from the same guy.
And I'm sorry, but you lost me at the word "Terminator". I have zero interest in seeing yet another retread of that franchise. Find another stone to squeeze blood from.
Nintendo of America (NOA) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nintendo Co., Ltd. (NCL), of Kyoto, Japan. Also, NES stands for Nintendo Entertainment System, not the name of a company.
PEDANTIC FAIL.
I can absolutely dig Nintendo's position on large-scale bootlegging, but isn't Nintendo a Japanese company? Let them ask their own country for help leaning on China. We already have enough people bitching about America acting like the world's policeman.
10 terabits per square inch
None of your tech mumbo-jumbo, please. Just tell me how many Libraries of Congress per width of a human hair.
Lots and lots of Protestants don't take Genesis as literally historical either. That's a more common view among Anabaptists, most of whom don't consider themselves Protestant.
"Protestant" is not the same as "Not Catholic", as any Orthodox adherent would gladly tell you. Hell, "Catholic" doesn't even mean what you think it means. It's just an adjective meaning "whole" or "complete". I assume that you're using it to mean the Roman Catholic Church but this is a situation where the exact terms do matter.
Also, please don't confuse the ravings of a vocal and well-organized minority with the beliefs of the majority just because we're not all out in the streets fighting the culture wars. Some of us have more pressing matters to worry about, like keeping our jobs.
IAAAACAAPTYVM (I am an Anglican, a Catholic and a Protestant, thank you very much).
I can't find an analog station that will broadcast it, you insensitive clod!
To use a /.-mandatory car analogy, make automobiles mandatory to go the the doctor's office, and you'll find unmaintained cars breaking down in the middle of the road all over, because the car hasn't been made that doesn't need tire replacement, oil-and-filter changes, and other periodic maintenance.
This isn't about making cars mandatory, it's about getting the government to build and maintain a road that goes to your house. You don't have to own a car but even if you don't the government will still maintain that road to your house. This is because at some point we all decided to use tax dollars to ensure that everyone who wants to own a car has the means to use it.
Same thing with the electricity, water, telephone. You aren't required to make use of it but government will ensure that you can make use of it at any time should you desire, and they will ensure that you don't get price gouged for living in a rural area or for using a non-Bell phone.
The days when Internet was a magical voodoo totem of the privileged few are far behind us. Millions of Americans are hooked on fast, always-on Internet access just as much as they have come to rely on telephones. It's time to stop pretending that net providers are justified in dragging their feet to roll out new service and then charging everyone an extra $15/month for it.
I too was quite happy with the OS X port until I had to type something longer than a page. Then I found out it will crash if you cut a loud fart or look at it funny. Now it's pretty much useless to me.
Why the hell is OO.o still missing support for SVG? Users have been bitching about this for years, literally. It was a Summer of Code project in 2007 and still, nothing.
Believe it or not, people actually tell me that they don't want OO.o because it doesn't have clip art. Too bad that there thousands of free clip art images out there but OO.o is too SVG-retarded to use them.
When we sat down together it turned out we had the same first and last names, our fathers and mothers had the same first and last names and the same middle initials...
After all if two people whose families have never met face to face could have so much in common in a little place like AR...
...can't think... too many jokes... all trying to get out at once...