Sure kids who program or release viruses should get their wrirsts slapped and do some community service. What gets me is these stupid figures for damages that get banded about. If companies really are losing much as they claim, why don't they just hire someone to install security patches when they become available, it's not exactly rocket science. In my view if you have some critical systems but don't bother to add security patches when they become available, you are equally to blame and should not be allowed to claim damages.
People will always object that if it's GPLed or whatever, if you don't like what the Admin's doing, fork it. Kind of like the old: "If you don't like the village, go live on the heath."
As well as ignoring suggestions on patches, an equally good (perhaps better since you don't end up looking bad) way to prevent people spoiling your grand vision is neglecting design and documenting your code. The old: "I'd rather write code than discuss things or think about them." It sounds silly when put like that, but it's an easy trap to fall into (I speak from experience).
Another question, how does one end up as an Admin? I think it is nearly always by either starting the project oneself, or being recognised as a good programmer and promoted by an Admin who is moving on. This means that Admins usually have vision and/or good programming skills, but may well suck when it comes to managing people, which is what's important if collaborative development matters. (And I believe collaborative development is often overrated.)
As Thomas Jefferson once said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants."
Replace "liberty" with "Islam" (or whatever their cause may have been), and you'll probably be close to what the terrorists were thinking.
(I shouldn't need to say this but expect I do need to: the overwhelming majority of Muslims are decent people, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise.)
Re:taken to it's natural conclusion
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Yeah, I would choose a 6x6 cell over certain death all else equal. I think I would risk a 1/10 chance of death to escape though. And if other people's lives were involved, there would be some situations where I would be willing to give up my own life.
NO! [was Re:We Are On Notice]
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WE HAVE GOT TO STOP THESE GUYS COLD ***NOW*** BEFORE THEY GET NUKES.
But when we get a target, a plan and resources ready, we must GO!
Views like this scare me. NATO can drop every bomb it has on which ever target is eventually chosen: it will do noting except make things worse. Too many innocent people are dead already. These guys hijacked planes with knives, anyone with determination could have done it. Fighting terrorism with conventional weapons does not work. Look at Israel, despite overwhelming military superiority, they cannot stop attacks. The only way to stop terrorism is to heighten security and remove their support. The way to remove their support is to settle the legitimate grievances that societies that may be tempted to harbour terrorists have. This is not easy, dropping bombs is. However, every bomb dropped will strengthen the terrorist's resolve, push moderates to extremism, and make extremists mad-dogs.
my favourite civil liberty is...
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...life
If I were an Arab... [was: Re:What can be...]
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...I might question America's respect for human life.
I remember seeing IR footage of an Apache attack on a radar station. The mission should have been complete, the Iraqis were running for their lives from the burning buildings. It was pitch black. Against the US apache pilots using IR vision and 30 mm automatic cannons they stood no chance. They wouldn't have even known what direction the attack was coming from.
You're a 17 year old conscript. You're in a trench, you want to surrender. Instead the Americans drive an armoured bulldozer along the line of the trench burying you all alive.
The war is lost and the Iraqi army is in disarray, you've lost your weapon and are escaping on the back of a packed cattle truck. American A10 tank busters drop napalm on the truck. Everyone is burned alive.
The United States suffered 148 killed in action, an estimated 100,000 Iraqi soldiers died (killed by the armies of elected governments, not terrorists).
Instead of talking of making no distinction between terrorists and those who harbour them, GWB should ask why people are willing to harbour them, and whether America could do anything about it.
If you wanted it to be global across all applications, it'd be more work.
Actually, I'm not convinced it would be that hard. All that you would need to do is intercept key presses, record them, and pass them to the relevant application. Suppose that [S][t][space] was the shortcut for "String", since you had already passed the [S] and [t] to the application, you would need to send [backspace], [backspace], followed by [S],[t],[r],[i],[n],[g]. You would also need a an escape character that cancelled shortcuts for when you actually wanted to type "St ". Perhaps you could use [S][t][space] [backspace] to get "St "?
I don't have enough time for the projects I'm involved in already, so there's not much prospect of implementing it myself.
I guess my Where can I find it? got taken the wrong way. I thought I had a good idea, and that if I expressed enthusiasm for it, it would increase the likelihood of someone picking it up.
Looks interesting, I don't actually have OS X though:(
However, I'm not yet persuaded by autocompleters. I tend to find they interrupt my train of thought and if I need to check the autocompleter has chosen what I wanted or to choose one of several options, its faster just to type the whole damn thing. I'm generally against smart/intelligent computers - I'd rather have a dumb machine that was completely predictable than a smart one whose shoulder one has to look over.
...a program that watches what I type and when it sees me repeating a word or phrase several times, suggests a short cut without interrupting me, e.g. displaying it in the info bar at the bottom of the window. For example, if I keep typing "String", it might suggest [S][T][space] as the shortcut.
I don't want to have to stop working and think up shortcuts since the computer would be better at identifying which words and phases I use most. I don't want the computer to try to guess what I'm going to do next since no matter how good it was, it would still piss me off when it was wrong (and it's none of the computer's business whether I'm writing a letter).
Wasn't it possible to rescue people from the rooves of the burning WTO buildings using helicopters?
Was UA flight 93 shot down over Somerset County PA? (Even if the F16s were not air bourn at the time, what about a SAM?) Would the USAF admit doing it if they did? (This Economist article suggests doing so would have been illegal.)
I was flipping through the original RRT manual when I noticed the "Designer's Notes" at the back. I think the following raises an interesting point:
A central problem was choosing the right scope of the game. Sid's early game was a model railroading game. Bruce's proposal posed the player as the president and guiding force of a railroad...
Something I've noticed is that when people make suggestions, they're are usually something like this: X is unrealistic, you should do Y (something more complicated) instead. While more realism, all else constant, makes for a better game; all else usually isn't constant: more realism usually means more complexity, and too much complexity spoils game play. I've tried a few flight-sims that went for all out realism, and they weren't much fun.
The questions is: what should the scope for freerails be?
The graphics could certainly be improved. At the moment we're using the freeciv trident tileset which I adapted a little myself to get something to work with. What we really need is someone artistic who can dedicate a bit of time to the graphics. I'm not sure what the best approach would be. A couple of people on the mailing list have said they would like freerails to have isometric graphics. Personally, I'm not a big fan of isometric graphics and don't think they add much to a 2D game other than making the screenshots look better, but it would be possible to have an isometric mode as well as a square tiled mode.
Something I was thinking about some time ago was using a 3D package to build models of trains and buildings and then use them (pre rendered) instead of hand-drawn graphics. This might make them look a bit better, but on the other hand, rendered graphics often seem to lack character.
Are there any similar games (i.e. tile based) that stand out as having good (but relatively simple) graphics? I haven't been following releases recently.
2) Why not try to come up with an original game? If I wanted to play Railroad tycoon, I'd have played it on Windows 98 5 years ago.
If I thought I could come up with an original game idea better than Railroad Tycoon, I wouldn't be working on a game based on RRT. While RRT 5 years ago on win98 was a good game, it was spoilt by several annoying bugs and limitations. You were only allowed to build 32 stations and 32 trains, and there was a limit on how much track you could build. Worse, if your cash went beyond $32,000,000, bad things happened.
RRT II added a few nice features and more up to date graphics, but IMO lacked the playability of the original.
You're right that we should be doing something original rather than just copying an old game: we intend to do so. That's why I submitted this to slashdot and it's why there is a wish list . If you have some original ideas, we'd like to hear them!
Who loses when a cool new thing (press, photography, airplane, Internet) is invented?
You're confusing freedom, in the sense of liberty, which concerns relations between people, and freedom in the sense of technology, which concerns relations between people and nature. E.g. you are not free to fly because someone wouldn't let you and you are not free to fly because the aeroplane has not been invented. I don't claim there is necessarily a loser in the second case.
Life isn't zero sum.
I don't claim that it is. What I claim is that saying X is better than Y because it is in some sense freer is nonsense, since for every freedom created, another is destroyed. This does not mean that very freedom is equally valuable, they are not. What it does mean, however, is that you need some principle to judge what is better. E.g. based on something other than freedom such as utility or fairness.
Your argument reeks of the kind....
This argument reeks of name-calling. If you actually have an argument, lets hear it (saying something looks/smells like something else is usually a bad one).
Freedom of speech gives us the right to say things, if you disagree you can voice those opinons. This is very different from saying that my right to speech infringes on your right to gag me.
This sounds appealing, and I don't dispute there is a difference between speaking and gagging someone. The problem gagging someone is not the only thing that infringes on their ability to speak. Suppose we're both at a seminar, there is only 5 minutes left. For whatever reason, you are given these last 5 minutes to put your case across. Now it's your right to speak in these 5 minutes that infringes on my right to speak in them. This illustrates how talking about freedom, even when it is qualified as freedom of speech, doesn't make sense until you say to whom exactly the freedom is given.
The material is targeted towards Fortune 500 companies that would have an interest in driving down the costs of custom web development, design, construction, migration, and support. I'm wondering where the largest gains are to be had and what supporting statistics show the validity of such strategies?
This sounds alarming. Shouldn't you be asking whether there really are gains to be had before you start looking for statistics to show their validity? And if you really do know that there are gains, how do you know this without already having the supporting statistics?
What mp3.com has is a directory of music, sorted in genres, pretty much like Yahoo. It's pretty easy to expose your music there, no need for a fancy homepage.
I agree. I'm not saying mp3.com is worth nothing. But for, say, $1 million, I think anyone could set up a pretty good directory of music. And if your music really is good, I don't think you'll have a problem finding someone to make the CDs for you.
I thought the internet bubble had burst. How can mp3.com possibly be worth $372 Million?
The article says: Vivendi Universal is to acquire one of the top worldwide Internet brands. MP3.com's brand and web site are well-known to a global online gathering of music fans and artists. But $372 for a brand name, it doesn't make sense. Then there's their proprietary-patented technology for music distribution... But anyone can put mp3's on a website, and if they're any good, people will find out about them and download them. Then there's the aggregate audience... close to 40 million registered users, but at $372 Million, that's almost $10 a user.
I expect that most people will disagree with what I have to say, but please hear me through.
It seems to me that there is no honestly persuasive case for P2P. Sure, advocates will be able to dig up some supposed example of legitimate use, but if we are honest, we the reason people really like P2P is that it allows them to get their hands on copyright material without paying for it.
Of course the P2P advocates will claim that P2P can be used to distribute legitimate material. While this is true, it is not persuasive: why bother with P2P if you material is legitimate - why not simple upload your stuff one of the free web space providers, then your material available 24/7 without sucking up your machines clock-cycles or bandwidth.
Am I the only one who misread the headline. I was expecting something witty about the talking paperclip and find myself reading some boring story about cryptography.
...I would just want:... Reasonable range (say 300-500 Km on a single charge) Reasonable re-charge time from a normal home circuit (over night perhaps).
I don't understand why range and recharge time are really that important. Surely, when electric car use becomes widespread, you'll be able to pull into a gas station, whip the flat batteries out and stick a freshly charged set in in 2 minutes. I know you can't do this at the moment, but see no reason why it shouldn't be possible. After all, the same system worked with horses and inns in the old days.
I guess it may require some redesign of the cars, but surely it's not that impractical.
You're jumping to conclusions there.. have you actually read the book.
No, I haven't read the book. I was making a comment on my reading of the review - that's why I included the quote.
You seem to think that mentioning adaptive systems is evidence that the author was not very reductionist. But one can take a reductionist approach to buliding adaptive systems or one can take a functional approach. If you disagree, I would be interested to hear why. (Your post suggests you didn't like what I wrote, but were more concerned with getting a punch in below the belt than making an argument.)
Anyway, I hope this gives you guys at mad.scientist.com food for thought!
Slashdot Mirror
Sure kids who program or release viruses should get their wrirsts slapped and do some community service. What gets me is these stupid figures for damages that get banded about. If companies really are losing much as they claim, why don't they just hire someone to install security patches when they become available, it's not exactly rocket science. In my view if you have some critical systems but don't bother to add security patches when they become available, you are equally to blame and should not be allowed to claim damages.
My thoughts...
People will always object that if it's GPLed or whatever, if you don't like what the Admin's doing, fork it. Kind of like the old: "If you don't like the village, go live on the heath."
As well as ignoring suggestions on patches, an equally good (perhaps better since you don't end up looking bad) way to prevent people spoiling your grand vision is neglecting design and documenting your code. The old: "I'd rather write code than discuss things or think about them." It sounds silly when put like that, but it's an easy trap to fall into (I speak from experience).
Another question, how does one end up as an Admin? I think it is nearly always by either starting the project oneself, or being recognised as a good programmer and promoted by an Admin who is moving on. This means that Admins usually have vision and/or good programming skills, but may well suck when it comes to managing people, which is what's important if collaborative development matters. (And I believe collaborative development is often overrated.)
How do you make a suicide attacker afraid?
Laws making explosives and guns illegal did not even come close to stopping this tragedy.
But better airline security would.
Replace "liberty" with "Islam" (or whatever their cause may have been), and you'll probably be close to what the terrorists were thinking.
(I shouldn't need to say this but expect I do need to: the overwhelming majority of Muslims are decent people, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise.)
Yeah, I would choose a 6x6 cell over certain death all else equal. I think I would risk a 1/10 chance of death to escape though. And if other people's lives were involved, there would be some situations where I would be willing to give up my own life.
But when we get a target, a plan and resources ready, we must GO!
Views like this scare me. NATO can drop every bomb it has on which ever target is eventually chosen: it will do noting except make things worse. Too many innocent people are dead already. These guys hijacked planes with knives, anyone with determination could have done it. Fighting terrorism with conventional weapons does not work. Look at Israel, despite overwhelming military superiority, they cannot stop attacks. The only way to stop terrorism is to heighten security and remove their support. The way to remove their support is to settle the legitimate grievances that societies that may be tempted to harbour terrorists have. This is not easy, dropping bombs is. However, every bomb dropped will strengthen the terrorist's resolve, push moderates to extremism, and make extremists mad-dogs.
...life
...I might question America's respect for human life.
I remember seeing IR footage of an Apache attack on a radar station. The mission should have been complete, the Iraqis were running for their lives from the burning buildings. It was pitch black. Against the US apache pilots using IR vision and 30 mm automatic cannons they stood no chance. They wouldn't have even known what direction the attack was coming from.
You're a 17 year old conscript. You're in a trench, you want to surrender. Instead the Americans drive an armoured bulldozer along the line of the trench burying you all alive.
The war is lost and the Iraqi army is in disarray, you've lost your weapon and are escaping on the back of a packed cattle truck. American A10 tank busters drop napalm on the truck. Everyone is burned alive.
The United States suffered 148 killed in action, an estimated 100,000 Iraqi soldiers died (killed by the armies of elected governments, not terrorists).
Instead of talking of making no distinction between terrorists and those who harbour them, GWB should ask why people are willing to harbour them, and whether America could do anything about it.
Actually, I'm not convinced it would be that hard. All that you would need to do is intercept key presses, record them, and pass them to the relevant application. Suppose that [S][t][space] was the shortcut for "String", since you had already passed the [S] and [t] to the application, you would need to send [backspace], [backspace], followed by [S],[t],[r],[i],[n],[g]. You would also need a an escape character that cancelled shortcuts for when you actually wanted to type "St ". Perhaps you could use [S][t][space] [backspace] to get "St "?
I don't have enough time for the projects I'm involved in already, so there's not much prospect of implementing it myself.
I guess my Where can I find it? got taken the wrong way. I thought I had a good idea, and that if I expressed enthusiasm for it, it would increase the likelihood of someone picking it up.
Looks interesting, I don't actually have OS X though :(
However, I'm not yet persuaded by autocompleters. I tend to find they interrupt my train of thought and if I need to check the autocompleter has chosen what I wanted or to choose one of several options, its faster just to type the whole damn thing. I'm generally against smart/intelligent computers - I'd rather have a dumb machine that was completely predictable than a smart one whose shoulder one has to look over.
...a program that watches what I type and when it sees me repeating a word or phrase several times, suggests a short cut without interrupting me, e.g. displaying it in the info bar at the bottom of the window. For example, if I keep typing "String", it might suggest [S][T][space] as the shortcut.
I don't want to have to stop working and think up shortcuts since the computer would be better at identifying which words and phases I use most. I don't want the computer to try to guess what I'm going to do next since no matter how good it was, it would still piss me off when it was wrong (and it's none of the computer's business whether I'm writing a letter).
Where can I find it?
Wasn't it possible to rescue people from the rooves of the burning WTO buildings using helicopters?
Was UA flight 93 shot down over Somerset County PA? (Even if the F16s were not air bourn at the time, what about a SAM?) Would the USAF admit doing it if they did? (This Economist article suggests doing so would have been illegal.)
If this giving away software and selling stuffed monkey's doesn't work out, why not give away the stuffed monkeys and sell the software?
I was flipping through the original RRT manual when I noticed the "Designer's Notes" at the back. I think the following raises an interesting point:
A central problem was choosing the right scope of the game. Sid's early game was a model railroading game. Bruce's proposal posed the player as the president and guiding force of a railroad...
Something I've noticed is that when people make suggestions, they're are usually something like this: X is unrealistic, you should do Y (something more complicated) instead. While more realism, all else constant, makes for a better game; all else usually isn't constant: more realism usually means more complexity, and too much complexity spoils game play. I've tried a few flight-sims that went for all out realism, and they weren't much fun.
The questions is: what should the scope for freerails be?
The graphics could certainly be improved. At the moment we're using the freeciv trident tileset which I adapted a little myself to get something to work with. What we really need is someone artistic who can dedicate a bit of time to the graphics. I'm not sure what the best approach would be. A couple of people on the mailing list have said they would like freerails to have isometric graphics. Personally, I'm not a big fan of isometric graphics and don't think they add much to a 2D game other than making the screenshots look better, but it would be possible to have an isometric mode as well as a square tiled mode.
Something I was thinking about some time ago was using a 3D package to build models of trains and buildings and then use them (pre rendered) instead of hand-drawn graphics. This might make them look a bit better, but on the other hand, rendered graphics often seem to lack character.
Are there any similar games (i.e. tile based) that stand out as having good (but relatively simple) graphics? I haven't been following releases recently.
Ok, I'll bite..
2) Why not try to come up with an original game? If I wanted to play Railroad tycoon, I'd have played it on Windows 98 5 years ago.
If I thought I could come up with an original game idea better than Railroad Tycoon, I wouldn't be working on a game based on RRT. While RRT 5 years ago on win98 was a good game, it was spoilt by several annoying bugs and limitations. You were only allowed to build 32 stations and 32 trains, and there was a limit on how much track you could build. Worse, if your cash went beyond $32,000,000, bad things happened.
RRT II added a few nice features and more up to date graphics, but IMO lacked the playability of the original.
You're right that we should be doing something original rather than just copying an old game: we intend to do so. That's why I submitted this to slashdot and it's why there is a wish list . If you have some original ideas, we'd like to hear them!
You're confusing freedom, in the sense of liberty, which concerns relations between people, and freedom in the sense of technology, which concerns relations between people and nature. E.g. you are not free to fly because someone wouldn't let you and you are not free to fly because the aeroplane has not been invented. I don't claim there is necessarily a loser in the second case.
Life isn't zero sum.
I don't claim that it is. What I claim is that saying X is better than Y because it is in some sense freer is nonsense, since for every freedom created, another is destroyed. This does not mean that very freedom is equally valuable, they are not. What it does mean, however, is that you need some principle to judge what is better. E.g. based on something other than freedom such as utility or fairness.
Your argument reeks of the kind....
This argument reeks of name-calling. If you actually have an argument, lets hear it (saying something looks/smells like something else is usually a bad one).
This sounds appealing, and I don't dispute there is a difference between speaking and gagging someone. The problem gagging someone is not the only thing that infringes on their ability to speak. Suppose we're both at a seminar, there is only 5 minutes left. For whatever reason, you are given these last 5 minutes to put your case across. Now it's your right to speak in these 5 minutes that infringes on my right to speak in them. This illustrates how talking about freedom, even when it is qualified as freedom of speech, doesn't make sense until you say to whom exactly the freedom is given.
This sounds alarming. Shouldn't you be asking whether there really are gains to be had before you start looking for statistics to show their validity? And if you really do know that there are gains, how do you know this without already having the supporting statistics?
I agree. I'm not saying mp3.com is worth nothing. But for, say, $1 million, I think anyone could set up a pretty good directory of music. And if your music really is good, I don't think you'll have a problem finding someone to make the CDs for you.
The article says: Vivendi Universal is to acquire one of the top worldwide Internet brands. MP3.com's brand and web site are well-known to a global online gathering of music fans and artists. But $372 for a brand name, it doesn't make sense. Then there's their proprietary-patented technology for music distribution... But anyone can put mp3's on a website, and if they're any good, people will find out about them and download them. Then there's the aggregate audience ... close to 40 million registered users, but at $372 Million, that's almost $10 a user.
It seems like the suckers haven't leant yet.
It seems to me that there is no honestly persuasive case for P2P. Sure, advocates will be able to dig up some supposed example of legitimate use, but if we are honest, we the reason people really like P2P is that it allows them to get their hands on copyright material without paying for it.
Of course the P2P advocates will claim that P2P can be used to distribute legitimate material. While this is true, it is not persuasive: why bother with P2P if you material is legitimate - why not simple upload your stuff one of the free web space providers, then your material available 24/7 without sucking up your machines clock-cycles or bandwidth.
That really sucks
I don't understand why range and recharge time are really that important. Surely, when electric car use becomes widespread, you'll be able to pull into a gas station, whip the flat batteries out and stick a freshly charged set in in 2 minutes. I know you can't do this at the moment, but see no reason why it shouldn't be possible. After all, the same system worked with horses and inns in the old days.
I guess it may require some redesign of the cars, but surely it's not that impractical.
No, I haven't read the book. I was making a comment on my reading of the review - that's why I included the quote.
You seem to think that mentioning adaptive systems is evidence that the author was not very reductionist. But one can take a reductionist approach to buliding adaptive systems or one can take a functional approach. If you disagree, I would be interested to hear why. (Your post suggests you didn't like what I wrote, but were more concerned with getting a punch in below the belt than making an argument.)
Anyway, I hope this gives you guys at mad.scientist.com food for thought!