Re:Can it live up to the fans' expectations?
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Stargate MMO Announced
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"Good Guys" vs "Bad Guys" is only a description of alignment. It's not racial and does not mean that it's exclusively humans vs. go'a'uld players only.
Just as you can be a gnome, elf or human on the Alliance side of WoW, you could be a human, nox or asgard member of the SGC side, or a jaffa or un'as member of the System Lords. Actually, most of the races have members on both sides of the conflict, so race might not even be the determining factor of which side your character is on.
I almost want to be a replicator (talk about an overpowered character!), but playing a lego brick just doesn't sound like the ultimate immersive game experience to me. Besides, we'd need a raid group of like a billion people to do much of anything.:-)
Yes, but Google promised us they won't be evil. Steve Ballmer said Microsoft is opposed to that.
First, to address your point, Google would only have control over their own distro (just as Red Hat, Debian, etc. have.) The GPL ensures they can't shut down others. And those others won't go away just because Google arrived. But they might voluntarily choose to do so.
Another "standard" distro would not be a bad thing. Sure, it's going to have name recognition which will be a shiny thing to attract an initial following. It'll also help corporate adoption (the new slogan could be "Nobody ever got fired for downloading Google":-) But even if all it did was to consolidate the Ubuntu crowd with the Mandriva crowd under one googly umbrella, that's still a pretty powerful group of followers.
Think about the popular distros that are out there now. None of them are backed in any significant way by any large companies. (Sure, IBM has pumped money into linux, but they missed the boat by never marketing a Big Blue Distro to anyone other than mainframe shops.)
I think Linux will grow to the next step just by having a huge corporate backer. So far, the biggest corporate players all have their own unices to pimp, and have never pushed linux in a big way. Google is the only really big company in a position to pull something like this off successfully. And they have the added legitimacy of having built their empire on linux. Finally, people will expect great things from a Google distro. I think the market will take this distro very seriously.
What about the Taiwanese? Do they still speak Tanglish, or do they now speak "Republic of Chenglish"?
I still remember trying to decipher a manual for a Fanuc CNC control computer, the kind of computer that controls the motion of an industrial laser. Never could find the setting for parity, and I spent two hours on the phone with a "Tanglish-only" speaker. God, what a headache I had!
Unfortunately, your second statment is the epitome of the "Tragedy of the Commons." There is ALWAYS another troll, someone who wants to maliciously sow dissent just to provoke a reaction. In some of these congressional cases it's a blatant attempt at a "revisionist history", while in others it's been purely "vandalism" -- the posting of the goatse trolls is a good example of that.
But the problem is that one man's troll is another man's political statement. Google for "santorum" some time, and hit "I'm feeling lucky". Some people consider that a political statement, and some consider it a troll. Both are right! So how do you include both points of view on a description of "santorum"? If you include the gross description, you've trolled Senator Santorum's supporters. If you censor the description, you're invalidating the political position of his opponents. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. And the third choice, eliminating mention of both santorum and Senator Santorum, does an even worse disservice to history by removing his legitimate accomplishments as well as the voice of his opposition.
While it would be nice to think otherwise, it's an impossible fantasy to hope that there will never be web vandals.
You wrote: I've worked with autistic children, but personally know of no "milder" cases. and
ADD, ADHD, and Asberger's syndrome are separate from autism.
Sorry, I was misquoting the Wired article mentioned above, in which the author describes Asperger's syndrome:
Asperger's syndrome is one of the disorders on the autistic spectrum - a milder form of the condition that afflicted Raymond Babbitt, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.
That's why I thought of Asperger's as a "milder" form -- I misread his words to mean that "Asperger's is a milder form of autism", when the author actually wrote that Asperger's is a milder form of the Rain Man's condition.
But in the same sentence the author does explicitly state that Asperger's is "one of the disorders on the autistic spectrum." It may not fall under the clinical definition of autism; but it seems to me that by mentioning it in the article, he's implying that people with Asperger's were counted in the study. That said, my original question still stands: isn't it possible that better diagnosis of Asperger's (due to money and the better health care it brings) somehow 'inflated' the Silicon Valley study?
I'd do it. As long as the movie isn't DRM crippled, I'd pay to P2P it for several reasons.
First, I don't want the DRM. I'm willing to give up "something" of mine in exchange for a freely usable movie. For example, I'd pay a premium for unprotected DVDs. Ripping is a total hassle, and a big waste of my time. If the extra cost to me is a blank DVD (or a bit of hard drive space) fine.
Second, I don't care about my outgoing bandwidth all the time, just when I'm trying to use it. I'll typically leave Azureus up after downloading something if I'm not interested in using the web once I've gotten the content. But if I want to get back to surfing, well, then it's going to get paused for a while.
Finally, I'd do it to encourage this type of behavior from the studios. Yes, I'll be responsible with your movie. No, I'm not going to share it without your permission. Yes, I'm willing to pay you for it.
Is it possible the Silicon Valley spike in autism was simply the result of better diagnosis? Think about it, that region was awash in money in the '90s. Every rich kid in the valley had access to the best pre- and post-natal care ever seen in the world. A kid could barely get a runny nose without a doctor visit.
So for the "milder" cases of autism, the ones in which the children are quite likely to lead self-sufficient lives (a friend's daughter with Asperger's syndrome comes to mind) isn't it a valid hypothesis that these kids would have been correctly diagnosed, while similar kids in an impoverished (or even "average") areas would have just been labeled "troublemakers" or perhaps misdiagnosed with ADHD and given ritalin?
I certainly don't know the statistics here, the percentages of kids diagnosed, the quality of the diagnoses or any of that stuff. I'm just guessing at possible reasons for the correlation on a few things mentioned hhere. But I do know that it's very tough to compare apples to apples when money is involved. And we all know that correlation does not guarantee causality.
I found that notifying hosting firms gets the best response when it comes to these clowns. For the past couple of years I've been notifying both the "victim" company plus I've been notifying the hosting company of any phishing emails I've received.
The very first time I decided to do this, I discovered the hosting firm was in China, and thought "uh-oh, this is never gonna work. What Chinese firm is going to care if stupid Americans are getting scammed?" But I sent the email anyway.
I got a letter of response from the hosting company within an hour, and that afternoon the spoof site was down.
I was absolutely floored by their prompt response. But it sure encouraged me to pursue the hosting companies every time since then.
Because there is no in-game sex in WoW. There is not even an in-game concept of sex. Characters have gender, but that's little more than a "costume" providing a body shape that has typical gender identifying characteristics.
Guilds are character associations, not player groups. (A player can have multiple characters, say a cleric and a rogue, but if his cleric is accepted in a guild, that doesn't grant his rogue any special status.) Guilds are for gaming concepts -- and there is no gaming concept of sex in WoW. You can start a rogue's guild or an Ironforge guild. You can start a We Farm URBS guild. You could start a racist "elves-only" guild or a "no gnomes allowed" guild if you want. You could even have a "no-girl-characters" guild, and disallow any female characters. But they're all character-based, and based on the in-game reality. In real life, it doesn't matter if it's a male or female player controlling the male or female character.
What about patents? Think about a box like the NSLU2. Now, I don't know if Linksys holds any patents on it or not, but let's assume for the moment they held both software and hardware patents on it.
Would they be able to continue to run a linux kernel on it? Can you run the linux kernel on a patented platform? Can you run patented software on a linux platform?
If it turns out that you can still run patented software, what about kernel modules? Can you patent them or not?
What if it turns out that you can't? Then what do you do about VMWARE? VMWARE can be used to run a Windows XP virtual machine, which for all we know is encrusted with thousands of patents.
This whole "we enforce the following opinions about these uses of our software" thing is a bad idea, in general. Sure, they've made it plainly obvious that they don't want to be a party to building a TPM-based-machine. But what's next? No military uses? No "dual uses" (civilian and military)? "Sorry, can't write GPS software, it uses data that comes from a military owned satellite." "Can't put Word support in Open Office, it allows cross-platform usage of patented file formats." "Can't write an Asterisk plug-in, you might use that phone line to call Microsoft support."
"Preamble
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users." [ emphasis mine ]
I think they have to accept the good with the bad. All should mean "all". Freedom should mean "freedom".
The laws regarding diesel fuel are governed on a state-by-state basis here in the U.S, so not everything I say here may be true in every state. But in general, diesel fuel used on the road is taxed at a higher rate than any other usage of #2. And home heating oil is colored here, too.
The vast majority of consumers of diesel are commercial trucks. I think they're subject to periodic and/or random inspections in every state, and one of the quick tests every inspector performs is a stick in the tank. If it comes up colored with dye, you get busted for tax evasion. Very unpleasant penalties, so the honest truckers don't bother.
But diesel passenger cars are still quite uncommon (I'm guessing 5% or less) there. My state has no required vehicular inspections, so I'm not sure if anyone would ever find out. There is a box to check on the vehicle registration form indicating "alternative fuel" (not gasoline) so I imagine if you check it they may correlate that with buying home heating oil in July.
Since I think the vast majority of spam is originating at botnets compromised exclusively of Windows boxes, I think the onus IS on Microsoft to eliminate spam.
Spam wouldn't be such a huge problem if the stuff was never sent in the first place. For years now, legitimate ISPs have quickly blacklisted any downstream customers who are sending massive amounts of spam, or else face blacklisting themselves. The spammers turned to hackers operating botnets, which has greatly reduced the possibility of stopping them at the source.
If Microsoft could somehow "clean up" these owned boxes, the problem would indeed get better. However, since they constantly pull crap like "dropping support for old versions" those old OSes will continue to offer havens to hackers. Somehow claiming that "Vista" will solve all the problems misses the point entirely: I'm never upgrading to Vista, for example, because I don't want the OS DRMing me. Maw and Paw Sixpack have an old Winders 98 PC -- they're never going to touch it. Hell, I have a buddy who is absolutely f'ing brilliant in the Unix world who fails to see why he should bother updating his Windows PC, since he only uses it for games anyway. Since he doesn't care what happens to that machine, he fails to care what can happen because of it.
Cutscenes have always been an issue with computer games, for as far back as I go.
Set the wayback machine to the early 1970's. Back then I used to play Colossal Cave a lot. It was one of the original text adventure games, preceding Zork by at least 10 years. When I played, it was on a chugga-chugga-ding!ding! teletype attached to a 110 baud modem, which meant 10 characters per second. When you got to some place where the author wanted you to be suitably impressed, he'd "tart up" the description, running it to several paragraphs. (The mirror spanning the lake comes to mind.) But it was awful to have to sit there and wait for the whole description to print out before you could continue, even though it was the same description you'd read every time you played the game before.
Even back then, the game programmer had the good sense to only show you the "long description" once. If you wanted, you could always type "LOOK" and you'd get to read it again (the descriptions sometimes held clues.) So in that respect, games have actually gone backwards in user friendliness!
I just saw those new length-aware versions of the old standby functions, too, and thought "hey, that's a good idea." Actually, I became aware of them by the sheer number of C4996 - "deprecated" warnings the project I was compiling emitted:-( I was so depressed I had to #pragma warning(disable:4996) them all away:-)
To bring this back on topic, those secure functions would not have helped with this particular case. There was no "program flaw" present, it was instead a "design flaw". And flaw is even too strong a word -- weakness would be better. Given the state of the world in 1992 when it was first designed, there was no thought at all given to "malicious code" other than viruses. With Windows still being three years away from even supporting IP, the only code you executed was code you brought with you. And virus scanners watched those floppy drives like hawks. Even when Windows NT came out, there was still no real thought given to code "security."
Malware didn't reach the big time until about 1997 or 1998 when the first adware started being installed. Microsoft finally focused on security somewhere around 2001. And by then, the WMF code had gained tenure. The AbortProc() API didn't leak memory, it didn't trigger any buffer overrun tests (in isolation, anyway.) It did exactly what it was designed to do, it's just that it was designed in a safer era.
Back off topic: even as late as last year my Microsoft rep has continued to insist that Microsoft "security" comes from Microsoft innovations such as "security blankets" and "access permissions". He continued to spout the corporate line, while completely failing to recognize that Trojan horses are still the #1 vector of disaster on Microsoft boxes. What pissed me off is that he did not seem to want to understand that it wasn't about "bad people doing bad things", it has always been about "authorized people being manipulated into doing bad things." I think their training has been lacking.
That's why you whitelist the HTML tags you support, and then you still sanitize the users' data. Your permitting random HTML allows skript kiddies to take advantage of new exploits as they are revealed.
Even if the page was secure when you wrote it, the latest version of Apache (OK, IIS) might have a hole in the new FOO tag. You'd have to know to revisit your sanitizing routine to plug the newly discovered holes, and you'd need to do it fast before you're hit by the bad guys. A whitelist of nice safe timeworn tags may be less "user friendly" but is certainly more "future-security-proof".
Just as I'm not familiar with the current state of the Pronto's software (I last looked at it about two years ago), I can see you're equally not familiar with the Harmony. Everything you suggest is not only possible, but designed-for up front and made easy for everyone. The big advantage is: I didn't have to do nearly that much work to get more functionality than I thought I could get, including precise control when I need it.
How is a remote going to magically know if I have my DVD player hooked up to a input on my pre/pro or directly to my TV?
The software knows from your model number that your TVs has certain audio and video inputs, that your cable box and DVD player has specific audio and video outputs, and that your VCRs, DVRs, video switches and post-processors (such as equalizers, filters or whatever) have both inputs and outputs. It applies rules to whatever combination of gear you've entered, and figures out things like "if you have a cable box and a TV set you might want to set up a 'Watch Cable TV' macro." Once it's come up with the list of tasks that you should be able to do with your equipment, it presents you with that list and prompts you to set each activity up.
Once you click "set up the 'Watch Cable TV' activity", it then assumes that one of your cable box's outputs would be plugged into the TiVo, and that your TV is connected to your TiVo. For the 'Watch Cable TV' activity, it might prompt "To watch cable channels on your TiVo, which input on your TiVo do you have to select?" and gives the exact list of inputs that your model of TiVo has. It then asks "Which input on your TV do you have to select to watch TiVo?" And that's literally all that's required for the setup process for each activity. From there, the web page will assemble the IR codes, build up macros, and download a configuration file which is then sent to the remote.
I answered at most a dozen or two carefullly scripted questions, at which point my remote was fully functional. But since I'm me, I wanted to play around with it so I added another "activity" to support another set of functions. It was almost as easy as the pre-scripted ones.
On the remote, the "activities" are displayed on the 8 "soft" keys. (They are actually hard buttons surrounding the non-touch LCD display screen.) It has hard keys to bring up activities, devices, media and help. And the help is also very intelligent. The remote keeps track of your current context (it knows if you are trying to watch cable or if your system is supposed to be off, for example) but if your TV input gets changed, or it gets out of sync because your DVD player missed the "on" signal, pressing the "help" button will ask you a series of questions that will get everything back in sync. "Is your TV on? [no] *blinky-blinky* Now is your TV on? [yes] Did that fix the problem? [yes]"
The media button is a context-sensitive "favorites" list. For the "Watch TV" activity, it's a list of favorite cable channels. For the "Listen to radio", it's a list of frequencies or presets that you'd have on your tuner. For a DVD carousel, it could be a disc selector.
If you want to do something that's not pre-scripted, hit the "device" button and select the specific device from the soft keys. The remote is then configured to send commands exclusively to that one device; all the hard keys that make sense are supported (menu, up/down/left/right, 0-9, volume, etc) and any keys that don't have hard analogues are supported in the on-screen soft keys.
The web side is designed so that a hard-core geek can set or tweak anything, while the handhold wizards will walk even Joe Sixpack through the process with a minimum of knowledge. Their database holds a record of absolutely every obscure device I could find to play with. This remote not only scored a WAF of about 98 (would have been 100 except for the price), it's even easy enough to use that it passes the "Aunt Judy" test. While I set one up for her, I did not have to train her how to
Carry a bottle of gin and a bottle of vermouth with you. When you get lost, pour one shot of gin into a glass, and two shots of vermouth. You'll get people coming from every direction telling you "that's no way to mix a martini!"
Understanding a foreign accent is simply a matter of practice. (I'm an n-th generation American, of European descent.) I initially found Indian programmers to be difficult to understand, but since we have so many working at our company now I've acquired lots of practice, and it's been a long time since that was an issue for me.
I telephone interviewed an applicant today who had an Indian accent. This is for a technical lead role, where clear communication is important. But the accent simply wasn't a factor in my decision -- he sounded very competent and practiced at the skills we desire, so I recommended he be flown in for a second round of interviews. The people he will be working with already work for an Indian senior group manager, so I don't imagine they'll have a problem either. (Honestly, I didn't think of that till just now anyway.)
The thing I've noticed most is that I'm not seeing a wide diversity of candidates. I think I've seen only about three females' resumes over the last year, and one Chinese man's, while I've been given literally dozens of white and Indian men's resumes. I'd be interested to find out if those statistics match the labor pool of applicants at a place like monster.com.
Actually I just bought a Harmony 880 last year, and I am sure pleased with it.
The entire setup process is fully automated. I didn't have to hunt for files on the web, I didn't have to figure out or create long lists of macros, I just had to plug a USB cable into the remote. It launched a web page where I entered my model numbers, tied a few inputs to outputs, and it did all the macro creation for me. And it knows full codes for every random old piece of hardware I own.
I've looked at the Pronto's programming environment before, and I know I didn't want to go to that much work to define remote screens for each device, and then train them. And yes, I could have gone hunting for all the right CCF files. But why? Everything for the Harmony is automatically downloaded just by my entering a model number. And it then creates the sensible macros magically: Watch TV, for example. I didn't have to pick "Power on amp, power on TV, set amp input to Audio1, set TV input to HDMI, set internal channel changing device to cable box". The Pronto looked like it was still going to require me to figure out and assemble a half-dozen macros.
I also thought about using Neo-Pacific's remote software for one of my old Palms. But they were even worse to set up than the Prontos (even if you could import them from CCF files.)
The other big advantage to the Harmony is actual keys. I can feel where the mute button is in the dark, or volume up/down, or skip ahead/back, or channel up/down, or power, or aspect ratio. The Pronto has a finite set of hard keys, and what are the chances they support all the stuff I frequently use?
The only bummer I have right now is that I'd rather have had the 890. I had to spend another $$$ on a Niles remote extender because I hid all my gear in a closet. I tried several different brands of those RF IR extenders, but they all had extremely poor IR detection range -- sometimes were eight feet or less! I had no place to mount the little pyramids that close. So I mounted the Niles receiver in the wall behind the TV, and it works fine, but at a price. RF would have been a much better option.
Without running you through a test hoop or two, the rendering server won't necessarily know in advance if your browser honors the ping attribute or not, and so would probably continue to deliver pages that contain the redirect anyway.
Even if they came up with some data in the browser identity string, you know as well as I do that a Firefox extension will come out tomorrow to "lie" to these servers, to say "Why yes, of course I honor the ping attribute. Psyche!!!!!"
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Just as you can be a gnome, elf or human on the Alliance side of WoW, you could be a human, nox or asgard member of the SGC side, or a jaffa or un'as member of the System Lords. Actually, most of the races have members on both sides of the conflict, so race might not even be the determining factor of which side your character is on.
I almost want to be a replicator (talk about an overpowered character!), but playing a lego brick just doesn't sound like the ultimate immersive game experience to me. Besides, we'd need a raid group of like a billion people to do much of anything. :-)
But Google can't be "The One True Evil."® Microsoft's already trademarked that slogan! :-)
First, to address your point, Google would only have control over their own distro (just as Red Hat, Debian, etc. have.) The GPL ensures they can't shut down others. And those others won't go away just because Google arrived. But they might voluntarily choose to do so.
Another "standard" distro would not be a bad thing. Sure, it's going to have name recognition which will be a shiny thing to attract an initial following. It'll also help corporate adoption (the new slogan could be "Nobody ever got fired for downloading Google" :-) But even if all it did was to consolidate the Ubuntu crowd with the Mandriva crowd under one googly umbrella, that's still a pretty powerful group of followers.
Think about the popular distros that are out there now. None of them are backed in any significant way by any large companies. (Sure, IBM has pumped money into linux, but they missed the boat by never marketing a Big Blue Distro to anyone other than mainframe shops.)
I think Linux will grow to the next step just by having a huge corporate backer. So far, the biggest corporate players all have their own unices to pimp, and have never pushed linux in a big way. Google is the only really big company in a position to pull something like this off successfully. And they have the added legitimacy of having built their empire on linux. Finally, people will expect great things from a Google distro. I think the market will take this distro very seriously.
I still remember trying to decipher a manual for a Fanuc CNC control computer, the kind of computer that controls the motion of an industrial laser. Never could find the setting for parity, and I spent two hours on the phone with a "Tanglish-only" speaker. God, what a headache I had!
But the problem is that one man's troll is another man's political statement. Google for "santorum" some time, and hit "I'm feeling lucky". Some people consider that a political statement, and some consider it a troll. Both are right! So how do you include both points of view on a description of "santorum"? If you include the gross description, you've trolled Senator Santorum's supporters. If you censor the description, you're invalidating the political position of his opponents. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. And the third choice, eliminating mention of both santorum and Senator Santorum, does an even worse disservice to history by removing his legitimate accomplishments as well as the voice of his opposition.
While it would be nice to think otherwise, it's an impossible fantasy to hope that there will never be web vandals.
Sorry, I was misquoting the Wired article mentioned above, in which the author describes Asperger's syndrome:
Asperger's syndrome is one of the disorders on the autistic spectrum - a milder form of the condition that afflicted Raymond Babbitt, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.
That's why I thought of Asperger's as a "milder" form -- I misread his words to mean that "Asperger's is a milder form of autism", when the author actually wrote that Asperger's is a milder form of the Rain Man's condition.
But in the same sentence the author does explicitly state that Asperger's is "one of the disorders on the autistic spectrum." It may not fall under the clinical definition of autism; but it seems to me that by mentioning it in the article, he's implying that people with Asperger's were counted in the study. That said, my original question still stands: isn't it possible that better diagnosis of Asperger's (due to money and the better health care it brings) somehow 'inflated' the Silicon Valley study?
First, I don't want the DRM. I'm willing to give up "something" of mine in exchange for a freely usable movie. For example, I'd pay a premium for unprotected DVDs. Ripping is a total hassle, and a big waste of my time. If the extra cost to me is a blank DVD (or a bit of hard drive space) fine.
Second, I don't care about my outgoing bandwidth all the time, just when I'm trying to use it. I'll typically leave Azureus up after downloading something if I'm not interested in using the web once I've gotten the content. But if I want to get back to surfing, well, then it's going to get paused for a while.
Finally, I'd do it to encourage this type of behavior from the studios. Yes, I'll be responsible with your movie. No, I'm not going to share it without your permission. Yes, I'm willing to pay you for it.
Could you be thinking of ... hmm ... I don't know, maybe ... SATAN??!!?!
So for the "milder" cases of autism, the ones in which the children are quite likely to lead self-sufficient lives (a friend's daughter with Asperger's syndrome comes to mind) isn't it a valid hypothesis that these kids would have been correctly diagnosed, while similar kids in an impoverished (or even "average") areas would have just been labeled "troublemakers" or perhaps misdiagnosed with ADHD and given ritalin?
I certainly don't know the statistics here, the percentages of kids diagnosed, the quality of the diagnoses or any of that stuff. I'm just guessing at possible reasons for the correlation on a few things mentioned hhere. But I do know that it's very tough to compare apples to apples when money is involved. And we all know that correlation does not guarantee causality.
The very first time I decided to do this, I discovered the hosting firm was in China, and thought "uh-oh, this is never gonna work. What Chinese firm is going to care if stupid Americans are getting scammed?" But I sent the email anyway.
I got a letter of response from the hosting company within an hour, and that afternoon the spoof site was down.
I was absolutely floored by their prompt response. But it sure encouraged me to pursue the hosting companies every time since then.
Hey, I'm just trying to rationalize Blizzard's statement here. Yeah, it seems like it would preclude forming a guild based on schoolmates or whatever.
Guilds are character associations, not player groups. (A player can have multiple characters, say a cleric and a rogue, but if his cleric is accepted in a guild, that doesn't grant his rogue any special status.) Guilds are for gaming concepts -- and there is no gaming concept of sex in WoW. You can start a rogue's guild or an Ironforge guild. You can start a We Farm URBS guild. You could start a racist "elves-only" guild or a "no gnomes allowed" guild if you want. You could even have a "no-girl-characters" guild, and disallow any female characters. But they're all character-based, and based on the in-game reality. In real life, it doesn't matter if it's a male or female player controlling the male or female character.
Would they be able to continue to run a linux kernel on it? Can you run the linux kernel on a patented platform? Can you run patented software on a linux platform?
If it turns out that you can still run patented software, what about kernel modules? Can you patent them or not?
What if it turns out that you can't? Then what do you do about VMWARE? VMWARE can be used to run a Windows XP virtual machine, which for all we know is encrusted with thousands of patents.
This whole "we enforce the following opinions about these uses of our software" thing is a bad idea, in general. Sure, they've made it plainly obvious that they don't want to be a party to building a TPM-based-machine. But what's next? No military uses? No "dual uses" (civilian and military)? "Sorry, can't write GPS software, it uses data that comes from a military owned satellite." "Can't put Word support in Open Office, it allows cross-platform usage of patented file formats." "Can't write an Asterisk plug-in, you might use that phone line to call Microsoft support."
"Preamble
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users." [ emphasis mine ]
I think they have to accept the good with the bad. All should mean "all". Freedom should mean "freedom".
The vast majority of consumers of diesel are commercial trucks. I think they're subject to periodic and/or random inspections in every state, and one of the quick tests every inspector performs is a stick in the tank. If it comes up colored with dye, you get busted for tax evasion. Very unpleasant penalties, so the honest truckers don't bother.
But diesel passenger cars are still quite uncommon (I'm guessing 5% or less) there. My state has no required vehicular inspections, so I'm not sure if anyone would ever find out. There is a box to check on the vehicle registration form indicating "alternative fuel" (not gasoline) so I imagine if you check it they may correlate that with buying home heating oil in July.
Umm... those are their "working clothes." A uniform of sorts.
Let's just say it's not the casinos paying them to dress that way.
Spam wouldn't be such a huge problem if the stuff was never sent in the first place. For years now, legitimate ISPs have quickly blacklisted any downstream customers who are sending massive amounts of spam, or else face blacklisting themselves. The spammers turned to hackers operating botnets, which has greatly reduced the possibility of stopping them at the source.
If Microsoft could somehow "clean up" these owned boxes, the problem would indeed get better. However, since they constantly pull crap like "dropping support for old versions" those old OSes will continue to offer havens to hackers. Somehow claiming that "Vista" will solve all the problems misses the point entirely: I'm never upgrading to Vista, for example, because I don't want the OS DRMing me. Maw and Paw Sixpack have an old Winders 98 PC -- they're never going to touch it. Hell, I have a buddy who is absolutely f'ing brilliant in the Unix world who fails to see why he should bother updating his Windows PC, since he only uses it for games anyway. Since he doesn't care what happens to that machine, he fails to care what can happen because of it.
Set the wayback machine to the early 1970's. Back then I used to play Colossal Cave a lot. It was one of the original text adventure games, preceding Zork by at least 10 years. When I played, it was on a chugga-chugga-ding!ding! teletype attached to a 110 baud modem, which meant 10 characters per second. When you got to some place where the author wanted you to be suitably impressed, he'd "tart up" the description, running it to several paragraphs. (The mirror spanning the lake comes to mind.) But it was awful to have to sit there and wait for the whole description to print out before you could continue, even though it was the same description you'd read every time you played the game before.
Even back then, the game programmer had the good sense to only show you the "long description" once. If you wanted, you could always type "LOOK" and you'd get to read it again (the descriptions sometimes held clues.) So in that respect, games have actually gone backwards in user friendliness!
To bring this back on topic, those secure functions would not have helped with this particular case. There was no "program flaw" present, it was instead a "design flaw". And flaw is even too strong a word -- weakness would be better. Given the state of the world in 1992 when it was first designed, there was no thought at all given to "malicious code" other than viruses. With Windows still being three years away from even supporting IP, the only code you executed was code you brought with you. And virus scanners watched those floppy drives like hawks. Even when Windows NT came out, there was still no real thought given to code "security."
Malware didn't reach the big time until about 1997 or 1998 when the first adware started being installed. Microsoft finally focused on security somewhere around 2001. And by then, the WMF code had gained tenure. The AbortProc() API didn't leak memory, it didn't trigger any buffer overrun tests (in isolation, anyway.) It did exactly what it was designed to do, it's just that it was designed in a safer era.
Back off topic: even as late as last year my Microsoft rep has continued to insist that Microsoft "security" comes from Microsoft innovations such as "security blankets" and "access permissions". He continued to spout the corporate line, while completely failing to recognize that Trojan horses are still the #1 vector of disaster on Microsoft boxes. What pissed me off is that he did not seem to want to understand that it wasn't about "bad people doing bad things", it has always been about "authorized people being manipulated into doing bad things." I think their training has been lacking.
Even if the page was secure when you wrote it, the latest version of Apache (OK, IIS) might have a hole in the new FOO tag. You'd have to know to revisit your sanitizing routine to plug the newly discovered holes, and you'd need to do it fast before you're hit by the bad guys. A whitelist of nice safe timeworn tags may be less "user friendly" but is certainly more "future-security-proof".
"It's a trap!"
How is a remote going to magically know if I have my DVD player hooked up to a input on my pre/pro or directly to my TV?
The software knows from your model number that your TVs has certain audio and video inputs, that your cable box and DVD player has specific audio and video outputs, and that your VCRs, DVRs, video switches and post-processors (such as equalizers, filters or whatever) have both inputs and outputs. It applies rules to whatever combination of gear you've entered, and figures out things like "if you have a cable box and a TV set you might want to set up a 'Watch Cable TV' macro." Once it's come up with the list of tasks that you should be able to do with your equipment, it presents you with that list and prompts you to set each activity up.
Once you click "set up the 'Watch Cable TV' activity", it then assumes that one of your cable box's outputs would be plugged into the TiVo, and that your TV is connected to your TiVo. For the 'Watch Cable TV' activity, it might prompt "To watch cable channels on your TiVo, which input on your TiVo do you have to select?" and gives the exact list of inputs that your model of TiVo has. It then asks "Which input on your TV do you have to select to watch TiVo?" And that's literally all that's required for the setup process for each activity. From there, the web page will assemble the IR codes, build up macros, and download a configuration file which is then sent to the remote.
I answered at most a dozen or two carefullly scripted questions, at which point my remote was fully functional. But since I'm me, I wanted to play around with it so I added another "activity" to support another set of functions. It was almost as easy as the pre-scripted ones.
On the remote, the "activities" are displayed on the 8 "soft" keys. (They are actually hard buttons surrounding the non-touch LCD display screen.) It has hard keys to bring up activities, devices, media and help. And the help is also very intelligent. The remote keeps track of your current context (it knows if you are trying to watch cable or if your system is supposed to be off, for example) but if your TV input gets changed, or it gets out of sync because your DVD player missed the "on" signal, pressing the "help" button will ask you a series of questions that will get everything back in sync. "Is your TV on? [no] *blinky-blinky* Now is your TV on? [yes] Did that fix the problem? [yes]"
The media button is a context-sensitive "favorites" list. For the "Watch TV" activity, it's a list of favorite cable channels. For the "Listen to radio", it's a list of frequencies or presets that you'd have on your tuner. For a DVD carousel, it could be a disc selector.
If you want to do something that's not pre-scripted, hit the "device" button and select the specific device from the soft keys. The remote is then configured to send commands exclusively to that one device; all the hard keys that make sense are supported (menu, up/down/left/right, 0-9, volume, etc) and any keys that don't have hard analogues are supported in the on-screen soft keys.
The web side is designed so that a hard-core geek can set or tweak anything, while the handhold wizards will walk even Joe Sixpack through the process with a minimum of knowledge. Their database holds a record of absolutely every obscure device I could find to play with. This remote not only scored a WAF of about 98 (would have been 100 except for the price), it's even easy enough to use that it passes the "Aunt Judy" test. While I set one up for her, I did not have to train her how to
Carry a bottle of gin and a bottle of vermouth with you. When you get lost, pour one shot of gin into a glass, and two shots of vermouth. You'll get people coming from every direction telling you "that's no way to mix a martini!"
I telephone interviewed an applicant today who had an Indian accent. This is for a technical lead role, where clear communication is important. But the accent simply wasn't a factor in my decision -- he sounded very competent and practiced at the skills we desire, so I recommended he be flown in for a second round of interviews. The people he will be working with already work for an Indian senior group manager, so I don't imagine they'll have a problem either. (Honestly, I didn't think of that till just now anyway.)
The thing I've noticed most is that I'm not seeing a wide diversity of candidates. I think I've seen only about three females' resumes over the last year, and one Chinese man's, while I've been given literally dozens of white and Indian men's resumes. I'd be interested to find out if those statistics match the labor pool of applicants at a place like monster.com.
The entire setup process is fully automated. I didn't have to hunt for files on the web, I didn't have to figure out or create long lists of macros, I just had to plug a USB cable into the remote. It launched a web page where I entered my model numbers, tied a few inputs to outputs, and it did all the macro creation for me. And it knows full codes for every random old piece of hardware I own.
I've looked at the Pronto's programming environment before, and I know I didn't want to go to that much work to define remote screens for each device, and then train them. And yes, I could have gone hunting for all the right CCF files. But why? Everything for the Harmony is automatically downloaded just by my entering a model number. And it then creates the sensible macros magically: Watch TV, for example. I didn't have to pick "Power on amp, power on TV, set amp input to Audio1, set TV input to HDMI, set internal channel changing device to cable box". The Pronto looked like it was still going to require me to figure out and assemble a half-dozen macros.
I also thought about using Neo-Pacific's remote software for one of my old Palms. But they were even worse to set up than the Prontos (even if you could import them from CCF files.)
The other big advantage to the Harmony is actual keys. I can feel where the mute button is in the dark, or volume up/down, or skip ahead/back, or channel up/down, or power, or aspect ratio. The Pronto has a finite set of hard keys, and what are the chances they support all the stuff I frequently use?
The only bummer I have right now is that I'd rather have had the 890. I had to spend another $$$ on a Niles remote extender because I hid all my gear in a closet. I tried several different brands of those RF IR extenders, but they all had extremely poor IR detection range -- sometimes were eight feet or less! I had no place to mount the little pyramids that close. So I mounted the Niles receiver in the wall behind the TV, and it works fine, but at a price. RF would have been a much better option.
Even if they came up with some data in the browser identity string, you know as well as I do that a Firefox extension will come out tomorrow to "lie" to these servers, to say "Why yes, of course I honor the ping attribute. Psyche!!!!!"