Legitimate reason: yes. Good reason: no. Commonly accepted best-practice is not to let the user know which part is wrong. Reporting that the username is fine but the password isn't makes brute-force login attempts a more practical form of attack especially where you are expecting daft users with poor password choices - and facebook themselves expects their users to be too daft to properly choose and look after their usernames/passwords hence the "enter your email address and password here and we'll look at your contacts for you!" area that is present on sign-up and occasionally lied about on wall updates (I have a couple of fake accounts that I use to check how I look to others, and fb has claimed more than once that one of those accounts "has tried the friend finder" when I know full well this has not happened).
Yep. Though they've only ever been officially known as AOL in their branding over here. They were famous for their badly implemented parental controls when their dial-up services appeared in the UK using said parental controls as a key selling point - their systems would not let you sign up if you were from Scunthorpe, for instance.
Also (missed this from my previous post) I don't want my browser deciding it want to download an several Mb update while I'm connected via a very slow cellular connection (i.e. GPRS in area with no 3G or wifi coverage) trying to get something done with what little bandwidth is available in such circumstances.
Some take exception to their software installing stuff (even updates) without their express permission (or request), or to software refusing to run until it is updated (MS's IM client does this, or so I'm told). There are a number of reasons why you might want to hold back on an update - perhaps you are a dev who want to keep old versions around for testing how their pages work in older versions that have certain issues, or perhaps you just prefer to hold back a day or so to make sure there are no massive bugs in the new release (letting the early adopters get scalped instead). Providing the off switch should alleviate these concerns for people who care though.
There is a potential security issue too: what if someone manages to hack Mozilla's DNS to point to a malicious site pretending that there is an update (which introduces malware)? I hope they are planning on properly signing and verifying updates to deal with this possibility.
Ultimately, how does the end users computer get infected by this `malware'?
The site linked to by the advert includes code that exploits a drive-by install using an unpatched exploit for the user's browser/OS, or uses some form of human engineering to get them to install it (i.e. like the many many "your machine is infected, follow these instructions to fix this" things that are seen out there).
At least one ad network I've seen seems to allow advertises to include custom javascript in their adverts, either that or the advertisers have found a way around the filtering the ad network does on the content, at which point such unpatched flaws can be exploited without the user needing to click the ad at all.
But there is nothing to stop them just drawing the 500mA if the right sort of charger is not detected. Refusing to charge at all unless the licensed parts are present is pure market control, nothing else.
Yes, but getting agreement for this would take sign-off from relevant people in the other company which would take time and hassle which would have to be paid for on top of the remuneration for the actual game units. And it would be more expensive per game - internally the free games would be passed off on balance sheets "at cost" which is probably zero or near zero (unless they have a tortuous internal economy like some of our clients do), the other company (if another company's game were to be used as the "sorry, here have this as a thankyou for your understanding and a token of good faith") would expect more than that per unit.
Ironic this, seeing as how TalkTalk have been pushing back against almost the same things in the Digital Economy Act.
They are against the act because as itis currently written it favours smaller operators, as some of its rules such as the automatic disconnection for copyright violation only apply to ISPs with at least 40,000 customers. They are not fighting the act to protect anyone's privacy, they are fighting the act because it could make their services look less competitive.
Shame really the did look like they might be good guys.
No they didn't, not if you look into their (recent) past. They were one of the big three ISPs connected to the "ex-" spyware outfit Phorm in 2008/2009 and their past sales techniques including line-slamming (using people's details gleaned from other sales activity to switch their landline provision to them without permission) and apparetnyl deliberate ignorance of the Telephone Preference List have left a lot to be desired. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TalkTalk#Data_pimping and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carphone_Warehouse#Data_protection respectively for links to more info.
The Valeyard turned out to be the Doctor in his thirteenth generation from the series "Trial of a Timelord". Will we see this happen again with the next generation???
I think the Valyard was said to be a part that "schismed" from the Doctor at that point. Given how much causality would have been mucked around in the time war that may have been rearranged.
I totally agree that he was awesome and it will be so sad if he goes. Can't they offer more money or something?
No-one over here can afford much more money right now, least not the BBC. It doesn't really show but this series of Who had a reduced budget compared to the previous ones and the BBC in general is having to tighten the purse strings further. It might not be the money he is after though, at least not just the money.
I'd like to see him stay longer too. His playing of the doctor, Amy as the main companion, and Moffat running the show behind the scenes, is a combination that has to worked very well IMO.
at least some of the episodes like "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" or "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone" are far too dark for a children's show.
Bah! Maybe American children. Hiding behind the sofa from the Doctor Who aliens is a right of passage for British children. Did you see the "Pandorica Opens" episode, where the severed cyberman helment pops open and the desicated skull pops out? The general reaction over here was: "my seven year old ran out of the room in fear - good episode!"
A great example of this is Blink, the episode that introduced the weeping angles. My brother runs a gift shop (one of the Past Times chain) and at the time they were stocking some faux-porcelain statues that out of the corner of your eye did not look at all dissimilar. Kids would blunder in along with their parents, see these, go silent, and not take their eyes off them until they'd left the shop. Brilliant.
they are all regular episodes with a bit of christmas in the middle...
As well as the "bit of Christmas" they have their toung in their cheek a bit more than the normal episodes - aiming to be a stand-alone-ish specacle with a few "we know we are being daft" nods. Things like the spaceship hurtling towards Buck Palace, the silly giant cyber-thingy stomping around, and the cat-burgler character.
For some of the people I know, and possibly many others, the making of calls has actually become a secondary function of their phones. Music, video, GPS and route planning, and maybe make/receive a call or two in an emergency. So perhaps the manufacturers of smart phones are prioritising their testing similarly. I'm talking as an outsider though - my nearly-four-year-old Nokia mini-brick format phone (a 6233, FYI) still serves me well and taking calls/texts is still its primary function.
Not that I wish to defend Apple here (from what I gather there *is* a problem, and while it may not be massive it is seems significant enough for many people to notice even after discounting obvious group-think and multiple re-reporting of the same unverified facts), but what your old smart phone is doing a lot less then the new iPhone. The receiving equipment for 1G/2G reception that the old blackberry is using is sharing the phone case and it's power supply lines with far far less potentially interfering equipment then the iPhone: the receiving equipment and circuitry for 3G reception (which will be online even if no reception is possible at that location so the phone can switch over as soon as adequate reception is detected), the fancy screen, the extra RAM, and so on. It is not unlikely that the iPhone is essentially interfering with itself more then the old Blackberry does, and that other new smartphones with similar capabilities to the iPhone would also be less capable of dealing with seriously borderline compared to the old Blackberry.
I think that would go down badly with some players, and certainly some (p)reviewers. Many games are sold on their shiny shiny at least in the early marketting.
Also with some modern games and engines the plain number of polygons is not as important as other effects that are being applied, and turning off the atmospheric lighting effects when something happens might jar a lot more than drawing less detail in the distance.
A good idea though, if your game is one that can take advantage of it.
That is another reason that display size and your position relative to it makes a difference. The 23" widescreen unit I look at most now fills my field of vision much more fully than the little old 14" CRT I played the original Doom on all those years ago did. That means peripheral vision is probably getting used more these days.
15fps is often fine if it is constant, though I would usually demand more (and be willing to drop things like texture quality, AA, and so on to compensate) from a fast-paced game.
A drop from ~30 to ~15 in a busy scene, if you are watching intently, can be a bit jarring though (I assume the change in timing is enough to kick off a "something is different, best be alert" reflex in the brain's optical processing). Much more so then the same relative change in a drop from ~60 to ~30 (which I'm not 100% sure I'd particularly notice if I'm honest - though I'm not a big gamer with good eye-sight!).
Have other cards been offered as 'limited editions'?
From what I've seen there is often at least one for each generation of each major manufacturer's chip. Sometimes there is more than one, as two or more board builders compete with each other to see who can earn most nerd points by pushing a given generation of chip the furthest (by over-clocking everything, over-speccing other parts, including the require cooling system to keep the out-of-spec setup inside an acceptable thermal profile, and turning marketing up to 11).
I tend to ignore such limited editions though. More often than not the price/performance ratio of them is many times more ridiculous than the officially (by the chip maker) sanctioned top-of-the-range cards which them selves offer poor p/p compared to the next layer or two down.
This sort of card has two purposes. It is aimed at selling to the sort of people that want the best of the best no matter what the cost and even if they know something better will be along next month, and it raises the profile of the company a bit via coverage on hardware review sites and news agregators like./.
1) 30fps is a joke and not anywhere near a playable framerate
FPS is one of those subjective issues where there seems to be a lot more "I don't like X so you are daft for suggesting someone might" then hard facts.
For lot of people 30fps is perfectly fine if it is a minimum rate rather than an average. A lot of people talk at cross purposes on this one, the "30 is fine" crowd assuming that the people looking for 100fps+ when there monitor probably refreshes at 60Hz are daft and want 100+fps everywhere and the "30 is no were near enough" crowd thinking that the 30fpss would be happy with 30 on average. For games that require decent graphics hardware the demand on that hardware can vary a lot, so a card that gets 30pfs in some areas will drop below 15fps in others, likewise that card that pushes 100Hz in the lighter scenes may drop below 50 on the really heavy ones.
So any quote of an fps requirement or recommendation is completely useless unless you qualify the figure in more detail.
Another factor that needs to be considered is screen size. An object moving from one side of the screen to the other at the same framerate is going to look smoother on an smaller monitor than it'll look on a full-wall projector (unless of course you are far away from said wall, to the point where it is effectively the same size as the small monitor in terms of how it appear on the back of your eye). How far objects on the display travel between frames is what needs to be measured, not just how many frames there are in a given time. This brings up another point as to why this sort of thing is subjective and difficult to sound reasonable discussing (without so much supporting detail that you bore people to death) - it very much depends on what games you play and how you play them.
For the major app that I work on for my company, I would say that a lot of the data is write-only until something goes wrong. There is a lot of data that is recorded simply for auditing purposes. The system keeps a copy of every version of a form that it has seen and in ideal situations these data rows, and sometimes entire documents that someone has written, are not looked at again - they are there so that if a problem is found or a complaint made everything can be tracked down to the source and procedures updated (and/or wrists slapped) so the problem is less likely to happen again in future.
I suspect that less then 1% of data is read a week after it is generated. There will be a lot of information out there, be it full documents or rows of stats in a data table, that is generated, made available to people by some means, read (or just skimmed) once by those people, and then "filed" for future reference. It was nearly the same with paper based systems, why should it be any different for electronic storage - the ease of storing and searching through the data (assuming it is well indexed) encourages more data to be stored like this because you don't have quite the same logistical problems associated by massive paper filling systems.
And yes, it will affect how people purchase and use storage. It has done for years, at least for large databases (main active store and transaction logs on fancy drives in a RAID 10 array possibly of SSDs these days, archive data pushed off (by data partitioning inside the one DB or by actually migrating data to another DB) to a slower array of spinning disks, backups to tape and moved off-site) and home users (active content on one drive, gobs of video on recordable media - though with large drive as cheap as they are these days most people don't need to offline storage unless they want a proper backup).
Even if they were all traced, you would need to chase, capture and prosecute them. Even if the regulators had the power, from where would they get the funds? And even if they caught all the current crop, more would turn up next day. You can't fix this completely as the fraudsters end, the only sure fire way to get rid of the problem is to educate the potential victims. Unfortunately this is ny on impossible too.
Slashdot Mirror
Legitimate reason: yes. Good reason: no. Commonly accepted best-practice is not to let the user know which part is wrong. Reporting that the username is fine but the password isn't makes brute-force login attempts a more practical form of attack especially where you are expecting daft users with poor password choices - and facebook themselves expects their users to be too daft to properly choose and look after their usernames/passwords hence the "enter your email address and password here and we'll look at your contacts for you!" area that is present on sign-up and occasionally lied about on wall updates (I have a couple of fake accounts that I use to check how I look to others, and fb has claimed more than once that one of those accounts "has tried the friend finder" when I know full well this has not happened).
America Online operates in Europe?
Yep. Though they've only ever been officially known as AOL in their branding over here. They were famous for their badly implemented parental controls when their dial-up services appeared in the UK using said parental controls as a key selling point - their systems would not let you sign up if you were from Scunthorpe, for instance.
I recommend giving http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ a go. It can turn some of the most eye-burning of pages into a simple block of readable content.
Also (missed this from my previous post) I don't want my browser deciding it want to download an several Mb update while I'm connected via a very slow cellular connection (i.e. GPRS in area with no 3G or wifi coverage) trying to get something done with what little bandwidth is available in such circumstances.
why would this be considered a bad idea?
Some take exception to their software installing stuff (even updates) without their express permission (or request), or to software refusing to run until it is updated (MS's IM client does this, or so I'm told). There are a number of reasons why you might want to hold back on an update - perhaps you are a dev who want to keep old versions around for testing how their pages work in older versions that have certain issues, or perhaps you just prefer to hold back a day or so to make sure there are no massive bugs in the new release (letting the early adopters get scalped instead). Providing the off switch should alleviate these concerns for people who care though.
There is a potential security issue too: what if someone manages to hack Mozilla's DNS to point to a malicious site pretending that there is an update (which introduces malware)? I hope they are planning on properly signing and verifying updates to deal with this possibility.
Ultimately, how does the end users computer get infected by this `malware'?
The site linked to by the advert includes code that exploits a drive-by install using an unpatched exploit for the user's browser/OS, or uses some form of human engineering to get them to install it (i.e. like the many many "your machine is infected, follow these instructions to fix this" things that are seen out there).
At least one ad network I've seen seems to allow advertises to include custom javascript in their adverts, either that or the advertisers have found a way around the filtering the ad network does on the content, at which point such unpatched flaws can be exploited without the user needing to click the ad at all.
But there is nothing to stop them just drawing the 500mA if the right sort of charger is not detected. Refusing to charge at all unless the licensed parts are present is pure market control, nothing else.
Yes, but getting agreement for this would take sign-off from relevant people in the other company which would take time and hassle which would have to be paid for on top of the remuneration for the actual game units. And it would be more expensive per game - internally the free games would be passed off on balance sheets "at cost" which is probably zero or near zero (unless they have a tortuous internal economy like some of our clients do), the other company (if another company's game were to be used as the "sorry, here have this as a thankyou for your understanding and a token of good faith") would expect more than that per unit.
I thought that to. Though on reconsidering, they couldn't much hand out free versions of someone else's game in recompense for their mistake...
Ironic this, seeing as how TalkTalk have been pushing back against almost the same things in the Digital Economy Act.
They are against the act because as itis currently written it favours smaller operators, as some of its rules such as the automatic disconnection for copyright violation only apply to ISPs with at least 40,000 customers. They are not fighting the act to protect anyone's privacy, they are fighting the act because it could make their services look less competitive.
Shame really the did look like they might be good guys.
No they didn't, not if you look into their (recent) past. They were one of the big three ISPs connected to the "ex-" spyware outfit Phorm in 2008/2009 and their past sales techniques including line-slamming (using people's details gleaned from other sales activity to switch their landline provision to them without permission) and apparetnyl deliberate ignorance of the Telephone Preference List have left a lot to be desired. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TalkTalk#Data_pimping and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carphone_Warehouse#Data_protection respectively for links to more info.
You don't know how right you might be: http://shakespearelang.sourceforge.net/report/shakespeare/ - maybe Romeo and Julie is really a solution to the halting problem!
The Valeyard turned out to be the Doctor in his thirteenth generation from the series "Trial of a Timelord". Will we see this happen again with the next generation???
I think the Valyard was said to be a part that "schismed" from the Doctor at that point. Given how much causality would have been mucked around in the time war that may have been rearranged.
I totally agree that he was awesome and it will be so sad if he goes. Can't they offer more money or something?
No-one over here can afford much more money right now, least not the BBC. It doesn't really show but this series of Who had a reduced budget compared to the previous ones and the BBC in general is having to tighten the purse strings further. It might not be the money he is after though, at least not just the money.
I'd like to see him stay longer too. His playing of the doctor, Amy as the main companion, and Moffat running the show behind the scenes, is a combination that has to worked very well IMO.
Bah! Maybe American children. Hiding behind the sofa from the Doctor Who aliens is a right of passage for British children. Did you see the "Pandorica Opens" episode, where the severed cyberman helment pops open and the desicated skull pops out? The general reaction over here was: "my seven year old ran out of the room in fear - good episode!"
A great example of this is Blink, the episode that introduced the weeping angles. My brother runs a gift shop (one of the Past Times chain) and at the time they were stocking some faux-porcelain statues that out of the corner of your eye did not look at all dissimilar. Kids would blunder in along with their parents, see these, go silent, and not take their eyes off them until they'd left the shop. Brilliant.
they are all regular episodes with a bit of christmas in the middle...
As well as the "bit of Christmas" they have their toung in their cheek a bit more than the normal episodes - aiming to be a stand-alone-ish specacle with a few "we know we are being daft" nods. Things like the spaceship hurtling towards Buck Palace, the silly giant cyber-thingy stomping around, and the cat-burgler character.
For some of the people I know, and possibly many others, the making of calls has actually become a secondary function of their phones. Music, video, GPS and route planning, and maybe make/receive a call or two in an emergency. So perhaps the manufacturers of smart phones are prioritising their testing similarly. I'm talking as an outsider though - my nearly-four-year-old Nokia mini-brick format phone (a 6233, FYI) still serves me well and taking calls/texts is still its primary function.
Not that I wish to defend Apple here (from what I gather there *is* a problem, and while it may not be massive it is seems significant enough for many people to notice even after discounting obvious group-think and multiple re-reporting of the same unverified facts), but what your old smart phone is doing a lot less then the new iPhone. The receiving equipment for 1G/2G reception that the old blackberry is using is sharing the phone case and it's power supply lines with far far less potentially interfering equipment then the iPhone: the receiving equipment and circuitry for 3G reception (which will be online even if no reception is possible at that location so the phone can switch over as soon as adequate reception is detected), the fancy screen, the extra RAM, and so on. It is not unlikely that the iPhone is essentially interfering with itself more then the old Blackberry does, and that other new smartphones with similar capabilities to the iPhone would also be less capable of dealing with seriously borderline compared to the old Blackberry.
So what do I throw in a fit of pique now?
I think that would go down badly with some players, and certainly some (p)reviewers. Many games are sold on their shiny shiny at least in the early marketting.
Also with some modern games and engines the plain number of polygons is not as important as other effects that are being applied, and turning off the atmospheric lighting effects when something happens might jar a lot more than drawing less detail in the distance.
A good idea though, if your game is one that can take advantage of it.
That is another reason that display size and your position relative to it makes a difference. The 23" widescreen unit I look at most now fills my field of vision much more fully than the little old 14" CRT I played the original Doom on all those years ago did. That means peripheral vision is probably getting used more these days.
15fps is often fine if it is constant, though I would usually demand more (and be willing to drop things like texture quality, AA, and so on to compensate) from a fast-paced game.
A drop from ~30 to ~15 in a busy scene, if you are watching intently, can be a bit jarring though (I assume the change in timing is enough to kick off a "something is different, best be alert" reflex in the brain's optical processing). Much more so then the same relative change in a drop from ~60 to ~30 (which I'm not 100% sure I'd particularly notice if I'm honest - though I'm not a big gamer with good eye-sight!).
Have other cards been offered as 'limited editions'?
From what I've seen there is often at least one for each generation of each major manufacturer's chip. Sometimes there is more than one, as two or more board builders compete with each other to see who can earn most nerd points by pushing a given generation of chip the furthest (by over-clocking everything, over-speccing other parts, including the require cooling system to keep the out-of-spec setup inside an acceptable thermal profile, and turning marketing up to 11).
I tend to ignore such limited editions though. More often than not the price/performance ratio of them is many times more ridiculous than the officially (by the chip maker) sanctioned top-of-the-range cards which them selves offer poor p/p compared to the next layer or two down.
This sort of card has two purposes. It is aimed at selling to the sort of people that want the best of the best no matter what the cost and even if they know something better will be along next month, and it raises the profile of the company a bit via coverage on hardware review sites and news agregators like ./.
1) 30fps is a joke and not anywhere near a playable framerate
FPS is one of those subjective issues where there seems to be a lot more "I don't like X so you are daft for suggesting someone might" then hard facts.
For lot of people 30fps is perfectly fine if it is a minimum rate rather than an average. A lot of people talk at cross purposes on this one, the "30 is fine" crowd assuming that the people looking for 100fps+ when there monitor probably refreshes at 60Hz are daft and want 100+fps everywhere and the "30 is no were near enough" crowd thinking that the 30fpss would be happy with 30 on average. For games that require decent graphics hardware the demand on that hardware can vary a lot, so a card that gets 30pfs in some areas will drop below 15fps in others, likewise that card that pushes 100Hz in the lighter scenes may drop below 50 on the really heavy ones.
So any quote of an fps requirement or recommendation is completely useless unless you qualify the figure in more detail.
Another factor that needs to be considered is screen size. An object moving from one side of the screen to the other at the same framerate is going to look smoother on an smaller monitor than it'll look on a full-wall projector (unless of course you are far away from said wall, to the point where it is effectively the same size as the small monitor in terms of how it appear on the back of your eye). How far objects on the display travel between frames is what needs to be measured, not just how many frames there are in a given time. This brings up another point as to why this sort of thing is subjective and difficult to sound reasonable discussing (without so much supporting detail that you bore people to death) - it very much depends on what games you play and how you play them.
For the major app that I work on for my company, I would say that a lot of the data is write-only until something goes wrong. There is a lot of data that is recorded simply for auditing purposes. The system keeps a copy of every version of a form that it has seen and in ideal situations these data rows, and sometimes entire documents that someone has written, are not looked at again - they are there so that if a problem is found or a complaint made everything can be tracked down to the source and procedures updated (and/or wrists slapped) so the problem is less likely to happen again in future.
I suspect that less then 1% of data is read a week after it is generated. There will be a lot of information out there, be it full documents or rows of stats in a data table, that is generated, made available to people by some means, read (or just skimmed) once by those people, and then "filed" for future reference. It was nearly the same with paper based systems, why should it be any different for electronic storage - the ease of storing and searching through the data (assuming it is well indexed) encourages more data to be stored like this because you don't have quite the same logistical problems associated by massive paper filling systems.
And yes, it will affect how people purchase and use storage. It has done for years, at least for large databases (main active store and transaction logs on fancy drives in a RAID 10 array possibly of SSDs these days, archive data pushed off (by data partitioning inside the one DB or by actually migrating data to another DB) to a slower array of spinning disks, backups to tape and moved off-site) and home users (active content on one drive, gobs of video on recordable media - though with large drive as cheap as they are these days most people don't need to offline storage unless they want a proper backup).
Even if they were all traced, you would need to chase, capture and prosecute them. Even if the regulators had the power, from where would they get the funds? And even if they caught all the current crop, more would turn up next day. You can't fix this completely as the fraudsters end, the only sure fire way to get rid of the problem is to educate the potential victims. Unfortunately this is ny on impossible too.