you need to know a lot about the APIs you're working with
And there I was thinking I just mashed my keyboard at random and hoped the IDE sorted it out for me...
I've seen people in business app development that went straight out of some sort of evening school and were put behind a project to create productive code, with little care about stability, safety or reliability.
Yes, I've seen that too - either other people on the team take up the slack, or the project fails, either technically (the product is buggy and unstable), commercially (cost and time overruns) or totally (it dies). I've also played games that felt like the same tactic had been used in their development. You get know-little morons hired by short-sighted cost-cutting managers in most lines of work.
There is also a very big difference between noticing the fault, stepping the hell away from the keyboard and thinking long and hard about how best to inform the relevant people (if at all in these ultra-paranoid, litigation-happy times), and exploiting the fault to poke around and see what information you can find.
I in no way condone the extradition or the heavy-handed way in which the US authorities appear to be conducting things, but no, he should not be praised.
How about we give it up already and just forego the use of the term hacker meaning good computer nerd?
I've been arguing that for years, especially as in my experience in the UK, a hack most certainly is not a clever piece of code; the image presented is of someone making a mess of it, much like hacking through the undergrowth with a machete.
Besides which, you should attempt to target your language at the intended audience, and on a site like BBC News that most certainly is not the 5% of the population who know about the other use of the word.
If you read the linked-to article (the last one), you'll see this:
The authorities have warned that without his co-operation and a guilty plea the case could be treated as terrorism and he could face a long jail sentence.
They're already threatening to treat it as terrorism.
Assuming ${EXPENSIVE_PRODUCT_A} is Windows and ${CHEAP_PRODUCT_B} is Linux (and I can't see what else you could be referring to in this context), that's neither legally wrong (of course you can wipe the preinstalled OS) nor anything at all to do with WGA.
my laptop, which dual boots with XP MCE, my HTPC which is running Vista Ultimate (both came from MSDN)
Unless the licence has changed in the couple of years since I last read it, the OSes you get with an MSDN subscription are for testing purposes only - you're not supposed to use them for day to day use...
If you had followed the link, you would see the following for crash recovery:
"If a website or add-on causes a tab to crash in Internet Explorer 8, only that tab is affected. The browser itself remains stable and other tabs remain unaffected"
That's not the same as Firefox's session recovery.
I would hope with Vista's kernel security IE8 is nearly a stand-alone product now days.
IE7 was a standalone product. Lots of other apps use mshtml.dll (the standard Windows HTML rendering engine, as used by IE) but that does not mean that IE is any less standalone. Since at least IE7 if you type an http:/// URL in the address bar in Windows Explorer, an IE process is spawned to handle it instead of WE handling it itself.
Besides that, IE was never integrated into the kernel. It was integrated into Explorer, which provides the desktop environment, but that is most certainly not the same thing. I'm all for bashing MS, but let's keep it to things they've actually done.
It's tough when your target audience are distracted by your speech instead of focused on your product.
That's true, but given that it was an English team showcasing their stuff on an English website, I'd say they targetted their audience appropriately. (Quite apart from the fact that the guy does not have an particular regional accent - if you think that's hard to understand, you should try a strong Glaswegian accent)
Besides which, you don't hear us Brits whining about all the US accents we have to put up with hearing.
Honestly if you have trouble understanding a perfectly ordinary English accent I dread to think how you'd deal with most non-native English speakers.
I don't know about this particular system, but I have dealt with phone systems that ask you for certain letters from your password (e.g. 2nd and 5th, 3rd and 8th, etc). I wouldn't be surprised if this was the same.
He essentially said that he didn't believe video games were art as they offered an open ended experience where players can immerse themselves in order to form unique experiences.
And there I was thinking that forming unique experiences was part of the whole art thing...
Is riding the subway to work art? No. Is seeing a painting on the wall art? The painting itself is, yes, but not the act of seeing it or your choice to go and see it. Is listening to music art? Not the act of listening, but the music itself is art... and you see my point.
I think I do see your point - the game itself is art, but the act of playing it is not.
Well I for one have been blocking google analytics for a while, as I got tired of the number of times I've been sat looking at a blank white tab with a "wating for google-analytics.com...." message in the status bar.
back in the early days of the web, if a website was 500k in TOTAL is was large
And back in the day I was browsing with a 33.6kbps modem; now I have an "up to 8Mbps" ADSL connection (really about 2.5 thanks to my shitty phone line).
What's the point of having a connection 75x the speed (costing less than half what I was paying in phone bills) if nothing uses it? (Not defending ads here by the way, but things like Google maps would have been largely unusable on dial up)
now days[sic] chewing 10 megs on a single site is nothing, most of it is ads and very little content.
I have two points to make on this:
a) 10MB is 20x 500KB; even my crappy phone line gets me 75x the speed of my old modem, so that site is still loading in less than a third the time of the old one
b) I don't believe that figure anyway; do you have any real numbers to back that assertion up with?
The problem with that is that if the company fails, you inadvertently punish a number of people who had nothing to do with the crime. That happens with normal crime too, when you jail someone and their friends and relatives lose them for that time, but that doesn't generally affect their livelihoods.
Why should even criminal negligence on the part of maybe a handful of employees potentially mean that everyone else employed by the company loses their jobs too?
The notion that because 100% success is impossible one should not even try is common and defeatist. What's wrong with making as much of a difference as you can?
It's particularly ironic given your sig - you can't stop telemarketers completely either.
To be fair, I think a lot of them are also (loosely) support rather than creative - that is, support programmers, sysadmins, PC support, etc, rather than development programmers, artists, musicians, etc. In other words, they're in the group that are paid to maintain an existing item, not the group that is paid to create new items.
More correctly, "JIT" is an acronym, standing for "Just In Time". While it's very common to talk about something having "(a) JIT", what is really meant is that it has "a JIT compiler" or "JIT compilation".
Mozilla Firefox 3 for Windows requires Windows NT 5.0 or later. This currently includes Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Vista.
While that's true, knowing that my data may well have fallen into the wrong hands (they lost a copy of the child support records, and I have a child) doesn't actually make me feel any better than not knowing...
Slashdot Mirror
you need to know a lot about the APIs you're working with
And there I was thinking I just mashed my keyboard at random and hoped the IDE sorted it out for me...
I've seen people in business app development that went straight out of some sort of evening school and were put behind a project to create productive code, with little care about stability, safety or reliability.
Yes, I've seen that too - either other people on the team take up the slack, or the project fails, either technically (the product is buggy and unstable), commercially (cost and time overruns) or totally (it dies). I've also played games that felt like the same tactic had been used in their development. You get know-little morons hired by short-sighted cost-cutting managers in most lines of work.
There is also a very big difference between noticing the fault, stepping the hell away from the keyboard and thinking long and hard about how best to inform the relevant people (if at all in these ultra-paranoid, litigation-happy times), and exploiting the fault to poke around and see what information you can find.
I in no way condone the extradition or the heavy-handed way in which the US authorities appear to be conducting things, but no, he should not be praised.
How about we give it up already and just forego the use of the term hacker meaning good computer nerd?
I've been arguing that for years, especially as in my experience in the UK, a hack most certainly is not a clever piece of code; the image presented is of someone making a mess of it, much like hacking through the undergrowth with a machete.
Besides which, you should attempt to target your language at the intended audience, and on a site like BBC News that most certainly is not the 5% of the population who know about the other use of the word.
If you read the linked-to article (the last one), you'll see this:
They're already threatening to treat it as terrorism.
Assuming ${EXPENSIVE_PRODUCT_A} is Windows and ${CHEAP_PRODUCT_B} is Linux (and I can't see what else you could be referring to in this context), that's neither legally wrong (of course you can wipe the preinstalled OS) nor anything at all to do with WGA.
my laptop, which dual boots with XP MCE, my HTPC which is running Vista Ultimate (both came from MSDN)
Unless the licence has changed in the couple of years since I last read it, the OSes you get with an MSDN subscription are for testing purposes only - you're not supposed to use them for day to day use...
So in this case the law and morals are in agreement. That does not mean that the one necessarily springs from the other.
The law is about what society deems to be acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Morals help shape the law, but they are not synonymous.
If you had followed the link, you would see the following for crash recovery:
"If a website or add-on causes a tab to crash in Internet Explorer 8, only that tab is affected. The browser itself remains stable and other tabs remain unaffected"
That's not the same as Firefox's session recovery.
I would hope with Vista's kernel security IE8 is nearly a stand-alone product now days.
IE7 was a standalone product. Lots of other apps use mshtml.dll (the standard Windows HTML rendering engine, as used by IE) but that does not mean that IE is any less standalone. Since at least IE7 if you type an http:/// URL in the address bar in Windows Explorer, an IE process is spawned to handle it instead of WE handling it itself.
Besides that, IE was never integrated into the kernel. It was integrated into Explorer, which provides the desktop environment, but that is most certainly not the same thing. I'm all for bashing MS, but let's keep it to things they've actually done.
If police can reliably access it, chances are they're going to do it by subpoenaing the search engine's logs.
Note that the article specifically talks about search history, not browsing history.
I thought that IEtab used the native MSHTML.dll, and thus would still require IE (and presumably Windows)
It's tough when your target audience are distracted by your speech instead of focused on your product.
That's true, but given that it was an English team showcasing their stuff on an English website, I'd say they targetted their audience appropriately. (Quite apart from the fact that the guy does not have an particular regional accent - if you think that's hard to understand, you should try a strong Glaswegian accent)
Besides which, you don't hear us Brits whining about all the US accents we have to put up with hearing.
Honestly if you have trouble understanding a perfectly ordinary English accent I dread to think how you'd deal with most non-native English speakers.
I don't know about this particular system, but I have dealt with phone systems that ask you for certain letters from your password (e.g. 2nd and 5th, 3rd and 8th, etc). I wouldn't be surprised if this was the same.
He essentially said that he didn't believe video games were art as they offered an open ended experience where players can immerse themselves in order to form unique experiences.
And there I was thinking that forming unique experiences was part of the whole art thing...
Is riding the subway to work art? No. Is seeing a painting on the wall art? The painting itself is, yes, but not the act of seeing it or your choice to go and see it. Is listening to music art? Not the act of listening, but the music itself is art... and you see my point.
I think I do see your point - the game itself is art, but the act of playing it is not.
Well I for one have been blocking google analytics for a while, as I got tired of the number of times I've been sat looking at a blank white tab with a "wating for google-analytics.com...." message in the status bar.
back in the early days of the web, if a website was 500k in TOTAL is was large
And back in the day I was browsing with a 33.6kbps modem; now I have an "up to 8Mbps" ADSL connection (really about 2.5 thanks to my shitty phone line).
What's the point of having a connection 75x the speed (costing less than half what I was paying in phone bills) if nothing uses it? (Not defending ads here by the way, but things like Google maps would have been largely unusable on dial up)
now days[sic] chewing 10 megs on a single site is nothing, most of it is ads and very little content.
I have two points to make on this:
a) 10MB is 20x 500KB; even my crappy phone line gets me 75x the speed of my old modem, so that site is still loading in less than a third the time of the old one
b) I don't believe that figure anyway; do you have any real numbers to back that assertion up with?
I think you messed up your <head> tags.
The problem with that is that if the company fails, you inadvertently punish a number of people who had nothing to do with the crime. That happens with normal crime too, when you jail someone and their friends and relatives lose them for that time, but that doesn't generally affect their livelihoods.
Why should even criminal negligence on the part of maybe a handful of employees potentially mean that everyone else employed by the company loses their jobs too?
The notion that because 100% success is impossible one should not even try is common and defeatist. What's wrong with making as much of a difference as you can?
It's particularly ironic given your sig - you can't stop telemarketers completely either.
You've lost that fight. Piracy has been used as a term for copyright infringement since 1701.
To be fair, I think a lot of them are also (loosely) support rather than creative - that is, support programmers, sysadmins, PC support, etc, rather than development programmers, artists, musicians, etc. In other words, they're in the group that are paid to maintain an existing item, not the group that is paid to create new items.
The day will come when the NPC AIs get smart enough to realize that the players are ruining their world and band together to exterminate the players.
Actually that sounds pretty awesome to me, but then I've always been a sucker for post-apocalyptic survival horror/action films.
More correctly, "JIT" is an acronym, standing for "Just In Time". While it's very common to talk about something having "(a) JIT", what is really meant is that it has "a JIT compiler" or "JIT compilation".
Mozilla Firefox 3 for Windows requires Windows NT 5.0 or later. This currently includes Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Vista.
Or Server 2008, of course.
While that's true, knowing that my data may well have fallen into the wrong hands (they lost a copy of the child support records, and I have a child) doesn't actually make me feel any better than not knowing...