Maybe there's no usefulness at this moment, but my guess is that if enough geeks spend some time with it, there will be all sorts of useful, cool things that nobody, not even the designers thought of. This is the way of things.
Look at some of the early attempts to hack game consoles... now there are lots of things you can do with a modded console... avoiding region restrictions, home media servers, and storing your games on hard drive instead of loading disks come to mind.
Just give it time.
The first generation of anything is usually clumsy and overpriced, but as it becomes commoditized, you'll see tons of uses nobody's thinking of right now.
This stuff is why I use NoScript and haven't even installed the Flash plugin addon to Firefox. If I REALLY want to view something in flash and I trust the content provider, I'll fire up IETab.
Not perfect, but a far sight safer than Joe Q. User.
First of all, they already put the 800-ish MB pre-patch torrent up in a background "after you close wow" connection. I just let my PCs run all night and they had fully picked it up by morning. I'm sure patch day will see another, smaller patch that will get applied against the big one they pre-loaded.
That's for patch 2.5 the pre-WOTLK patch where they turn on new talent trees and new Enscription profession as well as replacing +heal/+spell damage stats with spellpower and the like.
WOTLK itself may indeed cause a lot of usage for those folks who choose to upgrade via download instead of purchasing a retail package. Blizard seems to be ok with you installing the retail software package on multiple PCs since it's the actual account activation/monthly payment where they get their money anyway.
(I'm just a WOW player though, so this is based on past experience and the fact that the pre-wotlk patch has been downloaded to my PCs)
I would agree with you, except that it seems that the IOC has devolved into a bunch of self-important moneygrubbing f***tards, and as such deserves neither our respect nor our support.
Frankly, as appalled as I was at how China forcibly relocated thousands in Bejing to make room for the Olympics, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the fact that the IOC did absolutely nothing about it... guess they were too busy counting all their profits.
So, what you're saying is that there IS a god, and that he/she is a geek in a lab coat who cooked us up in a beaker? I wonder if the scientist lovingly watches over each and every protocell and punishes them for impure thoughts.
I think I'll stick to the Big Bang and/or Brane collission, thanks.:)
I'd say that any instance where you don't fully own/control the hardware (managed servers or shared hosting), that the contract can SAY whatever it wants, but if they want to see your data, they can.
Now, I'm sure most tech support folks have better things to do than to nose through your data or read your email. There is a certain level of trust that you have to give your hosting service, or else it's just not going to work.
It's been my experience that if you want more change / access control in place, you can get it, but it's not going to be cheap. The hosting facility my previous employer used had tech support folks who always asked permission and told us what they were going to do and/or what they did, but that was a $50,000/month hosting contract.
Anyhow, You're going to have to choose... is your privacy more important than having to buy/handle your hardware? if so, then go back to a colo and be prepared for those occasional 4:00am calls. If the support is what's more important, then find a hosting provider where you have some faith in the folks involved. I maintain a very good working relationship with the main support guy where my own server is hosted. I have a lot of faith in him, and I never get redirected to the "Bangalore Bargain Bin" cuz they're not doing that outsourced support thing. To me, this is a comfortable arrangement.
In the end, security versus convenience is always going to be a give-and-take arrangement.
If you don't like the mail coming in, you can whitelist your domains and deny all.
With all due respect, this may work for times when you know what address stuff is coming from, but it really makes things a bit of a pain when you want to do business.
For instance, what about when you have some kind of email-back verification you need to receive from a web site? sure, most of the time, you could guess and say "ok, allow this domain" but unless the site in question provides the exact address that the verification is coming from (not all do), you've either got to open it up for the whole domain or everyone long enough to receive it... White-listing is not a practical method for everyone.
Even if good admins take reasonable steps to protect their systems, the spammers are getting more and more skilled as well as more and more aggressive with the tactics they take. A criminal only needs to find one way in to a system, but the admin has to try and defend all of the ways in. Many of these defenses have serious down-sides with respect to usability, required resources, or practicality, and at some point, you have to draw the line as to what is and isn't a reasonable amount of extra work / expense (the "cost" of spam to your organization), and hold the spammers accountable for their share.
Let's go back to your whitelist for a second... let's assume that I set one up at my company. Now, how do sales people and engineers and all the others let folks get ahold of them via email? Bug the admin to add an exception for each person who they gave their card to? Set up an automated system to let individuals whitelist folks to their accounts themselves? sure, but that depends on the users being active and informed. I'd argue that the admins will be getting lots of calls on the helpdesk asking why emails won't go through. You forget that the vast majority of users within an organization are non-IT folks who may or may not be very savy with regard to technology.
Ok, so maybe the admins can also build a web-based system to proxy communications (a "send us a message" kind of thing), but spammers are constantly poking at those trying to find holes and abuse them. Even with best practices and careful input validation, someone who wants in badly enough will find a way past it or find a way to misuse it to send spam. The admin's got to spend an awful lot of time and effort keeping on top of it and still deal with all the other day-to-day issues.
I'm not saying that I think you're completely wrong - certainly, an admin should be paying attention and taking steps to protect their networks... but I do think that you're oversimplifying a bit (so am I for the record).
This was my first thought as well... I understand that prepared statements and stored procedures are a bit more difficult for the beginner to wrap their head around than straight SQL. However, as far as I'm concerned, the thing that KEPT MySsl from being a serious database in the eyes of my employers and others were the lack of such fundamental "best practices".
Sure, when I first started doing a lot of sql, I had some difficulty with joins, stored procedures, triggers, prepared statements, and transactions... but that was then. Now, they're important parts of my tool set. Sure, maybe I'll prototype something with a direct sql statement for ease of changing things around, but as soon as I have an idea of where I want to go, I go back and "do it right".
I don't quite understand something else either. Even with more recent feature additions, MySql seems a lot faster for high-volume CRUD style web applications than MSSql and Oracle due to the lower connect/disconnect overhead (yes, yes, connection pools and other neato stuff can help with that, but I'm assuming we're talking about your average LAMP hack here, not some enterprise Java thingamee). Sure, by tossing out some of the "advanced" features, you might save a teeny bit of improvement, but it hardly seems worth the bother. Is MySQL really that bloated that it needs such a trimming?
While I agree with your proposition about unlocking abilities per-toon, I think the problem is that Bliz is facing is that they want to get new people interested. However, without them nerfing the leveling curve and/or doing this whole hero class toon starting out so high up thing, they're only going to appeal to existing players.
Of course, if I were Blizzard, I'd be more concerned about keeping my existing player base interested, figuring that I'd rather see slower but consistent long-term monthly account growth rather than a high rate of turnover where I'd be more likely to have bigger ups and downs.
Eh, I'm a sucker and I'll plop down my money for the update on both my accounts, dual box my way up to 80th on both my mains, and get bored again until the next update.:)
However, the thought strikes me that since our magnetic shield plays such an important role in making our planet habitable, and that this shield is responsible for the noise... so wouldn't that at least provide a fingerprint for "planets with viable magnetic fields"? I'm just thinking that this might help make the "search for Earth-like planets" stuff a little easier.
Right now, we keep finding stars with Jupiter size gas balls in Mercury's orbit... cosmic vacuum cleaners that probably keep rocky planets from coalescing in the thin habitable zone of their solar system. If instead, we looked for stars that didn't wobble really fast, and where we picked up radio signals characteristic of magnetic field interacting with solar wind, wouldn't that help narrow down the search?
No, the EFF site was found to be in violation of the act by the RIAA, and has been filtered out. You will never see anything about the story there. It is an un-story. Mention it again, and the RIAA will sue your ISP to remove your account for spreading un-truth and ideologically impure thoughtcrime.:)
While I believe you are 100% morally correct, I would wonder if many ISPs wouldn't regard such sharing as a violation of the Terms of Service.
I'm not saying you should stop doing what you're doing because I think it's gret. However if I were doing the same, my ISP and their lovely TOS would probably claim that I don't have the right to authorize anyone outside my home to access THEIR network without paying. It's rubbish, but I just bet that this is how they'd interpret it.
More likely though, this is fine and dandy as long as your trust in your neighbors is rewarded with honorable actions. Maybe on a small island community where folks help and respect each other, but I know I'd never leave my AP open because I'd be worried that some stranger would use my connection to do stuff that would be traced back to my IP address and get me in trouble. I wish I could trust the way you can, but I've been kicked in the butt too many times - my trust has been abused far too often in the more urban surroundings in which I live.
It makes me so happy that I'm planning a road trip along the Gaspe Peninsula, up to PEI, and down to Nova Scotia in a couple months. I just love the folks I meet whenever I travel up that way.
I have heard about the outstanding safety record of our nuclear powered navy fleet, but did not have any direct personal experience with it. I had always assumed that part of the equation was that the reactors on ships are quite a bit smaller, and that maybe in the case of such reactors, making lots of smaller ones versus few bigger ones might provide some additional measure of safety, but this was only conjecture. I have to say that your the high degrees of training and maintenance in military reactors hadn't occurred to me, but it makes a lot of sense.
I like the added benefit of providing decent civilian job prospects to veterans as well... it just seems like the right thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I had that passing thought too... Oh goodie, we get rid of the electronic voting machines AFTER McCain steals the election.
But I'm not biased or anything :)
Simon Pegg is one of my favorites... and I agree, having been a one-episode baddie does not really put him out of the running.
Maybe there's no usefulness at this moment, but my guess is that if enough geeks spend some time with it, there will be all sorts of useful, cool things that nobody, not even the designers thought of. This is the way of things.
Look at some of the early attempts to hack game consoles... now there are lots of things you can do with a modded console... avoiding region restrictions, home media servers, and storing your games on hard drive instead of loading disks come to mind.
Just give it time.
The first generation of anything is usually clumsy and overpriced, but as it becomes commoditized, you'll see tons of uses nobody's thinking of right now.
Sure, but it's vastly inferior to (and has been replaced by) C4. C5 (with even more bang for the buck) is still in beta testing. :)
As Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw said (paraphrasing):
The game designers CLAIM to give you choice, but that choice effectively boils down to to Mother Teresa or baby eating
I love his reviews. Said it all really. :)
Hear Hear!. I may be addicted to World of Warcrack, but at least theres kind-of a point to it. (one which DOESN'T involve cyber sex)
This stuff is why I use NoScript and haven't even installed the Flash plugin addon to Firefox. If I REALLY want to view something in flash and I trust the content provider, I'll fire up IETab.
Not perfect, but a far sight safer than Joe Q. User.
First of all, they already put the 800-ish MB pre-patch torrent up in a background "after you close wow" connection. I just let my PCs run all night and they had fully picked it up by morning. I'm sure patch day will see another, smaller patch that will get applied against the big one they pre-loaded.
That's for patch 2.5 the pre-WOTLK patch where they turn on new talent trees and new Enscription profession as well as replacing +heal/+spell damage stats with spellpower and the like.
WOTLK itself may indeed cause a lot of usage for those folks who choose to upgrade via download instead of purchasing a retail package. Blizard seems to be ok with you installing the retail software package on multiple PCs since it's the actual account activation/monthly payment where they get their money anyway.
(I'm just a WOW player though, so this is based on past experience and the fact that the pre-wotlk patch has been downloaded to my PCs)
With any luck, it will take some griefers/gankers with it... good riddance.
I would agree with you, except that it seems that the IOC has devolved into a bunch of self-important moneygrubbing f***tards, and as such deserves neither our respect nor our support.
Frankly, as appalled as I was at how China forcibly relocated thousands in Bejing to make room for the Olympics, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the fact that the IOC did absolutely nothing about it... guess they were too busy counting all their profits.
Bitter? no, not me. :)
I humbly disagree.
It seems to me that his use of the site for having a voice is exactly the kind of thing that "free speech" applies to.
So, what you're saying is that there IS a god, and that he/she is a geek in a lab coat who cooked us up in a beaker? I wonder if the scientist lovingly watches over each and every protocell and punishes them for impure thoughts.
I think I'll stick to the Big Bang and/or Brane collission, thanks. :)
I'd say that any instance where you don't fully own/control the hardware (managed servers or shared hosting), that the contract can SAY whatever it wants, but if they want to see your data, they can.
Now, I'm sure most tech support folks have better things to do than to nose through your data or read your email. There is a certain level of trust that you have to give your hosting service, or else it's just not going to work.
It's been my experience that if you want more change / access control in place, you can get it, but it's not going to be cheap. The hosting facility my previous employer used had tech support folks who always asked permission and told us what they were going to do and/or what they did, but that was a $50,000/month hosting contract.
Anyhow, You're going to have to choose... is your privacy more important than having to buy/handle your hardware? if so, then go back to a colo and be prepared for those occasional 4:00am calls. If the support is what's more important, then find a hosting provider where you have some faith in the folks involved. I maintain a very good working relationship with the main support guy where my own server is hosted. I have a lot of faith in him, and I never get redirected to the "Bangalore Bargain Bin" cuz they're not doing that outsourced support thing. To me, this is a comfortable arrangement.
In the end, security versus convenience is always going to be a give-and-take arrangement.
"You are likely to be eaten by a grue"
With all due respect, this may work for times when you know what address stuff is coming from, but it really makes things a bit of a pain when you want to do business.
For instance, what about when you have some kind of email-back verification you need to receive from a web site? sure, most of the time, you could guess and say "ok, allow this domain" but unless the site in question provides the exact address that the verification is coming from (not all do), you've either got to open it up for the whole domain or everyone long enough to receive it... White-listing is not a practical method for everyone.
Even if good admins take reasonable steps to protect their systems, the spammers are getting more and more skilled as well as more and more aggressive with the tactics they take. A criminal only needs to find one way in to a system, but the admin has to try and defend all of the ways in. Many of these defenses have serious down-sides with respect to usability, required resources, or practicality, and at some point, you have to draw the line as to what is and isn't a reasonable amount of extra work / expense (the "cost" of spam to your organization), and hold the spammers accountable for their share.
Let's go back to your whitelist for a second... let's assume that I set one up at my company. Now, how do sales people and engineers and all the others let folks get ahold of them via email? Bug the admin to add an exception for each person who they gave their card to? Set up an automated system to let individuals whitelist folks to their accounts themselves? sure, but that depends on the users being active and informed. I'd argue that the admins will be getting lots of calls on the helpdesk asking why emails won't go through. You forget that the vast majority of users within an organization are non-IT folks who may or may not be very savy with regard to technology.
Ok, so maybe the admins can also build a web-based system to proxy communications (a "send us a message" kind of thing), but spammers are constantly poking at those trying to find holes and abuse them. Even with best practices and careful input validation, someone who wants in badly enough will find a way past it or find a way to misuse it to send spam. The admin's got to spend an awful lot of time and effort keeping on top of it and still deal with all the other day-to-day issues.
I'm not saying that I think you're completely wrong - certainly, an admin should be paying attention and taking steps to protect their networks... but I do think that you're oversimplifying a bit (so am I for the record).
Well, except the Wii can use them along with downloaded GameCube games...
Gods, I hate patent trolls.
This was my first thought as well... I understand that prepared statements and stored procedures are a bit more difficult for the beginner to wrap their head around than straight SQL. However, as far as I'm concerned, the thing that KEPT MySsl from being a serious database in the eyes of my employers and others were the lack of such fundamental "best practices".
Sure, when I first started doing a lot of sql, I had some difficulty with joins, stored procedures, triggers, prepared statements, and transactions... but that was then. Now, they're important parts of my tool set. Sure, maybe I'll prototype something with a direct sql statement for ease of changing things around, but as soon as I have an idea of where I want to go, I go back and "do it right".
I don't quite understand something else either. Even with more recent feature additions, MySql seems a lot faster for high-volume CRUD style web applications than MSSql and Oracle due to the lower connect/disconnect overhead (yes, yes, connection pools and other neato stuff can help with that, but I'm assuming we're talking about your average LAMP hack here, not some enterprise Java thingamee). Sure, by tossing out some of the "advanced" features, you might save a teeny bit of improvement, but it hardly seems worth the bother. Is MySQL really that bloated that it needs such a trimming?
While I agree with your proposition about unlocking abilities per-toon, I think the problem is that Bliz is facing is that they want to get new people interested. However, without them nerfing the leveling curve and/or doing this whole hero class toon starting out so high up thing, they're only going to appeal to existing players.
Of course, if I were Blizzard, I'd be more concerned about keeping my existing player base interested, figuring that I'd rather see slower but consistent long-term monthly account growth rather than a high rate of turnover where I'd be more likely to have bigger ups and downs.
Eh, I'm a sucker and I'll plop down my money for the update on both my accounts, dual box my way up to 80th on both my mains, and get bored again until the next update. :)
Dpilot,
That's along the lines of what I was thinking, but you said it far more succinclty. :)
Oh, and glad to see another Saberhagen fan too.
However, the thought strikes me that since our magnetic shield plays such an important role in making our planet habitable, and that this shield is responsible for the noise... so wouldn't that at least provide a fingerprint for "planets with viable magnetic fields"? I'm just thinking that this might help make the "search for Earth-like planets" stuff a little easier.
Right now, we keep finding stars with Jupiter size gas balls in Mercury's orbit... cosmic vacuum cleaners that probably keep rocky planets from coalescing in the thin habitable zone of their solar system. If instead, we looked for stars that didn't wobble really fast, and where we picked up radio signals characteristic of magnetic field interacting with solar wind, wouldn't that help narrow down the search?
-- just a thought
Better, shorter response in three words:
MADE OF FAIL
No, the EFF site was found to be in violation of the act by the RIAA, and has been filtered out. You will never see anything about the story there. It is an un-story. Mention it again, and the RIAA will sue your ISP to remove your account for spreading un-truth and ideologically impure thoughtcrime. :)
That's what bugs me so much about Ebay owning PayPal. How much you wanna bet they refuse you too?
While I believe you are 100% morally correct, I would wonder if many ISPs wouldn't regard such sharing as a violation of the Terms of Service.
I'm not saying you should stop doing what you're doing because I think it's gret. However if I were doing the same, my ISP and their lovely TOS would probably claim that I don't have the right to authorize anyone outside my home to access THEIR network without paying. It's rubbish, but I just bet that this is how they'd interpret it.
More likely though, this is fine and dandy as long as your trust in your neighbors is rewarded with honorable actions. Maybe on a small island community where folks help and respect each other, but I know I'd never leave my AP open because I'd be worried that some stranger would use my connection to do stuff that would be traced back to my IP address and get me in trouble. I wish I could trust the way you can, but I've been kicked in the butt too many times - my trust has been abused far too often in the more urban surroundings in which I live.
It makes me so happy that I'm planning a road trip along the Gaspe Peninsula, up to PEI, and down to Nova Scotia in a couple months. I just love the folks I meet whenever I travel up that way.
I have heard about the outstanding safety record of our nuclear powered navy fleet, but did not have any direct personal experience with it. I had always assumed that part of the equation was that the reactors on ships are quite a bit smaller, and that maybe in the case of such reactors, making lots of smaller ones versus few bigger ones might provide some additional measure of safety, but this was only conjecture. I have to say that your the high degrees of training and maintenance in military reactors hadn't occurred to me, but it makes a lot of sense.
I like the added benefit of providing decent civilian job prospects to veterans as well... it just seems like the right thing to do.