Since HBSS was identified as the security software that caught the 'virus' I was immediately skeptical. Why? Because HBSS has found and deleted mission-critical software on classified networks before. HBSS was deployed in a hurry because security personnel wanted to lock the network down, and one of the steps that got skipped in a lot of places was coordinating what software is and isn't permitted on the network. Down at the operational level, this translates to an overworked captain or lieutenant passing the memo to whoever in the comms shop has time to do an install (ask yourself: why isn't this person busy?). HBSS gets installed and starts throwing up pop-up windows, and the sergeant, with no training or policy to guide him, helpfully starts making the same kinds of judgments your parents make: "What's SYSTEM32? Sounds dangerous. Deleted!"
Deeply deeply misinformed. The Missile Defense Agency press release is better than the Reuters article and a thousand times better than the Slashdot headline blurb. Some corrections:
1. Two targets were destroyed - one liquid and one solid fueled. This puts the lie to the above comment, and the Slashdot article that implies that they only shot a liquid-fueled target because it was easier. Furthermore, the solid-fueled target was identical to one that the ALTB had destroyed in flight a week earlier.
2. The first target was launched from a "sea platform", not a submarine, and is much more likely to have been a SCUD or SCUD simulator on a barge. The U.S. Navy has never permitted liquid-fueled missiles aboard their submarines because a fuel or oxidizer leak could kill the crew.
FreeCiv, a freeware implementation of the Civ and Civ II rules - http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Dwarf Fortress is a fantastically complex game, like a cross between SimCity, NetHack, and Oregon Trail - http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Main_Page
NetHack is a classic dungeon crawler with ASCII graphics - http://www.nethack.org/
Command & Conquer is an old but awesome RTS, now available for free from EA - http://www.commandandconquer.com/intel/default.aspx?id=62#NewsMain
Abandonware is murky but you can find install files for many abandonware titles online as well.
Huh? Why change the word order? All he did was mix up "who" and "whom" -- there's no reason to compound his error by moving the preposition to the end of the sentence.
FFRDCs (Federally Funded Research and Development Corporations) are great, but the UARCs (University-Affiliated Research Centers) do lots of cool work, too. MIT's Lincoln Labs and Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab both do fantastic amounts of cool-as-hell work. Lincoln Labs is focused on but not limited to lots of cool radar work; APL has a broader portfolio including satellite development, missile defense work, biology, emergent behavior of teamed robots, and acoustical research for submarine applications. Both of them are really awesome places to work.
Such a subsystem would be a custom design for each payload (engineering design man-hours). It would also have to be able to anticipate or react to any of the hundreds of failure modes of a launch vehicle -- solid booster failure, liquid engine failure in any stage, stage separation failure, guidance system anomalies, guidance computer crashes, gyro alignment errors, and more, requiring exhaustive telemetry of the launch vehicle. It would add a significant weight penalty to every launch (forcing many payloads to move up at least one booster size and eliminating many smaller boosters from carrying any payload at all). It would have to be tested for survivability from the thermal and vibrational launch environments (more engineering man-hours). And last but not least, payloads would have to be redesigned to survive the ride back to earth in that subsystem (mass, power, and structure penalties and engineering man-hours).
You would more than double the cost of your payload hedging against the risk of a 1-in-30 booster failure. For satellite programs so important that a booster failure can't be tolerated, they just build spare payloads.
(1) Live frugally. There are (theoretically) 21 meals in the week. Each meal you make at home saves you between $3.00 and $30.00 and is probably healthier (prepackaged convenience foods like TV dinners don't count, as they're expensive and less healthy). Car insurance and gas are very expensive - rent a place within walking distance of where you need to be.
(2) Pay off credit card and other interest-bearing debts immediately. You will never make money if your debt is losing 20%.
(3) Place your money in legal risk-free non-investments: CDs and interest-bearing bank accounts like an ING Direct account are legal ways to make Federal loan money work for you without incurring the hefty "processing fees" associated with a fraud conviction.
I don't think it is a code. Try dropping the zeroes between each non-zero 2-digit number, allowing "00" to be a legitimate pair and assuming the occasional 3-digit string. You get a sequence that has 45 unique numbers (in the case of Group 617, 41 unique numbers) and a frequency distribution that doesn't seem all that likely for a pad's vocabulary. Add to that the fact that none of the numbers in either group exceeds 112, and the pad you were using would be working with a very small vocabulary. I can't dispute that it could be, for example, an agreed-upon newspaper from the group-date (415 = April 15 edition of the New York Times, front page, main article). The numbers could refer to word-order in that article. But right now, I'm treating it as some form of substitution cipher.
It could be a one-time pad, I guess, but they've used three-digit numbers (padding them out with zeroes and using canonical five-digit spacing) and a few things make me think it's not a pad:
First, there are 45 unique 3-digit strings in the first message, 41 in the second, and 23 of those common between the two; that's an extremely small vocabulary. If it were a pad, one would expect to see a much greater representation of 3-digit numbers. As it is, none of the characters exceeds 112. Second, the frequency distribution of the 3-grams doesn't appear uniform - some characters are repeated as many as 7 times, with a "long tail" of doubled and tripled characters. Words like "the" and "a" would stick out much more than the most-frequent characters do here; the most common character in Group 415 represents about 8% of the total message, and the most common character in Group 617 represents about 6%.
Nobody seems to have pointed out anywhere that these codes, while broken into the canonical 5-digit groupings, are almost certainly composed of three-digit numbers padded with zeroes. The first one, when you strip out the annoying five-character spacing, becomes:
Each one just barely scratches into the low hundreds (once each), and uses "00" several times, occasionally doubled. The first one uses 45 unique numbers ranging as high as 108 with the most common characters in the teens; I haven't done any frequency analysis on the second grouping yet but the teens look popular again. I just happened to start reading David Kahn's "The Codebreakers" this week, so I've got lots of places to start, but I wouldn't mind a little help with this. Holler if you think of something!
"The Elements of Style" is often called just "Strunk & White" after its authors. If you're hesitant, realize that White is the E.B. White famous for writing Charlotte's Web. If he can write a compelling and emotional story that adults love (but that children can read and understand on their own) then he might know a thing or two about how to communicate.
That's weird - I just specced a mid-range system for a friend (lowest of the low-end 64-bit system) and squeezed in under Dell's discounted price for a comparable system by almost $150. If he had bought a Dell and refused the 24-month internet subscription and other gotchas, he would have paid $250 or more over the price of the NewEgg system I specced. Just for reference, it was almost identical to the Ultimate Budget Box that Ars Technica publishes regularly.
My friend added a few bells and whistles where he wanted more power (a little more RAM, a better CPU) and managed to beat a comparable Dell system in price. Because he's switching from Win2K to WinXP, he had to buy the OS, but it was still cheaper overall.
If you head over to Simtropolis, you'll see a thriving community of user-made buildings, most of them "growable". That means that in your SimCity, you can have Starbuck's and McDonald's and Home Depot "grow up" naturally into your city layout. You can have an apartment complex that looks just like where you live; you can have less-famous (but still striking) landmarks that may or may not exist. There are architecture styles, like Baltimore Rowhouse, that the original game never included, but which look fantastic and add realism to the city.
If the developers had tried to put a Starbuck's in the game, they'd have to license the logo and the trademarked architecture; if they tried to make all the thousands of obscure local landmarks in mid-sized American and Asian cities, the production costs would have tripled and the game would never have been released. As it is, Starbuck's gets free advertising and the game gets a realistic facelift.
There are also functional content upgrades, like Ground Light Rail (the original game only has subway, el train, and heavy rail) and retaining walls that block traffic noise from freeways. I wouldn't play the game without these upgrades, but I'd absolutely buy another SimCity title knowing that the mod community will polish it and make it shine.
Simtropolis' bandwidth isn't free, and I've PayPalled them donations to keep their server up; in this way, my donations have essentially turned user-created content (from which I can pick and choose) into a second, self-directed expansion pack for the game.
No, I really won't have to "get used to it." If I don't want advertising in my games, I won't buy the games with in-game ads. In games like Super Monkey Ball, the "DOLE" stickers on the bananas are fine; in Half-Life I could stand to see name-brand soda machines or even cars (although I would not like to be forced to drive a HummerTM to beat a level). So I'm not all that offended by it, yet, but I am a discriminating consumer of video games, and I'm not going to pay for something with tacky disruptive ads.
Bizarrely enough, I downloaded -- for free! -- user-created content for SimCity 4, including a Starbuck'sTM, a McDonald'sTM, a Home DepotTM, a PetCoTM, and so forth, so that my cities would look more realistic. Any of those companies could sue for trademark infringement, especially if the SimArchitect uses the Golden Arches or the corporate building style (which is usually trademarked). But they're too smart for that, I hope. They know that I laugh my ass off when I see a Starbuck'sTM pop up on all four corners of the same block, and they probably understand that it doesn't hurt their brand.
If that's the case, and someone is only participating in raids, then they should have a high community rating, shouldn't they? I mean, I don't really want someone critiquing the way my language "sings" on Slashdot - I write to make a point, and then submit. If I'm writing poetry, I do it on a different system (like Everything2.com) and get rated on my poetry there.
MMORPGs aren't just about your goals. They're about shared goals.
If someone wants to be an asshole, but can curb his anti-social behavior to participate in raids, then isn't he a functioning member of the MMORPG society? If there were an Azeroth Division of Revenue, don't you think he probably contributes just as much to the "local economy" -- if not more -- than your character?
Think about it like this: running a small raid with you is like getting a pizza from the neighborhood joint; but running big raids with him is just ordering eight pizzas from one of the big chains. Both are valid ways to get pizza, but both are different experiences. You know what you're getting with each one, and you know which one will have better service, better flavor, and better efficiency and value.
While the Russians do have to put up with shoddy manufacturing for most consumer-level goods, their military and space engineering are second only to America's (and sometimes they're better than America's). Russia's liquid-fuel rocket engines are so good that the American Atlas V uses a Russian RD-180 engine. If the Russians are bragging that their missile can do a particular thing, the odds are good that it can, in fact, do that particular thing. Remember that they were a nation of relatively backward farmers until Stalin cracked the whip, and then suddenly they skipped the Industrial Revolution and went straight into modern WWII-era technology. The USSR was our primary adversary in the Space Race, and most Americans tend to forget that until the moon landing, Russia was winning!
If you still think the Russians have crappy space engineering, you should head to your local large library and take out a copy of Pavel Podvig's excellent text, "Russia's Strategic Nuclear Forces", which outlines the history of their ICBM and SLBM development over the last 60 years or so.
Boycotts are basically ineffective unless tied to a publicity effort. A good way to get this to work is to volunteer to write consumer electronics articles for a local paper. Anytime a SONY product comes out, volunteer to review it, and call SONY and ask them if they think "accusations that they have violated customers' privacy" and "threats of boycotts" will impact their sales of this product. Include it in a basically favorable review, but close with a line like "Can this product's performance sway the opinion of the thousands of boycotters? Only time will tell!"
To quote Lyndon Johnson, when faced with an opponent who has the resources to out-shout you in the media, your best bet is to "call him a pig fucker, and make him deny it."
He's not going to have his clearance for very long if he goes around bullshitting his buddies about the NSA's sources and methods. If you've got a real citation for this, serve it up. Otherwise, you're just one more uncleared idiot pretending you know what's going on at Ft. Meade.
So not only was the food free, it was also "complementary". If a Slashdot post is saved from redundancy by a spelling mistake, is it still a horribly-composed post? Yes. Yes it is.
Also: "were showed" and "there was... food and drinks". If I can learn Perl, then surely someone at the Slashdot editors' bunker can learn English!
Re:To the rag that is the Wash. Times: Let them sc
on
Reining in Google
·
· Score: 1
"Google envisions a world in which all content is free; and of course, it controls the portal through which Internet user's access that content. It would completely devalue everyone else's property and massively increase the value of its own."
Any newspaper whose editorial section contains apostrophe-plural errors clearly needs new editors. I thought this was a Slashdot typo, but it appears in the online article as well. If you can't see why the above text is in error, here's a handy guide to apostrophes.
Hey, I'm pretty tech-savvy -- check out my slashdot user number. I build hardware from scratch all the time, even when it's more expensive than a Dell, because I like to know what's inside. Every year since 1999 I've given Linux a try, and I have yet to install a distro that
(a) recognized all of my hardware (b) was able to connect to the internet or (c) had any semblance of useful HELP info
I ask around on Linux-flavored message boards and get eighteen replies - "You're a n00b, why do you want Linux?" "You should use Redhat." "NOBODY uses Redhat!!!111!" and so forth.
The article's claim that "people learn new things all the time" is based on a desire to learn them. Windows works out of the box -- whether or not you want to admit it -- and Linux still doesn't. You guys squandered your lead in the "better stability and performance" race, and Bill caught up to you.
The average person can't grasp the complexity. Remember, it's cool to be able to snag college kids who are willing to give anything a try, but you've got to win over the grandmas. When a hardware dork with time to spare treats Linux as a "wasted weekend" each year, you guys have a long damn row to hoe.
Good managers are priceless in this respect -- they should work to shield their employees from the tasks that burn them out, rotate them through tasks to keep them "fresh", and present them with long-term goals that can be accomplished piecemeal during any downtime.
My first boss said to me "I used to have your job, and I remember how much fun it was. My job is to shield you from all the bullsh*t that senior management rains down, so you can enjoy that job. When you enjoy your job, we all benefit from you reaching your full potential."
Pricing the Civ Games
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Mr Meier,
I greatly enjoy Civ, Civ II, and Civ III, and I will undoubtedly buy Civ IV, and its expansion, for the PC. However, I still cringe when I see a "sticker price" of $60, especially when I know there's a $30 expansion coming down the pike in less than a year, and a year after that I can get both of them together in a "Gold" or "Game of the Year" edition for $45 or $50 that you will still realize profits from. You're one of the few developers who makes great games that don't stress my hardware and force me to get upgrades, so I guess I should be thankful about that.
My buying habits -- waiting until the games hit the discount bin with their expansion packs -- probably hit you in the wallet. Is there anything you can say to convince me I should buy Civ IV as soon as it's released?
Slashdot Mirror
Since HBSS was identified as the security software that caught the 'virus' I was immediately skeptical. Why? Because HBSS has found and deleted mission-critical software on classified networks before. HBSS was deployed in a hurry because security personnel wanted to lock the network down, and one of the steps that got skipped in a lot of places was coordinating what software is and isn't permitted on the network. Down at the operational level, this translates to an overworked captain or lieutenant passing the memo to whoever in the comms shop has time to do an install (ask yourself: why isn't this person busy?). HBSS gets installed and starts throwing up pop-up windows, and the sergeant, with no training or policy to guide him, helpfully starts making the same kinds of judgments your parents make: "What's SYSTEM32? Sounds dangerous. Deleted!"
Deeply deeply misinformed. The Missile Defense Agency press release is better than the Reuters article and a thousand times better than the Slashdot headline blurb. Some corrections:
1. Two targets were destroyed - one liquid and one solid fueled. This puts the lie to the above comment, and the Slashdot article that implies that they only shot a liquid-fueled target because it was easier. Furthermore, the solid-fueled target was identical to one that the ALTB had destroyed in flight a week earlier.
2. The first target was launched from a "sea platform", not a submarine, and is much more likely to have been a SCUD or SCUD simulator on a barge. The U.S. Navy has never permitted liquid-fueled missiles aboard their submarines because a fuel or oxidizer leak could kill the crew.
Toasting in an epic bread.
FreeCiv, a freeware implementation of the Civ and Civ II rules - http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Dwarf Fortress is a fantastically complex game, like a cross between SimCity, NetHack, and Oregon Trail - http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Main_Page
NetHack is a classic dungeon crawler with ASCII graphics - http://www.nethack.org/
Command & Conquer is an old but awesome RTS, now available for free from EA - http://www.commandandconquer.com/intel/default.aspx?id=62#NewsMain
Abandonware is murky but you can find install files for many abandonware titles online as well.
Black bag = breaking and entering to steal information; a meatspace attack on someone's files, like Watergate.
False Flag = committing an act while disguised as one's enemy so that the consequences accrue to that enemy, like the bombing of the Al-Askari mosque.
Huh? Why change the word order? All he did was mix up "who" and "whom" -- there's no reason to compound his error by moving the preposition to the end of the sentence.
FFRDCs (Federally Funded Research and Development Corporations) are great, but the UARCs (University-Affiliated Research Centers) do lots of cool work, too. MIT's Lincoln Labs and Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab both do fantastic amounts of cool-as-hell work. Lincoln Labs is focused on but not limited to lots of cool radar work; APL has a broader portfolio including satellite development, missile defense work, biology, emergent behavior of teamed robots, and acoustical research for submarine applications. Both of them are really awesome places to work.
Such a subsystem would be a custom design for each payload (engineering design man-hours). It would also have to be able to anticipate or react to any of the hundreds of failure modes of a launch vehicle -- solid booster failure, liquid engine failure in any stage, stage separation failure, guidance system anomalies, guidance computer crashes, gyro alignment errors, and more, requiring exhaustive telemetry of the launch vehicle. It would add a significant weight penalty to every launch (forcing many payloads to move up at least one booster size and eliminating many smaller boosters from carrying any payload at all). It would have to be tested for survivability from the thermal and vibrational launch environments (more engineering man-hours). And last but not least, payloads would have to be redesigned to survive the ride back to earth in that subsystem (mass, power, and structure penalties and engineering man-hours).
You would more than double the cost of your payload hedging against the risk of a 1-in-30 booster failure. For satellite programs so important that a booster failure can't be tolerated, they just build spare payloads.
(1) Live frugally. There are (theoretically) 21 meals in the week. Each meal you make at home saves you between $3.00 and $30.00 and is probably healthier (prepackaged convenience foods like TV dinners don't count, as they're expensive and less healthy). Car insurance and gas are very expensive - rent a place within walking distance of where you need to be.
(2) Pay off credit card and other interest-bearing debts immediately. You will never make money if your debt is losing 20%.
(3) Place your money in legal risk-free non-investments: CDs and interest-bearing bank accounts like an ING Direct account are legal ways to make Federal loan money work for you without incurring the hefty "processing fees" associated with a fraud conviction.
I don't think it is a code. Try dropping the zeroes between each non-zero 2-digit number, allowing "00" to be a legitimate pair and assuming the occasional 3-digit string. You get a sequence that has 45 unique numbers (in the case of Group 617, 41 unique numbers) and a frequency distribution that doesn't seem all that likely for a pad's vocabulary. Add to that the fact that none of the numbers in either group exceeds 112, and the pad you were using would be working with a very small vocabulary. I can't dispute that it could be, for example, an agreed-upon newspaper from the group-date (415 = April 15 edition of the New York Times, front page, main article). The numbers could refer to word-order in that article. But right now, I'm treating it as some form of substitution cipher.
It could be a one-time pad, I guess, but they've used three-digit numbers (padding them out with zeroes and using canonical five-digit spacing) and a few things make me think it's not a pad:
First, there are 45 unique 3-digit strings in the first message, 41 in the second, and 23 of those common between the two; that's an extremely small vocabulary. If it were a pad, one would expect to see a much greater representation of 3-digit numbers. As it is, none of the characters exceeds 112. Second, the frequency distribution of the 3-grams doesn't appear uniform - some characters are repeated as many as 7 times, with a "long tail" of doubled and tripled characters. Words like "the" and "a" would stick out much more than the most-frequent characters do here; the most common character in Group 415 represents about 8% of the total message, and the most common character in Group 617 represents about 6%.
Nobody seems to have pointed out anywhere that these codes, while broken into the canonical 5-digit groupings, are almost certainly composed of three-digit numbers padded with zeroes. The first one, when you strip out the annoying five-character spacing, becomes:
Group 415
13 56 51 12 79 46 65 10 93 00
82 39 13 94 69 12 78 108 17 28 17
69 22 73 38 14 17 15 15 73 04 20
68 12 13 12 51 00 54 04 91 14 13
15 86 22 96 81 66 02 82 55 70 02
00 22 83 29 08 22 12 12 04 71 13
65 27 94 19 29 14 22 08 02 11 83
73 03 26 19 07 86 86
and the second one becomes
Group 617
61 78 02 21 85 06 13 69 06
79 12 15 24 07 06 16 17 69
95 00 17 24 05 14 24 09 87
22 67 89 74 10 82 10 86 78
13 24 04 16 27 73 13 15 06
93 69 112 20 84 00 00 21 03
70 31 76 49 65 23 27 67 00 07 16
12 17
Each one just barely scratches into the low hundreds (once each), and uses "00" several times, occasionally doubled. The first one uses 45 unique numbers ranging as high as 108 with the most common characters in the teens; I haven't done any frequency analysis on the second grouping yet but the teens look popular again. I just happened to start reading David Kahn's "The Codebreakers" this week, so I've got lots of places to start, but I wouldn't mind a little help with this. Holler if you think of something!
"The Elements of Style" is often called just "Strunk & White" after its authors. If you're hesitant, realize that White is the E.B. White famous for writing Charlotte's Web. If he can write a compelling and emotional story that adults love (but that children can read and understand on their own) then he might know a thing or two about how to communicate.
That's weird - I just specced a mid-range system for a friend (lowest of the low-end 64-bit system) and squeezed in under Dell's discounted price for a comparable system by almost $150. If he had bought a Dell and refused the 24-month internet subscription and other gotchas, he would have paid $250 or more over the price of the NewEgg system I specced. Just for reference, it was almost identical to the Ultimate Budget Box that Ars Technica publishes regularly.
My friend added a few bells and whistles where he wanted more power (a little more RAM, a better CPU) and managed to beat a comparable Dell system in price. Because he's switching from Win2K to WinXP, he had to buy the OS, but it was still cheaper overall.
If you head over to Simtropolis, you'll see a thriving community of user-made buildings, most of them "growable". That means that in your SimCity, you can have Starbuck's and McDonald's and Home Depot "grow up" naturally into your city layout. You can have an apartment complex that looks just like where you live; you can have less-famous (but still striking) landmarks that may or may not exist. There are architecture styles, like Baltimore Rowhouse, that the original game never included, but which look fantastic and add realism to the city.
If the developers had tried to put a Starbuck's in the game, they'd have to license the logo and the trademarked architecture; if they tried to make all the thousands of obscure local landmarks in mid-sized American and Asian cities, the production costs would have tripled and the game would never have been released. As it is, Starbuck's gets free advertising and the game gets a realistic facelift.
There are also functional content upgrades, like Ground Light Rail (the original game only has subway, el train, and heavy rail) and retaining walls that block traffic noise from freeways. I wouldn't play the game without these upgrades, but I'd absolutely buy another SimCity title knowing that the mod community will polish it and make it shine.
Simtropolis' bandwidth isn't free, and I've PayPalled them donations to keep their server up; in this way, my donations have essentially turned user-created content (from which I can pick and choose) into a second, self-directed expansion pack for the game.
No, I really won't have to "get used to it." If I don't want advertising in my games, I won't buy the games with in-game ads. In games like Super Monkey Ball, the "DOLE" stickers on the bananas are fine; in Half-Life I could stand to see name-brand soda machines or even cars (although I would not like to be forced to drive a HummerTM to beat a level). So I'm not all that offended by it, yet, but I am a discriminating consumer of video games, and I'm not going to pay for something with tacky disruptive ads.
Bizarrely enough, I downloaded -- for free! -- user-created content for SimCity 4, including a Starbuck'sTM, a McDonald'sTM, a Home DepotTM, a PetCoTM, and so forth, so that my cities would look more realistic. Any of those companies could sue for trademark infringement, especially if the SimArchitect uses the Golden Arches or the corporate building style (which is usually trademarked). But they're too smart for that, I hope. They know that I laugh my ass off when I see a Starbuck'sTM pop up on all four corners of the same block, and they probably understand that it doesn't hurt their brand.
If that's the case, and someone is only participating in raids, then they should have a high community rating, shouldn't they? I mean, I don't really want someone critiquing the way my language "sings" on Slashdot - I write to make a point, and then submit. If I'm writing poetry, I do it on a different system (like Everything2.com) and get rated on my poetry there.
MMORPGs aren't just about your goals. They're about shared goals.
If someone wants to be an asshole, but can curb his anti-social behavior to participate in raids, then isn't he a functioning member of the MMORPG society? If there were an Azeroth Division of Revenue, don't you think he probably contributes just as much to the "local economy" -- if not more -- than your character?
Think about it like this: running a small raid with you is like getting a pizza from the neighborhood joint; but running big raids with him is just ordering eight pizzas from one of the big chains. Both are valid ways to get pizza, but both are different experiences. You know what you're getting with each one, and you know which one will have better service, better flavor, and better efficiency and value.
While the Russians do have to put up with shoddy manufacturing for most consumer-level goods, their military and space engineering are second only to America's (and sometimes they're better than America's). Russia's liquid-fuel rocket engines are so good that the American Atlas V uses a Russian RD-180 engine. If the Russians are bragging that their missile can do a particular thing, the odds are good that it can, in fact, do that particular thing. Remember that they were a nation of relatively backward farmers until Stalin cracked the whip, and then suddenly they skipped the Industrial Revolution and went straight into modern WWII-era technology. The USSR was our primary adversary in the Space Race, and most Americans tend to forget that until the moon landing, Russia was winning!
If you still think the Russians have crappy space engineering, you should head to your local large library and take out a copy of Pavel Podvig's excellent text, "Russia's Strategic Nuclear Forces", which outlines the history of their ICBM and SLBM development over the last 60 years or so.
Boycotts are basically ineffective unless tied to a publicity effort. A good way to get this to work is to volunteer to write consumer electronics articles for a local paper. Anytime a SONY product comes out, volunteer to review it, and call SONY and ask them if they think "accusations that they have violated customers' privacy" and "threats of boycotts" will impact their sales of this product. Include it in a basically favorable review, but close with a line like "Can this product's performance sway the opinion of the thousands of boycotters? Only time will tell!"
To quote Lyndon Johnson, when faced with an opponent who has the resources to out-shout you in the media, your best bet is to "call him a pig fucker, and make him deny it."
He's not going to have his clearance for very long if he goes around bullshitting his buddies about the NSA's sources and methods. If you've got a real citation for this, serve it up. Otherwise, you're just one more uncleared idiot pretending you know what's going on at Ft. Meade.
So not only was the food free, it was also "complementary". If a Slashdot post is saved from redundancy by a spelling mistake, is it still a horribly-composed post? Yes. Yes it is.
... food and drinks". If I can learn Perl, then surely someone at the Slashdot editors' bunker can learn English!
Also: "were showed" and "there was
Any newspaper whose editorial section contains apostrophe-plural errors clearly needs new editors. I thought this was a Slashdot typo, but it appears in the online article as well. If you can't see why the above text is in error, here's a handy guide to apostrophes.
Hey, I'm pretty tech-savvy -- check out my slashdot user number. I build hardware from scratch all the time, even when it's more expensive than a Dell, because I like to know what's inside. Every year since 1999 I've given Linux a try, and I have yet to install a distro that
(a) recognized all of my hardware
(b) was able to connect to the internet
or
(c) had any semblance of useful HELP info
I ask around on Linux-flavored message boards and get eighteen replies - "You're a n00b, why do you want Linux?" "You should use Redhat." "NOBODY uses Redhat!!!111!" and so forth.
The article's claim that "people learn new things all the time" is based on a desire to learn them. Windows works out of the box -- whether or not you want to admit it -- and Linux still doesn't. You guys squandered your lead in the "better stability and performance" race, and Bill caught up to you.
The average person can't grasp the complexity. Remember, it's cool to be able to snag college kids who are willing to give anything a try, but you've got to win over the grandmas. When a hardware dork with time to spare treats Linux as a "wasted weekend" each year, you guys have a long damn row to hoe.
Good managers are priceless in this respect -- they should work to shield their employees from the tasks that burn them out, rotate them through tasks to keep them "fresh", and present them with long-term goals that can be accomplished piecemeal during any downtime.
My first boss said to me "I used to have your job, and I remember how much fun it was. My job is to shield you from all the bullsh*t that senior management rains down, so you can enjoy that job. When you enjoy your job, we all benefit from you reaching your full potential."
Mr Meier,
I greatly enjoy Civ, Civ II, and Civ III, and I will undoubtedly buy Civ IV, and its expansion, for the PC. However, I still cringe when I see a "sticker price" of $60, especially when I know there's a $30 expansion coming down the pike in less than a year, and a year after that I can get both of them together in a "Gold" or "Game of the Year" edition for $45 or $50 that you will still realize profits from. You're one of the few developers who makes great games that don't stress my hardware and force me to get upgrades, so I guess I should be thankful about that.
My buying habits -- waiting until the games hit the discount bin with their expansion packs -- probably hit you in the wallet. Is there anything you can say to convince me I should buy Civ IV as soon as it's released?
Thanks
Jurph