I'm not terribly into MMORPG, but I usually play female characters in fighting games, simply because I usually prefer the faster characters instead of the hard-hitting character. Why should my gender not allow me to choose the character that I wish, while female players gets to choose from the full gamut?
Yes, IT Staff are employees too, but during their course of duties, they may require access to said systems. If you company cannot trust the person who actually administer the machine holding personal information, then who can you trust?
It's like saying that HR person who files employee information is not allowed to look at the name of the folder without announce it to someone that you "trust".
At the risk of being totally flamed, I prefer OpenBSD for setting up a barebones server without extra bloat. Of course, there are specialized linux distros that are very tiny, DSL, Puppy and Slax comes into mind, but they are desktop distros.
How does closed-source program really affect the use of AppArmor? When was the last time the average Linux user had gone through code to make sure that it is doing things as advertised? When was the last time someone verified that the binary package they got from the distribution is the result of the open source code?
Well supposedly at least for somewhere in North America, breaking and entering isn't necessarily about a guy busting down the door, but for crossing the barrier between say the sidewalk and private property.
However, in terms of wireless, there is really, no well defined boundary. Last time I read about wireless distance record attempts, it went from Las Vegas to Utah using a 10ft parabolic antenna (at Defcon) at 275km. Suppose I manage to connect to a wireless AP using one of these monsters through the English channel (improbable, I know), but what would you do now? Phone Interpol?
They have better luck getting manufacturers to turn on wireless security like WPA on default than to actually prosecute. How will a bobby on his beat know that I'm connecting to some guy's wireless if I'm doing it at home?
They shouldn't be asking non-tech guys to hire...
on
Network Warrior
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· Score: 1
"The pro-cert people say that the certs serve as a measuring stick for non-techs who are looking to hire techs"
Fact of the matter is, non-techs (here to mean someone who has no clue) shouldn't be there to hire techs. Certs are not really good metrics for those who have little computer experience to judge whether a person would excel at a technical role. There are plenty of people who could do "puke learning" quite well, but simply cannot apply what they've "learnt". Resumes, CVs, etc... are not good media to convince a person whether they're qualified or not. You may say that the applicant suck at writing resume, but how are you going to document every single bit of experience that you have at, say, identifying dead hardware and replacing/reviving a dead box?
The tech-adapt, regardless whether they're certified or not, would be able to tell the difference.
Same thing can be applied to the Linux vs BSD debate, shown by the debates followed the report on systrace.
Tech Writing is one of those neglected disciplines
on
Creative Documentation
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· Score: 1
Along with good programming and commenting techniques that won't yield insecure code that just cannot be read, and software maintenance, etc... There are plenty of times that I'm glad to have a book written on the subject, instead of some quick tutorial on Google. I find that when they are well written, they do give you good grasp of software. I have got lots of books for precisely that reason.
Yeah, my hair, on the keyboard, freshly torn out of my scalp, whne I was trying to configure their bloody driver.
I use to have a bit of respect when there was open source 3D accelerated drivers for some of the older Radeons, while nVidia had none, but right now, screw that. I just want the thing to work.
"Taking micromanagement out of the player's hands - and putting it in the computer's hands like it belongs - adds a dimension to the game instead of taking one away. Formation tactics, with direct combat units protecting artillery, etc., can really come to the fore. In Warcraft/Starcraft games, any attempt at formation falls apart immediately upon engagement. Due to the lack of formation tactics, vital military concepts such as "flank" and "rear" have significantly reduced importance in Starcraft. All that is left to emulate combined arms is unit mix."
I couldn't put this better. Thanks very much C&C3 tried to introduce the concept of directional armor. Rear armor is 50% less than front, side is somewhere around 10%-25% (I forgot). It's not working out too well at the moment, they need to rebalance the units so that it's just not a tank spam. To betray my objectivity, when I play an RTS, I consider myself a commander. I shouldn't need to tell an Orc Raider to throw a net over a Harpy when he's getting attacked. WC3 with its micromanagement, forces you to be the platoon sergeant, and you would have to tell your men to what to do to stay alive for a bit longer than 2 seconds. Normally, if I don't like the game mechanics, I would just leave the game alone. I did that for SC (even thogh occasionally I had fun), but it's just that I find that some of the blizzard fans want to degenerate all RTS to the same mechanics of WC3. I will try SC2 given that they've eliminated the whole Hero thing. The Hero units in WC3 was one of the most upsetting thing they've done. I loved WC2, despite its interface flaws, but I hated WC3.
I don't know, all that matter to me is to shift the attention of the (Star|War)Craft fanboys away C&C3 and complaining about how the game economy system doesn't work like they wanted, or how they wanted to see some RPG elements to encourage gamers to keep their units alive. I wouldn't say I liked StarCraft. The gaming style isn't something that I was proficient at, but at least it has moments that was enjoyable, both single and multiplayer. WC3 was just all about Creeping and Micromanagement, to the point that I would refuse to call WarCraft 3 real time strategy. Personally I don't particularly care fo the announcement other than the effect it would have on C&C3, and I was expecting something like Universe of StarCraft MMO meant to milk more money. I won't be surprised if they did that after SC2 comes out though.
It's actually kinda sad that NIN Year Zero sale is beaten by Avril Lavigne in Canada. Bt at least we know that NIN would be longer lasting as musicians, and people would keep remixing their songs as long as Reznor going to keep releasing his songs like this.
You're viewing this in the techie perspective. Most poeple won't mind the space that a DVD takes up, 2-3 dvd single cases would take up the space of VHS, and I'm sure there are those who aren't technically savvy like us who had space for VHS.
Also, they would be mostly playing it on TV (not HD DVD), and the difference between a H.264/DivX vs DVD would be non-existent. Sure, on a 21" widescreen it's very noticible, but DVD has more than enough resolution for TV anyways.
DVD has an advantage over all the different encoding for online delivery of movies - backwards compatibilty. Average Joe could pop by to WalMart, get some $50CDN dvd player, hook it up pretty much like a VCR to his TV, and watch DVDs. He could rent them, he could borrow them and he could drag DVD players around. But he (unless a geek) won't join the encoding zoo out there. He would need a geek to tell him which player to play what format. He might not want to go to various sites (possibly spyware infested) to get his movies (face it, there isn't an online delivery of movies at your required resolution legally). H.264 eats quite a bit of power, and machines a few years old mightn ot be up to the stuff.
DVDs and their next gen equivalent won't go to the way of the floppy. Those of us who demand more of our movies would go for the digital format, while people who don't like computers very much wouldn't mind pulling a DVD off their shelf and jam it in their DVD player, designed for the task, and would hardly break due to spyware or their OS. At least that would be the case until someone offers a set-top device that does what you want right now, and even then, it would still be iffy for the technologically inept to adopt it.
Well, gcc does provide instrinsics that allows assembly functions to be accessed almost as if functions. One must realize that although gcc does generate decent code, it still (to my knowledge, does not do any automatic vectorization. FFMpeg probably contains assembly for this reason.
I think it is folly to totally ignore assembly. Assembly language is still needed for any disassembly, and there may be cute optimization that other programmer may overlook if they were not subjected to bit-mangling before.
The point of having a rather diverse choice of desktop environments in Linux is that if you don't like one of them, you can use another. Different people use different desktop environments for their own reason. I like GNOME that comes with Ubuntu because I don't get bombarded with choices, yet still have a good level of integration that isn't always present with other windowmanagers. If I need to put Linux on a low resource computer, I wouldn't even consider GNOME. Now, if Linus doesn't like GNOME, and prefers KDE, he is more than welcome to ignore GNOME. To have GNOME roll over and obey Linus is to blindly ignore existing GNOME users just to please a [benevolent] dictator. I have no problems with choice. I find myself gravitate towards software that works quickly, without much fussing around. I like GNOME over KDE, and apparently when I had to set up a webserver for light use, I preferred lighttpd over apache (apache can be too configurable, and overwhelming). That's the reason why we have these parallel projects. If we all a hive mind, then simply these different projects won't exists. Linus can better serve the open source community by just ignoring GNOME, if he doesn't like where they're heading. If he is right, then GNOME would simply wither away.
Tell me about it. A NYC cabbie was not yielding to pedestrians on our light, and almost runned me over. In anger, I kicked his plastic fender, and he claimed that I dented it, and went all nuts. I will admit that kicking his fender was stupid, but while I was there for 2-3 days as a tourist, I noticed that the drivers are not yielding, especially when pedestrian light's on. At the end, I just bought myself a daypass for the subway, and duck into the subway whenever I can. I think New Yorkers are better served with stricter laws against drivers not yielding to pedestrian before they start legistlate against iPods and such.
Citing Wikipedia seems like a minor offense compared to how cheating seems to be getting more rampant. I've seen the quality of the students in my school decline, and I've seen first years out right try to look for the prof's editions of certain books to answer their homework. Well, finally someone got enough balls to do this, but it shouldn't have took them that long anyways.
I couldn't agree more. Crypto hash are esigned to be preimage, second-preimage and collosion resistant. There is probably some limit on how secure the algorithm is based on how many bits the generated hash is; however it isn't security through obscurity.
All those good points about OSX aside, has anyone else used the OLPC GUI interface? I can guarantee that it will drive all those who have used a computer before nuts, and I do question whether a children who have not used a computer before be able to do any better either.
If you are so concern about boot time, why shutdown? Laptop users either use sleep, which only powers the RAM, or uses hibernate, which writes the memory in blocks into the hard drive, and reads it back on boot. Win2k supported this feature a long time ago. Putting your desktop into sleep, if properly supported, should have the feel of instant on. At work, there is this Dell that auto-sleep, and wakes up in a couple of seconds, and you can probably change the behaviour so that either it wakes on LAN on not, so if you are paranoid about malware, you can make sure that it doesn't wake on LAN. And no, booting up computers aren't just about reading a bunch of stuff in memory (this ain't the days of DOS, and even DOS needed drivers on boot), so your reading large chunks into memory is basically waking from Hibernation.
Heck, it's even possible to run an instance of Win98 inside qemu. I've done that to play some of my old games before. If the only reason why the legacy app doesn't run on Win2k/xp is just that it detects the version, this is a free way to virtualize it. If I was the consultant, I'd document this event, and find a convenient excuse to get the heck out of there.
If the OS is easy to use, it's a good chance that the UI is going to be beautiful. Is Exposé beautiful? Yes, but it's function is to show the user what type of windows are open (yet hidden), and allow them to choose. The pretty interface for it stems from the function. Don't create a GUI for the sake of being beautiful. Create a GUI that's easy to use, and the beauty would come automatically.
AFAIK, the userspace app framework for OLPC is Sugar, which is Python based. On what is basically an embedded computing platform with 128MB RAM, ~500MB permanent storage, and a CPU that doesn't have a L2 cache (last I checked), how much of these performance tuning would actually matter if all of these userspace apps depends on a language with an interpreter that you couldn't even fit 1/10 into the 16K of L1 instruction cache?
Don't get me wrong, me and my fellow students at the university are working on performance tuning, but as I look in to the Geode chip more and more, I believe that Sugar is poison for OLPC.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not terribly into MMORPG, but I usually play female characters in fighting games, simply because I usually prefer the faster characters instead of the hard-hitting character. Why should my gender not allow me to choose the character that I wish, while female players gets to choose from the full gamut?
Yes, IT Staff are employees too, but during their course of duties, they may require access to said systems. If you company cannot trust the person who actually administer the machine holding personal information, then who can you trust?
It's like saying that HR person who files employee information is not allowed to look at the name of the folder without announce it to someone that you "trust".
At the risk of being totally flamed, I prefer OpenBSD for setting up a barebones server without extra bloat.
Of course, there are specialized linux distros that are very tiny, DSL, Puppy and Slax comes into mind, but they are desktop distros.
How does closed-source program really affect the use of AppArmor? When was the last time the average Linux user had gone through code to make sure that it is doing things as advertised? When was the last time someone verified that the binary package they got from the distribution is the result of the open source code?
You can't mix ideology with due diligence.
Well supposedly at least for somewhere in North America, breaking and entering isn't necessarily about a guy busting down the door, but for crossing the barrier between say the sidewalk and private property.
However, in terms of wireless, there is really, no well defined boundary. Last time I read about wireless distance record attempts, it went from Las Vegas to Utah using a 10ft parabolic antenna (at Defcon) at 275km. Suppose I manage to connect to a wireless AP using one of these monsters through the English channel (improbable, I know), but what would you do now? Phone Interpol?
They have better luck getting manufacturers to turn on wireless security like WPA on default than to actually prosecute. How will a bobby on his beat know that I'm connecting to some guy's wireless if I'm doing it at home?
"The pro-cert people say that the certs serve as a measuring stick for non-techs who are looking to hire techs"
Fact of the matter is, non-techs (here to mean someone who has no clue) shouldn't be there to hire techs.
Certs are not really good metrics for those who have little computer experience to judge whether a person would excel at a technical role. There are plenty of people who could do "puke learning" quite well, but simply cannot apply what they've "learnt".
Resumes, CVs, etc... are not good media to convince a person whether they're qualified or not. You may say that the applicant suck at writing resume, but how are you going to document every single bit of experience that you have at, say, identifying dead hardware and replacing/reviving a dead box?
The tech-adapt, regardless whether they're certified or not, would be able to tell the difference.
"Some people get a bit too excited about MS"
Same thing can be applied to the Linux vs BSD debate, shown by the debates followed the report on systrace.
Along with good programming and commenting techniques that won't yield insecure code that just cannot be read, and software maintenance, etc...
There are plenty of times that I'm glad to have a book written on the subject, instead of some quick tutorial on Google. I find that when they are well written, they do give you good grasp of software. I have got lots of books for precisely that reason.
Yeah, my hair, on the keyboard, freshly torn out of my scalp, whne I was trying to configure their bloody driver.
I use to have a bit of respect when there was open source 3D accelerated drivers for some of the older Radeons, while nVidia had none, but right now, screw that. I just want the thing to work.
"Taking micromanagement out of the player's hands - and putting it in the computer's hands like it belongs - adds a dimension to the game instead of taking one away. Formation tactics, with direct combat units protecting artillery, etc., can really come to the fore. In Warcraft/Starcraft games, any attempt at formation falls apart immediately upon engagement. Due to the lack of formation tactics, vital military concepts such as "flank" and "rear" have significantly reduced importance in Starcraft. All that is left to emulate combined arms is unit mix."
I couldn't put this better. Thanks very much
C&C3 tried to introduce the concept of directional armor. Rear armor is 50% less than front, side is somewhere around 10%-25% (I forgot). It's not working out too well at the moment, they need to rebalance the units so that it's just not a tank spam.
To betray my objectivity, when I play an RTS, I consider myself a commander. I shouldn't need to tell an Orc Raider to throw a net over a Harpy when he's getting attacked. WC3 with its micromanagement, forces you to be the platoon sergeant, and you would have to tell your men to what to do to stay alive for a bit longer than 2 seconds.
Normally, if I don't like the game mechanics, I would just leave the game alone. I did that for SC (even thogh occasionally I had fun), but it's just that I find that some of the blizzard fans want to degenerate all RTS to the same mechanics of WC3.
I will try SC2 given that they've eliminated the whole Hero thing. The Hero units in WC3 was one of the most upsetting thing they've done. I loved WC2, despite its interface flaws, but I hated WC3.
I don't know, all that matter to me is to shift the attention of the (Star|War)Craft fanboys away C&C3 and complaining about how the game economy system doesn't work like they wanted, or how they wanted to see some RPG elements to encourage gamers to keep their units alive.
I wouldn't say I liked StarCraft. The gaming style isn't something that I was proficient at, but at least it has moments that was enjoyable, both single and multiplayer. WC3 was just all about Creeping and Micromanagement, to the point that I would refuse to call WarCraft 3 real time strategy. Personally I don't particularly care fo the announcement other than the effect it would have on C&C3, and I was expecting something like Universe of StarCraft MMO meant to milk more money. I won't be surprised if they did that after SC2 comes out though.
It's actually kinda sad that NIN Year Zero sale is beaten by Avril Lavigne in Canada.
Bt at least we know that NIN would be longer lasting as musicians, and people would keep remixing their songs as long as Reznor going to keep releasing his songs like this.
You're viewing this in the techie perspective. Most poeple won't mind the space that a DVD takes up, 2-3 dvd single cases would take up the space of VHS, and I'm sure there are those who aren't technically savvy like us who had space for VHS.
Also, they would be mostly playing it on TV (not HD DVD), and the difference between a H.264/DivX vs DVD would be non-existent. Sure, on a 21" widescreen it's very noticible, but DVD has more than enough resolution for TV anyways.
DVD has an advantage over all the different encoding for online delivery of movies - backwards compatibilty. Average Joe could pop by to WalMart, get some $50CDN dvd player, hook it up pretty much like a VCR to his TV, and watch DVDs. He could rent them, he could borrow them and he could drag DVD players around. But he (unless a geek) won't join the encoding zoo out there. He would need a geek to tell him which player to play what format. He might not want to go to various sites (possibly spyware infested) to get his movies (face it, there isn't an online delivery of movies at your required resolution legally). H.264 eats quite a bit of power, and machines a few years old mightn ot be up to the stuff.
DVDs and their next gen equivalent won't go to the way of the floppy. Those of us who demand more of our movies would go for the digital format, while people who don't like computers very much wouldn't mind pulling a DVD off their shelf and jam it in their DVD player, designed for the task, and would hardly break due to spyware or their OS. At least that would be the case until someone offers a set-top device that does what you want right now, and even then, it would still be iffy for the technologically inept to adopt it.
And also the link in the /. post was to a site that posted it before April 1
Well, gcc does provide instrinsics that allows assembly functions to be accessed almost as if functions.
One must realize that although gcc does generate decent code, it still (to my knowledge, does not do any automatic vectorization.
FFMpeg probably contains assembly for this reason.
I think it is folly to totally ignore assembly. Assembly language is still needed for any disassembly, and there may be cute optimization that other programmer may overlook if they were not subjected to bit-mangling before.
The point of having a rather diverse choice of desktop environments in Linux is that if you don't like one of them, you can use another.
Different people use different desktop environments for their own reason. I like GNOME that comes with Ubuntu because I don't get bombarded with choices, yet still have a good level of integration that isn't always present with other windowmanagers. If I need to put Linux on a low resource computer, I wouldn't even consider GNOME.
Now, if Linus doesn't like GNOME, and prefers KDE, he is more than welcome to ignore GNOME. To have GNOME roll over and obey Linus is to blindly ignore existing GNOME users just to please a [benevolent] dictator.
I have no problems with choice. I find myself gravitate towards software that works quickly, without much fussing around. I like GNOME over KDE, and apparently when I had to set up a webserver for light use, I preferred lighttpd over apache (apache can be too configurable, and overwhelming). That's the reason why we have these parallel projects. If we all a hive mind, then simply these different projects won't exists.
Linus can better serve the open source community by just ignoring GNOME, if he doesn't like where they're heading. If he is right, then GNOME would simply wither away.
Tell me about it. A NYC cabbie was not yielding to pedestrians on our light, and almost runned me over. In anger, I kicked his plastic fender, and he claimed that I dented it, and went all nuts.
I will admit that kicking his fender was stupid, but while I was there for 2-3 days as a tourist, I noticed that the drivers are not yielding, especially when pedestrian light's on. At the end, I just bought myself a daypass for the subway, and duck into the subway whenever I can.
I think New Yorkers are better served with stricter laws against drivers not yielding to pedestrian before they start legistlate against iPods and such.
Citing Wikipedia seems like a minor offense compared to how cheating seems to be getting more rampant.
I've seen the quality of the students in my school decline, and I've seen first years out right try to look for the prof's editions of certain books to answer their homework.
Well, finally someone got enough balls to do this, but it shouldn't have took them that long anyways.
I couldn't agree more. Crypto hash are esigned to be preimage, second-preimage and collosion resistant. There is probably some limit on how secure the algorithm is based on how many bits the generated hash is; however it isn't security through obscurity.
All those good points about OSX aside, has anyone else used the OLPC GUI interface?
I can guarantee that it will drive all those who have used a computer before nuts, and I do question whether a children who have not used a computer before be able to do any better either.
If you are so concern about boot time, why shutdown?
Laptop users either use sleep, which only powers the RAM, or uses hibernate, which writes the memory in blocks into the hard drive, and reads it back on boot. Win2k supported this feature a long time ago.
Putting your desktop into sleep, if properly supported, should have the feel of instant on. At work, there is this Dell that auto-sleep, and wakes up in a couple of seconds, and you can probably change the behaviour so that either it wakes on LAN on not, so if you are paranoid about malware, you can make sure that it doesn't wake on LAN.
And no, booting up computers aren't just about reading a bunch of stuff in memory (this ain't the days of DOS, and even DOS needed drivers on boot), so your reading large chunks into memory is basically waking from Hibernation.
Not to mention half of the PS3 list of games are games that are/have been rehashed to death.
Heck, it's even possible to run an instance of Win98 inside qemu.
I've done that to play some of my old games before. If the only reason why the legacy app doesn't run on Win2k/xp is just that it detects the version, this is a free way to virtualize it.
If I was the consultant, I'd document this event, and find a convenient excuse to get the heck out of there.
If the OS is easy to use, it's a good chance that the UI is going to be beautiful.
Is Exposé beautiful? Yes, but it's function is to show the user what type of windows are open (yet hidden), and allow them to choose. The pretty interface for it stems from the function.
Don't create a GUI for the sake of being beautiful. Create a GUI that's easy to use, and the beauty would come automatically.
AFAIK, the userspace app framework for OLPC is Sugar, which is Python based.
On what is basically an embedded computing platform with 128MB RAM, ~500MB permanent storage, and a CPU that doesn't have a L2 cache (last I checked), how much of these performance tuning would actually matter if all of these userspace apps depends on a language with an interpreter that you couldn't even fit 1/10 into the 16K of L1 instruction cache?
Don't get me wrong, me and my fellow students at the university are working on performance tuning, but as I look in to the Geode chip more and more, I believe that Sugar is poison for OLPC.