That's a little different from what I was picturing. "A box whose contents scroll independantly of the parent", compared to what I would describe as "an element always visible at the same position of the page, irrespective of the parent's scroll position."
Slashdot has the latter if you're using D2 with Javascript enabled.
*fills out a long web form* *gets to bottom of page, sees privacy policy* *thinks "Hmm, there's a lot about privacy and facebook on the news, maybe I should check this out* *clicks policy. policy opens in current window.* *reads policy* *clicks back* *screams as entire form has been erased*
Sites requiring the use of Javascript are pretty evil. And what CSS style are you referring to--I don't think I've run across that one. Usually, when I see behavior like that, it's an iframe.
I've also used a keyfile which got corrupt. No amount of recall is ever going to get that back. And I've also had corrupted ciphertext which wouldn't properly decrypt even with the correct pass phrase.
Seriously, there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong with improperly implemented encryption.
Forensics people are actually pretty damned smart. If they see a binary blog, they'll try to tie it to anything they can. If they can't, they'll probably assume that it's encrypted personal data.
Well, they don't say how the offender must register, do they? Will it be on a form that you hand to a police officer? Will it be online? If it's online, how will the database verify that only the sex offender is the one doing the registering?
Worse, the bill requires not only e-mail addresses, but any designation for the person:
(under definitions:) (2) OFââINTERNETIDENTIFIERSâ(TM)â(TM).â"As used in this Act, the term ââInternet identifiersâ(TM)â(TM) means electronic mail addresses and other designations used for self-identification or routing in Internet communication or posting.
Does that mean that, if a sex offender wanted to use the nick "nsayer" on a social networking site, that they must register it? If so, you may have problems registering with that nick later on, in the event that a site does a blanket block of "internet identifiers" used by sex offenders.
The law, like so many others, is vaguely worded and imprecise enough that it's only going to cause trouble. It further bothers me that the implementation is left unspecified, except inasmuch as the attorney general is to direct it. One person (effectively) is going to decide how abusable the database and registration process is.
There is also a potential for the crafty sex offender to possibly cause false positives by just registering an address that does not belong to them, thereby drawing in innocent bystanders.
1. Cui bono? Why would they bother to do this, except just to be a dick?
The downside is that in 64-bit mode, pointers are all twice as big, which means your program will need more memory and possibly memory bandwidth than the 32-bit version would. My experience is that 64-bit is usually slower, unless you have 4GB or more of RAM. Theoretically, 64-bit can be faster, but generally people don't switch because they need the faster CPU speed, they switch because they need the RAM.
Exactly. Even if every application had a 64-bit compatible version out there, I wouldn't bother switching unless I really needed the extra addressable memory. Addressable memory is really the key, though--you can still see the benefits of 64-bit without having 4GB of physical RAM.
But the guy you replied to really seems to not have much of a clue. There's certainly not going to be a noticeable performance difference between a 32-bit version of Flash and a 64-bit version of Flash on the same machine. The historic problem with the lack of a 64-bit version was that you simply couldn't run Flash on that machine without setting up a 32-bit environment as well. It wasn't a particularly hard task, but it's annoying, it means keeping up with multiple versions of Firefox, and it was quite a hassle. Now with the plugin wrapper, it's trivial, and I can't think of a single reason that Adobe should bother with a 64-bit version of Flash for Linux.
Some perspective: Right now, there are over 6 billion people on Earth. IPv4 has a theoretical maximum of 2^32 (4.3 billion) IP addresses. IPv6 has a theoretical maximum of 2^128 IP addresses, which works out to more than 2^90 addresses per person currently on the planet. Yeah. Each person could have a whole bunch of IPv4-sized address spaces. A bunch of a bunch. Our planet probably isn't capable of holding so many people that each person would only get 2^32 addresses (size of the IPv4 address space.)
I'd bet a couple of bucks that the human race will never ever need anything more than IPv6.
3> Implementation cost of IPv6 is more likely to drop than to raise over time.
That's only true to a point. The faster you need something done, the more it tends to cost. If we get into a big crunch, the move will cost more. Also, some organizations are poo-pooing IPv6 even as they're revamping their infrastructure (a major ISP in Britain is a recent example). If they get into a crunch and need to deploy IPv6, they'll have to replace a great deal of their infrastructure. Depending upon when they need to, it could be much sooner than their next planned refresh cycle.
So there's a lot to consider, honestly. Probably one of the good things to do is to buy IPv6-capable equipment as you replace existing equipment. That way, hopefully the bulk of your infrastructure will be in place and ready when you need it, and it's going to be relatively small additional costs per piece of equipment.
Online activation kills the second-hand market, and that's what they're largely going for.
CD-based copy protection kills the casual copying market, which may well generate more sales. In fact, I don't doubt one bit that making it difficult to copy the CD means that fewer people will pirate the game--the question is whether or not the licensing costs (of the copy protection) are justified compared to the extra sales generated and the perception of the company. If copy protection ever gets too intrusive, the latter may be what kills it.
Interestingly, you'll find that piracy isn't even mention. Piracy did not kill Looking Glass studios. Difficult financials did, same as Origin, Westwood, and a multitude of other classic studios.
Define "difficult financials", please. I think that Origin died not because of any real financial problem, but because EA made some bad decisions. Origin was soled to EA in 1992. Once Ultima Online became such a hit, EA decided that Origin would only focus on online play. This is the bonehead move that did Origin in--the bread and butter of gaming (back then) was not in online play. Even back then, there were several MMO and MMO-like games which tanked. But EA got lucky with Origin's Ultima Online, saw the huge hit it was going to be, and got greedy.
Every post-UO game slated to be produced by Origin was eventually canceled. They were put to work milking the UO cash cow until their death in 2004. It's certainly hard to say for sure whether or not they would have been successful if they'd been allowed to work on other projects (specifically non-online ones), but their track record indicates that, yeah, they probably would have been.
If you want to take the steps to increase the minimum wage to a decent living wage and improve workers' rights then I'm 100% behind you.
Why do you think that a minimum wage does anything more than increase the costs for everyone? Do you think that businesses paying minimum wage employees are just going to suck up the added employment costs?
The company will want to make the same profits, so they're either going to raise prices or cut employees in order to pay the new wage.
It's really a tough problem, because increasing taxes in order to pay for socialized medicine effectively does the same thing. Either the taxes hit the working class (meaning the quality of life goes down) or they hit businesses (meaning they raise prices, to the same effect) or both. Or in an extreme case, the business may leave the country to avoid taxes. These things may not happen immediately, but it's an inevitable result of capitalism and the human condition. People want wealth, and if the government tries to take away their wealth, they'll try to get it back.
No doubt, USB is "good enough." So was VHS and HDDVD, and any number of other technologies that lost the marketing game.
Firewire is nice when you're doing backups, though eSATA sort of obviates it if you're going to have to buy an add-on card, anyway. If you're just streaming media files or transporting small amounts of data, USB will certainly do just fine.
firewire gives better performance than USB for otherwise identical drives.
No doubt. Firewire gets very close to its advertised speeds for sustained throughput. USB advertised speeds are peak throughput, not sustained--they do very poorly when trying to pass a lot of data across that bus.
I browsed over to bestbuy.com to look at their drive offerings. They have 68 drives which are USB-only, and 23 drives which have Firewire connections (and all of those also had USB--combined with a smattering of other multi-BUS drives, there are 97 drives supporting USB.)
All things being equal, I'd prefer the higher throughput of Firewire, however I also have to consider versatility. Every computer I have to touch has a USB port. Only a couple of them have Firewire.
Release dates mean a lot. Playing with them lets you adjust your income based upon your fiscal year (look at Harry Potter 6 release date shenanigans.) Shareholders want consistent earnings from year to year, not large fluctuations, for example. There are also times of the year when people tend to use their disposable income more freely, such as around holidays. Releasing your game too far from, say, Christmas means that a great deal of your marketing (which will almost certainly coincide with the release date) won't be as effective when people are actually spending the money.
Then there are other release considerations. Who wants to release their flagship product at the same time that another company has a major release? There are a lot of things that need to be considered when picking a release date--it's not as simple as "release it when it's ready."
Possibly, but I truly don't think Microsoft could ever do right around here. Short of releasing the OS under either the BSD license or the GPL, they will forever have a reputation as software bloaters, monopolists, and DRM-supporters. And such a reputation is not undeserved.
The truth is, I'm not sure they could ever make a stable release of Windows. Vista was horribly delayed, horribly buggy on release, and had dropped a fair number of planned features in order to prevent further delays. If they'd planned to quash most of the bugs before release, I wonder how long it would have taken to get it all done?
Debian has the benefit of a good reputation and of having free software. People aren't scared to run pre-release versions of Debian in production, and it's relatively simple to fix many bugs yourself while waiting for something official from Debian. This means that Debian gets more testers doing real work with their release candidates.
Compare this to Microsoft, who also publish beta and release candidates for free (though free-as-in-beer.) How many people ran Vista full-time before it was released? Heck, Microsoft can barely get people to run it full-time now that it's been out for a while!
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, ok, that makes sense. Thanks!
That's a little different from what I was picturing. "A box whose contents scroll independantly of the parent", compared to what I would describe as "an element always visible at the same position of the page, irrespective of the parent's scroll position."
Slashdot has the latter if you're using D2 with Javascript enabled.
Just because the tools you use work that way does not mean that the majority of them do.
I wonder how many people actually think to open links in new windows/tabs? Geeks aside, I bet it's pretty few.
*fills out a long web form*
*gets to bottom of page, sees privacy policy*
*thinks "Hmm, there's a lot about privacy and facebook on the news, maybe I should check this out*
*clicks policy. policy opens in current window.*
*reads policy*
*clicks back*
*screams as entire form has been erased*
The web is not, and should not be designed for savvy users.
Savvy users will get around the stupid measures put into place for everyone else.
Sites requiring the use of Javascript are pretty evil. And what CSS style are you referring to--I don't think I've run across that one. Usually, when I see behavior like that, it's an iframe.
It's probably the extremely rare case where encryption keys kill people.
Me, too.
I've also used a keyfile which got corrupt. No amount of recall is ever going to get that back. And I've also had corrupted ciphertext which wouldn't properly decrypt even with the correct pass phrase.
Seriously, there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong with improperly implemented encryption.
Forensics people are actually pretty damned smart. If they see a binary blog, they'll try to tie it to anything they can. If they can't, they'll probably assume that it's encrypted personal data.
Well, they don't say how the offender must register, do they? Will it be on a form that you hand to a police officer? Will it be online? If it's online, how will the database verify that only the sex offender is the one doing the registering?
Worse, the bill requires not only e-mail addresses, but any designation for the person:
(under definitions:)
(2) OFââINTERNETIDENTIFIERSâ(TM)â(TM).â"As used in this Act, the term ââInternet identifiersâ(TM)â(TM) means electronic mail addresses and other designations used for self-identification or routing in Internet communication or posting.
Does that mean that, if a sex offender wanted to use the nick "nsayer" on a social networking site, that they must register it? If so, you may have problems registering with that nick later on, in the event that a site does a blanket block of "internet identifiers" used by sex offenders.
The law, like so many others, is vaguely worded and imprecise enough that it's only going to cause trouble. It further bothers me that the implementation is left unspecified, except inasmuch as the attorney general is to direct it. One person (effectively) is going to decide how abusable the database and registration process is.
It would also be nice if you explained yourself. Might even get you some karma.
There is also a potential for the crafty sex offender to possibly cause false positives by just registering an address that does not belong to them, thereby drawing in innocent bystanders.
1. Cui bono? Why would they bother to do this, except just to be a dick?
How long have you been on the Internet?
You joke, but I'm pretty sure I don't have 4 billion pages combined in all of the books I own :)
The downside is that in 64-bit mode, pointers are all twice as big, which means your program will need more memory and possibly memory bandwidth than the 32-bit version would. My experience is that 64-bit is usually slower, unless you have 4GB or more of RAM. Theoretically, 64-bit can be faster, but generally people don't switch because they need the faster CPU speed, they switch because they need the RAM.
Exactly. Even if every application had a 64-bit compatible version out there, I wouldn't bother switching unless I really needed the extra addressable memory. Addressable memory is really the key, though--you can still see the benefits of 64-bit without having 4GB of physical RAM.
But the guy you replied to really seems to not have much of a clue. There's certainly not going to be a noticeable performance difference between a 32-bit version of Flash and a 64-bit version of Flash on the same machine. The historic problem with the lack of a 64-bit version was that you simply couldn't run Flash on that machine without setting up a 32-bit environment as well. It wasn't a particularly hard task, but it's annoying, it means keeping up with multiple versions of Firefox, and it was quite a hassle. Now with the plugin wrapper, it's trivial, and I can't think of a single reason that Adobe should bother with a 64-bit version of Flash for Linux.
Some perspective:
Right now, there are over 6 billion people on Earth. IPv4 has a theoretical maximum of 2^32 (4.3 billion) IP addresses. IPv6 has a theoretical maximum of 2^128 IP addresses, which works out to more than 2^90 addresses per person currently on the planet. Yeah. Each person could have a whole bunch of IPv4-sized address spaces. A bunch of a bunch. Our planet probably isn't capable of holding so many people that each person would only get 2^32 addresses (size of the IPv4 address space.)
I'd bet a couple of bucks that the human race will never ever need anything more than IPv6.
3> Implementation cost of IPv6 is more likely to drop than to raise over time.
That's only true to a point. The faster you need something done, the more it tends to cost. If we get into a big crunch, the move will cost more. Also, some organizations are poo-pooing IPv6 even as they're revamping their infrastructure (a major ISP in Britain is a recent example). If they get into a crunch and need to deploy IPv6, they'll have to replace a great deal of their infrastructure. Depending upon when they need to, it could be much sooner than their next planned refresh cycle.
So there's a lot to consider, honestly. Probably one of the good things to do is to buy IPv6-capable equipment as you replace existing equipment. That way, hopefully the bulk of your infrastructure will be in place and ready when you need it, and it's going to be relatively small additional costs per piece of equipment.
Online activation kills the second-hand market, and that's what they're largely going for.
CD-based copy protection kills the casual copying market, which may well generate more sales. In fact, I don't doubt one bit that making it difficult to copy the CD means that fewer people will pirate the game--the question is whether or not the licensing costs (of the copy protection) are justified compared to the extra sales generated and the perception of the company. If copy protection ever gets too intrusive, the latter may be what kills it.
Interestingly, you'll find that piracy isn't even mention. Piracy did not kill Looking Glass studios. Difficult financials did, same as Origin, Westwood, and a multitude of other classic studios.
Define "difficult financials", please. I think that Origin died not because of any real financial problem, but because EA made some bad decisions. Origin was soled to EA in 1992. Once Ultima Online became such a hit, EA decided that Origin would only focus on online play. This is the bonehead move that did Origin in--the bread and butter of gaming (back then) was not in online play. Even back then, there were several MMO and MMO-like games which tanked. But EA got lucky with Origin's Ultima Online, saw the huge hit it was going to be, and got greedy.
Every post-UO game slated to be produced by Origin was eventually canceled. They were put to work milking the UO cash cow until their death in 2004. It's certainly hard to say for sure whether or not they would have been successful if they'd been allowed to work on other projects (specifically non-online ones), but their track record indicates that, yeah, they probably would have been.
If you want to take the steps to increase the minimum wage to a decent living wage and improve workers' rights then I'm 100% behind you.
Why do you think that a minimum wage does anything more than increase the costs for everyone? Do you think that businesses paying minimum wage employees are just going to suck up the added employment costs?
The company will want to make the same profits, so they're either going to raise prices or cut employees in order to pay the new wage.
It's really a tough problem, because increasing taxes in order to pay for socialized medicine effectively does the same thing. Either the taxes hit the working class (meaning the quality of life goes down) or they hit businesses (meaning they raise prices, to the same effect) or both. Or in an extreme case, the business may leave the country to avoid taxes. These things may not happen immediately, but it's an inevitable result of capitalism and the human condition. People want wealth, and if the government tries to take away their wealth, they'll try to get it back.
No doubt, USB is "good enough." So was VHS and HDDVD, and any number of other technologies that lost the marketing game.
Firewire is nice when you're doing backups, though eSATA sort of obviates it if you're going to have to buy an add-on card, anyway. If you're just streaming media files or transporting small amounts of data, USB will certainly do just fine.
firewire gives better performance than USB for otherwise identical drives.
No doubt. Firewire gets very close to its advertised speeds for sustained throughput. USB advertised speeds are peak throughput, not sustained--they do very poorly when trying to pass a lot of data across that bus.
I browsed over to bestbuy.com to look at their drive offerings. They have 68 drives which are USB-only, and 23 drives which have Firewire connections (and all of those also had USB--combined with a smattering of other multi-BUS drives, there are 97 drives supporting USB.)
All things being equal, I'd prefer the higher throughput of Firewire, however I also have to consider versatility. Every computer I have to touch has a USB port. Only a couple of them have Firewire.
Most modern computers can, yes, but that's somewhat irrelevant.
Most external drives are firewire (if they have USB too, the firewire performance is still far better).
Really? In my experience, most new external drives are either USB-only or USB+FW(maybe +eSATA).
Release dates mean a lot. Playing with them lets you adjust your income based upon your fiscal year (look at Harry Potter 6 release date shenanigans.) Shareholders want consistent earnings from year to year, not large fluctuations, for example. There are also times of the year when people tend to use their disposable income more freely, such as around holidays. Releasing your game too far from, say, Christmas means that a great deal of your marketing (which will almost certainly coincide with the release date) won't be as effective when people are actually spending the money.
Then there are other release considerations. Who wants to release their flagship product at the same time that another company has a major release? There are a lot of things that need to be considered when picking a release date--it's not as simple as "release it when it's ready."
Possibly, but I truly don't think Microsoft could ever do right around here. Short of releasing the OS under either the BSD license or the GPL, they will forever have a reputation as software bloaters, monopolists, and DRM-supporters. And such a reputation is not undeserved.
The truth is, I'm not sure they could ever make a stable release of Windows. Vista was horribly delayed, horribly buggy on release, and had dropped a fair number of planned features in order to prevent further delays. If they'd planned to quash most of the bugs before release, I wonder how long it would have taken to get it all done?
Debian has the benefit of a good reputation and of having free software. People aren't scared to run pre-release versions of Debian in production, and it's relatively simple to fix many bugs yourself while waiting for something official from Debian. This means that Debian gets more testers doing real work with their release candidates.
Compare this to Microsoft, who also publish beta and release candidates for free (though free-as-in-beer.) How many people ran Vista full-time before it was released? Heck, Microsoft can barely get people to run it full-time now that it's been out for a while!