*shrug* Of course, any respectable Linux user won't use your software unless they can see the code anyway. How else do we know it's not chock full of security holes and spyware?
Ah. So that's why Loki went bust.
But you know what... I'm respectable, and I bought their games. And no, I didn't get any source code.
There are legitimate reasons not to release source code, and the original poster didn't give any details of his licence, so I think you're being excessively harsh to call it obnoxious.
The decision to distribute source code or not does not affect the quality of the software. It may make it harder for you to look inside, but remember - Sony didn't release their DRM source code either.
Like.... uh.... proving that Mars really is orange......and... uh.... proving that solar power works even that far away from the sun.......and.... uh.... naming dozens of insignificant boulders after members of the research team.
Am I the only one who fears they will never implement OpenDocument support, but rather 'open' their proprietary formats?
Well of course not. The whole point of opening their own standards is to kill the OpenDocument standard.
It's a tactical move: of course they wouldn't have opened their document standard if they didn't think it would help them. The ideal end result for Microsoft would be the death of the OpenDocument standard because it's been made redundant; the world would still have the open standard it's been craving, but MS would still be hanging onto the reigns.
What company gives regular IT people their own offices?
It happens. My very first job (as a junior programmer), I got my own office. It was a big one too. It was an IT centre for a manufacturing company; maybe two dozen people in the building, and all the programmers had their own offices. That was nice. Spent three years there.:-D
But yes... it was blind luck. Everywhere else I've worked since, it's just been a desk in an open-plan room.
It sounds like a seriously ambitious project to approach...
I second that.
Starting at 25TB to scale 1PB? And you want it cheap? If it was cheap to do that sort of thing, we'd all be lining up to get one of our own(*).
Seriously, though, you don't really specify how cheap you are expecting to get it for. What are your expectations, and just how far over-budget are the options you've looked at already? Do you really need 25TB/1PB in one volume, or could it be achieved by splitting it into smaller chunks and working out some sort of load-sharing system?
And in any case, what on Earth kind of data do they anticipate will take a petabyte of contiguous storage????
[(*) Yes, I'm aware that in X years, someone's going to be looking back at this in the/. archive, and laughing about how low tiny our disc storage space was back in 2005]
My question is: Why bother hacking a Wiki? Can't you just make your own changes to it anyway?
Re:What is your opinion...
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Freeloaders looks a lot like FreeCiv, but the only unit you get is a flat-bed truck loaded with moonshine, and you have to drive it around avoiding "barbarians" (who have a police car icon).
Flatterers, on the other hand, is a special version of FreeCiv released by the Flat Earth Society, in which the map doesn't wrap around at the edges.
(and for God's sake, please don't mod this 'informative'!!!!)
I can see the headline now: Air Force "reflects" on decision to purchase sexy new laser, after a test backfires when attempting to shoot down a mirrored missile...
& yes, defending against laser is that simple.
So how come Queen Amidala's ship had such difficulty getting past the blockade?
Suggested additional methods of preventing CAPTCHA defeat:
1. Change the instructions so that it isn't always "type these characters". Maybe "type the first three characters", etc. Randomise this element.
2. Use the technique that spammers love: replace characters in your CAPTCHA with similar-looking, but non-standard ones; the word will still be readable, but will foil font-based algorithms.
3. Divide the image into small blocks, cutting across characters, and with randomised cutting points. Display them together on the page, and the user need never know the difference, but a bot is much more likely to choke.
4. Use Javascript to load the image, so that a bot that doesn't process JS won't ever see the image.
5. Better still, load a dummy image in HTML, and overlay it with another in JS. Legitimate users will see the overlaid image; bots will see the original one, and therefore get it wrong in a predictable way, even if they can decipher the graphic. Could be a good way to spot the dodgy user right from the beginning (yes, it would also catch users with JS turned off... but in these days of Ajax, who does that?)
6. Use hieroglyphics rather than alphabetic characters: show a couple of easily recognised icons or pictures, and ask the user to identify them.
7. Trap IP addresses, etc of users that fail the test. Increase the difficulty of the test for IPs that have previously failed.
That's all I can think of for now. I'm sure some of them won't really be workable (and I'm sure the slashdot crowd will gleefully tell me so!), but hopefully there's something useful and new in that lot.:)
(btw - is it deliberate that CAPTCHA sounds so similar to GOTCHA?)
In which case, it would play on a standard turntable. (though, of course, you'll want to be sure of that first -- if it isn't one, playing it on a turntable will probably wreck it, whatever it is....)
It will force game/application developers to write windows-only apps instead of cross-platform. OpenGL made is quite a bit easier to do that.
You know, I never understood why games developers don't just write for Linux (or indeed, any other OS), and then provide their games on a bootable disc.
You have to have the game disc in the drive anyway for most games, so there wouldn't be any hardship to the user, but it would remove all the issues of what libraries are installed on the host machine.
It would also remove the need for platform-specific versions for games (especially once Apple starts shipping their Intel-based machines).
If the application runs under Wine or Crossover Office, then that would clearly be the cheapest and least disruptive option. But realistically, a lot of apps won't work like that, and you won't probably get support for it.
So Windows Terminal Server or Citrix would be the option I think would be the best bet. It will be an especially attractive option if the application in question will be in use by a limited number of people at any one time, because it would be the best way to keep down the number of licences required. It also means you don't have to worry about upgrading the spec of the client machines.
Be aware the some applications are not suitable for Terminal Server environments - some apps make assumptions that they'll have exclusive access to the machine they're running on, which of course causes problems on a multi-user terminal server (it's poor coding, but you'd be surprised how often it happens); other apps may require much more expensive server licences when run in a Terminal Server environment, which can make the cost prohibitive (Crystal Reports does this).
But for the majority of apps, I would expect a Terminal Server to be the best bet for your situation.
A company I used to work for has been through exactly the same process over the last few years. I'm a programmer, so I wasn't directly involved in the process, but I'll tell you what I know.
The first thing to say is that we had a number of false starts before we got going. We had a couple of companies in Germany and elsewhere that we were talking to for a long time, but they didn't work out.
They do now, however, have three overseas distributors, in very different places around the world.
The first thing that they did was they hired a marketing specialist specifically for the task of finding the partners. She started off by researching which countries would have the best market for the product. This includes both the size of the market for our software in each country, as well as how similarly that country operates compared to our home market (the software deals contracts and so on, and needs to comply with local laws, so to break into some countries would need a lot of software changes, whereas in others the software could be used almost unchanged apart from translation)
Having identified a number of countries, she then researched the software market in those countries, looking at both producers and resellers. She was specifically looking for software companies with existing links in our market sector, as they would already have a good base of contacts to sell into.
Once she'd located a range of companies that matched her criteria, she wrote letters to them all (and had them translated professionally where necessary).
The software was already fully translateable, so once we had found our resellers, we only had to ship them the existing packages, and it was their task to do all the necessary translations for themselves. When they require software changes to suit the local market (or when they spot bugs!), they have access to our internal error logging system, and they can take a copy of our daily builds as well for testing purposes.
Just to give you an idea of the sorts of companies that we are dealing with: All three resellers were different: One was a software company who was already selling a product that competed directly with ours, but who were looking to replace it with newer technology; the second was a marketing firm with no real knowledge of our market, but who had been approached by a company local to them to find a package they could use; and the third was a company selling a local accounting package, and they integrated our software with their own to help themselves break into a new market sector.
I hope that helps. I'd be very interested to hear anyone else's experiences of similar situations.
This is a good demonstration of how spammers are messing things up for everyone. A handful of short-sighted and greedy individuals have turned email into a near-useless medium for many legitimate purposes.
But on the bright side, I hear a lot of the biggest spammers live in Florida? Great. Come the next hurricane season, I hope they all miss something important.
There's also the problem of allowing new websites into the game, but I guess that's for the Google developers to figure out.:)
That problem exists already for sites using the page rank system - you already need some good links to your site in order for it to come up in a decent position in a search.
All they're really doing with this new idea is tightening up the existing system by adjusting the weighting given in that system so that links from more 'trustworthy' sites are awarded a higher rank.
The choice of which sites are trustworthy is, of course, open to debate, but I suspect the end result will basically just be to make the existing rules stronger and weighted more heavily in favour of sites with genuine content.
Google's motivation here is to return the most relevant links for your query. Regardless of how that affects their advertising revenues, search results are their core function, so if they fail to return the best result, they will be overtaken by another search engine. And that definitely will impact their bottom line.
Slashdot Mirror
...which in turn reminds me of the old joke:
"Goblin's food is bad for his elf."
*shrug* Of course, any respectable Linux user won't use your software unless they can see the code anyway. How else do we know it's not chock full of security holes and spyware?
Ah. So that's why Loki went bust.
But you know what... I'm respectable, and I bought their games. And no, I didn't get any source code.
There are legitimate reasons not to release source code, and the original poster didn't give any details of his licence, so I think you're being excessively harsh to call it obnoxious.
The decision to distribute source code or not does not affect the quality of the software. It may make it harder for you to look inside, but remember - Sony didn't release their DRM source code either.
Bah! They've done lots of useful things....
...and... uh.... proving that solar power works even that far away from the sun... ....and.... uh.... naming dozens of insignificant boulders after members of the research team.
Like.... uh.... proving that Mars really is orange...
Am I the only one who fears they will never implement OpenDocument support, but rather 'open' their proprietary formats?
Well of course not. The whole point of opening their own standards is to kill the OpenDocument standard.
It's a tactical move: of course they wouldn't have opened their document standard if they didn't think it would help them. The ideal end result for Microsoft would be the death of the OpenDocument standard because it's been made redundant; the world would still have the open standard it's been craving, but MS would still be hanging onto the reigns.
My advice to you would be to install tripwires at the entrance to your cube.
;-))
(I don't know if it's an actual Dilbert idea, but it sounds like it ought to be
What company gives regular IT people their own offices?
:-D
It happens. My very first job (as a junior programmer), I got my own office. It was a big one too. It was an IT centre for a manufacturing company; maybe two dozen people in the building, and all the programmers had their own offices. That was nice. Spent three years there.
But yes... it was blind luck. Everywhere else I've worked since, it's just been a desk in an open-plan room.
It sounds like a seriously ambitious project to approach...
/. archive, and laughing about how low tiny our disc storage space was back in 2005]
I second that.
Starting at 25TB to scale 1PB? And you want it cheap? If it was cheap to do that sort of thing, we'd all be lining up to get one of our own(*).
Seriously, though, you don't really specify how cheap you are expecting to get it for. What are your expectations, and just how far over-budget are the options you've looked at already? Do you really need 25TB/1PB in one volume, or could it be achieved by splitting it into smaller chunks and working out some sort of load-sharing system?
And in any case, what on Earth kind of data do they anticipate will take a petabyte of contiguous storage????
[(*) Yes, I'm aware that in X years, someone's going to be looking back at this in the
No. It was just the WiKi server that went down.
My question is: Why bother hacking a Wiki? Can't you just make your own changes to it anyway?
Freeloaders looks a lot like FreeCiv, but the only unit you get is a flat-bed truck loaded with moonshine, and you have to drive it around avoiding "barbarians" (who have a police car icon).
Flatterers, on the other hand, is a special version of FreeCiv released by the Flat Earth Society, in which the map doesn't wrap around at the edges.
(and for God's sake, please don't mod this 'informative'!!!!)
AWF is worth a look -- it certainly supports multiple languages, which seems to be the main question here.
http://www.awf-cms.org/
It doesn't have quite as many features as some other better known apps, but it can still produce a decent site.
I can see the headline now: Air Force "reflects" on decision to purchase sexy new laser, after a test backfires when attempting to shoot down a mirrored missile...
& yes, defending against laser is that simple.
So how come Queen Amidala's ship had such difficulty getting past the blockade?
Suggested additional methods of preventing CAPTCHA defeat:
:)
1. Change the instructions so that it isn't always "type these characters". Maybe "type the first three characters", etc. Randomise this element.
2. Use the technique that spammers love: replace characters in your CAPTCHA with similar-looking, but non-standard ones; the word will still be readable, but will foil font-based algorithms.
3. Divide the image into small blocks, cutting across characters, and with randomised cutting points. Display them together on the page, and the user need never know the difference, but a bot is much more likely to choke.
4. Use Javascript to load the image, so that a bot that doesn't process JS won't ever see the image.
5. Better still, load a dummy image in HTML, and overlay it with another in JS. Legitimate users will see the overlaid image; bots will see the original one, and therefore get it wrong in a predictable way, even if they can decipher the graphic. Could be a good way to spot the dodgy user right from the beginning (yes, it would also catch users with JS turned off... but in these days of Ajax, who does that?)
6. Use hieroglyphics rather than alphabetic characters: show a couple of easily recognised icons or pictures, and ask the user to identify them.
7. Trap IP addresses, etc of users that fail the test. Increase the difficulty of the test for IPs that have previously failed.
That's all I can think of for now. I'm sure some of them won't really be workable (and I'm sure the slashdot crowd will gleefully tell me so!), but hopefully there's something useful and new in that lot.
(btw - is it deliberate that CAPTCHA sounds so similar to GOTCHA?)
1. "If I tell you negative information, you'll know less."
:)
2. "researchers hope to use this to gain deeper insights"
Hmmm..... I always knew quantum physics was full of contradictions, but putting those two lines together really did make me laugh.
It might be a one of these?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc
In which case, it would play on a standard turntable. (though, of course, you'll want to be sure of that first -- if it isn't one, playing it on a turntable will probably wreck it, whatever it is....)
It will force game/application developers to write windows-only apps instead of cross-platform. OpenGL made is quite a bit easier to do that.
You know, I never understood why games developers don't just write for Linux (or indeed, any other OS), and then provide their games on a bootable disc.
You have to have the game disc in the drive anyway for most games, so there wouldn't be any hardship to the user, but it would remove all the issues of what libraries are installed on the host machine.
It would also remove the need for platform-specific versions for games (especially once Apple starts shipping their Intel-based machines).
If the application runs under Wine or Crossover Office, then that would clearly be the cheapest and least disruptive option. But realistically, a lot of apps won't work like that, and you won't probably get support for it.
So Windows Terminal Server or Citrix would be the option I think would be the best bet. It will be an especially attractive option if the application in question will be in use by a limited number of people at any one time, because it would be the best way to keep down the number of licences required. It also means you don't have to worry about upgrading the spec of the client machines.
Be aware the some applications are not suitable for Terminal Server environments - some apps make assumptions that they'll have exclusive access to the machine they're running on, which of course causes problems on a multi-user terminal server (it's poor coding, but you'd be surprised how often it happens); other apps may require much more expensive server licences when run in a Terminal Server environment, which can make the cost prohibitive (Crystal Reports does this).
But for the majority of apps, I would expect a Terminal Server to be the best bet for your situation.
A company I used to work for has been through exactly the same process over the last few years. I'm a programmer, so I wasn't directly involved in the process, but I'll tell you what I know.
The first thing to say is that we had a number of false starts before we got going. We had a couple of companies in Germany and elsewhere that we were talking to for a long time, but they didn't work out.
They do now, however, have three overseas distributors, in very different places around the world.
The first thing that they did was they hired a marketing specialist specifically for the task of finding the partners. She started off by researching which countries would have the best market for the product. This includes both the size of the market for our software in each country, as well as how similarly that country operates compared to our home market (the software deals contracts and so on, and needs to comply with local laws, so to break into some countries would need a lot of software changes, whereas in others the software could be used almost unchanged apart from translation)
Having identified a number of countries, she then researched the software market in those countries, looking at both producers and resellers. She was specifically looking for software companies with existing links in our market sector, as they would already have a good base of contacts to sell into.
Once she'd located a range of companies that matched her criteria, she wrote letters to them all (and had them translated professionally where necessary).
The software was already fully translateable, so once we had found our resellers, we only had to ship them the existing packages, and it was their task to do all the necessary translations for themselves. When they require software changes to suit the local market (or when they spot bugs!), they have access to our internal error logging system, and they can take a copy of our daily builds as well for testing purposes.
Just to give you an idea of the sorts of companies that we are dealing with:
All three resellers were different: One was a software company who was already selling a product that competed directly with ours, but who were looking to replace it with newer technology; the second was a marketing firm with no real knowledge of our market, but who had been approached by a company local to them to find a package they could use; and the third was a company selling a local accounting package, and they integrated our software with their own to help themselves break into a new market sector.
I hope that helps. I'd be very interested to hear anyone else's experiences of similar situations.
That was my first reaction as well.
It's going to be very difficult to distinguish between a legitimate auto-update and an unwanted spyware application.
How would you tell the difference legally?
Hehe. I'd like to see that happen with click-thru licenses. :-D
This is a good demonstration of how spammers are messing things up for everyone. A handful of short-sighted and greedy individuals have turned email into a near-useless medium for many legitimate purposes.
But on the bright side, I hear a lot of the biggest spammers live in Florida? Great. Come the next hurricane season, I hope they all miss something important.
Oh, and it's either The Netherlands (English) or Nederland (Dutch). :) ...or Neverland (Michael Jackson).
There's also the problem of allowing new websites into the game, but I guess that's for the Google developers to figure out. :)
That problem exists already for sites using the page rank system - you already need some good links to your site in order for it to come up in a decent position in a search.
All they're really doing with this new idea is tightening up the existing system by adjusting the weighting given in that system so that links from more 'trustworthy' sites are awarded a higher rank.
The choice of which sites are trustworthy is, of course, open to debate, but I suspect the end result will basically just be to make the existing rules stronger and weighted more heavily in favour of sites with genuine content.
Google's motivation here is to return the most relevant links for your query. Regardless of how that affects their advertising revenues, search results are their core function, so if they fail to return the best result, they will be overtaken by another search engine. And that definitely will impact their bottom line.
And he never thought to just turn off his screensaver?
Well, whaddya know? Mircrothoft does thumbtimeth come up with good ideath.
Right. So none of the browsers tested can display the test page correctly? And they're the best, most compliant browsers available?
And they've had how long to get it right?
In that case, it would seem to me that it is the standard that is broken, if it's really that difficult to render a page with a cascading style sheet.