However, put us in a situation where others can give input and the groupthink mentality starts to take over.
You should be more precise. "Groupthink" is usually considered a perjoritive, but it doesn't quite look like you're using in that sense.
If members of the group can provide feedback to each other directly, then groupthink can take over and I'd expect a group to start acting more like an individual. This is the perjorative sense.
However, if the members of the group don't feed back to each other (or do so "sufficiently indirectly" for some suitable definition), you can get the effect mentioned in the GP, and this is amazingly powerful.
("Sufficiently indirectly" is an important point. A single political group can exhibit very powerful perjorative-groupthink, but the political system as a whole does vastly better than any individual or small group could possibly do, via this statistical-groupthink. Sure, it ain't perfect, but you shouldn't be measuring against "perfection", a very subjective measure on a national scale anyhow, but against those economies that have existed that tried to be run by a single person or small group. You'll note most of them have been Darwin-ed away...)
Jeez, who needed an inside line? I just watched the trailer they ran at the Incredibles.
Granted, the Incredibles trailer from the year before wasn't that informative, but it was funny and obviously had potential. The Cars trailer was painful to watch, and I had a hard time imagining what story could possibly be worth watching for ~2 hours with that. It looked like a neat 5-10 minute short, but a feature length animation? Yow.
Cars is the first Pixar movie I am completely uninterested in, and I'll be waiting for the reviews before I even think about it. I'm expecting to skip it.
(Context: I like all of them up to this point, more or less, and while I wouldn't call "The Incredibles" the best movie ever, it is my personal favorite movie ever. I guess they had to strike out sooner or later.)
But perhaps it's because you've unfairly maligned our C-in-C.
Unfairly maligning President Bush does not get you a flamebait around here.
The more likely explanation is: There are two Global Warmings "in play", the scientific case for it and the religious case for it. Only rarely have the two been in such direct conflict, so if someone is pounding the podium and insisting that these hurricanes are directly related to global warming (as the GP did indirectly), we have a clear case of the latter. A religiously-fervent person taking the opportunity to accuse everybody who disagrees with him of spreading FUD, combined with assorted and sundry mocking is pretty clearly flamebait.
(Full disclosure: I accept the strong evidence for global warming. I'm open to human causation but I think the jury is still out. The effectively-religious belief that global warming is the end of life on Earth (yes, exaggerated a bit) has never made sense to me.)
Does anyone have thoughts on what can be done to improve the security of XP Home?
Ask Microsoft for licenses for Pro. Remember, it costs them nearly nothing and they might use it for PR or something. Remind them how fun the news stories will be when the system gets hacked and all the Poor Africans (TM) are being betrayed by the White Imperialist Multinational Corporation (TM). The story practically writes itself (even though I personally do not subscribe to that narrative).
Oh, and the PS1 dual analoge controllers were pretty much a standard not too long after the N64 launched, so it's not like Sony hasn't taken Nintendo's innovation for their own in the past.
I knew someone was going to bring them up, which is why I made such a big deal about new types of controllers, like dance mats, fishing rods, etc. Refinements of conventional controllers have certainly succeeded, because they don't have the game chicken-and-egg problem. (I don't own one, but from what I gather the "original" XBox controllers are effectively deprecated, for instance.)
The ColecoVision that others pointed to has a little ugly joystick on the bottom.
The Intellivision had a finger-killing disc on the bottom, a keypad, and "four" side-trigger buttons. (However, the top two were the same button and the bottom two were the same button, IIRC; this is actually a good thing.)
Both had a numeric pad on it. The Intellivion allowed you to drop overlays in that labelled the buttons.
While Intellivision and Colecovision controllers basically sucked (as did everything in that era), it was a long time before we got a mainstream console again that allowed for as many possibilities from the controller. SNES at the earliest, and probably more like the PS1/Saturn era.
If this controller is a big hit it won't be too hard for Sony and MS to add one to their systems. Nintendo then loses what might be their main selling point. So in the end, it's still all about the games.
Your message contains the reason why this is not a serious problem for Nintendo. History shows through every generation that controller add-ons extremely rarely do well if they require game support. (In fact, "our system will have tons of add-ons" has become one of those things they just say every generation and most of us have learned to ignore.) How many games are there for the dance mat? The light gun? etc. Obviously, the answer is not zero, but it is extremely rare for a totally new controller to ever achieve significant penetration. As a chicken-and-egg consequence, nobody makes the games for the controller.
I don't think Sony and Microsoft can match this in the current generation. Whether they try in the next depends on what happens with the Revolution, and whether this represents a new two-part gaming industry, 18-34 males and everybody else. Even if they try, they'll probably end up with an inferior copy that nobody will code games for.
MS and Sony can't "answer" this, certainly not now (it'd just give legitimacy to the idea, and their strategy is almost certainly going to be to mock it as openly as possible), and not later (when it'll be an "add-on" to an established system that nobody will buy, and if there is pressure to "answer", that basically means everybody already has a Revolution). Their next chance will be ~2010 in the next generation.
That's why this is such a daring play for Nintendo. If this works, they will own this space for 5-7 years, in almost exactly the same way they own (currently) the portable space. Doesn't mean it's the whole of gaming, doesn't mean it'll "kill" MS or Sony, but the big N doesn't have to to make the big bucks.
Those aren't "blogs", those are "search engine spam". "Removing blogs" ain't gonna do squat about that problem. Shall we remove all consumer product review sites because there is spam that looks like consumer product review sites?
(I don't get to do this often.... most people aren't as oblivious to what other people are saying.)
Those aren't "blogs", those are "search engine spam". "Removing blogs" ain't gonna do squat about that problem. Shall we remove all consumer product review sites because there is spam that looks like consumer product review sites?
(A typical human fallacy; "this argument happens to result in something I agree with, therefore it must be correct", even if it's complete and utter nonsense if actually examined.)
Haven't you noticed? That feature's been implemented in Windows since at least 3.1. (Only half joking, if that much.)
It's also quite heavily implemented in Office, especially Word, which I've caught multiple times in multiple places in multiple versions just deciding that you really, really meant to check this checkbox, and by golly, that "unchecking" action just has to be a mistake...
Leaning on tar is probably a better solution anyhow.
I don't know your exact needs, but you can make this easy on yourself with a very short shell script, or even just an alias. Instead of using "scp", use "ssh" directly, something like:
ssh [your login here] -C 'tar c $*' | tar x
This runs "tar" on the remote server, $* is trying to convey the idea of passing all the params of the script/alias to the remote tar, and outputs to stdout. ssh redirects stdout across the network to its own stdout, which is then piped to local tar for extraction. -C compresses the stream, which is probably Good Enough, but under certain circumstances (CPU time vastly outweighs transfer time, think modem transfer here) it can be worthwhile to add bzip2 into the mix:
ssh [your login] 'tar c $* | bzip2' | bunzip2 | tar x
Tune the script to your needs, and the reverse script is pretty easy too; ssh will redirect its stdin across the network just as easily if you use it in a pipe.
Note there is never a temporary file.
I belabor how this works because it took me a while to fully grasp how cool it is that ssh makes the Unix pipe idea fully work across the network. Note you can set up pipes on the remote side in the ssh command if you escape it correctly (apostrophes will usually do, but shell escaping can get evil). scp is more "convenience script" than "fundamental tool".
Just to be clear, that makes the problem worse, not better.
(I think you just meant to point the possibility, AJWM; I don't mean this to be targetted at you. But it's mentioning that this increases the number of decisions a translater has to make.)
Written by D.C. Fontana, whom true fans will recognize as the author of many episodes, most of them good. Voiced by the original actors, minus the late DeForest Kelley.
One can only wonder what it could have been. It's my biggest "could'a been", and that includes myself as both an Ultima and Fallout fan. (Fallout3 would probably have been at least OK, hopefully outstanding, but after Ultima 9, I'm not sure we needed a 10...)
While I'm not a big fan of playing the victim card, you got screwed. Your advisor/professor/whatever should have politely chuckled and asked for something a little less ambitious. I've seen less ambitious Master's theses.
Biting off more than you can chew is an extremely common programmer failing, one many never outgrow, but even for those who do it's usually a matter of decades. Most senior projects should be rejected, and substituted with something smaller, at least in my experience.
For those of you in a similar boat, take this advice: If your advisor doesn't politely chuckle and ask for something less ambitious, be wary. Either you actually asked for something reasonable, or your advisor doesn't care. Be extra, extra sure you're in the former situation, because I'd say statistics favor the latter!
I think they were going for the "vivere" root, life, involved in words like "vivacious" and "vitality", but given the computer connections "virus" does tend to come out too.
Trying to peice together syllables to indirectly invoke things is a dangerous game. (Doesn't seem to stop a lot of big companies, though.)
With the staggering number of frameworks available, "unique" is an awfully high bar. I'm not sure a standard that eliminates all frameworks from consideration is a valuable one.
I've learned a lot of the old sayings I thought were metaphorical are literal. I've never done "seeing red", but my heart has "skipped a beat" (or at least felt exactly like I would expect), and there's another one of a similar nature that I've experienced, but can't recall.
I'm hoping to skip experiencing "burst a blood vessel".
Counterbet: While I bet they could do that, I bet such a paste would be more human-energy-expensive, by several times, than a current diet consisting of an average mix of meat and plant materials.
All that "free" solar power adds up.
An economic expression of this irony in the modern world is that some of the cheapest foods, unprocessed vegetables, are also in many ways the best, on a number of levels, not just health.
(I acknowledge that this doesn't address the criticism you were making, though, which is probably still valid. But who stays on topic around here?:) )
Does anyone have a version of this article that isn't a vague promise that several buzzwords now have more to do with each other than ever?
I would expect this code actually does something, but the article is so vague I'm not really sure what. What's an example of something that does not work now that will work after this code is integrated and released?
(Preferably from someone who actually knows; I could make stuff up based on the article too, like this: "Before, if you set the ALT attribute on a dynamically-generated IMG tag, the screen-readers couldn't pick it up. Now they can." But I'm not sure if that's what they mean; that's just my plausible interpretation of the buzzword soup that I'm not very confident in, as I would have thought that works fine now....)
Sadly, the DMCA cares less about what you do than what you might do. Any action that you take that "circumvents a copy protection", which can be reasonably translated into "increasing the set of copy protected things that can be 'played' on the system", is illegal, whether or not you ever actually violate copyright.
Running the XBox Media Center to download Comedy Central shows is a copyright violation. It is a copyright violation not possible with a stock XBox. Therefore, any mod chip that will allow you to perform that action is illegal, regardless of whether you do. The DMCA doesn't care if you're actually copying XBox games; it cares if you've expanded the set of copyright violation you are capable of performing. Running "whatever you want" clearly includes programs that are capable of such things. Very stupid law, as we should just be banning the violations themselves and not the capability, but there it is.
If you're about to say that precisely defining what constitutes a program that is "capable" of copyright violation is inherently fuzzy and most likely impossible, well, you're most likely right, but I can't imagine you winning that one in court, as a judge will tend to use the logic that if Congress passed a law, clearly they intended that law to do something. (That is to say, the argument that a law is meaningless rarely gets far, from what I see; it is an invitation to the judge to try to determine what Congress did mean. Again, pointing out that is not always possible is unlikely to stop them.)
Of course, nobody but a judge with a case in front of them can say how it would go until judgement is rendered; but I'd encourage you to read the law itself, preferably as a hostile judge, not someone looking for four or five words that will vindicate their cause. I'm pretty confident you'll see this is what it says, because the part in question deals entirely with "circumventing protection", protections that clearly work by virtue of the fact that the copyright violations in question aren't possible until after the circumvention. Can you come up with some counterarguments? Sure, you can always counterargue. But you'd get shredded in court, because both the text and "sense" of the law were clearly to allow the enforced existance of something like the XBox which can control the user's "consuming"* experiences.
(*: I hate the word "consuming", but I have not found a suitable verb that people will recognize what I mean. I personally prefer "experiencing", but that's a leap I've historically had a hard time explaining to people.)
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However, put us in a situation where others can give input and the groupthink mentality starts to take over.
You should be more precise. "Groupthink" is usually considered a perjoritive, but it doesn't quite look like you're using in that sense.
If members of the group can provide feedback to each other directly, then groupthink can take over and I'd expect a group to start acting more like an individual. This is the perjorative sense.
However, if the members of the group don't feed back to each other (or do so "sufficiently indirectly" for some suitable definition), you can get the effect mentioned in the GP, and this is amazingly powerful.
("Sufficiently indirectly" is an important point. A single political group can exhibit very powerful perjorative-groupthink, but the political system as a whole does vastly better than any individual or small group could possibly do, via this statistical-groupthink. Sure, it ain't perfect, but you shouldn't be measuring against "perfection", a very subjective measure on a national scale anyhow, but against those economies that have existed that tried to be run by a single person or small group. You'll note most of them have been Darwin-ed away...)
Jeez, who needed an inside line? I just watched the trailer they ran at the Incredibles.
Granted, the Incredibles trailer from the year before wasn't that informative, but it was funny and obviously had potential. The Cars trailer was painful to watch, and I had a hard time imagining what story could possibly be worth watching for ~2 hours with that. It looked like a neat 5-10 minute short, but a feature length animation? Yow.
Cars is the first Pixar movie I am completely uninterested in, and I'll be waiting for the reviews before I even think about it. I'm expecting to skip it.
(Context: I like all of them up to this point, more or less, and while I wouldn't call "The Incredibles" the best movie ever, it is my personal favorite movie ever. I guess they had to strike out sooner or later.)
But perhaps it's because you've unfairly maligned our C-in-C.
Unfairly maligning President Bush does not get you a flamebait around here.
The more likely explanation is: There are two Global Warmings "in play", the scientific case for it and the religious case for it. Only rarely have the two been in such direct conflict, so if someone is pounding the podium and insisting that these hurricanes are directly related to global warming (as the GP did indirectly), we have a clear case of the latter. A religiously-fervent person taking the opportunity to accuse everybody who disagrees with him of spreading FUD, combined with assorted and sundry mocking is pretty clearly flamebait.
(Full disclosure: I accept the strong evidence for global warming. I'm open to human causation but I think the jury is still out. The effectively-religious belief that global warming is the end of life on Earth (yes, exaggerated a bit) has never made sense to me.)
Does anyone have thoughts on what can be done to improve the security of XP Home?
Ask Microsoft for licenses for Pro. Remember, it costs them nearly nothing and they might use it for PR or something. Remind them how fun the news stories will be when the system gets hacked and all the Poor Africans (TM) are being betrayed by the White Imperialist Multinational Corporation (TM). The story practically writes itself (even though I personally do not subscribe to that narrative).
Oh, and the PS1 dual analoge controllers were pretty much a standard not too long after the N64 launched, so it's not like Sony hasn't taken Nintendo's innovation for their own in the past.
I knew someone was going to bring them up, which is why I made such a big deal about new types of controllers, like dance mats, fishing rods, etc. Refinements of conventional controllers have certainly succeeded, because they don't have the game chicken-and-egg problem. (I don't own one, but from what I gather the "original" XBox controllers are effectively deprecated, for instance.)
The ColecoVision that others pointed to has a little ugly joystick on the bottom.
The Intellivision had a finger-killing disc on the bottom, a keypad, and "four" side-trigger buttons. (However, the top two were the same button and the bottom two were the same button, IIRC; this is actually a good thing.)
Both had a numeric pad on it. The Intellivion allowed you to drop overlays in that labelled the buttons.
While Intellivision and Colecovision controllers basically sucked (as did everything in that era), it was a long time before we got a mainstream console again that allowed for as many possibilities from the controller. SNES at the earliest, and probably more like the PS1/Saturn era.
If this controller is a big hit it won't be too hard for Sony and MS to add one to their systems. Nintendo then loses what might be their main selling point. So in the end, it's still all about the games.
Your message contains the reason why this is not a serious problem for Nintendo. History shows through every generation that controller add-ons extremely rarely do well if they require game support. (In fact, "our system will have tons of add-ons" has become one of those things they just say every generation and most of us have learned to ignore.) How many games are there for the dance mat? The light gun? etc. Obviously, the answer is not zero, but it is extremely rare for a totally new controller to ever achieve significant penetration. As a chicken-and-egg consequence, nobody makes the games for the controller.
I don't think Sony and Microsoft can match this in the current generation. Whether they try in the next depends on what happens with the Revolution, and whether this represents a new two-part gaming industry, 18-34 males and everybody else. Even if they try, they'll probably end up with an inferior copy that nobody will code games for.
MS and Sony can't "answer" this, certainly not now (it'd just give legitimacy to the idea, and their strategy is almost certainly going to be to mock it as openly as possible), and not later (when it'll be an "add-on" to an established system that nobody will buy, and if there is pressure to "answer", that basically means everybody already has a Revolution). Their next chance will be ~2010 in the next generation.
That's why this is such a daring play for Nintendo. If this works, they will own this space for 5-7 years, in almost exactly the same way they own (currently) the portable space. Doesn't mean it's the whole of gaming, doesn't mean it'll "kill" MS or Sony, but the big N doesn't have to to make the big bucks.
Those aren't "blogs", those are "search engine spam". "Removing blogs" ain't gonna do squat about that problem. Shall we remove all consumer product review sites because there is spam that looks like consumer product review sites?
(I don't get to do this often.... most people aren't as oblivious to what other people are saying.)
When someone considers the truth "pretentious garbage", that says more about the person than the "garbage".
Those aren't "blogs", those are "search engine spam". "Removing blogs" ain't gonna do squat about that problem. Shall we remove all consumer product review sites because there is spam that looks like consumer product review sites?
(A typical human fallacy; "this argument happens to result in something I agree with, therefore it must be correct", even if it's complete and utter nonsense if actually examined.)
Haven't you noticed? That feature's been implemented in Windows since at least 3.1. (Only half joking, if that much.)
It's also quite heavily implemented in Office, especially Word, which I've caught multiple times in multiple places in multiple versions just deciding that you really, really meant to check this checkbox, and by golly, that "unchecking" action just has to be a mistake...
Microsoft plans on installing at least half a dozen starving, crazed weasels that will attack anyone who succeeds in opening their boxes.
Ah, Weird Al Rights Management. However, I think only 360s shipped to Albuquerque will have this "feature".
If I do manage to hack the 360, will I be stuck in a closet with Vanna White, night after night after night after night?
I don't know your exact needs, but you can make this easy on yourself with a very short shell script, or even just an alias. Instead of using "scp", use "ssh" directly, something like:This runs "tar" on the remote server, $* is trying to convey the idea of passing all the params of the script/alias to the remote tar, and outputs to stdout. ssh redirects stdout across the network to its own stdout, which is then piped to local tar for extraction. -C compresses the stream, which is probably Good Enough, but under certain circumstances (CPU time vastly outweighs transfer time, think modem transfer here) it can be worthwhile to add bzip2 into the mix:Tune the script to your needs, and the reverse script is pretty easy too; ssh will redirect its stdin across the network just as easily if you use it in a pipe.
Note there is never a temporary file.
I belabor how this works because it took me a while to fully grasp how cool it is that ssh makes the Unix pipe idea fully work across the network. Note you can set up pipes on the remote side in the ssh command if you escape it correctly (apostrophes will usually do, but shell escaping can get evil). scp is more "convenience script" than "fundamental tool".
Just to be clear, that makes the problem worse, not better.
(I think you just meant to point the possibility, AJWM; I don't mean this to be targetted at you. But it's mentioning that this increases the number of decisions a translater has to make.)
Finally, I small hope for the Republicans... ;-)
;) )
But brains can't be grown, so Democrats are out of luck.
"If you're not a liberal at 21, you haven't got a heart. If you're not a conservative at 40, you haven't got a brain." - various
(All in good fun.
Star Trek: Secret of Vulcan Fury.
Written by D.C. Fontana, whom true fans will recognize as the author of many episodes, most of them good. Voiced by the original actors, minus the late DeForest Kelley.
One can only wonder what it could have been. It's my biggest "could'a been", and that includes myself as both an Ultima and Fallout fan. (Fallout3 would probably have been at least OK, hopefully outstanding, but after Ultima 9, I'm not sure we needed a 10...)
While I'm not a big fan of playing the victim card, you got screwed. Your advisor/professor/whatever should have politely chuckled and asked for something a little less ambitious. I've seen less ambitious Master's theses.
Biting off more than you can chew is an extremely common programmer failing, one many never outgrow, but even for those who do it's usually a matter of decades. Most senior projects should be rejected, and substituted with something smaller, at least in my experience.
For those of you in a similar boat, take this advice: If your advisor doesn't politely chuckle and ask for something less ambitious, be wary. Either you actually asked for something reasonable, or your advisor doesn't care. Be extra, extra sure you're in the former situation, because I'd say statistics favor the latter!
No, I got the same out of it.
I think they were going for the "vivere" root, life, involved in words like "vivacious" and "vitality", but given the computer connections "virus" does tend to come out too.
Trying to peice together syllables to indirectly invoke things is a dangerous game. (Doesn't seem to stop a lot of big companies, though.)
never once have I... heard the screams of the damned coming from my computer speakers.
What, you've never played Doom? Wow, have you missed out.
(And I'm not talking 3...)
With the staggering number of frameworks available, "unique" is an awfully high bar. I'm not sure a standard that eliminates all frameworks from consideration is a valuable one.
I've learned a lot of the old sayings I thought were metaphorical are literal. I've never done "seeing red", but my heart has "skipped a beat" (or at least felt exactly like I would expect), and there's another one of a similar nature that I've experienced, but can't recall.
I'm hoping to skip experiencing "burst a blood vessel".
Counterbet: While I bet they could do that, I bet such a paste would be more human-energy-expensive, by several times, than a current diet consisting of an average mix of meat and plant materials.
:) )
All that "free" solar power adds up.
An economic expression of this irony in the modern world is that some of the cheapest foods, unprocessed vegetables, are also in many ways the best, on a number of levels, not just health.
(I acknowledge that this doesn't address the criticism you were making, though, which is probably still valid. But who stays on topic around here?
Thank you.
Does anyone have a version of this article that isn't a vague promise that several buzzwords now have more to do with each other than ever?
I would expect this code actually does something, but the article is so vague I'm not really sure what. What's an example of something that does not work now that will work after this code is integrated and released?
(Preferably from someone who actually knows; I could make stuff up based on the article too, like this: "Before, if you set the ALT attribute on a dynamically-generated IMG tag, the screen-readers couldn't pick it up. Now they can." But I'm not sure if that's what they mean; that's just my plausible interpretation of the buzzword soup that I'm not very confident in, as I would have thought that works fine now....)
Sadly, the DMCA cares less about what you do than what you might do. Any action that you take that "circumvents a copy protection", which can be reasonably translated into "increasing the set of copy protected things that can be 'played' on the system", is illegal, whether or not you ever actually violate copyright.
Running the XBox Media Center to download Comedy Central shows is a copyright violation. It is a copyright violation not possible with a stock XBox. Therefore, any mod chip that will allow you to perform that action is illegal, regardless of whether you do. The DMCA doesn't care if you're actually copying XBox games; it cares if you've expanded the set of copyright violation you are capable of performing. Running "whatever you want" clearly includes programs that are capable of such things. Very stupid law, as we should just be banning the violations themselves and not the capability, but there it is.
If you're about to say that precisely defining what constitutes a program that is "capable" of copyright violation is inherently fuzzy and most likely impossible, well, you're most likely right, but I can't imagine you winning that one in court, as a judge will tend to use the logic that if Congress passed a law, clearly they intended that law to do something. (That is to say, the argument that a law is meaningless rarely gets far, from what I see; it is an invitation to the judge to try to determine what Congress did mean. Again, pointing out that is not always possible is unlikely to stop them.)
Of course, nobody but a judge with a case in front of them can say how it would go until judgement is rendered; but I'd encourage you to read the law itself, preferably as a hostile judge, not someone looking for four or five words that will vindicate their cause. I'm pretty confident you'll see this is what it says, because the part in question deals entirely with "circumventing protection", protections that clearly work by virtue of the fact that the copyright violations in question aren't possible until after the circumvention. Can you come up with some counterarguments? Sure, you can always counterargue. But you'd get shredded in court, because both the text and "sense" of the law were clearly to allow the enforced existance of something like the XBox which can control the user's "consuming"* experiences.
(*: I hate the word "consuming", but I have not found a suitable verb that people will recognize what I mean. I personally prefer "experiencing", but that's a leap I've historically had a hard time explaining to people.)