clearly you don't understand - it has nothing to do with "proprietary doing better" and everything to do with DirextX (and it's focus on all gaming) being owned 100% by Microsoft.
DirectX is the only game in town because OpenGL failed to be a viable alternative, it's two sides of the same coin. What exactly are you trying to blame Microsoft for here, they did it better and even Carmack and long since given up despite the quote that OpenGL proponents hyped while the games left.
When does DirectX release new versions? Shortly after when wine cracks the full functionality of the existing DirectX.
Whatever you're smoking, it's good. There's still issues with DX9 games and DX9 launched in 2004, and there's nothing like DX10 support while DX11 is already out. This is a poster and moderators on crack.
I am not a member or supporter in anyway of the KKK, Nazis, etc., but why is certain speech categorized as "hate" and therefore not allowed to be even stated? Who decides what is hate?
If you want it in US lingo, think of it as class action libel/slander. There's usually some rather blatant accusations and dehumanizing insults involved, it's just not aimed directly at one person. Usually it's followed shortly by a call to take away rights that one in the US would call "unalienable", sending Europe back to where the US was before the civil rights movement. sometimes I think even before the Civil War. One set of rules for the white people, another set of rules for everyone else.
To really understand it, you must understand the difference between the country and the people. Americans tend to have a very strong allegiance to their country, but little to the people. Compared to say the German or French or English, I'm not even sure you can say there is an American people. In the US, the last step is your citizenship when you "really" become an American. In Europe you can become a citizen, but getting accepted as part of the people takes much longer and requires you to adopt their lifestyle and values and culture.
That division is much deeper in Europe, and nothing in the US really compares. The KKK had six million members and yet: "The number of lynchings escalated, and from 1918 to 1927, 416 African Americans were killed, mostly in the South." according to wikipedia. The Nazis killed more Jews per day than that during WWII, not counting all the other millions of people they were at war with in no small part because they deemed themselves a higher race destined to rule over the lesser races.
That ideology is dead, but people still think in terms of ethnics not citizenships. The only reason the US doesn't have hate speech laws is that it's never seen its own people truly go "us" against "them". Europe has, and has paid the cost in blood by the millions. So did 400,000 Americans. And those lines will lie latent in Europe long after Obama makes the US mushpot an even more well-mixed mushpot. In Europe there will be the "natives" and "foreigners" for centuries to come, even if they are natural born citizens.
As far as I understand, the judge has found that as a matter of law they can not claim more than 54,000$. I would think that they could either accept this decision or appeal it as a matter of law. What good is the new trial going to do? Will they have to go through another full trial, only for the RIAA to dispute the jury instructions and demand another new trial? Surely that judge isn't the prime authority on the law and this must sooner or later reach the Supreme Court? Or did the RIAA pass up the possibility to appeal the 54,000$ decision? I somehow doubt that.
In the long term it's NEVER cheaper to follow a vendor's lock-in.
This quote is really about the stock market, but the market can be wrong longer than you can be right. And one thing about open source is that it's incredibly expensive to be first and carry all the development costs. With closed source software you implicitly calculate how much it'll add to the value of the product. It may cost 5000$ to develop a feature and one company is willing to pay 1000$, but maybe you can sell it as a "nice to have" to 100 companies for 40$ each. Guess what, a closed source company can do that but an open source company can't.
Sure, in total it can be more effective, but that won't help if those who lead the plow see "Hey, I can pay 5000$ for an open source solution or 1000$ for a closed source solution. Of course all those "nice to have" companies would prefer they get it for 0$ rather than for 40$, but they're not in control. And every attempt I've seen to create any form of money pool system has been a big failure.
A democratic world government would be a Good Thing if it only let in democratic member states and if representation in the House was based on GDP, not population. (That way, voting power would reflect real-world power. Otherwise, a nation relatively small in population but with lots of guns would tell the world government to take a hike. The US comes to mind...)
Huh? The US is ranked 9th on nominal GDP and 6th on purchasing power parity (PPP) GDP per capita and it'd only make the US more powerful than by population. Not to mention that you are creating a non-democratic world government, unless your understanding of democracy is plutocracy. And unless the US really gave off sovereignty, they're big enough to just say "fuck that" even if the EU were to band together and agree on something the US disagrees with.
Nobody would like to join a world government that looks more like an US empire with satellite states. Even the EU has big vs small state issues, and the biggest country (Germany) is only about 16% of the population. With the EU being as disjoint as they are (not to mention the UK almost always siding with the US), it'd in practice be the US running the show. The only way I could possibly see this happening is if the United States and European Union merged and became one pan-western federation with 50+27=77 member states. But I won't be holding my breath for that...
Good point. By the same logic of this law, maybe folks should have to register all those Confederate flags they're so fond of down there.
Wow, I think you're on to the best campaign against this law. Find the application form and start filling it out:
Organization: The Confederacy Founded: 1861 Members: We don't keep membership records. However, we have our own flags, confederate seal, lots of supporters, we regularly do military training missions under the guise of reenactments and most of all, we're tried it once already. You should probably get all our members to register to risk 10 years in jail.
Sure. A Linux NLE will happily work with any file you want. iMovie will barf if you try to feed it anything that's not quicktime.
Hahahhahahahahha LOL. First time I tried opening kdenlive to edit HDV video I tried to cut the clip, instant crash. Tried it again thinking it was bad luck, another instant crash. And that was supposed to be one of the good ones, the rest weren't quite as bad just ranging from terrible to abysmal. I manage to capture it under Linux but for any editing I'll still take Windows or Mac any day.
Estimate the worst possible case, if everything goes wrong, and there are lots of unforeseen issues - you are 99% sure you can get it done within this amount of time. Call it T3.
The Weighted average estimate is (T1+(4*T2) + T3)/6
That's also the PMI method, but the problem is estimating T3 and the outcome largely depends on T3 as you saw. The 95%, 99% and 99.9% T3 estimate will be way different because there's a really long tail, and then so will your weighted average. The three estimates usually map to:
T1: I got a design in mind that will in general work T2: I got a design in mind that with some tweaking and fixing and reading docs it'll work T3: I got a design in mind that'll turn out to be unusable or impossible to execute
T1 is fairly easy, T2 is usually just T1 multiplied by a fixed factor. But the last could push it back from "two days" to "critically depends on having an obscure bug fixed in middleware/base libraries that could take months". It's near unestimatable to say how bad it really could go.
Maybe I have been reading too much sci-fi lately but arent we closer to using nanotech as an immune system than using biological sources?
To actually apply it in the real world you need mass production and while bacteria and viruses have a working means to reproduce nanotech isn't even close. So I think for a long time to come we will manipulate biological sources into producing the antibodies and amino acids and hormones and whatever else we need. Not to mention that if we can manipulate our own DNA to make it "ours" there's much less chance of rejection or reactions to all the foreign elements. It also helps that all the blueprints are also there, imagine if you could trick cells into growing new hearts or livers or kidneys or lungs. Creating an army of nanorobots to build one would be a massive undertaking. There's still extremely much that could be done on the biological side if only we figured out how.
Here's hoping I don't die before they invent invincibility... biologically speaking of course:)
Personally, I'm hoping they invent immortality instead. I've looked at the curves and honestly, relatively few people die "before their time" because we've become rather good at medicine but we've made very little impact on prolonging the real life span barring injury or disease. Very few of us, even those young today, will live to be 100 unless there's some real medical breakthroughs on repairing and restoring body and mind. If our bodies could stay like a 20 year old's forever, we could live to be a thousand years old already. The mortality rate for a 20 year old is <0,001.
...as the way people think they can manipulate the estimates. It's like I give an estimate to bake a cake, then halfway into baking it they decide we only need a cake 80% the size, so that can be done in 80% of the time for 80% of the cost right? Everybody except project managers and clients would laugh at that, but it's happened in far too many planning meetings to count - particularly in response to overruns. If there had been complicated or expensive toppings that were easy to remove, they would usually already have been stripped in negotiations already so the estimates just don't work that way.
Right click on a panel area with no widgets, pick "Panel settings" in context menu. A toolbar will appear next to the panel, one of the buttons is "Screen Edge" that you can use to move it to the top (or sides or whatever). Just tested it on KUbuntu 9.10 (karmic) and works fine...
I tried 4.0, decided to sit way back and switched with the Jaunty on 4.2.2 but upgraded via backports to 4.3 and since then I've had no real issues. The only issue I have is that my sound sometimes fails to initialize, but it seems to be a heisenbug with my chipset in ALSA that is hard to pin down as others report the same. What seems to me as the biggest problem right now is that several of the KDE projects are really struggling to keep up with the times like Konqueror or is never hitting release quality like KDevelop4 which expected their 4.0 release to be at end of March. Most of the releases are frameworks and APIs or some gee-wiz plasma widget but pretty soon I'm not running a single KDE app anymore and then there's little point in running KDE either.
There should be some kind of proportion to the damages, (...) Seriously, go on a walk for 3 years and move on in your life instead of being sentenced to financial death for the rest of your natural time.
Games can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, Modern Warfare 2 has passed the billion. It is very possible that 1.5 million dollars is in proportion to the damages. What good does prison time do to recover those? If a homeless guy vandalizes my car either I or my insurance company will have to eat the cost, I don't get anything back from him doing jail time. But if that guy ever wins the lottery I want them to take the money and pay me back no matter how long time has passed. That it's a company doesn't really matter, if you ruined my small time business it'd be exactly the same. That Nintendo is a huge publicly owned company just means that the damages are smeared thin across all the stock holders, but they are still equally valid and should be collected on if at all possible.
OK, but how does focus-follows-mouse disadvantage everyone else? I use it, and I don't have a beard.
I can't speak for everyone else, but in my case the keyboard and mouse works like a team, I do shortcuts on the keyboard while the mouse is on its way or already somewhere else. A typical operation is copying/moving files or text which for me is usually Ctrl-X/C *click* Ctrl-V as the click focuses on the destination. Focus follow steals the focus too soon.
Another big annoyance is losing focus if I move my hand over to the keyboard to type, particularly on the stupid apps that have focus follows mouse even inside the application. It really doesn't take much to move a line away in a form or something.
Also, I find I can be much more effective if I can be erratic with the mouse and click to confirm rather than things popping in and out of focus all over the place. That I could probably get used to ignore but I find it distracting and not productive.
More intelligent and skilled people would always help, but I'm quite sure I'd run a project differently if I had an elite team vs a few skilled and many mediocre developers. The greater imbalance in the team, the less you can rely on "the team" working it out and the more you have to introduce structure like XP or test-driven development or waterfallish specs and designs made by the skilled people.
How about keeping a security-patched branch? There can be some middle ground between bringing everything forward and dropping support completely. I mean sooner or later the world has to move on where new features are only on those platforms that support them.
The real problem is that a huge majority of the people want to break the law. Most people aren't making phone calls to plan the next 9/11. Most people aren't buying cooking knifes to stab their neighbors. Most people aren't buying digicams to produce kiddie porn. Nobody sees these things as inherent to phones, knives or digicams and nobody thinks it sane or possible to demand producers and providers make it impossible. But give people the ability to transfer 0s and 1s and somehow you blame the ISPs, even though they're clearly not the problem and couldn't do much about it if they tried.
I guess the title pretty much sums it up, there's now an open source solution for watching videos online and I will most certainly use it. Silverlight or Firefox with flash? Who wants to use closed source software, and Microsoft's EEE plugin or that horrible plugin from Adobe of all things? Not me. At least we're replacing the closed nonfree video with open nonfree video.
Because the demand for a "fake" Xboxlive server just became reality.
Someone will hack one together in short order and post the code out there.
I assume the master server used some kind of secure connection, if so good luck faking its security certificate. Only modded boxes will ever think the fake server is real.
The problem is there's no real scenario where they lose. You say "Fuck you", they take whatever evidence they have to court and maybe they win and maybe they don't but the evidence passes enough standards to never be considered a frivolous lawsuit. Didn't you see this case that was just covered on slashdot, fight for 5 years and end in stalemate. Now this is UK law and not US, but I assume it's civil with a standard of "preponderance of evidence", I've heard that this means in practice something like a 60-40 probability. Is it possible their accusations are 60% correct? Quite possible, 40% is a huge error margin. And if so, their evidence really does meet that legal standard, disturbingly enough as it is for the 40% who ends up falsely paying.
It's always hard to find incentives that makes everybody pull in the right direction. For example, it's not that US companies don't want to think long term. But when employees think short term because they want to pass their performance evaluations, middle managers think short term of their quarterly bonus and executives think short term on the stock price and their stock options, then the result is that the company acts like short term is all that matters right up until it collapses in bankruptcy.
The same is true for departments, people only act in the company's best interest if it's better to cooperate than to compete. Unprofitable units and business lines are cut all the times, you're safer as a moneymaker in a tanking company than a mediocre department in a booming company. You can still get axed or outsourced because they need to focus their business or increase their margins but nobody wants to put their head on the chopping block and hope they'll be spared for setting a good example. An indispensable worker is a liability, somehow the same rules don't apply for departments.
Finally, it's not just different business units competing but even competing functions, like say the classic of the salesman who'll happily sell an overpromised and underestimated solution because his bonus depends on sales and not if it's actually a good deal for the company. But in defense of marketing, I've seen equally as bad examples where it seems engineering and QA has only cared about being on schedule and on budget and left the support function to pick up the tab. And even support departments that act more like anti-support departments to minimize support queues and rather kill sales because people are unhappy.
With all due respect to software developers I've found that writing software is easy because you tell the computer and it just does. Granted, it'll crash or hang if you instruct it wrong and has no intelligence of its own, but it's nothing like all the ways people circumvent your intentions and exploit your incentives. Sometimes I wonder if great leadership is just keeping people from doing all the things they shouldn't be doing. Not that by using the word "just" I mean that it's easy, quite the opposite really. I think everyone here knows the output one man can have if he's motivated, challenged and reasonably pushed so he's neither stressed nor slacking. If you could keep ten thousand people in that state you'd be worth every cent of your CEO salary.
People joke about OTP and say it's infeasible, but seriously: how inconvenient is it to carry around a few gigabytes of pad? (...) And yet, if our software could use it, I bet plenty of people really would be carrying around randomized flash cards
Long story short, if it was practical to use a one time pad it'd also be practical to carry around the fingerprint and a SSH client certificate which has been added to the known hosts on the server. Verifying the fingerprint over a secure channel is a lot easier than transferring a OTP, it''s not the carrying it's that you can't send it over the Internet or the whole point would be lost. If you carry the whole OTP on a flash drive, then someone can just steal the whole OTP as easily as they steal the certificate or sniff the password or both. Yes, I know someone will cite the Debian OpenSSL exploit now but looking at it a different way, it was the local software that was exploitable. If you can get a security hole into the OTP software, it'll do you no good no matter how good the encryption was supposed to be. The only effective one time "pads" I've known are those where you get the code externally from a key calculator, a key card or over your cell phone which is assumed to be a secure channel. In short, OTP is fixing all the things that aren't a problem in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
clearly you don't understand - it has nothing to do with "proprietary doing better" and everything to do with DirextX (and it's focus on all gaming) being owned 100% by Microsoft.
DirectX is the only game in town because OpenGL failed to be a viable alternative, it's two sides of the same coin. What exactly are you trying to blame Microsoft for here, they did it better and even Carmack and long since given up despite the quote that OpenGL proponents hyped while the games left.
When does DirectX release new versions? Shortly after when wine cracks the full functionality of the existing DirectX.
Whatever you're smoking, it's good. There's still issues with DX9 games and DX9 launched in 2004, and there's nothing like DX10 support while DX11 is already out. This is a poster and moderators on crack.
I am not a member or supporter in anyway of the KKK, Nazis, etc., but why is certain speech categorized as "hate" and therefore not allowed to be even stated? Who decides what is hate?
If you want it in US lingo, think of it as class action libel/slander. There's usually some rather blatant accusations and dehumanizing insults involved, it's just not aimed directly at one person. Usually it's followed shortly by a call to take away rights that one in the US would call "unalienable", sending Europe back to where the US was before the civil rights movement. sometimes I think even before the Civil War. One set of rules for the white people, another set of rules for everyone else.
To really understand it, you must understand the difference between the country and the people. Americans tend to have a very strong allegiance to their country, but little to the people. Compared to say the German or French or English, I'm not even sure you can say there is an American people. In the US, the last step is your citizenship when you "really" become an American. In Europe you can become a citizen, but getting accepted as part of the people takes much longer and requires you to adopt their lifestyle and values and culture.
That division is much deeper in Europe, and nothing in the US really compares. The KKK had six million members and yet: "The number of lynchings escalated, and from 1918 to 1927, 416 African Americans were killed, mostly in the South." according to wikipedia. The Nazis killed more Jews per day than that during WWII, not counting all the other millions of people they were at war with in no small part because they deemed themselves a higher race destined to rule over the lesser races.
That ideology is dead, but people still think in terms of ethnics not citizenships. The only reason the US doesn't have hate speech laws is that it's never seen its own people truly go "us" against "them". Europe has, and has paid the cost in blood by the millions. So did 400,000 Americans. And those lines will lie latent in Europe long after Obama makes the US mushpot an even more well-mixed mushpot. In Europe there will be the "natives" and "foreigners" for centuries to come, even if they are natural born citizens.
As far as I understand, the judge has found that as a matter of law they can not claim more than 54,000$. I would think that they could either accept this decision or appeal it as a matter of law. What good is the new trial going to do? Will they have to go through another full trial, only for the RIAA to dispute the jury instructions and demand another new trial? Surely that judge isn't the prime authority on the law and this must sooner or later reach the Supreme Court? Or did the RIAA pass up the possibility to appeal the 54,000$ decision? I somehow doubt that.
In the long term it's NEVER cheaper to follow a vendor's lock-in.
This quote is really about the stock market, but the market can be wrong longer than you can be right. And one thing about open source is that it's incredibly expensive to be first and carry all the development costs. With closed source software you implicitly calculate how much it'll add to the value of the product. It may cost 5000$ to develop a feature and one company is willing to pay 1000$, but maybe you can sell it as a "nice to have" to 100 companies for 40$ each. Guess what, a closed source company can do that but an open source company can't.
Sure, in total it can be more effective, but that won't help if those who lead the plow see "Hey, I can pay 5000$ for an open source solution or 1000$ for a closed source solution. Of course all those "nice to have" companies would prefer they get it for 0$ rather than for 40$, but they're not in control. And every attempt I've seen to create any form of money pool system has been a big failure.
A democratic world government would be a Good Thing if it only let in democratic member states and if representation in the House was based on GDP, not population. (That way, voting power would reflect real-world power. Otherwise, a nation relatively small in population but with lots of guns would tell the world government to take a hike. The US comes to mind...)
Huh? The US is ranked 9th on nominal GDP and 6th on purchasing power parity (PPP) GDP per capita and it'd only make the US more powerful than by population. Not to mention that you are creating a non-democratic world government, unless your understanding of democracy is plutocracy. And unless the US really gave off sovereignty, they're big enough to just say "fuck that" even if the EU were to band together and agree on something the US disagrees with.
Nobody would like to join a world government that looks more like an US empire with satellite states. Even the EU has big vs small state issues, and the biggest country (Germany) is only about 16% of the population. With the EU being as disjoint as they are (not to mention the UK almost always siding with the US), it'd in practice be the US running the show. The only way I could possibly see this happening is if the United States and European Union merged and became one pan-western federation with 50+27=77 member states. But I won't be holding my breath for that...
Good point. By the same logic of this law, maybe folks should have to register all those Confederate flags they're so fond of down there.
Wow, I think you're on to the best campaign against this law. Find the application form and start filling it out:
Organization: The Confederacy
Founded: 1861
Members: We don't keep membership records. However, we have our own flags, confederate seal, lots of supporters, we regularly do military training missions under the guise of reenactments and most of all, we're tried it once already. You should probably get all our members to register to risk 10 years in jail.
Sure. A Linux NLE will happily work with any file you want. iMovie will barf if you try to feed it anything that's not quicktime.
Hahahhahahahahha LOL. First time I tried opening kdenlive to edit HDV video I tried to cut the clip, instant crash. Tried it again thinking it was bad luck, another instant crash. And that was supposed to be one of the good ones, the rest weren't quite as bad just ranging from terrible to abysmal. I manage to capture it under Linux but for any editing I'll still take Windows or Mac any day.
Estimate the worst possible case, if everything goes wrong, and there are lots of unforeseen issues - you are 99% sure you can get it done within this amount of time. Call it T3.
The Weighted average estimate is (T1+(4*T2) + T3)/6
That's also the PMI method, but the problem is estimating T3 and the outcome largely depends on T3 as you saw. The 95%, 99% and 99.9% T3 estimate will be way different because there's a really long tail, and then so will your weighted average. The three estimates usually map to:
T1: I got a design in mind that will in general work
T2: I got a design in mind that with some tweaking and fixing and reading docs it'll work
T3: I got a design in mind that'll turn out to be unusable or impossible to execute
T1 is fairly easy, T2 is usually just T1 multiplied by a fixed factor. But the last could push it back from "two days" to "critically depends on having an obscure bug fixed in middleware/base libraries that could take months". It's near unestimatable to say how bad it really could go.
Have you ever asked which feature has the highest priority, and received the answer, "all of them"?
"In other words, none of them"
Maybe I have been reading too much sci-fi lately but arent we closer to using nanotech as an immune system than using biological sources?
To actually apply it in the real world you need mass production and while bacteria and viruses have a working means to reproduce nanotech isn't even close. So I think for a long time to come we will manipulate biological sources into producing the antibodies and amino acids and hormones and whatever else we need. Not to mention that if we can manipulate our own DNA to make it "ours" there's much less chance of rejection or reactions to all the foreign elements. It also helps that all the blueprints are also there, imagine if you could trick cells into growing new hearts or livers or kidneys or lungs. Creating an army of nanorobots to build one would be a massive undertaking. There's still extremely much that could be done on the biological side if only we figured out how.
Here's hoping I don't die before they invent invincibility... biologically speaking of course :)
Personally, I'm hoping they invent immortality instead. I've looked at the curves and honestly, relatively few people die "before their time" because we've become rather good at medicine but we've made very little impact on prolonging the real life span barring injury or disease. Very few of us, even those young today, will live to be 100 unless there's some real medical breakthroughs on repairing and restoring body and mind. If our bodies could stay like a 20 year old's forever, we could live to be a thousand years old already. The mortality rate for a 20 year old is <0,001.
...as the way people think they can manipulate the estimates. It's like I give an estimate to bake a cake, then halfway into baking it they decide we only need a cake 80% the size, so that can be done in 80% of the time for 80% of the cost right? Everybody except project managers and clients would laugh at that, but it's happened in far too many planning meetings to count - particularly in response to overruns. If there had been complicated or expensive toppings that were easy to remove, they would usually already have been stripped in negotiations already so the estimates just don't work that way.
Right click on a panel area with no widgets, pick "Panel settings" in context menu. A toolbar will appear next to the panel, one of the buttons is "Screen Edge" that you can use to move it to the top (or sides or whatever). Just tested it on KUbuntu 9.10 (karmic) and works fine...
I tried 4.0, decided to sit way back and switched with the Jaunty on 4.2.2 but upgraded via backports to 4.3 and since then I've had no real issues. The only issue I have is that my sound sometimes fails to initialize, but it seems to be a heisenbug with my chipset in ALSA that is hard to pin down as others report the same. What seems to me as the biggest problem right now is that several of the KDE projects are really struggling to keep up with the times like Konqueror or is never hitting release quality like KDevelop4 which expected their 4.0 release to be at end of March. Most of the releases are frameworks and APIs or some gee-wiz plasma widget but pretty soon I'm not running a single KDE app anymore and then there's little point in running KDE either.
There should be some kind of proportion to the damages, (...) Seriously, go on a walk for 3 years and move on in your life instead of being sentenced to financial death for the rest of your natural time.
Games can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, Modern Warfare 2 has passed the billion. It is very possible that 1.5 million dollars is in proportion to the damages. What good does prison time do to recover those? If a homeless guy vandalizes my car either I or my insurance company will have to eat the cost, I don't get anything back from him doing jail time. But if that guy ever wins the lottery I want them to take the money and pay me back no matter how long time has passed. That it's a company doesn't really matter, if you ruined my small time business it'd be exactly the same. That Nintendo is a huge publicly owned company just means that the damages are smeared thin across all the stock holders, but they are still equally valid and should be collected on if at all possible.
OK, but how does focus-follows-mouse disadvantage everyone else? I use it, and I don't have a beard.
I can't speak for everyone else, but in my case the keyboard and mouse works like a team, I do shortcuts on the keyboard while the mouse is on its way or already somewhere else. A typical operation is copying/moving files or text which for me is usually Ctrl-X/C *click* Ctrl-V as the click focuses on the destination. Focus follow steals the focus too soon.
Another big annoyance is losing focus if I move my hand over to the keyboard to type, particularly on the stupid apps that have focus follows mouse even inside the application. It really doesn't take much to move a line away in a form or something.
Also, I find I can be much more effective if I can be erratic with the mouse and click to confirm rather than things popping in and out of focus all over the place. That I could probably get used to ignore but I find it distracting and not productive.
That should be pretty much method-independent
More intelligent and skilled people would always help, but I'm quite sure I'd run a project differently if I had an elite team vs a few skilled and many mediocre developers. The greater imbalance in the team, the less you can rely on "the team" working it out and the more you have to introduce structure like XP or test-driven development or waterfallish specs and designs made by the skilled people.
How about keeping a security-patched branch? There can be some middle ground between bringing everything forward and dropping support completely. I mean sooner or later the world has to move on where new features are only on those platforms that support them.
The real problem is that a huge majority of the people want to break the law. Most people aren't making phone calls to plan the next 9/11. Most people aren't buying cooking knifes to stab their neighbors. Most people aren't buying digicams to produce kiddie porn. Nobody sees these things as inherent to phones, knives or digicams and nobody thinks it sane or possible to demand producers and providers make it impossible. But give people the ability to transfer 0s and 1s and somehow you blame the ISPs, even though they're clearly not the problem and couldn't do much about it if they tried.
I guess the title pretty much sums it up, there's now an open source solution for watching videos online and I will most certainly use it. Silverlight or Firefox with flash? Who wants to use closed source software, and Microsoft's EEE plugin or that horrible plugin from Adobe of all things? Not me. At least we're replacing the closed nonfree video with open nonfree video.
Because the demand for a "fake" Xboxlive server just became reality.
Someone will hack one together in short order and post the code out there.
I assume the master server used some kind of secure connection, if so good luck faking its security certificate. Only modded boxes will ever think the fake server is real.
The hosting industry would just go somewhere else, and leave the bill to all the ISPs whose meatbag customers can't emigrate as easily.
The problem is there's no real scenario where they lose. You say "Fuck you", they take whatever evidence they have to court and maybe they win and maybe they don't but the evidence passes enough standards to never be considered a frivolous lawsuit. Didn't you see this case that was just covered on slashdot, fight for 5 years and end in stalemate. Now this is UK law and not US, but I assume it's civil with a standard of "preponderance of evidence", I've heard that this means in practice something like a 60-40 probability. Is it possible their accusations are 60% correct? Quite possible, 40% is a huge error margin. And if so, their evidence really does meet that legal standard, disturbingly enough as it is for the 40% who ends up falsely paying.
It's always hard to find incentives that makes everybody pull in the right direction. For example, it's not that US companies don't want to think long term. But when employees think short term because they want to pass their performance evaluations, middle managers think short term of their quarterly bonus and executives think short term on the stock price and their stock options, then the result is that the company acts like short term is all that matters right up until it collapses in bankruptcy.
The same is true for departments, people only act in the company's best interest if it's better to cooperate than to compete. Unprofitable units and business lines are cut all the times, you're safer as a moneymaker in a tanking company than a mediocre department in a booming company. You can still get axed or outsourced because they need to focus their business or increase their margins but nobody wants to put their head on the chopping block and hope they'll be spared for setting a good example. An indispensable worker is a liability, somehow the same rules don't apply for departments.
Finally, it's not just different business units competing but even competing functions, like say the classic of the salesman who'll happily sell an overpromised and underestimated solution because his bonus depends on sales and not if it's actually a good deal for the company. But in defense of marketing, I've seen equally as bad examples where it seems engineering and QA has only cared about being on schedule and on budget and left the support function to pick up the tab. And even support departments that act more like anti-support departments to minimize support queues and rather kill sales because people are unhappy.
With all due respect to software developers I've found that writing software is easy because you tell the computer and it just does. Granted, it'll crash or hang if you instruct it wrong and has no intelligence of its own, but it's nothing like all the ways people circumvent your intentions and exploit your incentives. Sometimes I wonder if great leadership is just keeping people from doing all the things they shouldn't be doing. Not that by using the word "just" I mean that it's easy, quite the opposite really. I think everyone here knows the output one man can have if he's motivated, challenged and reasonably pushed so he's neither stressed nor slacking. If you could keep ten thousand people in that state you'd be worth every cent of your CEO salary.
People joke about OTP and say it's infeasible, but seriously: how inconvenient is it to carry around a few gigabytes of pad? (...) And yet, if our software could use it, I bet plenty of people really would be carrying around randomized flash cards
Long story short, if it was practical to use a one time pad it'd also be practical to carry around the fingerprint and a SSH client certificate which has been added to the known hosts on the server. Verifying the fingerprint over a secure channel is a lot easier than transferring a OTP, it''s not the carrying it's that you can't send it over the Internet or the whole point would be lost. If you carry the whole OTP on a flash drive, then someone can just steal the whole OTP as easily as they steal the certificate or sniff the password or both. Yes, I know someone will cite the Debian OpenSSL exploit now but looking at it a different way, it was the local software that was exploitable. If you can get a security hole into the OTP software, it'll do you no good no matter how good the encryption was supposed to be. The only effective one time "pads" I've known are those where you get the code externally from a key calculator, a key card or over your cell phone which is assumed to be a secure channel. In short, OTP is fixing all the things that aren't a problem in the first place.