The API differences on Windows are mostly handled by Cygwin and mingw.
Or by Interix.
Interix is the best sign so far that Open Source has won. Microsoft is shipping, for free, a UNIX subsystem based on Open Source software... including GCC... that provides an environment closer to standard UNIX than any UNIX emulation under Win32 can. Because it IS a subsystem.
Let's repeat that. Microsoft is shipping a package specifically to let people run Open Source software better under Windows. Microsoft is shipping the "evil", "viral" GCC.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Ghandi
Open Source has won, people. Oh, you never win "for good", you can't stop just because you won, but... damn.
So you talk to someone about 'x' FOSS app and you get "So what if you run 'x'? I run 'x' too on windows. Can you run my proprietary 'y' on linux?".
That's a perfectly good argument. And one you're not going to counter by declaring that "we" (whoever "we" is) should quit supporting Windows. Because the argument that supporting "minor platforms" is a waste cuts both ways.
That's also the argument that I've been given for using Linux rather than BSD, because there's more proprietary software available for Linux than BSD. And for that matter, using Red Hat rather than Gentoo or Debian, because Red Hat supported the proprietary software, or the proprietary software vendor only supported Red Hat.
You can't have it both ways. If the added value of Red Hat is that it does a better job of supporting proprietary software, and supporting proprietary software is hurting FOSS, then Red Hat is hurting FOSS software by being an easy monoculture target for proprietary software.
Meanwhile, I'll keep using my minority-platform BSD based minority-platform Mac with its minority-platform PPC processor that's got more free software than Windows and more commercial software than Linux.
I mean, really, every time I've installed a new Linux box where it's mattered what version of Linux it is, it's HAD TO BE Red Hat. Not just that, it's HAD TO BE some particular version of Red Hat. And every version of Red Hat (or Fedora Core, or whatever it is these days now that Red Hat itself isn't free software any more) has required a new learning experience. Sometimes the installer hasn't worked because I was using "minority" hardware like Adaptec SCSI controllers and Red Hat only used Buslogic internally. Most recently, I have had to hover over a RHES install so I can whack the "reset to factory defaults" and "recalibrate" button on the flat panel displays we've been using in our equipment racks because their GUI installer starts up in some nice high-quality display mode that these LCDs don't *quite* support... so until I get to X11 configuration and reset to 1024x768x60 Hz every time they restart X11 the display freaks out.
I mean, OK, 85 Hz looks better, and having the installer load drivers from the CD lets you make the installer kernel a little smaller, and RPM... no, don't get me started on all the different extensions to RPM and the contrast between the BSD ports system and the RPM scavenger hunt.
It sure would be convenient for Red Hat if open source software people stopped supporting minority hardware (though there are more people running UNIX on Power PC desktops than any of the myriad x86 almost-compatible ones), minority operating systems (though this is the first time I've seen Windows described as a minority), and next I'm sure it'll be nice if they quit bothering about minority open source platforms like BSD and Darwin (even though there are more people running THOSE now), or minority versions of Linux like Gentoo and Slackware... and, hey, who needs Suse and Debian...
And then this:
Companies like Sun and HP have for far too long survived without providing a decent compiler in the default configuration since there was always gcc.
I don't get this at all. GCC is not a bad compiler, but it's not great. It produces good code these days on x86, but native compilers produce better code on most platforms. That's why I've only ever installed GCC on Tru64 when I've had to for some particular program. And I've never had any difficulty writing code that ports between C compilers... I've got code that I wrote on the PDP-11 in the early '80s that compiles and runs on just about anything today.
But then I don't use incompatible non-C extensions that were added to GCC and act as a Microsoftian "barrier to entry" to other compilers, like "a = b ?: c;". Oh, it's a perfectly logical extension to C, but only GCC accepts it.
This article... change a few words around, and I can imagine it sitting on "Monoculture Central" -- Microsoft.COM. It's the same argument that commercial software developers have used for years to explain why they don't support Linux. Now a few of them are supporting Linux, but only Red Hat. If I want to support a software monoculture with a good UNIX environment, I sure wouldn't pick Red Hat as my monoculture of choice, not when both Apple and Microsoft give me one for free on their proprietary but well supported platforms.
The problem is that those pesky rays can go anywhere once they hit a surface, including directions that you didn't intend for them to go in.
Well, yeh, that's the point. That's one reason raytracing looks better. Another way of putting it is that a photorealistic rendering of a screen really does require more data than a bunch of ad-hoc piecemeal techniques. At least when you have reflective surfaces like faceplates, water, mystical auras, and the like.
That extra detail is part of what I'm looking for. Yeh, I know there's more data involved. It's moving more of the work from the CPU to the GPU. But, geeze, those GPUs have more RAM than any entry-level PC that was manipulating a complete scene map and trimming it for feeding to a GPU in 2000.
Antialiasing a raytraced image should be easier in some ways than supersampling, because you don't need to trace 4x (or even 16x) the rays. At least if my understanding of the normal way you do antialiasing in a raytracer: you only need to trace the center and corners, and the corners are shared with adjacent pixels.
As for the data formats, what about Renderman?
Last time I checked, a license for the upcoming Unreal Engine 3 cost between 700K and 1 million dollars. Quake 3 was 1 million, without support. HL2 is in the same ballpark.
Jesus.
Well, I guess everything Valve and the rest said about their game being technology demonstrators for an engine they want to be widely used in the industry can be taken with a grain of salt. If they really wanted people to use them, and if they were really confident they were worth that kind of money, then they'd come up with some kind of royalty arrangement instead of a flat fee.
Yes, definitely. I've been waiting for a graphics card that does real-time photorealistic graphics since the first time I played with Sculpt-3d on the Amiga. Raytracing is one of those embarassingly-parallelizable problems that should be hardcoded into the graphics engine, with each 16x16 patch of the screen having its own just-fast-enough GPU to render its 256 pixels over and over again. HL2 promised photorealistic graphics and water with ripples that actually produced optically correct distortions. Not quite, but we're close, and that's why the other big thing is...
Physics.
HL2 promised you could actually hit stuff and it'd break and break realistically. Your character would move realistically, so you wouldn't have the "Damn it, I can see a way through, why can't I get there? Oh yes, the game engine doesn't know there's a gap at the edge of that crate..." problem. Not quite, but better. And you can actually do things like hit a monster with a swinging weight instead of just shooting it... but only where that's been set up.
But did I buy HL2 for me? No, I bought it for my kid for his birthday. I wouldn't have bought it for myself... because he wanted it and I thought it'd be interesting to look at... but I knew that it wouldn't be a good game for me, even if it was a more realistic one. Give me an interesting game, I'll buy it for myself. But the interesting games don't tend to use the good game engines. I don't know why you can't use a good game engine to build something that isn't a "twitch" FPS. Does the API suck? Is the graphics and physics tied into a genre level editor? What's the problem?
I did buy Katamari Damarci. And it's the only recent videogame I've played by myself, instead of playing it with my kids for half an hour until I got tired of being blown away by the twitch reflexes of the young.
I figured that out 20 years ago, when the Amiga was the hottest game machine out.
On the other hand, players DO want to feel that there's a good reason that a computer character is hard to beat. In a racing game, don't have the bad guy suddenly speed up at the end and pass me... if the monsters just charge at me and I mow 'em down, let them duck and dodge a little... but then DON'T throw a million monsters at me at once as if I could just shoot blindly and get them all.
Also, don't do the AI by letting the monsters know more than the player. That's "meatball AI", and it feels like cheating.
Also...
when another human repeatedly kicks your ass, it's a challenge. When the machine does, it's simply frustrating.
When I play games, the game repeatedly kicks my ass for quite a long time before I "get it". This is one reason I don't play games much any more, because I don't have the reflexes and patience to learn "right, right, left, dive, wait 3, pop up and shoot". I don't care if I'm getting my ass kicked by real AI, "meatball" AI, or unfairly overpowered dumb monsters.
If the monsters had just a bit of AI, so you had to figure out how to trick them, maybe you could come up with a game that would keep an older guy interested by making it hard without making it depend on 20 year old reflexes.
Where do you think they host all those porn images in your spams?
All over the place: it's a lot easier to get space to store images than it is to get space to run mailservers. Plus, there's nothing the guy running the BBS can do about where the images come from, but they CAN ban mailservers from registering.
And less users, because a lot of people, me included, will not bother to register.
Well, sure, that's yet another example of the secondary damage from spamming.
And you can have far better protection with captchas
That still turns some people off, compared to registration. You can't win.
Even if it's optional, many people are stll going to find themselves in a REALLY tough identity theft situation due to the fact that you can't change your fingerprints as easily as a credit card.
I don't think it's OK to have a system that's going to hurt a lot of people just because I'm aware of the problems and can avoid using it.
Because spammers have no idea how to register a free email account, and definitely don't have access to large numbers of servers of their own on which they could run any number of mail daemons.
The free mail account people had been abused by spammers for dropboxes for years before this universal registration stuff started. They already watch for suspicious numbers of accounts from the same sources, and blacklist 'em.
And if they use their own servers they're telling the people they're spamming where their own servers are.
And... it does work. There's less spam on boards where you have to register.
You really think spammers can't do just that?
I've got several THOUSAND email addresses I've already used and thrown away on my server, but I can do that because I'm not using it to support spamming, so having a bunch of dropbox accounts on it doesn't get it added to blocklists.
So, no, there's some things spammers can't do as effectively, and this is one of them.
And yet it was Johnson who went into Vietnam and it took Nixon to go to China.
More recently, it wasn't a Republican administration that went into the Balkans.
The facts are actually a hell of a lot more complicated than any "Republicans are this, Democrats are that" analysis, as the results of Bush's and Clinton's international adventurism demonstrates.
And please don't interpret any of this as approval of any recent US president or administration, of either party. Neither party is in any position to take the moral high ground.
Two reasons. One, it provides a good secure mechanism for password recovery. Two, it makes it harder for spammers to autoregister without leaving a trail.
But my idea would help another problem that was brought up.
I don't see that it helps anyone.
The "secret question" technique is pointless online, whether you have one, two, four, or a thousand questions. The only point to it in the real world is that there's no unique token they can exchange with the person calling to "prove" who they are. Mailing a unique token to the requestor's email address is more than enough security for all the sites I know of that use this technique, they don't need a "secret question" in addition.
if someone can't remember the secret answers to their secret questions four months after the fact...
If someone can't remember their password four months after the fact, what makes you think they're going to remember what they answered their "secret questions"?
I hope you're not actually suggesting people answer these questions honestly, are you? That just turns them into the same kind of "unchangable passwords" as biometrics (see my previous message). These kinds of things REALLY DO need to be restricted to the few very high-security situations where they're appropriate.
I'm not sure how real a threat it is -- Even though someone may "know" my email address, they won't have access to my email?
Read the original article.
The idea is that people are using this technique to target spam and phishing techniques based on where the email addresses in their databases are pointing to. Whether or not you personally care about YOUR address being "surgically targeted", the bigger problem is the effect on the net when a large number of people are targeted like this.
1. Spam becomes more effective, and thus more attractive. This doesn't mean you'll get "less spam, because you'll only get spam targeted for you", it means when they get to your address they'll pick a message they think you're more likely to respond to. You of course won't respond, but since a higher number of other people will the spammer will have more incentive to keep spamming that list... and you're on it.
2. Phishing becomes more effective. More people will be tricked out of their passwords and credit card info, credit card fraud increases and becomes more effective, we all pay for that.
Like spam itself, there is nothing you can do in terms of "being smart" or improving your filtering that will help to decrease the overall trend. What will help is to deny spammers information they need to spam people... efficiently or at all... and that's something the companies using email addresses as identifiers can do something about. Simply by NOT doing that.
I meant all four secret questions need to have all of them answered correctly to go on.
1. The phisher doesn't need to answer any of them. As soon as they get the questions they know the email address is valid.
2. If someone's trying to recover their password, how the hell do you think they're going to remember what they answered four questions months or years ago? "First grade English teacher? Wasn't that Atkins? Or did I say Rhonda Atkins? Oh, to hell with is..."
Maybe this security issue could be solved by instead of sticking up a message saying "email not found" if the email is entered incorrectly, it could randomly generate the "secret questions".
I've got a better idea. Don't require the user to give you their email address EXCEPT for initial registration. Don't use their email address as their ID. Don't ask for email address for password reset*. Just take the user ID, send the message, and have done with it.
This is a case where there's really no good and easy way to fix the security problem except by backing up and not doing the thing that causes the problem. This is like someone's saying "I want to leave my front door open while I'm not at home, so my cat can get in and out." and then coming up with "Well, you can set up a webcam to close the door when something bigger than a car comes up" instead of "Don't DO that, use a cat-flap".
---- * Why sites do that, I don't know... there's no extra security from having a login name AND and email address typed in by the user, since the verification mail won't go to anyone but the real user... all it does for me is make me generate a new account 'cos I don't know what email address I used to sign up with because of exactly this kind of problem.
Here's another one, and it ties into the original posting: it's the same problem as using biometrics for identification: using an ID or password that's hard to change. You don't want to use that kind of ID casually, because you want to make sure that people who have your ID have an incentive to be at least as careful with it as you would be.
If you use your thumbprint to pay for a drink at a bar, how good a job do you think the bar is going to do about making sure someone else doesn't game their sensor with a bit of latex on their fingertip? If someone steals your credit card, you can cancel it and get a new credit card. If someone steals your thumbprint you're hosed.
This is the same kind of thing. If someone finds out that there's someone with the handle "fishdan" on slashdot, they don't have anything useful. If they have your email address, they have something useful that's hard to change (look at me, I'm using year-tagged email addresses and I'm thinking of going to month tags). Plus, if you DO change your email address you have to change it EVERYWHERE (which is why I've got spam filters that reject entire countries for my main email address... because I've had it for about as long as personal domains have been available and I'm really loath to dump it).
And because of all this, what this means is that all email addresses have to be treated as disposable, even the supposedly private ones you use for account registration only. Which means that now your email address has the same problem as any other name: you have to remember a bunch of them, you have to remember where you used them, and if you only keep 'em long enough for the verification you can't relogin with the old address.
I'm not in "the Linux world", and I've in the past even recommended Windows over any of the competition when it's been the best choice. So...
They can't see that Windows is easier to install, configure, use, and support than any Unix variant for the average person and try to make Linux as easy.
When you say this are you being a wise person defending a smart idea or a smart person defending a dumb idea? Remember, Mac OS X is a Unix variant too.
Microsoft is smart and sexy because they will after a while admit, say "we screwed up", and shrug and move on.
Oh, lord, I wish that was so. They've abandoned some of their best ideas, like the really clean and consistent keyboard/mouse integration they started with, and held onto dumb ideas like the IE/Desktop integration even when they were faced with the possible dismantling of the company as a result. About the only case can think of where Microsoft completely backed down on a really dumb idea was when they quit trying to make Windows work using cooperative multitasking.
... until they're demonstrated dumb/wrong. I think the problem the original essay is addressing is what happens then...
Though that's an interesting insight, and a useful corollary. The other useful corrolory is that sometimes the smart person defending the dumb idea is right. You touched on that, I think, but didn't make it explicit.
I am almost every day, whether I've a reason to Windows myself that day or not, forced to deal with the seeping miasma of sheer banal incompetence that permiates the Windows-using world. There's just so much sheer stupid design that's baked into the genes of Windows that I can't imagine ANYTHING that Microsoft might credibly do that would improve things.
I don't care WHAT people use instead of Windows. I don't care if it's Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, BeOS, Linux, QNX, VMS, or AmigaDOS. Just so long as it's not Windows.
Isn't close to 100% of the gripes you listed for XP really with your IT departments policy, and could be exactly the same where they running Mac?
Theoretically, yes, I suppose so. But IT Trolls don't tend to go for Macs. They don't have all the "Paternal Control" tools Microsoft provides, so they're too hard to cripple. There were a couple of Macs among the pallet-worth I restored a couple of years ago that had been set up by "trolls", but even those were less screwed up than "standard environment" PCs are wont to be.
You know, as someone who owns and uses both a Mac and a PC (thereby insuring my lack of bias), I have been saying for a while that the difference between using the two is only slightly more acute than the difference between Coke and Pepsi.
As someone who owns and uses and writes code for and maintains other people's code for and has released free software for and supports users on both Mac and Windows, I have good reason for my bias against Windows.
Despite that bias, for most of the '90s I really couldn't in all honesty recommend a Mac against a Windows box for anyone but the computerphobic: Macs were great for them, not because they were simpler to use but because they were simple to understand and because "common sense" actions actually tended to work.
But the OS was horribly kludgy and unstable if you needed more than something to run one program at a time. Multitasking on the Mac was a matter of being able to pause your use of one program, switch reasonably quickly to another, and use IT for a while.
And while Windows needed a lot of stupid maintainance (you STILL need to manually defragment the file system? I honestly find that hard to believe, but I'm assured it's so) as long as you didn't download and open untrusted files you were pretty much OK.
And there's some design decisions that Microsoft made in Windows that really were very good. The original key bindings and controls were well designed, and it was easy to work primarily with the keyboard, primarily with the mouse, or using both in concert. They did this much better than anyone else has ever done. Unfortunately since Windows 95 they've systematically undermined this, and even if they hadn't it wouldn't make up for the rest of the things Microsoft has done to Windows over the years.
Which brings me to the two things that changed my mind about recommending Windows.
First, Internet Explorer and desktop integration changes the virus threat on Windows from "if you don't do stupid stuff, you should be OK" to "if you want to be OK, you have to commit to abandoning Microsoft's browser and mail software, and sticking to it"... and for most Windows users, particularly when they hit web pages they couldn't use in Netscape, that was too much to commit to. It still is for over 90% of Windows users... even the ten or twenty percent who use Firefox don't use it exclusively or even primarily.
Second, Mac OS X meant that instead of having one of the worst operating systems under the hood, it had one of the best.
Now, I'd managed to get a few people to try FreeBSD or Linux, I used to hand out copies of the FreeBSD install disk as business cards, and I've done the same with Linux and BSD liveCDs. But it wasn't the same kind of experience for them, and they ended up back on Windows. Even I ended up using Windows as my desktop with UNIX apps running through a local X server from another computer.
But Mac OS X gives you not just the same kind of experience as Windows, with lots of good commercial software and a well integrated UI that most programs follow... it does all that BETTER than Windows does it. And, with a few exceptions, it's avoided the big "virus magnet" design flaws in Windows.
"let's get something straight. I don't love my computers. They are machines that help me work, that's all."
And THAT is the best reason of all for choosing OS X over Windows, when you have a choice, when you have to choose.
When I recommend a Mac to someone I know, I want their computer to be something that's just there, that just works. I don't want it to be a burden to them, and (and this is a selfish reason, yes, but it's an unbiased one) I don't want to have to return again and again to help them out of a jam.
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The API differences on Windows are mostly handled by Cygwin and mingw.
Or by Interix.
Interix is the best sign so far that Open Source has won. Microsoft is shipping, for free, a UNIX subsystem based on Open Source software... including GCC... that provides an environment closer to standard UNIX than any UNIX emulation under Win32 can. Because it IS a subsystem.
Let's repeat that. Microsoft is shipping a package specifically to let people run Open Source software better under Windows. Microsoft is shipping the "evil", "viral" GCC.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Ghandi
Open Source has won, people. Oh, you never win "for good", you can't stop just because you won, but... damn.
So you talk to someone about 'x' FOSS app and you get "So what if you run 'x'? I run 'x' too on windows. Can you run my proprietary 'y' on linux?".
That's a perfectly good argument. And one you're not going to counter by declaring that "we" (whoever "we" is) should quit supporting Windows. Because the argument that supporting "minor platforms" is a waste cuts both ways.
That's also the argument that I've been given for using Linux rather than BSD, because there's more proprietary software available for Linux than BSD. And for that matter, using Red Hat rather than Gentoo or Debian, because Red Hat supported the proprietary software, or the proprietary software vendor only supported Red Hat.
You can't have it both ways. If the added value of Red Hat is that it does a better job of supporting proprietary software, and supporting proprietary software is hurting FOSS, then Red Hat is hurting FOSS software by being an easy monoculture target for proprietary software.
Meanwhile, I'll keep using my minority-platform BSD based minority-platform Mac with its minority-platform PPC processor that's got more free software than Windows and more commercial software than Linux.
I mean, really, every time I've installed a new Linux box where it's mattered what version of Linux it is, it's HAD TO BE Red Hat. Not just that, it's HAD TO BE some particular version of Red Hat. And every version of Red Hat (or Fedora Core, or whatever it is these days now that Red Hat itself isn't free software any more) has required a new learning experience. Sometimes the installer hasn't worked because I was using "minority" hardware like Adaptec SCSI controllers and Red Hat only used Buslogic internally. Most recently, I have had to hover over a RHES install so I can whack the "reset to factory defaults" and "recalibrate" button on the flat panel displays we've been using in our equipment racks because their GUI installer starts up in some nice high-quality display mode that these LCDs don't *quite* support... so until I get to X11 configuration and reset to 1024x768x60 Hz every time they restart X11 the display freaks out.
I mean, OK, 85 Hz looks better, and having the installer load drivers from the CD lets you make the installer kernel a little smaller, and RPM... no, don't get me started on all the different extensions to RPM and the contrast between the BSD ports system and the RPM scavenger hunt.
It sure would be convenient for Red Hat if open source software people stopped supporting minority hardware (though there are more people running UNIX on Power PC desktops than any of the myriad x86 almost-compatible ones), minority operating systems (though this is the first time I've seen Windows described as a minority), and next I'm sure it'll be nice if they quit bothering about minority open source platforms like BSD and Darwin (even though there are more people running THOSE now), or minority versions of Linux like Gentoo and Slackware... and, hey, who needs Suse and Debian...
And then this:
Companies like Sun and HP have for far too long survived without providing a decent compiler in the default configuration since there was always gcc.
I don't get this at all. GCC is not a bad compiler, but it's not great. It produces good code these days on x86, but native compilers produce better code on most platforms. That's why I've only ever installed GCC on Tru64 when I've had to for some particular program. And I've never had any difficulty writing code that ports between C compilers... I've got code that I wrote on the PDP-11 in the early '80s that compiles and runs on just about anything today.
But then I don't use incompatible non-C extensions that were added to GCC and act as a Microsoftian "barrier to entry" to other compilers, like "a = b ?: c;". Oh, it's a perfectly logical extension to C, but only GCC accepts it.
This article... change a few words around, and I can imagine it sitting on "Monoculture Central" -- Microsoft.COM. It's the same argument that commercial software developers have used for years to explain why they don't support Linux. Now a few of them are supporting Linux, but only Red Hat. If I want to support a software monoculture with a good UNIX environment, I sure wouldn't pick Red Hat as my monoculture of choice, not when both Apple and Microsoft give me one for free on their proprietary but well supported platforms.
The problem is that those pesky rays can go anywhere once they hit a surface, including directions that you didn't intend for them to go in.
Well, yeh, that's the point. That's one reason raytracing looks better. Another way of putting it is that a photorealistic rendering of a screen really does require more data than a bunch of ad-hoc piecemeal techniques. At least when you have reflective surfaces like faceplates, water, mystical auras, and the like.
That extra detail is part of what I'm looking for. Yeh, I know there's more data involved. It's moving more of the work from the CPU to the GPU. But, geeze, those GPUs have more RAM than any entry-level PC that was manipulating a complete scene map and trimming it for feeding to a GPU in 2000.
Antialiasing a raytraced image should be easier in some ways than supersampling, because you don't need to trace 4x (or even 16x) the rays. At least if my understanding of the normal way you do antialiasing in a raytracer: you only need to trace the center and corners, and the corners are shared with adjacent pixels.
As for the data formats, what about Renderman?
Last time I checked, a license for the upcoming Unreal Engine 3 cost between 700K and 1 million dollars. Quake 3 was 1 million, without support. HL2 is in the same ballpark.
Jesus.
Well, I guess everything Valve and the rest said about their game being technology demonstrators for an engine they want to be widely used in the industry can be taken with a grain of salt. If they really wanted people to use them, and if they were really confident they were worth that kind of money, then they'd come up with some kind of royalty arrangement instead of a flat fee.
Graphics.
Yes, definitely. I've been waiting for a graphics card that does real-time photorealistic graphics since the first time I played with Sculpt-3d on the Amiga. Raytracing is one of those embarassingly-parallelizable problems that should be hardcoded into the graphics engine, with each 16x16 patch of the screen having its own just-fast-enough GPU to render its 256 pixels over and over again. HL2 promised photorealistic graphics and water with ripples that actually produced optically correct distortions. Not quite, but we're close, and that's why the other big thing is...
Physics.
HL2 promised you could actually hit stuff and it'd break and break realistically. Your character would move realistically, so you wouldn't have the "Damn it, I can see a way through, why can't I get there? Oh yes, the game engine doesn't know there's a gap at the edge of that crate..." problem. Not quite, but better. And you can actually do things like hit a monster with a swinging weight instead of just shooting it... but only where that's been set up.
But did I buy HL2 for me? No, I bought it for my kid for his birthday. I wouldn't have bought it for myself... because he wanted it and I thought it'd be interesting to look at... but I knew that it wouldn't be a good game for me, even if it was a more realistic one. Give me an interesting game, I'll buy it for myself. But the interesting games don't tend to use the good game engines. I don't know why you can't use a good game engine to build something that isn't a "twitch" FPS. Does the API suck? Is the graphics and physics tied into a genre level editor? What's the problem?
I did buy Katamari Damarci. And it's the only recent videogame I've played by myself, instead of playing it with my kids for half an hour until I got tired of being blown away by the twitch reflexes of the young.
I figured that out 20 years ago, when the Amiga was the hottest game machine out.
On the other hand, players DO want to feel that there's a good reason that a computer character is hard to beat. In a racing game, don't have the bad guy suddenly speed up at the end and pass me... if the monsters just charge at me and I mow 'em down, let them duck and dodge a little... but then DON'T throw a million monsters at me at once as if I could just shoot blindly and get them all.
Also, don't do the AI by letting the monsters know more than the player. That's "meatball AI", and it feels like cheating.
Also...
when another human repeatedly kicks your ass, it's a challenge. When the machine does, it's simply frustrating.
When I play games, the game repeatedly kicks my ass for quite a long time before I "get it". This is one reason I don't play games much any more, because I don't have the reflexes and patience to learn "right, right, left, dive, wait 3, pop up and shoot". I don't care if I'm getting my ass kicked by real AI, "meatball" AI, or unfairly overpowered dumb monsters.
If the monsters had just a bit of AI, so you had to figure out how to trick them, maybe you could come up with a game that would keep an older guy interested by making it hard without making it depend on 20 year old reflexes.
Where do you think they host all those porn images in your spams?
All over the place: it's a lot easier to get space to store images than it is to get space to run mailservers. Plus, there's nothing the guy running the BBS can do about where the images come from, but they CAN ban mailservers from registering.
And less users, because a lot of people, me included, will not bother to register.
Well, sure, that's yet another example of the secondary damage from spamming.
And you can have far better protection with captchas
That still turns some people off, compared to registration. You can't win.
Even if it's optional, many people are stll going to find themselves in a REALLY tough identity theft situation due to the fact that you can't change your fingerprints as easily as a credit card.
I don't think it's OK to have a system that's going to hurt a lot of people just because I'm aware of the problems and can avoid using it.
Because spammers have no idea how to register a free email account, and definitely don't have access to large numbers of servers of their own on which they could run any number of mail daemons.
The free mail account people had been abused by spammers for dropboxes for years before this universal registration stuff started. They already watch for suspicious numbers of accounts from the same sources, and blacklist 'em.
And if they use their own servers they're telling the people they're spamming where their own servers are.
And... it does work. There's less spam on boards where you have to register.
You really think spammers can't do just that?
I've got several THOUSAND email addresses I've already used and thrown away on my server, but I can do that because I'm not using it to support spamming, so having a bunch of dropbox accounts on it doesn't get it added to blocklists.
So, no, there's some things spammers can't do as effectively, and this is one of them.
And yet it was Johnson who went into Vietnam and it took Nixon to go to China.
More recently, it wasn't a Republican administration that went into the Balkans.
The facts are actually a hell of a lot more complicated than any "Republicans are this, Democrats are that" analysis, as the results of Bush's and Clinton's international adventurism demonstrates.
And please don't interpret any of this as approval of any recent US president or administration, of either party. Neither party is in any position to take the moral high ground.
I voted for Bush because I trust the Republican party with national security more then the "other" party.
On what basis?
By the same logic, if there might be musicians funding terrorists then stronger copyright protection might help terrorists.
Why would you need (an email address) even then?
Two reasons. One, it provides a good secure mechanism for password recovery. Two, it makes it harder for spammers to autoregister without leaving a trail.
Why do you need registration at all?
To reduce comment spam, mostly.
But my idea would help another problem that was brought up.
I don't see that it helps anyone.
The "secret question" technique is pointless online, whether you have one, two, four, or a thousand questions. The only point to it in the real world is that there's no unique token they can exchange with the person calling to "prove" who they are. Mailing a unique token to the requestor's email address is more than enough security for all the sites I know of that use this technique, they don't need a "secret question" in addition.
if someone can't remember the secret answers to their secret questions four months after the fact...
If someone can't remember their password four months after the fact, what makes you think they're going to remember what they answered their "secret questions"?
I hope you're not actually suggesting people answer these questions honestly, are you? That just turns them into the same kind of "unchangable passwords" as biometrics (see my previous message). These kinds of things REALLY DO need to be restricted to the few very high-security situations where they're appropriate.
I'm not sure how real a threat it is -- Even though someone may "know" my email address, they won't have access to my email?
Read the original article.
The idea is that people are using this technique to target spam and phishing techniques based on where the email addresses in their databases are pointing to. Whether or not you personally care about YOUR address being "surgically targeted", the bigger problem is the effect on the net when a large number of people are targeted like this.
1. Spam becomes more effective, and thus more attractive. This doesn't mean you'll get "less spam, because you'll only get spam targeted for you", it means when they get to your address they'll pick a message they think you're more likely to respond to. You of course won't respond, but since a higher number of other people will the spammer will have more incentive to keep spamming that list... and you're on it.
2. Phishing becomes more effective. More people will be tricked out of their passwords and credit card info, credit card fraud increases and becomes more effective, we all pay for that.
Like spam itself, there is nothing you can do in terms of "being smart" or improving your filtering that will help to decrease the overall trend. What will help is to deny spammers information they need to spam people... efficiently or at all... and that's something the companies using email addresses as identifiers can do something about. Simply by NOT doing that.
I meant all four secret questions need to have all of them answered correctly to go on.
1. The phisher doesn't need to answer any of them. As soon as they get the questions they know the email address is valid.
2. If someone's trying to recover their password, how the hell do you think they're going to remember what they answered four questions months or years ago? "First grade English teacher? Wasn't that Atkins? Or did I say Rhonda Atkins? Oh, to hell with is..."
What they need to do is require four secret questions, all needing to be answered correctly to go on.
As soon as they get the FIRST question they have the information they need, that this is a valid email address.
If you don't put the email address in in the first place, then you don't need any secret questions at all.
Maybe this security issue could be solved by instead of sticking up a message saying "email not found" if the email is entered incorrectly, it could randomly generate the "secret questions".
I've got a better idea. Don't require the user to give you their email address EXCEPT for initial registration. Don't use their email address as their ID. Don't ask for email address for password reset*. Just take the user ID, send the message, and have done with it.
This is a case where there's really no good and easy way to fix the security problem except by backing up and not doing the thing that causes the problem. This is like someone's saying "I want to leave my front door open while I'm not at home, so my cat can get in and out." and then coming up with "Well, you can set up a webcam to close the door when something bigger than a car comes up" instead of "Don't DO that, use a cat-flap".
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* Why sites do that, I don't know... there's no extra security from having a login name AND and email address typed in by the user, since the verification mail won't go to anyone but the real user... all it does for me is make me generate a new account 'cos I don't know what email address I used to sign up with because of exactly this kind of problem.
cons for using email as login
Here's another one, and it ties into the original posting: it's the same problem as using biometrics for identification: using an ID or password that's hard to change. You don't want to use that kind of ID casually, because you want to make sure that people who have your ID have an incentive to be at least as careful with it as you would be.
If you use your thumbprint to pay for a drink at a bar, how good a job do you think the bar is going to do about making sure someone else doesn't game their sensor with a bit of latex on their fingertip? If someone steals your credit card, you can cancel it and get a new credit card. If someone steals your thumbprint you're hosed.
This is the same kind of thing. If someone finds out that there's someone with the handle "fishdan" on slashdot, they don't have anything useful. If they have your email address, they have something useful that's hard to change (look at me, I'm using year-tagged email addresses and I'm thinking of going to month tags). Plus, if you DO change your email address you have to change it EVERYWHERE (which is why I've got spam filters that reject entire countries for my main email address... because I've had it for about as long as personal domains have been available and I'm really loath to dump it).
And because of all this, what this means is that all email addresses have to be treated as disposable, even the supposedly private ones you use for account registration only. Which means that now your email address has the same problem as any other name: you have to remember a bunch of them, you have to remember where you used them, and if you only keep 'em long enough for the verification you can't relogin with the old address.
You would think smart people would be running the USA
I think the last time that happened was in the Carter administration.
I'm not in "the Linux world", and I've in the past even recommended Windows over any of the competition when it's been the best choice. So...
They can't see that Windows is easier to install, configure, use, and support than any Unix variant for the average person and try to make Linux as easy.
When you say this are you being a wise person defending a smart idea or a smart person defending a dumb idea? Remember, Mac OS X is a Unix variant too.
Microsoft is smart and sexy because they will after a while admit, say "we screwed up", and shrug and move on.
Oh, lord, I wish that was so. They've abandoned some of their best ideas, like the really clean and consistent keyboard/mouse integration they started with, and held onto dumb ideas like the IE/Desktop integration even when they were faced with the possible dismantling of the company as a result. About the only case can think of where Microsoft completely backed down on a really dumb idea was when they quit trying to make Windows work using cooperative multitasking.
Though that's an interesting insight, and a useful corollary. The other useful corrolory is that sometimes the smart person defending the dumb idea is right. You touched on that, I think, but didn't make it explicit.
I am almost every day, whether I've a reason to Windows myself that day or not, forced to deal with the seeping miasma of sheer banal incompetence that permiates the Windows-using world. There's just so much sheer stupid design that's baked into the genes of Windows that I can't imagine ANYTHING that Microsoft might credibly do that would improve things.
I don't care WHAT people use instead of Windows. I don't care if it's Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, BeOS, Linux, QNX, VMS, or AmigaDOS. Just so long as it's not Windows.
Isn't close to 100% of the gripes you listed for XP really with your IT departments policy, and could be exactly the same where they running Mac?
Theoretically, yes, I suppose so. But IT Trolls don't tend to go for Macs. They don't have all the "Paternal Control" tools Microsoft provides, so they're too hard to cripple. There were a couple of Macs among the pallet-worth I restored a couple of years ago that had been set up by "trolls", but even those were less screwed up than "standard environment" PCs are wont to be.
You know, as someone who owns and uses both a Mac and a PC (thereby insuring my lack of bias), I have been saying for a while that the difference between using the two is only slightly more acute than the difference between Coke and Pepsi.
As someone who owns and uses and writes code for and maintains other people's code for and has released free software for and supports users on both Mac and Windows, I have good reason for my bias against Windows.
Despite that bias, for most of the '90s I really couldn't in all honesty recommend a Mac against a Windows box for anyone but the computerphobic: Macs were great for them, not because they were simpler to use but because they were simple to understand and because "common sense" actions actually tended to work.
But the OS was horribly kludgy and unstable if you needed more than something to run one program at a time. Multitasking on the Mac was a matter of being able to pause your use of one program, switch reasonably quickly to another, and use IT for a while.
And while Windows needed a lot of stupid maintainance (you STILL need to manually defragment the file system? I honestly find that hard to believe, but I'm assured it's so) as long as you didn't download and open untrusted files you were pretty much OK.
And there's some design decisions that Microsoft made in Windows that really were very good. The original key bindings and controls were well designed, and it was easy to work primarily with the keyboard, primarily with the mouse, or using both in concert. They did this much better than anyone else has ever done. Unfortunately since Windows 95 they've systematically undermined this, and even if they hadn't it wouldn't make up for the rest of the things Microsoft has done to Windows over the years.
Which brings me to the two things that changed my mind about recommending Windows.
First, Internet Explorer and desktop integration changes the virus threat on Windows from "if you don't do stupid stuff, you should be OK" to "if you want to be OK, you have to commit to abandoning Microsoft's browser and mail software, and sticking to it"... and for most Windows users, particularly when they hit web pages they couldn't use in Netscape, that was too much to commit to. It still is for over 90% of Windows users... even the ten or twenty percent who use Firefox don't use it exclusively or even primarily.
Second, Mac OS X meant that instead of having one of the worst operating systems under the hood, it had one of the best.
Now, I'd managed to get a few people to try FreeBSD or Linux, I used to hand out copies of the FreeBSD install disk as business cards, and I've done the same with Linux and BSD liveCDs. But it wasn't the same kind of experience for them, and they ended up back on Windows. Even I ended up using Windows as my desktop with UNIX apps running through a local X server from another computer.
But Mac OS X gives you not just the same kind of experience as Windows, with lots of good commercial software and a well integrated UI that most programs follow... it does all that BETTER than Windows does it. And, with a few exceptions, it's avoided the big "virus magnet" design flaws in Windows.
"let's get something straight. I don't love my computers. They are machines that help me work, that's all."
And THAT is the best reason of all for choosing OS X over Windows, when you have a choice, when you have to choose.
When I recommend a Mac to someone I know, I want their computer to be something that's just there, that just works. I don't want it to be a burden to them, and (and this is a selfish reason, yes, but it's an unbiased one) I don't want to have to return again and again to help them out of a jam.