Microsoft innovated a hell of a lot with Visual Basic,.NET, and C#... There are language features that Microsoft has innovated... I'm just saying that Microsoft has come up with some game changing innovations, and and the very least, decent honest techies should acknowledge that Visual Basic was one of them.
OK, I'm curious, name ten of these "innovations". Make SURE that they were actually original ideas, not just implementations of pre-existing ideas.
"My 9 month old will work himself into a huge fit when he first wakes up if we don't get him."
9 months!? Way to spoil the kid. At what point do you expect him to magically learn that you're not going to always come running to meet his every demand... he owns you.
I "gave the ribbon a chance" - I used it for over a year - and still hated it. I slowly grew to hate it more and more and more. It drove me to use OpenOffice more and more.
So yeah, YMMV applies - don't assume that because you like it, it means it's better. Or that because snobbery exists, that any criticism is snobbery.
I think you (and many posters here) are missing the point (regardless of its validity) - he's not complaining about a threat that someone might attempt to control what software people publish or what they call it. As I understand, the "threat" he refers to is this: Imagine for a moment that Ubuntu strike it really big and become "the" OS on 90% of computers. Now, any ISV has to make sure their software runs on Ubuntu... then imagine that Canonical forced every ISP to pay a small "trademark use licensing fee" every time they had to mention the platform their software ran on was Ubuntu, e.g. say they made Adobe pay to mention things like "Photoshop for Ubuntu" or "the Ubuntu version of Photoshop" as a "licensed" use of "their trademark". Even if the figure was low, Canonical could probably make a tidy sum if Ubuntu was dominant.
Whether or not this is a valid concern is another issue, but my understanding is that this is the author's concern here.
So do I, and I want a pony too, but the world just doesn't work that way - there's a finite, limited amount of resources available for medical research, and you have to divide these resources so as to maximize the benefit gained from the resource expenditure. Deliberately diverting money in a way that gives you *less* overall benefit just doesn't work. I would much rather those doing the research focus the expenditure where they'll get the most 'bang for their buck' - and in most cases, by definition, that's the bigger diseases (unless it just happens that the technology created in curing a rare disease will be applicable to more common ones - but in such cases, the market is smart enough to see this and pick up on that by itself - I know this from studying research on my own 'rare disease' - there are companies doing some research into it, because some of the cures might lead to cures for big-name disorders.)
We don't have to cure all the common diseases until we move on to the harder ones.
Oh, so we should let people with common diseases die by pushing money onto rarer diseases instead. No thanks.
Because individuals and business don't really have any reason (or the means) to do a lot of basic research. Think of CERN or the Manhattan Project. Do you think those kind of research would be done if it wasn't paid for by the government?
You seem to think you know, but we *can't* know the answer to this, since we only know the history we followed in which government spent that money - it's false to assume that if government hadn't spent that money, these developments would not have occurred, because if government hadn't spent that money, a *lot* more money would've remained available to corporations to do far more R&D.
Therefore, some things, like rare diseases, will never be researched.
Do you really think it's better for humanity as a whole if we focus more on curing rare diseases than common ones, that by definition affect *far* more people? You alleviate the most suffering "for your money spent" by focusing on *common* diseases.
Government doesn't create the wealth required to invest in research; therefore there really is a zero-sum effect here: In order to spend a billion dollars in taxpayer money on rare disease, you have to forcibly take a billion dollars aware from corporations who were about to spend that money trying to cure common diseases.
It's a pity for those who have rare diseases, but come on, it's just illogical to say that it's better to cure rare diseases than common ones.
And I'm saying this as someone *afflicted* by a deadly rare disease. Sucks to be me, but it doesn't make sense to let millions die to save a few.
I own a small ISV startup, and you would be surprised how many people are more than willing to fabricate and spread complete lies about your company and products (for various reasons of their own, usually vested interests e.g. competitors, or people using your as a scapegoat for their own failures, especially in government), and you'd be surprised how much damage they can do to your business.
Unfortunately if you show yourself to be a pussycat who just rolls over and does nothing, these people and their damaging lies do proliferate rapidly and exponentially, and you'll be crushed - so your hand is forced - you have to be willing to show that you take the liars seriously and will fight unfair slander to the end. So you are in effect forced to have policies in place to defend yourself against unfair attacks. And once you have procedures and policies, it gets harder to sit and say on a case-by-case basis, are these negative comments legitimate, or bogus. E.g. sites like this can be and often are set up by competitors or other people with vested interests. I'm guessing the top management in a very large company don't sit on a case-by-case basis and say "go after this guy", they just have e.g. lawyers and others who work for them who are tasked with dealing with these kinds of things routinely and systematically.
So while I don't condone this (I'm a big 'consumer advocate' myself), I can at least understand it.
Yes, but in order to do that you'd have to have some minimal intelligence and common sense.
Some of them are even willing to admit to their own stupidity, e.g. in one news source I read the following:
Enzo Boschi, the head of the National Geophysics Institute, said the real problem for Italy was a long-standing failure to take proper precautions despite a history of tragic quakes. "We have earthquakes but then we forget and do nothing. It's not in our culture to take precautions or build in an appropriate way in areas where there could be strong earthquakes," he said.
There you have it.
Anyway, people should be given the choice. If I have the capability to travel freely (as I do, I work from anywhere), why shouldn't I have the option to evacuate my town "just in case", why should I effectively be tricked into staying by some mayor artificially suppressing information?
Well, it was originally created by the military with the goal of creating a robust, decentralized telecommunications network that could withstand large portions of it being destroyed in a war. But when it was commercialized, there most certainly was a business model 'in mind' - charging low amounts for easy, cheap, rapid and widespread information distribution. It's just a new, different business model, and it partially threatens outdated business models, but it does so precisely because it's a compelling value proposition to businesses who use it. And many companies have made a lot of money providing Internet services, and still do.
The easy, rapid proliferation of interesting information *is* what's great about the Internet. When anything of relevance happens, you hear about it quickly and at almost zero cost, without having to pay anyone just to get that information. I don't bother to watch e.g. TV news anymore, because I frequently find that most of what is on is old to me, i.e. I've usually already read about it hours before from any of a trillion sources on the Internet where the information has propagated within minutes of it occurring.
No, the informed, well written journalism is still in demand - it always will be. The "problem" that damages their business model is that the costs of *distributing information* in the Internet era are close to zero - information that's interesting naturally propagates rapidly through many sites and channels. The news media can no longer really make money off charging for *distribution* of information because the distribution portion is no longer naturally scarce. Distribution as a product is separate from information-gathering (journalism) as a product - the information itself (has value, always will), vs. the technological means of distributing that information.
Many will go out of business, because technology simply makes it cheaper to distribute information, but somebody will figure out a business model for information gathering, because it will always be in demand.
While I loathe your reflex to call for a 'new law' (ugh) to protect the industry, the problem you point out is a simple economic one: It used to be that information *distribution* was naturally scarce, so newspapers could cover the costs of investigative work by charging for information distribution. In the Internet era, the cost of the actual distribution of information will virtually approach zero. But it still costs the same to do the legwork.
Basically: *distribution* has little value, but *investigation* still does, and always will have value. Nobody *should* be making more lots of money for distributing information when technology allows it to cost so little - artificially protecting that would just be protectionist welfare and damaging to everyone.
You are suggesting that nobody would be able to pay investigators if they couldn't charge for distribution. This simply isn't true. Since investigation has value, people won't mind paying to obtain its results in one way or another; if investigators disappeared, people would freak out, and a gap in the market would appear. This could be solved in many ways - for example, a company like Google could make use of advertising to subsidize investigators.
Don't be so scared that we're going to run out of news. It will naturally have value, because people will naturally demand it. No need to call government to help. Governments are absolutely the last people you want to trust with controlling impartial investigation!
Europeans don't have the Second Amendment. I guess they could defend their rapidly eroding rights by writing a strongly worded letter to the government, and express their outrage over a cuppa, by gosh.
If you think predictions based on tea leaves are equivalent to predictions based on the best science available (albeit imperfect), then you are part of the problem. The whole *point* is that we should listen to scientists and not whackjobs like tea leaf readers and government bureaucrats, because even though the current science not perfect, there *is nothing better*. I absolutely guarantee you that scientists are going to give you better, more accurate, more often earthquake predictions than anyone and anything else in our entire known universe. You don't seem to get this simple fact, which puts you in the same camp as the anti-science politicians here.
"Government protected, oligopolized" is not equal to "capitalism", pretty much by definition - capitalism, as the term is used everywhere, is characterized primarily by private ownership of the means of production AND free markets.
I now return you to your regular uninformed, mindless anti-capitalist ranting.
Sigh... a typical slashdot comment, from a typical slashdot user, that adds absolutely nothing to the conversation
Uh, gee, it was only 5% of my post, the rest of which did add something to the conversation. Typical troll, cutting out and ignoring the 95% of a post which makes good points, and focusing all attention on the one sentence that doesn't. Seen that same-old technique used on Usenet by many a troll, year ago.
Funny, game developers don't seem to have that problem. I guess they must know something you don't
I guess John Carmack must not know what he's doing then - do a quick web search for his opinion on D3D vs OGL. That article may be oldish, and d3D may have improved, but all the basic arguments still apply, and capability bits are still there.
Why don't you please TRY LEARN SOMETHING about the thing you are attempting to make comments about??!? There is a very specific valid reason why a Direct3D program tends not to work automatically on all cards - CAPABILITY BITS. But then, you're obviously just a troll, so what do you care about learning about real, technical, solid arguments such as why the existence capability bits and allowing every card to support any possible subset of functionality might make it EXTRA effort for game programmers to support all mainstream cards. Ask any game programmer who has done Direct3D, I dare you. Oh wait, I know, you know more than John Carmack now, because "this one buddy of yours works at this one game programming company hey and he says yadda yadda blah blah". Is it something like that? Or is more like, "I read this one thing in this one gaming magazine hey, and this guy he said yadda yadda blah blah". Whatever. You clearly have never written a single line of D3D-related code yourself. Until you have, put up or shut up. "Funny, game developers don't seem to have that problem" -- really, please point me the game developers who have not? Or is it just a bogus assumption that you keep trying to push to argue your point, in the hopes that repeating it over and over will somehow lend credibility to the statement?
By the sheer amount of DX games out there, isn't it obvious that the game industry doesn't find DX clunky and hard to program in
Uh, yeah... that really proves it. Not.
DirectX *IS* hard and clunky to program in. The "sheer amount of DX games out there" is because DirectX is because (a) it is the standard game programming API on Windows, and 99% of game development companies clients run their games on Windows, (b) "DirectX" is not "Direct3D", comparing "OpenGL" to "DirectX" is incorrect - DirectX includes sound, network, input devices and so on, so even games that use OpenGL for 3D often still use DirectX for other things (e.g. Quake) (you yourself mention this), and lastly (c) DirectX has some more advanced 3D features than OpenGL.
so we have a whole lot of reasons why companies use DirectX, and yet you still manage to somehow reach the fault conclusion that DirectX can't be clunky and hard to program? Your faulty logic is astounding. People use DirectX *in spite of* it being clunky and hard to program in. We develop virtual reality applications at our company, and we have a generic abstraction of a 3D API, behind which we have both OpenGL implementations and Direct3D implementations - the OpenGL one is LESS THAN HALF the number of lines of code than the Direct3D one, is MORE cross-platform (our Direct3D one, despite Direct3D supposedly being generic, has problems on most cards that are not nVidia-based), and the Direct3D one has taken more than twice has long to develop, because Direct3D is still overcomplicated, requires much more code, and has plenty of esoteric, strange undocumented "issues" (HRESULT hr returns "Generic error", anyone?)
Don't make technical comments on something when you obviously don't have technical insight into it.
At this time, he did not know they were FBI agents. As part of the explanation, West clicked edit in IE to show them how the bug worked
I can just picture this situation, these FBI agents were probably sitting there thinking "wow, this hacker dude is hacking into the site right in front of us, we've really got him now. This is too easy!".
Seriously, if an organization such as the FBI doesn't even have the know-how to tell the difference between "hacking malicously" and "letting a company know they have a security problem", then their authority should be taken away from them - unless they can prove they actually know what they are doing - otherwise, we have a serious problem. You can't give someone so much authority and power to investigate crime when they know little to nothing about what they are supposed to be investigating. Thats scary.
Come on, THINK man. If this guy was really hacking, why would he CONTACT THE MANAGER OF THE NEWSPAPER AND INFORM HIM, DIRECTLY?!?!? Yeah, real clever "hacker" that. It doesn't make sense whatsoever.
"The newspaper said its logs".. so what? "The newspaper" (i.e. the management) obviously also only has a really really vague understanding of what the "logs" even are. Do you have any idea how "management" works? We recently got the SirCam virus at our work. Our management were highly upset, and blamed one of my coworkers - why? Because a few weeks prior to that he had sent some jokes to a couple of other people in the office, as an email attachment. My boss was talking about banning the use of attachments totally, i tried to convince him that SirCam doesn't spread by people deliberately sending attachments, and that it couldn't attach to image files etc.. it mostly went straight past his head, he was under the impression that this thing attaches itself to your email attachments as you send them out, and that any attachment was vulnerable.. management is clueless, take what they say with a truckload of salt.
Anyway, my web site's user logs ALSO has hundreds of attempts to contact the web site, including efforts to "acces the files and scripts that cause the web site to operate".. I mean, hello, this statement is SO vague that it describes ANY web sites comletely benign logs. For all we know these clueless "webmasters" saw stuff like _vti_inf in their logs and thought that that was a hacking attempt or something. (The webmasters can't have been very clued up in the first place to have such security holes).
Still, if you can explain to me WHY someone who had just supposedly *malicously* hacked into someones web site would phone the MANAGER of the company immediately to explain what they themselves had just done, then I might consider your opinions as being more than just those of someone who can't think for himself.
Wouldn't their estimate also include (a) average hourly rate of administrators fixing the problem multiplied by average number of hours required to correct the problem, (b) productivity loss due to downtime of systems? We rely on our NT server at work pretty heavily (SourceSafe etc), when it goes down half of our programmers either can't work, or can work but in an impaired way that wastes quite a lot of time. And programmers aren't that cheap:) If you have twenty people getting paid 20$/hour, and they all can't work for two hours, thats $800 lost, not to mention that you're probably ending up further behind on a project that was already running late anyway. Another factor is that when the server is down, people often find it a convenient excuse to take a break. Yet another thing is that for many companies, it usually takes something like CR to get the management to realise that they *need* to spend money on things like antivirus software, and you need to have someone keeping the server patched etc. Management often think they're saving money here and there, until something like this happens. So some companies may end up hiring an administrator. And often, not only will an antivirus be installed on the server, but on everyone's systems (hmm.. this is pretty much what happened at our company a few weeks back with SirCam). Installing on everyones systems takes yet more time and money and productivity loss. And of course, you need meetings - you have to have one of those meetings where everyone is present, where everyone has explained to them (by managers who now think that all email attachments should be banned, because they don't understand the technology) the dangers of using email attachments, or running unmanaged web servers, how to keep their antivirus software up to date etc. Many companies are also probably going to go purchase firewall software now too, after CR. Heck, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the cost did approach $2600. I mean, if a large company with 500 desktops suddenly decides to install antivirus software on all 500 desktops just because their server was hit with CR, thats expensive. Professional firewall software can be very expensive too, as well as the training and time required by the administrator(s) to set up and install all the stuff.
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Yes, you're missing the fact that Axum is too new for anyone to have 5 years experience developing on it.
I remember seeing ads just like that when Java had just come out.
Microsoft innovated a hell of a lot with Visual Basic, .NET, and C# ... There are language features that Microsoft has innovated ... I'm just saying that Microsoft has come up with some game changing innovations, and and the very least, decent honest techies should acknowledge that Visual Basic was one of them.
OK, I'm curious, name ten of these "innovations". Make SURE that they were actually original ideas, not just implementations of pre-existing ideas.
Why am I starting to wonder if there might not be something a little bit wrong with this form of argument?
If you don't like that form of argument, don't use it.
"My 9 month old will work himself into a huge fit when he first wakes up if we don't get him."
9 months!? Way to spoil the kid. At what point do you expect him to magically learn that you're not going to always come running to meet his every demand ... he owns you.
I "gave the ribbon a chance" - I used it for over a year - and still hated it. I slowly grew to hate it more and more and more. It drove me to use OpenOffice more and more.
So yeah, YMMV applies - don't assume that because you like it, it means it's better. Or that because snobbery exists, that any criticism is snobbery.
sorry, "every ISP" -> "every ISV"
I think you (and many posters here) are missing the point (regardless of its validity) - he's not complaining about a threat that someone might attempt to control what software people publish or what they call it. As I understand, the "threat" he refers to is this: Imagine for a moment that Ubuntu strike it really big and become "the" OS on 90% of computers. Now, any ISV has to make sure their software runs on Ubuntu ... then imagine that Canonical forced every ISP to pay a small "trademark use licensing fee" every time they had to mention the platform their software ran on was Ubuntu, e.g. say they made Adobe pay to mention things like "Photoshop for Ubuntu" or "the Ubuntu version of Photoshop" as a "licensed" use of "their trademark". Even if the figure was low, Canonical could probably make a tidy sum if Ubuntu was dominant.
Whether or not this is a valid concern is another issue, but my understanding is that this is the author's concern here.
I think its better for humanity if we do both.
So do I, and I want a pony too, but the world just doesn't work that way - there's a finite, limited amount of resources available for medical research, and you have to divide these resources so as to maximize the benefit gained from the resource expenditure. Deliberately diverting money in a way that gives you *less* overall benefit just doesn't work. I would much rather those doing the research focus the expenditure where they'll get the most 'bang for their buck' - and in most cases, by definition, that's the bigger diseases (unless it just happens that the technology created in curing a rare disease will be applicable to more common ones - but in such cases, the market is smart enough to see this and pick up on that by itself - I know this from studying research on my own 'rare disease' - there are companies doing some research into it, because some of the cures might lead to cures for big-name disorders.)
We don't have to cure all the common diseases until we move on to the harder ones.
Oh, so we should let people with common diseases die by pushing money onto rarer diseases instead. No thanks.
Common diseases don't need extra funding. There's lots of research into cancer and AIDS.
If this was true, they would be cured already. They're not. Pretty much 'by definition' they need more funding 'cos they ain't cured yet.
Because individuals and business don't really have any reason (or the means) to do a lot of basic research. Think of CERN or the Manhattan Project. Do you think those kind of research would be done if it wasn't paid for by the government?
You seem to think you know, but we *can't* know the answer to this, since we only know the history we followed in which government spent that money - it's false to assume that if government hadn't spent that money, these developments would not have occurred, because if government hadn't spent that money, a *lot* more money would've remained available to corporations to do far more R&D.
no.
Therefore, some things, like rare diseases, will never be researched.
Do you really think it's better for humanity as a whole if we focus more on curing rare diseases than common ones, that by definition affect *far* more people? You alleviate the most suffering "for your money spent" by focusing on *common* diseases.
Government doesn't create the wealth required to invest in research; therefore there really is a zero-sum effect here: In order to spend a billion dollars in taxpayer money on rare disease, you have to forcibly take a billion dollars aware from corporations who were about to spend that money trying to cure common diseases.
It's a pity for those who have rare diseases, but come on, it's just illogical to say that it's better to cure rare diseases than common ones.
And I'm saying this as someone *afflicted* by a deadly rare disease. Sucks to be me, but it doesn't make sense to let millions die to save a few.
I own a small ISV startup, and you would be surprised how many people are more than willing to fabricate and spread complete lies about your company and products (for various reasons of their own, usually vested interests e.g. competitors, or people using your as a scapegoat for their own failures, especially in government), and you'd be surprised how much damage they can do to your business.
Unfortunately if you show yourself to be a pussycat who just rolls over and does nothing, these people and their damaging lies do proliferate rapidly and exponentially, and you'll be crushed - so your hand is forced - you have to be willing to show that you take the liars seriously and will fight unfair slander to the end. So you are in effect forced to have policies in place to defend yourself against unfair attacks. And once you have procedures and policies, it gets harder to sit and say on a case-by-case basis, are these negative comments legitimate, or bogus. E.g. sites like this can be and often are set up by competitors or other people with vested interests. I'm guessing the top management in a very large company don't sit on a case-by-case basis and say "go after this guy", they just have e.g. lawyers and others who work for them who are tasked with dealing with these kinds of things routinely and systematically.
So while I don't condone this (I'm a big 'consumer advocate' myself), I can at least understand it.
Yes, but in order to do that you'd have to have some minimal intelligence and common sense.
Some of them are even willing to admit to their own stupidity, e.g. in one news source I read the following:
Enzo Boschi, the head of the National Geophysics Institute, said the real problem for Italy was a long-standing failure to take proper precautions despite a history of tragic quakes. "We have earthquakes but then we forget and do nothing. It's not in our culture to take precautions or build in an appropriate way in areas where there could be strong earthquakes," he said.
There you have it.
Anyway, people should be given the choice. If I have the capability to travel freely (as I do, I work from anywhere), why shouldn't I have the option to evacuate my town "just in case", why should I effectively be tricked into staying by some mayor artificially suppressing information?
Well, it was originally created by the military with the goal of creating a robust, decentralized telecommunications network that could withstand large portions of it being destroyed in a war. But when it was commercialized, there most certainly was a business model 'in mind' - charging low amounts for easy, cheap, rapid and widespread information distribution. It's just a new, different business model, and it partially threatens outdated business models, but it does so precisely because it's a compelling value proposition to businesses who use it. And many companies have made a lot of money providing Internet services, and still do.
The easy, rapid proliferation of interesting information *is* what's great about the Internet. When anything of relevance happens, you hear about it quickly and at almost zero cost, without having to pay anyone just to get that information. I don't bother to watch e.g. TV news anymore, because I frequently find that most of what is on is old to me, i.e. I've usually already read about it hours before from any of a trillion sources on the Internet where the information has propagated within minutes of it occurring.
No, the informed, well written journalism is still in demand - it always will be. The "problem" that damages their business model is that the costs of *distributing information* in the Internet era are close to zero - information that's interesting naturally propagates rapidly through many sites and channels. The news media can no longer really make money off charging for *distribution* of information because the distribution portion is no longer naturally scarce. Distribution as a product is separate from information-gathering (journalism) as a product - the information itself (has value, always will), vs. the technological means of distributing that information.
Many will go out of business, because technology simply makes it cheaper to distribute information, but somebody will figure out a business model for information gathering, because it will always be in demand.
While I loathe your reflex to call for a 'new law' (ugh) to protect the industry, the problem you point out is a simple economic one: It used to be that information *distribution* was naturally scarce, so newspapers could cover the costs of investigative work by charging for information distribution. In the Internet era, the cost of the actual distribution of information will virtually approach zero. But it still costs the same to do the legwork.
Basically: *distribution* has little value, but *investigation* still does, and always will have value. Nobody *should* be making more lots of money for distributing information when technology allows it to cost so little - artificially protecting that would just be protectionist welfare and damaging to everyone.
You are suggesting that nobody would be able to pay investigators if they couldn't charge for distribution. This simply isn't true. Since investigation has value, people won't mind paying to obtain its results in one way or another; if investigators disappeared, people would freak out, and a gap in the market would appear. This could be solved in many ways - for example, a company like Google could make use of advertising to subsidize investigators.
Don't be so scared that we're going to run out of news. It will naturally have value, because people will naturally demand it. No need to call government to help. Governments are absolutely the last people you want to trust with controlling impartial investigation!
Europeans don't have the Second Amendment. I guess they could defend their rapidly eroding rights by writing a strongly worded letter to the government, and express their outrage over a cuppa, by gosh.
If you think predictions based on tea leaves are equivalent to predictions based on the best science available (albeit imperfect), then you are part of the problem. The whole *point* is that we should listen to scientists and not whackjobs like tea leaf readers and government bureaucrats, because even though the current science not perfect, there *is nothing better*. I absolutely guarantee you that scientists are going to give you better, more accurate, more often earthquake predictions than anyone and anything else in our entire known universe. You don't seem to get this simple fact, which puts you in the same camp as the anti-science politicians here.
"Government protected, oligopolized" is not equal to "capitalism", pretty much by definition - capitalism, as the term is used everywhere, is characterized primarily by private ownership of the means of production AND free markets.
I now return you to your regular uninformed, mindless anti-capitalist ranting.
Sigh... a typical slashdot comment, from a typical slashdot user, that adds absolutely nothing to the conversation
Uh, gee, it was only 5% of my post, the rest of which did add something to the conversation. Typical troll, cutting out and ignoring the 95% of a post which makes good points, and focusing all attention on the one sentence that doesn't. Seen that same-old technique used on Usenet by many a troll, year ago.
Funny, game developers don't seem to have that problem. I guess they must know something you don't
I guess John Carmack must not know what he's doing then - do a quick web search for his opinion on D3D vs OGL. That article may be oldish, and d3D may have improved, but all the basic arguments still apply, and capability bits are still there.
Why don't you please TRY LEARN SOMETHING about the thing you are attempting to make comments about??!? There is a very specific valid reason why a Direct3D program tends not to work automatically on all cards - CAPABILITY BITS. But then, you're obviously just a troll, so what do you care about learning about real, technical, solid arguments such as why the existence capability bits and allowing every card to support any possible subset of functionality might make it EXTRA effort for game programmers to support all mainstream cards. Ask any game programmer who has done Direct3D, I dare you. Oh wait, I know, you know more than John Carmack now, because "this one buddy of yours works at this one game programming company hey and he says yadda yadda blah blah". Is it something like that? Or is more like, "I read this one thing in this one gaming magazine hey, and this guy he said yadda yadda blah blah". Whatever. You clearly have never written a single line of D3D-related code yourself. Until you have, put up or shut up. "Funny, game developers don't seem to have that problem" -- really, please point me the game developers who have not? Or is it just a bogus assumption that you keep trying to push to argue your point, in the hopes that repeating it over and over will somehow lend credibility to the statement?
By the sheer amount of DX games out there, isn't it obvious that the game industry doesn't find DX clunky and hard to program in
Uh, yeah... that really proves it. Not.
DirectX *IS* hard and clunky to program in. The "sheer amount of DX games out there" is because DirectX is because (a) it is the standard game programming API on Windows, and 99% of game development companies clients run their games on Windows, (b) "DirectX" is not "Direct3D", comparing "OpenGL" to "DirectX" is incorrect - DirectX includes sound, network, input devices and so on, so even games that use OpenGL for 3D often still use DirectX for other things (e.g. Quake) (you yourself mention this), and lastly (c) DirectX has some more advanced 3D features than OpenGL.
so we have a whole lot of reasons why companies use DirectX, and yet you still manage to somehow reach the fault conclusion that DirectX can't be clunky and hard to program? Your faulty logic is astounding. People use DirectX *in spite of* it being clunky and hard to program in. We develop virtual reality applications at our company, and we have a generic abstraction of a 3D API, behind which we have both OpenGL implementations and Direct3D implementations - the OpenGL one is LESS THAN HALF the number of lines of code than the Direct3D one, is MORE cross-platform (our Direct3D one, despite Direct3D supposedly being generic, has problems on most cards that are not nVidia-based), and the Direct3D one has taken more than twice has long to develop, because Direct3D is still overcomplicated, requires much more code, and has plenty of esoteric, strange undocumented "issues" (HRESULT hr returns "Generic error", anyone?)
Don't make technical comments on something when you obviously don't have technical insight into it.
At this time, he did not know they were FBI agents. As part of the explanation, West clicked edit in IE to show them how the bug worked
I can just picture this situation, these FBI agents were probably sitting there thinking "wow, this hacker dude is hacking into the site right in front of us, we've really got him now. This is too easy!".
Seriously, if an organization such as the FBI doesn't even have the know-how to tell the difference between "hacking malicously" and "letting a company know they have a security problem", then their authority should be taken away from them - unless they can prove they actually know what they are doing - otherwise, we have a serious problem. You can't give someone so much authority and power to investigate crime when they know little to nothing about what they are supposed to be investigating. Thats scary.
Come on, THINK man. If this guy was really hacking, why would he CONTACT THE MANAGER OF THE NEWSPAPER AND INFORM HIM, DIRECTLY?!?!? Yeah, real clever "hacker" that. It doesn't make sense whatsoever.
.. so what? "The newspaper" (i.e. the management) obviously also only has a really really vague understanding of what the "logs" even are. Do you have any idea how "management" works? We recently got the SirCam virus at our work. Our management were highly upset, and blamed one of my coworkers - why? Because a few weeks prior to that he had sent some jokes to a couple of other people in the office, as an email attachment. My boss was talking about banning the use of attachments totally, i tried to convince him that SirCam doesn't spread by people deliberately sending attachments, and that it couldn't attach to image files etc .. it mostly went straight past his head, he was under the impression that this thing attaches itself to your email attachments as you send them out, and that any attachment was vulnerable .. management is clueless, take what they say with a truckload of salt.
.. I mean, hello, this statement is SO vague that it describes ANY web sites comletely benign logs. For all we know these clueless "webmasters" saw stuff like _vti_inf in their logs and thought that that was a hacking attempt or something. (The webmasters can't have been very clued up in the first place to have such security holes).
"The newspaper said its logs"
Anyway, my web site's user logs ALSO has hundreds of attempts to contact the web site, including efforts to "acces the files and scripts that cause the web site to operate"
Still, if you can explain to me WHY someone who had just supposedly *malicously* hacked into someones web site would phone the MANAGER of the company immediately to explain what they themselves had just done, then I might consider your opinions as being more than just those of someone who can't think for himself.
Wouldn't their estimate also include (a) average hourly rate of administrators fixing the problem multiplied by average number of hours required to correct the problem, (b) productivity loss due to downtime of systems? We rely on our NT server at work pretty heavily (SourceSafe etc), when it goes down half of our programmers either can't work, or can work but in an impaired way that wastes quite a lot of time. And programmers aren't that cheap :) If you have twenty people getting paid 20$/hour, and they all can't work for two hours, thats $800 lost, not to mention that you're probably ending up further behind on a project that was already running late anyway. Another factor is that when the server is down, people often find it a convenient excuse to take a break. Yet another thing is that for many companies, it usually takes something like CR to get the management to realise that they *need* to spend money on things like antivirus software, and you need to have someone keeping the server patched etc. Management often think they're saving money here and there, until something like this happens. So some companies may end up hiring an administrator. And often, not only will an antivirus be installed on the server, but on everyone's systems (hmm .. this is pretty much what happened at our company a few weeks back with SirCam). Installing on everyones systems takes yet more time and money and productivity loss. And of course, you need meetings - you have to have one of those meetings where everyone is present, where everyone has explained to them (by managers who now think that all email attachments should be banned, because they don't understand the technology) the dangers of using email attachments, or running unmanaged web servers, how to keep their antivirus software up to date etc. Many companies are also probably going to go purchase firewall software now too, after CR. Heck, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the cost did approach $2600. I mean, if a large company with 500 desktops suddenly decides to install antivirus software on all 500 desktops just because their server was hit with CR, thats expensive. Professional firewall software can be very expensive too, as well as the training and time required by the administrator(s) to set up and install all the stuff.