The best that this idiocy can possibly produce is further fragmentation of "The Web": right now, we have "kinda sane" standards in HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1, as well as CSS 2.1; everything beyond that are half-baked hacks in the form of several implementations of HTML 5, CSS 3 modules, their DOM APIs, and whatever browser vendors decided to implement. Adding DRM to the fray will not help things, since no matter how you look at it, you will end up with content only available on specialty browsers like Chrome, IE, or fringe mobile platforms, all the while still blissfully carrying the "HTML" tag.
At the end of the day, it will be cheaper for content peddlers to just cut out the bullshit and keep doing things in Flash, and I can't even say that I'm sad about it anymore.
Oh, and the W3C? They can go die in a car crash FWIW, it wouldn't be a huge loss beyond the humanitarian impact. Not like they did anything useful in the past 10 years.
That whole homo-semi-erotic topic in SWOR is blown out of proportion by a small bunch of loud idiots.
What really happens is that (1) those idiots have been crying about Bioware not providing homo romances with companions since the day the beta started. Then, (2) Bioware is so kind as to look into it, and puts it on their todo list. Later, (3) the whole game has its business model revamped, which makes for a huge reprioritisation of future plans; this means that low-priority add-ons like 8 all-new written, voiced, posed companion stories go to the backburner.
Now, they are finally going to release a new planet and offer a few [flirt] options in the conversations. The original minority of smacktards feels emo and nobody listens to them and waaaaaah!, and the anti-gay idiots crawl out of their holes and make it out to be the new holocaust or something.
Some people need to be kicked off the internet. Seriously.
The current mess this country is in is pretty much the result of an incompetent back-and-forth between elected governments that always try to push through some bullshit to get re-elected. Several years back, a "left"/green coalition (the chancellor from back then coincidentally got into a leading position at Russias gas racket Gazprom when he was done with that) actually decided to phase out nuclear power with a set timeframe. Nobody in the industry gave a shit by then, because everyone banked on the next government reverting the whole thing. There were also enough loopholes in there to drive the entire US nuclear arsenal through without anyone bothering: stuff like transferring lifetime from new, safer reactors to old crappy ones that were already beyond their planned lifetime. Why? Simple: the old ones were fully written off, and everything they produced was pure profit.
Some years later, enter right-conservative/capitalist government (the one we have now), the whole thing was actually scrapped for good! The industry rejoiced, but of course they continued generating income through the financing plan for renewables. Politics didn't care: they actually tax the tax, so more taxes on top of higher fees!
Some years later, enter the tsunami and upcoming elections, it was, of course top priority for our current ruling fascists (actually those are the ones at least partly responsible for some Greek islands having no water sometimes, austerity measures can be fun) to make it their idea to phase out nuclear power. Now. No thought, no brains, just now. Of course, in the past years, nobody bothered to invest in the infrastructure because the whole thing was canned earlier in the legislative period.
Oh, of course we also stopped paying for ITER, so we will always need to import some fossil fuel, preferably through the new pipeline from Russia, to meet base demand, so that was a smart move.
That "plan" deserves shooting of everyone involved, not recommendation.
Code editors (at least most of them) are still stuck in a dark age where everything comes down to hand-crafted ASCII-art, which is complete and utter bullshit. Editors could and should work much closer, if not directly on, the AST of the language in question, and completely abstract away all those pesky details like indenting scopes or formatting comment blocks "properly". That stuff should be left to user preference and style sheets.
But I guess that would put an immediate end to the religious zeal displayed in tabs-vs-spaces (it's of course ts=8 sw=4 noexpandtab, noobs!), would not mask syntax errors in gobs of meticulously crafted gunk, and take all the "fun" out of programming.
It's bullshit like that which makes the Linux biotope unsuitable for the desktop and other fields, and shows why the GPL is destructive, not useful for anything interesting, and generally not a well thought-of concept.
It shows why extremism is destructive in any field.
You may all bitch and moan about "proprietary closed shit", but at the end of the day, that very shit provides viable and accessible interfaces for people to do interesting stuff with.
"We will just use the moon as a projection surface to gather spectroscopic data from a tiny speck moving across the sun. Because we can. We're that awesome."
The official Google party line is "we want the best of the best (of the best, SIR!)". As such, having a quota would be complete and utter bullshit for them, since it'd artificially bias their hiring process.
The GPL traditionally can't deal with any language "above" assembly and maybe C. As soon as a language allows "modern" features like generics or even crazy stuff like open classes, it becomes impossible to draw a clear line between projects. This effectively means that GPLed code really becomes a fast-spreading plague.
Stuff like the Asshole GPL don't really help acceptance, creating infection vectors across service boundaries.
All in all, it was fun while it lasted. Some highly encapsulated projects like the Linux kernel may stick with an old, benign version of the license, but it doesn't have a future in today's environment.
Ever-increasing productivity could be something people looked forward to, instead of being something that was a real threat to putting food on their table, as the Luddites who smashed mechanized looms realized. That better productivity winds up harming the majority of people is a contradiction within the current system of production we live under. At some point, these contradictions become too great and the system breaks down, then it needs some major reconfiguring.
TL;DR: Never before in history could we have slacked off in hedonism as much as we could now, and here we are whining that we aren't able to work our asses off!
I'm blacklisting *.facebook.com, their CDN (fbcdn.net), and connect.facebook.net in ABP (the connect rule is older since it used to break a bunch of sites when the service started and was even more unreliable than it is today). The other solution would be to just make my home DNS auth for those zones, which I've done for a bunch of other crap like doubleclick, making that stuff NXDOMAIN.
Right now, the whole "Linux on the desktop" brouhaha is failing at the point where I have the choice of either
using a pre-3.0 kernel and having my desktop "experience" freeze for up to 30 seconds every time an application does something graphically challenging like, say, drawing a 32x32 icon, or
using a current kernel and at some point have X corrupt random drawing surfaces until the whole thing is entirely unusable.
And that's not even starting with the overly half-assed state most "desktop" applications are in. Most of KDE is a pile of ugly hacks that manages to get worse with each iteration, only to be beaten by whatever cruft Mozilla is shoving out the door, actually losing features with every "release". Gnome is quickly going towards a point where they will be a sad imitation of an Apple UI without any usability or skillful design. The office suites are trying to rip off their commercial counterparts, but mostly fail because they suffer from an extreme amount of legacy ballast.
This is not about "arguments", this is about failing to get the basics right. Linux doesn't belong on a productive desktop by a long shot, unless your idea of a desktop still is a bunch of terminal windows running vim/emacs/ed (or if that meets your requirements).
Really, the most annoying part of a mumorpuger is the "community" that forms like an accretion disk around the game itself, usually a bunch of pushy whining kids who won't ever be satisfied, will always feel underpowered with their favourite in-game character, and threaten to leave to other games for years instead of packing up and leaving.
If there was a technology to eliminate actual players from those games, it would improve the communities a lot. We are finally getting closer to a point where it becomes possible. Exciting times.
It would be immediately obvious when someone performed a MitM attack using a valid certificate for "webmail". Why? Because the real certificate is signed by a ghetto CA that isn't trusted by any of the "major" vendors, and both the certificate and some of the intermediates have long since expired.
I'll be worried if I can access that site without a bunch of ugly warnings popping up.
The most important part of a conference is the social event. You get to know interesting people who potentially work for interesting companies (although I'm not quite sure about the event you're supposed to go to). You also get to learn that other people "in the field" are really as smart or stupid as you are, which will make you more comfortable with the environment, or it will drive you away from it. Either way, you get to know if you would like to stay in academia.
We routinely try to make our students' theses into publications at decent venues, and then send them there. We usually pay for the trip and the conference fee too. If that's not possible at your group, check if there's some kind of travel grant for the conference where you can apply.
Or manually port forwarding, as described on the Beat site.
Why should anyone be required to touch their router settings to install or run a game, unless they want to host game sessions? We're talking about settings here that mean opening up the system to even more vulnerabilities (UPnP gateway features), or require modifications that might well break functionality some time down the road (DNAT). In any case, the "average user" (and maybe to a lesser degree the "average gamer") does not have the knowledge about either alternative to evaluate risks or troubleshoot resulting problems.
it will happily corrupt itself beyond repair if it ever times out or is interrupted for some other reason.
Nonsense, I've killed it or had it crash multiple times while in progress. Still works fine. That's why, as with any BitTorrent client, it re-hashes the pieces it has downloaded and throws out any corrupt ones when it starts.
I've had it just sit there with no progress for hours, and it timed out after several minutes for a few times, each time from a clean (re)install. In any case, the patcher was completely unable to resume, coughed up an error message, and terminated. No installation attempt resulted in any visible progress, either in the closed or in the open beta.
as it didn't transfer more than maybe 1MB in the 20 or so attempts I made before sending some rather impolite feedback and uninstalling the POS
So, you didn't have UPnP or port forwarding set up, and it didn't work. That's not surprising.
Seeing how the instructions that SE pushes out for the closed beta (i.e., close to none) don't mention either, no I didn't, and it didn't work. So I followed the documentation, and it still failed.
The FFXIV beta really should mention that it uses a badly broken BitTorrent client as a "patcher". On top of pretty much requiring UPnP "trojan all-you-can-eat buffet" features to do anything useful, it will happily corrupt itself beyond repair if it ever times out or is interrupted for some other reason. Insofar, it didn't get to use much bandwidth on my network, as it didn't transfer more than maybe 1MB in the 20 or so attempts I made before sending some rather impolite feedback and uninstalling the POS.
The client is lacking any upstream limiting features, and poses as an opaque bandwidth stealer, so FWIW I consider it malware. There's also no easily reachable "STOP THE F***ING MUZAK" toggle. Any competent publisher that values its customers (so maybe all two of them) just buys bandwidth from some CDN and has the clients do straight downloads.
From the bug reports, it seems like KDE still can't handle silly things nobody ever uses, like persistent printer settings or SSL certificates. Both of those are regressions from KDE 3.5, and it seems like KDE tries to mimic Mozilla when it comes to usability.
But yeah, we totally need more UI bling. Not like there was work to do.
Ubuntu, and KDE both handle multiple monitors very well.
I call bullshit. KDE is a piece of crap when it comes to multi-monitor setup, even the latest 4.3.x series. One of the major issues is that RandR handling in KDE is basically a comment in the monitor setup tool, stating that nobody cares to implement it. So unless you're still running Xinerama, you're out of luck. And as was mentioned above, you can pretty much kiss composite desktops goodbye then. It goes so far that when you setup your monitors with the commandline xrandr tool, the control center will collapse all monitors back into one as soon as you open the monitor settings.
In happier news, Gnome seems to do far better in that regard and in printer handling
Hardly - it's about the Windows ecosystem. Legitimately purchased (but vulnerable) Windows PC's can get viruses from pirated copies of Windows just fine.
I kind of see what you tried to do there... but if your fully patched legitimate copy is vulnerable, then how would a fully patched illegitimate copy help anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
Who wants a fish?
That's pretty much all.
The best that this idiocy can possibly produce is further fragmentation of "The Web": right now, we have "kinda sane" standards in HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1, as well as CSS 2.1; everything beyond that are half-baked hacks in the form of several implementations of HTML 5, CSS 3 modules, their DOM APIs, and whatever browser vendors decided to implement. Adding DRM to the fray will not help things, since no matter how you look at it, you will end up with content only available on specialty browsers like Chrome, IE, or fringe mobile platforms, all the while still blissfully carrying the "HTML" tag.
At the end of the day, it will be cheaper for content peddlers to just cut out the bullshit and keep doing things in Flash, and I can't even say that I'm sad about it anymore.
Oh, and the W3C? They can go die in a car crash FWIW, it wouldn't be a huge loss beyond the humanitarian impact. Not like they did anything useful in the past 10 years.
That whole homo-semi-erotic topic in SWOR is blown out of proportion by a small bunch of loud idiots.
What really happens is that (1) those idiots have been crying about Bioware not providing homo romances with companions since the day the beta started. Then, (2) Bioware is so kind as to look into it, and puts it on their todo list. Later, (3) the whole game has its business model revamped, which makes for a huge reprioritisation of future plans; this means that low-priority add-ons like 8 all-new written, voiced, posed companion stories go to the backburner.
Now, they are finally going to release a new planet and offer a few [flirt] options in the conversations. The original minority of smacktards feels emo and nobody listens to them and waaaaaah!, and the anti-gay idiots crawl out of their holes and make it out to be the new holocaust or something.
Some people need to be kicked off the internet. Seriously.
The current mess this country is in is pretty much the result of an incompetent back-and-forth between elected governments that always try to push through some bullshit to get re-elected. Several years back, a "left"/green coalition (the chancellor from back then coincidentally got into a leading position at Russias gas racket Gazprom when he was done with that) actually decided to phase out nuclear power with a set timeframe. Nobody in the industry gave a shit by then, because everyone banked on the next government reverting the whole thing. There were also enough loopholes in there to drive the entire US nuclear arsenal through without anyone bothering: stuff like transferring lifetime from new, safer reactors to old crappy ones that were already beyond their planned lifetime. Why? Simple: the old ones were fully written off, and everything they produced was pure profit.
Some years later, enter right-conservative/capitalist government (the one we have now), the whole thing was actually scrapped for good! The industry rejoiced, but of course they continued generating income through the financing plan for renewables. Politics didn't care: they actually tax the tax, so more taxes on top of higher fees!
Some years later, enter the tsunami and upcoming elections, it was, of course top priority for our current ruling fascists (actually those are the ones at least partly responsible for some Greek islands having no water sometimes, austerity measures can be fun) to make it their idea to phase out nuclear power. Now. No thought, no brains, just now. Of course, in the past years, nobody bothered to invest in the infrastructure because the whole thing was canned earlier in the legislative period.
Oh, of course we also stopped paying for ITER, so we will always need to import some fossil fuel, preferably through the new pipeline from Russia, to meet base demand, so that was a smart move.
That "plan" deserves shooting of everyone involved, not recommendation.
Code editors (at least most of them) are still stuck in a dark age where everything comes down to hand-crafted ASCII-art, which is complete and utter bullshit. Editors could and should work much closer, if not directly on, the AST of the language in question, and completely abstract away all those pesky details like indenting scopes or formatting comment blocks "properly". That stuff should be left to user preference and style sheets.
But I guess that would put an immediate end to the religious zeal displayed in tabs-vs-spaces (it's of course ts=8 sw=4 noexpandtab, noobs!), would not mask syntax errors in gobs of meticulously crafted gunk, and take all the "fun" out of programming.
It's bullshit like that which makes the Linux biotope unsuitable for the desktop and other fields, and shows why the GPL is destructive, not useful for anything interesting, and generally not a well thought-of concept.
It shows why extremism is destructive in any field.
You may all bitch and moan about "proprietary closed shit", but at the end of the day, that very shit provides viable and accessible interfaces for people to do interesting stuff with.
"We will just use the moon as a projection surface to gather spectroscopic data from a tiny speck moving across the sun. Because we can. We're that awesome."
Men and their toys ;-)
(doesn't Google have an overt quota?)
The official Google party line is "we want the best of the best (of the best, SIR!)". As such, having a quota would be complete and utter bullshit for them, since it'd artificially bias their hiring process.
The GPL traditionally can't deal with any language "above" assembly and maybe C. As soon as a language allows "modern" features like generics or even crazy stuff like open classes, it becomes impossible to draw a clear line between projects. This effectively means that GPLed code really becomes a fast-spreading plague.
Stuff like the Asshole GPL don't really help acceptance, creating infection vectors across service boundaries.
All in all, it was fun while it lasted. Some highly encapsulated projects like the Linux kernel may stick with an old, benign version of the license, but it doesn't have a future in today's environment.
Ever-increasing productivity could be something people looked forward to, instead of being something that was a real threat to putting food on their table, as the Luddites who smashed mechanized looms realized. That better productivity winds up harming the majority of people is a contradiction within the current system of production we live under. At some point, these contradictions become too great and the system breaks down, then it needs some major reconfiguring.
TL;DR: Never before in history could we have slacked off in hedonism as much as we could now, and here we are whining that we aren't able to work our asses off!
That burning feeling? That's your body telling you not to eat that.
You eating that anyway? Bannable offence.
127.0.1.1 www.facebook.com
I'm blacklisting *.facebook.com, their CDN (fbcdn.net), and connect.facebook.net in ABP (the connect rule is older since it used to break a bunch of sites when the service started and was even more unreliable than it is today). The other solution would be to just make my home DNS auth for those zones, which I've done for a bunch of other crap like doubleclick, making that stuff NXDOMAIN.
Ride the wave, get some public exposure, but in the end they just spouted some rubbish.
I wonder what the carbon footprint of all that fake research is.
Right now, the whole "Linux on the desktop" brouhaha is failing at the point where I have the choice of either
And that's not even starting with the overly half-assed state most "desktop" applications are in. Most of KDE is a pile of ugly hacks that manages to get worse with each iteration, only to be beaten by whatever cruft Mozilla is shoving out the door, actually losing features with every "release". Gnome is quickly going towards a point where they will be a sad imitation of an Apple UI without any usability or skillful design. The office suites are trying to rip off their commercial counterparts, but mostly fail because they suffer from an extreme amount of legacy ballast.
This is not about "arguments", this is about failing to get the basics right. Linux doesn't belong on a productive desktop by a long shot, unless your idea of a desktop still is a bunch of terminal windows running vim/emacs/ed (or if that meets your requirements).
Really, the most annoying part of a mumorpuger is the "community" that forms like an accretion disk around the game itself, usually a bunch of pushy whining kids who won't ever be satisfied, will always feel underpowered with their favourite in-game character, and threaten to leave to other games for years instead of packing up and leaving.
If there was a technology to eliminate actual players from those games, it would improve the communities a lot. We are finally getting closer to a point where it becomes possible. Exciting times.
It would be immediately obvious when someone performed a MitM attack using a valid certificate for "webmail". Why? Because the real certificate is signed by a ghetto CA that isn't trusted by any of the "major" vendors, and both the certificate and some of the intermediates have long since expired.
I'll be worried if I can access that site without a bunch of ugly warnings popping up.
On CompSci conferences, you're easily overdressed, even for the evening events. IME, "business casual" is all you really need.
And if you meant "networking *winkwink*", forget it :-P
The most important part of a conference is the social event. You get to know interesting people who potentially work for interesting companies (although I'm not quite sure about the event you're supposed to go to). You also get to learn that other people "in the field" are really as smart or stupid as you are, which will make you more comfortable with the environment, or it will drive you away from it. Either way, you get to know if you would like to stay in academia.
We routinely try to make our students' theses into publications at decent venues, and then send them there. We usually pay for the trip and the conference fee too. If that's not possible at your group, check if there's some kind of travel grant for the conference where you can apply.
Or manually port forwarding, as described on the Beat site.
Why should anyone be required to touch their router settings to install or run a game, unless they want to host game sessions? We're talking about settings here that mean opening up the system to even more vulnerabilities (UPnP gateway features), or require modifications that might well break functionality some time down the road (DNAT). In any case, the "average user" (and maybe to a lesser degree the "average gamer") does not have the knowledge about either alternative to evaluate risks or troubleshoot resulting problems.
it will happily corrupt itself beyond repair if it ever times out or is interrupted for some other reason.
Nonsense, I've killed it or had it crash multiple times while in progress. Still works fine. That's why, as with any BitTorrent client, it re-hashes the pieces it has downloaded and throws out any corrupt ones when it starts.
I've had it just sit there with no progress for hours, and it timed out after several minutes for a few times, each time from a clean (re)install. In any case, the patcher was completely unable to resume, coughed up an error message, and terminated. No installation attempt resulted in any visible progress, either in the closed or in the open beta.
as it didn't transfer more than maybe 1MB in the 20 or so attempts I made before sending some rather impolite feedback and uninstalling the POS
So, you didn't have UPnP or port forwarding set up, and it didn't work. That's not surprising.
Seeing how the instructions that SE pushes out for the closed beta (i.e., close to none) don't mention either, no I didn't, and it didn't work. So I followed the documentation, and it still failed.
The FFXIV beta really should mention that it uses a badly broken BitTorrent client as a "patcher". On top of pretty much requiring UPnP "trojan all-you-can-eat buffet" features to do anything useful, it will happily corrupt itself beyond repair if it ever times out or is interrupted for some other reason. Insofar, it didn't get to use much bandwidth on my network, as it didn't transfer more than maybe 1MB in the 20 or so attempts I made before sending some rather impolite feedback and uninstalling the POS.
The client is lacking any upstream limiting features, and poses as an opaque bandwidth stealer, so FWIW I consider it malware. There's also no easily reachable "STOP THE F***ING MUZAK" toggle. Any competent publisher that values its customers (so maybe all two of them) just buys bandwidth from some CDN and has the clients do straight downloads.
means 6 months of retro computing.
I wish they'd just cut the bull and focus on unstable and testing.
From the bug reports, it seems like KDE still can't handle silly things nobody ever uses, like persistent printer settings or SSL certificates. Both of those are regressions from KDE 3.5, and it seems like KDE tries to mimic Mozilla when it comes to usability.
But yeah, we totally need more UI bling. Not like there was work to do.
Ubuntu, and KDE both handle multiple monitors very well.
I call bullshit. KDE is a piece of crap when it comes to multi-monitor setup, even the latest 4.3.x series. One of the major issues is that RandR handling in KDE is basically a comment in the monitor setup tool, stating that nobody cares to implement it. So unless you're still running Xinerama, you're out of luck. And as was mentioned above, you can pretty much kiss composite desktops goodbye then. It goes so far that when you setup your monitors with the commandline xrandr tool, the control center will collapse all monitors back into one as soon as you open the monitor settings.
In happier news, Gnome seems to do far better in that regard and in printer handling
Dogs are not halal.
Hardly - it's about the Windows ecosystem. Legitimately purchased (but vulnerable) Windows PC's can get viruses from pirated copies of Windows just fine.
I kind of see what you tried to do there... but if your fully patched legitimate copy is vulnerable, then how would a fully patched illegitimate copy help anyone?