Just by chance, a potential employer may even go to the same channel as I, and may not hire me based on my antics. For many years standard netiquette on Usenet said "Take pride in your posts, your next employer is probably reading them." In the 1980's when the online community was mainly UUCP, this was likely true.
I can't find a really old version of the netiquette guidelines, but see rule #1 here: http://www.albion.com/netiquette/rule1.html which says something similar.
Another reason not to be offensive online
When you communicate through cyberspace -- via email or on discussion groups -- your words are written. And chances are they're stored somewhere where you have no control over them. In other words, there's a good chance they can come back to haunt you.
How is the WoW community going to take it? I think that depends on when and how the Wrath of the Lich King comes out. As of patch 2.3, they've trashed most of the sport of WoW (leveling to 60), so I'm sure I'm not the only one anxiously awaiting the new expansion.
Give me my World of Warcraft (as I've experienced it for the last year or so) and I don't particularly care what they do corporate-wise.
I'm not sure why I love that game more than Nethack/Rogue, but I do.
There are some people in this world who actually have some integrity. Granted, except that people with integrity are far and few between. There's a difference between saying "all" people are corrupt and "most" people are corrupt (or indifferent to corruption) in such and such.
Learning to tell the difference between the two is an important survival skill.
[Glad I read at -1 so I was able to see this, and it is not -1 "Offtopic", just -1 "I don't agree with you"]
Dead on comments, AC.
Sturgeons law, 90% of everything is crap, must be taken seriously. If I cannot teach my sons anything else, I hope to teach them bullshit detecting and how to glean useful information out of garbage. There isn't anyone I trust implicitly to do my own thinking for me, not even my wife and I will not think for my sons.
I agree with your comments, but the only one hurt by this incident is Eidos, IMO.
Yeah, I agree. There's just enough content here moderated -1 "I don't agree with you" to make it worthwhile scanning past all the trolltalk to get to it.
I do read GameInformer, dead tree edition, even though I'm not much of a gamer beyond World of Warcraft (and the now apparently and sadly dead GBA) and do recognize bias in the ratings. Their review of this game said pretty much what this guy said in the YouTube video link, though they simply omitted the bad parts of the review.
Also, writing as someone who has received freebies to review in the past (it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it[1]), I can say that true objectivity is extremely difficult in that sort of environment. If you're reviewing stuff you care about, it is only natural to want it to succeed IMO.
[1] O.K. I'm lying, it was a glorious job. Best I've had in 3 decades of experience in the computer industry.
Don't allow the AH to sell anything for more then 5 times the vendor cost. This would have to be thought through very carefully. A limit of 5 times vendor cost would eliminate the resale of unusable green/blue drops, instead they would be disenchanted.
Lower the cost of items. How you can charge 5000 Gold to learn to use a mount and not expect a spike in Gold selling and farming is beyond me. This also, would have to be thought through very carefully. I don't find the price of an elite flying mount outrageous (it's closer to 6000 gold than 5000 gold, btw), even though I'm still not even close to purchasing my first one. In my own experiences as a player playing multiple alts, it's only the first time you reach a certain mount level that's hard. Subsequent times are all trivial. True, I've been helped by a guildie the first time in every case so far, but I've also repaid back the loans with interest.
Farming for your own use and for sale to others is a basic part of the game. The whole Fishing profession is based on farming. Professional crafters require lots of basic mats to first skill up and then to make the rarer and most usable items.
I think Blizzard has already solved the problem of outrageous prices for midlevel epics (500 gold or more for a level 40ish epic as in my server's AH is theft). It's so easy to reach level 60 now, that the amount of time spent on the meaningful levels for such items will be smaller and reduce demand considerably.
Basically, I think patch 2.3 is extremely well thought out to eliminate the demand for shady out-of-game services like power leveling - no more outdoor elites, increased experience for questing between levels 30 through 60, and decreased experience required for levels 20 through 60, gold farmers - since there are so many more safe quests now, players can complete more quests and make mount money just from the results of questing and whatever professions they've chosen. And if they make it much more difficult to automate any of that through unattended botting, then so much the better. Note however, that the Chinese gold farmers are real people behind the keyboard, not bots.
I'm OK with those changes and have no intention of canceling any of my family's accounts.
I worry that since it's now so easy to reach level 60, Blizzard is going to have a problem with people who have played by the rules, reached level 58 and then find themselves completely stuck in Outlands because they've never learned to play. The thing I hate most in games is where a difficulty spike suddenly appears, a slow and steady increase in difficulty is always the best way to do it. I assume Blizzard has a plan for that, but that's their problem.
because trust me, you can tell if it's a bot or human playing Exactly.
even if it leads to a few retard players getting accused constantly of using bots when in fact it's they themselves who are getting stuck on that rock Been there done that. But it would be easy to tell that I was not a bot. The first time I got stuck trying to loot corpses in Searing Gorge (character frozen in the loot position), I opened a ticket and spoke directly with a GM, the time I got stuck trying to loot a corpse (that was on top of an unclimable rock) I had just killed in Hellfire Peninsula I just gave up after a minute or two of flailing.
And the worst time, in the first week or so when I was playing and fell off the Great Tree Teldrassil and died and couldn't get the wisp back to my corpse, I asked for help in the guild and someone explained spirit healer rezzing at the graveyard to me.
You make good points, although I seriously doubt there would be any false positives. I have little idea how understaffed their online GMs are though.
I don't play WOW, I don't get why people are obsessed with it, and that has absolutely nothing to do with the point, which is this:
1. Many people like playing WOW. It brings them happiness to play it.
2. The provider of WOW has instituted a policy that is objectionable. The first part of your statement is probably the root cause of your bogus item 2. This policy is not objectionable. I enjoy playing WoW. I do not object to reasonable measures taken to restrict or eliminate "cheating"[1], nor does anyone else in my guild. See my earlier posts where I described my reasoning in some detail.
The article doesn't go into any meaningful details, but I would be interested in knowing why my UI addon has suddenly approached the limits of what is considered legal. There's a lot more going on here than the article would indicate. Hypothetical threats, if they are really threats, will be fixed by Blizzard. WoW is a gold mine for them and I cannot believe they would endanger it.
Despite what you may believe, it is hard math. It is also harder than you might think to develop good glides for the game. So long as you playing attended that might be OK with me. If you are running unattended scripts overnight gathering rare mats in an area, then I'm sorry, but I do not agree with your approach.
I would be fine if there were separate servers for this, but the closest that blizzard has provided is PvP. If you are running mat gathering bots, then you could gather your rare mats on the bot server, then pay for a transfer to a regular server and enrich your other characters. Or, if you weren't allowed to transfer characters, you could still "legally" explore through programming the corners and limitations of Blizzard's interface and apply that to characters on regular servers.
From my standpoint and to name a specific example, it is extremely irritating to be competing against bots when trying to obtain fel cloth (the only mat in the game that can be transformed into 16 slot bags by a level 35 tailor and they're a rare drop off a specific type of demon in a very limited location). Been there done that and sadly had to move on because although I had to eat, work and sleep, the hordie bots that were there did not.
My opinion doesn't matter though. As you point out, it's Blizzard's opinion that counts.
Compare that to the number of people that would have a problem with Blizzard NOT doing everything possible to stop cheating and botting. I agree and they have made very visible progress in the year I've been playing WoW. The 2.3 patch is more of the same. Online gold sellers already have had their access to free advertising nuked. Leveling "services" have just been hit with Cheap Shot.
Why would people pay for leveling services and what not? Because it takes a casual player so dang long to get from level 1 to level 60 or 70. Leveling between 20 and 60 (and apparently especially between 30 and 60) has been made significantly easier. They've also wiped out in one stroke some of the most irritating midlevel quests by nuking outdoor elites (I found it sad in a strange way to visit the underwater murlocs in the Vile Reef and see them only as typical irritating murlocs and not dangerous like they were last week).
A more likely explanation of the general Azeroth nerf though, is that they want the vast majority of players to be in Outlands by the time they release the next expansion so that they'll buy it quickly.
I have no visibility into what changes they've made with respect to bot detection, but I've noted that my UI addon (cosmos) is generating new error messages about actions being blocked. Actually, it's time for me to get rid of cosmos because Blizzard has just about implemented everything (the right way) that I used it for.
Blizzard's doing the right thing for their customers by providing the best game experience possible. I truly believe that and it was most illuminating to me to play a few of the newly nerfed quests and compare the experience against the older harder versions. For all the difficulty, the older versions played better, but the new versions will just help (newer) people level faster. The UI changes also make it easier to find stuff on the ground and quest givers in an area. Those will help everyone. And, if you (still) think it's a lousy game...
You don't have to play it if you don't want to. Well said. There's a reason why there are 9.3 million subscribers and climbing, so let the rest of us have our fun. Competing against people who have used gold selling services and against bot-driven mat grinders is seriously un-fun. Anything which cuts into both of those activities is a Good Thing in my book. (People who have used leveling services and have gotten to Outlands or level 70 without learning how to play won't go any further anyway, so they're irrelevant).
Hum... I'm not so sure what "Social Networking" is, but I'm pretty sure its not Search. I mean, I dont think people go on MySpace or Facebook to search for information... If you think about it a second, the rest of your post refutes that statement.
As I understand it, people tend to go to social networking sites to search for long lost friends, or be available for long lost friends to find them. That is searching. Basic Google search doesn't do that good of a job of it, but it could...
I remember running Windows 95 on a 100mhz system with 8mb of ram. The thing installed off 13 floppy disks, took up about 50mb of hd space, and considering the specs of the system, ran very well. If that's not a lean OS I don't know what is. Commercial Unix in the mid 80's, System V/R2, ran nicely on far less than that. The largest of my first home Unix systems had 2.5MB of RAM, 50MB of total disk usable running on an M68010 10 MHz (and was far more stable than today's Microsoft Windows XP).
Thanks for the history. My first manager, post college was a Word fan.
few people had seen, let alone used, Xerox's Star or Apple's Lisa I had a homework assignment that required me to use a Star. I was not impressed by Smalltalk and object oriented programming then, neither am I impressed now. Too complex and bug-ridden compared to simpler things like functional programming. (There's a solid reason why Lisp alone of the languages invented over a half a century ago are still alive). The Star was cool though. I never used Lisa, but I was impressed by it. I first saw the Lisa as an intern at JPL. Nice machine and it could also run Unix.
The link to xemacs.org in your profile pretty much covers where you're coming from Only in so far as it was a lovely rose that smelled bad in 19.14 and needed a maintainer, so I became the lead guy for the next five years. XEmacs is a text editor and that is very different from word processing. I do not confuse the two, but apparently you do.
... to figure out that neither you nor your boss have taken 30 minutes to customize Word to work the way you want it to.... Let me guess, it's A-OK to spend 8 hours doing the same to Emacs First: I despise VIM on general principles, BSD vi was OK except for being too heavy weight to use comfortably over a 1200 baud connection on a loaded VAX. I was package maintainer for nvi at Turbolinux (and I often used nvi for touch up editing when I was in the final stages of preparing XEmacs releases) and I don't do the religious war XEmacs -vs- Vi thing unless I'm trolling on alt.religion.emacs or the equivalent.
Second: Your idea of how much time it takes to make an environment comfortable for you does not necessarily translate to anyone else. Neither does mine, except that in the case of XEmacs, I spent a lot of time hacking on the code to make it easier.
O.K. You successfully trolled me, hope I have a nice day.
Comparing Microsoft Word to XEmacs is like comparing apples to oranges -- totally different beasties.
As to word processors, the Microsoft Word on Microsoft Windows XP that I have unhappily been forced to use compared to FrameMaker for Sun OS 3, a product I was quite happy recommending for document preparation two decades ago is no comparison. FrameMaker 20 years ago was a superior word processing tool to today's Microsoft Word. Of course, FrameMaker used sensible default keybindings so from the first impression to having to do substantial documentation in it was quite easy for me.
The post I responded to made the unfounded statement that no one known to the poster hated Microsoft Office. Well, I do. Superior products exist, or existed before Microsoft forced them out of business.
There is one comparison between XEmacs and Microsoft Word that is valid though. When I navigate a GUI menu in XEmacs with the touchpad on a notebook, I can hit the menu item or submenu item I'm aiming at. With Microsoft Word, it's a much touchier situation. A user interface where the human is fighting the machine is a bad one. Microsoft Word in particular and Microsoft Windows XP in general, is tough and just seems broken to me. Of course, as I wrote earlier, if you've known nothing better, then it won't seem broken to you.
I've yet to meet someone who hates Microsoft Office Microsoft Office is total hell. The menus take two or three clicks to get right on a notebook for me. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. (Star Office on Sun's is a little better, but not by much).
Microsoft Office has an interface designed in Hell by idiots. I hate it. HATE IT.
You can't do anything that isn't programmed in. My boss, who is a Microsoft fan, fumbles around in its interface, I've watched him. The emperor is wearing no clothes.
You just think it's OK because you don't know anything better.
Yeah, I know I"ll be modded down for this. Whatever. Star Office sucks, but so does Microsoft Office.
I was impressed by what is now known as Microsoft Word before it was bought out by Microsoft, but that was a couple decades ago. What is also impressive is that I see the same kind of fumbling around in a twisty maze of GUI menus all alike that I saw when someone was once trying to impress me with Microsoft Windows for Workgroups. Not more than a couple of years previous, I had people screaming at me at my workplace to not require any of that in the UI guidelines I was writing for that section of the company.
So tell us, what here is worthy of the patent? Internet Search engines. The professor whose name is on the patent invented them. Really.
If it's simply parallel search Um no. I know this is/., but did the thought of reading the patent or the article ever occur to you before you wrote that?
Out of the patent articles I've seen on/., nearly every one of them contains something clever enough IMO to invalidate 99.9% of the ideas posted here as "prior art". This is clearly one of them.
This guy wrote the book on how to make efficient Internet Search engines and patented it before any search engines existed.
The way I've read this, it seems like a pishing expedition of Google needing to prove that they don't violate the patent, and not that there is yet any proof that they do violate it. You don't read very well.
The patent was filed in 1994, ie. before internet search engines.
The inventor wrote the book, several of them from the looks of the references, on how to make internet search engines before any existed.
Distributed batch jobs are not what is covered in the patent. They are not how Google implements its search engine either.
Executive summary: Google is almost certainly using technology covered by this patent and will settle out of court, quickly. And yes, Microsoft and Yahoo! are next.
And we'll take a job an run it on multiple machines to get a faster answer? Wrong. That's not what's covered by the patent.
IBM says play chess... Now, you're more on the right track. Before there was Deep Blue, there was Ken Thompson's Belle. Belle the machine, as versus Belle the program distributed as "/usr/games/chess" on earlier Unix systems, did have a similar architecture compared to the one patented. The query, "What move shall I play next?" was broken up into pieces and handed off to subordinated dedicated computer search chips which searched different portions of the position tree. Unfortunately, Belle was not networked so there was no internet involved and there wasn't any static database except for the opening book, so I would be doubtful that it would qualify as prior art.
What the hell do they teach at this school? Stuff this guy invented and patented it looks like.
Yes, it was filed in 1994. From reading the titles of references in the patent, many of them written by the inventor, I would expect most or all of them to have been required reading by anyone setting up an internet search engine.
The patent claims stress "non-relational" databases, but at the very bottom there is a poorly worded sentence that appears to claim any related distributed database technology as being under the patent.
My prediction is that Google will have to settle this one and quickly.
They didn't put a link to the patent in TFA. This sentence jumps right out at you:
Jarg learned of the alleged infringement from a Boston-area lawyer who thought Google's search technology resembled that covered by the patent, said Jarg's president, Michael Belanger, according to a reportin Saturday's Boston Globe newspaper. Whether or not Jarg is a patent troll or not, I don't know. They do appear to sell a related product. That lawyer, however, has "ambulance chaser" written all over him.
"Bayesian" is spelled correctly on the stupidfilter.org site. Maybe the FastSilicon author has a developmental version of the stupidfilter that works in reverse, kind of like jive or valspeak.
I'm not going to respond to the anonymous coward and for the record, my favorite browser is Konqueror.
For an automatic password thingie to work, it must store the passwords effectively as plain text. Please type password so I can automatically insert your password on this line? [ok]? I think not. That means that somewhere in the code path the password is in plain text or an encryption key is hardcoded into the binary.
Consider how he did this thing. He patched the binary to give access to the stored passwords. This does not require escalated privilege. Consider the common case where `~/bin' is inserted at the beginning of $PATH by/etc/profile (or the equivalent and $SHELL is readily available). Copy the binary (or the shell script wrapper and the binary), patch it with the password "sniffer" and he's in.
Yes, Microsoft Windows users who always run as administrator are most vulnerable, but the rest of us are too.
Kwallet, if it uses one password to substitute for multiple passwords and it only prompts once for a password is vulnerable to the same kind of attack.
So, once it is possible for an operating system installed on an actual computer to run in a virtual machine using all the same drivers, how long will it be before we see the hypervisor rootkit? I don't know. I'm still digesting the hypervisor stuffs in Linux. However, if it is possible, someone will do it and before anyone else's most optimistic prediction. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Excellent point and you deserve +1 insightful for it.
The built-in stealth features of the newest malware disturbs me. It's most logical, but it means that good programmers have replaced script kiddies. Sadly, I would expect more of this coming out of the US as our economy continues to go to hell.
It almost seems like you're excusing his behavior, and blaming it on Microsoft. Passwords should never be saved in plaintext. Clearly though, Microsoft is not the only one with criminally stupid behavior here because Mozilla/Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, etc. will do it too.
Both parties are guilty, and yes, I think any software product that stores passwords like that should be held guilty when that facility is exploited. To be sure, I am not including buffer overflows in that category. Human error is different from ignorance of history.
Password saving features, like ActiveX and Javascript are just stupid, stupid insecure features that were known to be insecure by design before they were invented. Stupidity (or greed) on the part of the managers deciding to release those features is no excuse.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't find a really old version of the netiquette guidelines, but see rule #1 here:
http://www.albion.com/netiquette/rule1.html
which says something similar. Another reason not to be offensive online
When you communicate through cyberspace -- via email or on discussion groups -- your words are written. And chances are they're stored somewhere where you have no control over them. In other words, there's a good chance they can come back to haunt you.
Give me my World of Warcraft (as I've experienced it for the last year or so) and I don't particularly care what they do corporate-wise.
I'm not sure why I love that game more than Nethack/Rogue, but I do.
Learning to tell the difference between the two is an important survival skill.
[Glad I read at -1 so I was able to see this, and it is not -1 "Offtopic", just -1 "I don't agree with you"]
Dead on comments, AC.
Sturgeons law, 90% of everything is crap, must be taken seriously. If I cannot teach my sons anything else, I hope to teach them bullshit detecting and how to glean useful information out of garbage. There isn't anyone I trust implicitly to do my own thinking for me, not even my wife and I will not think for my sons.
I agree with your comments, but the only one hurt by this incident is Eidos, IMO.
Yeah, I agree. There's just enough content here moderated -1 "I don't agree with you" to make it worthwhile scanning past all the trolltalk to get to it.
I do read GameInformer, dead tree edition, even though I'm not much of a gamer beyond World of Warcraft (and the now apparently and sadly dead GBA) and do recognize bias in the ratings. Their review of this game said pretty much what this guy said in the YouTube video link, though they simply omitted the bad parts of the review.
Also, writing as someone who has received freebies to review in the past (it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it[1]), I can say that true objectivity is extremely difficult in that sort of environment. If you're reviewing stuff you care about, it is only natural to want it to succeed IMO.
[1] O.K. I'm lying, it was a glorious job. Best I've had in 3 decades of experience in the computer industry.
Farming for your own use and for sale to others is a basic part of the game. The whole Fishing profession is based on farming. Professional crafters require lots of basic mats to first skill up and then to make the rarer and most usable items.
I think Blizzard has already solved the problem of outrageous prices for midlevel epics (500 gold or more for a level 40ish epic as in my server's AH is theft). It's so easy to reach level 60 now, that the amount of time spent on the meaningful levels for such items will be smaller and reduce demand considerably.
Basically, I think patch 2.3 is extremely well thought out to eliminate the demand for shady out-of-game services like power leveling - no more outdoor elites, increased experience for questing between levels 30 through 60, and decreased experience required for levels 20 through 60, gold farmers - since there are so many more safe quests now, players can complete more quests and make mount money just from the results of questing and whatever professions they've chosen. And if they make it much more difficult to automate any of that through unattended botting, then so much the better. Note however, that the Chinese gold farmers are real people behind the keyboard, not bots.
I'm OK with those changes and have no intention of canceling any of my family's accounts.
I worry that since it's now so easy to reach level 60, Blizzard is going to have a problem with people who have played by the rules, reached level 58 and then find themselves completely stuck in Outlands because they've never learned to play. The thing I hate most in games is where a difficulty spike suddenly appears, a slow and steady increase in difficulty is always the best way to do it. I assume Blizzard has a plan for that, but that's their problem.
And the worst time, in the first week or so when I was playing and fell off the Great Tree Teldrassil and died and couldn't get the wisp back to my corpse, I asked for help in the guild and someone explained spirit healer rezzing at the graveyard to me.
You make good points, although I seriously doubt there would be any false positives. I have little idea how understaffed their online GMs are though.
1. Many people like playing WOW. It brings them happiness to play it.
2. The provider of WOW has instituted a policy that is objectionable. The first part of your statement is probably the root cause of your bogus item 2. This policy is not objectionable. I enjoy playing WoW. I do not object to reasonable measures taken to restrict or eliminate "cheating"[1], nor does anyone else in my guild. See my earlier posts where I described my reasoning in some detail.
The article doesn't go into any meaningful details, but I would be interested in knowing why my UI addon has suddenly approached the limits of what is considered legal. There's a lot more going on here than the article would indicate. Hypothetical threats, if they are really threats, will be fixed by Blizzard. WoW is a gold mine for them and I cannot believe they would endanger it.
[1] "Cheating" as defined by Blizzard.
From my standpoint and to name a specific example, it is extremely irritating to be competing against bots when trying to obtain fel cloth (the only mat in the game that can be transformed into 16 slot bags by a level 35 tailor and they're a rare drop off a specific type of demon in a very limited location). Been there done that and sadly had to move on because although I had to eat, work and sleep, the hordie bots that were there did not.
My opinion doesn't matter though. As you point out, it's Blizzard's opinion that counts.
Why would people pay for leveling services and what not? Because it takes a casual player so dang long to get from level 1 to level 60 or 70. Leveling between 20 and 60 (and apparently especially between 30 and 60) has been made significantly easier. They've also wiped out in one stroke some of the most irritating midlevel quests by nuking outdoor elites (I found it sad in a strange way to visit the underwater murlocs in the Vile Reef and see them only as typical irritating murlocs and not dangerous like they were last week).
A more likely explanation of the general Azeroth nerf though, is that they want the vast majority of players to be in Outlands by the time they release the next expansion so that they'll buy it quickly.
I have no visibility into what changes they've made with respect to bot detection, but I've noted that my UI addon (cosmos) is generating new error messages about actions being blocked. Actually, it's time for me to get rid of cosmos because Blizzard has just about implemented everything (the right way) that I used it for. Blizzard's doing the right thing for their customers by providing the best game experience possible. I truly believe that and it was most illuminating to me to play a few of the newly nerfed quests and compare the experience against the older harder versions. For all the difficulty, the older versions played better, but the new versions will just help (newer) people level faster. The UI changes also make it easier to find stuff on the ground and quest givers in an area. Those will help everyone. And, if you (still) think it's a lousy game
That's maybe the most profound posting I've ever read. I never thought of it that way, but you are absolutely correct.
As I understand it, people tend to go to social networking sites to search for long lost friends, or be available for long lost friends to find them. That is searching. Basic Google search doesn't do that good of a job of it, but it could
... to figure out that neither you nor your boss have taken 30 minutes to customize Word to work the way you want it to.Let me guess, it's A-OK to spend 8 hours doing the same to Emacs First: I despise VIM on general principles, BSD vi was OK except for being too heavy weight to use comfortably over a 1200 baud connection on a loaded VAX. I was package maintainer for nvi at Turbolinux (and I often used nvi for touch up editing when I was in the final stages of preparing XEmacs releases) and I don't do the religious war XEmacs -vs- Vi thing unless I'm trolling on alt.religion.emacs or the equivalent.
Second: Your idea of how much time it takes to make an environment comfortable for you does not necessarily translate to anyone else. Neither does mine, except that in the case of XEmacs, I spent a lot of time hacking on the code to make it easier.
O.K. You successfully trolled me, hope I have a nice day.
Comparing Microsoft Word to XEmacs is like comparing apples to oranges -- totally different beasties.
As to word processors, the Microsoft Word on Microsoft Windows XP that I have unhappily been forced to use compared to FrameMaker for Sun OS 3, a product I was quite happy recommending for document preparation two decades ago is no comparison. FrameMaker 20 years ago was a superior word processing tool to today's Microsoft Word. Of course, FrameMaker used sensible default keybindings so from the first impression to having to do substantial documentation in it was quite easy for me.
The post I responded to made the unfounded statement that no one known to the poster hated Microsoft Office. Well, I do. Superior products exist, or existed before Microsoft forced them out of business.
There is one comparison between XEmacs and Microsoft Word that is valid though. When I navigate a GUI menu in XEmacs with the touchpad on a notebook, I can hit the menu item or submenu item I'm aiming at. With Microsoft Word, it's a much touchier situation. A user interface where the human is fighting the machine is a bad one. Microsoft Word in particular and Microsoft Windows XP in general, is tough and just seems broken to me. Of course, as I wrote earlier, if you've known nothing better, then it won't seem broken to you.
Microsoft Office has an interface designed in Hell by idiots. I hate it. HATE IT.
You can't do anything that isn't programmed in. My boss, who is a Microsoft fan, fumbles around in its interface, I've watched him. The emperor is wearing no clothes.
You just think it's OK because you don't know anything better.
Yeah, I know I"ll be modded down for this. Whatever. Star Office sucks, but so does Microsoft Office.
I was impressed by what is now known as Microsoft Word before it was bought out by Microsoft, but that was a couple decades ago. What is also impressive is that I see the same kind of fumbling around in a twisty maze of GUI menus all alike that I saw when someone was once trying to impress me with Microsoft Windows for Workgroups. Not more than a couple of years previous, I had people screaming at me at my workplace to not require any of that in the UI guidelines I was writing for that section of the company.
Out of the patent articles I've seen on
This guy wrote the book on how to make efficient Internet Search engines and patented it before any search engines existed.
If there is any prior art, I'd look towards the TRW Fast Data Finder (which should also be patented), or maybe TRW should be suing Google too.
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:BpqvVhCxlswJ:trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec2/papers/ps/trw.ps.gz+TRW+fast+data+finder&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=firefox-a
The patent was filed in 1994, ie. before internet search engines.
The inventor wrote the book, several of them from the looks of the references, on how to make internet search engines before any existed.
Distributed batch jobs are not what is covered in the patent. They are not how Google implements its search engine either.
Executive summary: Google is almost certainly using technology covered by this patent and will settle out of court, quickly. And yes, Microsoft and Yahoo! are next.
Yes, it was filed in 1994. From reading the titles of references in the patent, many of them written by the inventor, I would expect most or all of them to have been required reading by anyone setting up an internet search engine.
The patent claims stress "non-relational" databases, but at the very bottom there is a poorly worded sentence that appears to claim any related distributed database technology as being under the patent.
My prediction is that Google will have to settle this one and quickly.
"Bayesian" is spelled correctly on the stupidfilter.org site. Maybe the FastSilicon author has a developmental version of the stupidfilter that works in reverse, kind of like jive or valspeak.
I'm not going to respond to the anonymous coward and for the record, my favorite browser is Konqueror.
/etc/profile (or the equivalent and $SHELL is readily available). Copy the binary (or the shell script wrapper and the binary), patch it with the password "sniffer" and he's in.
For an automatic password thingie to work, it must store the passwords effectively as plain text. Please type password so I can automatically insert your password on this line? [ok]? I think not. That means that somewhere in the code path the password is in plain text or an encryption key is hardcoded into the binary.
Consider how he did this thing. He patched the binary to give access to the stored passwords. This does not require escalated privilege. Consider the common case where `~/bin' is inserted at the beginning of $PATH by
Yes, Microsoft Windows users who always run as administrator are most vulnerable, but the rest of us are too.
Kwallet, if it uses one password to substitute for multiple passwords and it only prompts once for a password is vulnerable to the same kind of attack.
Excellent point and you deserve +1 insightful for it.
The built-in stealth features of the newest malware disturbs me. It's most logical, but it means that good programmers have replaced script kiddies. Sadly, I would expect more of this coming out of the US as our economy continues to go to hell.
Both parties are guilty, and yes, I think any software product that stores passwords like that should be held guilty when that facility is exploited. To be sure, I am not including buffer overflows in that category. Human error is different from ignorance of history.
Password saving features, like ActiveX and Javascript are just stupid, stupid insecure features that were known to be insecure by design before they were invented. Stupidity (or greed) on the part of the managers deciding to release those features is no excuse.