All major spending projects are a bit of a sham, and everyone, the people paying and the people being paid know the game, that's on top of legitimately different views on how to count things (e.g. do you mean in year 2000 dollars, 2009 dollars, or total nominal dollars for the lifetime of the programme?).
Think of it this way. You and I agree to a billion dollar project. I spend 750 million and come back to you and say 'look, the last 250 million isn't going to be enough, and if I don't get more money you'll be left with nothing, because what I've spent so far won't work, it won't fly, won't go to space, won't be a completed tunnel, whatever'. So I ask for an extra 300 million dollars. Now you've already committed to a billion. And you've thrown away 750 million, that's basically a pile of garbage in a room right now. So you either pay more, and hopefully get something, or pay nothing and get accused of throwing away tax payer money.
Now lets say you and I have been doing this for the last 50 years. I'm the only guy who makes this thing you want. So you have to do business with boeing, er, sorry, me. When I ask for money I ask for less than it will cost, to lowball and get the contract, and you know full well that I'll take more money to do the project, because I haven't once managed anything on budget in the last 50 years, there's no reason to think I'm about to start now. But you also know the less money you offer now, the less you're likely to be asked to pony up in the future.
In this case both parties have a reasonable estimate of the 'real' cost for both sides, they just don't actually agree to pay that, because you always want to be pleasantly surprised when the other guy comes in on time and on budget, or offers to pony up way more money than it will actually take. It's a stupid system, but it has worked surprisingly well for basically the entire history of government.
And as I say, on top of all that is the legitimate accounting issues of different people counting things in different ways. With the F35 some people talk about the flyaway cost in 2009 dollars, some people talk about the total lifetime cost of the aircraft in nominal dollars (i.e. adjusting for projected inflation), other people talk about the total cost of operating the fleet of fighters, including pilots, training, bases, munitions etc. All of which are different things, and all of which can be cherry picked by politicians to make the other guy look bad.
Right, they both are strict adherents to bad ideas. Just what you want in a politician, righteous determination to stick to a plan in spite of evidence the plan is bad.
I'm not an american, but I'd rather a dishonest politician who does good things than an honest one who does bad things.
Tort reform would save the system more money then any of the current proposals.
That, unfortunately, is unlikely to be true. http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/751009
No matter how you 'reform' the system there will remain some liability.
Do you really think that parents that take their kids to the ER for a fever and/or ear infection are going to suddenly stop taking their kids to the ER and go to their regular doctor?
You never stop it completely. But after they've waiting 5 hours in an ER once, versus getting an appointment the next day with their family physician the problem isn't nearly as bad as it sounds. This has the downside of inflating ER wait times considerably in Canada and the UK for example, but most sane parents get the message.
The US spends almost 18% of GDP on healthcare. France and the UK both have better healthcare and come in around 10-12% of GDP. The best way to save money would be to copy either of their systems and tell the insurance companies to GTFO, you'd get better care for about half the price. Effectively this would be the same as extending medicare or medicaid to everyone with some relatively minor adjustments. Right now you've decided to copy the swiss system (which is still better than the US system by far), so it's something, but it could be better.
Keep in mind that part of medical lawsuits is the (entirely justifiable) cost of fixing whatever went wrong. When you have socialized care you still have that cost - but it's not a lawsuit anymore, the cash transaction is much smaller, so lawyers are taking less of a cut on top of it, and it becomes a system problem to try and reduce the cost fro accidents, rather than a liability problem to shield yourself from bankruptcy due to the cost of making a mistake.
Someone rich enough who doesn't want their view sullied or the the local owner of that strip of road in front of his house/business who paid to have it built in front. S/he is responsible for cleaning it off of his property, or keeping the unkempt masses off of his/her properly so they don't die there.
That, or the body just sits there and rots/is eaten by scavengers. Pure 'personal responsibility' also allows for the problem to simply not be solved and piles of bodies can just lie around. Because that works so well.
P.S. Yes, I'm serious that's probably about the argument ayn rand types would make, no, I don't think that's even remotely sensible.
In terms of, for example, the web database etc. mentioned in the question you're into a lot of installing an SQL server (that's separate from a developer team generally, but it's a 30 minute job if you know what you're doing), and then building the database. Once you built the database you don't necessarily have an 'installer', you just send them an image of the whole installation (or the whole physical machine).
If you're a company that specializes in making billing software databases then sure, you might have an install script and setup parameters than your installer guys can execute.
There's sort of a hierarchy of techie people. Not everyone at a higher level can do the low level jobs, but one person at a higher level might be able to do all of the lower level stuff in 20 minutes that would take them weeks. This isn't 'consumer' product, in enterprise you might send out a 'linux guy' (who doesn't know linux scripting, that's an advanced linux guy) to do a linux install, but he can be given detailed, line by line instructions to follow from developers. In enterprise 'you' as the development firm can be responsible for getting it installed and setup. And you have co-op students who are basically high school grads following instructions for installations, or you can have a partially automated lab with software engineers running deployment tools to hundreds of machines at a time, it just depends on how big an outfit you are and the sort of customers you have.
Right, but it's still for a 'this calendar year' basis, US accounting is kind of wonky to those of us on the outside, but the way I understand it from people I know who have done kickstarters is that a 2 year project you have to count it all as revenue for the one year you get it (it's not an investment, it's income), on a 3 month project this is a non issue, on a multi year project this can be really problematic.
I'm actually more concerned about projects that never get _delivered.
Unfortunately most of the major press kickstarter projects are a ways out from being due to be delivered.
In the case of the one you linked, the 90k handed over is considered revenue for the calendar year it's received and is taxable and stuff afaik, which is one of the big downsides to kickstarter.
The difference between the 'simulation of a product' and the link you have is that the 'simulation of a product' could be for something that won't ever work. The author could write a book, it might be terrible, but he can definitely write a book. A physical product (the example I have seen often used about this would be a water purifier) that doesn't actual do what they say it might poses a problem. If you give me 100k for a water purified odds are the water purifier won't ever actually purify water. If you give me 100k to write a book on water purifiers it might be the worst book ever written, but I can definitely produce a book.
It's like investing, but without the prospect of cash return, it's more 'investing in future entertainment' than future financial rewards. You may get goods (most of which will have more sentimental value than actual value). It's 'better' in some sense, because you know you're losing the money you give - there's no risk, you're just out the money - but it allows you to support a product that might not otherwise get made, and no one should give more than they can afford to lose, because they will definitely lose everything they give.
Also, it stabs at a lot of pricing models. I'm a games guy so I think in terms of games. If I look at games I've played the most those happen to be the paradox strategy games and the X series (I'm not linking because I'm not pitching them just take this as a statement of fact, as I am an expert in the games I have played the most), now those games have given me personally quite a lot more value than other comparably priced titles. I would have been quite happy with those products at double the price, and if I can be reasonably sure of another one in the series by offering to pay more then I'm 'investing' in my future entertainment, not my pension plan, but future entertainment.
It has the side benefit of being able to extract astronomical amounts of money (10 grand for a game) from people who have astronomical amounts of money and nothing to do with it. That money won't trickle down on it's own in some supply side voodoo, you need to create a product (fly out to meet the developers, get a statue of yourself in the game!) to sell at an extremely high margin. The rich guy gets some novelty and ego padding out of it, and the rest of us might get a game.
It would seem like a benefit of the system that you can actually get paid for the work you did, rather than being narrowly restricted to a handful of codes and having to 'pick the closest', where you go from say a 25% error on paper to 10% electronically that's good.
Obviously there will be fraud - even in a fully nationalized healthcare system doctors still try and find ways to get more money for the same work. It's management and oversights job to prevent it, and the more tools they have to find it, the better. It's the same problem with any workers, if you pay them by the hour they try and find a way to take more hours at a higher rate, if you pay per procedure they try and find a way to do more (or more expensive) procedures, if you pay them a salary they do the minimum necessary to qualify for yearly promotions and why do anymore when you get paid the same either way?
As hard as we try to hold doctors to a higher ethical standard than the average person (and pay them well for it) they are as greedy as the rest of us.
I figured that, but thats a hard assertion to make, because the password has to be passed in final form from the inputted text box through the hashing algorithm no matter what - ideally that operation is atomic and not interceptable, but you can't construct a hash character by character (at least not that I know of), so you have to take the whole input somewhere and then hash it. Somewhere along the line the whole input has to exist in memory.
Sure, but microsoft sees the writing on the wall here. Home computing is becoming small business computing. And microsoft wants to be your IT guy because that's a value added service they can charge for.
Cloud services are very useful for students, portability and you don't lose your data when someone steals your laptop (or you spill coffee on it etc.). They're useful for old people who can't figure out backups, and want to keep their (sometimes very) important documents safe from computer failures and theft or loss. With my parents I'm at the point where being able to see and edit their documents from 400km away might be useful as they're getting older, in case they start doing goofy things. All of the stuff google docs does now, but hopefully with better privacy controls, and better document editing tools and compatibility.
Without a doubt MS is trying to find a way to make the subscription plan work in the home environment even though they've pulled the idea from their enterprise products. Google gives a comparable service away for 'free', making users into the product, as strange as it may seem to come out in favour of MS over google, I'd rather pay for software than have someone scanning my data for marketable keywords. Granted, Microsoft will probably try and do both, but we can always hope not.
With enough money you can buy your way to freedom somewhere on earth. We're all stuck breathing air, and pollution ends up everywhere in varying concentrations.
But it's hard to believe that people, and especially businesses, will actually fall for this scam.
Actually the subscription thing is primarily driven by businesses, not consumers.
If you need to install 5000 computers you could be looking at 5 million dollars in cash outlays just for software licences. And as other people point out, when you need to upgrade you need to upgrade a lot of your IT, that can be 5 million dollars all at once. With a subscription cost it makes your expenses less bursty.
The other thing with businesses is that a subscription plan defers some of your IT responsibility away from in house, that's actually good for small shops. Trying to navigate the various upgrade paths, support options, and trying to stay compliant with volume licencing arrangements costs money.
It also means, when you layoff staff, that you aren't stuck holding investments in software that you don't need anymore.
You're right, most consumers don't care, but that's where you want to find a value added service to tack on that you're charging for. Cloud storage and synchronization sort of stuff usually.
How can brute force work on a web site sign in page?
Interception of the packets themselves. Remember hackers will have hotmail accounts themselves where they know what is being transmitted, so they might be able to reverse engineer the packets, they could also just compromise the database.
Brute force doesn't need to be done on the site itself if you can get an encrypted copy of password you can brute force that at your leisure.
The thing with hotmail, and windows live in general is that the system has so many different potential points of failure it's really hard to know where an attack came from. There's the web form, the web security, general security of the OS, hotmail is hugely popular so all of the various phishing scams centred around hotmail, then there are the various messenger clients (some of which might connect to microsoft messenger and not be from microsoft itself), all of the various versions of games for windows live, god knows how it's handled internally but each department might have control over their own mechanism to access the database (so if you signed in through an xbox site you'd be passed through something managed by the xbox team etc.).
I don't really envy anyone trying to secure systems like this. Too many things that can go wrong in too many different places, and isolating everything down to a single point of failure is still, well, a single point of failure.
The hashing algorithm they use might have collisions past 16 characters anyway, so you'd get no added security out of extra characters, and you only hash and handle the hash from the first 16 characters.
A limit of 16 characters is theoretically a problem, but not really, since the vast majority of users aren't making passwords that long anyway.
I suggest it's sort of intellectually dishonest if you evaluate a posting in a certain way based on who posted it rather than what was posted. Ideas should be evaluated based on their content rather than their source.
Depends. If someone on fox news claim that that they aren't in bed with the Romney campaign, or that Obama is in fact a kenyan muslim I know they're likely to be full of their usual shit. There's far more information in the world than I can reasonable parse through, so you have to pick your sources you trust and sources you don't, or you'll spend your life doing research and never actually getting things done. That doesn't mean I completely discount everything fox news said, but I'll leave it to someone else to actual check their facts - after all, it was the national enquirer that broke the Monika Lewinsky scandal correctly in detail (despite the vast majority of their material at the time being completely made up nonsense).
Also, posting everything purely anonymously makes it hard to verify you're continuing a conversation with the right person, which does happen in the comments here occasionally.
Believe it or not Walmart is actually pretty good to deal with in that regard. If they can sell it at a profit they don't seem to care. Have a game that uses steam, or an item that connects you primarily to an online store that would cut walmart of the process? No problem, as long as the product in question can make money.
I bet walmart would sell amazon gift cards if they exist (I don't know if there are physical amazon gift cards like there are for itunes, if they exist they might just not be where I am in canada).
Walmart are assholes about commoditized goods, if your toaster isn't the cheapest toaster on the market, or you don't expect to sell a million of them they won't talk to you, or they'll demand you lower the price. And if you order 40 000 toasters to put in their stores they can change their mind if and leave you stuck with them. But if they think they'll make money on maps to the nearest costco they'd probably sell them to you.
The EU isn't about personal freedom. On the spectrum of 'liberty equality and brotherhood' (liberte, egalite fraternite) europe and canada have landed on the side of Equality before the others, the US 'liberty' first, and China and Japan are more in the 'brotherhood' as in service to the country first.
As an American, I think holding the EU up as a model for personal freedom is ridiculous.
As a canadian I think holding up the united states a model of anything worth emulating is ridiculous. About the only thing you can say you do better than we do is bomb people, and half the time that does more harm than good.
See the problem? We all look at the primary responsibility of the role of government and the people differently. So we don't try and emulate each other, we should steal good ideas as they come up, and reject bad ones. The EU is trying to bottle up facebooks privacy invasion service, that's good. They supported the americans in torturing people, that's bad, but they're coming around to prosecuting that, which is good. The US has a relatively large federal government, in a single currency, the EU has almost no 'federal' government and a hodge podge of currencies but the Euro area is a single currency without a state, you can guess which is working better based on what is happening in Spain, Italy, and Greece.
We also have recognize where our situations are different. Police in England don't carry guns, but there's also a lot less gun crime in england than in the US, so following the US model would be bad, and the US following the UK model wouldn't work either (unless you could magically make millions of guns appear or disappear of course).
It's an art history book. A critique of a work is useless unless you've at lest seen a representation of the work being discussed.
Powerpoint in class... links on the web.
obviously we have to disagree on this point, but art history journals and discussions don't include a print of the original. Obviously the book was at least in part written assuming it would have the images -that's bad form, but you don't need the image in the book to discuss it in class.
People who are on death row have every incentive to save their own life in protest, and your legal system has to work hard to be sure it's not executing the wrong person, so you need multiple trials and so on. With a prison sentence no on feels any great obligation to listen to repeated pleas for clemency.
And frankly, I see it as a release. Given the option of life without parole and death, I will take death over an 8'x6' room.
False choice much? Not all prison is a single lonely cell. Lots of people with serious crimes get various forms of parole, visitation, and, as crazy as it sounds, people in prison can actually make friends and have sort of lives within the confines of walls. Not all of them certainly, but a well designed prison system that's exactly what happens - you're trying to prepare people to behave properly when they leave, not punish them for how they behaved before they got there.
Keeping people in jail for life, now THAT is not civilized.
Depends on the jail doesn't it? A jail of people 70+ and a retirement home are, remarkably, not that much different. And the state is on the hook either way, since someone who just spent 25 years in prison is unlikely to have much in the way of assets to retire on.
Also, you only incarcerate people for their entire lives if they pose a serious threat to society for their entire lives, at least in civilized countries. Anders Brevik could conceivably be out of jail at age 53 (the maximum term for any prisoner in Norway, though he is subject to 'containment' which is a lot like life in prison, where he'll be stuck as long as people thing he's a threat to society). Assuming he becomes less of a racist raving nutter in the next 10 years he might even qualify for parole.
You've made a nice narrative, based on an assertion one can only assume was 'not intended to be a factual statement' and two false choices. That doesn't help the debate about death penalty policy. Now if you want to compare death penalty policy in say, Iran, Saudi Arabia or China to Europe then sure, your assertions might have some validity, but they come with their own complications, and the death penalty is not the most serious problem facing their justice systems.
No, I meant literally. You don't find computers in books.
A photograph of a computer isn't functional, theoretically a photograph of a piece of art might be useful (but maybe not, if you're shrinking it down to book size it might lose some of its appeal).
Also, as I pointed out to someone else, most of the coding books you get these days have the code online and the text just references the code online. At least in my little corner of the CS universe which is AI/Graphics/Game programming/HPC.
that's what makes it bizarre. It's more like the book wasn't finished.
Again though, as I say, if the 'book' is just a very expensive way to get the online version of the book that does actually work properly then whatever, it weird, if you didn't want weird don't go to OCAD.
Second of all, none of my computer science books have computers in them, lots of them don't have code in them. That is, believe it or not, not the point.
A comp sci book doesn't need to have programming in it because comp sci is not all programming. I specifically mentioned coding books as not having code in them.
An art book need not be about looking at art, it's about critique of art and discussion of the art. How representative the sample image is of the entire book I don't know.
Also, I develop the curriculum and choose the CS textbook these days. Which is why I have so many textbooks, and I'm still not sure if students end up happier (or better off) with a book that is entirely self contained, but has no fully working code, or with a book that requires you access a website to get the code at all. My general feeling is that 10 years from now the book that is entirely self contained is better as a textbook - because the code snippets in isolation should still do their thing so to speak - whereas the more immediately topical stuff is good as a course pack, but I haven't found the sweet spot yet.
Especially in first and second year we cover a lot of core CS concepts as part of programming, so they tend to intermingle a bit. Not everyone does though, I know our colleagues down the highway at waterloo are more theoretically inclined than we are, but their admission average is also 10 points higher than ours.
I thought, and admittedly, I'm purely a game AI guy, so I could be wrong, but I thought that book was replaced by that author with some newer variant (the systems approach one).
This is why we shouldn't recommend old books, just because you can get one copy cheap doesn't mean you can get a full class worth of them cheap. We had a prof at the last place I was that used to find textbooks from bargain bins to keep costs down. Unfortunately finding 150 or 300 copies of books that are bargain binned is not trivial.
Also, you've made a choice - you gambled on Amazon, and you could lose. You could suck it up and pay the full price and know you'll have the book from the bookstore. That's a fair market. At least here you couldn't use the book as a text if the bookstore couldn't get it, but that comes with a premium cost because anyone who can find it cheap will.
Slashdot Mirror
All major spending projects are a bit of a sham, and everyone, the people paying and the people being paid know the game, that's on top of legitimately different views on how to count things (e.g. do you mean in year 2000 dollars, 2009 dollars, or total nominal dollars for the lifetime of the programme?).
Think of it this way. You and I agree to a billion dollar project. I spend 750 million and come back to you and say 'look, the last 250 million isn't going to be enough, and if I don't get more money you'll be left with nothing, because what I've spent so far won't work, it won't fly, won't go to space, won't be a completed tunnel, whatever'. So I ask for an extra 300 million dollars. Now you've already committed to a billion. And you've thrown away 750 million, that's basically a pile of garbage in a room right now. So you either pay more, and hopefully get something, or pay nothing and get accused of throwing away tax payer money.
Now lets say you and I have been doing this for the last 50 years. I'm the only guy who makes this thing you want. So you have to do business with boeing, er, sorry, me. When I ask for money I ask for less than it will cost, to lowball and get the contract, and you know full well that I'll take more money to do the project, because I haven't once managed anything on budget in the last 50 years, there's no reason to think I'm about to start now. But you also know the less money you offer now, the less you're likely to be asked to pony up in the future.
In this case both parties have a reasonable estimate of the 'real' cost for both sides, they just don't actually agree to pay that, because you always want to be pleasantly surprised when the other guy comes in on time and on budget, or offers to pony up way more money than it will actually take. It's a stupid system, but it has worked surprisingly well for basically the entire history of government.
And as I say, on top of all that is the legitimate accounting issues of different people counting things in different ways. With the F35 some people talk about the flyaway cost in 2009 dollars, some people talk about the total lifetime cost of the aircraft in nominal dollars (i.e. adjusting for projected inflation), other people talk about the total cost of operating the fleet of fighters, including pilots, training, bases, munitions etc. All of which are different things, and all of which can be cherry picked by politicians to make the other guy look bad.
Right, they both are strict adherents to bad ideas. Just what you want in a politician, righteous determination to stick to a plan in spite of evidence the plan is bad.
I'm not an american, but I'd rather a dishonest politician who does good things than an honest one who does bad things.
Tort reform would save the system more money then any of the current proposals.
That, unfortunately, is unlikely to be true.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/751009
No matter how you 'reform' the system there will remain some liability.
Do you really think that parents that take their kids to the ER for a fever and/or ear infection are going to suddenly stop taking their kids to the ER and go to their regular doctor?
You never stop it completely. But after they've waiting 5 hours in an ER once, versus getting an appointment the next day with their family physician the problem isn't nearly as bad as it sounds. This has the downside of inflating ER wait times considerably in Canada and the UK for example, but most sane parents get the message.
The US spends almost 18% of GDP on healthcare. France and the UK both have better healthcare and come in around 10-12% of GDP. The best way to save money would be to copy either of their systems and tell the insurance companies to GTFO, you'd get better care for about half the price. Effectively this would be the same as extending medicare or medicaid to everyone with some relatively minor adjustments. Right now you've decided to copy the swiss system (which is still better than the US system by far), so it's something, but it could be better.
Keep in mind that part of medical lawsuits is the (entirely justifiable) cost of fixing whatever went wrong. When you have socialized care you still have that cost - but it's not a lawsuit anymore, the cash transaction is much smaller, so lawyers are taking less of a cut on top of it, and it becomes a system problem to try and reduce the cost fro accidents, rather than a liability problem to shield yourself from bankruptcy due to the cost of making a mistake.
Someone rich enough who doesn't want their view sullied or the the local owner of that strip of road in front of his house/business who paid to have it built in front. S/he is responsible for cleaning it off of his property, or keeping the unkempt masses off of his/her properly so they don't die there.
That, or the body just sits there and rots/is eaten by scavengers. Pure 'personal responsibility' also allows for the problem to simply not be solved and piles of bodies can just lie around. Because that works so well.
P.S. Yes, I'm serious that's probably about the argument ayn rand types would make, no, I don't think that's even remotely sensible.
depends on the software....
In terms of, for example, the web database etc. mentioned in the question you're into a lot of installing an SQL server (that's separate from a developer team generally, but it's a 30 minute job if you know what you're doing), and then building the database. Once you built the database you don't necessarily have an 'installer', you just send them an image of the whole installation (or the whole physical machine).
If you're a company that specializes in making billing software databases then sure, you might have an install script and setup parameters than your installer guys can execute.
There's sort of a hierarchy of techie people. Not everyone at a higher level can do the low level jobs, but one person at a higher level might be able to do all of the lower level stuff in 20 minutes that would take them weeks. This isn't 'consumer' product, in enterprise you might send out a 'linux guy' (who doesn't know linux scripting, that's an advanced linux guy) to do a linux install, but he can be given detailed, line by line instructions to follow from developers. In enterprise 'you' as the development firm can be responsible for getting it installed and setup. And you have co-op students who are basically high school grads following instructions for installations, or you can have a partially automated lab with software engineers running deployment tools to hundreds of machines at a time, it just depends on how big an outfit you are and the sort of customers you have.
Right, but it's still for a 'this calendar year' basis, US accounting is kind of wonky to those of us on the outside, but the way I understand it from people I know who have done kickstarters is that a 2 year project you have to count it all as revenue for the one year you get it (it's not an investment, it's income), on a 3 month project this is a non issue, on a multi year project this can be really problematic.
I'm actually more concerned about projects that never get _delivered.
Unfortunately most of the major press kickstarter projects are a ways out from being due to be delivered.
In the case of the one you linked, the 90k handed over is considered revenue for the calendar year it's received and is taxable and stuff afaik, which is one of the big downsides to kickstarter.
The difference between the 'simulation of a product' and the link you have is that the 'simulation of a product' could be for something that won't ever work. The author could write a book, it might be terrible, but he can definitely write a book. A physical product (the example I have seen often used about this would be a water purifier) that doesn't actual do what they say it might poses a problem. If you give me 100k for a water purified odds are the water purifier won't ever actually purify water. If you give me 100k to write a book on water purifiers it might be the worst book ever written, but I can definitely produce a book.
It's like investing, but without the prospect of cash return, it's more 'investing in future entertainment' than future financial rewards. You may get goods (most of which will have more sentimental value than actual value). It's 'better' in some sense, because you know you're losing the money you give - there's no risk, you're just out the money - but it allows you to support a product that might not otherwise get made, and no one should give more than they can afford to lose, because they will definitely lose everything they give.
Also, it stabs at a lot of pricing models. I'm a games guy so I think in terms of games. If I look at games I've played the most those happen to be the paradox strategy games and the X series (I'm not linking because I'm not pitching them just take this as a statement of fact, as I am an expert in the games I have played the most), now those games have given me personally quite a lot more value than other comparably priced titles. I would have been quite happy with those products at double the price, and if I can be reasonably sure of another one in the series by offering to pay more then I'm 'investing' in my future entertainment, not my pension plan, but future entertainment.
It has the side benefit of being able to extract astronomical amounts of money (10 grand for a game) from people who have astronomical amounts of money and nothing to do with it. That money won't trickle down on it's own in some supply side voodoo, you need to create a product (fly out to meet the developers, get a statue of yourself in the game!) to sell at an extremely high margin. The rich guy gets some novelty and ego padding out of it, and the rest of us might get a game.
It would seem like a benefit of the system that you can actually get paid for the work you did, rather than being narrowly restricted to a handful of codes and having to 'pick the closest', where you go from say a 25% error on paper to 10% electronically that's good.
Obviously there will be fraud - even in a fully nationalized healthcare system doctors still try and find ways to get more money for the same work. It's management and oversights job to prevent it, and the more tools they have to find it, the better. It's the same problem with any workers, if you pay them by the hour they try and find a way to take more hours at a higher rate, if you pay per procedure they try and find a way to do more (or more expensive) procedures, if you pay them a salary they do the minimum necessary to qualify for yearly promotions and why do anymore when you get paid the same either way?
As hard as we try to hold doctors to a higher ethical standard than the average person (and pay them well for it) they are as greedy as the rest of us.
I figured that, but thats a hard assertion to make, because the password has to be passed in final form from the inputted text box through the hashing algorithm no matter what - ideally that operation is atomic and not interceptable, but you can't construct a hash character by character (at least not that I know of), so you have to take the whole input somewhere and then hash it. Somewhere along the line the whole input has to exist in memory.
Sure, but microsoft sees the writing on the wall here. Home computing is becoming small business computing. And microsoft wants to be your IT guy because that's a value added service they can charge for.
Cloud services are very useful for students, portability and you don't lose your data when someone steals your laptop (or you spill coffee on it etc.). They're useful for old people who can't figure out backups, and want to keep their (sometimes very) important documents safe from computer failures and theft or loss. With my parents I'm at the point where being able to see and edit their documents from 400km away might be useful as they're getting older, in case they start doing goofy things. All of the stuff google docs does now, but hopefully with better privacy controls, and better document editing tools and compatibility.
Without a doubt MS is trying to find a way to make the subscription plan work in the home environment even though they've pulled the idea from their enterprise products. Google gives a comparable service away for 'free', making users into the product, as strange as it may seem to come out in favour of MS over google, I'd rather pay for software than have someone scanning my data for marketable keywords. Granted, Microsoft will probably try and do both, but we can always hope not.
With enough money you can buy your way to freedom somewhere on earth. We're all stuck breathing air, and pollution ends up everywhere in varying concentrations.
But it's hard to believe that people, and especially businesses, will actually fall for this scam.
Actually the subscription thing is primarily driven by businesses, not consumers.
If you need to install 5000 computers you could be looking at 5 million dollars in cash outlays just for software licences. And as other people point out, when you need to upgrade you need to upgrade a lot of your IT, that can be 5 million dollars all at once. With a subscription cost it makes your expenses less bursty.
The other thing with businesses is that a subscription plan defers some of your IT responsibility away from in house, that's actually good for small shops. Trying to navigate the various upgrade paths, support options, and trying to stay compliant with volume licencing arrangements costs money.
It also means, when you layoff staff, that you aren't stuck holding investments in software that you don't need anymore.
You're right, most consumers don't care, but that's where you want to find a value added service to tack on that you're charging for. Cloud storage and synchronization sort of stuff usually.
How can brute force work on a web site sign in page?
Interception of the packets themselves. Remember hackers will have hotmail accounts themselves where they know what is being transmitted, so they might be able to reverse engineer the packets, they could also just compromise the database.
Brute force doesn't need to be done on the site itself if you can get an encrypted copy of password you can brute force that at your leisure.
The thing with hotmail, and windows live in general is that the system has so many different potential points of failure it's really hard to know where an attack came from. There's the web form, the web security, general security of the OS, hotmail is hugely popular so all of the various phishing scams centred around hotmail, then there are the various messenger clients (some of which might connect to microsoft messenger and not be from microsoft itself), all of the various versions of games for windows live, god knows how it's handled internally but each department might have control over their own mechanism to access the database (so if you signed in through an xbox site you'd be passed through something managed by the xbox team etc.).
I don't really envy anyone trying to secure systems like this. Too many things that can go wrong in too many different places, and isolating everything down to a single point of failure is still, well, a single point of failure.
Um... Not many really.
The hashing algorithm they use might have collisions past 16 characters anyway, so you'd get no added security out of extra characters, and you only hash and handle the hash from the first 16 characters.
A limit of 16 characters is theoretically a problem, but not really, since the vast majority of users aren't making passwords that long anyway.
I suggest it's sort of intellectually dishonest if you evaluate a posting in a certain way based on who posted it rather than what was posted.
Ideas should be evaluated based on their content rather than their source.
Depends. If someone on fox news claim that that they aren't in bed with the Romney campaign, or that Obama is in fact a kenyan muslim I know they're likely to be full of their usual shit. There's far more information in the world than I can reasonable parse through, so you have to pick your sources you trust and sources you don't, or you'll spend your life doing research and never actually getting things done. That doesn't mean I completely discount everything fox news said, but I'll leave it to someone else to actual check their facts - after all, it was the national enquirer that broke the Monika Lewinsky scandal correctly in detail (despite the vast majority of their material at the time being completely made up nonsense).
Also, posting everything purely anonymously makes it hard to verify you're continuing a conversation with the right person, which does happen in the comments here occasionally.
Believe it or not Walmart is actually pretty good to deal with in that regard. If they can sell it at a profit they don't seem to care. Have a game that uses steam, or an item that connects you primarily to an online store that would cut walmart of the process? No problem, as long as the product in question can make money.
I bet walmart would sell amazon gift cards if they exist (I don't know if there are physical amazon gift cards like there are for itunes, if they exist they might just not be where I am in canada).
Walmart are assholes about commoditized goods, if your toaster isn't the cheapest toaster on the market, or you don't expect to sell a million of them they won't talk to you, or they'll demand you lower the price. And if you order 40 000 toasters to put in their stores they can change their mind if and leave you stuck with them. But if they think they'll make money on maps to the nearest costco they'd probably sell them to you.
The EU isn't about personal freedom. On the spectrum of 'liberty equality and brotherhood' (liberte, egalite fraternite) europe and canada have landed on the side of Equality before the others, the US 'liberty' first, and China and Japan are more in the 'brotherhood' as in service to the country first.
As an American, I think holding the EU up as a model for personal freedom is ridiculous.
As a canadian I think holding up the united states a model of anything worth emulating is ridiculous. About the only thing you can say you do better than we do is bomb people, and half the time that does more harm than good.
See the problem? We all look at the primary responsibility of the role of government and the people differently. So we don't try and emulate each other, we should steal good ideas as they come up, and reject bad ones. The EU is trying to bottle up facebooks privacy invasion service, that's good. They supported the americans in torturing people, that's bad, but they're coming around to prosecuting that, which is good. The US has a relatively large federal government, in a single currency, the EU has almost no 'federal' government and a hodge podge of currencies but the Euro area is a single currency without a state, you can guess which is working better based on what is happening in Spain, Italy, and Greece.
We also have recognize where our situations are different. Police in England don't carry guns, but there's also a lot less gun crime in england than in the US, so following the US model would be bad, and the US following the UK model wouldn't work either (unless you could magically make millions of guns appear or disappear of course).
It's an art history book. A critique of a work is useless unless you've at lest seen a representation of the work being discussed.
Powerpoint in class... links on the web.
obviously we have to disagree on this point, but art history journals and discussions don't include a print of the original. Obviously the book was at least in part written assuming it would have the images -that's bad form, but you don't need the image in the book to discuss it in class.
It saves the tax payer thousands upon thousands of dollars.
Except that it doesn't.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty
People who are on death row have every incentive to save their own life in protest, and your legal system has to work hard to be sure it's not executing the wrong person, so you need multiple trials and so on. With a prison sentence no on feels any great obligation to listen to repeated pleas for clemency.
And frankly, I see it as a release. Given the option of life without parole and death, I will take death over an 8'x6' room.
False choice much? Not all prison is a single lonely cell. Lots of people with serious crimes get various forms of parole, visitation, and, as crazy as it sounds, people in prison can actually make friends and have sort of lives within the confines of walls. Not all of them certainly, but a well designed prison system that's exactly what happens - you're trying to prepare people to behave properly when they leave, not punish them for how they behaved before they got there.
Keeping people in jail for life, now THAT is not civilized.
Depends on the jail doesn't it? A jail of people 70+ and a retirement home are, remarkably, not that much different. And the state is on the hook either way, since someone who just spent 25 years in prison is unlikely to have much in the way of assets to retire on.
Also, you only incarcerate people for their entire lives if they pose a serious threat to society for their entire lives, at least in civilized countries. Anders Brevik could conceivably be out of jail at age 53 (the maximum term for any prisoner in Norway, though he is subject to 'containment' which is a lot like life in prison, where he'll be stuck as long as people thing he's a threat to society). Assuming he becomes less of a racist raving nutter in the next 10 years he might even qualify for parole.
You've made a nice narrative, based on an assertion one can only assume was 'not intended to be a factual statement' and two false choices. That doesn't help the debate about death penalty policy. Now if you want to compare death penalty policy in say, Iran, Saudi Arabia or China to Europe then sure, your assertions might have some validity, but they come with their own complications, and the death penalty is not the most serious problem facing their justice systems.
No, I meant literally. You don't find computers in books.
A photograph of a computer isn't functional, theoretically a photograph of a piece of art might be useful (but maybe not, if you're shrinking it down to book size it might lose some of its appeal).
Also, as I pointed out to someone else, most of the coding books you get these days have the code online and the text just references the code online. At least in my little corner of the CS universe which is AI/Graphics/Game programming/HPC.
that's what makes it bizarre. It's more like the book wasn't finished.
Again though, as I say, if the 'book' is just a very expensive way to get the online version of the book that does actually work properly then whatever, it weird, if you didn't want weird don't go to OCAD.
to quote myself on the topic
Second of all, none of my computer science books have computers in them, lots of them don't have code in them. That is, believe it or not, not the point.
A comp sci book doesn't need to have programming in it because comp sci is not all programming. I specifically mentioned coding books as not having code in them.
An art book need not be about looking at art, it's about critique of art and discussion of the art. How representative the sample image is of the entire book I don't know.
Also, I develop the curriculum and choose the CS textbook these days. Which is why I have so many textbooks, and I'm still not sure if students end up happier (or better off) with a book that is entirely self contained, but has no fully working code, or with a book that requires you access a website to get the code at all. My general feeling is that 10 years from now the book that is entirely self contained is better as a textbook - because the code snippets in isolation should still do their thing so to speak - whereas the more immediately topical stuff is good as a course pack, but I haven't found the sweet spot yet.
Especially in first and second year we cover a lot of core CS concepts as part of programming, so they tend to intermingle a bit. Not everyone does though, I know our colleagues down the highway at waterloo are more theoretically inclined than we are, but their admission average is also 10 points higher than ours.
AI Application Programming?
I thought, and admittedly, I'm purely a game AI guy, so I could be wrong, but I thought that book was replaced by that author with some newer variant (the systems approach one).
This is why we shouldn't recommend old books, just because you can get one copy cheap doesn't mean you can get a full class worth of them cheap. We had a prof at the last place I was that used to find textbooks from bargain bins to keep costs down. Unfortunately finding 150 or 300 copies of books that are bargain binned is not trivial.
Also, you've made a choice - you gambled on Amazon, and you could lose. You could suck it up and pay the full price and know you'll have the book from the bookstore. That's a fair market. At least here you couldn't use the book as a text if the bookstore couldn't get it, but that comes with a premium cost because anyone who can find it cheap will.
Do they have empty spaces where source code was meant to be, with a URL?
Yes, quite a lot of them actually.
Most coding books these days have an online presence where you get the actual source code, and the text itself just points you to it.