Which has its merits - the XBox Live experience is generally superior to most roll-your-own-multiplayer solutions for PC games. I'm still beholden to the mouse/kb interface for first person shooters, but Live is the way to go for games well-suited to the console-style controller, since you get reliable voice, game-matching, etc.
Why hasn't someone made a mouse and kb for the XBox, anyway? Or even a keypad suitable for gaming rather than a full keyboard?
I agree, the spam angle is a pretty weak context, and the gain is questionable compared to the fallout.
The only reason I use a Yahoo account is the fact that Trillian makes it trivially easy to access it without additional software - I have all of 3 or 4 contacts on that service, and at least 2 of them have accounts on other services anyway.
I think these IM services need to revisit the whole idea of an ad-encumbered free client as a source of revenue.
Like the free email services, they're always going to be loss leaders to hypothetically profitable services (search, ads on the portal, paid-for premium email, etc.). Keep the IM-driven mail notification, and focus on that free, ad-encumbered web-based email client instead - I haven't seen nearly as big a push to make alternative clients to *that*, though I'm sure they exist.
Either way, Yahoo should make a declarative statement about their attitude towards 3rd party clients of their protocol - so their current/potential users know where they stand, so these 3rd party clients know where they stand, etc.
The way I see it, they are hurting themselves more this way than if they took either side of the fence:
1) Just say no - State that they don't intend to support 3rd party clients and discourage their users from using them (for security, features, whatever other reason they want to claim in addition to the unstated-but-primary reason - ad revenue, why else would they bother to have the service?).
2) Walk the path - Go for the customer 'warm fuzzy' goodwill factor by officially allowing 3rd party clients to interoperate (though without technical support). All they'd really have to do is publish protocol change information with some lead time so the other clients out there can have the changes ready to go. Obviously, responding to that notice in a timely and intelligent fashion (e.g. Trillian's devs making their client auto-update) are not Yahoo's problem.
As it stands, even if Yahoo *isn't* out to break these other clients, they may as well be, because that's the public perception to a situation like this. So take a stand either way.
Good point - texture sheets that encompass the whole model, for example, and the engine is responsible for slapping the right parts onto the right facings of the model.
So, it's a pretty finite ceiling, which is the point we're (almost) all trying to make:)
You missed part of the parent's point: Given a certain screen resolution, you can quickly compute an upper limit to how much texture information you can keep in physical (that is, non-virtual) memory at once.
From there it's a short trip to see that the volume of RAM is a potential performance bottleneck.
Balanced against that is your point about the OS having a smaller footprint; the high memory *bandwidth*; and the fact that the screen resolution generally *won't* be 1024x1024. I don't know the HDTV standard screen resolution but the standard PAL or NTSC out certainly won't be needing that many pixels per frame.
VGA out will be nice, I'm one of those who like the option of getting higher resolution on a smaller screen that's not in the living room (and, thus, less likely to be contended for by significant others, children, etc.). That's assuming that it puts out a smart and/or configurable resolution to VGA out (especially for folks with LCD screens...).
Plus, it's likely to be a lot simpler to hook up to the network connection if it can be in the computer room instead of the living room...
Making the source code available to anyone makes it easier for people to find holes.
This is a proven, incontrovertible fact.
It makes it easier to find, but that doesn't mean open source automatically more secure - you still have to have the right people actually looking, and a defect has to be what they're looking for. I'll explain.
If no-one qualified to spot the hole bothers to look, open source doesn't buy you anything (this is why bugs in things like OpenSSL can linger quite awhile before being discovered - not enough of the right people bothering to look, even though *anyone* can and many do).
A bigger problem is the disconnect between design limitations not meeting end-user expectations. The recent shining example of this is the latest set of CVS vulnerabilities: The CVS team does not claim CVS is secure enough to be publicly-accessible over the internet; yet it frequently IS placed in this position, and that makes it an ongoing security disaster waiting to happen. (Linkage: "We have always said that CVS is not secure")
Bug? No; design limitation. But if the end users aren't aware of that (or, worse, choose to disregard the danger), it's still a vulnerability waiting to be exploited, and open source does NOTHING to prevent that.
So, "easier to find holes"? I'll go with the stock CompSci answer, "It depends". It's certainly not a simple or complete answer.
Glad to see everyone staying optimistic about these things!
Some of us still want conclusive data on IF, and if so, HOW MANY Earth-like planets there are out there - on the theory that extraterrestrial life is more likely to be found if there are other worlds out there like ours (we know *this* system works, we don't know what else *might* work).
The case for ETI is much stronger if you can show that there ARE many many Earthlike worlds in the universe, compared to the present, where we can say "there MAY be many, with this set of assumptions, or ours may be the ONLY one, if you use this other set of assumptions."
Xentax
Re:Portable face detector
on
The Face Detector
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I think this technology just recognizes faces from backgrounds, it *does not* appear to uniquely identify faces (a la fingerprints).
Others have tried that, and we all know how monumentally insufficient it has been thus far as a legitimate security tool, in terms of missed matches and a high false-positive to actual positive ratio.
When a company like Eolas can sue for millions of dollars, and (equally disruptive) get an injunction that forces MS to make changes to IE, I'd call that a cost of business high enough that preventing future lawsuits of the same nature starts to become worthwhile.
I realize that's a fairly subjective judgement, though.
...this is another bad patent. At least some people paused to notice that it's not THAT rediculous (compared to, say, patenting reverse auctions on the internet, or Amazon's one-click checkout patent, etc.), just another classic case of why just because it's being done on a computer or on the internet does NOT make it new and non-obvious.
However, I wonder what else a company like MS, or IBM, or Intel can do in a situation like this -- namely, one where they're doing things that haven't been done before that, while NOT patentable in "our" sense of the term, are nevertheless things that DO get patents from the USPTO.
I mean, if you want to do something, and *someone* will patent it because our broken system lets them, shouldn't you try to patent it first? That's what most corporate patents seem to be these day -- defensive patents.
It's the nobody's out there that are really abusing the system -- SCO, Eolas, etc. I'm not really saying they're forcing Microsoft's hand (or IBM's, or Intel's, or AMD's, or NVidia's, etc.) -- but I *am* saying that I think these large research-driven companies are exercising good business sense by trying to defend themselves against the more flagrant abusers of the patent system.
Sooner or Later (I'm guessing Later), even the cost of doing business with defensive patents and cross-licensing will reach that point that the big guys will push for Patent/Trademark reform, and these sorts of problems will finally go away. But, IMHO that day is years away, and the targets for patent abuse have to defend themselves in the meantime.
I just wish one of the big patent powerhouses like MS or IBM would step up and drive a challenge against the existing patent status quo -- either via a Constitutionality argument, or lobbying Congress to get REAL patent reforms going, *something*. It's a gamble right now, sure, but business is all about risk and reward, and the payoffs for being able to get out of the patent litigation minefields that any technology company finds itself in these days would be worth it.
...this was the sort of thing that could provoke an international incident, even a war. Though, I'll concede Helen of Troy might have a bit more literary appeal than Joe Bloe Nigerian Scammer Dude.
Now, we suck it up and try to live with it, or work around it.
Has civilization taken a step forward, or a step backwards? Seriously.
The article author suggests that the patch be distributed in an encrypted form, and then on a specified date, the key gets sent and everyone patches simultaneously.
Though if he really thinks that a patch in this form would be significantly harder to crack than a 'normal' patch, he's stretching.
Even if it was, the key would at least occasionally get leaked privately before it was publicly sent, and thus malware writers would have a field day.
All of that is also based on the assumption that exploit writers use the patch to reverse-engineer the vulnerability and exploit it. If this slower cycle he's proposing is too slow, there'll be plenty of "ne'er-do-wells" that will find vulnerabilities the old fashioned way. It's trading the current problem for yesterday's, not what I'd call a step in the right direction.
Working harder to make consumer machines and OSes able to intelligently patch themselves is a better solution. XPsp2 will switch Windows Update to "install by default" instead of "off by default", which will help there. Making it as transparent and yet as unobtrusive to Joe AverageComputerUser is, IMHO, the way to get the attack surface down from millions of machines to a few thousand or less.
The one thing I'll agree about as far as slowing the patch cycle down is that making sure any released patch DOES fix the problem and DOES NOT break other things in the process. Those are the kinds of arguments that various parties throw up when they're objecting to applying patches as soon as they're available (that's what was horribly badly wrong with the old NT service packs, for example -- they often broke applications and thus people would wait months or even stay a full service pack behind the latest version).
Hmm. You bring up an interesting point -- the arguments against polygamy seem as arbitrary as not allowing gay marriage in purely legal terms.
Though obviously ALL parties to a "3+" marriage need to consent. A man shouldn't be able to be married to two different women without them knowing about and approving of each other, for example (that amounts to fraud, if nothing else).
You don't say *I* have XYZ. You say, "Virtual Address A123B456C has XYZ". Only you know that YOU are A123B456C -- the best your neighbors can do is realize that A123B456C must be close to them, because they have strong hints to route through you to reach A123B456C. Similarly, you can't ever nail down who asked for the file, because you just start seeing packets that say "Z789 wants XYZ". You'd have to be able to sniff a huge part of the network to find out who started asking for it first with any degree of certainty, because a node can't tell if its neighbors asked for XYZ, or are merely relaying one of their other neighbors, or one of THEIR neighbors, etc.
The trick is that the system NEVER says WHERE A123B456C is, only who to route to in order to get "closer" to A123B456C. When you get packets headed for A123B456C, you (being the owner of address A123B456C) just happen to keep them, and not route them onwards. Even not routing isn't dangerous, because anyone who could observe THAT would just assume that your routing table has A123B456C as closer to the person who sent YOU the packet, and they have you as closer or don't know where it is -- that might tell them that one of you is A123B456C, but it might also mean that you just don't have good routing data either. Impossible to prove, that's the key.
Virtual addresses, whose owners never identify themselves, are the key.
And, of course, simply keeping all of the packets for A123B456C when you're NOT the owner of that address won't buy you crap, because you'd have to brute-force-decrypt every at least one of them against to determine the AES key (or the RSA private key, if you can somehow determine which packets were used for the key exchange). The RIAA doesn't have the resources to do that on any sufficient scale to make a difference.
I didn't mean his "biological parents", since as you correctly pointed out, he didn't have a human father.
Another poster commented on the semantics of "bastard", something I dont' really want to get into.
I meant parents in the sense of the *married couple* that raised the central figure of the Christian faith, which by definition predates Christianity. If marriage existed as a religious custom before Christianity, then it cannot be accurately defined as a "Christian" tradition, instead as one common to MANY religions. And, as has been said, it can be discussed as a legal 'contract' (I'm not sure what the law calls it) without any religious implications when appropriate.
Which part of this being about the *legal* concept of marriage, not the religious concept, did you miss?
Leviticus (at least try to spell it right) is part of the Bible. Various federal and state laws relating to marriage do not, and CANNOT, be built upon religious premises.
So, if you want to stop your particular religion from PERFORMING gay marriages, and the Bible (specifically Leviticus) is part of your religion (Leviticus would apply to Judaism as well as Christianity, right?), feel free to bring it up there. Otherwise, leave the Bible and *again* all religious objections out of it.
People of Jewish faith get married (hello, *Jesus Christ*'s parents were married). People of Islamic faith get married. ATHEISTS get married.
Noone's saying gays should be allowed to get married in a Catholic church -- that's for Catholics to decide (for example). What they're saying is that the LEGAL STATE of marriage should extend to gay couple as well as straight ones.
I've yet to see a logical objection to that premise. All attempts should consider *in particular* that an atheist, straight couple is perfectly entitled to get married in all 50 states.
Or, put another way, ALL RELIGIOUS OBJECTIONS TO GAY MARRIAGE ARE INVALID for this discussion. This is (or should be) a legal discussion, not a moral or religious one.
When you can show how an atheist heterosexual marriage should be allowed but gay marriage should not, you'll have my attention. Reproductive capability is clearly irrelevant, as it's not a prerequisite for heterosexual marriage.
The difference is that, without region codes, they'd more or less HAVE to release them at about the same time, because international commerce would make it possible and legal anyway.
As it stands, region codes are what allow the staggered release dates to work -- sure, the American version is out, but that doesn't do Joe British Consumer any good because the *AVERAGE* DVD consumer doesn't have a region-free DVD player (the average Slashdot poster is apparently another story).
But yes, of course they could release all the regions on the same date (or very close, instead of months apart). But at that point, of course, you have to wonder what's the point of regions at all?
This is really about creating artificially closed (or nearly closed) markets, so a cheaper supply or a lower demand in Country X doesn't affect the price in Country Y. That would be the case regardless of release dates. Piracy is tied to the release date disparities as much as the region codes, but the market for pirated discs would be diminished IF you could just order a legal copy from elsewhere rather than wait for the local release.
Yet another front in the battle over Globalization, I guess. I guess the movie industry has the numbers to justify this scheme as more profitable than worldwide simultaneous releases (or nearly so). I guess they only pull these long delays for movies that do well? If I were them, I'd certainly want crap movies to hit all the markets at about the same time, lest the people in Country Y have a few months to hear from Country X that "Tomb Raider: The Push-Up Bra of Life" defies the laws of physics by managing to suck AND blow, and end up not renting/buying it...
Sounds like people have mostly good things to say about it, which fits with what I'd heard elsewhere.
Question about FPS's on the XBox, though (any console, for that matter) -- can it really work with a controller?
I'm very VERY used to the mouse/kb interface, and the few fps-style games I'd tried elsewhere (e.g. Goldeneye) were just NOT fun with a controller, aiming was downright counterintuitive compared to the mouse. Have console shooters fixed or worked around this? Does anyone who has lots of experience on both console and PC shooters *really* like the console controller better and can explain why?
I mean, shooting in Vice City on the PS2, for example, mostly worked ok because you could lock a target and the actual aiming was handled by the game. That didn't apply to all of the guns of course, meaning the colt pistol was actually easier to kill with than the M4 or the sniper rifles (again, on the PS2).
Also, I have Halo for the PC, so I won't miss that having already missed it for over a year waiting for the PC port. But I definitely want to see what MM3 and PGR2 are like, if I can convince one of the honored gift givers to supply me with one...
Also, I wouldn't be bothering to mod it, at least not likely. I have 2 pcs (you know, one fairly recent one and its 2.5 yr. old predecessor) and parts from still others to do hobby computing.
So, I have a PS2 and a GameCube from last year's gift-a-thon. And I have a PC as well, naturally.
Based on personal experience, do you readers out there think I should get someone to get me an XBox? I hear wonderful things about the XBox Live experience (compared to PC online games), for example, and there are a couple games I've not had the chance to try because they're XBox only or at least XBox first (like Midtown Madness 3).
I like almost any category of games, first person shooters first, followed closely by TBS and then RTS games, driving games, sports games probably least of all.
You can be a tyrant and still be a coward. Maybe he didn't have the courage (or whatever you call it) to go down fighting or put one in his brain himself.
It's very easy to be a hardass when you've got the upperhand; being a tough guy when it really comes down to it is something else.
Having said that, his sons clearly went down fighting, so I personally WAS expecting more active resistance from Saddam. Given the circumstances, maybe he was hoping to go undetected until it was too late to do otherwise. I bet he's been *almost* detected several times in the past, and they missed his hidey-holes elsewhere. Maybe he was counting on them doing so again.
There's one very simple reason Microsoft *has* to go after anything that is arguably a trademark violation: Unlike copyrights and patents, trademarks (and trade secrets) MUST be defended to hold any force. Trademark Violator B will win a trademark infringement case if it can show that Trademark Violator A (or especially A, C, D, and their 5000 friends) were NOT asked to cease and desist.
Or, for the short vesion: Ask Xerox and Kleenex why protecting trademarks is important, even when it involves the little guy.
Disclaimer: I am not (yet) taking a position on whether Lindows is or should be considered a trademark violation. That comes next:
Frankly, I'm confused as to how "Windows" can be trademarked at all. "Microsoft Windows" is one thing. "Microsoft Lindows" would be an obvious violation, right? Like "Rolexx". But "Windows", as a common English word, shouldn't be able to be trademarked IMHO. I think it's a bit more of a stretch to say "Lindows" violates a trademark on "Microsoft Windows". I think this is one of those gray areas -- the similarity is obvious. The big issue is *consumer confusion*. I think one can make the case that "Lindows" is obviously meant to be associated with Windows, and since it IS in fact from a competitor, that it could thus fall under the spirit of a trademark violation.
Imagine trying to start a Mac clone company that made "Orange" computers (insert obvious joke here). Obviously not the same trademark, but that doesn't mean that there's no chance an average consumer might be misled, either...
Lisp wasn't my choice:) I didn't want to touch off a war by arguing about which language is 'the best' from an academic standpoint -- because, as I said, that's not the most interesting question.
Plus, I'm not really qualified to judge anything other than languages I've had direct experience with, which include C, C++, and Java (among others), but does *not* include Lisp or OCAML.
On a tangent, IMHO there's no one "best" language by almost any measure except for the problem/project at hand. I've used C++ on a project I would have dreaded doing in Java or C#, and vice versa, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Which has its merits - the XBox Live experience is generally superior to most roll-your-own-multiplayer solutions for PC games. I'm still beholden to the mouse/kb interface for first person shooters, but Live is the way to go for games well-suited to the console-style controller, since you get reliable voice, game-matching, etc.
Why hasn't someone made a mouse and kb for the XBox, anyway? Or even a keypad suitable for gaming rather than a full keyboard?
Xentax
I agree, the spam angle is a pretty weak context, and the gain is questionable compared to the fallout.
The only reason I use a Yahoo account is the fact that Trillian makes it trivially easy to access it without additional software - I have all of 3 or 4 contacts on that service, and at least 2 of them have accounts on other services anyway.
I think these IM services need to revisit the whole idea of an ad-encumbered free client as a source of revenue.
Like the free email services, they're always going to be loss leaders to hypothetically profitable services (search, ads on the portal, paid-for premium email, etc.). Keep the IM-driven mail notification, and focus on that free, ad-encumbered web-based email client instead - I haven't seen nearly as big a push to make alternative clients to *that*, though I'm sure they exist.
Xentax
Source?
Either way, Yahoo should make a declarative statement about their attitude towards 3rd party clients of their protocol - so their current/potential users know where they stand, so these 3rd party clients know where they stand, etc.
The way I see it, they are hurting themselves more this way than if they took either side of the fence:
1) Just say no - State that they don't intend to support 3rd party clients and discourage their users from using them (for security, features, whatever other reason they want to claim in addition to the unstated-but-primary reason - ad revenue, why else would they bother to have the service?).
2) Walk the path - Go for the customer 'warm fuzzy' goodwill factor by officially allowing 3rd party clients to interoperate (though without technical support). All they'd really have to do is publish protocol change information with some lead time so the other clients out there can have the changes ready to go. Obviously, responding to that notice in a timely and intelligent fashion (e.g. Trillian's devs making their client auto-update) are not Yahoo's problem.
As it stands, even if Yahoo *isn't* out to break these other clients, they may as well be, because that's the public perception to a situation like this. So take a stand either way.
Xentax
Good point - texture sheets that encompass the whole model, for example, and the engine is responsible for slapping the right parts onto the right facings of the model.
:)
So, it's a pretty finite ceiling, which is the point we're (almost) all trying to make
Xentax
You missed part of the parent's point: Given a certain screen resolution, you can quickly compute an upper limit to how much texture information you can keep in physical (that is, non-virtual) memory at once.
From there it's a short trip to see that the volume of RAM is a potential performance bottleneck.
Balanced against that is your point about the OS having a smaller footprint; the high memory *bandwidth*; and the fact that the screen resolution generally *won't* be 1024x1024. I don't know the HDTV standard screen resolution but the standard PAL or NTSC out certainly won't be needing that many pixels per frame.
VGA out will be nice, I'm one of those who like the option of getting higher resolution on a smaller screen that's not in the living room (and, thus, less likely to be contended for by significant others, children, etc.). That's assuming that it puts out a smart and/or configurable resolution to VGA out (especially for folks with LCD screens...).
Plus, it's likely to be a lot simpler to hook up to the network connection if it can be in the computer room instead of the living room...
Xentax
Making the source code available to anyone makes it easier for people to find holes.
This is a proven, incontrovertible fact.
It makes it easier to find, but that doesn't mean open source automatically more secure - you still have to have the right people actually looking, and a defect has to be what they're looking for. I'll explain.
If no-one qualified to spot the hole bothers to look, open source doesn't buy you anything (this is why bugs in things like OpenSSL can linger quite awhile before being discovered - not enough of the right people bothering to look, even though *anyone* can and many do).
A bigger problem is the disconnect between design limitations not meeting end-user expectations. The recent shining example of this is the latest set of CVS vulnerabilities: The CVS team does not claim CVS is secure enough to be publicly-accessible over the internet; yet it frequently IS placed in this position, and that makes it an ongoing security disaster waiting to happen. (Linkage: "We have always said that CVS is not secure")
Bug? No; design limitation. But if the end users aren't aware of that (or, worse, choose to disregard the danger), it's still a vulnerability waiting to be exploited, and open source does NOTHING to prevent that.
So, "easier to find holes"? I'll go with the stock CompSci answer, "It depends". It's certainly not a simple or complete answer.
Xentax
Glad to see everyone staying optimistic about these things!
Some of us still want conclusive data on IF, and if so, HOW MANY Earth-like planets there are out there - on the theory that extraterrestrial life is more likely to be found if there are other worlds out there like ours (we know *this* system works, we don't know what else *might* work).
The case for ETI is much stronger if you can show that there ARE many many Earthlike worlds in the universe, compared to the present, where we can say "there MAY be many, with this set of assumptions, or ours may be the ONLY one, if you use this other set of assumptions."
Xentax
I think this technology just recognizes faces from backgrounds, it *does not* appear to uniquely identify faces (a la fingerprints).
Others have tried that, and we all know how monumentally insufficient it has been thus far as a legitimate security tool, in terms of missed matches and a high false-positive to actual positive ratio.
Xentax
I'm a genious! ;)
Xentax
When a company like Eolas can sue for millions of dollars, and (equally disruptive) get an injunction that forces MS to make changes to IE, I'd call that a cost of business high enough that preventing future lawsuits of the same nature starts to become worthwhile.
I realize that's a fairly subjective judgement, though.
Xentax
...this is another bad patent. At least some people paused to notice that it's not THAT rediculous (compared to, say, patenting reverse auctions on the internet, or Amazon's one-click checkout patent, etc.), just another classic case of why just because it's being done on a computer or on the internet does NOT make it new and non-obvious.
However, I wonder what else a company like MS, or IBM, or Intel can do in a situation like this -- namely, one where they're doing things that haven't been done before that, while NOT patentable in "our" sense of the term, are nevertheless things that DO get patents from the USPTO.
I mean, if you want to do something, and *someone* will patent it because our broken system lets them, shouldn't you try to patent it first? That's what most corporate patents seem to be these day -- defensive patents.
It's the nobody's out there that are really abusing the system -- SCO, Eolas, etc. I'm not really saying they're forcing Microsoft's hand (or IBM's, or Intel's, or AMD's, or NVidia's, etc.) -- but I *am* saying that I think these large research-driven companies are exercising good business sense by trying to defend themselves against the more flagrant abusers of the patent system.
Sooner or Later (I'm guessing Later), even the cost of doing business with defensive patents and cross-licensing will reach that point that the big guys will push for Patent/Trademark reform, and these sorts of problems will finally go away. But, IMHO that day is years away, and the targets for patent abuse have to defend themselves in the meantime.
I just wish one of the big patent powerhouses like MS or IBM would step up and drive a challenge against the existing patent status quo -- either via a Constitutionality argument, or lobbying Congress to get REAL patent reforms going, *something*. It's a gamble right now, sure, but business is all about risk and reward, and the payoffs for being able to get out of the patent litigation minefields that any technology company finds itself in these days would be worth it.
Xentax
...this was the sort of thing that could provoke an international incident, even a war. Though, I'll concede Helen of Troy might have a bit more literary appeal than Joe Bloe Nigerian Scammer Dude.
Now, we suck it up and try to live with it, or work around it.
Has civilization taken a step forward, or a step backwards? Seriously.
Xentax
The article author suggests that the patch be distributed in an encrypted form, and then on a specified date, the key gets sent and everyone patches simultaneously.
Though if he really thinks that a patch in this form would be significantly harder to crack than a 'normal' patch, he's stretching.
Even if it was, the key would at least occasionally get leaked privately before it was publicly sent, and thus malware writers would have a field day.
All of that is also based on the assumption that exploit writers use the patch to reverse-engineer the vulnerability and exploit it. If this slower cycle he's proposing is too slow, there'll be plenty of "ne'er-do-wells" that will find vulnerabilities the old fashioned way. It's trading the current problem for yesterday's, not what I'd call a step in the right direction.
Working harder to make consumer machines and OSes able to intelligently patch themselves is a better solution. XPsp2 will switch Windows Update to "install by default" instead of "off by default", which will help there. Making it as transparent and yet as unobtrusive to Joe AverageComputerUser is, IMHO, the way to get the attack surface down from millions of machines to a few thousand or less.
The one thing I'll agree about as far as slowing the patch cycle down is that making sure any released patch DOES fix the problem and DOES NOT break other things in the process. Those are the kinds of arguments that various parties throw up when they're objecting to applying patches as soon as they're available (that's what was horribly badly wrong with the old NT service packs, for example -- they often broke applications and thus people would wait months or even stay a full service pack behind the latest version).
Xentax
Hmm. You bring up an interesting point -- the arguments against polygamy seem as arbitrary as not allowing gay marriage in purely legal terms.
Though obviously ALL parties to a "3+" marriage need to consent. A man shouldn't be able to be married to two different women without them knowing about and approving of each other, for example (that amounts to fraud, if nothing else).
Xentax
Incorrect.
You don't say *I* have XYZ. You say, "Virtual Address A123B456C has XYZ". Only you know that YOU are A123B456C -- the best your neighbors can do is realize that A123B456C must be close to them, because they have strong hints to route through you to reach A123B456C. Similarly, you can't ever nail down who asked for the file, because you just start seeing packets that say "Z789 wants XYZ". You'd have to be able to sniff a huge part of the network to find out who started asking for it first with any degree of certainty, because a node can't tell if its neighbors asked for XYZ, or are merely relaying one of their other neighbors, or one of THEIR neighbors, etc.
The trick is that the system NEVER says WHERE A123B456C is, only who to route to in order to get "closer" to A123B456C. When you get packets headed for A123B456C, you (being the owner of address A123B456C) just happen to keep them, and not route them onwards. Even not routing isn't dangerous, because anyone who could observe THAT would just assume that your routing table has A123B456C as closer to the person who sent YOU the packet, and they have you as closer or don't know where it is -- that might tell them that one of you is A123B456C, but it might also mean that you just don't have good routing data either. Impossible to prove, that's the key.
Virtual addresses, whose owners never identify themselves, are the key.
And, of course, simply keeping all of the packets for A123B456C when you're NOT the owner of that address won't buy you crap, because you'd have to brute-force-decrypt every at least one of them against to determine the AES key (or the RSA private key, if you can somehow determine which packets were used for the key exchange). The RIAA doesn't have the resources to do that on any sufficient scale to make a difference.
Xentax
I didn't mean his "biological parents", since as you correctly pointed out, he didn't have a human father.
Another poster commented on the semantics of "bastard", something I dont' really want to get into.
I meant parents in the sense of the *married couple* that raised the central figure of the Christian faith, which by definition predates Christianity. If marriage existed as a religious custom before Christianity, then it cannot be accurately defined as a "Christian" tradition, instead as one common to MANY religions. And, as has been said, it can be discussed as a legal 'contract' (I'm not sure what the law calls it) without any religious implications when appropriate.
Xentax
Which part of this being about the *legal* concept of marriage, not the religious concept, did you miss?
Leviticus (at least try to spell it right) is part of the Bible. Various federal and state laws relating to marriage do not, and CANNOT, be built upon religious premises.
So, if you want to stop your particular religion from PERFORMING gay marriages, and the Bible (specifically Leviticus) is part of your religion (Leviticus would apply to Judaism as well as Christianity, right?), feel free to bring it up there. Otherwise, leave the Bible and *again* all religious objections out of it.
Xentax
"Christian" tradition? Do you live in a cave?
People of Jewish faith get married (hello, *Jesus Christ*'s parents were married). People of Islamic faith get married. ATHEISTS get married.
Noone's saying gays should be allowed to get married in a Catholic church -- that's for Catholics to decide (for example). What they're saying is that the LEGAL STATE of marriage should extend to gay couple as well as straight ones.
I've yet to see a logical objection to that premise. All attempts should consider *in particular* that an atheist, straight couple is perfectly entitled to get married in all 50 states.
Or, put another way, ALL RELIGIOUS OBJECTIONS TO GAY MARRIAGE ARE INVALID for this discussion. This is (or should be) a legal discussion, not a moral or religious one.
When you can show how an atheist heterosexual marriage should be allowed but gay marriage should not, you'll have my attention. Reproductive capability is clearly irrelevant, as it's not a prerequisite for heterosexual marriage.
Xentax
The difference is that, without region codes, they'd more or less HAVE to release them at about the same time, because international commerce would make it possible and legal anyway.
As it stands, region codes are what allow the staggered release dates to work -- sure, the American version is out, but that doesn't do Joe British Consumer any good because the *AVERAGE* DVD consumer doesn't have a region-free DVD player (the average Slashdot poster is apparently another story).
But yes, of course they could release all the regions on the same date (or very close, instead of months apart). But at that point, of course, you have to wonder what's the point of regions at all?
This is really about creating artificially closed (or nearly closed) markets, so a cheaper supply or a lower demand in Country X doesn't affect the price in Country Y. That would be the case regardless of release dates. Piracy is tied to the release date disparities as much as the region codes, but the market for pirated discs would be diminished IF you could just order a legal copy from elsewhere rather than wait for the local release.
Yet another front in the battle over Globalization, I guess. I guess the movie industry has the numbers to justify this scheme as more profitable than worldwide simultaneous releases (or nearly so). I guess they only pull these long delays for movies that do well? If I were them, I'd certainly want crap movies to hit all the markets at about the same time, lest the people in Country Y have a few months to hear from Country X that "Tomb Raider: The Push-Up Bra of Life" defies the laws of physics by managing to suck AND blow, and end up not renting/buying it...
Xentax
Sounds like people have mostly good things to say about it, which fits with what I'd heard elsewhere.
Question about FPS's on the XBox, though (any console, for that matter) -- can it really work with a controller?
I'm very VERY used to the mouse/kb interface, and the few fps-style games I'd tried elsewhere (e.g. Goldeneye) were just NOT fun with a controller, aiming was downright counterintuitive compared to the mouse. Have console shooters fixed or worked around this? Does anyone who has lots of experience on both console and PC shooters *really* like the console controller better and can explain why?
I mean, shooting in Vice City on the PS2, for example, mostly worked ok because you could lock a target and the actual aiming was handled by the game. That didn't apply to all of the guns of course, meaning the colt pistol was actually easier to kill with than the M4 or the sniper rifles (again, on the PS2).
Also, I have Halo for the PC, so I won't miss that having already missed it for over a year waiting for the PC port. But I definitely want to see what MM3 and PGR2 are like, if I can convince one of the honored gift givers to supply me with one...
Also, I wouldn't be bothering to mod it, at least not likely. I have 2 pcs (you know, one fairly recent one and its 2.5 yr. old predecessor) and parts from still others to do hobby computing.
Xentax
So, I have a PS2 and a GameCube from last year's gift-a-thon. And I have a PC as well, naturally.
Based on personal experience, do you readers out there think I should get someone to get me an XBox? I hear wonderful things about the XBox Live experience (compared to PC online games), for example, and there are a couple games I've not had the chance to try because they're XBox only or at least XBox first (like Midtown Madness 3).
I like almost any category of games, first person shooters first, followed closely by TBS and then RTS games, driving games, sports games probably least of all.
Leave the MS bashing at the door, please.
Xentax
Tell me about it :(
Not only was it mismanaged into a disaster, Atari decided to pull the plug instead of trying to salvage the game (and the fanbase along with it).
It's sad to see a brand die off when it could have been saved.
Xentax
You can be a tyrant and still be a coward. Maybe he didn't have the courage (or whatever you call it) to go down fighting or put one in his brain himself.
It's very easy to be a hardass when you've got the upperhand; being a tough guy when it really comes down to it is something else.
Having said that, his sons clearly went down fighting, so I personally WAS expecting more active resistance from Saddam. Given the circumstances, maybe he was hoping to go undetected until it was too late to do otherwise. I bet he's been *almost* detected several times in the past, and they missed his hidey-holes elsewhere. Maybe he was counting on them doing so again.
Xentax
There's one very simple reason Microsoft *has* to go after anything that is arguably a trademark violation: Unlike copyrights and patents, trademarks (and trade secrets) MUST be defended to hold any force. Trademark Violator B will win a trademark infringement case if it can show that Trademark Violator A (or especially A, C, D, and their 5000 friends) were NOT asked to cease and desist.
Or, for the short vesion: Ask Xerox and Kleenex why protecting trademarks is important, even when it involves the little guy.
Disclaimer: I am not (yet) taking a position on whether Lindows is or should be considered a trademark violation. That comes next:
Frankly, I'm confused as to how "Windows" can be trademarked at all. "Microsoft Windows" is one thing. "Microsoft Lindows" would be an obvious violation, right? Like "Rolexx". But "Windows", as a common English word, shouldn't be able to be trademarked IMHO. I think it's a bit more of a stretch to say "Lindows" violates a trademark on "Microsoft Windows". I think this is one of those gray areas -- the similarity is obvious. The big issue is *consumer confusion*. I think one can make the case that "Lindows" is obviously meant to be associated with Windows, and since it IS in fact from a competitor, that it could thus fall under the spirit of a trademark violation.
Imagine trying to start a Mac clone company that made "Orange" computers (insert obvious joke here). Obviously not the same trademark, but that doesn't mean that there's no chance an average consumer might be misled, either...
Xentax
Lisp wasn't my choice :) I didn't want to touch off a war by arguing about which language is 'the best' from an academic standpoint -- because, as I said, that's not the most interesting question.
Plus, I'm not really qualified to judge anything other than languages I've had direct experience with, which include C, C++, and Java (among others), but does *not* include Lisp or OCAML.
On a tangent, IMHO there's no one "best" language by almost any measure except for the problem/project at hand. I've used C++ on a project I would have dreaded doing in Java or C#, and vice versa, for example.
Xentax