It's not quite that obvious. That's why nobody's done it. It's actually useful, so if it was obvious, you can imagine somebody would have done it.
Judging from your analogy: "putting a bunch of Post-Its in a book to come back later for review", I think you still misunderstand it.
It's more like the book intelligently analyzing itself, identifying where you'd probably like to put post-its, doing so itself, and then removing them when you don't need them anymore.
Granted, my description doesn't make it much clearer, but what the patent actually covers is relatively innovative and unobvious. Everything you currently do to manage tasks (which I assume are obvious things) you can continue doing. This just proposes a previously undocumented and unimplemented way to do it.
The real problem with most software patents isn't that they're obvious. It's that software technology is developing at an astounding place, but by granting patents to companies that abuse and mismanage them, exceedingly useful innovations don't get wide enough dispersion fast enough. Good patents are held onto for so long, or have licenses that are priced so high that further innovations that could be based on them don't have enough chance to develop. Ultimately, this means that software progress may be hindered by patents, at least until it slows down.
Generally speaking, patent rights provide a valuable incentive for investment into creative research and development. However, it seems that in very-fast-growing industries, they may impede overall industry development.
Good grief. I think we need to institute some kind of reasonable editorial policy here. As is so often the case in articles about Microsoft or patents, the lead is patently misleading.
The patent is on a relatively complex system that I've never seen or heard of before. It's about an IDE tool that dynamically identifies syntax errors and TODO comments throughout your code, associates them with named tasks and gives them priorities.
It is not about the little notebook you keep next to your computer, nor about running "grep//TODO *.c". It's about a smart IDE offering a useful and creative way of managing tasks. Should software processes be patentable? Maybe not. Are they? Yes. Does this infringe on prior art? Not really. So might this be a patentable software process? Sure looks like it.
If anyone of you out there have been working on this kind of thing for emacs or Eclipse 5 years ago, I suggest you speak up now...
It's not even in the school's interest to have kept him at the school if they knew he'd be kicked out at the end. Anybody who's kicked out sure the hell isn't going to donate to the Alumni Association, and they could have easily replaced him with a transfer student that would have paid just as much as him during that time.
Obviously, he's an idiot and found one damned ambitious lawyer. Ignorance of published policy is not an excuse, even if you've gotten away with it in the past. Corporate policy and law are not like trademarks, where if you don't enforce a trademark, you lose the right too. They are permanent sets of rules, and although uneven enforcement can be argued against on grounds of discrimination, non-enforcement cannot be argued against on grounds of complacency.
Which is bad, since, as we all know, there isn't any valid excuse for having bugs:) (in the software I mean:) )
Not true. Bugs are a resource problem. Take a fixed team of developers and a fixed time for development and you have to sacrific either stability, security, or features.
Desktop and most corporate customers demand features far more than they demand stability. It's a fact of life. Everybody complained about bugs in the 9x branch of Windows, but stayed with it because of the exclusive features (including market penetration).
The solution is to supply more resources, which means that your product must involve more developers, and/or take more time. So there's a plenty good excuse: nobody wants to wait for progress in software.
For the few markets that do, like some financial and government projects, stability is very important, and so these projects take a hell of a lot more time and money to develop.
Re:Where many people miss the point...
on
Is Swap Necessary?
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· Score: 1
I'm not saying that you, as a savvy user with a fair income, cannot do better by making swap unneccessary for yourself. I totally agree that performance is higher and that therefore it's the preferred way to go.
But most desktop users are niether savvy or of fair income. They don't have the faintest idea how much RAM they need, and they don't always even have $50 for more RAM. By giving them swap, they can respond to an "out of memory" error by deleting a couple MP3's and increasing their swap space. They don't have to lose an unexpected $50, go to Best Buy, or be a computing genius. It just works.
I assume that by "any other pro sector" you mean sports photography.
My whole point is that although her equipment is considered appropriate for an "enthusiastic amateur", it's plenty good for most anything a paid professional needs.
She's a photojournalistic wedding photographer, which, by definition is moving subjects, many of which are often far away, and which sometimes are in pretty low light. Her equipment is perfectly sufficient for that, portraiture of all sorts (including glamour), nature photography, product/commercial photography, and even most news photojournalism. It might even be okay for some local sports coverage, but she hasn't had an opportunity to try it yet.
It covers 90-95% of what a professional photographer would need to do. The manufacturer's though, are obsessed with selling for that small margin that covers 95-99% and charging $100,000 to do so. There's uses for that stuff, but chances are you won't actually be doing it.
One of her favorite quotes from that whole analysis-fixated camp:
"Of course you can do natural light photography! You just need to treat the sun like a big lamp!"
That someone needs to say that, and relate the worlds biggest and best light source to some $2000 catalog item really captures the mentality of that school.
Dead on, and that's pretty much what I was saying.
Like I replied in the other thread, I'm speaking from the experience of living with a very successful wedding and portrait photographer for the last three years. Her current workflow involves a D100 ($1500), an SB800 flash ($800), a few 1GB CF cards ($750), two lenses worth about $300, and a $70 reflector. Granted, the lenses only go to F/4, but it isn't that hard to pull off a good number of shots with that. And upgrading to a ~28-300mm lens with F/2.4 will only cost her around $500 or so when she wants to do that.
Trust me. I live with a successful and well-appreciated photographer making a better than decent living in Los Angeles. You don't need to fall for the gimmicks of manufacturer's if you want to go pro. You can, and it can potentially make up for lacking in composition or digital post, but you really don't need to.
I love geeks and gadget freaks. For the most part, you can be a great and successful professional photographer without relying on $100,000 of equipment. In fact, you can get away with about $4000 for a good camera, flash, lens, reflector, and some storage.
Of course, if you like gadgets, there's a world of stuff out there for you. It's all too easy to turn the art of photography into a geek's paradise of analysis, formulas, and techniques. But I guess that kind of flexibility is just the beauty of the medium.
Re:Where many people miss the point...
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 1
Fine. Let me rephrase that:
Everywhere I put Photoshop put "Crappy 3rd-party off-the-self product that acts like Photoshop but was built by 2nd rate developers who don't manage resources well, but which is 1/10th the cost of Photoshop."
Said application certainly does not an efficient swapfile mechanism of it's own, and therefore needs a lot of what it thinks is RAM.
If you choose to live without swap, more power to you, but it's a damn good safeguard for ignorant people who use software by ignorant developers.
Re:Where many people miss the point...
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 1
The average user can do all that just fine in 512MB of physical ram, in windows, with swap disabled completely. 512MB is so cheap, it's irreelvant.
That's totally inaccurate. Have you ever worked with Photoshop? It's not just for graphic designers anymore. Working with just one or two layered images from some 5 megapixel CoolPix or something can eat up that memory like crazy.
What you just said is remarkably similar to the philosophy behind the "640k is plenty!" philosophy. Swap freed us from such presumptive declarations.
Can we improve how swap is used? Yes. Should we encourage people to disable swap on desktop systems? You'll be hard pressed to find a reason.
If nothing else, you can have a VMM ignore swap unless or untill actual RAM is (say) 80% full. You get "no swap" performance but still have the option of buffering your RAM in an emergency.
Re:Where many people miss the point...
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
What about the basic situation of not setting a hard-to-describe limit on desktop users? Managing and disabling swap is great in controlled environments like servers and embedded systems, where the applications being run are limited and pre-determined.
But on desktop systems, a user may want to use Word, Photoshop, Outlook, Internet Explorer, an anti-virus tool, 30 other system tray tasks and services, etc. Should this user sit there and add up the recommended RAM of each of every application she owns and use that as a guideline for buying? That seems a little over-complicated and wasteful. Most of the time, she won't be running every application, but she really should be able to when she wants to.
The solution is to introduce a cheap storage tool to extend what's treated (by applications) as RAM--swap.
You're obviously an unabashed engineer (or engineer-type), although that's not a surprise given the forum. You like to work alone, or in small groups of people you respect. When faced with the a large company, and the unavoidable fact that 80% of employees in every department (including engineering) are poor workers who spend most of their time mastering the art of looking like they're working, you grow uncomfortable. So you stay in your cubicle or small department, or you start a freelance business where you don't have to deal with these problems at all.
Unfortunately, the economy benefits from big business and therefore requires people who are able to tolerate and manage that useless 80%. These people are professional executives and managers. They get business, communications, or resource management degrees and some even go so far as to get MBA's. In so doing, they learn a whole new kind of jargon and a whole set of skills which make absolutely no sense to you. Your keenness for knowledgable people and your own personal skill encourages you to forget about stupid people in leave them in your wake. Were you to actually try to deal with them, instead, (not that you should,) you'd develop all kinds of ideas about how to do that.
Unfortunately, organizing and motivating the lazy and stupid workforce is one of the hardest problems out there, akin to uniting General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. All this non-sense you quoted from KM magazine is an attempt at that. Is it analytic, like you'd like? No, but neither is the subject (a shitty workforce). Does it work and with adequate interpretation? Sometimes, and probably only temporarily.
But it's not a pile of horshit, it's the sincere work of people working on the one of the hardest problem in modern society.
Don't misrepresent. I wasn't replying to the lead article, I was replying to the inarticulate and shallow thinking poster who my post says it was replying to. This may be a brilliant idea (I'm not sure it is), but if it is, of course we should invest in it. But before we know that, should we spend the next twenty years throwing every dollar we have into longshots? Or should we direct some money to various, attractive ventures in alternative energy sources and conversation?
I'm just saying the latter, and you probably agree with me on that so let's just let it be.
Consider that the rate of expenditure on alternative power sources is closely tied to how far off doom is. If we won't run out of fossil for 50 or 500 years, we're probably perfectly on track. Without evidence that the problem is more pressing, why waste money on solving it so long before we need to?
Don't you think that money's better spent on education, health care and disease control, political stability, and a little bit of hedonism to make it worth it? Is it better to have a world of plague-ridden and destitute people who have unlimited power, or a balanced world with lots of healthy people and enough power for it not to be a problem?
And you really ought to quit overusing emphasis on specific words. It ends up distracting the reader from what you're actually trying to say.
Please pick up Applied Cryptography or some resource other than your intuition. Security is a complicated business, and you should take heed of the original replier's warning.
1) Proxies are not always recognized as such. DNS hijacking and malicious routing both allow for proxies that the user wouldn't even know about.
2) A private key doesn't mean squat with a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. The way it works is that the MITM creates a certificate that presents himself to the Client as you. The Client thinks he's connecting directly to you and initiates an encrypted session by exchanging a new session key (SA). This session key encrypts the data between the Client and the MITM. Meanwhile, the MITM begins a new session with you, presenting himself as the Client. You, thinking you're connected directly with the Client, exchanges a session key (SB) with the MITM. This session key encrypts the data between the MITM and you. At this point, the MITM simply decrypts each packet from the client using SA, reads it, then sends it to you using SB. And of course, the same principle works in reverse. Neither you nor the client have any way to distinguish MITM's presence from any other sort of packet delay, amd you have absolutely no privacy or security.
A CA allows the client to verify through a second channel that he is in fact talking directly to you and not some MITM. Different levels of CA's authentication provide different levels of reassurance. A low-grade certificate from Thawte or another provider should cost you less than $100 and will put a significant (though still not foolproof) hurdle in the way. Just get one already.
I just wanted to point out that you seem to misunderstand encryption. A self-signed SSL certificate is a completely useless item on the Internet. It's useful for closed systems, but not what you're trying to accomplish. What you want is the ability for users to know that your and only your server is receiving their data (aka no snooping). A self-signed SSL certificate does doesn't provide that. You need to counteract man-in-the-middle attacks by using a reputable and recognized CA. As it stands, anybody running a proxy could self-sign their own certificate as you, then act as a relay from point to point--looking at every piece of data while it passes.
You are generally protected from your likeness being used for commercial promotion purposes. This is largely to protect you from unwillingly becoming the spokesperson for a Herpes treatment. However, if they chopped off your head, I bet you'll have a hard time saying that it's your likeness.
The fallback argument is that whoever took the original picture holds copyright, and the head-chopping promoters may not have secured rights properly. Track down the photographer and see if they knowingly released the photograph to these people.
This isn't a security flaw of any meaning. This is a way to slip past the content filter on Yahoo! and Hotmail. Big fricking deal. Any script you manage to slip by the filters using this script could be found on any web page. There is no system vulnerability involved here. All "injected" scripts are subject to the same sandboxes and vulnerabilities that code you put up on your web page is. Nothing more, nothing less. Yahoo! doesn't need to jump on this because the damn thing is just an inconvenience, not a security threat.
#1) This is a press release. It is in the interest of the Nielsen group to exaggerate these figures. The more people who they show as on the internet, the more advertisers who will buy their data.
#2) The data was collected using random-digit dialing. Obviously, the people who don't have phones are more likely to not have internet access too. I wouldn't discount this factor.
#3) It's very vague what question they actually asked people. Does it include "is there a library within 50 miles of you that has internet access?" Given their natural bias towards inflating the numbers, you can't discount them incorporating those results into their totals.
It's great if more people are online, but these figures and percentages need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Although your idea seems "Totally awesome" to you as a consumer, you have to understand how ridiculous the logistics are for something like that.
The rights for at least 50% of roms you're playing on your MAME cabinet probably belong with the roomate of the nephew of the brother of the guy who started the company that built and sold the original game. However, that doesn't immediately make the rights defunct, and because of that ROM pirating is illegal (though I wouldn't personally hold it against anyone).
So yeah, an iTunes like thing would be a great way for these ROM pirates to legitimize their usage of these retro games, but building an iTunes like system is completely different. The music collections in iTunes largely belong to five major labels, although smaller proactive indie labels are trying to get their place. But if you were to start iRoms, even once you hit the big names (Atari, Sega, Konami, etc) you still don't have a very big collection and you'll be missing out on a lot of the most memorable games. And until you have a big selection an iRoms service just isn't going to attract many users.
So it's much easier for all these publishers who are still active (Sega, Atari, Nintendo) to take the titles that they already have the rights to and release them in controlled fashion, like this. And because they *can* do this and there is a market for it, you certainly can't expect all these companies just let the ROMs go into public domain. If they're publicly funded they'd get sued for that kind of fiscal irresponsibility.
I like the idea a lot. An ambitious company could even try to restructure the game industry to look more like broadcast TV. I mean, once you have good game engines stablized, you can start hiring artists, voice actors and writers to produce regular episodics. These episodics can be occasionally interrupted by advertising and delivered, for free, to the end user.
Ultimately, this would change the industry to stop focusing on technical advancements (renderers, etc) and focus on gameplay and story enhancements instead. Some of us seem to be waiting for that.
Of course, you could also shoot for a subscription model instead of ad-support, but most people already pointed out the problem with that: current gamers are reluctant to move to a monthly-fee model when they can already buy 60-gameplay-hour games for $50.
If anybody's seriously interested in this, and brainstorming some ideas I'd be curious to talk to them.
Companies usually take into account two things when setting requirements.
The first is the actual requirements. These stem from the specific things that are required by libraries and compiled code. These are things like the class of processor, the operating system, or the DirectX generation supported by the graphics drivers.
The other thing accounted for is the presumed requirements. This sets the lower threshold of performance for which the company needs to account. Few things depend on a specific processor speed, but when a company says X requires a 1GHz Pentium, they are disclaiming liability for when someone runs it with a 766MHz chip.
You may be surprised how much software you can technically get to function on a 486 100Mhz running Window95. You won't be surprised by how incredibly poorly it performs. The company is just trying to avoid having to deal with your complaints when you try it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not quite that obvious. That's why nobody's done it. It's actually useful, so if it was obvious, you can imagine somebody would have done it.
Judging from your analogy: "putting a bunch of Post-Its in a book to come back later for review", I think you still misunderstand it.
It's more like the book intelligently analyzing itself, identifying where you'd probably like to put post-its, doing so itself, and then removing them when you don't need them anymore.
Granted, my description doesn't make it much clearer, but what the patent actually covers is relatively innovative and unobvious. Everything you currently do to manage tasks (which I assume are obvious things) you can continue doing. This just proposes a previously undocumented and unimplemented way to do it.
The real problem with most software patents isn't that they're obvious. It's that software technology is developing at an astounding place, but by granting patents to companies that abuse and mismanage them, exceedingly useful innovations don't get wide enough dispersion fast enough. Good patents are held onto for so long, or have licenses that are priced so high that further innovations that could be based on them don't have enough chance to develop. Ultimately, this means that software progress may be hindered by patents, at least until it slows down.
Generally speaking, patent rights provide a valuable incentive for investment into creative research and development. However, it seems that in very-fast-growing industries, they may impede overall industry development.
Good grief. I think we need to institute some kind of reasonable editorial policy here. As is so often the case in articles about Microsoft or patents, the lead is patently misleading.
//TODO *.c". It's about a smart IDE offering a useful and creative way of managing tasks. Should software processes be patentable? Maybe not. Are they? Yes. Does this infringe on prior art? Not really. So might this be a patentable software process? Sure looks like it.
The patent is on a relatively complex system that I've never seen or heard of before. It's about an IDE tool that dynamically identifies syntax errors and TODO comments throughout your code, associates them with named tasks and gives them priorities.
It is not about the little notebook you keep next to your computer, nor about running "grep
If anyone of you out there have been working on this kind of thing for emacs or Eclipse 5 years ago, I suggest you speak up now...
I don't think we'll be hearing much.
It's not even in the school's interest to have kept him at the school if they knew he'd be kicked out at the end. Anybody who's kicked out sure the hell isn't going to donate to the Alumni Association, and they could have easily replaced him with a transfer student that would have paid just as much as him during that time.
Obviously, he's an idiot and found one damned ambitious lawyer. Ignorance of published policy is not an excuse, even if you've gotten away with it in the past. Corporate policy and law are not like trademarks, where if you don't enforce a trademark, you lose the right too. They are permanent sets of rules, and although uneven enforcement can be argued against on grounds of discrimination, non-enforcement cannot be argued against on grounds of complacency.
Which is bad, since, as we all know, there isn't any valid excuse for having bugs :) (in the software I mean :) )
Not true. Bugs are a resource problem. Take a fixed team of developers and a fixed time for development and you have to sacrific either stability, security, or features.
Desktop and most corporate customers demand features far more than they demand stability. It's a fact of life. Everybody complained about bugs in the 9x branch of Windows, but stayed with it because of the exclusive features (including market penetration).
The solution is to supply more resources, which means that your product must involve more developers, and/or take more time. So there's a plenty good excuse: nobody wants to wait for progress in software.
For the few markets that do, like some financial and government projects, stability is very important, and so these projects take a hell of a lot more time and money to develop.
I'm not saying that you, as a savvy user with a fair income, cannot do better by making swap unneccessary for yourself. I totally agree that performance is higher and that therefore it's the preferred way to go.
But most desktop users are niether savvy or of fair income. They don't have the faintest idea how much RAM they need, and they don't always even have $50 for more RAM. By giving them swap, they can respond to an "out of memory" error by deleting a couple MP3's and increasing their swap space. They don't have to lose an unexpected $50, go to Best Buy, or be a computing genius. It just works.
I assume that by "any other pro sector" you mean sports photography.
My whole point is that although her equipment is considered appropriate for an "enthusiastic amateur", it's plenty good for most anything a paid professional needs.
She's a photojournalistic wedding photographer, which, by definition is moving subjects, many of which are often far away, and which sometimes are in pretty low light. Her equipment is perfectly sufficient for that, portraiture of all sorts (including glamour), nature photography, product/commercial photography, and even most news photojournalism. It might even be okay for some local sports coverage, but she hasn't had an opportunity to try it yet.
It covers 90-95% of what a professional photographer would need to do. The manufacturer's though, are obsessed with selling for that small margin that covers 95-99% and charging $100,000 to do so. There's uses for that stuff, but chances are you won't actually be doing it.
One of her favorite quotes from that whole analysis-fixated camp:
"Of course you can do natural light photography! You just need to treat the sun like a big lamp!"
That someone needs to say that, and relate the worlds biggest and best light source to some $2000 catalog item really captures the mentality of that school.
Dead on, and that's pretty much what I was saying.
Like I replied in the other thread, I'm speaking from the experience of living with a very successful wedding and portrait photographer for the last three years. Her current workflow involves a D100 ($1500), an SB800 flash ($800), a few 1GB CF cards ($750), two lenses worth about $300, and a $70 reflector. Granted, the lenses only go to F/4, but it isn't that hard to pull off a good number of shots with that. And upgrading to a ~28-300mm lens with F/2.4 will only cost her around $500 or so when she wants to do that.
Trust me. I live with a successful and well-appreciated photographer making a better than decent living in Los Angeles. You don't need to fall for the gimmicks of manufacturer's if you want to go pro. You can, and it can potentially make up for lacking in composition or digital post, but you really don't need to.
I love geeks and gadget freaks. For the most part, you can be a great and successful professional photographer without relying on $100,000 of equipment. In fact, you can get away with about $4000 for a good camera, flash, lens, reflector, and some storage.
Of course, if you like gadgets, there's a world of stuff out there for you. It's all too easy to turn the art of photography into a geek's paradise of analysis, formulas, and techniques. But I guess that kind of flexibility is just the beauty of the medium.
Fine. Let me rephrase that:
Everywhere I put Photoshop put "Crappy 3rd-party off-the-self product that acts like Photoshop but was built by 2nd rate developers who don't manage resources well, but which is 1/10th the cost of Photoshop."
Said application certainly does not an efficient swapfile mechanism of it's own, and therefore needs a lot of what it thinks is RAM.
If you choose to live without swap, more power to you, but it's a damn good safeguard for ignorant people who use software by ignorant developers.
The average user can do all that just fine in 512MB of physical ram, in windows, with swap disabled completely. 512MB is so cheap, it's irreelvant.
That's totally inaccurate. Have you ever worked with Photoshop? It's not just for graphic designers anymore. Working with just one or two layered images from some 5 megapixel CoolPix or something can eat up that memory like crazy.
What you just said is remarkably similar to the philosophy behind the "640k is plenty!" philosophy. Swap freed us from such presumptive declarations.
Can we improve how swap is used? Yes. Should we encourage people to disable swap on desktop systems? You'll be hard pressed to find a reason.
If nothing else, you can have a VMM ignore swap unless or untill actual RAM is (say) 80% full. You get "no swap" performance but still have the option of buffering your RAM in an emergency.
What about the basic situation of not setting a hard-to-describe limit on desktop users? Managing and disabling swap is great in controlled environments like servers and embedded systems, where the applications being run are limited and pre-determined.
But on desktop systems, a user may want to use Word, Photoshop, Outlook, Internet Explorer, an anti-virus tool, 30 other system tray tasks and services, etc. Should this user sit there and add up the recommended RAM of each of every application she owns and use that as a guideline for buying? That seems a little over-complicated and wasteful. Most of the time, she won't be running every application, but she really should be able to when she wants to.
The solution is to introduce a cheap storage tool to extend what's treated (by applications) as RAM--swap.
I'm not a PHB, I just play one when I think somebody loses sight of the whole picture.
You're obviously an unabashed engineer (or engineer-type), although that's not a surprise given the forum. You like to work alone, or in small groups of people you respect. When faced with the a large company, and the unavoidable fact that 80% of employees in every department (including engineering) are poor workers who spend most of their time mastering the art of looking like they're working, you grow uncomfortable. So you stay in your cubicle or small department, or you start a freelance business where you don't have to deal with these problems at all.
Unfortunately, the economy benefits from big business and therefore requires people who are able to tolerate and manage that useless 80%. These people are professional executives and managers. They get business, communications, or resource management degrees and some even go so far as to get MBA's. In so doing, they learn a whole new kind of jargon and a whole set of skills which make absolutely no sense to you. Your keenness for knowledgable people and your own personal skill encourages you to forget about stupid people in leave them in your wake. Were you to actually try to deal with them, instead, (not that you should,) you'd develop all kinds of ideas about how to do that.
Unfortunately, organizing and motivating the lazy and stupid workforce is one of the hardest problems out there, akin to uniting General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. All this non-sense you quoted from KM magazine is an attempt at that. Is it analytic, like you'd like? No, but neither is the subject (a shitty workforce). Does it work and with adequate interpretation? Sometimes, and probably only temporarily.
But it's not a pile of horshit, it's the sincere work of people working on the one of the hardest problem in modern society.
Don't misrepresent. I wasn't replying to the lead article, I was replying to the inarticulate and shallow thinking poster who my post says it was replying to. This may be a brilliant idea (I'm not sure it is), but if it is, of course we should invest in it. But before we know that, should we spend the next twenty years throwing every dollar we have into longshots? Or should we direct some money to various, attractive ventures in alternative energy sources and conversation?
I'm just saying the latter, and you probably agree with me on that so let's just let it be.
Consider that the rate of expenditure on alternative power sources is closely tied to how far off doom is. If we won't run out of fossil for 50 or 500 years, we're probably perfectly on track. Without evidence that the problem is more pressing, why waste money on solving it so long before we need to?
Don't you think that money's better spent on education, health care and disease control, political stability, and a little bit of hedonism to make it worth it? Is it better to have a world of plague-ridden and destitute people who have unlimited power, or a balanced world with lots of healthy people and enough power for it not to be a problem?
And you really ought to quit overusing emphasis on specific words. It ends up distracting the reader from what you're actually trying to say.
Please pick up Applied Cryptography or some resource other than your intuition. Security is a complicated business, and you should take heed of the original replier's warning.
1) Proxies are not always recognized as such. DNS hijacking and malicious routing both allow for proxies that the user wouldn't even know about.
2) A private key doesn't mean squat with a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. The way it works is that the MITM creates a certificate that presents himself to the Client as you. The Client thinks he's connecting directly to you and initiates an encrypted session by exchanging a new session key (SA). This session key encrypts the data between the Client and the MITM. Meanwhile, the MITM begins a new session with you, presenting himself as the Client. You, thinking you're connected directly with the Client, exchanges a session key (SB) with the MITM. This session key encrypts the data between the MITM and you. At this point, the MITM simply decrypts each packet from the client using SA, reads it, then sends it to you using SB. And of course, the same principle works in reverse. Neither you nor the client have any way to distinguish MITM's presence from any other sort of packet delay, amd you have absolutely no privacy or security.
A CA allows the client to verify through a second channel that he is in fact talking directly to you and not some MITM. Different levels of CA's authentication provide different levels of reassurance. A low-grade certificate from Thawte or another provider should cost you less than $100 and will put a significant (though still not foolproof) hurdle in the way. Just get one already.
I just wanted to point out that you seem to misunderstand encryption. A self-signed SSL certificate is a completely useless item on the Internet. It's useful for closed systems, but not what you're trying to accomplish. What you want is the ability for users to know that your and only your server is receiving their data (aka no snooping). A self-signed SSL certificate does doesn't provide that. You need to counteract man-in-the-middle attacks by using a reputable and recognized CA. As it stands, anybody running a proxy could self-sign their own certificate as you, then act as a relay from point to point--looking at every piece of data while it passes.
You are generally protected from your likeness being used for commercial promotion purposes. This is largely to protect you from unwillingly becoming the spokesperson for a Herpes treatment. However, if they chopped off your head, I bet you'll have a hard time saying that it's your likeness.
The fallback argument is that whoever took the original picture holds copyright, and the head-chopping promoters may not have secured rights properly. Track down the photographer and see if they knowingly released the photograph to these people.
This isn't a security flaw of any meaning. This is a way to slip past the content filter on Yahoo! and Hotmail. Big fricking deal. Any script you manage to slip by the filters using this script could be found on any web page. There is no system vulnerability involved here. All "injected" scripts are subject to the same sandboxes and vulnerabilities that code you put up on your web page is. Nothing more, nothing less. Yahoo! doesn't need to jump on this because the damn thing is just an inconvenience, not a security threat.
Yeah. It reminds me of that other gaming library they tried to make everybody use... What was it called? AngularX or something. That sure bombed.
Mod the parent up, he made a good point.
#1) This is a press release. It is in the interest of the Nielsen group to exaggerate these figures. The more people who they show as on the internet, the more advertisers who will buy their data.
#2) The data was collected using random-digit dialing. Obviously, the people who don't have phones are more likely to not have internet access too. I wouldn't discount this factor.
#3) It's very vague what question they actually asked people. Does it include "is there a library within 50 miles of you that has internet access?" Given their natural bias towards inflating the numbers, you can't discount them incorporating those results into their totals.
It's great if more people are online, but these figures and percentages need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Dude.
Although your idea seems "Totally awesome" to you as a consumer, you have to understand how ridiculous the logistics are for something like that.
The rights for at least 50% of roms you're playing on your MAME cabinet probably belong with the roomate of the nephew of the brother of the guy who started the company that built and sold the original game. However, that doesn't immediately make the rights defunct, and because of that ROM pirating is illegal (though I wouldn't personally hold it against anyone).
So yeah, an iTunes like thing would be a great way for these ROM pirates to legitimize their usage of these retro games, but building an iTunes like system is completely different. The music collections in iTunes largely belong to five major labels, although smaller proactive indie labels are trying to get their place. But if you were to start iRoms, even once you hit the big names (Atari, Sega, Konami, etc) you still don't have a very big collection and you'll be missing out on a lot of the most memorable games. And until you have a big selection an iRoms service just isn't going to attract many users.
So it's much easier for all these publishers who are still active (Sega, Atari, Nintendo) to take the titles that they already have the rights to and release them in controlled fashion, like this. And because they *can* do this and there is a market for it, you certainly can't expect all these companies just let the ROMs go into public domain. If they're publicly funded they'd get sued for that kind of fiscal irresponsibility.
I hope you're less confused now.
I like the idea a lot. An ambitious company could even try to restructure the game industry to look more like broadcast TV. I mean, once you have good game engines stablized, you can start hiring artists, voice actors and writers to produce regular episodics. These episodics can be occasionally interrupted by advertising and delivered, for free, to the end user.
Ultimately, this would change the industry to stop focusing on technical advancements (renderers, etc) and focus on gameplay and story enhancements instead. Some of us seem to be waiting for that.
Of course, you could also shoot for a subscription model instead of ad-support, but most people already pointed out the problem with that: current gamers are reluctant to move to a monthly-fee model when they can already buy 60-gameplay-hour games for $50.
If anybody's seriously interested in this, and brainstorming some ideas I'd be curious to talk to them.
Companies usually take into account two things when setting requirements.
The first is the actual requirements. These stem from the specific things that are required by libraries and compiled code. These are things like the class of processor, the operating system, or the DirectX generation supported by the graphics drivers.
The other thing accounted for is the presumed requirements. This sets the lower threshold of performance for which the company needs to account. Few things depend on a specific processor speed, but when a company says X requires a 1GHz Pentium, they are disclaiming liability for when someone runs it with a 766MHz chip.
You may be surprised how much software you can technically get to function on a 486 100Mhz running Window95. You won't be surprised by how incredibly poorly it performs. The company is just trying to avoid having to deal with your complaints when you try it.