Not to say that it won't happen, but you may be premature in saying that a current 360 owner could purchase an external BD-ROM drive for their 360.
Based on the article, my interpretation is that they've been contracted to build 360's with integrated BD-ROM drives. It could just be poor wording, but to me I wouldn't be expecting BD-ROM addons right away, at least based on this.
For those of us actually interested in opinions / answers to the poster's question, please actually respond to the QUESTION. Anonymous didn't ask for criticism over the choice of languages, keep that in mind.
Or how about the US Government deciding to execute a gigantic dragnet and grab everyone who has read Al-Jazeera and posted something somewhere that says that "we deserved to get bombed" - which I've seen on this site here many times.
"...granted Microsoft a patent for privacy policy change notification, which describes how to threaten users with the loss of their accounts and access to web sites and services should they refuse to consent to changes in a privacy policy."
As opposed to...? How it is now, that if you disagree with a site's current or new privacy policy you shouldn't, y'know, use them? Say for example GMail changes their privacy policy, and tells its users that it's going to start divulging the contents of your all your email to 'select marketing partners' for 'market research' purposes. I can't tell them "You know what, I don't care what the rest of your users do, but I'm going to stick with the original privacy policy, kay?" I either, as the submitter puts it, consent or die.
Be glad that in the figure they indicate they'd let you delete your account in that case.
PS - I'd seriously dig a Windows theme that looked like that.
Does it really surprise anyone though? FF is huge (perhaps as an understatement) in Japan where Microsoft has a pretty tiny share. Releasing exclusively would be suicide, and though there is a large market in the US, I would expect there's enough PS3 owners and enough would-be PS3 owners on the fence that would pick up a PS3 because of FF that it wouldn't necessarily be worth the added effort to port to xbox.
And please God, don't let them contract out to another company to do a half-assed port.:-P
Take a look at Marathon: Aleph One. A modernized version of the Marathon engine, just insert data files from the original games and go. Or it looks like there's some new maps and such available now, too.
Do you not agree, however, that a properly-firewalled port is inaccessible to the outside world?
And do you also not agree that, outside of a directed, intentional effort to bypass through faulty software or firmware, a machine behind a NAT device is essentially protected from the outside?
I did not say the three are the same, only that the outcome is essentially the same.
The default XP Pro install these days with the firewall turned on only allows traffic in on a couple ports (remote assistance, and a few other services, I can't recall them off the top of my head at the moment) unless you tell it otherwise. I don't think that a stock Windows install even can have a hundred ports open.
Yes, firewalling is not the same as closing ports, but it essentially gives you the same outcome. I would imagine the vast majority of home users are hiding behind a NAT device anyway these days, so it becomes even less of an issue.
The Fall of Reach, going into the history of the SPARTANs, ending just before the beginning of the first game The Flood, basically a straight novelization of the first game, a little bland if you've played the game, though they do throw in a few little extras you don't get from the game. First Strike which I haven't read yet, though judging from the amazon.com description sounds like it may bridge the gap between Halo and Halo 2. Someone who has read it could certainly flesh this out a bit more. Ghosts of Onyx which again I haven't read, though it sounds as though it takes place alongside either Halo 2 or Halo 3, and I believe wikipedia will tell you it deals with the SPARTAN III project.
Additionally, as you noted, there's the graphic novel, a collection of four stories taking place at varying points in time throughout the Halo universe, published by Marvel. Though I'm not much of a graphic novel / manga enthusiast, I recall a friend saying the names involved with this were relatively big.
There are also three soundtracks out, one for Halo and two for Halo 2 (and a single so far for Halo 3 available on the iTunes Music Store), though these don't necessarily expand the Halo universe; it is interesting to note though that on the first Halo 2 soundtrack there's some additional music not in the game, kind of a 'music inspired by' album, with four selections from Incubus, an opening track by Breaking Benjamin (though no longer available via iTMS) and a closing track by Hoobastank.
On a personal note, if anyone could point me to a source for near-lifesize (i.e. 8ft is too big, but 4-5ft would be good) cardboard standups of Master Chief, I would be eternally grateful. Don't ask.
I, for one, enjoyed the Halo 2 cutscenes, I didn't feel they were too obtrusive and the extra detail they were able to pump in was certainly a nice touch. Given the additional power of the 360, I look forward to seeing what they can pull off.
On an unrelated note, am I the only one who had a problem with apparently the texture detail jumping during the cutscenes in Halo 2? As soon as someone or something appeared on-screen it'd have a relatively low-res texture applied to it for as long as a second or so, then bump up to the full quality. I've never figured out if it's a problem with my xbox or just a fact of life in the game.
It all sounds like yet another continuation of the separation of work and personal life.
She's certainly free to have a myspace account and post whatever she wants in it, but if she leaves it wide open then she should be prepared to face consequences for it because yes, someone may find it and it may well influence a hiring decision.
Though she did take it a step further, advertising it to the children and the teachers at the school, pretty much forcing the issue.
To me, it sounds like she may have just been an overzealous I-can-do-what-I-want-and-you-can't-touch-me slightly naive college grad (albeit with two kids, you'd hope that she'd have learned that's not always the case already.) To me, it would seem the happy ending would be she learns her lesson, demonstrates such, and is able to redeem herself to the university and the school she was teaching at, gets her degree, goes on her way and goes on to educate our kids and set good examples for them. That's of course assuming the lawsuit is just posturing on her part and it ends in a simple settlement or just gets dropped altogether. Given the day and age, I don't have a lot of faith that it will though, unfortunately.
There's a difference between that kind of interaction and the kind where you direct your students to photos of you drunk on the web.
There definitely is, and yes, she did cross the line with that. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the quote, but I'm just concerned by the wording allegedly coming from the other teacher, almost that she's telling her not to get involved with the children is all.
A little more digging turns up some of the finer points of the fight that aren't necessarily reported in the Washington Post article. For example, this article from the Sydney Morning Herald states:
Snyder did her student-teaching at Conestoga Valley High School in 2006.
Conestoga Valley officials told the college they would stop accepting student-teachers from Millersville if she went unpunished, the lawsuit said.
Which leads one to believe that the university was being pressured from the district to do something about her and let them save face. Presumably the district feels they're in a position of enough power (taking on most of their students for their student teaching assignments?) that they could do this.
However, if you look at the response from Conestoga Valley, available on their website here, they state that's untrue, and include some more information not linked in the Washington Post article, including what they claim is the offending Myspace blog post which is not the picture hosted by thesmokinggun.com which the WP article links to. It could be a little damning towards her if you believe the district that she was actively encouraging the kids to go to her Myspace page, but then, not knowing what her page is (I would imagine by now it's either been deleted or locked down anyway) it'd be hard to say whether the content therein is really unacceptable for the students to see.
One quote from their response troubles me to some degree though, from her cooperating teacher, Nicole Reinking:
One of the concerns that Ms. Snyder's cooperating teacher, Nicole Reinking, expressed to Ms. Snyder throughout the semester was the importance of maintaining a professional working relationship with the students and not to become overly familiar with them regarding her personal life.
Certainly that can be taken any number of ways, some good, some bad, but taking it simply at face value, it saddens me to see where education has gone these days. Growing up in rural Maine (not that there's really any other kind of Maine:-P) we were all very friendly with our teachers, they would regularly invite our classes to their houses for cookouts and such, we didn't turn out so bad. But that's an entirely different discussion.
Regardless, in the end I'm a little surprised and frightened that a university feels they have the ability to do this. That after someone has paid them tens of thousands of dollars for their education, and has presumably satisfactorily completed the academic requirements, they can one day before graduation tell you "Yeah, we're not going to give you the degree you wanted, have this English degree instead." What's to keep them from doing that to someone else because they don't like brunettes or people from Alaska? (Don't answer that, I know it's a stupid question.:-P) At the very least, if her performance in the field so to speak was the cause of their decision, say so. Naturally (as would be standard practice at any univeristy, I'd assume) the only mention of it on their website at the moment is a brief aside that they can't say anything publicly.
2. There are no drivers for her Lexmark printer and Lexmark have no plans to release any. Not to nitpick (well, okay, yeah to nitpick) this isn't (necessarily) Microsoft's problem, but Lexmark's.
Does Vista have no drivers at all for Lexmark printers, or just not for this particular model of printer? If they have none at all, then yeah, that kinda sucks, but if they just don't have the driver for a bleeding edge / stoneaged printer, that's not too unexpected. With Lexmark stating they don't plan on releasing Vista drivers for it, I would assume the printer is the latter, though that is based on absolutely nothing at all, so don't hold me to it.:-P
NPR had a longer on-air piece about this, but unfortunately all I could dig up on their website was this brief (though the Listen link provides the whole story).
Basically, Intuit (and presumably H&R Block and any other tax software producers) lobby long and hard to make sure the public can't e-file directly to the IRS, only by proxy. So your $16.95 is presumably going entirely to Intuit. Plus the $44.95 (or more, or less if you're lucky) you paid for the software. Plus the additional $29.95 if you have to file to two states.
Careful, son, them's fightin' words. You just suggested that Covenant Elites are better than the Master Chief. You're walking a dangerous line, once the Halo fanboys catch wind of this.
GT is a simulation which tries to be realistic, so its natural that with each release it gets a little closer to its goal, they can't just be innovative and add turtle shells, since that would totally break what the game is about. That said, its really time for a damage model in GT, kind of miss that since GT3.
A damage model would be nice, sure, but how about an AI for the other cars? I'm getting tired of constantly being rear-ended into the dirt because I happened to be on the other cars' track at the wrong time.
My guess would be that the average user will not have the slightest idea what "Cannot find server or DNS Error" (why does IE6 capitalize Error, anyway?) means or moreover just get frustrated with "The page cannot be displayed" and assume it's a problem with the site they're trying to get to and not know what's wrong. Whereas yes, they could use Google (or your alternate search engine of choice) to try to find the correct URL, this is just taking out that extra step and trying to help the user along.
I'm sure, as with a lot of the contentious things that IE7 does, there is a setting somewhere for advanced users who would prefer to simply see the DNS error message instead of being redirected to their Live Search tool (similar to the 'Show friendly HTTP error messages' option in IE6)
Yeah, their documentation (excepting certain editions of the reference manuals, they tend to be pretty neutral) does tend to lean towards the fast development / lower security side of things a little too much. Because that is a great function for beginners, or people who are deploying to trusted intranets, it saves development time and just works.
But like most things, once you've got a solid enough knowledge of it, in my opinion, if you sick with the quick and easy pre-made libraries and such without considering the security implications, you're setting yourself up for disaster. It amazes me how little people consider security in web applications, even today I noticed a glaring flaw (to me anyway) in a client's single signin system that they've been using for years, I explained it to their lead programmer and just got a blank stare.
Ten minutes later, I had access to all of his email, files, databases and had almost gotten into their master password store. I like to think he's a changed man now.
In defense of ColdFusion (been developing with it since version 4.5 back in 2000), people who use the tag (which is where you find the "_required" suffix on field names, barring the random oddball person who implements that manually) are just plain lazy and asking for trouble anyway. It adds a whole pile of extra Javascript to the page and, as you hint at, it's insanely simple to bypass and it's just plain bad practice not to be defensive about even those variables.
Blame the lazy i-just-got-a-college-degree-so-i-know-everything-a bout-everything students who learned how to write web scripts through Dreamweaver and have never actually seen the resulting ColdFusion code in their life.:-P (Bitter? Nah.)
Slashdot Mirror
Not to say that it won't happen, but you may be premature in saying that a current 360 owner could purchase an external BD-ROM drive for their 360.
Based on the article, my interpretation is that they've been contracted to build 360's with integrated BD-ROM drives. It could just be poor wording, but to me I wouldn't be expecting BD-ROM addons right away, at least based on this.
For those of us actually interested in opinions / answers to the poster's question, please actually respond to the QUESTION. Anonymous didn't ask for criticism over the choice of languages, keep that in mind.
See #1. Or refer to "paranoid nutcases."
As opposed to...? How it is now, that if you disagree with a site's current or new privacy policy you shouldn't, y'know, use them? Say for example GMail changes their privacy policy, and tells its users that it's going to start divulging the contents of your all your email to 'select marketing partners' for 'market research' purposes. I can't tell them "You know what, I don't care what the rest of your users do, but I'm going to stick with the original privacy policy, kay?" I either, as the submitter puts it, consent or die.
Be glad that in the figure they indicate they'd let you delete your account in that case.
PS - I'd seriously dig a Windows theme that looked like that.
American cinema peaked with Weekend at Bernie's...
Sadly, the sequel just didn't have the same charm.
Does it really surprise anyone though? FF is huge (perhaps as an understatement) in Japan where Microsoft has a pretty tiny share. Releasing exclusively would be suicide, and though there is a large market in the US, I would expect there's enough PS3 owners and enough would-be PS3 owners on the fence that would pick up a PS3 because of FF that it wouldn't necessarily be worth the added effort to port to xbox.
:-P
And please God, don't let them contract out to another company to do a half-assed port.
Take a look at Marathon: Aleph One. A modernized version of the Marathon engine, just insert data files from the original games and go. Or it looks like there's some new maps and such available now, too.
Do you not agree, however, that a properly-firewalled port is inaccessible to the outside world?
And do you also not agree that, outside of a directed, intentional effort to bypass through faulty software or firmware, a machine behind a NAT device is essentially protected from the outside?
I did not say the three are the same, only that the outcome is essentially the same.
Hundreds?
The default XP Pro install these days with the firewall turned on only allows traffic in on a couple ports (remote assistance, and a few other services, I can't recall them off the top of my head at the moment) unless you tell it otherwise. I don't think that a stock Windows install even can have a hundred ports open.
Yes, firewalling is not the same as closing ports, but it essentially gives you the same outcome. I would imagine the vast majority of home users are hiding behind a NAT device anyway these days, so it becomes even less of an issue.
There's four books so far
The Fall of Reach, going into the history of the SPARTANs, ending just before the beginning of the first game
The Flood, basically a straight novelization of the first game, a little bland if you've played the game, though they do throw in a few little extras you don't get from the game.
First Strike which I haven't read yet, though judging from the amazon.com description sounds like it may bridge the gap between Halo and Halo 2. Someone who has read it could certainly flesh this out a bit more.
Ghosts of Onyx which again I haven't read, though it sounds as though it takes place alongside either Halo 2 or Halo 3, and I believe wikipedia will tell you it deals with the SPARTAN III project.
Additionally, as you noted, there's the graphic novel, a collection of four stories taking place at varying points in time throughout the Halo universe, published by Marvel. Though I'm not much of a graphic novel / manga enthusiast, I recall a friend saying the names involved with this were relatively big.
There are also three soundtracks out, one for Halo and two for Halo 2 (and a single so far for Halo 3 available on the iTunes Music Store), though these don't necessarily expand the Halo universe; it is interesting to note though that on the first Halo 2 soundtrack there's some additional music not in the game, kind of a 'music inspired by' album, with four selections from Incubus, an opening track by Breaking Benjamin (though no longer available via iTMS) and a closing track by Hoobastank.
On a personal note, if anyone could point me to a source for near-lifesize (i.e. 8ft is too big, but 4-5ft would be good) cardboard standups of Master Chief, I would be eternally grateful. Don't ask.
I, for one, enjoyed the Halo 2 cutscenes, I didn't feel they were too obtrusive and the extra detail they were able to pump in was certainly a nice touch. Given the additional power of the 360, I look forward to seeing what they can pull off.
On an unrelated note, am I the only one who had a problem with apparently the texture detail jumping during the cutscenes in Halo 2? As soon as someone or something appeared on-screen it'd have a relatively low-res texture applied to it for as long as a second or so, then bump up to the full quality. I've never figured out if it's a problem with my xbox or just a fact of life in the game.
It all sounds like yet another continuation of the separation of work and personal life.
She's certainly free to have a myspace account and post whatever she wants in it, but if she leaves it wide open then she should be prepared to face consequences for it because yes, someone may find it and it may well influence a hiring decision.
Though she did take it a step further, advertising it to the children and the teachers at the school, pretty much forcing the issue.
To me, it sounds like she may have just been an overzealous I-can-do-what-I-want-and-you-can't-touch-me slightly naive college grad (albeit with two kids, you'd hope that she'd have learned that's not always the case already.) To me, it would seem the happy ending would be she learns her lesson, demonstrates such, and is able to redeem herself to the university and the school she was teaching at, gets her degree, goes on her way and goes on to educate our kids and set good examples for them. That's of course assuming the lawsuit is just posturing on her part and it ends in a simple settlement or just gets dropped altogether. Given the day and age, I don't have a lot of faith that it will though, unfortunately.
There definitely is, and yes, she did cross the line with that. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the quote, but I'm just concerned by the wording allegedly coming from the other teacher, almost that she's telling her not to get involved with the children is all.
Which leads one to believe that the university was being pressured from the district to do something about her and let them save face. Presumably the district feels they're in a position of enough power (taking on most of their students for their student teaching assignments?) that they could do this.
However, if you look at the response from Conestoga Valley, available on their website here, they state that's untrue, and include some more information not linked in the Washington Post article, including what they claim is the offending Myspace blog post which is not the picture hosted by thesmokinggun.com which the WP article links to. It could be a little damning towards her if you believe the district that she was actively encouraging the kids to go to her Myspace page, but then, not knowing what her page is (I would imagine by now it's either been deleted or locked down anyway) it'd be hard to say whether the content therein is really unacceptable for the students to see.
One quote from their response troubles me to some degree though, from her cooperating teacher, Nicole Reinking:
Certainly that can be taken any number of ways, some good, some bad, but taking it simply at face value, it saddens me to see where education has gone these days. Growing up in rural Maine (not that there's really any other kind of Maine
Regardless, in the end I'm a little surprised and frightened that a university feels they have the ability to do this. That after someone has paid them tens of thousands of dollars for their education, and has presumably satisfactorily completed the academic requirements, they can one day before graduation tell you "Yeah, we're not going to give you the degree you wanted, have this English degree instead." What's to keep them from doing that to someone else because they don't like brunettes or people from Alaska? (Don't answer that, I know it's a stupid question.
Does Vista have no drivers at all for Lexmark printers, or just not for this particular model of printer? If they have none at all, then yeah, that kinda sucks, but if they just don't have the driver for a bleeding edge / stoneaged printer, that's not too unexpected. With Lexmark stating they don't plan on releasing Vista drivers for it, I would assume the printer is the latter, though that is based on absolutely nothing at all, so don't hold me to it.
NPR had a longer on-air piece about this, but unfortunately all I could dig up on their website was this brief (though the Listen link provides the whole story).
NPR : IRS Urges E-filing - But by Vendors Only, Please
Basically, Intuit (and presumably H&R Block and any other tax software producers) lobby long and hard to make sure the public can't e-file directly to the IRS, only by proxy. So your $16.95 is presumably going entirely to Intuit. Plus the $44.95 (or more, or less if you're lucky) you paid for the software. Plus the additional $29.95 if you have to file to two states.
It's a pretty nice gig.
FYI, here's Part I (The Early Years 1980-1983) and Part II (The Golden Age 1985-1993).
Might save you a little digging as for some reason part I doesn't show up on his bio.
Careful, son, them's fightin' words. You just suggested that Covenant Elites are better than the Master Chief. You're walking a dangerous line, once the Halo fanboys catch wind of this.
Wake me when my PS3 can fold all my laundry. I don't even have that many jeans, anyway.
A damage model would be nice, sure, but how about an AI for the other cars? I'm getting tired of constantly being rear-ended into the dirt because I happened to be on the other cars' track at the wrong time.
My guess would be that the average user will not have the slightest idea what "Cannot find server or DNS Error" (why does IE6 capitalize Error, anyway?) means or moreover just get frustrated with "The page cannot be displayed" and assume it's a problem with the site they're trying to get to and not know what's wrong. Whereas yes, they could use Google (or your alternate search engine of choice) to try to find the correct URL, this is just taking out that extra step and trying to help the user along.
I'm sure, as with a lot of the contentious things that IE7 does, there is a setting somewhere for advanced users who would prefer to simply see the DNS error message instead of being redirected to their Live Search tool (similar to the 'Show friendly HTTP error messages' option in IE6)
Show us WSXGA (1440x900) display users some widescreen love! :(
Don't forget, this is Slashdot. And the politics section. Redundancy at its finest there. kdawson has a promising career ahead of him/her/it.
Yeah, their documentation (excepting certain editions of the reference manuals, they tend to be pretty neutral) does tend to lean towards the fast development / lower security side of things a little too much. Because that is a great function for beginners, or people who are deploying to trusted intranets, it saves development time and just works.
But like most things, once you've got a solid enough knowledge of it, in my opinion, if you sick with the quick and easy pre-made libraries and such without considering the security implications, you're setting yourself up for disaster. It amazes me how little people consider security in web applications, even today I noticed a glaring flaw (to me anyway) in a client's single signin system that they've been using for years, I explained it to their lead programmer and just got a blank stare.
Ten minutes later, I had access to all of his email, files, databases and had almost gotten into their master password store. I like to think he's a changed man now.
Though I know better than to think like that.
In defense of ColdFusion (been developing with it since version 4.5 back in 2000), people who use the tag (which is where you find the "_required" suffix on field names, barring the random oddball person who implements that manually) are just plain lazy and asking for trouble anyway. It adds a whole pile of extra Javascript to the page and, as you hint at, it's insanely simple to bypass and it's just plain bad practice not to be defensive about even those variables.
a bout-everything students who learned how to write web scripts through Dreamweaver and have never actually seen the resulting ColdFusion code in their life. :-P (Bitter? Nah.)
Blame the lazy i-just-got-a-college-degree-so-i-know-everything-