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al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hacking will become synonymous with terrorism (MS was already hoping it would be), and before long will be prosecuted as such.
It's a good thing Skylarov got out of the country when he did. With Bin Laden nowhere to be found in Tora Bora, the hawks have GOT to be hungry for whatever scapegoats they can get their hands on.
But Microsoft will retain control over who gets to license the technology and how it will be distributed, a company spokesman said.
This alone makes it seem pretty useless to me.
What good is creating just any old C# compiler? The point would be to get the compiler to output code that could run on the.NET framework, and it's not like MS is going to be forthcoming with the information to make that possible.
Okay, what you have is a society whose government has decided that it doesn't want video games that make carjacking and other violent mayhem seem like a fun idea.
From a moral standpoint, that's actually kind of healthy.
Where it starts to get iffy is when this sort of ban is actually symptomatic of a bigger problem, in which the government is trying to make their entire population goosestep and a commercial ban on violent games is only one such restriction imposed, in parallel with other restrictions like clampdowns on information or restricted free political speech.
For instance, if the US were to ban counterstrike servers that didn't automatically put bots on the terrorist team, I'd be pretty freaked out. And you can bet this is something that will come further down the line if Ashcroft et al. don't get their powers checked.
But I've never heard of Australia being a society with a reputation of doing this sort of thing to its population. Now, I'm not saying that this isn't happening there per se, I may just be ignorant of it, and an Aussie contribution on this issue would definitely be valuable.
But what I'm thinking is that we shouldn't necessarily be taking this in the same vein as if a North American government were imposing such a restriction. You might disagree, but I think that the censorship is only a problem when it comes close to stifling dissent against the powers that be, as opposed to just trying to promote a little bit of morality and decency. Yes, I know that the line is easily blurred, but is it blurred here?
If Microsoft can get the DRMOS thing going, and then ensure that only Microsoft operating systems can access MS Office file formats... spooky...
Well, maybe not. It basically means one of two things:
1) If the majority of other people you work with use MS Office, then you pretty much have to forsake any other operating system to use their files (unless they give Mac special priviledges or something)...
2) The whole world falls in love with "Save As XML " and the proprietary Microsoft file formats become obsolete...
If we're worried about toys that promote violence, I wonder why there's no mention of those Topps trading cards featuring all the big names in Operation Enduring Freedom and all the different weaponry at work, etc.
I guess Doom's mistake was that it promotes the killing of aliens instead of Afghans.
Sorry if this is a dumb question. I guess I was just wondering if it would ever turn out that all these networks would join up someday, or if we'll end up needing multiple computers to connect to all the different internets (should we want to), or if we'll have high-speed backbones connecting the backbones...
Sorry, I'm a programmer. I don't know any more network stuff than is necessary to download pr0n on my breaks.
I can't imagine you couldn't get a larger audience to watch a CS championship match than you could to get a bunch of weird-looking home-schooled kids with lisps trying to spell "mellifluous".
It's also a great piece of feminist literature (and no, not the man-bashing sort of feminism). If you've got any friends who are into Women's Studies or whatnot and who haven't read this book, recommend it to them.
Okay, before you mod me offtopic, someone was telling me their sys admins were telling the office staff that this worm pretty much destroyed your antivirus software and you'd have to reinstall it.
Now, wouldn't it be something if the antivirus software you had to reinstall came with all those FBI backdoors we've been hearing about?
I was looking at a book on DirectX 7 and I saw that you could load and render a 3D studio max model into a direct3d object in about four lines of code.
Does OpenGL have this? If not, should it? Or would this be the turf of an extension?
I belong to a website where there's tons of political talk, personal sharing, advice etc. being posted all the time. The basic rules are:
(a) You cannot out anybody. If you give out a name or location, that post gets edited or deleted. People who post that sort of thing are often warned about it, and have the option to fix it themselves within the 30-minute "edit window" for a post.
(b) Hate speech is usually deleted. This is a sticky situation, and usually it requires a ton of people complaining to the site administrator that such and such a post is offensive. We don't automatically filter out any words, and each post is often treated separately.
(c) Spam. Nobody wants it there, so it's toast the moment it goes up.
(d) Copyright violations. This is one of the regulations for the hosting corporation, and so we usually have to replace text with a link to it. Sometimes we get away with it if we're siting a literary passage for a debate or something.
(e) Every now and then, if something is truly indecent, it'll get cut. That's too bad, because I had this really great run of posts that said "Don't click this!" and pointed to our goatsex friend. It was quite funny, but one silly twit who couldn't take a joke complained and it got taken down. Fortunately, that was almost two months after the fact so nobody there was liable to read that post again anytime soon anyway.
(f) Every now and then we self-police, and gang up on somebody if they're being really cruel. Many people enjoy their anonymity there, and use the opportunity to talk about a lot of personal stuff, so if a particularly mean poster uses that stuff against them, they'll usually face criticism and pressure to be a little nicer.
(g) We also have a board dedicated to flaming. This is great because once discussion gets heated, every poster on that particular board who isn't interested in hearing it can redirect the posters in question to the flame board to air out grievances. Needless to say, our flame board is pretty popular.
I think the important thing isn't so much what gets a user edited, but whether or not that user knows about it beforehand and is given fair warning. Yeah, it ends up being subjective, but one of the reasons people like to go to this place is because they can safely discuss things. Our administrator is great about leaving political talk alone -- I've been ranting and raving about how stupid this whole Afghanistan war is, for instance, and there's been no deleting of any of my posts. That said, I've had to stand up to some pretty harsh criticism, but that's okay -- as far as political speech goes, it's really free. Even though we do self-police, we never ask someone to change their opinions on issues in debate.
On other method that gets used, new users go through a trial period where they can't post on every board, even though they can read them all. This gets them a chance to see how our particular dynamic goes before they are allowed to post. It's arbitrary (two weeks), but it does filter out many people who aren't genuinely interested in the site themselves (spammers, trolls, etc.). This is a new measure we've taken up, and it's pretty controversial right now, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone unless they KNOW something like this could fix some problems they're having.
As a website administrator, you've got to dedicate yourself to figuring out your own sites needs and getting everyone to stick to them. Oh yeah, and be prepared to be underappreciated and called a fascist pig if you ever do edit, even if it is the right thing for your site.
The plot, I read somewhere, is about a Picard clone trying to gain control of the Romulan Empire. No word on whether or not the stem cells will be used to help treat the obvious brain damage of the screenwriters of Insurrection.
I've been reading the Patriot Act and I cannot find a clear definitions of the word "terrorist" which aren't self-referential -- ie: "someone who commits an act of terrorism", and so forth.
Am I reading the section correctly? Because if so, it would seem to me that, without a clear definition, it's open to interpretation at various points along the way from suspicion to arrest and detainment to trial to sentencing...
I think Sci-Fi has had less to do with bringing about certain technologies (still waiting on my ansible) than it has on coining terms that have been applied to technologies.
For instance, look at Neuromancer. It gave us the term "Cyberspace", which was cool, but then tried to convince us of a guy running around trying to fence one-megabyte ram sticks. Talk about dystopian...
While I agree that gameplay is key, if you want to truly immerse a player you've got to give them a complete experience, and that means everything, gameplay, art, sound, story, etc. Immersion means overwhelming the player with just enough believable details and giving payoffs at the right time, while making sure that none of this detracts from gameplay.
If other commercial developers were as willing to face their own shortcomings (ie: gameplay & story) the way these guys are willing to face theirs (art & sound), we'd all be singing about what a wonderful world this was.
At least Red Hat sees what's going on: Microsoft's "punishment" is hardly a punishment, instead it's just an expanded advertising campaign that can lay the groundwork for a MS-addiction of enormous proportions once this phase of the punishment runs out.
What's too bad, though, is that MS had the foresight to see what a golden opportunity this sort of punishment was, and Red Hat is only seeing it now that MS has suggested it (and frantically scrambling to make sure it doesn't go through). I was livid when I heard about what a cop-out this whole thing turned out to be, but I was also a little peeved that none of the Linux vendors realized what a potentially important market this could be to invest in.
Have to hand it to Microsoft. Satan himself runs the show, but Satan is no dummy.
I know this isn't entirely the point of your question (and more than a little bit of this is motivated by my anger towards MS's recent settlement), but I just thought I'd put forward the idea that you shouldn't bother with Windows at all.
If you're hurting for cash for software, the outlook is probably not all that great for hardware too, right? The cutting edge of Linux and the various BSDs all run well on hardware that the latest Windows versions cough and sputter on.
Also, providing a Windows learning environment is only going to encourage use of Windows down the line, which will require further investments, software AND hardware upgrades etc.
If you're working with a blank slate, and these people need training anyway, might as well put it towards something that won't come back and make serious demands on your checkbook. Save the money for additional learning resources, a CD burner to replicate software for yourself (this is legal with the Linux and BSD OSes), etc. Don't go down the proprietary road, or else soon enough you'll be dealing with the same MS-driven crap the entire Western world is trying to handle right now.
One of the things about the proliferation of Windows is that people get used to a filesystem is generally organized by individual software entities. On Linux, it's organized by software type. Generally. Of course the rule gets broken both ways, and the Windows Directory throws its own set of curveballs, but for the most part, that's the way it goes.
The latter basically means that your source isn't always in the same place as the executable which isn't always in the same place as the libraries which isn't always in the same place as the documentation which isn't always in the same place as the user.conf files...
Tomayto Tomahto. You get used to it. It would help if all the vendors got together and enforced the LSB on themselves, so that a common way of doing things with the filesystem would become a practiced standard in its own.
But really, in the end, you just get used to it, and Linux has usability problems in other areas that the community should probably look into before worrying about this one.
I can't tell what you mean here by "Modles". Do you mean VB error-checking? That's "Muddles". Do you mean the prolific use of goto? That's "Noodles". Were you commenting on VB.Net code snippets? That's "Dawdles". Or were you trying to get at the collection of components and APIs? That's "Motleys".
Or maybe you had some dyslexic thing going on and really meant "seldom". That would make the original sentence: "I develop the Application Interface and Simple Functions using Visual Basic seldom..."
Yeah, that's probably the best way to go. Although the correct adverbial use is "seldomLY".
Slashdot Mirror
Hacking will become synonymous with terrorism (MS was already hoping it would be), and before long will be prosecuted as such.
It's a good thing Skylarov got out of the country when he did. With Bin Laden nowhere to be found in Tora Bora, the hawks have GOT to be hungry for whatever scapegoats they can get their hands on.
But Microsoft will retain control over who gets to license the technology and how it will be distributed, a company spokesman said.
.NET framework, and it's not like MS is going to be forthcoming with the information to make that possible.
This alone makes it seem pretty useless to me.
What good is creating just any old C# compiler? The point would be to get the compiler to output code that could run on the
Okay, what you have is a society whose government has decided that it doesn't want video games that make carjacking and other violent mayhem seem like a fun idea.
From a moral standpoint, that's actually kind of healthy.
Where it starts to get iffy is when this sort of ban is actually symptomatic of a bigger problem, in which the government is trying to make their entire population goosestep and a commercial ban on violent games is only one such restriction imposed, in parallel with other restrictions like clampdowns on information or restricted free political speech.
For instance, if the US were to ban counterstrike servers that didn't automatically put bots on the terrorist team, I'd be pretty freaked out. And you can bet this is something that will come further down the line if Ashcroft et al. don't get their powers checked.
But I've never heard of Australia being a society with a reputation of doing this sort of thing to its population. Now, I'm not saying that this isn't happening there per se, I may just be ignorant of it, and an Aussie contribution on this issue would definitely be valuable.
But what I'm thinking is that we shouldn't necessarily be taking this in the same vein as if a North American government were imposing such a restriction. You might disagree, but I think that the censorship is only a problem when it comes close to stifling dissent against the powers that be, as opposed to just trying to promote a little bit of morality and decency. Yes, I know that the line is easily blurred, but is it blurred here?
Just my two cents.
If Microsoft can get the DRMOS thing going, and then ensure that only Microsoft operating systems can access MS Office file formats... spooky...
Well, maybe not. It basically means one of two things:
1) If the majority of other people you work with use MS Office, then you pretty much have to forsake any other operating system to use their files (unless they give Mac special priviledges or something)...
2) The whole world falls in love with "Save As XML " and the proprietary Microsoft file formats become obsolete...
Taking bets on which one?
If we're worried about toys that promote violence, I wonder why there's no mention of those Topps trading cards featuring all the big names in Operation Enduring Freedom and all the different weaponry at work, etc.
I guess Doom's mistake was that it promotes the killing of aliens instead of Afghans.
Sorry if this is a dumb question. I guess I was just wondering if it would ever turn out that all these networks would join up someday, or if we'll end up needing multiple computers to connect to all the different internets (should we want to), or if we'll have high-speed backbones connecting the backbones...
Sorry, I'm a programmer. I don't know any more network stuff than is necessary to download pr0n on my breaks.
I can't imagine you couldn't get a larger audience to watch a CS championship match than you could to get a bunch of weird-looking home-schooled kids with lisps trying to spell "mellifluous".
It's also a great piece of feminist literature (and no, not the man-bashing sort of feminism). If you've got any friends who are into Women's Studies or whatnot and who haven't read this book, recommend it to them.
Alcohol.
It's foolproof.
Trust me, I've been on the wagon for two years and I am the least loose geek I know at any party.
Okay, before you mod me offtopic, someone was telling me their sys admins were telling the office staff that this worm pretty much destroyed your antivirus software and you'd have to reinstall it.
Now, wouldn't it be something if the antivirus software you had to reinstall came with all those FBI backdoors we've been hearing about?
Okay. NOW mod me offtopic.
I was looking at a book on DirectX 7 and I saw that you could load and render a 3D studio max model into a direct3d object in about four lines of code.
Does OpenGL have this? If not, should it? Or would this be the turf of an extension?
...it is considered at least poor taste to joke about game developers being hit by biological warfare.
Unless it's John Romero.
Bleah bleah bleah freedom of expression and all that...
I belong to a website where there's tons of political talk, personal sharing, advice etc. being posted all the time. The basic rules are:
(a) You cannot out anybody. If you give out a name or location, that post gets edited or deleted. People who post that sort of thing are often warned about it, and have the option to fix it themselves within the 30-minute "edit window" for a post.
(b) Hate speech is usually deleted. This is a sticky situation, and usually it requires a ton of people complaining to the site administrator that such and such a post is offensive. We don't automatically filter out any words, and each post is often treated separately.
(c) Spam. Nobody wants it there, so it's toast the moment it goes up.
(d) Copyright violations. This is one of the regulations for the hosting corporation, and so we usually have to replace text with a link to it. Sometimes we get away with it if we're siting a literary passage for a debate or something.
(e) Every now and then, if something is truly indecent, it'll get cut. That's too bad, because I had this really great run of posts that said "Don't click this!" and pointed to our goatsex friend. It was quite funny, but one silly twit who couldn't take a joke complained and it got taken down. Fortunately, that was almost two months after the fact so nobody there was liable to read that post again anytime soon anyway.
(f) Every now and then we self-police, and gang up on somebody if they're being really cruel. Many people enjoy their anonymity there, and use the opportunity to talk about a lot of personal stuff, so if a particularly mean poster uses that stuff against them, they'll usually face criticism and pressure to be a little nicer.
(g) We also have a board dedicated to flaming. This is great because once discussion gets heated, every poster on that particular board who isn't interested in hearing it can redirect the posters in question to the flame board to air out grievances. Needless to say, our flame board is pretty popular.
I think the important thing isn't so much what gets a user edited, but whether or not that user knows about it beforehand and is given fair warning. Yeah, it ends up being subjective, but one of the reasons people like to go to this place is because they can safely discuss things. Our administrator is great about leaving political talk alone -- I've been ranting and raving about how stupid this whole Afghanistan war is, for instance, and there's been no deleting of any of my posts. That said, I've had to stand up to some pretty harsh criticism, but that's okay -- as far as political speech goes, it's really free. Even though we do self-police, we never ask someone to change their opinions on issues in debate.
On other method that gets used, new users go through a trial period where they can't post on every board, even though they can read them all. This gets them a chance to see how our particular dynamic goes before they are allowed to post. It's arbitrary (two weeks), but it does filter out many people who aren't genuinely interested in the site themselves (spammers, trolls, etc.). This is a new measure we've taken up, and it's pretty controversial right now, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone unless they KNOW something like this could fix some problems they're having.
As a website administrator, you've got to dedicate yourself to figuring out your own sites needs and getting everyone to stick to them. Oh yeah, and be prepared to be underappreciated and called a fascist pig if you ever do edit, even if it is the right thing for your site.
The plot, I read somewhere, is about a Picard clone trying to gain control of the Romulan Empire. No word on whether or not the stem cells will be used to help treat the obvious brain damage of the screenwriters of Insurrection.
I've been reading the Patriot Act and I cannot find a clear definitions of the word "terrorist" which aren't self-referential -- ie: "someone who commits an act of terrorism", and so forth.
Am I reading the section correctly? Because if so, it would seem to me that, without a clear definition, it's open to interpretation at various points along the way from suspicion to arrest and detainment to trial to sentencing...
What's going on with this format? I mean, it's like, Bruce likes his chicken spicy! What's up with that?
Now that's fucking funny.
I think Sci-Fi has had less to do with bringing about certain technologies (still waiting on my ansible) than it has on coining terms that have been applied to technologies.
For instance, look at Neuromancer. It gave us the term "Cyberspace", which was cool, but then tried to convince us of a guy running around trying to fence one-megabyte ram sticks. Talk about dystopian...
Anyone who's in a creative arts program should be careful about this too. My university had something like this for creative writing students.
While I agree that gameplay is key, if you want to truly immerse a player you've got to give them a complete experience, and that means everything, gameplay, art, sound, story, etc. Immersion means overwhelming the player with just enough believable details and giving payoffs at the right time, while making sure that none of this detracts from gameplay.
If other commercial developers were as willing to face their own shortcomings (ie: gameplay & story) the way these guys are willing to face theirs (art & sound), we'd all be singing about what a wonderful world this was.
At least Red Hat sees what's going on: Microsoft's "punishment" is hardly a punishment, instead it's just an expanded advertising campaign that can lay the groundwork for a MS-addiction of enormous proportions once this phase of the punishment runs out.
What's too bad, though, is that MS had the foresight to see what a golden opportunity this sort of punishment was, and Red Hat is only seeing it now that MS has suggested it (and frantically scrambling to make sure it doesn't go through). I was livid when I heard about what a cop-out this whole thing turned out to be, but I was also a little peeved that none of the Linux vendors realized what a potentially important market this could be to invest in.
Have to hand it to Microsoft. Satan himself runs the show, but Satan is no dummy.
I know this isn't entirely the point of your question (and more than a little bit of this is motivated by my anger towards MS's recent settlement), but I just thought I'd put forward the idea that you shouldn't bother with Windows at all.
If you're hurting for cash for software, the outlook is probably not all that great for hardware too, right? The cutting edge of Linux and the various BSDs all run well on hardware that the latest Windows versions cough and sputter on.
Also, providing a Windows learning environment is only going to encourage use of Windows down the line, which will require further investments, software AND hardware upgrades etc.
If you're working with a blank slate, and these people need training anyway, might as well put it towards something that won't come back and make serious demands on your checkbook. Save the money for additional learning resources, a CD burner to replicate software for yourself (this is legal with the Linux and BSD OSes), etc. Don't go down the proprietary road, or else soon enough you'll be dealing with the same MS-driven crap the entire Western world is trying to handle right now.
One of the things about the proliferation of Windows is that people get used to a filesystem is generally organized by individual software entities. On Linux, it's organized by software type. Generally. Of course the rule gets broken both ways, and the Windows Directory throws its own set of curveballs, but for the most part, that's the way it goes.
.conf files...
The latter basically means that your source isn't always in the same place as the executable which isn't always in the same place as the libraries which isn't always in the same place as the documentation which isn't always in the same place as the user
Tomayto Tomahto. You get used to it. It would help if all the vendors got together and enforced the LSB on themselves, so that a common way of doing things with the filesystem would become a practiced standard in its own.
But really, in the end, you just get used to it, and Linux has usability problems in other areas that the community should probably look into before worrying about this one.
And you're right, I have no sense of humor about this.
The moment after I wrote what I wrote I wished I could rephrase it. I meant you (as in the royal "you") need a sense of humour to teach VB.
Visual Basic Modles
.Net code snippets? That's "Dawdles". Or were you trying to get at the collection of components and APIs? That's "Motleys".
I can't tell what you mean here by "Modles". Do you mean VB error-checking? That's "Muddles". Do you mean the prolific use of goto? That's "Noodles". Were you commenting on VB
Or maybe you had some dyslexic thing going on and really meant "seldom". That would make the original sentence: "I develop the Application Interface and Simple Functions using Visual Basic seldom..."
Yeah, that's probably the best way to go. Although the correct adverbial use is "seldomLY".
(jk. I teach VB. You need a sense of humour...)