Yes. Managers don't need to be experts in the things they're managing but they really need some experience in it.
A building manager who'd never hammered a nail or hung gyprock wouldn't understand the consequences of their decisions on the people who have to do it. They can bluff their way through by having a nose for bullshit - trying to guess if they're getting the full truth or not, but this is just guesswork.
In a programming example. Many companies have a policy that all programming must be done in one language, usually C or C++. If your manager has never programmed he won't know how much savings you'll get from writing a text parsing tool in Perl or Python over C, for instance. So they're unlikely to relax the rule. A manager who'd programmed would understand that every language has its strengths and that by letting one technical violation slip, they're saving a ton of time.
This is where trying to read the employees fits in. You try to guess if the programmer is serious, or if they just like language X more than language Y and are trying to let you program in the language of the week or are serious that it'll pay off.
Actually, even if you don't associate them with each other, the post still works. Bin Laden wants to destroy western culture, Ashcroft wants to save it (as he sees) by any means, even so far (as we see) by destroying what it stands for.
Oh give it up. Everybody knows what you're saying, nobody is reacting because it's obvious and irrelevant.
If you want to sell to a bunch of people, you make a bland product. So what?
If the magazine cared enough about their covers they'd either print two runs (cheap when you print huge numbers) or ignore Walmart's demands.
If a boycott is good when we do it (don't buy MS, they're scum) why is a boycott bad when Walmart does it? It's a fundamentally democratic action, it's spending your money on products you wish to support.
If enough people care about this, they can demand that the cover is changed back, if they outweigh Walmart, they win.
Yes, I understand that this changes magazines I see on the stands. But I don't buy them because they're all bland mass-market crap. If I buy magazines, I buy smaller-run, independent stuff because that's what I want to support.
But really, this doesn't affect free speech. You're still free to say whatever you want, I'm still free to ignore it.
For them to really be tolerant, they'd have to have that attitude when it might lose them a few subscribers. They've cracked down on people who have looked at uploading alternate listings.
It's just a little bit of enlightened self interest - hacked have to buy a unit to fiddle with. But get anywhere near being self sufficient, or competing with them and the shit hits the fan.
It doesn't take much to be tolerant of something that doesn't bother you in the slightest... (It's easy to support free speech when you like it, but much harder when you disagree strongly with it.)
I'd be a lot more impressed in TiVo accepted listings hacks and such and simply tried to compete on ease of use and features.
I don't think they should have any right to dictate what people do with their product, even if they don't like it.
They also burned a few bridges by lying about the ability to use a TiVo (the old ones claimed this on the box) without the service. They forced an upgrade on everyone and it basically made the boxes without service unusable. Rather than rolling out an immediate fix for their "mistake" they promised to roll it into the next release, a few months away. Their "helpful net representative" then flamed a few people for being useless deadbeats for being unwilling to pay a measly $10 (what are you, on welfare?!?) when they were unhappy at his suggested fix - buy service.
(I'm quite well off, with two incomes and no kids, and I spend a lot on tech, but I wouldn't want to be trapped into anything that I have to pay a monthly fee for if I could avoid it. I don't consider myself cheap, I just don't want to be over a barrel when the only provider of a service decides to suddenly jack up the price.)
They show some enlightened self interest, but no real care for the customers. (Not much different than many other companies.)
Mine worked with everything I threw at it, even Gigastore (the cheapest I could find that still had a name) at their rated speed, and usually at 24x, until I found some really cheap ones...
The cardboard packaging said Verbatim, but when I popped the top off they were unbranded white ones, with no identifying marks. The manufacturer data (as reported by the drive) says "CMC Magnetics" and they burn just fine, but nobody else can read them properly. (My wife's new DVD drive will, but it's very slow, nobody else can actually read them at all.)
I haven't found a brand that works better than anything else, but I certainly won't buy the extra-cheap ones anymore.
One spindle I bought unmarked turned out to be CDs branded as IBM. I dunno if that's the real IBM, or some clone company, but they worked really well and were dirt cheap. Anyone else ever run into this "brand"?
You downplay backups but in my experience they are fairly common. If someone downloads a game, it's been cracked, they don't need fancy burners and software to make a backup. It's only people who have a legitimate disc in front of them who have to go through these hoops.
You claim to have never lost a disc... I've never had a music CD die, but many game CDs have. I don't think it takes a lot before a protected CD can't be read properly, so while it may still be good enough for everything else, it fails the check. (I usually just go grab a crack.)
But I'll keep supporting those who break copy protection because of my experience with Diablo 2. I bought it and installed it, only to find out that it wouldn't play. It failed at the copy protection. The FAQ on Blizzard's site for this item said "buy a newer cd drive." Fuck that noise. I warned everyone I knew not to buy the game and told them where to get a warezed version. It was unforgivable that Blizzard was selling a product they knew to be broken on a large number of computers, but didn't care enough to help the users. The whole thing started to protect their pocket book, so I decided that was a good way to hurt them. They probably lost 10-20 sales (the group I LAN with tends to buy most games, except for the kiddies). It's also the last Blizzard game I'll ever buy, until they quit using copy protection.
Companies have an obligation to sell a working product. Not only is it dishonest not to, but you'll lose out big in the end when people who have no way of getting their money back try to sabotage you in any way possible.
If you want to read the whole article on one page you can either use the "print the article" option, where it removes the ads and concatenates it, or modify the URL...
I doubt it's for interpolation. It's easy to average two numbers and pick the midpoint but proper interpolation is a *very* complex subject. To get really good interpolation you need to graph both sides of the data set and extrapolate over the area you're interested in, from both sides. Then where (if) those meet, that's the new value. The farther away you graph from, the smoother the interpolated area.
This is something it might be nice to have a function to do, but if this was done on every array access it's going to be hella-slow.
Not to mention, sometimes you store arrays of things you don't want interpolated. You could interpolate between shades in a pallette, but perhaps you're holding three colors in an array for three effects. Effect one (blood) is red, effect two (slime) is green, etc... If you use floats for integers either you round them to get ints, or you have something that's never exact. So in this case you'd have 1.000003, for instance, and it'd interpolate between the red and green, even though you didn't want that behaviour.
So, for the reason that automatic interpolation between array values is hard to do, and hard to do in a way that you'd want, I don't think they're doing it.
Most likely they're dealing in floats simply because they've got hardware that can deal with floats very quickly, and they trunc or round to get the desired value when using them in an integer context.
One of the problems these days, is that many companies don't want to make royalty money in the "right" way. They often want to use patents to stop their competitor from bringing a product to market.
It makes sense, if you can get $10 / VCR sold by your company, or $1 in royalties from a VCR sold by another company. If you consider that if the competition didn't exist, you'd have sold that VCR, the $1 in royalties doesn't seem like profit, it seems like a $1 offset to a $10 loss.
So companies do things that on the surface seem absurd, when the real goal is to sabotage competition.
When you are given money for work, the government takes a slice. When you buy something, the government makes you pay more.
Technically they might be taking it from the merchant and thus making him charge more, but it still comes out of your pocket in the end, so it's essentially like being taxed twice on the same money.
Now, this is fairly irrelevant. In the end, it's just cash that they collect one way or another. The specific way does affect people of various wage levels more or less, but it really comes to one line in the budget in the end.
The other poster's talk about violence was valuable though. People often forget that all authority in society eventually comes from the armed forces. Get a parking ticket? What if you don't pay. Eventually they'll boot the car. Cut it off and they'll send a tow truck. Stop the guy from towing and they'll send police. Stop or deter the police, they'll send more. Stop or deter those and they'll send the national guard, etc... This might be a very distant threat, or might be thinly veiled, but it is behind all exercises of government power...
That's an example of a SWAG. It's like a WAG (Wild Assed Guess) sort of. A WAG would just say "WalMart can't sell more than 1000, maybe 2000 computers online", a SWAG would pick a few numbers, plug them into an equation and "prove it".
Shops won't support this? Heh. You don't understand market forces.
I worked for a while at a shop that did primarily windows support. Nobody there liked MS or anything, but we did what people called and asked us to do. Some Mac stuff, some hardware problems for people who were running BeOS or Linux. Even some Amiga problems. We hardly ever turned anyone away.
You think that if Walmart starts selling something in volume that shops won't start supporting it?
Not bloody likely. They'll buy one of the systems, get used to it, and list it as another system they proudly support.
Reading email recently I had a good laugh. There was a.sig at the bottom that said
"Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system http://www.grisoft.com)."
But there wasn't a message digest, a pgp signature, or anything. What's to stop me from taking that signature and appending it to my email, especially just before I send out an infected file? Or if I were a virus writer, having my virus include this in some of its email payloads?
AVG's message is training people to trust a message (and all attachments) based on a simple text sig. What could be more easily faked?
That's all well and good, for people you can convince to stop taking things, or killing in the name of religion.
Unfortunately, until you can, you need protection against them. It may suck that the US has the power, as opposed to another country that people trust more, Switzerland or whatever. But realistically, the reason the US isn't liked is because they do have the power; if another country had it, chances are they wouldn't be popular.
I too wish that the world wasn't violent, and that people would all just get along, but I know it's not going to happen. This'll echo the 2nd Amendment fundies, but as long as other people have guns, we need to have them too or we'll be sitting ducks. There are many people out there who think everyone of another religion needs to convert, or die...
Only to the uninformed. What you just did is called "Argument by Authority". You are implying that because Noam is famous, that his views are more likely to be correct in this area.
Even moreso, Noam is a false authority. He's a linguistics professor, arguing about politics. That's like using your dentist as an authority in a discussion about fighter planes. (Whatever authority the person could be said to be in their own field doesn't apply to the new field.)
The correct way to evaluate this is the way you would be a book came in without the author's name. Open it up, look at the conclusions, see if the evidence supports them, and if the sources for the evidence are provided. If a book doesn't meet those requirements it's probably because it was written by someone who couldn't, either because they didn't know how, or because the evidence simply doesn't support them.
If you invest in a camera good enough to bother taking TIFFs with (no need doing so on a 1.3MP camera) you should check out Canon's line. They use the RAW format, a proprietary one, that actually does a better job than TIFFs, but is much smaller.
I've gotten into using.RAWs because they store the output of the CCD directly, you can play with the white-balance (and other non-optics changes) without actually having done anything to the actual image. TIFFs might be uncompressed, and can be 16b/channel, but they still have a white-balance and some other effects applied. And while proprietary, the RAW format is documented well enough that many 3rd party utils decode it, so you don't run into problems trying to use it.
Gotta agree with the people who say that the G2 is too big, to be carried in the pocket at any rate...
I have one, and love it. I've taken 3500 pics in the last six weeks. But it's much larger than the S40, which I'd still call a bit big for the average person to feel comfortable having on them all the time.
The A20 (I think) is a pretty decent size... whichever one Canon bills at the World's smallest 2MP camera.
I think my next cameras are going to be an EOS line digital, perhaps a used 1D in a year or two, and a tiny pocket cam, whatever res those are by then. Canon of course.
While it's impossible to state that "true resolution" of film, because it's an analog medium, it's not infinite. The grain of film puts an upper limit on detail, as much as resolution of digital image does.
As for contrast, colour range, and the like, digital is starting to beat out filmin this regard.
Check out sample pics from a Canon EOS-1D, it's only 4MP and not only is it the best digital camera out (except perhaps for digital medium format) it's rivaling film in all but a few cases.
Most people estimate analog film, good stuff, Provia 100F and such, to have about the same usefull resolving capacity as a 9Mpixel digital camera, based on the fact that when you scan a film negative (on a $50k scanner) you don't gain any more detail by scanning it at a much higher resolution.
As for batteries, many low end digital cameras (and some high-end ones, like the Minolta Dimage 7i) take AA batteries which should last just as long - downtime - as they would in a film camera. You have to replace batteries more frequently than with a film camera, but batteries are cheaper than film + processing.
The benefit of a low end (though not very low, like the ones mentioned here) digital is that you can see how the shot turned out. I shoot ten times more (easily) with my digital than I did with film and I get many more different pics because I don't have to bracket all the time, taking many different shots in the hope one will turn out. In the end, I get way more pics from the combo.
At this range, a digital isn't as great, except that it lowers your threshold for an image to be worth taking. You might not waste film if you aren't sure if that's a dented bumper, or just dirt.
But if you're really cheap, and it is for emergencies only, get one of the disposables. They're really cheap, crappy, but cheap. And when you simply need a quick pic of the vehicle, what more do you need?
Usually the ads are server from some other company. The host page just has a URL with a referrer number in it, like http://www.ads.com/ad/imageFoo?12345. If you were to reload the save page from elsewhere and load all the images, the ad company would serve the appropriate add and note the hit for the original page.
Given that it's not the ad server that gets slashdotted into the ground, I think everyone involved would like it. Google could wrap everything in their own frame and sell a text ad at the top, the page would still attract viewers, and the ads would be served. (At least, unless you filter them.)
Maybe Mythic should simply design a game that doesn't lend itself well to coming into the middle.
It's like how games could prevent the sale of items. If you couldn't use the items until being roughly powerful enough to go get it yourself, and if the quests didn't renew in such a predictable way as to allow "professionals" to go through them each time, you'd see the market dry up.
If the game was based to a large degree around character interaction, such as having to belong to a guild or something and work within it, other players would be annoyed at the "new" player and probably kick them out of all the in-game power structures.
There are many ideas for how you could tweak a game to remove the huge cash incentives for selling in-game items.
And really, there's probably no legal way to prevent these actions short of printing the legalese on the box, where people can see it before purchase. (Even then, courts have ruled that nobody reads the small print, so it's not binding... You'd need to write it in clear and consise language.)
EULAs aren't binding. They can't be because they're after-sale restrictions. You can "sign" away because it's not a valid contract (you receive nothing for doing so - the use of the program doesn't count because you already paid for it.)
More importantly, requiring someone to pay you, or sign a contract in your benefit, before you let them use their property, or do something they're legally entitled to do, is extortion. If anyone had to cash to do it, this would be a fairly easy way to fight EULAs.
What is so hard for you fascists to understand? You sell something, you lose control over it.
If this wasn't the case, do you think companies like MS would waste money bribing politicians (oh, sorry, donating to election funds) to get the UCITA passed? The main feature of that law is that EULAs will be enforceable.
Your ranting about public funding is quite silly because you're completely off base with it.
Both options being considered involve the government spending just as much tax money. In one case it goes to companies like MS for the development of something the people have to pay to use. In the other it goes to companies like Red Hat and IBM for the development of something the public gets for free.
Assuming that "the public" is trying to decide how to spend its money, which do you think will win?
You could pay taxes, allowing the gov to buy MS licenses, and then buy your own license.
Or, you could pay taxes, allowing the gov to customize Linux, and then use Linux, including those customizations if desired, for free.
Really, it sounds like you're arguing for corporate welfare. You want taxes to be payed to a company that provides less value than the competition. Do you own their stock?
Yeah, I think it's paranoid libertarians complaining.
I'd much rather have the government spend money buying software from open source companies (thus funding software we could all use) than buying it from MS, funding software that we'd have to pay another purchase price to use...
I'm going to be taxed anyways. And for things I feel are worth it (roads, defense, etc) so if the money I spend on that can buy me other incidental benefits, why would I complain?
It's like how the interstate highway system was partly built for defense reasons. We paid the cost in order to help the armed forces respond to attack, but it also got us cheaper goods, better personal transportation, increased mobility, etc.
Really, if the government buys MS products with my money and I don't get to use them, that seems more like a crime than if they fund public software to get what they need.
It also makes sense from the point of view of the government wanting to increase competition. "The People" benefit from increased competition, and nobody really loses, unless you count the CEOs who only get mega rich, instead of being insanely rich. So if my tax dollars can go to helping increase useful competition I'd appreciate it.
The game can't read the hardware directly anyone in any modern OS. It has to take the OSes word for what the user is doing. If you wanted an aim cheat you'd simply work it by having the bot send the mouse movements that would cause a hit.
Your method makes it harder to cheat, but it'd be a lot harder to implement and would be more fragile - weird keyboard drivers, or a nonstandard system might cause it to malfunction, meaning they've either got to refund the purchase price, or have a pissed off person with motivation to go and download a 3rd party fix, and while they're there, why not grab a crack and some cheats...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Managers don't need to be experts in the things they're managing but they really need some experience in it.
A building manager who'd never hammered a nail or hung gyprock wouldn't understand the consequences of their decisions on the people who have to do it. They can bluff their way through by having a nose for bullshit - trying to guess if they're getting the full truth or not, but this is just guesswork.
In a programming example. Many companies have a policy that all programming must be done in one language, usually C or C++. If your manager has never programmed he won't know how much savings you'll get from writing a text parsing tool in Perl or Python over C, for instance. So they're unlikely to relax the rule. A manager who'd programmed would understand that every language has its strengths and that by letting one technical violation slip, they're saving a ton of time.
This is where trying to read the employees fits in. You try to guess if the programmer is serious, or if they just like language X more than language Y and are trying to let you program in the language of the week or are serious that it'll pay off.
Actually, even if you don't associate them with each other, the post still works. Bin Laden wants to destroy western culture, Ashcroft wants to save it (as he sees) by any means, even so far (as we see) by destroying what it stands for.
They're very different, but both a threat.
Oh give it up. Everybody knows what you're saying, nobody is reacting because it's obvious and irrelevant.
If you want to sell to a bunch of people, you make a bland product. So what?
If the magazine cared enough about their covers they'd either print two runs (cheap when you print huge numbers) or ignore Walmart's demands.
If a boycott is good when we do it (don't buy MS, they're scum) why is a boycott bad when Walmart does it? It's a fundamentally democratic action, it's spending your money on products you wish to support.
If enough people care about this, they can demand that the cover is changed back, if they outweigh Walmart, they win.
Yes, I understand that this changes magazines I see on the stands. But I don't buy them because they're all bland mass-market crap. If I buy magazines, I buy smaller-run, independent stuff because that's what I want to support.
But really, this doesn't affect free speech. You're still free to say whatever you want, I'm still free to ignore it.
For them to really be tolerant, they'd have to have that attitude when it might lose them a few subscribers. They've cracked down on people who have looked at uploading alternate listings.
It's just a little bit of enlightened self interest - hacked have to buy a unit to fiddle with. But get anywhere near being self sufficient, or competing with them and the shit hits the fan.
It doesn't take much to be tolerant of something that doesn't bother you in the slightest... (It's easy to support free speech when you like it, but much harder when you disagree strongly with it.)
I'd be a lot more impressed in TiVo accepted listings hacks and such and simply tried to compete on ease of use and features.
I don't think they should have any right to dictate what people do with their product, even if they don't like it.
They also burned a few bridges by lying about the ability to use a TiVo (the old ones claimed this on the box) without the service. They forced an upgrade on everyone and it basically made the boxes without service unusable. Rather than rolling out an immediate fix for their "mistake" they promised to roll it into the next release, a few months away. Their "helpful net representative" then flamed a few people for being useless deadbeats for being unwilling to pay a measly $10 (what are you, on welfare?!?) when they were unhappy at his suggested fix - buy service.
(I'm quite well off, with two incomes and no kids, and I spend a lot on tech, but I wouldn't want to be trapped into anything that I have to pay a monthly fee for if I could avoid it. I don't consider myself cheap, I just don't want to be over a barrel when the only provider of a service decides to suddenly jack up the price.)
They show some enlightened self interest, but no real care for the customers. (Not much different than many other companies.)
Mine worked with everything I threw at it, even Gigastore (the cheapest I could find that still had a name) at their rated speed, and usually at 24x, until I found some really cheap ones...
The cardboard packaging said Verbatim, but when I popped the top off they were unbranded white ones, with no identifying marks. The manufacturer data (as reported by the drive) says "CMC Magnetics" and they burn just fine, but nobody else can read them properly. (My wife's new DVD drive will, but it's very slow, nobody else can actually read them at all.)
I haven't found a brand that works better than anything else, but I certainly won't buy the extra-cheap ones anymore.
One spindle I bought unmarked turned out to be CDs branded as IBM. I dunno if that's the real IBM, or some clone company, but they worked really well and were dirt cheap. Anyone else ever run into this "brand"?
You downplay backups but in my experience they are fairly common. If someone downloads a game, it's been cracked, they don't need fancy burners and software to make a backup. It's only people who have a legitimate disc in front of them who have to go through these hoops.
You claim to have never lost a disc... I've never had a music CD die, but many game CDs have. I don't think it takes a lot before a protected CD can't be read properly, so while it may still be good enough for everything else, it fails the check. (I usually just go grab a crack.)
But I'll keep supporting those who break copy protection because of my experience with Diablo 2. I bought it and installed it, only to find out that it wouldn't play. It failed at the copy protection. The FAQ on Blizzard's site for this item said "buy a newer cd drive." Fuck that noise. I warned everyone I knew not to buy the game and told them where to get a warezed version. It was unforgivable that Blizzard was selling a product they knew to be broken on a large number of computers, but didn't care enough to help the users. The whole thing started to protect their pocket book, so I decided that was a good way to hurt them. They probably lost 10-20 sales (the group I LAN with tends to buy most games, except for the kiddies). It's also the last Blizzard game I'll ever buy, until they quit using copy protection.
Companies have an obligation to sell a working product. Not only is it dishonest not to, but you'll lose out big in the end when people who have no way of getting their money back try to sabotage you in any way possible.
Yeah, Anandtech is pretty good.
1 63 8. html?i=1638
If you want to read the whole article on one page you can either use the "print the article" option, where it removes the ads and concatenates it, or modify the URL...
http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.html?i=
becomes
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle
Change "showdoc" into "printarticle" and remove the directory, if there is one. You can also trim the ?page=xx if you wish, but that's optional.
I doubt it's for interpolation. It's easy to average two numbers and pick the midpoint but proper interpolation is a *very* complex subject. To get really good interpolation you need to graph both sides of the data set and extrapolate over the area you're interested in, from both sides. Then where (if) those meet, that's the new value. The farther away you graph from, the smoother the interpolated area.
This is something it might be nice to have a function to do, but if this was done on every array access it's going to be hella-slow.
Not to mention, sometimes you store arrays of things you don't want interpolated. You could interpolate between shades in a pallette, but perhaps you're holding three colors in an array for three effects. Effect one (blood) is red, effect two (slime) is green, etc... If you use floats for integers either you round them to get ints, or you have something that's never exact. So in this case you'd have 1.000003, for instance, and it'd interpolate between the red and green, even though you didn't want that behaviour.
So, for the reason that automatic interpolation between array values is hard to do, and hard to do in a way that you'd want, I don't think they're doing it.
Most likely they're dealing in floats simply because they've got hardware that can deal with floats very quickly, and they trunc or round to get the desired value when using them in an integer context.
One of the problems these days, is that many companies don't want to make royalty money in the "right" way. They often want to use patents to stop their competitor from bringing a product to market.
It makes sense, if you can get $10 / VCR sold by your company, or $1 in royalties from a VCR sold by another company. If you consider that if the competition didn't exist, you'd have sold that VCR, the $1 in royalties doesn't seem like profit, it seems like a $1 offset to a $10 loss.
So companies do things that on the surface seem absurd, when the real goal is to sabotage competition.
If you're right, it's by a technicality.
When you are given money for work, the government takes a slice. When you buy something, the government makes you pay more.
Technically they might be taking it from the merchant and thus making him charge more, but it still comes out of your pocket in the end, so it's essentially like being taxed twice on the same money.
Now, this is fairly irrelevant. In the end, it's just cash that they collect one way or another. The specific way does affect people of various wage levels more or less, but it really comes to one line in the budget in the end.
The other poster's talk about violence was valuable though. People often forget that all authority in society eventually comes from the armed forces. Get a parking ticket? What if you don't pay. Eventually they'll boot the car. Cut it off and they'll send a tow truck. Stop the guy from towing and they'll send police. Stop or deter the police, they'll send more. Stop or deter those and they'll send the national guard, etc... This might be a very distant threat, or might be thinly veiled, but it is behind all exercises of government power...
That's an example of a SWAG. It's like a WAG (Wild Assed Guess) sort of. A WAG would just say "WalMart can't sell more than 1000, maybe 2000 computers online", a SWAG would pick a few numbers, plug them into an equation and "prove it".
Shops won't support this? Heh. You don't understand market forces.
I worked for a while at a shop that did primarily windows support. Nobody there liked MS or anything, but we did what people called and asked us to do. Some Mac stuff, some hardware problems for people who were running BeOS or Linux. Even some Amiga problems. We hardly ever turned anyone away.
You think that if Walmart starts selling something in volume that shops won't start supporting it?
Not bloody likely. They'll buy one of the systems, get used to it, and list it as another system they proudly support.
Reading email recently I had a good laugh. There was a .sig at the bottom that said
"Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system http://www.grisoft.com)."
But there wasn't a message digest, a pgp signature, or anything. What's to stop me from taking that signature and appending it to my email, especially just before I send out an infected file? Or if I were a virus writer, having my virus include this in some of its email payloads?
AVG's message is training people to trust a message (and all attachments) based on a simple text sig. What could be more easily faked?
Seems like a backwards step in security, to me.
That's all well and good, for people you can convince to stop taking things, or killing in the name of religion.
Unfortunately, until you can, you need protection against them. It may suck that the US has the power, as opposed to another country that people trust more, Switzerland or whatever. But realistically, the reason the US isn't liked is because they do have the power; if another country had it, chances are they wouldn't be popular.
I too wish that the world wasn't violent, and that people would all just get along, but I know it's not going to happen. This'll echo the 2nd Amendment fundies, but as long as other people have guns, we need to have them too or we'll be sitting ducks. There are many people out there who think everyone of another religion needs to convert, or die...
Only to the uninformed. What you just did is called "Argument by Authority". You are implying that because Noam is famous, that his views are more likely to be correct in this area.
Even moreso, Noam is a false authority. He's a linguistics professor, arguing about politics. That's like using your dentist as an authority in a discussion about fighter planes. (Whatever authority the person could be said to be in their own field doesn't apply to the new field.)
The correct way to evaluate this is the way you would be a book came in without the author's name. Open it up, look at the conclusions, see if the evidence supports them, and if the sources for the evidence are provided. If a book doesn't meet those requirements it's probably because it was written by someone who couldn't, either because they didn't know how, or because the evidence simply doesn't support them.
If you invest in a camera good enough to bother taking TIFFs with (no need doing so on a 1.3MP camera) you should check out Canon's line. They use the RAW format, a proprietary one, that actually does a better job than TIFFs, but is much smaller.
.RAWs because they store the output of the CCD directly, you can play with the white-balance (and other non-optics changes) without actually having done anything to the actual image. TIFFs might be uncompressed, and can be 16b/channel, but they still have a white-balance and some other effects applied. And while proprietary, the RAW format is documented well enough that many 3rd party utils decode it, so you don't run into problems trying to use it.
I've gotten into using
Which camera do you have?
Gotta agree with the people who say that the G2 is too big, to be carried in the pocket at any rate...
I have one, and love it. I've taken 3500 pics in the last six weeks. But it's much larger than the S40, which I'd still call a bit big for the average person to feel comfortable having on them all the time.
The A20 (I think) is a pretty decent size... whichever one Canon bills at the World's smallest 2MP camera.
I think my next cameras are going to be an EOS line digital, perhaps a used 1D in a year or two, and a tiny pocket cam, whatever res those are by then. Canon of course.
While it's impossible to state that "true resolution" of film, because it's an analog medium, it's not infinite. The grain of film puts an upper limit on detail, as much as resolution of digital image does.
As for contrast, colour range, and the like, digital is starting to beat out filmin this regard.
Check out sample pics from a Canon EOS-1D, it's only 4MP and not only is it the best digital camera out (except perhaps for digital medium format) it's rivaling film in all but a few cases.
Most people estimate analog film, good stuff, Provia 100F and such, to have about the same usefull resolving capacity as a 9Mpixel digital camera, based on the fact that when you scan a film negative (on a $50k scanner) you don't gain any more detail by scanning it at a much higher resolution.
As for batteries, many low end digital cameras (and some high-end ones, like the Minolta Dimage 7i) take AA batteries which should last just as long - downtime - as they would in a film camera. You have to replace batteries more frequently than with a film camera, but batteries are cheaper than film + processing.
The benefit of a low end (though not very low, like the ones mentioned here) digital is that you can see how the shot turned out. I shoot ten times more (easily) with my digital than I did with film and I get many more different pics because I don't have to bracket all the time, taking many different shots in the hope one will turn out. In the end, I get way more pics from the combo.
At this range, a digital isn't as great, except that it lowers your threshold for an image to be worth taking. You might not waste film if you aren't sure if that's a dented bumper, or just dirt.
But if you're really cheap, and it is for emergencies only, get one of the disposables. They're really cheap, crappy, but cheap. And when you simply need a quick pic of the vehicle, what more do you need?
Usually the ads are server from some other company. The host page just has a URL with a referrer number in it, like http://www.ads.com/ad/imageFoo?12345. If you were to reload the save page from elsewhere and load all the images, the ad company would serve the appropriate add and note the hit for the original page.
Given that it's not the ad server that gets slashdotted into the ground, I think everyone involved would like it. Google could wrap everything in their own frame and sell a text ad at the top, the page would still attract viewers, and the ads would be served. (At least, unless you filter them.)
Maybe Mythic should simply design a game that doesn't lend itself well to coming into the middle.
It's like how games could prevent the sale of items. If you couldn't use the items until being roughly powerful enough to go get it yourself, and if the quests didn't renew in such a predictable way as to allow "professionals" to go through them each time, you'd see the market dry up.
If the game was based to a large degree around character interaction, such as having to belong to a guild or something and work within it, other players would be annoyed at the "new" player and probably kick them out of all the in-game power structures.
There are many ideas for how you could tweak a game to remove the huge cash incentives for selling in-game items.
And really, there's probably no legal way to prevent these actions short of printing the legalese on the box, where people can see it before purchase. (Even then, courts have ruled that nobody reads the small print, so it's not binding... You'd need to write it in clear and consise language.)
EULAs aren't binding. They can't be because they're after-sale restrictions. You can "sign" away because it's not a valid contract (you receive nothing for doing so - the use of the program doesn't count because you already paid for it.)
More importantly, requiring someone to pay you, or sign a contract in your benefit, before you let them use their property, or do something they're legally entitled to do, is extortion. If anyone had to cash to do it, this would be a fairly easy way to fight EULAs.
What is so hard for you fascists to understand? You sell something, you lose control over it.
If this wasn't the case, do you think companies like MS would waste money bribing politicians (oh, sorry, donating to election funds) to get the UCITA passed? The main feature of that law is that EULAs will be enforceable.
Your ranting about public funding is quite silly because you're completely off base with it.
Both options being considered involve the government spending just as much tax money. In one case it goes to companies like MS for the development of something the people have to pay to use. In the other it goes to companies like Red Hat and IBM for the development of something the public gets for free.
Assuming that "the public" is trying to decide how to spend its money, which do you think will win?
You could pay taxes, allowing the gov to buy MS licenses, and then buy your own license.
Or, you could pay taxes, allowing the gov to customize Linux, and then use Linux, including those customizations if desired, for free.
Really, it sounds like you're arguing for corporate welfare. You want taxes to be payed to a company that provides less value than the competition. Do you own their stock?
Yeah, I think it's paranoid libertarians complaining.
I'd much rather have the government spend money buying software from open source companies (thus funding software we could all use) than buying it from MS, funding software that we'd have to pay another purchase price to use...
I'm going to be taxed anyways. And for things I feel are worth it (roads, defense, etc) so if the money I spend on that can buy me other incidental benefits, why would I complain?
It's like how the interstate highway system was partly built for defense reasons. We paid the cost in order to help the armed forces respond to attack, but it also got us cheaper goods, better personal transportation, increased mobility, etc.
Really, if the government buys MS products with my money and I don't get to use them, that seems more like a crime than if they fund public software to get what they need.
It also makes sense from the point of view of the government wanting to increase competition. "The People" benefit from increased competition, and nobody really loses, unless you count the CEOs who only get mega rich, instead of being insanely rich. So if my tax dollars can go to helping increase useful competition I'd appreciate it.
The game can't read the hardware directly anyone in any modern OS. It has to take the OSes word for what the user is doing. If you wanted an aim cheat you'd simply work it by having the bot send the mouse movements that would cause a hit.
Your method makes it harder to cheat, but it'd be a lot harder to implement and would be more fragile - weird keyboard drivers, or a nonstandard system might cause it to malfunction, meaning they've either got to refund the purchase price, or have a pissed off person with motivation to go and download a 3rd party fix, and while they're there, why not grab a crack and some cheats...