If it's like the WoW servers, which I believe run on Linux, then this would be a complication. There are also likely to be many supporting tools and programs required, such as a database and management tools. It's unlikely to be a start-server-and-ignore system.
This is a lie, strip out the AH and add separate achievements for offline that are not published. Done.
It's the game architecture. All of the terrain generation, the drops, the fight calculations and the character storage are done on the server. Building this into the client would be a mammoth programming task.
Yes, and this is only necessary because of the model of exchangable items (although a third-party system wouldn't have access to the server databases to shift items). In WoW the vast majority of useful gear requires player effort and Blizzard have been relatively successful in clamping down on the things that could be traded for real money.
DIII is perhaps an oblique attempt at the micropayment system, or just an experiment in dropping the hardline approach in WoW (like legalising drugs).
Either way it has the effect of bringing the real world into the gaming world. Instead of playing the game to progress you get to work your job for a while to afford the progression.
The advantages of reading over listening to speech are that it is way faster and allows random access. The latter is important when the dialogue contains clues to a quest puzzle. If the gamer wasn't paying sufficient attention or needed to re-hear a part to figure out their next move then speech would be incredibly frustrating.
Games are combinations of many different forms of entertainment; stories, puzzles, real-time reactions (akin to sport), pretty pictures and mindless lever/action mechanisms (akin to whittling). Claiming that they should never involve a certain type is too narrow as it will appeal to some group of people who already like that form.
The warranty is void because she installed over the original OS. She could have installed exactly the same version of Windows and still be in the same situation.
I suggest Slashdot use a standard summary for these stories: Hey, some people don't like Linux, why don't you all get outraged and argue about that???
Actually, in many places neighbours can register their disapproval over building adjoining two-story houses, and such houses, if built, have requirements on the height of windows overlooking neighbouring yards.
But that's sort of irrelevant as many of the other things you point out are true. What is not true is that there is a simple "it must be impossible to see into a yard" principle in the law. This is about the practicality and the effects, and the possible effects from Google showing your yard to the world is a lot greater than from a tradesperson or passing stilt-walker.
To me it's similar to phone books. Everyone used to happily list their name, address and phone number in the local/state book. Now that this information is published globally online, people think it's "stupid" and "dangerous" to, say, state your address on Facebook.
This change in concern is both valid and invalid. The valid part is that the larger the group of people the more outliers there are, so you are exposed to the possibility of a more extreme event (some weirdo in another country randomly falling in love and stalking you, or those 5000-people flash parties at your house etc.). The invalid part is that it's probably as likely as being involved in a shark attack.
I'll admit web apps are not my area, but to me he had a semi-valid point. For all this talk about ensuring uncrackable hashes, the point of the password is usually to get to the data. If they can access the database to get the hashes they can probably obtain the data directly. Perhaps there are architectural designs that stop this, or the size of the full data is prohibitive to transfer, as I said this is not my area.
Of course there are reasons why you might want the password too such as identify theft and undetected access to future data. Also, using hashed passwords will give some protection against corruption by your own employees.
It might surprise you that prostitutes quite often meets customers that really want to talk more than anything else.
Interesting point but it doesn't address the GP's comment.
What's wrong with that image? If people want to look at pretties, that's a quite natural instinct, and not something to sweep under the rug and pretend doesn't exist.
In my opinion it is. Sweeping things under the rug is another term for politeness, the basis of behaviour that makes us a functioning community. Sexual morals differ, and the fact that these particular girls feel slighted shows that theirs are more conservative than their job suggests, or they realised of themselves. I guess any job involves prostituting yourself to some degree - doing something you wouldn't otherwise do for money.
Precisely. Just like the ribbon, studies show that existing users only find menus/lowercase easier because they're used to it. ONCE YOU READ THINGS IN ALL CAPS FOR A FEW YEARS IT REALLY IS EASIER. YOU'LL SEE. Same for driving on the other side of the road and brushing your teeth with your left hand.
For programming it depends on the task. If it's a mindless repetitive job then some music with a driving rhythm is ideal. If it requires a lot of thought then silence is probably better. There's also a difference between new and familiar music.
If you're in an open-plan area then anything is better than hearing your annoying colleagues on the phone or discussing a problem with each other - the human brain is tuned to focus on speech, which is why music may be distracting as the author claims.
Also, different people respond very differently to music and have very different emotional profiles in general. A study such as this may give an average result but that's no reason to encourage managers to ban or enforce music for everyone.
No but I am entitled to a refund if the song or movie I buy is crap
To the best of my knowledge you are not legally entitled to this for movies, it's just part of the customer service theatres in your area provide as part of their business model.
Legal consumer guarantees usually cover you not getting the advertised product of a quality widely held to be 'reasonable' (e.g. a microwave or plumbing work). They don't apply to the highly-individual area of artistic satisfaction.
This is your problem. If you can invert your attitude and consider yourself lucky to be so intelligent, rather than being angry that everyone else is so stupid, then you have it licked.
Easier said than done of course. The issue is that some people, like you, are outliers from the norm, yet (mostly) all people have the same need for social interaction and validation. If you are one of these outliers it very naturally leads to exclusion, bitterness and depression.
The flip side is that people aren't necessarily as stupid as you think they are. In some senses, yes, but often they have different priorities and recognising this is important. Remember we often over-value the things that are our own strengths, it helps build self-esteem, but you may have to compromise your priorities to become content.
Otherwise, there are definitely a lot of people out there at your level, and with the internet they are easily accessible. Seriously look into hobbies that will attract people with similar outlooks to you and, if available, a real-life group is far more valuable here.
Fourth, there's the "senior moments". It's when the Firefox window goes gray in Ubuntu.
My tab use is excessive (usually several hundred) and I find once it gets past a certain point on Ubuntu, Firefox starts using a lot of cpu and will occasionally get the gray 'not responding' look. Using strace shows a lot of disk access, I suspect it is thrashing the SQLite database for some reason.
As for tracking, use Chromium and turn query completion off.
Almost no regular user is going to do this, and if you are on Windows Chromium requires manual update checking and installing.
I take it Chrome has a minor performance advantage over Firefox but there are two reasons I favour Firefox. First, the plugin ecosystem is superior. This could change in the future. Second, Firefox's community-developed OSS deserves more trust than Chrome's corporate-developed closed/semi-open source. This won't change.
I've long fantasised about a politician running for office on the platform of complete openness; all conversations with other ministers, their own advisers, business leaders, lobbyists and community groups are recorded and made available for the public to peruse.
In the case of Assange his Wikileaks background makes this almost plausible. I'm not naive enough to believe he won't use the same old tactics of networking and backroom deals, but it's a dream...
it's like having to buy a stocked dealership when all you want is a Toyota Prius.
A little, it's also like having to pay extra for a Prius because it factors in their failed Echo model. Cable is bundled to spread the risk of producing shows. Even selling it in whole months is a form of bundling. If individual shows were available this would introduce volatility to the point where you'd start seeing more shows cancelled halfway through a season and so on. Nevertheless, it's the consumer-preferred model and hopefully it prevails.
It really pisses me off that you got downmodded, not because you trolled or had clearly wrong facts, but because people didn't agree with you. I try to use my mod points only to mod up posts I don't agree with (provided they are well-argued).
The Oatmeal only demonstrates that people can't do the right thing unless it's convenient to do so.
Now, this is harsh but there's some truth to it. Look at riots and looting. As soon as people perceive the social order has disappeared they commit all sorts of anti-social acts (e.g. Katrina). Pirating is an example where it appears to people that the established authority has disappeared. After all, they're alone sitting at their computer in the comfort of their own house, not a store detective or security camera in sight.
Paraphrasing Bertrand Russell, if your philosophy always justifies behaviour that is convenient for you, then you probably didn't arrive at it through logic.
MythTV with commercial detection goes a long way. I find myself getting angry if I have to watch ads now, having become used to not being emotionally manipulated into buying crap. Ironically there are laws limiting the amount of advertising.
In this case J.K. Rowling is an extreme outlier. It doesn't make sense to point to her as proof of general unproductive resource allocation caused by copyright, which is the scope we consider when questioning the impact of these laws on society.
I do like this view of things, but it competes with the range of attitudes as to the purpose behind IP laws. In particular there are notions of individual freedoms and concepts of 'natural' ownership.
Our company outsources both part of our development and most of our testing.
The development has been quite successful. They have access to our full source code and a VPN account so they can check in. The key here is to use a reputable outsourcing company. This makes it more expensive than it could be but it's still far cheaper than first-world developers. The quality of the work is very good. The advantages they have are speed, helpfulness and enthusiasm. The disadvantages are that they often prefer quick-fix solutions over structural ones and don't think in terms of the customer (i.e. they need specific instructions and wouldn't be given the task to design an entire option by themselves).
One of the dangers, in my opinion, is that we rely on them too much. Far too much knowledge of how our code works resides solely in outsourcing. I recommend requiring design documents to avoid this situation.
As for code security this is definitely a risk. On the other hand, most in-house programmers I have worked with have taken a full copy of the source when they left.
The testing is a mixed bag. This is done by a second outsourcing company in a different country. They are very good at following test scripts but cannot think outside of them (again, unable to place themselves in the customers' shoes). This leads to major bugs slipping through. We try to deal with this by being extra careful with our test cases. To be fair, this is technical software and they cannot be expected to be experts in the area like our consultants. On the plus side they are radically cheaper than hiring more consultants (our outsourced developers have programming degrees, a university degree is not necessary for testing).
Classical market forces would have competition drive the price to the marginal cost of production.
Interesting post, this is not how I've considered it, assuming the total cost of production is distributed. Long-term, yes, it should trend to the marginal cost (which happens with 'classic' abums and DVDs).
That is why you have all those laws making it illegal to buy a DVD in Singapore and then sell it in the U.S.
Yes, these markets are almost an afterthought. If those laws didn't exist they would likely not enter these markets, or do so at full price. The problem for these companies is that market access is becoming global but the disposable income of various consumer groups differs radically.
And the same is true in any area in which there are increasing returns in the relevant quantity scales -- e.g. autos, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, utilities, chip manufacturing
The thing is it's difficult to think of any industry that doesn't have some upfront cost. Does it mean consumers should be free to not pay for this upfront cost if they have the opportunity? Does this destroy the whole idea of capitalism? In a way it does as an ideal and I guess that's why we've developed patent and copyright laws.
The media industry is an extreme example of this class of industry;
* Marginal cost of production is diminishingly small (close to zero)
* Upfront cost is the vast bulk of of total cost
* Consumers have the ability to almost perfectly bypass splitting the upfront cost
From this perspective it's easy to see why society created copyright laws. That said, there's plenty of room left for capitalism to 'work' through competition by the means I originally listed. The fact that is hasn't (although I think it has price-wise) is more a reflection on how much people really do value the product.
I didn't communicate well. I was saying that it wasn't like shooting into a house because this company was targetting specific torrents. Therefore it is more like shooting a burglar within a house, although I don't think that's a good analogy either (because it is a controversial example).
15 - [...] having it built in will create a monoculture where malware only has a single target it needs to evade, so pretty soon all malware will have code to evade the built in av by default.
This was my first thought. MSE is pretty good, but selfishly I'd rather use a niche, good product than a popular, good one as it's popularity will work against it, either in bloat or target size.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's like the WoW servers, which I believe run on Linux, then this would be a complication. There are also likely to be many supporting tools and programs required, such as a database and management tools. It's unlikely to be a start-server-and-ignore system.
This is a lie, strip out the AH and add separate achievements for offline that are not published. Done.
It's the game architecture. All of the terrain generation, the drops, the fight calculations and the character storage are done on the server. Building this into the client would be a mammoth programming task.
Yes, and this is only necessary because of the model of exchangable items (although a third-party system wouldn't have access to the server databases to shift items). In WoW the vast majority of useful gear requires player effort and Blizzard have been relatively successful in clamping down on the things that could be traded for real money.
DIII is perhaps an oblique attempt at the micropayment system, or just an experiment in dropping the hardline approach in WoW (like legalising drugs).
Either way it has the effect of bringing the real world into the gaming world. Instead of playing the game to progress you get to work your job for a while to afford the progression.
The advantages of reading over listening to speech are that it is way faster and allows random access. The latter is important when the dialogue contains clues to a quest puzzle. If the gamer wasn't paying sufficient attention or needed to re-hear a part to figure out their next move then speech would be incredibly frustrating.
Games are combinations of many different forms of entertainment; stories, puzzles, real-time reactions (akin to sport), pretty pictures and mindless lever/action mechanisms (akin to whittling). Claiming that they should never involve a certain type is too narrow as it will appeal to some group of people who already like that form.
Of course they have an arcane attidue. Clearly Ghostcrawler plays a mage and just doesn't care about paladins.
The warranty is void because she installed over the original OS. She could have installed exactly the same version of Windows and still be in the same situation.
I suggest Slashdot use a standard summary for these stories: Hey, some people don't like Linux, why don't you all get outraged and argue about that???
Actually, in many places neighbours can register their disapproval over building adjoining two-story houses, and such houses, if built, have requirements on the height of windows overlooking neighbouring yards.
But that's sort of irrelevant as many of the other things you point out are true. What is not true is that there is a simple "it must be impossible to see into a yard" principle in the law. This is about the practicality and the effects, and the possible effects from Google showing your yard to the world is a lot greater than from a tradesperson or passing stilt-walker.
To me it's similar to phone books. Everyone used to happily list their name, address and phone number in the local/state book. Now that this information is published globally online, people think it's "stupid" and "dangerous" to, say, state your address on Facebook.
This change in concern is both valid and invalid. The valid part is that the larger the group of people the more outliers there are, so you are exposed to the possibility of a more extreme event (some weirdo in another country randomly falling in love and stalking you, or those 5000-people flash parties at your house etc.). The invalid part is that it's probably as likely as being involved in a shark attack.
I'll admit web apps are not my area, but to me he had a semi-valid point. For all this talk about ensuring uncrackable hashes, the point of the password is usually to get to the data. If they can access the database to get the hashes they can probably obtain the data directly. Perhaps there are architectural designs that stop this, or the size of the full data is prohibitive to transfer, as I said this is not my area.
Of course there are reasons why you might want the password too such as identify theft and undetected access to future data. Also, using hashed passwords will give some protection against corruption by your own employees.
This is also the meaning of "hack" used by most teams I have worked with - a quick and dirty mod that avoids refactoring.
Whether or not it has sucked to work with these teams has been independent of their definition of a single word :)
There's also Mitsubishi's "Pajero" which in colloquial Spanish means "wanker". You could be smarmy and claim it's a fitting name for a suburban 4WD.
It might surprise you that prostitutes quite often meets customers that really want to talk more than anything else.
Interesting point but it doesn't address the GP's comment.
What's wrong with that image? If people want to look at pretties, that's a quite natural instinct, and not something to sweep under the rug and pretend doesn't exist.
In my opinion it is. Sweeping things under the rug is another term for politeness, the basis of behaviour that makes us a functioning community. Sexual morals differ, and the fact that these particular girls feel slighted shows that theirs are more conservative than their job suggests, or they realised of themselves. I guess any job involves prostituting yourself to some degree - doing something you wouldn't otherwise do for money.
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH ALL CAPS TEXT!!!!!!!
Precisely. Just like the ribbon, studies show that existing users only find menus/lowercase easier because they're used to it. ONCE YOU READ THINGS IN ALL CAPS FOR A FEW YEARS IT REALLY IS EASIER. YOU'LL SEE. Same for driving on the other side of the road and brushing your teeth with your left hand.
For programming it depends on the task. If it's a mindless repetitive job then some music with a driving rhythm is ideal. If it requires a lot of thought then silence is probably better. There's also a difference between new and familiar music.
If you're in an open-plan area then anything is better than hearing your annoying colleagues on the phone or discussing a problem with each other - the human brain is tuned to focus on speech, which is why music may be distracting as the author claims.
Also, different people respond very differently to music and have very different emotional profiles in general. A study such as this may give an average result but that's no reason to encourage managers to ban or enforce music for everyone.
No but I am entitled to a refund if the song or movie I buy is crap
To the best of my knowledge you are not legally entitled to this for movies, it's just part of the customer service theatres in your area provide as part of their business model.
Legal consumer guarantees usually cover you not getting the advertised product of a quality widely held to be 'reasonable' (e.g. a microwave or plumbing work). They don't apply to the highly-individual area of artistic satisfaction.
They are all fucking morons
This is your problem. If you can invert your attitude and consider yourself lucky to be so intelligent, rather than being angry that everyone else is so stupid, then you have it licked.
Easier said than done of course. The issue is that some people, like you, are outliers from the norm, yet (mostly) all people have the same need for social interaction and validation. If you are one of these outliers it very naturally leads to exclusion, bitterness and depression.
The flip side is that people aren't necessarily as stupid as you think they are. In some senses, yes, but often they have different priorities and recognising this is important. Remember we often over-value the things that are our own strengths, it helps build self-esteem, but you may have to compromise your priorities to become content.
Otherwise, there are definitely a lot of people out there at your level, and with the internet they are easily accessible. Seriously look into hobbies that will attract people with similar outlooks to you and, if available, a real-life group is far more valuable here.
Fourth, there's the "senior moments". It's when the Firefox window goes gray in Ubuntu.
My tab use is excessive (usually several hundred) and I find once it gets past a certain point on Ubuntu, Firefox starts using a lot of cpu and will occasionally get the gray 'not responding' look. Using strace shows a lot of disk access, I suspect it is thrashing the SQLite database for some reason.
As for tracking, use Chromium and turn query completion off.
Almost no regular user is going to do this, and if you are on Windows Chromium requires manual update checking and installing.
I take it Chrome has a minor performance advantage over Firefox but there are two reasons I favour Firefox. First, the plugin ecosystem is superior. This could change in the future. Second, Firefox's community-developed OSS deserves more trust than Chrome's corporate-developed closed/semi-open source. This won't change.
I've long fantasised about a politician running for office on the platform of complete openness; all conversations with other ministers, their own advisers, business leaders, lobbyists and community groups are recorded and made available for the public to peruse.
In the case of Assange his Wikileaks background makes this almost plausible. I'm not naive enough to believe he won't use the same old tactics of networking and backroom deals, but it's a dream...
it's like having to buy a stocked dealership when all you want is a Toyota Prius.
A little, it's also like having to pay extra for a Prius because it factors in their failed Echo model. Cable is bundled to spread the risk of producing shows. Even selling it in whole months is a form of bundling. If individual shows were available this would introduce volatility to the point where you'd start seeing more shows cancelled halfway through a season and so on. Nevertheless, it's the consumer-preferred model and hopefully it prevails.
It really pisses me off that you got downmodded, not because you trolled or had clearly wrong facts, but because people didn't agree with you. I try to use my mod points only to mod up posts I don't agree with (provided they are well-argued).
The Oatmeal only demonstrates that people can't do the right thing unless it's convenient to do so.
Now, this is harsh but there's some truth to it. Look at riots and looting. As soon as people perceive the social order has disappeared they commit all sorts of anti-social acts (e.g. Katrina). Pirating is an example where it appears to people that the established authority has disappeared. After all, they're alone sitting at their computer in the comfort of their own house, not a store detective or security camera in sight.
Paraphrasing Bertrand Russell, if your philosophy always justifies behaviour that is convenient for you, then you probably didn't arrive at it through logic.
MythTV with commercial detection goes a long way. I find myself getting angry if I have to watch ads now, having become used to not being emotionally manipulated into buying crap. Ironically there are laws limiting the amount of advertising.
In this case J.K. Rowling is an extreme outlier. It doesn't make sense to point to her as proof of general unproductive resource allocation caused by copyright, which is the scope we consider when questioning the impact of these laws on society.
I do like this view of things, but it competes with the range of attitudes as to the purpose behind IP laws. In particular there are notions of individual freedoms and concepts of 'natural' ownership.
Our company outsources both part of our development and most of our testing.
The development has been quite successful. They have access to our full source code and a VPN account so they can check in. The key here is to use a reputable outsourcing company. This makes it more expensive than it could be but it's still far cheaper than first-world developers. The quality of the work is very good. The advantages they have are speed, helpfulness and enthusiasm. The disadvantages are that they often prefer quick-fix solutions over structural ones and don't think in terms of the customer (i.e. they need specific instructions and wouldn't be given the task to design an entire option by themselves).
One of the dangers, in my opinion, is that we rely on them too much. Far too much knowledge of how our code works resides solely in outsourcing. I recommend requiring design documents to avoid this situation.
As for code security this is definitely a risk. On the other hand, most in-house programmers I have worked with have taken a full copy of the source when they left.
The testing is a mixed bag. This is done by a second outsourcing company in a different country. They are very good at following test scripts but cannot think outside of them (again, unable to place themselves in the customers' shoes). This leads to major bugs slipping through. We try to deal with this by being extra careful with our test cases. To be fair, this is technical software and they cannot be expected to be experts in the area like our consultants. On the plus side they are radically cheaper than hiring more consultants (our outsourced developers have programming degrees, a university degree is not necessary for testing).
Classical market forces would have competition drive the price to the marginal cost of production.
Interesting post, this is not how I've considered it, assuming the total cost of production is distributed. Long-term, yes, it should trend to the marginal cost (which happens with 'classic' abums and DVDs).
That is why you have all those laws making it illegal to buy a DVD in Singapore and then sell it in the U.S.
Yes, these markets are almost an afterthought. If those laws didn't exist they would likely not enter these markets, or do so at full price. The problem for these companies is that market access is becoming global but the disposable income of various consumer groups differs radically.
And the same is true in any area in which there are increasing returns in the relevant quantity scales -- e.g. autos, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, utilities, chip manufacturing
The thing is it's difficult to think of any industry that doesn't have some upfront cost. Does it mean consumers should be free to not pay for this upfront cost if they have the opportunity? Does this destroy the whole idea of capitalism? In a way it does as an ideal and I guess that's why we've developed patent and copyright laws.
The media industry is an extreme example of this class of industry;
* Marginal cost of production is diminishingly small (close to zero)
* Upfront cost is the vast bulk of of total cost
* Consumers have the ability to almost perfectly bypass splitting the upfront cost
From this perspective it's easy to see why society created copyright laws. That said, there's plenty of room left for capitalism to 'work' through competition by the means I originally listed. The fact that is hasn't (although I think it has price-wise) is more a reflection on how much people really do value the product.
I didn't communicate well. I was saying that it wasn't like shooting into a house because this company was targetting specific torrents. Therefore it is more like shooting a burglar within a house, although I don't think that's a good analogy either (because it is a controversial example).
15 - [...] having it built in will create a monoculture where malware only has a single target it needs to evade, so pretty soon all malware will have code to evade the built in av by default.
This was my first thought. MSE is pretty good, but selfishly I'd rather use a niche, good product than a popular, good one as it's popularity will work against it, either in bloat or target size.