The real Anonymous of yore wouldn't point their cannons in such arbitrary manners.
I thought that arbitrarily pointing the cannon was most of the point of Anonymous, both of yore and today. The whole thing with not being your personal army and all that.
The dominant epistemology -how we answer the question of what it means to know a thing- is indeed changing. I'm not sure that it's changing for the better, either. But to call it anti-intellectualism is more than a bit of a stretch.
The dominant epistemology isn't perfect (only zealots think the perfect epistemology has yet been devised). And so, like every epistemology that has ever held sway, this new one seeks to address the flaws of what has came before it. It has its own weaknesses too; like I said, I'm not sure this particular change is for the better. But this article doesn't make its points toward that change being a fundamentally anti-intellectual one very well.
As the article itself points out, this makes it harder to see the URL of a site you visit. Anything that makes it harder for users to carry out the most basic security precautions is a Very Bad Thing. Seriously. The phishers must be positively drooling over this new user interface.
Interface minimalism is all well and good, but there are some things that need to be shown constantly. The URL bar is one of them.
I think you have the keys backward. What you're describing is authentication, which is also vitally important for transactions like this, but is not useful for keeping data secret if used by itself. To do that, you'd want to encrypt with the recipient's public key, not your own private key.
And that, ultimately, is where things get problematic. You actually need to perform both types of encryption for a transaction like this to really be secure: your private key (signing/authentication) and the recipient's public key (privacy/encryption). Either way should be traceable, since private keys are involved in creating the signature or decrypting the transaction, should they not?
Among other things, the article makes two claims about Bitcoin: one, that the coins are untraceable, and two, that because each transaction is cryptographically signed, you can verify the chain of ownership of any Bitcoins you are given.
Skype just locked in its place as the next Internet Explorer: Microsoft's attempt at locking-in users. Time to find a real standard for this sort of thing.
Umm, I'm not sure where you learned how to program, but "object oriented" certainly is all about classes, objects, polymorphism, inheritance, data hiding, etc.
Nope. Object-oriented programming is about objects and polymorphism, full stop. All else -classes or prototypes, interfaces versus one of the many forms of inheritance, and so on- is a matter of implementation detail: no more, no less. Data hiding isn't even OO-exclusive, and is valuable mainly insofar as it can aid polymorphism.
I realize your CS teacher/professor may have told you something else: in fact, they probably did. But computer science has moved on, and it has evolved in some very interesting ways. It might not be a bad idea to take some time getting your skills up to date.
I'm sorry, having one "type" is not strong typing.
If every variable or slot is aware of its type, either at compile-time or at run-time, then yes, it is strong typing. The type-awareness is what matters, not whether types are checked at compile-time versus runtime.
You, like many people, have confused strong/weak typing with static/dynamic typing. The concepts are actually orthogonal. Static/weak languages exist (like C), as do dynamic/strong languages (like Python and, yes, JavaScript). So, of course, do static/strong languages (Java, Pascal) and dynamic/weak ones (PHP, most assembly languages).
There's more to programming than Java and "languages that suck." You really need to learn more about what's out there.
IonMonkey compiles from SpiderMonkey's interpretation to an intermediate representation.
JaegerMonkey currently compiles from SpiderMonkey's interpretation to bytecode, which then gets passed to TraceMonkey. It will be changed to compile from IonMonkey's intermediate representation to bytecode instead, though it will still pass that to TraceMonkey.
Damn, Mozilla changes JIT engines like every year. Why should be believe this one will last any longer than all the others they have tried?
That's not actually what's happening, though Mozilla isn't helping matters with all the confusing names.
What's actually going on is that Mozilla is essentially implementing different parts of a longer pipeline. Even as recently as FF4, SpiderMonkey is still present at the front of that pipeline, and TraceMonkey is still present at the end (actually nanoJIT is at the very end, but it's not named after a monkey so we won't count it here). JaegerMonkey, IonMonkey, and all the other monkeys go in the middle.
This. It seems to be essentially a pipeline: the old code doesn't get thrown out, just added on. In essence, SpiderMonkey's path to awesome started out with the beginning and the end (TraceMonkey), and now they're going back to fill out the middle (JaegerMonkey and now IonMonkey).
Firefox 3.0 (and lower): SpiderMonkey (JavaScript interpretation Firefox 3.5: SpiderMonkey -> TraceMonkey (awesome JIT for hot functions only) Firefox 4.0: SpiderMonkey -> JaegerMonkey -> TraceMonkey (decent JIT for everything, awesome JIT for hot functions) Firefox ??? (I can't imagine this will be ready for FF5; maybe FF6?): SpiderMonkey -> IonMonkey -> JaegerMonkey -> TraceMonkey (better IR leading into the JIT, making it even better for everything, but still with awesome JIT for hot functions)
I thought you trusted that Nintendo didn't release hardware just for the sake of releasing hardware.
I did. Unfortunately, Nintendo has done much to disillusion me in the last year or so.
The 3DS is a speed bump, but does add 3D, a gyro from the wiimote tech and a pedometer from the pokewalker.
3D and the pedometer fall squarely into the gimmick category: nifty gee-whiz novelties, but not capable of improving games. Likewise for the speed bump. The gyro might have been another story if it weren't clearly an afterthought, and the same goes for the AR system.
You're the same sort of wanker who whined about the SNES being superseded, aren't you?
No, I just want my systems to provide meaningful improvement in each generation: something graphics alone, and hardware power in general, cannot provide.
And now for the second time in as many years, Nintendo is cutting the legs off a system at the top of its game for no better reason than that the developers were crying for pretty pictures. What ever happened to the things that matter?
I would be a lot happier with the ESRB if they changed their second-highest category to some name other than 'Mature' or anything else with a positive context. Most of the games in this category handle their subject matter in the least mature ways possible, so the name isn't accurate (and yes, I'm aware of how the name is intended to be used; the fact remains that it's not used that way). Worse, by using a word with positive connotations, the ESRB only increases the rating's viability as a marketing tool, which developers know all too well is a big selling point among their true target audiences: namely, people not mentally prepared to handle their content.
Maybe "C" for "Creepy," as in "you are unlikely to enjoy this game unless you have the mindset of a 14-year-old male, and if you do, that's just creepy."
I mentioned that already, though: the way out of being forced to open your code is to stop using the GPL'd software.
Or, to put it another way, GPL'd software is not gratis: it does, in fact, have a cost. It's just that instead of paying with money, you pay with code. The annoying situation of the English word "free" having multiple meanings rears its head yet again.
Slashdot Mirror
The real Anonymous of yore wouldn't point their cannons in such arbitrary manners.
I thought that arbitrarily pointing the cannon was most of the point of Anonymous, both of yore and today. The whole thing with not being your personal army and all that.
You know, I could get behind this. A red label along the lines of your description would let healthy gamers know exactly which games to round-file.
The dominant epistemology -how we answer the question of what it means to know a thing- is indeed changing. I'm not sure that it's changing for the better, either. But to call it anti-intellectualism is more than a bit of a stretch.
The dominant epistemology isn't perfect (only zealots think the perfect epistemology has yet been devised). And so, like every epistemology that has ever held sway, this new one seeks to address the flaws of what has came before it. It has its own weaknesses too; like I said, I'm not sure this particular change is for the better. But this article doesn't make its points toward that change being a fundamentally anti-intellectual one very well.
As the article itself points out, this makes it harder to see the URL of a site you visit. Anything that makes it harder for users to carry out the most basic security precautions is a Very Bad Thing. Seriously. The phishers must be positively drooling over this new user interface.
Interface minimalism is all well and good, but there are some things that need to be shown constantly. The URL bar is one of them.
Are they really that dumb?
Yes. I'd stake $599US on it.
Isn't someone claiming to be the public face of Anonymous by definition doing it wrong?
I think you have the keys backward. What you're describing is authentication, which is also vitally important for transactions like this, but is not useful for keeping data secret if used by itself. To do that, you'd want to encrypt with the recipient's public key, not your own private key.
And that, ultimately, is where things get problematic. You actually need to perform both types of encryption for a transaction like this to really be secure: your private key (signing/authentication) and the recipient's public key (privacy/encryption). Either way should be traceable, since private keys are involved in creating the signature or decrypting the transaction, should they not?
Among other things, the article makes two claims about Bitcoin: one, that the coins are untraceable, and two, that because each transaction is cryptographically signed, you can verify the chain of ownership of any Bitcoins you are given.
Doesn't the second point contradict the first?
Skype just locked in its place as the next Internet Explorer: Microsoft's attempt at locking-in users. Time to find a real standard for this sort of thing.
Umm, I'm not sure where you learned how to program, but "object oriented" certainly is all about classes, objects, polymorphism, inheritance, data hiding, etc.
Nope. Object-oriented programming is about objects and polymorphism, full stop. All else -classes or prototypes, interfaces versus one of the many forms of inheritance, and so on- is a matter of implementation detail: no more, no less. Data hiding isn't even OO-exclusive, and is valuable mainly insofar as it can aid polymorphism.
I realize your CS teacher/professor may have told you something else: in fact, they probably did. But computer science has moved on, and it has evolved in some very interesting ways. It might not be a bad idea to take some time getting your skills up to date.
I'm sorry, having one "type" is not strong typing.
If every variable or slot is aware of its type, either at compile-time or at run-time, then yes, it is strong typing. The type-awareness is what matters, not whether types are checked at compile-time versus runtime.
You, like many people, have confused strong/weak typing with static/dynamic typing. The concepts are actually orthogonal. Static/weak languages exist (like C), as do dynamic/strong languages (like Python and, yes, JavaScript). So, of course, do static/strong languages (Java, Pascal) and dynamic/weak ones (PHP, most assembly languages).
There's more to programming than Java and "languages that suck." You really need to learn more about what's out there.
IonMonkey compiles from SpiderMonkey's interpretation to an intermediate representation.
JaegerMonkey currently compiles from SpiderMonkey's interpretation to bytecode, which then gets passed to TraceMonkey. It will be changed to compile from IonMonkey's intermediate representation to bytecode instead, though it will still pass that to TraceMonkey.
Damn, Mozilla changes JIT engines like every year. Why should be believe this one will last any longer than all the others they have tried?
That's not actually what's happening, though Mozilla isn't helping matters with all the confusing names.
What's actually going on is that Mozilla is essentially implementing different parts of a longer pipeline. Even as recently as FF4, SpiderMonkey is still present at the front of that pipeline, and TraceMonkey is still present at the end (actually nanoJIT is at the very end, but it's not named after a monkey so we won't count it here). JaegerMonkey, IonMonkey, and all the other monkeys go in the middle.
This. It seems to be essentially a pipeline: the old code doesn't get thrown out, just added on. In essence, SpiderMonkey's path to awesome started out with the beginning and the end (TraceMonkey), and now they're going back to fill out the middle (JaegerMonkey and now IonMonkey).
Firefox 3.0 (and lower): SpiderMonkey (JavaScript interpretation
Firefox 3.5: SpiderMonkey -> TraceMonkey (awesome JIT for hot functions only)
Firefox 4.0: SpiderMonkey -> JaegerMonkey -> TraceMonkey (decent JIT for everything, awesome JIT for hot functions)
Firefox ??? (I can't imagine this will be ready for FF5; maybe FF6?): SpiderMonkey -> IonMonkey -> JaegerMonkey -> TraceMonkey (better IR leading into the JIT, making it even better for everything, but still with awesome JIT for hot functions)
...but let me know when it can play a game of Ar tonelico.
This, I think, is the main problem. Companies are afraid of having to compete with their own old products.
I thought they rewrote the thing in C++ around the time of System 7 or so.
I thought you trusted that Nintendo didn't release hardware just for the sake of releasing hardware.
I did. Unfortunately, Nintendo has done much to disillusion me in the last year or so.
The 3DS is a speed bump, but does add 3D, a gyro from the wiimote tech and a pedometer from the pokewalker.
3D and the pedometer fall squarely into the gimmick category: nifty gee-whiz novelties, but not capable of improving games. Likewise for the speed bump. The gyro might have been another story if it weren't clearly an afterthought, and the same goes for the AR system.
You're the same sort of wanker who whined about the SNES being superseded, aren't you?
No, I just want my systems to provide meaningful improvement in each generation: something graphics alone, and hardware power in general, cannot provide.
And now for the second time in as many years, Nintendo is cutting the legs off a system at the top of its game for no better reason than that the developers were crying for pretty pictures. What ever happened to the things that matter?
Marginally sharper pictures do not improve games.
So just because he's rich means he doesn't have the right to be treated fairly by the tax board?
I'm trying to figure out if this is sadder for Australia that it scored so low, or for the world in general that Australia scored so high.
I would be a lot happier with the ESRB if they changed their second-highest category to some name other than 'Mature' or anything else with a positive context. Most of the games in this category handle their subject matter in the least mature ways possible, so the name isn't accurate (and yes, I'm aware of how the name is intended to be used; the fact remains that it's not used that way). Worse, by using a word with positive connotations, the ESRB only increases the rating's viability as a marketing tool, which developers know all too well is a big selling point among their true target audiences: namely, people not mentally prepared to handle their content.
Maybe "C" for "Creepy," as in "you are unlikely to enjoy this game unless you have the mindset of a 14-year-old male, and if you do, that's just creepy."
I mentioned that already, though: the way out of being forced to open your code is to stop using the GPL'd software.
Or, to put it another way, GPL'd software is not gratis: it does, in fact, have a cost. It's just that instead of paying with money, you pay with code. The annoying situation of the English word "free" having multiple meanings rears its head yet again.