Any system that has humans (especially ones that don't follow proper secuity protocols) will always have a chance of a virus appearing. It may be a CEO/VP that insists on being able to run something, or some other app that gains admin prviliges by an exploit.
At best, you might be able to use a whitelist app system or something like DeepFreeze to cut down on damage. However, any rogue program (e.g. bounty hunter viruses) that breaks out of sandboxing can still zombify your network.
Also, a Facebook friend recently sent a link which was one of those virus-type sites. Inexperience users will encounter agressive attempts to download "setup.exe" - and like most other browsers, Firefox still didn't provide an option to immediatly block virus-like activity. It should: there's a key labeled "Break" in the top-right corner of my keyboard.
I noticed that browsers have a neat habit of storing userames that you've used on various sites, and help pre-fill the username field with that information.
It would be much more helpful if those usernames didn't bleed across servers; it would really cut down on potential exploits, and helps me remember which one of my usernames for a given site is correct (especially before I crack open the encrypted volume to lookup the real username/password combo.)
At one time, I tried compiling Bash under MinGW. Step 1 required running./configure, which required bash to already be compiled. It's easier just using either MSYS or Cygwin, since downloading the binary package is generally faster than figuring out the correct method of compiling if bash is not yet installed.
(deleting a thousand files with the same extension, for instance), and Microsoft has failed miserably at providing an adequate shell.
I find del *.jpg to be sufficient. In some more advanced usage of the cmd shell, Mozilla has a set of.bat files that detect the locations of MSVC in order to setup the build environment, and it works in most cases. After digging the appropriate registry key, you can then run the make file to get things started.
It's an artifact from MS-DOS, and around that time, there were custom utilities meant to augment batch files, such as Batchman. They never appeared as "standard" because of the 640K barrier.
Of course, the command line paradigm breaks down if command line utilities just plain suck, such as the ones that silently fail a certain task. Meanwhile, I'm writing my own program for alpha channel compositing.
Island maps. Against a Protost with cannons bordering the island 3 rows deep
A human can get past that simply by using heavy airborne artillery, armed with an escort. It would basically need to hit the supply limit as well.
The reason standard Starcraft AI players can't crack that is because they don't normally last long enough to break through that. They usually take out inexperienced players by early rushes, and keep persistent patten attacks throughout the game.
Do you count the cost of a bad reputation if you release a game like Big Rigs?
If a game is critically buggy, it's available for one week, and that's it. My most recent experience is with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter; while I could say that it is a passable co-op game, it has a critical bug which Ubisoft support believes is a problem with an outdated video card driver. Because of that, I can't recommend it.
*Glances at several windows with a god awful amount of tabs which have been open for.. days? weeks?*
You sure you've not got a foobared installation or messed up profile?
The early versions of Firefox 3 effectively crashed if you had a large quantity of bookmarks. It would work if you waited for the Bookmark processing to finish, but sometimes the wait period was over a few minutes. A version of Firefox 2 could crash if you clicked on Forward/Back at the right time, since a Javascript security hole wasn't properly patched. Thus, don't claim Firefox is immune to crashing.
Firefox can also crash if Adobe Flash player crashes, and effectively crash if there's rapid-fire CPU spikes from either plugins or Javascript, where sometimes is just easier killing Firefox rather than waiting for it to finish. (Note that Firefox is currently single-thread and single-process.) At one time, I paralyzed Firefox simply by right-clicking on a Flash application; Firefox became unusable until the context menu closed, and the CPU-spike mode prevented the context menu from accepting input.
Of course, if a stable version of Firefox is crashing, then you can worry. However, you would need to know ahead of time that you can switch profiles using "--profile-manager" as a command line option, since disabling extensions doesn't always work. Then, you need to export and import the bookmarks, passwords and other stuff if the profile does happen to be corrupt; although Firefox doesn't exactly support exporting passwords.
The question now becomes: Can you teach this concept of self discipline to kids or are they born with it?
I'd say yes, and it can be ruined as well.
It can be trained if there's a reward at the end (e.g. higher mark, chance to enter university, etc.) For example, a student studies a difficult subject and then performs better in the course.
It can be ruined just as easily. If one can maintain at good marks without needing to study, there's no point in doing so. Forcing those students to study an easy subject creates latent feelings of "why am I doing this?" since there's no perceived benefit.
It can be broken entirely by encouraging the wrong path. For example, by having the student go through school/university only to realize that there's no job openings in the field he studied for, the student discovers the better option is taking a menial job in order to save for university (to claim experience and have reserve funds..)
I am going out a limb here, but could it be 'conscience' ? Hackers, even black hats, will attack only that which they see as evil.
More like they're not willing to attack a target they perceive as critical to their operation.
For example, a hacker may find it funny to send something via the Border Gateway Protocol to disable access to Youtube; other hackers might consider this good, since it encouraged productivity. If he instead disables the entire Internet via BGP, he cripples himself and can't do much until the problem is recovered. Said hacker won't be able to brag about taking out the Internet, since no computer enthusiast likes critical infrastructure being taken out.
If a hacker accidentally took out an internet when trying to demonstrate something believed to be harmless (e.g. the Morris Worm), then that's okay. We all make mistakes and gain experience not to do it a third time.
ff guys think using the exit() syscall is not good enough, hence ff tries to unallocate everything before exiting, which takes forever and tells a lot on how the memory is badly fragmented with tons of leaked small memory blocs.
A method of memory leak detection is to free everything before returning to the system; any block still allocated are presumed to be from somewhere that would likely cause Firefox to become a black hole.
Some resources may also need to be handled specially. For example, if Firefox begins to support BitTorrent, it will need to explicitly tell other peers that it is closing up and is no longer a usable client (as opposed to just having a connection fail.)
You should give the old LucasArts adventures a try. They were specifically designed so that you could never get stuck or lose the game or get killed for stupid reasons.
The earliest ones didn't, unless there's something missing. In particular, Zak McKracken allows the game to be put in an unwinnable state when you put the bread in the garbage disposal, before removing the pipe.
I'm not sure what happens if you don't purchase the book from the Lay Devotee, but if I recall, he only appears once in the first airport. Also, you can also give the book to the Bum in Miami, which also throws a wrench in the plans. (The two walkthroughs I found didn't show contingency plans.)
That's intentional. One of the secrets requires you to do that (but with the grenade launcher).
The only real issue was that most of the maps weren't designed to block rocket-jumpers - for example, you could use a Quad-damage rocket jump to reach the exit in the final map and return to the episode select map.
As the release of Internet Explorer 8 approaches, Microsoft's IE Team has published a list of differences between IE7 and IE8, and how to fix code so that it will work on both.
Compatibility issues can be solved very easily: Remove the detection code that detects IE8 as an obsolete browser and prevents you from visiting the website that requires you to upgrade to a later version.
Hell, it's already happened with Opera 10, which gets detected as Opera 1.0.
If I'm ranked at number 100, I wouldn't ever fight anyone whose ranking is below 100; if I can't move up (even a little) from winning against them, there's no incentive
Quick fix: you need to be "active" in order to be ranked. You may be the best Chess player in the world, but if you aren't around, then it's presumed that you've retired or are no longer in the game. This forces you to play the occasional game in order to maintain your rank; you can either play against a low-ranking player (and become bored doing so), or risk a rank that would otherwise become invisible from inactivity.
with a computer opponent you abuse his AI (e.g. building walls because the PC is so dumb to attack walls with his ranged units instead of your gatherers),
Most modern RTS games don't have problems like that - either they did away with walls, the AI knows how to react to walls, or the game doesn't allow placing walls in the abusive fashion. Also, AIs that are vulnerable to those tactics aren't that well written, especially under modern standards.
Examples of what I'm looking for include Warcraft III, Rise of Nations, and Age of Empires III. I'm sure you can abuse the skirmish AI in those games, but there's no "obvious" means to do so.
like opening or saving a file to the users\username directory?
Right click said file/folder, choose properties. Click on the security tab. Unless you want to be self-masochistic, make sure that either either your account or the Users group has modify permissions. This is the exact procedure I used to help reorganize the start menu - since the start menu for "All users" was interleaved with my own version.
If the security tab isn't available, then either you have Simple file sharing active, or you are using the Home Basic version of Vista. In that case, your permissions table is messed up and you'll have to get a third-party utility to correct it - or you could life ICACLS.exe from another copy of windows.
didn't understand why "to boldly go" was poor language
Is it because it's a split infinitive, and it's violating a law stating to never split an infinitive?
The example you provided is the reason split infinitives should be allowed, since you can't place "boldly" elsewhere. You can't use "boldly to go" - while technically correct, it risks making the sentence awkard, and you can't use "to go boldly", since that changes the meaning.
It's also used in a semi-poetic context, where grammar rules don't apply as much.
And really, what's with the idea of yet another instant messaging system? PCs have this thing called "multitasking" which allows us to use existing communication channels to talk to friends.
Unless you are playing the game in a window, you generally need to Alt-tab out of the game (causing a small delay in reloading.) Some games aren't playable in a window, especially when they're almost as dark as Doom 3 or Left 4 Dead.
Without knowing what they are using Word for, why do you assume OpenOffice can take on all its tasks? For example, the school might have exercises or tests in Word that require the use of Word's form functionality
This would most likely be in a course dedicated to Microsoft Word, as opposed to a "general use" word processor. If you are in a course like that, you probably have enough access to the college/university computers that you can do any assignments in the computer labs. For anything else, such as typing a simple resume, you can do the work in OpenOffice, save as MS Word, and verify it on the college computers.
Geeks think that OpenOffice is as good as Office
It isn't - it only has 65535 rows. I also have specific qualms about the formatting system within OpenOffice, where I can only do conditional formatting to one of the existing format types (as opposed to having a freely customizable conditional format.) Lastly, I also tried entering what amounts to a "big number" - instant precision loss, which forced me to use Java instead.
The good thing about OpenOffice is that I don't need to pirate it.
This was an experimental game, where the theory was to see how long a player would remain in a given game - as people continued playing, the system adapted gradually in order to maximize the fun value (in this case, the amount of time spent on a single game.)
This experiment has a smaller search space than the article, but isn't generating any "successful" games. This may be caused by the environment(i.e. the evolution scope is too narrow and thus isn't generating a variety of enemies), but the same problem can easily apply to the article in question.
I'm surprised that/. geeks actually use specific tools to manage their passwords, when it's so much simpler and quicker with a couple of shell micro-scripts.
Shell scripts are harder to use if you have to cut-and-paste between them and the browser.
You provided a windows batch file as an example... on that terminal, you have to open the console menu and first select mark, then draw a block around the text, and copy the text to the clipboard.
The browser's built-in manager is very easy to use, and as such, is used the most frequently. If that starts to fail or strain, you then switch to the other tools, such as keeping a plaintext file or building a greasemonkey script.
Slashdot Mirror
Long answer: You cannot. (Okay, bad pun.)
Any system that has humans (especially ones that don't follow proper secuity protocols) will always have a chance of a virus appearing. It may be a CEO/VP that insists on being able to run something, or some other app that gains admin prviliges by an exploit.
At best, you might be able to use a whitelist app system or something like DeepFreeze to cut down on damage. However, any rogue program (e.g. bounty hunter viruses) that breaks out of sandboxing can still zombify your network.
Also, a Facebook friend recently sent a link which was one of those virus-type sites. Inexperience users will encounter agressive attempts to download "setup.exe" - and like most other browsers, Firefox still didn't provide an option to immediatly block virus-like activity. It should: there's a key labeled "Break" in the top-right corner of my keyboard.
I noticed that browsers have a neat habit of storing userames that you've used on various sites, and help pre-fill the username field with that information.
It would be much more helpful if those usernames didn't bleed across servers; it would really cut down on potential exploits, and helps me remember which one of my usernames for a given site is correct (especially before I crack open the encrypted volume to lookup the real username/password combo.)
The gnu toolset can compiled natively on Windows
At one time, I tried compiling Bash under MinGW. Step 1 required running ./configure, which required bash to already be compiled. It's easier just using either MSYS or Cygwin, since downloading the binary package is generally faster than figuring out the correct method of compiling if bash is not yet installed.
(deleting a thousand files with the same extension, for instance), and Microsoft has failed miserably at providing an adequate shell.
I find del *.jpg to be sufficient. In some more advanced usage of the cmd shell, Mozilla has a set of .bat files that detect the locations of MSVC in order to setup the build environment, and it works in most cases. After digging the appropriate registry key, you can then run the make file to get things started.
It's an artifact from MS-DOS, and around that time, there were custom utilities meant to augment batch files, such as Batchman. They never appeared as "standard" because of the 640K barrier.
Of course, the command line paradigm breaks down if command line utilities just plain suck, such as the ones that silently fail a certain task. Meanwhile, I'm writing my own program for alpha channel compositing.
Probably this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Lantern_(software)
It might contain features to detect downloading bad stuff, but it's primairly a keylogger.
One click and five hours of waiting for people stuck in a country that doesn't recognize a "right to broadband".
That's not counting the wait time caused by a failed apt-get download, since resuming downloads doesn't seem to be implemented.
Resuming downloads is a 10-year-old feature, ever since GetRight was released. All critical applications should be supporting it by now.
Island maps. Against a Protost with cannons bordering the island 3 rows deep
A human can get past that simply by using heavy airborne artillery, armed with an escort. It would basically need to hit the supply limit as well.
The reason standard Starcraft AI players can't crack that is because they don't normally last long enough to break through that. They usually take out inexperienced players by early rushes, and keep persistent patten attacks throughout the game.
Which option do you think costs less?
Do you count the cost of a bad reputation if you release a game like Big Rigs?
If a game is critically buggy, it's available for one week, and that's it. My most recent experience is with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter; while I could say that it is a passable co-op game, it has a critical bug which Ubisoft support believes is a problem with an outdated video card driver. Because of that, I can't recommend it.
The early versions of Firefox 3 effectively crashed if you had a large quantity of bookmarks. It would work if you waited for the Bookmark processing to finish, but sometimes the wait period was over a few minutes. A version of Firefox 2 could crash if you clicked on Forward/Back at the right time, since a Javascript security hole wasn't properly patched. Thus, don't claim Firefox is immune to crashing.
Firefox can also crash if Adobe Flash player crashes, and effectively crash if there's rapid-fire CPU spikes from either plugins or Javascript, where sometimes is just easier killing Firefox rather than waiting for it to finish. (Note that Firefox is currently single-thread and single-process.) At one time, I paralyzed Firefox simply by right-clicking on a Flash application; Firefox became unusable until the context menu closed, and the CPU-spike mode prevented the context menu from accepting input.
Of course, if a stable version of Firefox is crashing, then you can worry. However, you would need to know ahead of time that you can switch profiles using "--profile-manager" as a command line option, since disabling extensions doesn't always work. Then, you need to export and import the bookmarks, passwords and other stuff if the profile does happen to be corrupt; although Firefox doesn't exactly support exporting passwords.
The question now becomes: Can you teach this concept of self discipline to kids or are they born with it?
I'd say yes, and it can be ruined as well.
It can be trained if there's a reward at the end (e.g. higher mark, chance to enter university, etc.) For example, a student studies a difficult subject and then performs better in the course.
It can be ruined just as easily. If one can maintain at good marks without needing to study, there's no point in doing so. Forcing those students to study an easy subject creates latent feelings of "why am I doing this?" since there's no perceived benefit.
It can be broken entirely by encouraging the wrong path. For example, by having the student go through school/university only to realize that there's no job openings in the field he studied for, the student discovers the better option is taking a menial job in order to save for university (to claim experience and have reserve funds. .)
More like they're not willing to attack a target they perceive as critical to their operation.
For example, a hacker may find it funny to send something via the Border Gateway Protocol to disable access to Youtube; other hackers might consider this good, since it encouraged productivity. If he instead disables the entire Internet via BGP, he cripples himself and can't do much until the problem is recovered. Said hacker won't be able to brag about taking out the Internet, since no computer enthusiast likes critical infrastructure being taken out.
If a hacker accidentally took out an internet when trying to demonstrate something believed to be harmless (e.g. the Morris Worm), then that's okay. We all make mistakes and gain experience not to do it a third time.
ff guys think using the exit() syscall is not good enough, hence ff tries to unallocate everything before exiting, which takes forever and tells a lot on how the memory is badly fragmented with tons of leaked small memory blocs.
A method of memory leak detection is to free everything before returning to the system; any block still allocated are presumed to be from somewhere that would likely cause Firefox to become a black hole.
Some resources may also need to be handled specially. For example, if Firefox begins to support BitTorrent, it will need to explicitly tell other peers that it is closing up and is no longer a usable client (as opposed to just having a connection fail.)
You should give the old LucasArts adventures a try. They were specifically designed so that you could never get stuck or lose the game or get killed for stupid reasons.
The earliest ones didn't, unless there's something missing. In particular, Zak McKracken allows the game to be put in an unwinnable state when you put the bread in the garbage disposal, before removing the pipe.
I'm not sure what happens if you don't purchase the book from the Lay Devotee, but if I recall, he only appears once in the first airport. Also, you can also give the book to the Bum in Miami, which also throws a wrench in the plans. (The two walkthroughs I found didn't show contingency plans.)
Rocket jump
That's intentional. One of the secrets requires you to do that (but with the grenade launcher).
The only real issue was that most of the maps weren't designed to block rocket-jumpers - for example, you could use a Quad-damage rocket jump to reach the exit in the final map and return to the episode select map.
Compatibility issues can be solved very easily: Remove the detection code that detects IE8 as an obsolete browser and prevents you from visiting the website that requires you to upgrade to a later version.
Hell, it's already happened with Opera 10, which gets detected as Opera 1.0.
If I'm ranked at number 100, I wouldn't ever fight anyone whose ranking is below 100; if I can't move up (even a little) from winning against them, there's no incentive
Quick fix: you need to be "active" in order to be ranked. You may be the best Chess player in the world, but if you aren't around, then it's presumed that you've retired or are no longer in the game. This forces you to play the occasional game in order to maintain your rank; you can either play against a low-ranking player (and become bored doing so), or risk a rank that would otherwise become invisible from inactivity.
with a computer opponent you abuse his AI (e.g. building walls because the PC is so dumb to attack walls with his ranged units instead of your gatherers),
Most modern RTS games don't have problems like that - either they did away with walls, the AI knows how to react to walls, or the game doesn't allow placing walls in the abusive fashion. Also, AIs that are vulnerable to those tactics aren't that well written, especially under modern standards.
Examples of what I'm looking for include Warcraft III, Rise of Nations, and Age of Empires III. I'm sure you can abuse the skirmish AI in those games, but there's no "obvious" means to do so.
At least we know that it doesn't happen in America. Except in about 6 cities or so.
like opening or saving a file to the users\username directory?
Right click said file/folder, choose properties. Click on the security tab. Unless you want to be self-masochistic, make sure that either either your account or the Users group has modify permissions. This is the exact procedure I used to help reorganize the start menu - since the start menu for "All users" was interleaved with my own version.
If the security tab isn't available, then either you have Simple file sharing active, or you are using the Home Basic version of Vista. In that case, your permissions table is messed up and you'll have to get a third-party utility to correct it - or you could life ICACLS.exe from another copy of windows.
didn't understand why "to boldly go" was poor language
Is it because it's a split infinitive, and it's violating a law stating to never split an infinitive?
The example you provided is the reason split infinitives should be allowed, since you can't place "boldly" elsewhere. You can't use "boldly to go" - while technically correct, it risks making the sentence awkard, and you can't use "to go boldly", since that changes the meaning.
It's also used in a semi-poetic context, where grammar rules don't apply as much.
And really, what's with the idea of yet another instant messaging system? PCs have this thing called "multitasking" which allows us to use existing communication channels to talk to friends.
Unless you are playing the game in a window, you generally need to Alt-tab out of the game (causing a small delay in reloading.) Some games aren't playable in a window, especially when they're almost as dark as Doom 3 or Left 4 Dead.
I believe that's why XFire was created...
Without knowing what they are using Word for, why do you assume OpenOffice can take on all its tasks? For example, the school might have exercises or tests in Word that require the use of Word's form functionality
This would most likely be in a course dedicated to Microsoft Word, as opposed to a "general use" word processor. If you are in a course like that, you probably have enough access to the college/university computers that you can do any assignments in the computer labs. For anything else, such as typing a simple resume, you can do the work in OpenOffice, save as MS Word, and verify it on the college computers.
Geeks think that OpenOffice is as good as Office
It isn't - it only has 65535 rows. I also have specific qualms about the formatting system within OpenOffice, where I can only do conditional formatting to one of the existing format types (as opposed to having a freely customizable conditional format.) Lastly, I also tried entering what amounts to a "big number" - instant precision loss, which forced me to use Java instead.
The good thing about OpenOffice is that I don't need to pirate it.
Evolution SHMUP: http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/evolution-shmup
This was an experimental game, where the theory was to see how long a player would remain in a given game - as people continued playing, the system adapted gradually in order to maximize the fun value (in this case, the amount of time spent on a single game.)
This experiment has a smaller search space than the article, but isn't generating any "successful" games. This may be caused by the environment(i.e. the evolution scope is too narrow and thus isn't generating a variety of enemies), but the same problem can easily apply to the article in question.
I'm surprised that /. geeks actually use specific tools to manage their passwords, when it's so much simpler and quicker with a couple of shell micro-scripts.
Shell scripts are harder to use if you have to cut-and-paste between them and the browser.
You provided a windows batch file as an example... on that terminal, you have to open the console menu and first select mark, then draw a block around the text, and copy the text to the clipboard.
The browser's built-in manager is very easy to use, and as such, is used the most frequently. If that starts to fail or strain, you then switch to the other tools, such as keeping a plaintext file or building a greasemonkey script.
How do you print in MSO 2007?
ALT-F, P. Or, click on Office icon in top-left corner, click on print...