Members of the public are still welcome to go see the events, just not to publicly report them.
So the information being disclosed is so sensitive that it can't be broadcast at all, yet the general public is free to walk into the proceedings and watch them? There's a certain disconnect to logic there. Additionally, that creates the situation that people who happen to live in a geographic region and are rich (more likely to be able to afford to take time off to go watch a trial) have more information than the rest. Something doesn't seem right there.
Either the inquiry should be completely sealed or completely open. The in-between state is doomed to failure. If I were a conspiracy nut, I'd suggest that it's possible that the defendents planned this, knowing that information would leak, in order to build their defense on it.
where anything that's been around long enough... is certainly old enough for Black Hat websites to have published exploits that circumvent the techniques taught.
That's why you teach the skills to analyze and find the latest blackhat stuff, not how to find specific attacks. If you know how to look at packets at the hex level and know how to write your own snort (or IDS of choice) rules, then you have the skills to cope with the new threats that emerge.
To me, a certification means you stopped working long enough to play games with an authority figure -- usually in the hopes of getting more money
Perhaps I'm misreading you, but it seems like you may almost have some bias against people with certs. There's plenty of people out there who have certs because their management instructed sent them off for the training/certification, so it's not always a plot to get cash.
that authority figure may or may not have given you a rigorous testing to determine your eligibility for the certification.
Up until this change, the great thing about the GIAC certification process was that getting one required a substantial hands-on project and paper that was published online. That's what set it apart from the majority of the certifications, which can generally be passed by memorizing answers from a book or boot camp. So if you saw GCIA on someone's resume, you could hit the SANS website and read their report showing analysis of several day's worth of packets. You could ask someone to analyze a few samples in an interview, but it's much harder to see someone look at an extended period of time.
What is wrong with hiring better workers even if they are (shudder) foreign?
Provided you want to spread money around the world (not necessarily a bad thing), nothing. If you live in a first world nation and want to sustain your standard of living, sending money outside the country becomes a dangerous thing.
First world nations products inherently cost more to make and manufacture, so except for unique things that cannot be obtained elsewhere, first world products can largely only be sold to first world consumers. You don't see much clothing made in the US exported to Mexico, for example.
Economic ecosystems tend to circulate locally, on town/state/region/nation levels, which in first world countries produces a loop of income that allows a level of sustinence for each other. I pay people for services and goods in then use that money to buy services and goods from me.
Outsourcing isn't generally about hiring the best people, it's about hiring cheaper people. And once you start sending money outside of your local ecosystem, you've removed the money from the pockets of people who can and will buy your products. The flow of money outside of the first world serves to enrich a small portion of the upper crust at the expense of the general population of their countries. The US lower middle class that had decent paying manufacturing jobs largely cut their own throats by buying inexpensive foreign goods, eliminating their own jobs. Now there's towns with 30% unemployment with 40+ year old people with no experience other than running basic machinery. You can't just train someone with a high school education to move into a high tech job.
You may smugly say that you're part of the intellectual elite and don't have to worry about it, but the process is moving up the food chain. Beyond that, the French Revolution showed what happens when there's too many hopeless people who feel anger toward a rich and uncaring upper class. You may not be in the first world and thus feel that the flow of money out of it is a good thing, and again, I wouldn't say that's an entirely bad thing, but the fact is that the entire world's economy is strongly tied to the US's, and a major decline here will have unpleasant repercusions around the world.
Why not purchase the best, regardless?
The article wasn't about purchasing the best, it was about purchasing good enough because it's so much cheaper you just can't resist.
My $CREDITCARDCOMPANY just got gobbled up by a bigger one. One of their "innovations" is that you can't have an arbitrary ID - it has to be all numbers and defaults to your SSN. I had a little talk with one of their managers who said "that's the way it is and we have no intention of changing it" who suggested that I could use my phone number instead of my SSN if I wanted an easy to remember but "more" secure ID.
On top of that, their passwords are currently alphanumeric only, which makes me guess that they aren't hashing the passwords and are storing the password in plaintext in the the database (yes, you'd have to be really stupid to do that, but these guys give every indication of being that dumb), which means anyone that does penetrate their db system has all kinds of good stuff at his/her fingertips.
The problem is that there were significant problems with Linux last year that could have led to remote rooting - There were multiple issues with OpenSSL, OpenSSH had one, there was the notable kernel elevation of priviledges bug that led to Debian.org getting rooted. I'm a Linux type, but pretending that we don't have problems doesn't do anyone any favours.
Just try teaching someone who has never used a computer before to use a two button mouse.
Those people are becoming pretty rare in.us. Most kids are using two button mice without a problem, it's the older generations that tend to have issues with computer interfaces. My grandmother refuses to use a microwave also, saying it's too complicated. Does that mean that none of us should use them either? My grandmother would be just as confused by explaining that you have to hold down the botton for X seconds or hold down a key on the keyboard while clicking as she would be by the right button.
Very few applications have (or should have) the level of feature complexity that would require contextual menus for basic functionality
It's not necessarily about complexity, it's about ease of use. One of the reasons I can't stand Safari is that you can't go forward or back using the right button. I generally surf without my hand on the keyboard and I use high resolution monitors the vast majority of the time. Traveling to the upper left hand corner to get to the navigation buttons is a waste of time and energy compared to the right-click, slight movement down, left click that I can use in IE or Mozilla. I *like* being able to do that, or correct mispelled words, etc. with the bare minimum of movement.
multiple mouse buttons should rightly be viewed as an optional enhancement rather than an interface essential.
If you don't like it, do what I did, and get a $10 logitech wheelmouse. OS X supports it just fine.
Given that 95% of the Mac users I know (quite a few - I work for a university) have multibutton mice, wouldn't it be nice for Apple to either not bundle a mouse at all or include a mouse that caters to the majority and let the tiny minority who can't handle two buttons buy a single button mouse, saving money and landfill space for the majority?
P.S. A laptop should be useable in and of itself. If Apple split the button in two, you could always map both buttons to act as the main button. There's no way to do the reverse.
You can hold it just about however YOU want, there's no craning to reach the button because the WHOLE THING is a button.
Right. Which is part of why it's terrible, as most people I know rest part of their hand on the lower part of the mouse. Nothing like inadvertantly clicking every couple seconds.
P.S. The only RSI I get is if I have the mouse too high. By keeping both my keyboard and mouse just above my knees I've avoided nastyness, despite 15 years of very high computer use.
OK, let's pretend that the law actually stands and that even though I'm out of state I'm going to rate my stuff. So I decide to make a site about $FOO, and now it's my "responsibility" to rate it according to the Utah standards. Other states pass similar laws and other countries follow the states. Now I'm supposed to rate my Devo fan site for obscenity according to 50 states' slightly different laws, certify that the site is free of Nazi content for France and Germany, free of anything offensive to Islam for the various Islamic countries, free of suggestion of anything slightly dangerous for the British...
I hope you can see my reasoning, even if you still disagree with me.
I can agree with both of you. I think Jared was foolish to have done what he did, but I think that Hasbro's been incapable of developing a decent electronic version of Scrabble so this hasn't hurt them much. If Jared had used a little common sense and added a bit of salt, this never would have come up, and he prolly still would have had a popular site. I don't think the letter said anything outrageous - stop, tell us what you've done with the site. Hopefully he'll show that he didn't make money off the site, they'll come to a peaceful agreement, and there'll finally be a decent official scrabble game.
At the very least, I have to give you props being being a/. staff member who actually backs up their comments in the blurbs.
If you ask me copyright law is an absolute mess in the digital age.
True. More and more of what we depend on is entirely electronic and more and more of what we derive our incomes from is entirely electronic. Combine this with the fact that anything electronic [as in strings of 1s and 0s, not circuitry] is inherently duplicatable and the fact that humans don't treat each other very well well they think they can get away with it, and we've got major problems brewing.
Hard as it is, we need to move away from a society where the first person who has an idea can block someone else from using it. Certainly they the people responsible for thinking of it should expect to benefit financially, but they should not be able to take all the benefit from the fruits of an implementor's labour nor block someone else from implementing the idea.
There has to be _something_ to protect innovation, otherwise the marketplace will be reduced to a seething mass of bottom feeders. Bottom feeding is not a nice place to be, and there's absolutely nothing put back into improving one's self, one's workers, or one's product. Without some form of protection, almost any product out there can be made cheaper. Someone comes up with a good idea [be it a game, software, biochemical formula, whatever], spends a good deal of money perfecting it, marketing it, and then some company based out of $THIRD_WORLD_COUNTRY comes along and offers an identical product with a big sticker saying "Just like $PRODUCT." All of a sudden, there's a huge disadvantage to producing anything new.
hopefully overall we're more educated, meaning that several people may think of similiar ideas at the same time.
Some things [one click shopping] should not be protected. Some things [advanced medical research] should be. It's one thing to claim that a board game where you make words should be protected - that's [to me] clearly wrong. But saying a specific game should be protected makes perfect sense, along with the protection for a unique and trademarked name. Similarly, specific medicines should be protected. They cost enormous amounts of money for a private company to develop and test, so they need a way to make that money back. I believe that medical research serves the common good and that the majority of medical research should be government funded and put into the public domain, but that's an argument for another time.
So? I can't reach the site due to the slashdotting, but if what other people say is correct and he used the exact same board along with incorporating the trademarked name of the game into his website, it's pretty obvious to anyone with half a clue that he's going to get smacked down for it. And pretty much any court in.us/the European Union is going to side with Hasbro. If they want to ask for the code as part of the damages, that's not unreasonable. If it turns out he wasn't making money off the site and ask for the code as the only damages they collect, so much the better. If they find he made no money off of it, take the code instead of damages, and offer him the better, everyone wins.
The free iTerm is much better than any terminal available for Linux, by the way.
Um, iTerm sucks down 23% of my CPU sitting there not doing anything. And it breaks Apple's Rendevous programming requirements and sits there churning the network as well. [Quite possibly why it sits there chewing up CPU.]
For one thing, many people change their User-Agent string to accomidate some site that sniffs User-Agents (notice a problem here?) and never change them back to what they're actually using.
I'd run Linux on Powerbook over an Inspiron any day of the week.
This is apparently because you're an apple fanboi as are the moderators who will +5 anyone who mentions how great Macs/OS X/Steve Jobs is. But I'm bored so I'll play with your troll a little bit. As a note, I *am* an Apple user at work, with a 12", a 17", 3 Xserves, 2 dual G5s, and a couple dozen G4s of various flavours. Oh, and I use a 15" from time to time as well. Obviously I see virtue in Apple kit, but the rampant fanboism gets old.
The Apple Powerbook is steps ahead of comparable offerings from the PC world, from a purely hardware perspective.
Um, right. Which is why my Dell (bought at roughly the same time as my 12" for roughly the same price) is faster, and only just over a pound lighter, despite the Dell being a 15" ultrawide. Think Apples are light? Try one of the ultralights from Fujitsu et al. Even the Toshiba tablets feel light compared to my 12".
Did I mention better wireless reception with the same Broadcom card in both, due to the nice Faraday cage metal case design of the 12"? None of the Apple laptop screens (remember, I actually use all three) begin to touch the top of the line Dells, Sonys, Fujitsus. How about the fact that the Powerbook keyboards all feel horrible as far as travel, and that all three units use the horrid squeezed design of the 12", despite having room for advanced things like... full sized keys. Dedicated page up and down keys. I'll have to throw in the obligatory mouse flame here - I'm so much happier with my Dell's touchpad, eraser mouse, and four mouse buttons than anything built into the Apples...
Oh, and despite having similar use patterns, the 12" is more dinged up than my plasticy Dell.
CPU power? A Pentium M can eat a G4 for breakfast. Batter life? Pentium Ms can outlast anything Apple makes.
Firewire 800
Which is built into how many of the total Powerbooks out there? And useful for what laptop applications precisely?
I'd run Linux on Powerbook over an Inspiron any day of the week.
I guess you don't like wireless then. Airport Extremes don't play nice with Linux.
P.S. Those great slot loading CD Drives Mac fans love to drool over? They're a real pain when they die. Time to ship the entire thing back to fix something that Dell can cross ship to you...
If they public turns against them it could do major damage.
The public doesn't know what cloaking and keyword stuffing is, and even if they did, most of them wouldn't care so long as they could still find their pr0n, lurid stories about celebrity gossip, and so on.
I don't disagree with you on the concept of the importance of professional licensing in fields, but even with a fairly strict definition, the term engineer is already far too diluted. As an example, my university (fairly well known as a good engineering school) offers engineering degrees in 12 different fields. Other than a few basic courses and some math overlap, a Mining and Materials Engineer, a Civil Engineer, and a Computer [Hardware] Engineer can all lay claim to the generic title but will have vastly different skills.
If you don't think that a fuzzy artificially intelligent childhood friend is a good thing, then I wonder what kind of dark and emotionally deprived childhood you had yourself.
One that was filled with music (classical, folk, international, modern), absence of TV, a wide selection of books (fiction and non-fiction), a focus on creative toys (Legos etc.) and the imagination, a large amount of time spent in nature, family trips that emphasized the wonder of people and the world rather than the kitschy junk (Disneyland, beaches that seem to exist only to host an endless stream of shoddy shops on a boardwalk), and plenty of time with friends. How dark and emotionally deprived. I certainly don't agree with every choice my parents made, but I think they were on the right track.
I can certainly see that children would gravitate toward a toy that attempts to be pleasing at all times, and I see that as a bad thing - humans are lazy and tend to take the easy way out. If interacting with a toy is easier than actually dealing with humans who may not try to do everything they wish, chances are that they're retreat into the toy.
Or you could set the intensity of your toaster, etc.
Sorry, but I bet in twenty years the guy that came up with that concept will be sitting on a bench commiserating with the CEO of Pets.com about how "people just didn't understand the significance of their innovations." The fridge thing has useful applications. But I bet less than 1% of the population of the US has ever wanted to adjust the temperature of their toaster from a computer. Innovations have to solve a problem, otherwise they're just marketing fluff.
Cause production servers are connected directly to the Internet completely open for all to see.
That's exactly the kind of idiocy that let Blaster et al run amuck on office networks. Having a firewall doesn't mean that your inside systems are trustworthy and protected, and that sense of false security leads nowhere good. Internal computers may be compromised, the VP's laptop may inadvertantly be acting as a wireless access point (let's say their kid borrowed it and set it up to provide wireless access to the DSL connection for his buddies without telling the parent what they'd done)....
You might forget that MS is not a security company.
Every company that does computer work has to be a security company now. Many companies are completely dependent on computers and most of their crown jewels are stored on them. Many home users have sensitive banking information stored on their computers. Building broken software that allows system disruption or data to be stolen will loose customers. Part of my job is to migrate systems from Windows to Linux, specifically because of security and stability issues.
When you have as large of an installbase as MS does you can't shift things right away or you will lose customers, you have to make changes slowly and incrimentally so that users don't get confused.
That has no bearing whatsoever on this issue. Inserting
does not break any functionality because it's a packet that should not exist. It's something they fixed in older versions but got lazy and left out of current versions.
I agreee completely with your point about QT not being a codec etc.
As a point of information, the new version of QT due to be released with Tiger will support H.264, which [from everything I've seen] blows away MPEG-4. H.264 is also the codec that the vast majority of videoconferencing over IP systems use, so hopefully we'll see crossover products that allow live streaming videoconferences via QT at high quality.
Uh huh. That's going to be a lot of comfort when I have to spend 10 minutes on the phone for every system I install with our custom installation that wipes out the poorly configured Dell version. Oh well, the management's been increasingly interested in Linux anyway...
Or finally take advantage of online distribution and supply high-quality downloads themselves (of course containing commercials so they still have a revenue stream).
Which [the commercials] would be chopped out by some industrious person and promptly be spread across every P2P network in existance. They could try selling them directly without ads, but the same thing would happen - some people would buy it, but the vast majority would still download it for free. The "geek" community has indicated, as a whole, that they have little to no respect for other peoples' intellectual property (but heaven forbid that anyone trample on their open source license of choice). It makes little economic sense for most film/TV companies to attempt to cater to the geek crowd, as they know that whatever they make will be spread via P2P, TIVOed to skip commercials, copied on burners, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Members of the public are still welcome to go see the events, just not to publicly report them.
So the information being disclosed is so sensitive that it can't be broadcast at all, yet the general public is free to walk into the proceedings and watch them? There's a certain disconnect to logic there. Additionally, that creates the situation that people who happen to live in a geographic region and are rich (more likely to be able to afford to take time off to go watch a trial) have more information than the rest. Something doesn't seem right there.
Either the inquiry should be completely sealed or completely open. The in-between state is doomed to failure. If I were a conspiracy nut, I'd suggest that it's possible that the defendents planned this, knowing that information would leak, in order to build their defense on it.
where anything that's been around long enough ... is certainly old enough for Black Hat websites to have published exploits that circumvent the techniques taught.
That's why you teach the skills to analyze and find the latest blackhat stuff, not how to find specific attacks. If you know how to look at packets at the hex level and know how to write your own snort (or IDS of choice) rules, then you have the skills to cope with the new threats that emerge.
To me, a certification means you stopped working long enough to play games with an authority figure -- usually in the hopes of getting more money
Perhaps I'm misreading you, but it seems like you may almost have some bias against people with certs. There's plenty of people out there who have certs because their management instructed sent them off for the training/certification, so it's not always a plot to get cash.
that authority figure may or may not have given you a rigorous testing to determine your eligibility for the certification.
Up until this change, the great thing about the GIAC certification process was that getting one required a substantial hands-on project and paper that was published online. That's what set it apart from the majority of the certifications, which can generally be passed by memorizing answers from a book or boot camp. So if you saw GCIA on someone's resume, you could hit the SANS website and read their report showing analysis of several day's worth of packets. You could ask someone to analyze a few samples in an interview, but it's much harder to see someone look at an extended period of time.
What is wrong with hiring better workers even if they are (shudder) foreign?
Provided you want to spread money around the world (not necessarily a bad thing), nothing. If you live in a first world nation and want to sustain your standard of living, sending money outside the country becomes a dangerous thing.
First world nations products inherently cost more to make and manufacture, so except for unique things that cannot be obtained elsewhere, first world products can largely only be sold to first world consumers. You don't see much clothing made in the US exported to Mexico, for example.
Economic ecosystems tend to circulate locally, on town/state/region/nation levels, which in first world countries produces a loop of income that allows a level of sustinence for each other. I pay people for services and goods in then use that money to buy services and goods from me.
Outsourcing isn't generally about hiring the best people, it's about hiring cheaper people. And once you start sending money outside of your local ecosystem, you've removed the money from the pockets of people who can and will buy your products. The flow of money outside of the first world serves to enrich a small portion of the upper crust at the expense of the general population of their countries. The US lower middle class that had decent paying manufacturing jobs largely cut their own throats by buying inexpensive foreign goods, eliminating their own jobs. Now there's towns with 30% unemployment with 40+ year old people with no experience other than running basic machinery. You can't just train someone with a high school education to move into a high tech job.
You may smugly say that you're part of the intellectual elite and don't have to worry about it, but the process is moving up the food chain. Beyond that, the French Revolution showed what happens when there's too many hopeless people who feel anger toward a rich and uncaring upper class. You may not be in the first world and thus feel that the flow of money out of it is a good thing, and again, I wouldn't say that's an entirely bad thing, but the fact is that the entire world's economy is strongly tied to the US's, and a major decline here will have unpleasant repercusions around the world.
Why not purchase the best, regardless?
The article wasn't about purchasing the best, it was about purchasing good enough because it's so much cheaper you just can't resist.
SSNs and DoBs are far too easy to find.
My $CREDITCARDCOMPANY just got gobbled up by a bigger one. One of their "innovations" is that you can't have an arbitrary ID - it has to be all numbers and defaults to your SSN. I had a little talk with one of their managers who said "that's the way it is and we have no intention of changing it" who suggested that I could use my phone number instead of my SSN if I wanted an easy to remember but "more" secure ID.
On top of that, their passwords are currently alphanumeric only, which makes me guess that they aren't hashing the passwords and are storing the password in plaintext in the the database (yes, you'd have to be really stupid to do that, but these guys give every indication of being that dumb), which means anyone that does penetrate their db system has all kinds of good stuff at his/her fingertips.
They're my soon to be ex-$CREDITCARDCOMPANY...
The problem is that there were significant problems with Linux last year that could have led to remote rooting - There were multiple issues with OpenSSL, OpenSSH had one, there was the notable kernel elevation of priviledges bug that led to Debian.org getting rooted. I'm a Linux type, but pretending that we don't have problems doesn't do anyone any favours.
Just try teaching someone who has never used a computer before to use a two button mouse.
.us. Most kids are using two button mice without a problem, it's the older generations that tend to have issues with computer interfaces. My grandmother refuses to use a microwave also, saying it's too complicated. Does that mean that none of us should use them either? My grandmother would be just as confused by explaining that you have to hold down the botton for X seconds or hold down a key on the keyboard while clicking as she would be by the right button.
Those people are becoming pretty rare in
Very few applications have (or should have) the level of feature complexity that would require contextual menus for basic functionality
It's not necessarily about complexity, it's about ease of use. One of the reasons I can't stand Safari is that you can't go forward or back using the right button. I generally surf without my hand on the keyboard and I use high resolution monitors the vast majority of the time. Traveling to the upper left hand corner to get to the navigation buttons is a waste of time and energy compared to the right-click, slight movement down, left click that I can use in IE or Mozilla. I *like* being able to do that, or correct mispelled words, etc. with the bare minimum of movement.
multiple mouse buttons should rightly be viewed as an optional enhancement rather than an interface essential.
If you don't like it, do what I did, and get a $10 logitech wheelmouse. OS X supports it just fine.
Given that 95% of the Mac users I know (quite a few - I work for a university) have multibutton mice, wouldn't it be nice for Apple to either not bundle a mouse at all or include a mouse that caters to the majority and let the tiny minority who can't handle two buttons buy a single button mouse, saving money and landfill space for the majority?
P.S. A laptop should be useable in and of itself. If Apple split the button in two, you could always map both buttons to act as the main button. There's no way to do the reverse.
You can hold it just about however YOU want, there's no craning to reach the button because the WHOLE THING is a button.
Right. Which is part of why it's terrible, as most people I know rest part of their hand on the lower part of the mouse. Nothing like inadvertantly clicking every couple seconds.
P.S. The only RSI I get is if I have the mouse too high. By keeping both my keyboard and mouse just above my knees I've avoided nastyness, despite 15 years of very high computer use.
OK, let's pretend that the law actually stands and that even though I'm out of state I'm going to rate my stuff. So I decide to make a site about $FOO, and now it's my "responsibility" to rate it according to the Utah standards. Other states pass similar laws and other countries follow the states. Now I'm supposed to rate my Devo fan site for obscenity according to 50 states' slightly different laws, certify that the site is free of Nazi content for France and Germany, free of anything offensive to Islam for the various Islamic countries, free of suggestion of anything slightly dangerous for the British...
Um, no.
I hope you can see my reasoning, even if you still disagree with me.
/. staff member who actually backs up their comments in the blurbs.
I can agree with both of you. I think Jared was foolish to have done what he did, but I think that Hasbro's been incapable of developing a decent electronic version of Scrabble so this hasn't hurt them much. If Jared had used a little common sense and added a bit of salt, this never would have come up, and he prolly still would have had a popular site. I don't think the letter said anything outrageous - stop, tell us what you've done with the site. Hopefully he'll show that he didn't make money off the site, they'll come to a peaceful agreement, and there'll finally be a decent official scrabble game.
At the very least, I have to give you props being being a
If you ask me copyright law is an absolute mess in the digital age.
True. More and more of what we depend on is entirely electronic and more and more of what we derive our incomes from is entirely electronic. Combine this with the fact that anything electronic [as in strings of 1s and 0s, not circuitry] is inherently duplicatable and the fact that humans don't treat each other very well well they think they can get away with it, and we've got major problems brewing.
Hard as it is, we need to move away from a society where the first person who has an idea can block someone else from using it. Certainly they the people responsible for thinking of it should expect to benefit financially, but they should not be able to take all the benefit from the fruits of an implementor's labour nor block someone else from implementing the idea.
There has to be _something_ to protect innovation, otherwise the marketplace will be reduced to a seething mass of bottom feeders. Bottom feeding is not a nice place to be, and there's absolutely nothing put back into improving one's self, one's workers, or one's product. Without some form of protection, almost any product out there can be made cheaper. Someone comes up with a good idea [be it a game, software, biochemical formula, whatever], spends a good deal of money perfecting it, marketing it, and then some company based out of $THIRD_WORLD_COUNTRY comes along and offers an identical product with a big sticker saying "Just like $PRODUCT." All of a sudden, there's a huge disadvantage to producing anything new.
hopefully overall we're more educated, meaning that several people may think of similiar ideas at the same time.
Some things [one click shopping] should not be protected. Some things [advanced medical research] should be. It's one thing to claim that a board game where you make words should be protected - that's [to me] clearly wrong. But saying a specific game should be protected makes perfect sense, along with the protection for a unique and trademarked name. Similarly, specific medicines should be protected. They cost enormous amounts of money for a private company to develop and test, so they need a way to make that money back. I believe that medical research serves the common good and that the majority of medical research should be government funded and put into the public domain, but that's an argument for another time.
So? I can't reach the site due to the slashdotting, but if what other people say is correct and he used the exact same board along with incorporating the trademarked name of the game into his website, it's pretty obvious to anyone with half a clue that he's going to get smacked down for it. And pretty much any court in .us/the European Union is going to side with Hasbro. If they want to ask for the code as part of the damages, that's not unreasonable. If it turns out he wasn't making money off the site and ask for the code as the only damages they collect, so much the better. If they find he made no money off of it, take the code instead of damages, and offer him the better, everyone wins.
The free iTerm is much better than any terminal available for Linux, by the way.
Um, iTerm sucks down 23% of my CPU sitting there not doing anything. And it breaks Apple's Rendevous programming requirements and sits there churning the network as well. [Quite possibly why it sits there chewing up CPU.]
For one thing, many people change their User-Agent string to accomidate some site that sniffs User-Agents (notice a problem here?) and never change them back to what they're actually using.
I'd run Linux on Powerbook over an Inspiron any day of the week.
... full sized keys. Dedicated page up and down keys. I'll have to throw in the obligatory mouse flame here - I'm so much happier with my Dell's touchpad, eraser mouse, and four mouse buttons than anything built into the Apples...
This is apparently because you're an apple fanboi as are the moderators who will +5 anyone who mentions how great Macs/OS X/Steve Jobs is. But I'm bored so I'll play with your troll a little bit. As a note, I *am* an Apple user at work, with a 12", a 17", 3 Xserves, 2 dual G5s, and a couple dozen G4s of various flavours. Oh, and I use a 15" from time to time as well. Obviously I see virtue in Apple kit, but the rampant fanboism gets old.
The Apple Powerbook is steps ahead of comparable offerings from the PC world, from a purely hardware perspective.
Um, right. Which is why my Dell (bought at roughly the same time as my 12" for roughly the same price) is faster, and only just over a pound lighter, despite the Dell being a 15" ultrawide. Think Apples are light? Try one of the ultralights from Fujitsu et al. Even the Toshiba tablets feel light compared to my 12".
Did I mention better wireless reception with the same Broadcom card in both, due to the nice Faraday cage metal case design of the 12"? None of the Apple laptop screens (remember, I actually use all three) begin to touch the top of the line Dells, Sonys, Fujitsus. How about the fact that the Powerbook keyboards all feel horrible as far as travel, and that all three units use the horrid squeezed design of the 12", despite having room for advanced things like
Oh, and despite having similar use patterns, the 12" is more dinged up than my plasticy Dell.
CPU power? A Pentium M can eat a G4 for breakfast. Batter life? Pentium Ms can outlast anything Apple makes.
Firewire 800
Which is built into how many of the total Powerbooks out there? And useful for what laptop applications precisely?
I'd run Linux on Powerbook over an Inspiron any day of the week.
I guess you don't like wireless then. Airport Extremes don't play nice with Linux.
P.S. Those great slot loading CD Drives Mac fans love to drool over? They're a real pain when they die. Time to ship the entire thing back to fix something that Dell can cross ship to you...
If they public turns against them it could do major damage.
The public doesn't know what cloaking and keyword stuffing is, and even if they did, most of them wouldn't care so long as they could still find their pr0n, lurid stories about celebrity gossip, and so on.
I don't disagree with you on the concept of the importance of professional licensing in fields, but even with a fairly strict definition, the term engineer is already far too diluted. As an example, my university (fairly well known as a good engineering school) offers engineering degrees in 12 different fields. Other than a few basic courses and some math overlap, a Mining and Materials Engineer, a Civil Engineer, and a Computer [Hardware] Engineer can all lay claim to the generic title but will have vastly different skills.
If you don't think that a fuzzy artificially intelligent childhood friend is a good thing, then I wonder what kind of dark and emotionally deprived childhood you had yourself.
One that was filled with music (classical, folk, international, modern), absence of TV, a wide selection of books (fiction and non-fiction), a focus on creative toys (Legos etc.) and the imagination, a large amount of time spent in nature, family trips that emphasized the wonder of people and the world rather than the kitschy junk (Disneyland, beaches that seem to exist only to host an endless stream of shoddy shops on a boardwalk), and plenty of time with friends. How dark and emotionally deprived. I certainly don't agree with every choice my parents made, but I think they were on the right track.
I can certainly see that children would gravitate toward a toy that attempts to be pleasing at all times, and I see that as a bad thing - humans are lazy and tend to take the easy way out. If interacting with a toy is easier than actually dealing with humans who may not try to do everything they wish, chances are that they're retreat into the toy.
Or you could set the intensity of your toaster, etc.
Sorry, but I bet in twenty years the guy that came up with that concept will be sitting on a bench commiserating with the CEO of Pets.com about how "people just didn't understand the significance of their innovations." The fridge thing has useful applications. But I bet less than 1% of the population of the US has ever wanted to adjust the temperature of their toaster from a computer. Innovations have to solve a problem, otherwise they're just marketing fluff.
Cause production servers are connected directly to the Internet completely open for all to see.
That's exactly the kind of idiocy that let Blaster et al run amuck on office networks. Having a firewall doesn't mean that your inside systems are trustworthy and protected, and that sense of false security leads nowhere good. Internal computers may be compromised, the VP's laptop may inadvertantly be acting as a wireless access point (let's say their kid borrowed it and set it up to provide wireless access to the DSL connection for his buddies without telling the parent what they'd done)....
You might forget that MS is not a security company.
//Or whatever
Every company that does computer work has to be a security company now. Many companies are completely dependent on computers and most of their crown jewels are stored on them. Many home users have sensitive banking information stored on their computers. Building broken software that allows system disruption or data to be stolen will loose customers. Part of my job is to migrate systems from Windows to Linux, specifically because of security and stability issues.
When you have as large of an installbase as MS does you can't shift things right away or you will lose customers, you have to make changes slowly and incrimentally so that users don't get confused.
That has no bearing whatsoever on this issue. Inserting
if (fromIP == toIP && fromPort == toPort && TCPFlag == 'S') droppacket();
does not break any functionality because it's a packet that should not exist. It's something they fixed in older versions but got lazy and left out of current versions.
I agreee completely with your point about QT not being a codec etc.
As a point of information, the new version of QT due to be released with Tiger will support H.264, which [from everything I've seen] blows away MPEG-4. H.264 is also the codec that the vast majority of videoconferencing over IP systems use, so hopefully we'll see crossover products that allow live streaming videoconferences via QT at high quality.
Not Quite as Bad As It Sounds...
Uh huh. That's going to be a lot of comfort when I have to spend 10 minutes on the phone for every system I install with our custom installation that wipes out the poorly configured Dell version. Oh well, the management's been increasingly interested in Linux anyway...
Or finally take advantage of online distribution and supply high-quality downloads themselves (of course containing commercials so they still have a revenue stream).
Which [the commercials] would be chopped out by some industrious person and promptly be spread across every P2P network in existance. They could try selling them directly without ads, but the same thing would happen - some people would buy it, but the vast majority would still download it for free. The "geek" community has indicated, as a whole, that they have little to no respect for other peoples' intellectual property (but heaven forbid that anyone trample on their open source license of choice). It makes little economic sense for most film/TV companies to attempt to cater to the geek crowd, as they know that whatever they make will be spread via P2P, TIVOed to skip commercials, copied on burners, etc.
Bandwidth costs eat up profit margins.
That's also true for your ISP as well. Wasting bandwidth drives up your costs and slows down everyone who uses your local branch of the ISP.