To distill the article, those machines have some software options, such as volume, screen brightness, and some game options, such as whether or not a Double-Up feature was enabled.
Somehow the guy knew that if the Double-Up feature was enabled a software flaw would be exposed, whereby a certain sequence of button presses would trigger a jackpot (and the jackpot would not be recorded in the data log).
The machines did not have Double-Up enabled by default, so this guy would ask casino techs to mess with settings, like the volume and brightness. While they were changing those settings he also asked to have the Double-Up enabled, thus "enabling" the bug.
So the glaring question is how did this guy know about the "correct sequence of buttons" and the fact that it specifically had to be enabled via the Double-Up feature? To me this reeks of a developer slipping in a "glitch" to trigger a jackpot at will, and it was hidden with that Double-Up feature which they knew was disabled by default to keep the sequence from accidentally being discovered (or found via auditing).
The real criminal is the insider that passed this info along, and presumably maintained anonymity and safety while his patsy actually went around and harvested the winnings, which I'm sure the software developer would receive a share of.
Ironically, the Wii, which IMO has the best hardware control scheme for First Person Shooters of all the consoles, was not included in this competition. Many years ago I remember playing the Quake 2 "port" to the PS1 (wasn't really a port as much as the levels being retrofitted into an entirely different game engine - the player couldn't even duck, etc), and I remember being the most frustrated I think I've ever been playing a game. I was very proficient on the PC version, and the change to a dual-shock controller was terrible. I felt like I had to play with one hand tied behind my back. There simply is no comparison to mlook for a FPS, although the Wiimote comes very close.
You hit the nail on the head with the "magical mysterious" description of computers. I was 10 when Tron came out, and I had just gotten my first home computer - a TI-99/4A. This was the era in which computers finally began to make inroads to the home, and the C64, TI-99/4A and Atari 800 could be found set up and running in every Sears and KMart across America. Those that could fire up one of those computers (which all started out in the BASIC command environment) and could type "10 PRINT "DAN WAS HERE"; 20 GOTO 10 were demigods capable of working voodoo in this newfangled technological world. Everyone knew computers were the future, and that each home should probably have one, albeit for reasons they couldn't quite pin down (this might save me 10 minutes a month balancing my checkbook!).
For those of us that did know computers, the "ENCOM" mainframe in which the Tron world unfolded was hardware of unfathomable complexity, power and scale. Our home computers were puny things, that could only do one thing at a time and were totally stand-alone. Who knew what could happen in hardware of that magnitude! The sky's the limit! Of course now we all know that the only difference between a C64 and the most powerful supercomputer in the world is how fast it can calculate, and the convenience of accessing memory (swapping out billions of 5.25" discs by hand over the course of billions of years of computing doesn't sound very fun). The whole "Turing complete" deal sort of takes away the magic attributed to raw scale and complexity of computing devices.
But my point in running my mouth endlessly is to say that when Tron came out, computing was a new frontier, and all it took was to throw in a few "factually correct" constructs (like the Bit, for example) to totally reel kids like me in hook line and sinker. Just like Star Wars, which elicited awe and astonishment in those of us that saw visuals on the big screen the likes of which had never been seen before, it was a movie with irreproducible impact and significance grounded firmly in the very era of which it was a product. The "story" Tron would never be written in today's world - it is simply too naive, metaphorical and anthropomorphic for today's highly advanced technological world.
I think the US should sit on this resource for now. China only has 37% of the world's proven reserves of rare-earth minerals, but they are fulfilling 97% of the world's demand. Let them burn through their easily harvested natural supplies, so a decade from now they will be reliant on other countries for a critical resource. This could provide one of the few checks and balances for dealing with China as a communist super-power.
I've watched the Polar Express at least a dozen times (our 2 year old is really into trains at the moment). I think there is a problem with that movie besides just the rendering. Tom Hanks' acting was motion captured for practically every character, including the lead boy. Hanks has very specific mannerisms, and I don't think they were ideal for portrayal by CGI characters. For example, he does this stiff-necked type expression, where he keeps his neck stiff and rotates his whole torso part way towards the subject, then he looks at them out of the corner of his eyes (usually with a sort of bewildered expression). It's a very stiff motion, almost like he's wearing a neck brace. He does that several times in Polar Express, and it simply exacerbates the problem and makes the characters look more rigid and artificial. If anything they should have been slightly more articulate and dynamic to compensate for the negative expectations people would already have over the CGI.
I think it's also an issue of scaling. You can't just take an adult, have them pretend they are a child, scale them down to child-size, and have it look exactly right. The proportions and mechanics are wrong for one thing, besides the fact that kids naturally move and act like kids, and adults naturally act like adults.
Originally Hanks was even going to voice every single character, and voice affects would be applied to change the pitch, etc. In fact, there is a trailer floating around in which Hanks voiced the lead boy's voice, and it sounded horrible. I'm glad someone with enough clout was able to step in and convince Hanks otherwise without stepping on his toes too much. I think Polar Express demonstrated the same problem with the motion capture - everyone is drastically different in their motion and mannerism, and if you use one person to portray a dozen different people, then they will all look unnaturally similar. If your CGI movie has 5 lead roles, you need 5 people to act for motion capture, and 5 people to voice, and they should be cast just like for any "normal" movie. It's that simple.
The summary fails to connect the viewing of radiographs to surgery. The point of this is to allow interaction with a computer without having to touch anything, in order to select, view, zoom, pan, etc radiographs. Hands-free is fantastic in this case, as it maintains a sterile environment, and keeps blood from being smeared all over physical computer controls. Obviously there would be many uses for this in surgery besides just viewing radiographs, but that is a good place to start.
Google should have the right to do anything they want with this data. If it is unencrypted and transmitted over open airwaves (AKA no WPA or even WEP for that matter) then that's not Google's fault. If it were encrypted then that might be a different matter, but I am still of the opinion that anyone has the right to receive RF communication as long as they do not trespass, etc, to do so.
Yes, because only MS is evil enough to consider such a thing. Actually, it sounds like something more up Apple's alley. Regardless, that idea is absurd - any established company would be a stationary target for class action suites over something like this. They certainly aren't that stupid.
No, people should be far, far more concerned about viruses and malware. Especially considering how Anonymous and their ilk now think they have some sort of political agenda. The US government has done something Anonymous doesn't like? Let's brick every machine with a US IP address. Now that is something to be afraid of. Or those Chinese "patriotic hackers" that hacked their way into Google. Yeah, I'd be a bit concerned about that sort of thing.
Are you proposing that Microsoft should also write Firefox extensions to utilize the lower-level internals of other operating systems such as OSX and Linux, although Microsoft has neither the technical experience nor obligation to do so, just to keep competing operating systems on a level playing field? I'm sure that 3rd parties will quickly follow suite and provide similar functionality for other operating systems, assuming it can be done at all.
Remember, Firefox does not include an H.264 decoder due to patent issues. MS holds the necessary licenses already - essentially those licensed to use Windows have already paid in some way for H.264 codecs, thus MS is doing Firefox users a big favor by extending that functionality. I'm sure Apple can do the same with OSX, but I'm unsure about the whole patent issue when it comes to Linux.
If I remember correctly, when people were complaining about Firefox not supporting H.264 decoding, Mozilla specifically alluded to the fact that OS vendors would have to provide this functionality to work around patent issues.
By the 1970s, COBOL had become the preferred programming language for commercial data processing. Since then, Java, C #, and other languages have taken over many of its functions.
They slightly skipped a few things between COBOL and C#, lol.
As much traffic as Wikipedia enjoys, it seems they could have a single large advertiser / benefactor that could be promoted in a subtle, unobtrusive manner because their "ad" would be visible on every page. To me that would be preferable to context sensitive ads (Google adwords type stuff) or rotating ads which have to scream for attention and thus are a constant distraction. PBS and other non-profit entities have been able to do similar "advertising" in a very tasteful manner for many decades (between programming - "the following is made possible by donations from..."). That seems most fitting for Wikipedia as well, which is different than flat-out commercial advertising.
Guess what? We're going to be seeing this sort of thing a whole lot more. Compare the expense and risk involved in writing this virus versus firing off cruise missiles or sending planes on bombing missions or an actual ground invasion.
And to beat it all, no-one even knows who was actually responsible for this. Oh yes, the future of modern warfare and sabotage is most certainly here.
I know this isn't in the spirit of the other posts on this topic today, but I applaud MS for concentrating on security and the best interests of their end users. It's good to see they are taking these matters seriously as part of the product development process.
That said, I still use Firefox, followed by Chrome, for browsing, but at least they are looking out for those stuck with IE simply because it ships with their OS.
There's nothing inherently wrong about running Win7 on a tablet. As long as the gui shell is optimized for the form factor and method of input, then it has a fighting chance. However, people will invariably want to run standard Windows applications on the device, and that is where the user experience will be miserable. Apple really pulled a strategic coup with the iPad. First they built up an impressive array of modern applications totally designed around a multi-touch interface (via the iPhone), then they built a tablet that was fully compatible with that massive suite of applications. MS has a massive application base, but there is no acceptable manner of utilizing those applications with a touch-only interface (and oh, has that been tried and tried). Couple that with Microsoft's heavy-handed treatment of developers of late (C# only for Windows Phone 7), and the tablet version of Win7 will never build up that critical mass base of applications it must have to survive.
There are two levels to visual effects. One is what you see. The detail, the quality, the lighting, texturing, etc. In other words, how realistic it merely looks, which is more art than anything. The second is the physics and mechanics of whatever is being portrayed. That is where most movies screw it all up.
Everyone keeps mentioning Avatar, but it's not just how pretty it looks, but the physics and mechanics are all at least superficially realistic. Machines are bulky and slow moving, animals are organic and subtle, etc.
I'll name a few movies that totally screw up the special effects. Oh, they look nice, but the physics are so over the top that it destroys the movie. One is Van Helsing. Tons of potential in that movie, but they screwed up the mechanics of the effects horribly. One scene shows the heroine being carried up in the air by a winged vampire and dropped. She flops around like a rag doll in such a ridiculous way that it literally insulted the parts of my brain hardwired to process physics. Another is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Again, wonderful visuals and attention to detail, but the part where buildings in Venice fell like dominoes, and the method they used to stop it was to fire a guided missile (in the year 1899) to knock down even more buildings? Jumped the shark right then and there. Transformers was yet another. Somehow the robot's mass and bulk would quadruple when converting from a vehicle into a robot. Just didn't feel right, although it was intricate and detailed.
So I think that's why special effects typically don't impress, because they lack the engineering (in a literal sense!) required to underpin effects to at least a token level of realism.
Regardless, the resources marshaled by Anonymous and other botnet operators reside at the farthest, smallest nodes of the internet, while the beefy commercial entities like Google and Amazon are cozied right up to the trunks and branches at the most strategic distributed locations. Due to that simple fact alone it would require a disproportionately greater amount of resources to take down one of these mammoth operations.
I think that those holding the reigns of the botnets doing the current DDOSing are making massive mistakes employing them at this time. Not only that, the targets they are choosing are not valuable. Take for example visa.com and mastercard.com. Have you ever been to those sites? For all intent and purposes they are superficial, and have nothing to do with the logistics of the financial services they provide. If you go to either site and try to view financial information you will be given a list of banks that issue that type of card, which provides links to the respective banks that actually issue cards.
Furthermore, the various governments of the world are watching this whole affair with intense scrutiny, and the powers that be will be alarmed over the power wielded by these botnets. It will serve as a wake-up call. By utilizing their resources, these people have shown their hand and provided the evidence and forensics needed to aid in the dissemination of those nets.
As far as Amazon goes, they are so distributed and have such massive resources that I doubt a DDOS attack would have much effect. I might be wrong, but there is a world of difference between Amazon and public relations sites like visa.com and mastercard.com.
Exactly. I do not like what Wikileaks has done, but even so I can be the devil's advocate, and say that EVERYONE should be pissed at Assange. Those that want the information to be free should be very concerned that Assange wants to release it piece meal, ramp up the drama and attention to him and his site as much as possible, and provide commentary (aka judgment) regarding the information. All this is doing is giving time for him and his site to be taken down. The US may move rather slowly and clumsily over these sorts of affairs, having to check the legality of this and that and get allies involved, etc, but given enough time, there's a good chance they will be able to get Assange on something.
The files should ALL be placed online, in a distributed manner, and be done with. Not be Assange's little plaything to manipulate and play around with. Really, this guy has a major ego / power complex, and it will cost him eventually.
Who's panicking? Did you even look at the source for the "The US State Dept has started to warn potential recruits"? This is one of the most blatantly false things I've seen at Slashdot in a while. The source is an Arab blog which says that a State Dept employee sent a message to his Alumni recommending they do not post links to or otherwise comment on the documents online. This is not official, and it was one anonymous recommendation to a small group of people the employee felt he should give advice to.
Somehow I skipped the most important part of what I was going to say. At that era in computing, everyone and their brother was producing home computers. I can't be bothered to look at an actual time line to make sure these were all contemporary to the term "wintel", but to throw out same names: Apple Macintosh, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, Timex Sinclair, Tandy TRS-80
None of those machines were compatible with one another in any way, and each of those machines had a unified OS and hardware architecture. Thus Amiga represented both an OS and hardware, and it was simple branding to know that Amiga software ran on an Amiga computer.
When it came to x86 the hardware and OS were completely separate entities, and thus there were multiple operating systems for x86. The term wintel was very useful because it described both the hardware and OS, which was helpful in purchasing both computer hardware and computer software. So essentially you can add Wintel to my list of computers above, and it will fit right in, which is why the term was coined.
I think this moniker is dumb and pointless. Wintel meant two things - you were buying x86 compatible hardware preinstalled with Windows. There were multiple OS options when the term was coined, and it concisely meant that the machine was not preinstalled with OS/2, just MS-DOS, etc, but Windows specifically. Intel meant that the machine was Intel x86 compatible, which, again, was important at the time when the architecture of the machine mattered because many x86 programs did not even run in Windows.
So for starters, "Qualcomm" is a misnomer, because it is actually an ARM chip, and that is the important part. Android doesn't run on only Qualcomm chipsets, but on ARM compatible devices.
Second, people don't get a choice of OS and / or CPU architecture when they purchase a phone. There is no mixing and matching. Thus referring to the phone by its chipset is totally pointless.
Third, just because it's Qualcomm doesn't give any idea of the actual hardware. Does it have a FPU, GPU? What's the processor speed? We don't gain any important information from knowing that it is a Qualcomm chipset.
Everything that a consumer needs to know can be described in the name of the OS at this time when it comes to Smartphones, which is why "Quadroid" is lame and useless.
Too much of the development is dependent upon protein activation times and whole bunch of other stuff I know nothing about, for the cloned animal to be exactly like the original. For example, in the case of cats, the color is not directly determined by the DNA. The cat CC was the first cloned pet, and it did not look like its genetic donor. I imagine behavior is even more finicky, as it is affected by experiences and other such nebulous factors.
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To distill the article, those machines have some software options, such as volume, screen brightness, and some game options, such as whether or not a Double-Up feature was enabled.
Somehow the guy knew that if the Double-Up feature was enabled a software flaw would be exposed, whereby a certain sequence of button presses would trigger a jackpot (and the jackpot would not be recorded in the data log).
The machines did not have Double-Up enabled by default, so this guy would ask casino techs to mess with settings, like the volume and brightness. While they were changing those settings he also asked to have the Double-Up enabled, thus "enabling" the bug.
So the glaring question is how did this guy know about the "correct sequence of buttons" and the fact that it specifically had to be enabled via the Double-Up feature? To me this reeks of a developer slipping in a "glitch" to trigger a jackpot at will, and it was hidden with that Double-Up feature which they knew was disabled by default to keep the sequence from accidentally being discovered (or found via auditing).
The real criminal is the insider that passed this info along, and presumably maintained anonymity and safety while his patsy actually went around and harvested the winnings, which I'm sure the software developer would receive a share of.
Acid and a very powerful microscope? Or leaked information from a Sony insider?
Ironically, the Wii, which IMO has the best hardware control scheme for First Person Shooters of all the consoles, was not included in this competition. Many years ago I remember playing the Quake 2 "port" to the PS1 (wasn't really a port as much as the levels being retrofitted into an entirely different game engine - the player couldn't even duck, etc), and I remember being the most frustrated I think I've ever been playing a game. I was very proficient on the PC version, and the change to a dual-shock controller was terrible. I felt like I had to play with one hand tied behind my back. There simply is no comparison to mlook for a FPS, although the Wiimote comes very close.
You hit the nail on the head with the "magical mysterious" description of computers. I was 10 when Tron came out, and I had just gotten my first home computer - a TI-99/4A. This was the era in which computers finally began to make inroads to the home, and the C64, TI-99/4A and Atari 800 could be found set up and running in every Sears and KMart across America. Those that could fire up one of those computers (which all started out in the BASIC command environment) and could type "10 PRINT "DAN WAS HERE"; 20 GOTO 10 were demigods capable of working voodoo in this newfangled technological world. Everyone knew computers were the future, and that each home should probably have one, albeit for reasons they couldn't quite pin down (this might save me 10 minutes a month balancing my checkbook!).
For those of us that did know computers, the "ENCOM" mainframe in which the Tron world unfolded was hardware of unfathomable complexity, power and scale. Our home computers were puny things, that could only do one thing at a time and were totally stand-alone. Who knew what could happen in hardware of that magnitude! The sky's the limit! Of course now we all know that the only difference between a C64 and the most powerful supercomputer in the world is how fast it can calculate, and the convenience of accessing memory (swapping out billions of 5.25" discs by hand over the course of billions of years of computing doesn't sound very fun). The whole "Turing complete" deal sort of takes away the magic attributed to raw scale and complexity of computing devices.
But my point in running my mouth endlessly is to say that when Tron came out, computing was a new frontier, and all it took was to throw in a few "factually correct" constructs (like the Bit, for example) to totally reel kids like me in hook line and sinker. Just like Star Wars, which elicited awe and astonishment in those of us that saw visuals on the big screen the likes of which had never been seen before, it was a movie with irreproducible impact and significance grounded firmly in the very era of which it was a product. The "story" Tron would never be written in today's world - it is simply too naive, metaphorical and anthropomorphic for today's highly advanced technological world.
I think the US should sit on this resource for now. China only has 37% of the world's proven reserves of rare-earth minerals, but they are fulfilling 97% of the world's demand. Let them burn through their easily harvested natural supplies, so a decade from now they will be reliant on other countries for a critical resource. This could provide one of the few checks and balances for dealing with China as a communist super-power.
I've watched the Polar Express at least a dozen times (our 2 year old is really into trains at the moment). I think there is a problem with that movie besides just the rendering. Tom Hanks' acting was motion captured for practically every character, including the lead boy. Hanks has very specific mannerisms, and I don't think they were ideal for portrayal by CGI characters. For example, he does this stiff-necked type expression, where he keeps his neck stiff and rotates his whole torso part way towards the subject, then he looks at them out of the corner of his eyes (usually with a sort of bewildered expression). It's a very stiff motion, almost like he's wearing a neck brace. He does that several times in Polar Express, and it simply exacerbates the problem and makes the characters look more rigid and artificial. If anything they should have been slightly more articulate and dynamic to compensate for the negative expectations people would already have over the CGI.
I think it's also an issue of scaling. You can't just take an adult, have them pretend they are a child, scale them down to child-size, and have it look exactly right. The proportions and mechanics are wrong for one thing, besides the fact that kids naturally move and act like kids, and adults naturally act like adults.
Originally Hanks was even going to voice every single character, and voice affects would be applied to change the pitch, etc. In fact, there is a trailer floating around in which Hanks voiced the lead boy's voice, and it sounded horrible. I'm glad someone with enough clout was able to step in and convince Hanks otherwise without stepping on his toes too much. I think Polar Express demonstrated the same problem with the motion capture - everyone is drastically different in their motion and mannerism, and if you use one person to portray a dozen different people, then they will all look unnaturally similar. If your CGI movie has 5 lead roles, you need 5 people to act for motion capture, and 5 people to voice, and they should be cast just like for any "normal" movie. It's that simple.
The summary fails to connect the viewing of radiographs to surgery. The point of this is to allow interaction with a computer without having to touch anything, in order to select, view, zoom, pan, etc radiographs. Hands-free is fantastic in this case, as it maintains a sterile environment, and keeps blood from being smeared all over physical computer controls. Obviously there would be many uses for this in surgery besides just viewing radiographs, but that is a good place to start.
Google should have the right to do anything they want with this data. If it is unencrypted and transmitted over open airwaves (AKA no WPA or even WEP for that matter) then that's not Google's fault. If it were encrypted then that might be a different matter, but I am still of the opinion that anyone has the right to receive RF communication as long as they do not trespass, etc, to do so.
And you're certain there are no implemention flaws with this chip that could allow the feature to be exploited in an informal way?
Yes, because only MS is evil enough to consider such a thing. Actually, it sounds like something more up Apple's alley. Regardless, that idea is absurd - any established company would be a stationary target for class action suites over something like this. They certainly aren't that stupid.
No, people should be far, far more concerned about viruses and malware. Especially considering how Anonymous and their ilk now think they have some sort of political agenda. The US government has done something Anonymous doesn't like? Let's brick every machine with a US IP address. Now that is something to be afraid of. Or those Chinese "patriotic hackers" that hacked their way into Google. Yeah, I'd be a bit concerned about that sort of thing.
Are you proposing that Microsoft should also write Firefox extensions to utilize the lower-level internals of other operating systems such as OSX and Linux, although Microsoft has neither the technical experience nor obligation to do so, just to keep competing operating systems on a level playing field? I'm sure that 3rd parties will quickly follow suite and provide similar functionality for other operating systems, assuming it can be done at all.
Remember, Firefox does not include an H.264 decoder due to patent issues. MS holds the necessary licenses already - essentially those licensed to use Windows have already paid in some way for H.264 codecs, thus MS is doing Firefox users a big favor by extending that functionality. I'm sure Apple can do the same with OSX, but I'm unsure about the whole patent issue when it comes to Linux.
If I remember correctly, when people were complaining about Firefox not supporting H.264 decoding, Mozilla specifically alluded to the fact that OS vendors would have to provide this functionality to work around patent issues.
By the 1970s, COBOL had become the preferred programming language for commercial data processing. Since then, Java, C #, and other languages have taken over many of its functions.
They slightly skipped a few things between COBOL and C#, lol.
As much traffic as Wikipedia enjoys, it seems they could have a single large advertiser / benefactor that could be promoted in a subtle, unobtrusive manner because their "ad" would be visible on every page. To me that would be preferable to context sensitive ads (Google adwords type stuff) or rotating ads which have to scream for attention and thus are a constant distraction.
PBS and other non-profit entities have been able to do similar "advertising" in a very tasteful manner for many decades (between programming - "the following is made possible by donations from..."). That seems most fitting for Wikipedia as well, which is different than flat-out commercial advertising.
Guess what? We're going to be seeing this sort of thing a whole lot more. Compare the expense and risk involved in writing this virus versus firing off cruise missiles or sending planes on bombing missions or an actual ground invasion.
And to beat it all, no-one even knows who was actually responsible for this. Oh yes, the future of modern warfare and sabotage is most certainly here.
I know this isn't in the spirit of the other posts on this topic today, but I applaud MS for concentrating on security and the best interests of their end users. It's good to see they are taking these matters seriously as part of the product development process.
That said, I still use Firefox, followed by Chrome, for browsing, but at least they are looking out for those stuck with IE simply because it ships with their OS.
There's nothing inherently wrong about running Win7 on a tablet. As long as the gui shell is optimized for the form factor and method of input, then it has a fighting chance. However, people will invariably want to run standard Windows applications on the device, and that is where the user experience will be miserable.
Apple really pulled a strategic coup with the iPad. First they built up an impressive array of modern applications totally designed around a multi-touch interface (via the iPhone), then they built a tablet that was fully compatible with that massive suite of applications.
MS has a massive application base, but there is no acceptable manner of utilizing those applications with a touch-only interface (and oh, has that been tried and tried). Couple that with Microsoft's heavy-handed treatment of developers of late (C# only for Windows Phone 7), and the tablet version of Win7 will never build up that critical mass base of applications it must have to survive.
There are two levels to visual effects. One is what you see. The detail, the quality, the lighting, texturing, etc. In other words, how realistic it merely looks, which is more art than anything. The second is the physics and mechanics of whatever is being portrayed. That is where most movies screw it all up.
Everyone keeps mentioning Avatar, but it's not just how pretty it looks, but the physics and mechanics are all at least superficially realistic. Machines are bulky and slow moving, animals are organic and subtle, etc.
I'll name a few movies that totally screw up the special effects. Oh, they look nice, but the physics are so over the top that it destroys the movie.
One is Van Helsing. Tons of potential in that movie, but they screwed up the mechanics of the effects horribly. One scene shows the heroine being carried up in the air by a winged vampire and dropped. She flops around like a rag doll in such a ridiculous way that it literally insulted the parts of my brain hardwired to process physics.
Another is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Again, wonderful visuals and attention to detail, but the part where buildings in Venice fell like dominoes, and the method they used to stop it was to fire a guided missile (in the year 1899) to knock down even more buildings? Jumped the shark right then and there.
Transformers was yet another. Somehow the robot's mass and bulk would quadruple when converting from a vehicle into a robot. Just didn't feel right, although it was intricate and detailed.
So I think that's why special effects typically don't impress, because they lack the engineering (in a literal sense!) required to underpin effects to at least a token level of realism.
Too bad I spent all my mod points just now.
Regardless, the resources marshaled by Anonymous and other botnet operators reside at the farthest, smallest nodes of the internet, while the beefy commercial entities like Google and Amazon are cozied right up to the trunks and branches at the most strategic distributed locations. Due to that simple fact alone it would require a disproportionately greater amount of resources to take down one of these mammoth operations.
I think that those holding the reigns of the botnets doing the current DDOSing are making massive mistakes employing them at this time. Not only that, the targets they are choosing are not valuable. Take for example visa.com and mastercard.com. Have you ever been to those sites? For all intent and purposes they are superficial, and have nothing to do with the logistics of the financial services they provide. If you go to either site and try to view financial information you will be given a list of banks that issue that type of card, which provides links to the respective banks that actually issue cards.
Furthermore, the various governments of the world are watching this whole affair with intense scrutiny, and the powers that be will be alarmed over the power wielded by these botnets. It will serve as a wake-up call. By utilizing their resources, these people have shown their hand and provided the evidence and forensics needed to aid in the dissemination of those nets.
As far as Amazon goes, they are so distributed and have such massive resources that I doubt a DDOS attack would have much effect. I might be wrong, but there is a world of difference between Amazon and public relations sites like visa.com and mastercard.com.
Exactly. I do not like what Wikileaks has done, but even so I can be the devil's advocate, and say that EVERYONE should be pissed at Assange. Those that want the information to be free should be very concerned that Assange wants to release it piece meal, ramp up the drama and attention to him and his site as much as possible, and provide commentary (aka judgment) regarding the information. All this is doing is giving time for him and his site to be taken down. The US may move rather slowly and clumsily over these sorts of affairs, having to check the legality of this and that and get allies involved, etc, but given enough time, there's a good chance they will be able to get Assange on something.
The files should ALL be placed online, in a distributed manner, and be done with. Not be Assange's little plaything to manipulate and play around with. Really, this guy has a major ego / power complex, and it will cost him eventually.
Who's panicking? Did you even look at the source for the "The US State Dept has started to warn potential recruits"? This is one of the most blatantly false things I've seen at Slashdot in a while. The source is an Arab blog which says that a State Dept employee sent a message to his Alumni recommending they do not post links to or otherwise comment on the documents online. This is not official, and it was one anonymous recommendation to a small group of people the employee felt he should give advice to.
Somehow I skipped the most important part of what I was going to say. At that era in computing, everyone and their brother was producing home computers. I can't be bothered to look at an actual time line to make sure these were all contemporary to the term "wintel", but to throw out same names:
Apple Macintosh, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, Timex Sinclair, Tandy TRS-80
None of those machines were compatible with one another in any way, and each of those machines had a unified OS and hardware architecture. Thus Amiga represented both an OS and hardware, and it was simple branding to know that Amiga software ran on an Amiga computer.
When it came to x86 the hardware and OS were completely separate entities, and thus there were multiple operating systems for x86. The term wintel was very useful because it described both the hardware and OS, which was helpful in purchasing both computer hardware and computer software. So essentially you can add Wintel to my list of computers above, and it will fit right in, which is why the term was coined.
I think this moniker is dumb and pointless. Wintel meant two things - you were buying x86 compatible hardware preinstalled with Windows. There were multiple OS options when the term was coined, and it concisely meant that the machine was not preinstalled with OS/2, just MS-DOS, etc, but Windows specifically. Intel meant that the machine was Intel x86 compatible, which, again, was important at the time when the architecture of the machine mattered because many x86 programs did not even run in Windows.
So for starters, "Qualcomm" is a misnomer, because it is actually an ARM chip, and that is the important part. Android doesn't run on only Qualcomm chipsets, but on ARM compatible devices.
Second, people don't get a choice of OS and / or CPU architecture when they purchase a phone. There is no mixing and matching. Thus referring to the phone by its chipset is totally pointless.
Third, just because it's Qualcomm doesn't give any idea of the actual hardware. Does it have a FPU, GPU? What's the processor speed? We don't gain any important information from knowing that it is a Qualcomm chipset.
Everything that a consumer needs to know can be described in the name of the OS at this time when it comes to Smartphones, which is why "Quadroid" is lame and useless.
Too much of the development is dependent upon protein activation times and whole bunch of other stuff I know nothing about, for the cloned animal to be exactly like the original. For example, in the case of cats, the color is not directly determined by the DNA. The cat CC was the first cloned pet, and it did not look like its genetic donor. I imagine behavior is even more finicky, as it is affected by experiences and other such nebulous factors.
Cue floating datacenter posts in 3... 2...