1) Fix VLC first. There are still a lot of outstanding issues and I encounter DVD's every day that PowerDVD will play but VLC will just crash on. Usually, literally, in the first moments. We're not talking obscure movies, either, but current new DVD releases.
I remember an almighty-long wait for VLC to put back in functionality to ignore keyboard hotkeys after committing code that made pressing the volume button on your computer adjust both system volume and VLC volume and it was possible to get to a state where it was impossible to unmute both. The unofficial patch that circulated took forever to make its way into the client stables.
I also get a lot of random crashes and hangs when viewing content that, after killing the process, will work fine. I also have found it almost impossible to stream things properly without having to know a myriad technical details about what I'm streaming from / to, a large part of which VLC could automate for me. I spent an hour yesterday figuring out the command-line (yep, I gave up on the GUI quite quickly after several tests resulted in nothing) to stream my desktop (via VLC's built-in "screen" source) and local Stereo Mix audio to a network-accessible stream to a VLC player on a remote machine. I gave up in the end and did things another way.
Don't get me started on things like DVD navigation (easy to "go in circles" on a lot of DVD menus), obscure formats that still error, playlist management, etc. Do I hate VLC? No, it's the only media player I install and one of the first things I do on any fresh machine, and I often give people Portable VLC for when they just want to play an obscure video file once (e.g. CCTV recordings, etc.). Which makes it even MORE annoying that these things are still present.
2) VLC works on Windows 8. What you mean is "Metro", and nobody cares about that.
3) The delivery promises are rubbish. I wouldn't touch it even if it was something I wanted - they don't even know if the license is compatible, the toolchain can exist, the app would ever be accepted, the API's exposed are enough, or whether the performance wouldn't suffer atrociously - but the kickstarter doesn't mean you'll get your money back if they can't.
You could pay a fortune, still not see any app, and not see any money back. (Some would say that's par-for-the-course on Kickstarter, but if you use your brain and support only those people who make particular promises and are likely to deliver on them, it's no worse than doing the same anywhere else).
Sorry, I'd rather donate GBP20 to VLC itself and get some of my bugbears fixed, thanks. Still can't quite believe that I can pretty reliably crash the client just by turning on certain visualisations when I get *ZERO* problems in any other program, media-player, game or anything else.
You've never heard of The Reg? Come on, you're joking right?!
They are a site that hosts both satirical, comic and serious articles on a range of IT topics. Home of things like the BOFH and Verity Stob "funnies", tongue-in-cheek-but-serious projects (like sending a Playmobil toy figure into space using some of the latest IT kit), and serious editorial on IT news.
In good British tradition, even the most serious of IT events is reported with humour, to lessen the blow and provide a bit of humanity, and there's a lot of mocking of others (everything from satirising newspaper headlines of IT related news events to absolute piss-takes of, say, Apple announcements of why their maps don't work). And perhaps 99% of the entertainment is actually in the comments, not the article.
Think "what Slashdot should have always been", and make it a little more British (i.e. we can happily take the piss out of our own "commentards" - as they call them - and they'll take it in good humour).
Every penny those companies "save" in tax, is a penny that the government will try to find in other ways - like raising your personal tax, raising sales tax, introducing more taxes etc.
Tax is a zero-sum game. Your taxes will rise every year to cover the cost of providing the services required (which seem to involve going to war a lot in the case of the US, but whatever).
You either pay a company more that then has to pay more tax, or you have to pay more in tax anyway. The difference here is that these companies have found a way to make you pay "with tax" prices, and then not pay the tax. You pay more than necessary, they make a bigger profit at your expense, and then the government sees less money coming in and hence raises YOUR tax (not the companies - they are already paying 0% tax, remember!), directly or indirectly.
Hilariously, the government are paying Microsoft for products, directly or indirectly, which Microsoft are not paying the tax on either. That makes providing, say, healthcare, education, etc. even more expensive on top of them not paying "their fair share" of tax in the first place.
These companies "sticking it to the man" in terms of not paying tax in your jurisdiction costs you and every taxpayer there more than almost any number of benefits cheats / criminals / whatever do over their entire lives.
Every penny Microsoft saves in tax, probably costs the taxpayer closer to 3p in the end (even counting what they pay into their lawyers pension funds). Do you really want to support them that much?
The products were sold to UK customers. The products were delivered to UK customers. The products are operated by UK customers.
It's like saying "I've sold you a coffee here today, but actually I'm 5000 miles away, so I don't have to pay sales tax on that". In fact, it's almost exactly that.
And, again, nobody has said that any of the listed companies did anything *illegal*. But there are doing billions of pounds worth of business to UK customers and not paying a single penny of tax, unlike their UK competitors doing the same thing with UK employees and UK administration.
It's not illegal, it's just a circumvention of a tax system that hasn't been designed to take account of it. And if allowed to propagate, would mean that every company in the world would operate from a handful of countries that charge no corporation tax, and your personal tax bill would quadruple or more.
If you're doing business selling your products to customers in a country, it's not weird to expect you to pay appropriate taxes on those products the same as if you were based next-door. Not doing so, like the UK currently doesn't, is just a way to lose all the large businesses, lose millions of jobs and lose billions of pounds in tax and (hence) start riots because the people who have to pay the difference instead (i.e. me) get pissed off about it.
It's like me starting up a software firm in the UK, selling millions of units making me billions of profits, but doing so in the US. It would cost US jobs, US tax income and US business competition (by undercutting them because I pay no US tax).
Starbucks in the UK competes with Costa Coffee. Costa Coffee is UK-based, with UK employees, and pays full UK taxes. Starbucks doesn't, because it "pays itself" royalties to use the name to a foreign subsidiary (of itself) that equal 100% of its profits in the UK. Hence, they have no recorded profit on millions of pounds of annual sales, they pay themselves all the "profit" into a country with better tax laws for them (saving them millions), and stiff the competition nicely (thus encouraging them to do the same and cause a mass exodus of jobs and companies off-shore).
It's not illegal. It's bordering on immoral. But it's DEFINITELY a stupid way to tax if a corporation making BILLIONS from your people and stiffing the competition hasn't paid you a penny in tax, which you then have to get from other companies or the population by raising taxes and making the problem even worse.
I already gave up on Slashdot once, and kept an eye on it and the quality visibly improved for a while.
If this is the level of crap that we're going to post, I'm happy to abandon the whole site again. I didn't miss it much for its absence.
P.S. If people here don't already know what a VPS is, how to run one, or how to pick holes in that article, this isn't the kind of website I want to frequent, and that's the USERS. The editors / posters? They should know better, ffs.
So far, an article on "Business Intelligence", a video about a fecking jacket, and this article have been enough to undo 10+ years of coming here.
But I'll say the thing that I've said a million times:
As a scientist, it's interesting to find the causes, build a model, predict the future, record data, test your hypotheses, rinse and repeat.
But as a person, and a scientist of any forward thinking, repeatedly saying that the sky is falling is pointless. Even assuming that you can prove it beyond doubt.
Just assume that the worst-case scenario is true, what do you intend to do about it? If there's nothing you can do to fix it, or nothing *practical* you can do at all, then all the scaremongering in the world (backed by facts or not) isn't going to help.
Seriously, we need to sit all the climate scientists, sceptics and believers alike, and ask them what the fix is. Because that's something that I've NOT heard from anyone yet. And if the fix has a worse impact than the problem itself, we probably ARE better off just leaving it alone.
What is the fix? Let's assume we stop all carbon emissions tomorrow. How much does that cost? What do we lose? How many people lose their jobs? How high do energy prices and transportation costs rise? What does that mean for the economy and the guy at home just wanting to get to work to earn enough to live? What other ecological changes might be triggered by that change? How long will it buy us? Will the world still flood? What about ecological impact of the alternatives if they are scaled up *OVERNIGHT* to meet the lost production? How long can we sustain them for?
What if we're wrong and do all this and NOTHING changes? What if we do all this, change the world over to other productions, half the world go hungry or lose their home and STILL nothing changes (the world goes on getting hotter)? What if we spend billions, bankrupt ourselves, destroy the economy, and implement all the fixes we're told will "fix" the problem, and STILL nothing changes?
Sometimes, biting your tongue and hanging on to double-check your answers is the actions of a wise man. We don't see answers to these, and those we do aren't any better than the doomsayers predictions of how AGW will impact us (or are just as dubious as other evidence anyway).
I just have this nightmare scenario in our head where we bankrupt our countries for generations (hell, a few mortgage scams were enough to bring most of the developed world to its knees, imagine what this could do), rip up and abandon perfectly working resources and technology, and it makes NO DIFFERENCE and we still end up dying, flooding, choking, whatever dire consequences are picked.
And meanwhile, some third-world country that didn't have the money to do anything and said "bugger it", and did nothing ends up being a major global power because it had the same ecological impact on us all but they didn't spend a penny trying to fix it.
We *SHOULD* be looking. We *SHOULD* be predicting. We *SHOULD* be worrying. We *SHOULD* be shouting our results from the highest hill.
But not necessarily about just the problem itself. The form, and consequences, of the proposed fixes are sketchy and dangerously under-researched.
"You want to go from zero to having authenticated, revokable and protocol-protected lock programmers in a day? Dream on, chum, dream on."
When you're paying probably $100+ per lock (the internal circuit boards are $11 replacement-cost if you don't send them back, for a start) * 50 locks per floor * 5 floors per hotel * 3700 franchisee hotels? Plus any number of other clients?
No. I expect it to already be in place, especially if it means that you have to produce several thousand such devices for your field engineers to program the locks in the first place (and thus such field engineers and anyone who knows them could have complete access before you even start).
We're not talking Diffie-Hellman, here, we're talking about having some kind of protection on the programming interface. Like having to program them from inside the door, or remove the lock, first, for instance. Like just about anything with some kind of programming interface requires already (I can't program a key for my car without a very expensive, controlled, licensed device monitored and authorised only by the original manufacturer, or access to the internals of my exact car with at least two of my keys to it, one of which is capable of programming and one of which can already start the car, or a LOT of hacking - not just sticking a plug into a socket exposed to the driver's door handle and telling it what key to accept, which is what this is)
Even spam made to be relevant can't publish a URL that works for it.
Seriously, programming is going really downhill lately. It reminds me of the spammers who keep emailing made-up-hex-code addresses at my domain, and addresses that literally existed for minutes decades ago and have been 554'd by SMTP ever since.
I give it a month before the new firmware is discovered vulnerable to a very similar attack, or a way to bypass the plug is found.
That said, if I were Marriot, of course I'd have negotiated just this kind of deal. It would be quite simple, and any number of electronic lock-makers would fall over themselves to install reduced costs locks (or even compatible boards) and just live off the future support for them.
What bothers me is not the replacement policy (which looks like you need to argue lots to get something quite reasonable, like a free firmware fix), or the security (we all know that lots of modern products have security flaws and to be honest, this one requires quite some skills / balls to exploit), but the denials and brushing-under-the-carpet.
Your locks have one purpose. To stay shut against an intruder. That's all. Sure, we don't expect the room to be impenetrable or them to be crowbar-proof, but we do expect you to not be able to walk up to them with just a device and start changing their settings without that device being authenticated, revokable and protocol-protected. And certainly not to the point that you can work out what to do to make it accept any card from just a lock alone without some serious reverse-engineering.
Damn right, you'd replace my locks. Or your insurance would have one huge hefty claim on it by now from chains like Marriott. Hell, I'd even let you off if I could fit them myself on my own schedule so as to not disturb guests or interfere with business operations, and even let you charge me for delivery.
But what I wouldn't accept would be it taking MONTHS to get to the position that a fix was available after a successful public demonstration. You should have been calling me up and shipping the updated boards/firmware the next day, at least, and worrying about the cost later.
If there's a repeat of this incident with the new board, I would need to KNOW that you were going to do something timely about it BEFORE burglaries start hitting my hotel insurance, which may not even pay out if the locks are that bad.
Not "using it seriously as an OS day in and day out" is not a reason to disqualify people's opinions. I don't use a Ferrari day in and day out, but I know it's not suitable for my uses, and if I tried it for a day, it's easily possible that in that day I would find enough reasons not to use it (they may be temporary, fleeting, "fixable", or not but if there's alternatives that don't have those problems, why would I recommend it over them?)
I have used Windows 8. In the few minutes it took to install, configure, get working, it was okay. Then when I started to use it, it quickly became a nightmare. It took me nearly a day to install "Active Directory Users & Computers". I kid you not.
RSAT (that contains the network management tools that are normally bundled in Windows) is an msu file that doesn't install from a network share, like VM-software uses to share files with the host, even if mapped to a drive letter. It dies silently if you try.
RSAT needs en_US language language packs installed even on an en_GB install. It does silently otherwise (though they now warn you of this in small-print on a KB article).
If you turn off the Windows Search service, you cannot install a language pack. It's impossible. And it doesn't error, it just silently ignores the request to do so.
If you turn off Automatic Updates (not unreasonable on a closed-system while testing in a VM), even if you're at the latest patch level, you can't install a language pack. It pretends to do so but does nothing (silently) until you re-enable Automatic updates.
Say you fight through all those problems, and get to the point that you have figured your way through totally unrelated shit to get an Active Directory Users & Computers icon that works (even through MMC). It's no different to the Windows 7 one, really, or even the XP one. So why all the hassle to get that far?
And then you end up with crap like Server Manager which is the most horrendous abomination I've seen in a long time and I'm dreading having to actually use.
From that day, Windows 8 (a full, paid-for, Pro version) got confined to its VM until the day I *need* something from it (a month in, that's been precisely zero times). The Windows 7 host that runs it gets used for 16 hours a day, though. That's before we even get into personal preferences like "Metro", etc. which I personally hate and went to great lengths to try to disable even on a test deployment inside a VM, I hated it that much.
Not everyone boycotts things just because of a company name, and not everyone who *DOES* do that does it for no particular reason, and not everyone is required to have had 1 year's experience of the OS before they are allowed to ditch it in favour of something that works better for them.
Windows 8 lasted two days, for me, inside a convenient VM, at full performance (never had a performance issue), with a brand new laptop that I could have installed *ANYTHING* on and got used to it (I was coming from Windows XP, the laptop came with 7 which meant a lot of tweaking anyway, and I took the MS upgrade offer to 8 Pro).
Since then, I literally haven't had the courage to give it another try.
As an IT guy, I want to spend as little time as possible fighting with IT stuff to make it do what I want. This is my basic rule.
Windows 7? I was "happy" with it after my upgrade from XP within about a week of work, and never really hit any big issues with it. Several times I liked the way things worked, though it wasn't all plain-sailing.
Windows 8? I still detest it after days of fighting with it, had issues galore (Bluescreen on fully-updated clean version straight from the official ISO on a clean VM within hours of use caused by an explorer crash when I had NO VM tools - or anything else - installed yet? And, no, it wasn't VM-related!).
Not once did I ever think "Oh, that's cool", "that's useful", "I like that", for a single thing it threw at me. I learned to flinch in horror when I realised I'd have to go
The UK isn't that much bigger (probably 5-6% larger) and you don't question us having several.
I'd say an intelligence agency of some sort was probably vital to any non-trivial country (i.e. one that you've heard of). You don't have to be invading foreign countries to be able to benefit from knowing when others are planning to do that to you.
The file-sharing community moved to places that can't be seen by the MPAA unless they really look hard and properly.
You shutdown a major (alleged) file-sharing site, using legal tactics that bordered on the insane. You're then surprised that "MegaUpload2" doesn't pop up with a big announcement and just carry on running as normal (which, honestly, I was half-expecting even though I've never used MegaUpload in my life).
This is the biggest problem with "piracy" - I can make up any numbers I like and it's impossible to prove that that number of copies *weren't* distributed illegally.
Just because you can't see the file-sharers, doesn't mean their operations have been hindered at all. It just means you can't see what's happened. For all you know, piracy has quadrupled on private darknets. It's almost impossible to prove either way.
The file-sharers that I know wouldn't stop doing it just because one site went down. Hell, that's par for the course as far as they are concerned - move on to the next one. Hell, some of them don't even care about the possibility of strongly-worded letters from their ISP's and potential cutting off of their connection. When threatened, they find ways to continue what they do, without being noticed.
Every anti-piracy measure in the world hasn't reduced piracy one bit. In fact, almost the opposite (but, again, that's almost impossible to prove). All it's done is made the pirates more wary of doing so quite so publicly.
I can remember when file-sharing was filling up a Geocities account and passing it around. Then it moved onto dedicated sites, constantly shifting around as they went down. Then it become sign-up sites. Then it became private groups. Then it became filesharing networks. Then it became anonymised filesharing networks. Then it became torrents.
The file-sharers aren't particularly scared of getting caught, but the people who run the sites are. And such sites are profitable if you run them right. And thus *those* people have a vested interest in protecting their user's identities (from outsiders, and from each other!) and will do what it takes to make that happen. They're already skirting the grey-areas of law anyway, they won't be worried about doing it some more.
It's a question I get asked a lot, and have been asked a lot for years now. I've had even the most computer-illiterate person come to me and ask "So, now Napster/BearShare/SuprNova/PirateBay is dead, what's replacing it?". I don't file-share (never had interest in music at all, lost all interest in movies about 10 years ago and only buy DVD's that I then rip for my home use, and I buy cheap games for entertainment), so I usually have no idea. But even as someone that doesn't fileshare, I still see enough of the Internet to pick up on the name of these places and what comes along to replace them without even trying to.
I'm not saying they should give up on trying to stop piracy, but they should really take account of the amount of people out there that JUST DON'T CARE and also the amount of people who are put off by the atrociously-gathered "statistics" quoted, to the point that I lose all sympathy for their plight. It's like being asked to support a politician who claims there are a bazigiwillion criminals committing crimes out there so they need hujamaflipillions of tax to fix the problem. I'm all for the cause, but the fake numbers just make me want to write you off as an idiot.
Now, if you said "We're going to release a big film next week" and then deliberately DIDN'T (after putting a modified copy of it through your normal release mechanisms) and counted up the number of modified copies of the film floating around on the Internet and the number of downloaders of it before release - that's a statistic I can get behind.
But even then, chances are that most of those leaks are from your own internal processes and the people who pay you big bucks to license the content early (e.g. cinemas, etc.) anyway. So it's not really "filesharing" that's the problem so much as insecure release mechanisms and the total inability to stop someone copying the film somehow anyway.
Walk backwards for several miles from a crack in the rock. Some future explorer will follow that trail and think I disappeared.
Leave any colony in a state like the LV-426 colony, just for the laughs. A little-known, ugly-looking, smuggled Earth creature stuck in a specimen jar for bonus points.
Sketch out a Turing machine calculating flight trajectories in the dust on the ground, just for the hell of it.
Hunt down the Mars Rovers and turn them into Roomba's. Bonus points for making it look like Wall-E.
Write "Beware of the...." in the sand before I die.
In an air-tight environment, almost all of that water is excreted again at some point. Most as water vapour in your breath, some as urine, some as sweat, some in your faeces etc.
If you put a human in a hermetically-sealed box and gave them enough food and water for a week, that water would still be around in the box at the end. It's just a matter of collecting it.
Move forward to a non-hermetically sealed box and imperfect collection mechanisms and all you have to do it make up the difference. That's significantly less.
Your primary fuel will be hydrogen and oxygen. We actually think we can find most of that for a "return journey" by breaking down water found on the planet itself, it's so plentiful. Ignoring that, igniting said fuel (say, for warmth) produces pure water as the exhaust gas. Failing actually finding it on the planet, you can capture those gases from the air and make water by igniting hydrogen in oxygen. It's just a matter of time and electricity, both of which would (presumably) be plentiful on a mission to Mars.
Ignoring *that* - there is water ice on Mars. We know it. And in 20 years time, we'll know it even better. If there isn't, then taking along enough to make up the losses for several months/years at a time is a no-brainer. Hell, we got to the moon for several people without water shortages, any mission to Mars will scale up similarly.
Water really isn't a problem. Heat is your problem. Heating makes up a HUGE fraction of our energy usage even today, and Mars is colder (-143 to about 35 centigrade on the surface depending on latitude and time of day). So the hottest part of the hottest day on Mars is a warm summer's day, the coldest part of the coldest day is colder than the coldest recorded temperature ever on Earth.
So whatever way you look at it, the energy needed to keep you warm, and your surroundings warm, especially if you're going to build a colony to support life long-term, is through the roof compared to the difficulty of digging down or extracting water from the atmosphere with even the most inefficient tools.
I think that even some royalty probably said the same about traders who crossed the Atlantic, or tried to climb certain ranges of mountain to get to the next village, or ride the around around certain Cape around South Africa at some point.
You don't need to be stupid to want to go live on a planet of your own (effectively), especially if follow-up missions are likely. You *do* need to screen people for suicidal tendencies, because that can be a major factor - but there's nothing to say that a perfectly sane person wouldn't choose suicide in tough circumstances like they are likely to face anyway.
In fact, one of Man's greatest moments was called "stupid" at the time and ended up suicides. Or you wouldn't know *shit* about the South Pole now.
"I may be some time" doesn't ring a bell about one of our greatest explorers ever?
This isn't about live attacks on a system. This is about "offline" attacks and even things like hash collisions (where someone can make a certificate or a download that has the same hash as the "official" one but is fake or contains malware, etc.).
If you can take a login system and run millions of queries against it, it's a stupid system. But if you can steal a hashed file of password, or old hashed tokens from the network, then you can theoretically break them now in the time it takes to reboot the computer (if you could log into this other system remotely).
Things like the Sony break-in would reveal everyone's password, not just the other stolen details. And on a local network, you could sniff tokens sent for NTLM services etc. and start impersonating other users before it could even be detected. Of course you have to have a certain level of compromise / access already to get to that stage, but it doesn't make it any less dangerous to be able to forge hashes or find out their plain-text.
Please note, also, that things like these hashes have been used historically to verify software is genuine, as part of encryption algorithms, random number generators and all sorts of other things. At the time, they were reasonably unbreakable, but now they aren't. And that breaks lots of things if they are still relying on them.
Impact to security-conscious users: Zip. Impact to security-unconscious users: Huge.
OnLive for local LAN, run from your own PC, you mean?
It would suffer the same problems as OnLive, plus others.
You would get more lag, especially with screen compression / decompression (which you would still need because otherwise people would moan that it's jerky on their 56Mbps wireless, etc.). Your CPU use on the machine playing the game would rise, cutting FPS (it would be similar to running FRAPS saving onto a remote network share, for instance). Your machine doing the receiving would need to be quite meaty to do the decompression, display etc. in real time (and thus, why not just upgrade it to play games direct). Your inputs and video responses would lag - not as much as on OnLive, but it would happen. Your local net traffic would be huge, which would add to your ping.
Remember, Steam is aimed at gamers and the kind of gamer that has a powerful gaming PC that they want to use to do the backend of playing on their TV-with-client-machine downstairs is not going to be happy with the sacrifices. And more casual players won't be interested in doing it at all, even if they *do* have the equipment just lying around.
Then, there would be patent costs too. What you're describing hits not only OnLive's patent portfolio but that of just about every network display company in the world (e.g. Citrix, NetOp, maybe even some VNC extensions etc.) and even things like network audio, codecs and all sorts of other problems tha t would need to be licensed or otherwise resolved globally, not just in the US.
Basically, it's a mess in technical and legal terms for something that few people would use and, like most "thin-clients", would actually die a death quite quickly as CPU/GPU/RAM increase along their natural rates as normal. Hell, it's hard to justify even a desktop thin-client on technical or cost terms, and they only really win on management / security.
People still *watch* the news? I can't even remember the last time I actually watched a news story on TV or online.
Personally, I can't think of anything worse than being drip-fed only the news others want to give me, only the news that's "exciting" on video, only the news that can occupy time on-air, only the news that needs a 500Mb download in order to get the gist when 1000 words and a couple of links give me infinitely more information, etc.
I'm not a news-snob, I don't really care what I read because I take it *all* with a pinch of salt and anything interesting I run off and check facts myself. But being force-fed video of someone else's news is probably the worst thing I can imagine in terms of actually absorbing the information within, without finding out what's actually going on, and just allowing yourself to be "brainwashed".
Ever seen the 80's UK comedy series "Drop the Dead Donkey"? Set in a news-room, there's a character called Damien who is the guy who runs out with a camera and comes back with something visual to run. Every time I hear someone *watches* the news, I think of him using the same teddy bear as "the shot" for everything from an air crash to a terrorist attack to a motorway accident to a flood. It can't be far off the truth of how much news is twisted to make it visually appealing.
News isn't a thing in and of itself. It's a trigger for you to run off and find information on something, well, new. Anyone who just "consumes" news nowadays was probably not bright enough to move on from 70's-style news programming.
But I agree, the intersection was vanishingly small, especially when combined with "willing to pay to read a news paper". I haven't paid for a newspaper in my entire life, but I read several of the free ones for entertainment. I get most of my actual news from sites specialising in my interest. If I waited for the things that I *do* find interesting to come on the news, I'd die before I saw anything. But if I ever want to watch a cow being rescued from a flood, I'm sure I'd only have to wait about a week or so.
Now go try it. Squinting to read tiny text on your hi-res screen on the other side of the room. Sure, you can increase the font sizes etc. Now you have to window-manage, too. And you find that a lot of apps haven't thought about what happens when you increase the font size and the top menu of their menu can take up 10% of the screen (or 20+% if it wraps because the font is large enough).
And, sure, a keyboard would work. Until you realise that the programmers forgot to put in a menu shortcut for that vital function or the error dialog that pops up needs a different shortcut key to close it (and just Enter does nothing, etc.). Sure, they can fix it but would they bother?
The point of "big-picture" mode is that someone sat down, with a big screen and just a controller, and made Steam and an awful lot of Steam games work with it. It's nothing miraculous, but it's not something you can just fake, emulate or expect every application to do. It's been that way since I was using VGA->Composite convertors on 800x600 resolution. Hell, a lot of the time you could move windows off the screen and not get them back and things like that.
Nowadays, you're so used to consoles etc. that you don't think that there's any difference between PC gaming and console gaming. Well, there is. A huge one, that has nothing to do with the games. Console gamers don't want to faff managing windows, playing with bad tab-orders in programs, etc. PC gamers don't care and will never notice.
Big picture mode is Steam targeted at big screens. What sort of hyperbole do you think you can spin on that when that's ALL they've ever claimed?
The fuss is because it's *necessary* and *useful* and because now having a TV with HDTV resolution and a handful of Bluetooth / USB controllers around the house is so much more prevalent than it's ever been before that it's viable to just run your Steam account on the TV.
I don't think it will be long before you see Steam on smart-TV's and their own console. But if they *hadn't* done big-picture, it would always have been a second-class app like any number of Windows apps that just don't care about anything non-PC-desktop.
Or history. Or art. Or mathematics (though that's do-able, it's extraordinarily hard without proper tuition). Or medicine.
There's a LOT of problems with a drop-out culture for even a minority of students.
Go and ask most people what they wish they had done differently and probably "stay in school" / "work harder at school" / "gone to university", etc. will be high on their lists. Because they realise, and have life experience of the fact, that dropping out makes the choice between lucky/skilful entrepreneur, and waitressing. (There's nothing *wrong* with waitressing, per se, but how many people grow up fantasising about being a waitress?). Whereas a degree of some kind, and education in general, vastly widens the scope of the jobs you *can* get into.
A vanishingly small percentage of people are billionaires or being paid to churn out code that they love on their projects. There's nothing wrong with dreaming of being in that group. But the rest of the world, plus vast percentages of those people who then go on to fail, plus all those people who find they're just NOT good enough to become a self-styled guru on business / programming / whatever, will end up having to find something else to pay the bills, even if only until their "big break" arrives.
And for that, an education doesn't GUARANTEE anything, but *does* give you an advantage, if only of the scope of jobs within your intellectual range afterwards and the opinions of job creators on what those qualifications say about you.
I have a degree. It single-handedly, and through no forcing or "luck" got me my first job. I was building websites freelance. I got a website job for a school because of a friend that my brother knew who worked there. Working there on the website alone, I also was asked occasionally if I knew how to fix X (I generally did, because of a lifetime experience of IT). I was called into the head's (principal's) office the week after I fixed their entire network by flicking a switch and pressing Enter before their paid support line could even answer the phone. We talked. He wanted to give me a network job at the school (they had no on-site IT staff).
The primary factors they were concerned with were integrity (there were entrusting an entire school's data and operational systems to me), work ethic, ability to learn (they were complex systems and almost all their support experience was of "office"-type support that didn't understand schools do things differently) and, finally, experience. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that my degree counted towards all of them and proved many of them. Whereas just "knowing computers" would have hinted at only the last. He stated quite clearly that he wouldn't have employed me if I'd had bad grades - it would not only look bad on the school, employing staff less qualified than some of the kids, but it would affect the work I had to do. No amount of network knowledge or lucky guesses would have got me that job.
(And from there, I went on to work for many other schools on word-of-mouth alone and ended up in a nice cosy job for a private school that I've been in for years now - and in 12 years never had a day where I wasn't employed).
There is no "one plan" that will help everyone, and no doubt a couple of budding entrepreneurs who couldn't make it through college will do okay by the scheme. But claiming that people should drop out of college and go that way automatically is quite, quite daft (especially because most students will struggle at some point and might think it the "easy way out").
You can say it's the field I was sucked into working in, you can say it's the experience and hands-on skill I had, you can say it was just luck, you can say lots of things - but my degree got me my first ever job on it's word alone, and has kept me employed ever since, and often comes up (I'm technically more qualified than a lot of the school teaching staff, even those teaching IT for instance).
By your definition, everyone from Michelangelo up to and including, say, Matisse or Seurat, is merely a craftsman then.
So please stop referring to them as artists, exhibiting them in art galleries, and categorising their works as art.
Or are you suggesting that they are craftsmen AND artists simultaneously because they work is both technically brilliant and emotionally-responsive? Because in that case, almost ALL "MODERN" ARTISTS are, therefore, only emotionally-responsive and totally lack the technical-brilliance that makes them different from the classical "craftsmen". Thus they are both different from, and INFERIOR to, the classical artists. Which is exactly my point.
If you wish to draw lines in the sand, you can't then blur those lines to include the classical artists and the modern in the same word. Whichever way you look at it, they are two enormously different categories of artist, with hugely differing skills and calling them all "art" breaks any definition you care to fabricate.
If you want to distinguish between artists and craftsmen, then the "art world" needs to do so all the time, or recognise that they are NOT as skilled or as disciplined or as valuable as the classical creators. Still, a blob on a bit of paper, by whatever standard you want to apply, is still an inferior blob to the people who created fabulous murals and beautiful tapestries.
I have a maths and computing degree, and though I had a TI-85 that I loved, I couldn't really justify it on class use alone. Hell, I barely pulled that thing out in university at all, and it was mostly before that (A-levels in the UK) that we were told we "had" to have a graphing calculator.
For the number of times I used it academically, I probably could have drawn the graphs without any effort at all. For the number of times I wrote programs on it that any computer could run but which saved me work, that might have been worth the cost (i.e. it can actually be quicker to write a program to come to the answer than expect the calculator to show you the way by graphing a complex graph slowly).
Most of my use of it? Probably writing games in class. I had a pretty good Othello game with computer player that took me about a day to write, a decent minesweeper version, all written in BASIC (so slow, but the sort of thing you can knock up when you're bored).
In terms of computers in general, apart from the obvious things that need a computer anyway, the only other thing I ever used was Maple (like MathCAD, but a thousand times better at the time). Cost an absolute FORTUNE, so much that there's no way I could justify it even if it was amazing for double-checking your calculus, etc. when you get into higher functions. Gimme Maple on a tablet back at that time (never needed it since) and I would have broke your arm off for one.
But graphing / programmable calculators in general? It's like buying your kid a set of protactors or French curves for their first maths class. Sure, they might end up using them, but chances are they will never be *needed* and certainly not enough that it was worth buying them.
Every time I step in dogshit, it evokes a feeling or response. To some that would mean that dogshit is art. So her definition is equally as self-fulfilling as ours.:-)
My definition of how "arty" something is, to counteract all the shite that I see pushed as art, is thus:
"The amount of skill needed to reproduce the piece given the same time, materials and techniques."
So a square of splatty paint on a bit of canvas that the artist pondered over for a decade isn't very arty at all. 5-year-olds could copy it. Michaelangelo's David? That's a serious piece of art that's incredibly difficult to make. Sure, you could mould it or 3D print it or laser-scan it and then even CNC it, but it would take an artist (a proper one!) to make it using only the same methods / materials as it was originally produced with.
Similarly, splatting a bit of moondust or graphite sheets on a canvas and calling it art is stretching it because GIVEN those materials, the arrangement of them isn't anything fabulous. They *can* be highly-skilled art, but there the art is in the skill, not the materials, and the higher-skill, the harder to reproduce given those materials, no matter how rare they are.
This (to me) helpfully eradicates all of the shite that pretends to be art (especially the "interpretive" art where you're supposed to appreciate the message more than the delivery - pretty much everything since Picasso) while keeping all the classics, the masters and the geniuses firmly in their age-old deserved places.
By that definition, given a budget as large as the movie had, given the computer technology and everything else that was there, how hard would it be to generate something like that movie (or so similar as to be indistinguishable)? I don't think it would be as tricky as George Lucas would like to make out. Maybe *I* couldn't do it, but certainly any director of merit probably could pull it off quite easily.
The best artists I see today are putting work online for free, scrabbling for space on street corners, and selling things that must take them FOREVER to make for a few pounds on etsy or from their back yard or similar.
The best artist I've seen lately was some old guy I found living in a house in the Highlands (a turning in Erogie, near Inverness, Scotland, marked as "Art Gallery" on a scrap of paper by the side of the road, you can't miss it - there are about four houses in the town, and after you've driven 2 miles following those signs off-road through fields, over bridges, past farms, etc. and there's NOTHING else but those signs until you end up in front of his ramshackle house with a yappy little dog excited to see ANYONE, that's the guy!), who sells some beautiful "classic" paintings of things like stags and deer for a pittance out of his back bedroom.
Out of the thousands of "galleries" around that area, his was the only one that wasn't mass-produced, didn't have 10,000 prints of an actual nice painting (being the only thing really worth the money in most places, in my opinion), and had things that you actually had to whistle in disbelief when you saw the skill and time that had gone into it.
I can't believe people will spend an hour in some posh art gallery down the road, spending thousands while looking at the millionth print of a photograph someone took of the local scenery (it's really NOT that hard to take a photograph of nice scenery in that area, and then print it out) and the crudely Photoshopped to remove the huge electricity pylons that were in it, rather than go look at the old guy at work (hell, just his conversation is worth the price of the paintings).
It's not how many people copy it, it's not how long it took you to make, it's not what name it has on the bottom, it's not even how much it cost. It's how hard it would be to reproduce using the same material, techniques and time as the original creator did.
And by that definition, the "first" episode of the Star Wars trilogy (chronologically) is probably more arty than all the newer prequels put together. But where they come on the same scale as everything else is probably floating around the same rating as The Blair Witch Project.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Fix VLC first. There are still a lot of outstanding issues and I encounter DVD's every day that PowerDVD will play but VLC will just crash on. Usually, literally, in the first moments. We're not talking obscure movies, either, but current new DVD releases.
I remember an almighty-long wait for VLC to put back in functionality to ignore keyboard hotkeys after committing code that made pressing the volume button on your computer adjust both system volume and VLC volume and it was possible to get to a state where it was impossible to unmute both. The unofficial patch that circulated took forever to make its way into the client stables.
I also get a lot of random crashes and hangs when viewing content that, after killing the process, will work fine. I also have found it almost impossible to stream things properly without having to know a myriad technical details about what I'm streaming from / to, a large part of which VLC could automate for me. I spent an hour yesterday figuring out the command-line (yep, I gave up on the GUI quite quickly after several tests resulted in nothing) to stream my desktop (via VLC's built-in "screen" source) and local Stereo Mix audio to a network-accessible stream to a VLC player on a remote machine. I gave up in the end and did things another way.
Don't get me started on things like DVD navigation (easy to "go in circles" on a lot of DVD menus), obscure formats that still error, playlist management, etc. Do I hate VLC? No, it's the only media player I install and one of the first things I do on any fresh machine, and I often give people Portable VLC for when they just want to play an obscure video file once (e.g. CCTV recordings, etc.). Which makes it even MORE annoying that these things are still present.
2) VLC works on Windows 8. What you mean is "Metro", and nobody cares about that.
3) The delivery promises are rubbish. I wouldn't touch it even if it was something I wanted - they don't even know if the license is compatible, the toolchain can exist, the app would ever be accepted, the API's exposed are enough, or whether the performance wouldn't suffer atrociously - but the kickstarter doesn't mean you'll get your money back if they can't.
You could pay a fortune, still not see any app, and not see any money back. (Some would say that's par-for-the-course on Kickstarter, but if you use your brain and support only those people who make particular promises and are likely to deliver on them, it's no worse than doing the same anywhere else).
Sorry, I'd rather donate GBP20 to VLC itself and get some of my bugbears fixed, thanks. Still can't quite believe that I can pretty reliably crash the client just by turning on certain visualisations when I get *ZERO* problems in any other program, media-player, game or anything else.
You've never heard of The Reg? Come on, you're joking right?!
They are a site that hosts both satirical, comic and serious articles on a range of IT topics. Home of things like the BOFH and Verity Stob "funnies", tongue-in-cheek-but-serious projects (like sending a Playmobil toy figure into space using some of the latest IT kit), and serious editorial on IT news.
In good British tradition, even the most serious of IT events is reported with humour, to lessen the blow and provide a bit of humanity, and there's a lot of mocking of others (everything from satirising newspaper headlines of IT related news events to absolute piss-takes of, say, Apple announcements of why their maps don't work). And perhaps 99% of the entertainment is actually in the comments, not the article.
Think "what Slashdot should have always been", and make it a little more British (i.e. we can happily take the piss out of our own "commentards" - as they call them - and they'll take it in good humour).
Every penny those companies "save" in tax, is a penny that the government will try to find in other ways - like raising your personal tax, raising sales tax, introducing more taxes etc.
Tax is a zero-sum game. Your taxes will rise every year to cover the cost of providing the services required (which seem to involve going to war a lot in the case of the US, but whatever).
You either pay a company more that then has to pay more tax, or you have to pay more in tax anyway. The difference here is that these companies have found a way to make you pay "with tax" prices, and then not pay the tax. You pay more than necessary, they make a bigger profit at your expense, and then the government sees less money coming in and hence raises YOUR tax (not the companies - they are already paying 0% tax, remember!), directly or indirectly.
Hilariously, the government are paying Microsoft for products, directly or indirectly, which Microsoft are not paying the tax on either. That makes providing, say, healthcare, education, etc. even more expensive on top of them not paying "their fair share" of tax in the first place.
These companies "sticking it to the man" in terms of not paying tax in your jurisdiction costs you and every taxpayer there more than almost any number of benefits cheats / criminals / whatever do over their entire lives.
Every penny Microsoft saves in tax, probably costs the taxpayer closer to 3p in the end (even counting what they pay into their lawyers pension funds). Do you really want to support them that much?
The products were sold to UK customers.
The products were delivered to UK customers.
The products are operated by UK customers.
It's like saying "I've sold you a coffee here today, but actually I'm 5000 miles away, so I don't have to pay sales tax on that". In fact, it's almost exactly that.
And, again, nobody has said that any of the listed companies did anything *illegal*. But there are doing billions of pounds worth of business to UK customers and not paying a single penny of tax, unlike their UK competitors doing the same thing with UK employees and UK administration.
It's not illegal, it's just a circumvention of a tax system that hasn't been designed to take account of it. And if allowed to propagate, would mean that every company in the world would operate from a handful of countries that charge no corporation tax, and your personal tax bill would quadruple or more.
If you're doing business selling your products to customers in a country, it's not weird to expect you to pay appropriate taxes on those products the same as if you were based next-door. Not doing so, like the UK currently doesn't, is just a way to lose all the large businesses, lose millions of jobs and lose billions of pounds in tax and (hence) start riots because the people who have to pay the difference instead (i.e. me) get pissed off about it.
It's like me starting up a software firm in the UK, selling millions of units making me billions of profits, but doing so in the US. It would cost US jobs, US tax income and US business competition (by undercutting them because I pay no US tax).
Starbucks in the UK competes with Costa Coffee. Costa Coffee is UK-based, with UK employees, and pays full UK taxes. Starbucks doesn't, because it "pays itself" royalties to use the name to a foreign subsidiary (of itself) that equal 100% of its profits in the UK. Hence, they have no recorded profit on millions of pounds of annual sales, they pay themselves all the "profit" into a country with better tax laws for them (saving them millions), and stiff the competition nicely (thus encouraging them to do the same and cause a mass exodus of jobs and companies off-shore).
It's not illegal. It's bordering on immoral. But it's DEFINITELY a stupid way to tax if a corporation making BILLIONS from your people and stiffing the competition hasn't paid you a penny in tax, which you then have to get from other companies or the population by raising taxes and making the problem even worse.
I hope this is a joke.
I already gave up on Slashdot once, and kept an eye on it and the quality visibly improved for a while.
If this is the level of crap that we're going to post, I'm happy to abandon the whole site again. I didn't miss it much for its absence.
P.S. If people here don't already know what a VPS is, how to run one, or how to pick holes in that article, this isn't the kind of website I want to frequent, and that's the USERS. The editors / posters? They should know better, ffs.
So far, an article on "Business Intelligence", a video about a fecking jacket, and this article have been enough to undo 10+ years of coming here.
I kinda agree with your reasoning too.
But I'll say the thing that I've said a million times:
As a scientist, it's interesting to find the causes, build a model, predict the future, record data, test your hypotheses, rinse and repeat.
But as a person, and a scientist of any forward thinking, repeatedly saying that the sky is falling is pointless. Even assuming that you can prove it beyond doubt.
Just assume that the worst-case scenario is true, what do you intend to do about it? If there's nothing you can do to fix it, or nothing *practical* you can do at all, then all the scaremongering in the world (backed by facts or not) isn't going to help.
Seriously, we need to sit all the climate scientists, sceptics and believers alike, and ask them what the fix is. Because that's something that I've NOT heard from anyone yet. And if the fix has a worse impact than the problem itself, we probably ARE better off just leaving it alone.
What is the fix? Let's assume we stop all carbon emissions tomorrow. How much does that cost? What do we lose? How many people lose their jobs? How high do energy prices and transportation costs rise? What does that mean for the economy and the guy at home just wanting to get to work to earn enough to live? What other ecological changes might be triggered by that change? How long will it buy us? Will the world still flood? What about ecological impact of the alternatives if they are scaled up *OVERNIGHT* to meet the lost production? How long can we sustain them for?
What if we're wrong and do all this and NOTHING changes? What if we do all this, change the world over to other productions, half the world go hungry or lose their home and STILL nothing changes (the world goes on getting hotter)? What if we spend billions, bankrupt ourselves, destroy the economy, and implement all the fixes we're told will "fix" the problem, and STILL nothing changes?
Sometimes, biting your tongue and hanging on to double-check your answers is the actions of a wise man. We don't see answers to these, and those we do aren't any better than the doomsayers predictions of how AGW will impact us (or are just as dubious as other evidence anyway).
I just have this nightmare scenario in our head where we bankrupt our countries for generations (hell, a few mortgage scams were enough to bring most of the developed world to its knees, imagine what this could do), rip up and abandon perfectly working resources and technology, and it makes NO DIFFERENCE and we still end up dying, flooding, choking, whatever dire consequences are picked.
And meanwhile, some third-world country that didn't have the money to do anything and said "bugger it", and did nothing ends up being a major global power because it had the same ecological impact on us all but they didn't spend a penny trying to fix it.
We *SHOULD* be looking.
We *SHOULD* be predicting.
We *SHOULD* be worrying.
We *SHOULD* be shouting our results from the highest hill.
But not necessarily about just the problem itself. The form, and consequences, of the proposed fixes are sketchy and dangerously under-researched.
Just so long as you have to enter your PIN number...
"You want to go from zero to having authenticated, revokable and protocol-protected lock programmers in a day? Dream on, chum, dream on."
When you're paying probably $100+ per lock (the internal circuit boards are $11 replacement-cost if you don't send them back, for a start) * 50 locks per floor * 5 floors per hotel * 3700 franchisee hotels? Plus any number of other clients?
No. I expect it to already be in place, especially if it means that you have to produce several thousand such devices for your field engineers to program the locks in the first place (and thus such field engineers and anyone who knows them could have complete access before you even start).
We're not talking Diffie-Hellman, here, we're talking about having some kind of protection on the programming interface. Like having to program them from inside the door, or remove the lock, first, for instance. Like just about anything with some kind of programming interface requires already (I can't program a key for my car without a very expensive, controlled, licensed device monitored and authorised only by the original manufacturer, or access to the internals of my exact car with at least two of my keys to it, one of which is capable of programming and one of which can already start the car, or a LOT of hacking - not just sticking a plug into a socket exposed to the driver's door handle and telling it what key to accept, which is what this is)
Even spam made to be relevant can't publish a URL that works for it.
Seriously, programming is going really downhill lately. It reminds me of the spammers who keep emailing made-up-hex-code addresses at my domain, and addresses that literally existed for minutes decades ago and have been 554'd by SMTP ever since.
Just what exactly do they think they've gained?
I give it a month before the new firmware is discovered vulnerable to a very similar attack, or a way to bypass the plug is found.
That said, if I were Marriot, of course I'd have negotiated just this kind of deal. It would be quite simple, and any number of electronic lock-makers would fall over themselves to install reduced costs locks (or even compatible boards) and just live off the future support for them.
What bothers me is not the replacement policy (which looks like you need to argue lots to get something quite reasonable, like a free firmware fix), or the security (we all know that lots of modern products have security flaws and to be honest, this one requires quite some skills / balls to exploit), but the denials and brushing-under-the-carpet.
Your locks have one purpose. To stay shut against an intruder. That's all. Sure, we don't expect the room to be impenetrable or them to be crowbar-proof, but we do expect you to not be able to walk up to them with just a device and start changing their settings without that device being authenticated, revokable and protocol-protected. And certainly not to the point that you can work out what to do to make it accept any card from just a lock alone without some serious reverse-engineering.
Damn right, you'd replace my locks. Or your insurance would have one huge hefty claim on it by now from chains like Marriott. Hell, I'd even let you off if I could fit them myself on my own schedule so as to not disturb guests or interfere with business operations, and even let you charge me for delivery.
But what I wouldn't accept would be it taking MONTHS to get to the position that a fix was available after a successful public demonstration. You should have been calling me up and shipping the updated boards/firmware the next day, at least, and worrying about the cost later.
If there's a repeat of this incident with the new board, I would need to KNOW that you were going to do something timely about it BEFORE burglaries start hitting my hotel insurance, which may not even pay out if the locks are that bad.
Not "using it seriously as an OS day in and day out" is not a reason to disqualify people's opinions. I don't use a Ferrari day in and day out, but I know it's not suitable for my uses, and if I tried it for a day, it's easily possible that in that day I would find enough reasons not to use it (they may be temporary, fleeting, "fixable", or not but if there's alternatives that don't have those problems, why would I recommend it over them?)
I have used Windows 8. In the few minutes it took to install, configure, get working, it was okay. Then when I started to use it, it quickly became a nightmare. It took me nearly a day to install "Active Directory Users & Computers". I kid you not.
RSAT (that contains the network management tools that are normally bundled in Windows) is an msu file that doesn't install from a network share, like VM-software uses to share files with the host, even if mapped to a drive letter. It dies silently if you try.
RSAT needs en_US language language packs installed even on an en_GB install. It does silently otherwise (though they now warn you of this in small-print on a KB article).
If you turn off the Windows Search service, you cannot install a language pack. It's impossible. And it doesn't error, it just silently ignores the request to do so.
If you turn off Automatic Updates (not unreasonable on a closed-system while testing in a VM), even if you're at the latest patch level, you can't install a language pack. It pretends to do so but does nothing (silently) until you re-enable Automatic updates.
Say you fight through all those problems, and get to the point that you have figured your way through totally unrelated shit to get an Active Directory Users & Computers icon that works (even through MMC). It's no different to the Windows 7 one, really, or even the XP one. So why all the hassle to get that far?
And then you end up with crap like Server Manager which is the most horrendous abomination I've seen in a long time and I'm dreading having to actually use.
From that day, Windows 8 (a full, paid-for, Pro version) got confined to its VM until the day I *need* something from it (a month in, that's been precisely zero times). The Windows 7 host that runs it gets used for 16 hours a day, though. That's before we even get into personal preferences like "Metro", etc. which I personally hate and went to great lengths to try to disable even on a test deployment inside a VM, I hated it that much.
Not everyone boycotts things just because of a company name, and not everyone who *DOES* do that does it for no particular reason, and not everyone is required to have had 1 year's experience of the OS before they are allowed to ditch it in favour of something that works better for them.
Windows 8 lasted two days, for me, inside a convenient VM, at full performance (never had a performance issue), with a brand new laptop that I could have installed *ANYTHING* on and got used to it (I was coming from Windows XP, the laptop came with 7 which meant a lot of tweaking anyway, and I took the MS upgrade offer to 8 Pro).
Since then, I literally haven't had the courage to give it another try.
As an IT guy, I want to spend as little time as possible fighting with IT stuff to make it do what I want. This is my basic rule.
Windows 7? I was "happy" with it after my upgrade from XP within about a week of work, and never really hit any big issues with it. Several times I liked the way things worked, though it wasn't all plain-sailing.
Windows 8? I still detest it after days of fighting with it, had issues galore (Bluescreen on fully-updated clean version straight from the official ISO on a clean VM within hours of use caused by an explorer crash when I had NO VM tools - or anything else - installed yet? And, no, it wasn't VM-related!).
Not once did I ever think "Oh, that's cool", "that's useful", "I like that", for a single thing it threw at me. I learned to flinch in horror when I realised I'd have to go
To stay peaceful?
The UK isn't that much bigger (probably 5-6% larger) and you don't question us having several.
I'd say an intelligence agency of some sort was probably vital to any non-trivial country (i.e. one that you've heard of). You don't have to be invading foreign countries to be able to benefit from knowing when others are planning to do that to you.
Or,
The file-sharing community moved to places that can't be seen by the MPAA unless they really look hard and properly.
You shutdown a major (alleged) file-sharing site, using legal tactics that bordered on the insane. You're then surprised that "MegaUpload2" doesn't pop up with a big announcement and just carry on running as normal (which, honestly, I was half-expecting even though I've never used MegaUpload in my life).
This is the biggest problem with "piracy" - I can make up any numbers I like and it's impossible to prove that that number of copies *weren't* distributed illegally.
Just because you can't see the file-sharers, doesn't mean their operations have been hindered at all. It just means you can't see what's happened. For all you know, piracy has quadrupled on private darknets. It's almost impossible to prove either way.
The file-sharers that I know wouldn't stop doing it just because one site went down. Hell, that's par for the course as far as they are concerned - move on to the next one. Hell, some of them don't even care about the possibility of strongly-worded letters from their ISP's and potential cutting off of their connection. When threatened, they find ways to continue what they do, without being noticed.
Every anti-piracy measure in the world hasn't reduced piracy one bit. In fact, almost the opposite (but, again, that's almost impossible to prove). All it's done is made the pirates more wary of doing so quite so publicly.
I can remember when file-sharing was filling up a Geocities account and passing it around. Then it moved onto dedicated sites, constantly shifting around as they went down. Then it become sign-up sites. Then it became private groups. Then it became filesharing networks. Then it became anonymised filesharing networks. Then it became torrents.
The file-sharers aren't particularly scared of getting caught, but the people who run the sites are. And such sites are profitable if you run them right. And thus *those* people have a vested interest in protecting their user's identities (from outsiders, and from each other!) and will do what it takes to make that happen. They're already skirting the grey-areas of law anyway, they won't be worried about doing it some more.
It's a question I get asked a lot, and have been asked a lot for years now. I've had even the most computer-illiterate person come to me and ask "So, now Napster/BearShare/SuprNova/PirateBay is dead, what's replacing it?". I don't file-share (never had interest in music at all, lost all interest in movies about 10 years ago and only buy DVD's that I then rip for my home use, and I buy cheap games for entertainment), so I usually have no idea. But even as someone that doesn't fileshare, I still see enough of the Internet to pick up on the name of these places and what comes along to replace them without even trying to.
I'm not saying they should give up on trying to stop piracy, but they should really take account of the amount of people out there that JUST DON'T CARE and also the amount of people who are put off by the atrociously-gathered "statistics" quoted, to the point that I lose all sympathy for their plight. It's like being asked to support a politician who claims there are a bazigiwillion criminals committing crimes out there so they need hujamaflipillions of tax to fix the problem. I'm all for the cause, but the fake numbers just make me want to write you off as an idiot.
Now, if you said "We're going to release a big film next week" and then deliberately DIDN'T (after putting a modified copy of it through your normal release mechanisms) and counted up the number of modified copies of the film floating around on the Internet and the number of downloaders of it before release - that's a statistic I can get behind.
But even then, chances are that most of those leaks are from your own internal processes and the people who pay you big bucks to license the content early (e.g. cinemas, etc.) anyway. So it's not really "filesharing" that's the problem so much as insecure release mechanisms and the total inability to stop someone copying the film somehow anyway.
Walk backwards for several miles from a crack in the rock. Some future explorer will follow that trail and think I disappeared.
Leave any colony in a state like the LV-426 colony, just for the laughs. A little-known, ugly-looking, smuggled Earth creature stuck in a specimen jar for bonus points.
Sketch out a Turing machine calculating flight trajectories in the dust on the ground, just for the hell of it.
Hunt down the Mars Rovers and turn them into Roomba's. Bonus points for making it look like Wall-E.
Write "Beware of the...." in the sand before I die.
In an air-tight environment, almost all of that water is excreted again at some point. Most as water vapour in your breath, some as urine, some as sweat, some in your faeces etc.
If you put a human in a hermetically-sealed box and gave them enough food and water for a week, that water would still be around in the box at the end. It's just a matter of collecting it.
Move forward to a non-hermetically sealed box and imperfect collection mechanisms and all you have to do it make up the difference. That's significantly less.
Your primary fuel will be hydrogen and oxygen. We actually think we can find most of that for a "return journey" by breaking down water found on the planet itself, it's so plentiful. Ignoring that, igniting said fuel (say, for warmth) produces pure water as the exhaust gas. Failing actually finding it on the planet, you can capture those gases from the air and make water by igniting hydrogen in oxygen. It's just a matter of time and electricity, both of which would (presumably) be plentiful on a mission to Mars.
Ignoring *that* - there is water ice on Mars. We know it. And in 20 years time, we'll know it even better. If there isn't, then taking along enough to make up the losses for several months/years at a time is a no-brainer. Hell, we got to the moon for several people without water shortages, any mission to Mars will scale up similarly.
Water really isn't a problem. Heat is your problem. Heating makes up a HUGE fraction of our energy usage even today, and Mars is colder (-143 to about 35 centigrade on the surface depending on latitude and time of day). So the hottest part of the hottest day on Mars is a warm summer's day, the coldest part of the coldest day is colder than the coldest recorded temperature ever on Earth.
So whatever way you look at it, the energy needed to keep you warm, and your surroundings warm, especially if you're going to build a colony to support life long-term, is through the roof compared to the difficulty of digging down or extracting water from the atmosphere with even the most inefficient tools.
I think that even some royalty probably said the same about traders who crossed the Atlantic, or tried to climb certain ranges of mountain to get to the next village, or ride the around around certain Cape around South Africa at some point.
You don't need to be stupid to want to go live on a planet of your own (effectively), especially if follow-up missions are likely. You *do* need to screen people for suicidal tendencies, because that can be a major factor - but there's nothing to say that a perfectly sane person wouldn't choose suicide in tough circumstances like they are likely to face anyway.
In fact, one of Man's greatest moments was called "stupid" at the time and ended up suicides. Or you wouldn't know *shit* about the South Pole now.
"I may be some time" doesn't ring a bell about one of our greatest explorers ever?
This isn't about live attacks on a system. This is about "offline" attacks and even things like hash collisions (where someone can make a certificate or a download that has the same hash as the "official" one but is fake or contains malware, etc.).
If you can take a login system and run millions of queries against it, it's a stupid system. But if you can steal a hashed file of password, or old hashed tokens from the network, then you can theoretically break them now in the time it takes to reboot the computer (if you could log into this other system remotely).
Things like the Sony break-in would reveal everyone's password, not just the other stolen details. And on a local network, you could sniff tokens sent for NTLM services etc. and start impersonating other users before it could even be detected. Of course you have to have a certain level of compromise / access already to get to that stage, but it doesn't make it any less dangerous to be able to forge hashes or find out their plain-text.
Please note, also, that things like these hashes have been used historically to verify software is genuine, as part of encryption algorithms, random number generators and all sorts of other things. At the time, they were reasonably unbreakable, but now they aren't. And that breaks lots of things if they are still relying on them.
Impact to security-conscious users: Zip.
Impact to security-unconscious users: Huge.
OnLive for local LAN, run from your own PC, you mean?
It would suffer the same problems as OnLive, plus others.
You would get more lag, especially with screen compression / decompression (which you would still need because otherwise people would moan that it's jerky on their 56Mbps wireless, etc.). Your CPU use on the machine playing the game would rise, cutting FPS (it would be similar to running FRAPS saving onto a remote network share, for instance). Your machine doing the receiving would need to be quite meaty to do the decompression, display etc. in real time (and thus, why not just upgrade it to play games direct). Your inputs and video responses would lag - not as much as on OnLive, but it would happen. Your local net traffic would be huge, which would add to your ping.
Remember, Steam is aimed at gamers and the kind of gamer that has a powerful gaming PC that they want to use to do the backend of playing on their TV-with-client-machine downstairs is not going to be happy with the sacrifices. And more casual players won't be interested in doing it at all, even if they *do* have the equipment just lying around.
Then, there would be patent costs too. What you're describing hits not only OnLive's patent portfolio but that of just about every network display company in the world (e.g. Citrix, NetOp, maybe even some VNC extensions etc.) and even things like network audio, codecs and all sorts of other problems tha t would need to be licensed or otherwise resolved globally, not just in the US.
Basically, it's a mess in technical and legal terms for something that few people would use and, like most "thin-clients", would actually die a death quite quickly as CPU/GPU/RAM increase along their natural rates as normal. Hell, it's hard to justify even a desktop thin-client on technical or cost terms, and they only really win on management / security.
People still *watch* the news? I can't even remember the last time I actually watched a news story on TV or online.
Personally, I can't think of anything worse than being drip-fed only the news others want to give me, only the news that's "exciting" on video, only the news that can occupy time on-air, only the news that needs a 500Mb download in order to get the gist when 1000 words and a couple of links give me infinitely more information, etc.
I'm not a news-snob, I don't really care what I read because I take it *all* with a pinch of salt and anything interesting I run off and check facts myself. But being force-fed video of someone else's news is probably the worst thing I can imagine in terms of actually absorbing the information within, without finding out what's actually going on, and just allowing yourself to be "brainwashed".
Ever seen the 80's UK comedy series "Drop the Dead Donkey"? Set in a news-room, there's a character called Damien who is the guy who runs out with a camera and comes back with something visual to run. Every time I hear someone *watches* the news, I think of him using the same teddy bear as "the shot" for everything from an air crash to a terrorist attack to a motorway accident to a flood. It can't be far off the truth of how much news is twisted to make it visually appealing.
News isn't a thing in and of itself. It's a trigger for you to run off and find information on something, well, new. Anyone who just "consumes" news nowadays was probably not bright enough to move on from 70's-style news programming.
But I agree, the intersection was vanishingly small, especially when combined with "willing to pay to read a news paper". I haven't paid for a newspaper in my entire life, but I read several of the free ones for entertainment. I get most of my actual news from sites specialising in my interest. If I waited for the things that I *do* find interesting to come on the news, I'd die before I saw anything. But if I ever want to watch a cow being rescued from a flood, I'm sure I'd only have to wait about a week or so.
Of course there are ways to do it.
Now go try it. Squinting to read tiny text on your hi-res screen on the other side of the room. Sure, you can increase the font sizes etc. Now you have to window-manage, too. And you find that a lot of apps haven't thought about what happens when you increase the font size and the top menu of their menu can take up 10% of the screen (or 20+% if it wraps because the font is large enough).
And, sure, a keyboard would work. Until you realise that the programmers forgot to put in a menu shortcut for that vital function or the error dialog that pops up needs a different shortcut key to close it (and just Enter does nothing, etc.). Sure, they can fix it but would they bother?
The point of "big-picture" mode is that someone sat down, with a big screen and just a controller, and made Steam and an awful lot of Steam games work with it. It's nothing miraculous, but it's not something you can just fake, emulate or expect every application to do. It's been that way since I was using VGA->Composite convertors on 800x600 resolution. Hell, a lot of the time you could move windows off the screen and not get them back and things like that.
Nowadays, you're so used to consoles etc. that you don't think that there's any difference between PC gaming and console gaming. Well, there is. A huge one, that has nothing to do with the games. Console gamers don't want to faff managing windows, playing with bad tab-orders in programs, etc. PC gamers don't care and will never notice.
Big picture mode is Steam targeted at big screens. What sort of hyperbole do you think you can spin on that when that's ALL they've ever claimed?
The fuss is because it's *necessary* and *useful* and because now having a TV with HDTV resolution and a handful of Bluetooth / USB controllers around the house is so much more prevalent than it's ever been before that it's viable to just run your Steam account on the TV.
I don't think it will be long before you see Steam on smart-TV's and their own console. But if they *hadn't* done big-picture, it would always have been a second-class app like any number of Windows apps that just don't care about anything non-PC-desktop.
Or history.
Or art.
Or mathematics (though that's do-able, it's extraordinarily hard without proper tuition).
Or medicine.
There's a LOT of problems with a drop-out culture for even a minority of students.
Go and ask most people what they wish they had done differently and probably "stay in school" / "work harder at school" / "gone to university", etc. will be high on their lists. Because they realise, and have life experience of the fact, that dropping out makes the choice between lucky/skilful entrepreneur, and waitressing. (There's nothing *wrong* with waitressing, per se, but how many people grow up fantasising about being a waitress?). Whereas a degree of some kind, and education in general, vastly widens the scope of the jobs you *can* get into.
A vanishingly small percentage of people are billionaires or being paid to churn out code that they love on their projects. There's nothing wrong with dreaming of being in that group. But the rest of the world, plus vast percentages of those people who then go on to fail, plus all those people who find they're just NOT good enough to become a self-styled guru on business / programming / whatever, will end up having to find something else to pay the bills, even if only until their "big break" arrives.
And for that, an education doesn't GUARANTEE anything, but *does* give you an advantage, if only of the scope of jobs within your intellectual range afterwards and the opinions of job creators on what those qualifications say about you.
I have a degree. It single-handedly, and through no forcing or "luck" got me my first job. I was building websites freelance. I got a website job for a school because of a friend that my brother knew who worked there. Working there on the website alone, I also was asked occasionally if I knew how to fix X (I generally did, because of a lifetime experience of IT). I was called into the head's (principal's) office the week after I fixed their entire network by flicking a switch and pressing Enter before their paid support line could even answer the phone. We talked. He wanted to give me a network job at the school (they had no on-site IT staff).
The primary factors they were concerned with were integrity (there were entrusting an entire school's data and operational systems to me), work ethic, ability to learn (they were complex systems and almost all their support experience was of "office"-type support that didn't understand schools do things differently) and, finally, experience. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that my degree counted towards all of them and proved many of them. Whereas just "knowing computers" would have hinted at only the last. He stated quite clearly that he wouldn't have employed me if I'd had bad grades - it would not only look bad on the school, employing staff less qualified than some of the kids, but it would affect the work I had to do. No amount of network knowledge or lucky guesses would have got me that job.
(And from there, I went on to work for many other schools on word-of-mouth alone and ended up in a nice cosy job for a private school that I've been in for years now - and in 12 years never had a day where I wasn't employed).
There is no "one plan" that will help everyone, and no doubt a couple of budding entrepreneurs who couldn't make it through college will do okay by the scheme. But claiming that people should drop out of college and go that way automatically is quite, quite daft (especially because most students will struggle at some point and might think it the "easy way out").
You can say it's the field I was sucked into working in, you can say it's the experience and hands-on skill I had, you can say it was just luck, you can say lots of things - but my degree got me my first ever job on it's word alone, and has kept me employed ever since, and often comes up (I'm technically more qualified than a lot of the school teaching staff, even those teaching IT for instance).
If you want to know if a degree, or any sort of
By your definition, everyone from Michelangelo up to and including, say, Matisse or Seurat, is merely a craftsman then.
So please stop referring to them as artists, exhibiting them in art galleries, and categorising their works as art.
Or are you suggesting that they are craftsmen AND artists simultaneously because they work is both technically brilliant and emotionally-responsive? Because in that case, almost ALL "MODERN" ARTISTS are, therefore, only emotionally-responsive and totally lack the technical-brilliance that makes them different from the classical "craftsmen". Thus they are both different from, and INFERIOR to, the classical artists. Which is exactly my point.
If you wish to draw lines in the sand, you can't then blur those lines to include the classical artists and the modern in the same word. Whichever way you look at it, they are two enormously different categories of artist, with hugely differing skills and calling them all "art" breaks any definition you care to fabricate.
If you want to distinguish between artists and craftsmen, then the "art world" needs to do so all the time, or recognise that they are NOT as skilled or as disciplined or as valuable as the classical creators. Still, a blob on a bit of paper, by whatever standard you want to apply, is still an inferior blob to the people who created fabulous murals and beautiful tapestries.
I have a maths and computing degree, and though I had a TI-85 that I loved, I couldn't really justify it on class use alone. Hell, I barely pulled that thing out in university at all, and it was mostly before that (A-levels in the UK) that we were told we "had" to have a graphing calculator.
For the number of times I used it academically, I probably could have drawn the graphs without any effort at all. For the number of times I wrote programs on it that any computer could run but which saved me work, that might have been worth the cost (i.e. it can actually be quicker to write a program to come to the answer than expect the calculator to show you the way by graphing a complex graph slowly).
Most of my use of it? Probably writing games in class. I had a pretty good Othello game with computer player that took me about a day to write, a decent minesweeper version, all written in BASIC (so slow, but the sort of thing you can knock up when you're bored).
In terms of computers in general, apart from the obvious things that need a computer anyway, the only other thing I ever used was Maple (like MathCAD, but a thousand times better at the time). Cost an absolute FORTUNE, so much that there's no way I could justify it even if it was amazing for double-checking your calculus, etc. when you get into higher functions. Gimme Maple on a tablet back at that time (never needed it since) and I would have broke your arm off for one.
But graphing / programmable calculators in general? It's like buying your kid a set of protactors or French curves for their first maths class. Sure, they might end up using them, but chances are they will never be *needed* and certainly not enough that it was worth buying them.
Every time I step in dogshit, it evokes a feeling or response. To some that would mean that dogshit is art. So her definition is equally as self-fulfilling as ours. :-)
My definition of how "arty" something is, to counteract all the shite that I see pushed as art, is thus:
"The amount of skill needed to reproduce the piece given the same time, materials and techniques."
So a square of splatty paint on a bit of canvas that the artist pondered over for a decade isn't very arty at all. 5-year-olds could copy it. Michaelangelo's David? That's a serious piece of art that's incredibly difficult to make. Sure, you could mould it or 3D print it or laser-scan it and then even CNC it, but it would take an artist (a proper one!) to make it using only the same methods / materials as it was originally produced with.
Similarly, splatting a bit of moondust or graphite sheets on a canvas and calling it art is stretching it because GIVEN those materials, the arrangement of them isn't anything fabulous. They *can* be highly-skilled art, but there the art is in the skill, not the materials, and the higher-skill, the harder to reproduce given those materials, no matter how rare they are.
This (to me) helpfully eradicates all of the shite that pretends to be art (especially the "interpretive" art where you're supposed to appreciate the message more than the delivery - pretty much everything since Picasso) while keeping all the classics, the masters and the geniuses firmly in their age-old deserved places.
By that definition, given a budget as large as the movie had, given the computer technology and everything else that was there, how hard would it be to generate something like that movie (or so similar as to be indistinguishable)? I don't think it would be as tricky as George Lucas would like to make out. Maybe *I* couldn't do it, but certainly any director of merit probably could pull it off quite easily.
The best artists I see today are putting work online for free, scrabbling for space on street corners, and selling things that must take them FOREVER to make for a few pounds on etsy or from their back yard or similar.
The best artist I've seen lately was some old guy I found living in a house in the Highlands (a turning in Erogie, near Inverness, Scotland, marked as "Art Gallery" on a scrap of paper by the side of the road, you can't miss it - there are about four houses in the town, and after you've driven 2 miles following those signs off-road through fields, over bridges, past farms, etc. and there's NOTHING else but those signs until you end up in front of his ramshackle house with a yappy little dog excited to see ANYONE, that's the guy!), who sells some beautiful "classic" paintings of things like stags and deer for a pittance out of his back bedroom.
Out of the thousands of "galleries" around that area, his was the only one that wasn't mass-produced, didn't have 10,000 prints of an actual nice painting (being the only thing really worth the money in most places, in my opinion), and had things that you actually had to whistle in disbelief when you saw the skill and time that had gone into it.
I can't believe people will spend an hour in some posh art gallery down the road, spending thousands while looking at the millionth print of a photograph someone took of the local scenery (it's really NOT that hard to take a photograph of nice scenery in that area, and then print it out) and the crudely Photoshopped to remove the huge electricity pylons that were in it, rather than go look at the old guy at work (hell, just his conversation is worth the price of the paintings).
It's not how many people copy it, it's not how long it took you to make, it's not what name it has on the bottom, it's not even how much it cost. It's how hard it would be to reproduce using the same material, techniques and time as the original creator did.
And by that definition, the "first" episode of the Star Wars trilogy (chronologically) is probably more arty than all the newer prequels put together. But where they come on the same scale as everything else is probably floating around the same rating as The Blair Witch Project.