Quality business decision making can't occur if there is no data. So how do 99.9% of companies make decisions if they don't have data?
They think. They draw on experience. They hypothesise scenarios and choose the best strategy. They go with their gut instinct honed after years of making millions in profit. The kind of people that make change and earn millions *DON'T* stick in safe industries where data is easily available on every possible aspect and then just pick the safest route. They take risks and gambles and sometimes they pay off (and then they make more millions) and sometimes they don't (and then you'd never have heard of them).
I don't think Gabe is anything special - he's a bit of a self-important loudmouth in my job, like Jon Romero and his kind. But if Gabe thinks something about the gaming industry, specifically the online purchasing parts of the PC gaming industry, you should really listen, whether you agree or not, whether you think his opinion is biased or not. Because he basically owns that industry at the moment.
Not really. Games For Windows Live is already really an appstore for PC games. It's universally berated as a heap of junk. Origin is an appstore for PC games. It's universally berated as a heap of junk.
Steam have the best appstore at the moment. Sure, MS focusing on them could really hurt them but *killing* them without costing more than it would take just to buy them out is probably not easy at all, even for MS. For a start, I have several thousand dollars invested in my Steam account and have been using it for nearly 9 years now. That's a HELL of a legacy to just abandon, just switch over to a Windows appstore for.
Most existing Steam users will still want to keep their paid-for Steam accounts on Windows 8. Thus Windows 8 appstore is hardly a threat to Steam, really. But Steam is certainly a threat to the Windows appstore, especially if every Steam user on Windows 8 ends up installing Steam anyway - and that could bring trouble.
Hence, I think, why this "get the community on your side" effort is likely to be quite successful for Valve/Steam. If nothing else, you then bring in the Linux crowd as an extra weapon to ensure your own survival. I think it's a pre-emptive levelling of the playing field to ensure they don't become an easy target for MS, personally.
Did you miss the bit where they are porting L4D2 over already?
And there are dozens of games on Steam that have a Linux port. Almost anything offered in a humble bundle, for a start, not to mention the DosBox games, Quake series, etc.
They just don't have a client on Linux so you can play them through Steam yet.
Though I'm all for Linux advocacy and the low-end, it's not been easy to run a basic PC on 512Mb RAM for anything like common usage for a while now. Firefox alone will kill it, and as soon as you're picking and choosing apps which you can run or not, it's not exactly "perfectly fine".
That said, your point is true. Windows 3.11 used to be just fine for office work on a 386 with 4Mb RAM. I could even whack resolutions up to something considered "HD" today. It could do all the same things that most business apps manage today. The thing is that MS (and a lot of the desktop environments, to an extent) lost sight of what the desktop could be. I don't want an intelligent desktop, any more than I want a smart TV.
You know what I want? Fast boot times. Instant window open times. Fast application response. Sensible application control (i.e. just last week I was STILL fighting with an Ubuntu distro that likes to pop up unrelated programs over the top of the program I'm typing a password into and I end up typing my sudo password into a word processor that stole keyboard focus without warning rather than the secure login I was supposed to be typing into - obviously *my* fault for LOOKING DOWN for a fraction of a second...). And nothing that I don't need to be there.
I don't expect HL2 to run like a daemon on a smartphone, but we're not far off. But I do expect my word processor to load quicker than it did in 1990. And I expect my windows to actually minimize/maximise/drag without lag and (if I want) in the most graphically boring way possible (dotted outline boxes, anyone?), so long as it's faster.
There's a real market, I think, for a "business" OS. Locked down to a set of programs that load quickly and do exactly what they need to in a boring interface that needs no resources. As it is, we have businesses trying to shoehorn an operating system designed for games and pretty effects into their networks and then having to deal with the consequences.
Seriously, if I can run Windows 3.11 at LUDICROUS speeds in an emulated environment on a modern PC and get more productivity out of it (if it were for the inconvenience of the software being just-that-old and incompatible), why can't I just have an OS like that? I saw the ship sinking when Active Desktop came along, and it's been slowly sinking ever since - as has relative productivity (i.e. the amount you COULD have got done on a certain specification of PC, compared to the amount you DID get done).
Hell, I've spent literally minutes just staring boot screens, logon screens, hourglasses and everything else just to load up a web browser this morning. It's so bad, I use suspend rather than shutdown by habit now. But still I can't approach the simplicity and productivity that I'd get if someone made LibreOffice work on Windows 3.11, even if I ran it through an emulated environment.
Because, so far, nobody's really come up with an answer for the first, and all possible answers for the second have such a HUMONGOUS impact on how everyone on the planet lives (more so than the perceived risk of being under 2m more water in a few hundred years) that maybe we shouldn't rush it before we know.
Seriously. What should we do? What is the plan? Stop using all oil, coal, gas? You just killed energy production (and thus almost all industry, almost all heating, vast swathes of the elderly, entire developing countries, etc.) overnight.
Or would you want us to fund "clean" energy sources? Because we are. And have been. And haven't got very far, and not for lack of funds - the technology just isn't there yet (actually, it is - it's called nuclear but there's VAST political opposition to it because idiots don't understand the term "relative risk").
What you're saying is that we have a problem. And we should do something about it. Something more drastic than anything that humans have ever done to each other on a global scale. And we're to do it, how? And when? And get unanimous international cooperation in doing it? And sod the impact on the little people who actually vote the people who have the say into power? Can you see how well anything like that goes down in an age where people still riot across a city like London and up and down the UK for weeks because a policeman shot an armed drug dealer?
The problem with people is that they have knee-jerk reactions. That's what scientists, true scientists, DON'T do. Assuming we're breaking something. Fine. Now see what is broken, how to fix it and what the impact is. Don't immediately knee-jerk into the most drastic actions ever performed on the planet because of it.
In fact, pretty much, in a modern political, social, economic, hell even educational environment, there is NOTHING we can do to fix the problem at the moment, only make other aspects worse. Fixing some form of hypothetical (and arguable) climate change isn't much good if it starts World War III, incites nationwide riots, destroys the economy or (most embarrassingly) just plain doesn't work after having done all those.
We sit. We wait. We watch. We come up with a solution should a problem be confirmed. If the solution is more drastic than the problem, we go around the circle again.
Just what, precisely, would you have the world do about this problem at the moment? How about signing up to international agreements to reduce carbon emissions? Oh. Done that. Except some countries didn't want to play ball as it was, even with a half-hearted measure.
When CFC's were proven to damage the atmosphere, and viable alternatives were found, the change was legislated and completed with decades and you now only find CFC's in VERY old fridges. It's not that we can't do something once we have a solution - it's that we have no solutions. And the way to find them is to find out EXACTLY what is wrong and what's likely to happen when we try to fix it.
It's like the difference between a keyboard-swapping IT monkey, and a senior datacenter engineer. Let's not just start ripping things up in the hope we'll stumble on a fix. Let's sit and think until we have an actual, measured problem and a viable solution that's less painful than the original consequences.
Increasing longevity would presumably increase the useful working life of a person too. That increases taxes. Every year you get out of a person before they retire is another nine months they can "live for free" once they do retire (think about it - you work for, say, 45 years and you're retired for, what? 20-30?). Assuming that longevity also brings increase in health and working ages (which historically it has done - people used to die before they reached 30, now 65 is the retirement age!)
As people get live longer, they also feel less need to breed immediately. This means fewer children, more widely spaced. This is why women are now putting off having children until into their thirties while a few generations ago that was impossible and they were more likely pregnant before 20. This, however, means that not only are there fewer children to support, but fewer working adults to support the generation about them later on (so it's 50-50).
But there are numerous unquantifiable side-benefits. Living longer as an individual means that things like scientific research can go on for longer. We don't lose talent just through old-age. We keep geniuses around who have 50+ years experience of quantum physics, who can teach the next generation. This also means better education, better research, but comes at the cost of longer-held positions, less job opportunities, and longer time spent in education.
So, basically, it's not an all-lose situation. Longevity has been increasing for centuries, if not millennia. It has advantages and disadvantages that, on the whole, balance out and even provide "profit".
The problem we have is not longevity, per se - it's failing to adequately save for that retirement when working, and stopping working too early because we've hit an arbitrary age. The UK health system is also set up to encourage people to not save for private healthcare, which can be a problem when it comes to an ageing population (but I wouldn't give it up for the world, despite all the problems with it!) - other systems fare better under this sort of strain.
Longer lives do not mean longer retirements, necessarily. If it works out, it means longer working life, shorter retirements, better pension coverage and MORE tax, not less.
If you left partly because that guy was someone you didn't want to work with, burning bridges in that case actually works FOR you. Because if you ever run into a place where he's in any position where he has a say over you job - you've AUTOMATICALLY and PURPOSELY stopped yourself submitting to the same problems all over again.
Of course, it matters how / when / what you do, but burning bridges isn't necessarily a death-knell. If I hate working with you, enough to complain about it when I left, the chances of ever wanting to work with you ever again are slim. And if you'll ever have a say over whether or not I get a job (and thus, whether or not I continue to have that job in the future), I probably WANT you to veto me, even if I never knew it happened.
Burning bridges just to let off steam is immature. But sometimes you burn a bridge because you KNOW you will never, ever want to go back over that river again and doing so stops you even if you lapse in your willpower.
Because not having your password appear on a single leaked list of a limited number of usernames hacked from Yahoo by an SQL injection from a public site from an unhashed database is obviously reason to just relax and know that everything is okay.
Who cares if you're on the list? If you're using Yahoo, change your password, change your account, change your online service provider to anything but Yahoo.
SQL injection on public sites with unhashed passwords stored in open databases. This is like saying "Hell, my house wasn't burgled this week - Phew! I can continue using the security company whose alarms don't work, their security personnel never arrive and they leave all my doors unlocked!"
1) To show they can 2) To make Yahoo look bad (and boy should they look ashamed at the moment!) 3) To highlight a security flaw that Yahoo may have been knowingly ignoring 4) Because they stumbled across it and realised they COULD dump all the passwords and then it snowballed.
Or a million and one other reasons. Hell, I've found sites where I could have done all sorts of damage via SQL. Not everyone is nice enough to inform them and if you inform them and are ignored ("nobody would ever try to do that on our live website, so we won't fix it"), would you rather someone else found out, or you forced that site to tighten up?
Just think - if they hadn't done it, 450,000 people would have their emails and passwords floating around on hacker forums eventually anyway and it wouldn't make the news at all.
I don't know, it seems to be quite limited. There's tons of gmail and other domain addresses in there. I think it could be either what you signed up to Yahoo Voice as, or what you signed up to Yahoo as and they only got some addresses before they got caught (or aren't posting all the adddreses they captured).
There's even a few old Geocities addresses in there, which were later changed to "username.geo@yahoo.XXX" addresses when Yahoo took over:
If nothing else, given their lax security and data protection (Completely unhashed passwords? Really?), I'd change any account password on a Yahoo account, and any password on an account you've used on Yahoo (e.g. if you've plugged your GMail or messenger or any address into your Yahoo acccount for whatever reason - e.g. POP3 collection of other accounts or whatever).
If this matters to you, talk to your employer. If they push it through without taking on board your concerns - that's precisely how much you are worth to them.
That doesn't mean quit if they don't give in (that's up to you), but either they will listen and adjust (and thus, problem solved), or they will ignore EVERYTHING you do (and thus, lots of energy not wasted trying to get them to change).
Do you really think a huge company will just arrive at such a scheme overnight? Do you really think they will take kindly to you knowing better than whatever CEO instituted or approved that scheme? Do you really think they care that some people are marked as underachieving when they are not. If they did, they wouldn't have such a scheme already.
Make your concerns known (if you dare), and then suck it up. Either play the game or get out. That's a business rule that applies to 100% of such schemes, no matter what the size of the organisation. And the fact that you are in that position means that your predecessors and co-workers sucked it up when it was first proposed or they joined the company.
This is more akin to predicting that, say, a particular town, on a particular planet, in a particular star system, looks like Paris - even though NOBODY human has ever been there before and we had no other information but some complicated (and mostly previously unobserved) science to help us.
And then going there and it turning out to be the case (or at least substantially correct if not a perfect Paris replica).
Yeah, really suspicious, what with the position being posted on Wikipedia as the Wow! signal (named by a SETI researcher themselves) and linked to from even the SETI homepage.
There's no "cover up", they couldn't do a damn thing that would reproduce the signal, nor could thousands of independent scientists who looked at the same places. If it was a cover up, you wouldn't have pictures of the printed output with "Wow!" written on it, the exact coordinates, or hear about it anywhere.
There's nothing special about the Arecibo telescope - it's old, decrepit, outclassed and there's thousands of the damn things out there. And people with those telescopes have looked into that signal and region many times since trying to reproduce it. And found NOTHING. At worst, it was a spy sat wandering across the sky that they're not allowed to say they can see up there or just completely random blip.
It's like thinking you heard a tiny click in the night. You don't rush up, run around the house, start knocking down walls looking for an intruder. You listen harder, and if you hear anything else THEN you act. And if you don't hear anything - back to sleep.
The Wow! signal was sent "back to sleep" decades ago. Seriously, 1977, one barely-increasing signal on one radio telescope and NOTHING since then, even looking into that EXACT position. Hell, the scientists in Italy thought they'd messed up the speed of light and it turned out to be a faulty connector on a fibre optic cable. These things happen, times one billion.
SETI shouldn't be scrapped because they "missed" anything. They should be scrapped because the chances of them finding ANYTHING (even in a highly populated universe full of ultra-intelligent beings) is so ludicrously close to zero, and there's BUGGER ALL we can do if they do find anything (and it's been suggested, by Hawking no less, that the best strategy for human survival is to keep our mouths shut and not respond!), that even penny spent would be better placed on just travelling to the Moon, let alone communicating with a possibly distant "civilisation" whose speed-of-light communications time is probably on the order of millions, if not billions of years.
I got a 5-year cert from GoDaddy for $50. It's really not that much if you've bothered to have an SSL port exposed to the world. It scores "A" on that site and doesn't produce any kind of cert warning in any browser that I know of (and Opera is particularly fussy about SSL certs).
Beyond that, a number of SSL suppliers give out free certs now for the lower end (not saying you'd score "A" but they probably wouldn't error out in most browsers and would give you a basic "padlock").
Just watch out. There are some companies (like my server host) trying to charge me £89 a year for something that I can get for $50 for 5 years. Just shop around, there's lots of cheap certs to be had and because it's a standard and they are signed by pretty much the same entities in the end, if it passes the browser tests, it's the same no matter what you paid for it.
Oh, and steer clear of EV certs. What a scam. You won't find a cheap one of those at all.
The problem I have is that I'm running an up-to-date Ubuntu LTS edition that apparently is vulnerable, so there's little I can do about BEAST short of recompiling everything myself from what I see.
But, to be honest, the SSL isn't protecting anything vital and is only really used by myself so BEAST is pretty much a non-issue.
My SSL cert cost me $50 for 5 years, so I'm not really worried but it does put it in perspective when it comes to how easy getting an "A" can be, even when you are vulnerable to a known attack. Kinda makes their rating pretty worthless, actually.
The only person I know who actually owns a copy of AutoCAD is an interior designer.
Good luck lifting all those living-room designs. I think the inbox associated with the worm overflowed for a reason - nobody ever bothered to check it after the first several million examples, samples, minor designs and things totally uninteresting to anyone but the person who made the files (e.g. a house plan of some unknown suburban semi so they could see where the sofa could fit).
"I didn't break into your house to get photos of your wife, you used a lock that wasn't compliant to British Standard BS3621 as required by most insurer's and I overpowered the only person in the house who was your granny. I just exploited your vulnerabilities."
Sorry, can't do me for breaking-and-entering, criminal damage, theft, assault, copyright infringement, privacy invasion,....
I don't think they WANT people with home connections. They're more interested in people who run their own servers in a remote datacenter or even VPS servers. They need always-on, not "on whenever the user isn't on holiday".
And on that basis, I don't know of a VPS provider that *doesn't* just provide 100's or even 1000's of GB's of traffic to each user.
My current host has a limit of 1TB of data per month, for example, and costs less than £20 a month. And that's not even a particularly cheap example.
I think pornography is the last of your worries online.
Tumblr is filled with self-harm sites, for example. A couple of nipples or a picture of a naked woman doing just about anything is nothing compared to the sort of things that used to roam around on sites like rotten.com and the ilk.
I know, I work in schools and spend my life trying to stop them getting on that junk (actually, I don't - I spend my life making sure that it's hard to get on that kind of junk and if they do we know about it and punish them for it, because actually STOPPING them is virtually impossible without switching off all the computers).
For my child, my online concerns would be much more focused on things other than pornography (though there is still a boundary with some things in that category - simple intercourse or sexual acts are just the START of your problems there). I wouldn't want them looking up self-harm sites, because that's something that could easily propagate in private with all the good parenting in the world if the kid gets stressed or worried and reads that "cutting makes you feel better". Similarly for anorexia, bulimia, etc. which aren't naturally-occurring conditions but socially-provoked.
I'd be worried about encouragement towards drugs, inappropriate communication online (e.g. someone trying to talk them into stealing from me, sending others pictures of themselves, etc.), and things like just talking to little arseholes of their own age online who I wouldn't let them hang around in real life. If I wouldn't let them hang out with a kid in a playground, why would I give them the opportunity to talk to similar kids online?
The biggest problem, even being as open a parent as you can be, is not what they see necessarily, but what they read and are told by others. I assure you, their online "peers" have more influence over their desires and experimentation than their parents. People, even other children, can be *incredibly* convincing and manipulative online. We're not talking paedophiles talking your kid into meeting them - that's at the extreme end - but even something as simple as someone telling them that if they sniff a magic marker it gets them high or whatever.
The feedback loop of having a "peer" online tell them to do something that they ultimately enjoy, so they seek out more "peers" and more things to do is one of the biggest problems. And only stand-over-everything-they-do parenting can really combat that.
By comparison, them seeing a sexual act that most people perform twice a week on average is nothing. Hell, even those "once-a-year" sexual acts that the wife allows aren't even worth bothering to worry about for your own child. But there are categories of porn beyond that that even I can find distasteful, and that's still MINOR compared to my child being in a game that has a chat facility with "Stevie (15), YourHomeTown" and what they could end up discussing.
Standard porn won't hurt your child. Hell, they will be in their own "porn" at some point in their adult lives anyway, even if that doesn't stretch to filming it. But there's a lot worse out there than what pops up on Google Image Search. Just one depressed teenager on the other side of the world can cause more damage to your kid than the entirety of Playboy's back catalogue.
Apart from the obvious "don't let software parent your kids", with all the associated problems that brings, why not just do something simple?
Install VNC on the machine (use the modes where the icon is not visible and you may not quit the client). Tell them you can see their screen from anywhere, even on your phone. Demonstrate it by putting their computer screen onto the living room TV. Tell them you're watching everything they do and if they break your established rules (no chatrooms, no contact with strangers, NO GOOGLE for a start - it is NOT kid-safe, even with SafeSearch, etc.) you'll punish them.
Hell, tell them you are recording it onto your computer so you can play it back later and anything they do on the machine can be used in evidence against them.
It doesn't mean you actually HAVE to do all that (but it might not be a bad idea to just flick over or review history occasionally at least), just put the fear of it into them so that the only infractions are going to be accidental and unavoidable anyway.
I work IT in schools, there is no perfect filter, and certainly not a free one, and they will see worse things on your authorised sites than they will anywhere else, and they shouldn't be going on Google at all (we force safe-search in this school, and have OpenDNS filtering, and have internal filters too, and still we get 6-year-olds hitting on perfectly innocent searches that return undesirable results).
Don't rely on software to do your job. Either accept that it won't (and thus is pretty useless, and you might as well just let them loose and rely on their common sense and ingrained discipline - you DO instil discipline in your children, yes?), or do the job yourself.
Install a second monitor in the living room, next to the TV, and have it mirroring their display (wherever they happened to be - VNC or a HDMI over standard network cable is hardly difficult) all the time, and enforce logon restrictions so they CAN'T use it when you're not around or in the middle of the night.
But, to be honest, what I'd really do is just tell them the PC can only be used while I'm there, and in sight of me. And only after a big, long "family meeting"-type talk to draw their attention to the problems I would have with them breaching my laid-down rules on what they can do on it. I probably *don't* need to look at the screen at all. But I would, just to show them I do check up.
Because combining LGPL code and proprietary code is a dubious legal area, nothing to do with idealism, and would have required that code to ship in a DLL or shared object that was separate from Wine and only loaded by it. That would mean creating an API that ANY "mouse function" DLL could be replaced by it (kinda a condition of the LGPL, in fact), which means you've got to create, manage and maintain that API pretty much forever (wouldn't you be pissed if the next version of Wine broke that interface after you paid for that module?). And the very act of creating that API fixes the problem forever, for everyone, with just a few more lines of code (and still doesn't circumvent things like patent laws in some countries because ANYTHING that plugs into that module might be considered within the scope of the patent and, thus, the code itself to support that might be subject to patent infringement!)
It's not that there's some secret coven determined to make things free. It's that if you want to manage a free-alternative to Windows API calls as a project, you keep it free. You don't then go and sell parts of it off because then you could have just created a "Windows-clone" product yourslef and started closed-source from the beginning.
Cedega's existence proves that ANYONE could have done this. They did. They went out of business because they couldn't make profit doing it. TransGaming do similar things. They didn't do badly, but they still aren't any more popular than Wine is. I know, I'm a Crossover subscriber of old. I can't remember the last time I loaded it up in preference to Wine. They had to GIVE the software away for a day in the end.
I don't know what this "mouse issue" is that you're so adamant about, nor why it ABSOLUTELY REQUIRES a closed-source module. The only reason to do that is presumably patents. Paying patent licenses for functionality is not what open-source is about - the point is to avoid black-boxes and unknown code doing magical things, free or not.
And by the same token we could have just "bought" a DIB engine, and a window themer, and a Securom layer, and every single bit of Wine. And we'd have ended up with Windows, basically.
Even Windows isn't immune to this - did you own valid MPEG2 codecs for Windows XP? Only if you bought something else from a company other than Microsoft because, by default, XP couldn't play DVD's because of software licensing for codecs! Windows 8 is supposed to have the same restriction, according to a The Register article I read a few months back.
It's not a question of "You can't do it". It's a question of "Why should we support that? How much does it cost to support that API? What if we need to change something in a year's time? What are the licensing and other legal - e.g. patent - implications? Who's going to manage that closed source software for us? How do we verify that module is legal for our users to use? Can anyone even sell that software in some jurisdictions at all?..."
There are a billion and one problems. And if you want to run Windows programs and use that particular functionality, you still have options outside of Wine trunk (hell, use Windows!). So use them. But Wine trunk is there to be a pure source of only code that is licensed consistently and can be distributed anywhere. It's there to make an alternative to Windows that DOES NOT NEED black boxes and mysterious payments to third-parties for normal functionality.
It's like complaining that the people writing LibreOffice don't just use closed-source Office plugin filters. You've missed the point. Office software are ten-a-penny. Nobody buys them because if you're using those sorts of plugins, you might as well just have bought Microsoft Office. The point is that, this particular software project, we know what every line of code it executes is and can fix problems in all those parts whenever we want without having to worry about 20+ year old compatibility layers and licensing issues.
Slashdot doesn't say anywhere that it's US-centric. In fact most of the articles for the past few months have been about the Raspberry Pi, PirateBay and UK legislation.
I have always assumed it is US, but there's no reason to pretend this is the ONLY launch date in the world, especially not when it's one of the LAST countries to get it.
And when UK-centric sites announce launch dates, even for UK products, they always clarify it if there are other launch dates out there. It's common courtesy. The "Inter" in "Internet" stands for something, you know. I'd be shocked if more than 70% of the visitors were permanently residing in the US.
There's no reason to continue to be an arse, just because the rest of the world thinks you already believe US = World.
Slashdot Mirror
Quality business decision making can't occur if there is no data. So how do 99.9% of companies make decisions if they don't have data?
They think. They draw on experience. They hypothesise scenarios and choose the best strategy. They go with their gut instinct honed after years of making millions in profit. The kind of people that make change and earn millions *DON'T* stick in safe industries where data is easily available on every possible aspect and then just pick the safest route. They take risks and gambles and sometimes they pay off (and then they make more millions) and sometimes they don't (and then you'd never have heard of them).
I don't think Gabe is anything special - he's a bit of a self-important loudmouth in my job, like Jon Romero and his kind. But if Gabe thinks something about the gaming industry, specifically the online purchasing parts of the PC gaming industry, you should really listen, whether you agree or not, whether you think his opinion is biased or not. Because he basically owns that industry at the moment.
Pity you didn't think.
Not really. Games For Windows Live is already really an appstore for PC games. It's universally berated as a heap of junk. Origin is an appstore for PC games. It's universally berated as a heap of junk.
Steam have the best appstore at the moment. Sure, MS focusing on them could really hurt them but *killing* them without costing more than it would take just to buy them out is probably not easy at all, even for MS. For a start, I have several thousand dollars invested in my Steam account and have been using it for nearly 9 years now. That's a HELL of a legacy to just abandon, just switch over to a Windows appstore for.
Most existing Steam users will still want to keep their paid-for Steam accounts on Windows 8. Thus Windows 8 appstore is hardly a threat to Steam, really. But Steam is certainly a threat to the Windows appstore, especially if every Steam user on Windows 8 ends up installing Steam anyway - and that could bring trouble.
Hence, I think, why this "get the community on your side" effort is likely to be quite successful for Valve/Steam. If nothing else, you then bring in the Linux crowd as an extra weapon to ensure your own survival. I think it's a pre-emptive levelling of the playing field to ensure they don't become an easy target for MS, personally.
Did you miss the bit where they are porting L4D2 over already?
And there are dozens of games on Steam that have a Linux port. Almost anything offered in a humble bundle, for a start, not to mention the DosBox games, Quake series, etc.
They just don't have a client on Linux so you can play them through Steam yet.
Though I'm all for Linux advocacy and the low-end, it's not been easy to run a basic PC on 512Mb RAM for anything like common usage for a while now. Firefox alone will kill it, and as soon as you're picking and choosing apps which you can run or not, it's not exactly "perfectly fine".
That said, your point is true. Windows 3.11 used to be just fine for office work on a 386 with 4Mb RAM. I could even whack resolutions up to something considered "HD" today. It could do all the same things that most business apps manage today. The thing is that MS (and a lot of the desktop environments, to an extent) lost sight of what the desktop could be. I don't want an intelligent desktop, any more than I want a smart TV.
You know what I want? Fast boot times. Instant window open times. Fast application response. Sensible application control (i.e. just last week I was STILL fighting with an Ubuntu distro that likes to pop up unrelated programs over the top of the program I'm typing a password into and I end up typing my sudo password into a word processor that stole keyboard focus without warning rather than the secure login I was supposed to be typing into - obviously *my* fault for LOOKING DOWN for a fraction of a second...). And nothing that I don't need to be there.
I don't expect HL2 to run like a daemon on a smartphone, but we're not far off. But I do expect my word processor to load quicker than it did in 1990. And I expect my windows to actually minimize/maximise/drag without lag and (if I want) in the most graphically boring way possible (dotted outline boxes, anyone?), so long as it's faster.
There's a real market, I think, for a "business" OS. Locked down to a set of programs that load quickly and do exactly what they need to in a boring interface that needs no resources. As it is, we have businesses trying to shoehorn an operating system designed for games and pretty effects into their networks and then having to deal with the consequences.
Seriously, if I can run Windows 3.11 at LUDICROUS speeds in an emulated environment on a modern PC and get more productivity out of it (if it were for the inconvenience of the software being just-that-old and incompatible), why can't I just have an OS like that? I saw the ship sinking when Active Desktop came along, and it's been slowly sinking ever since - as has relative productivity (i.e. the amount you COULD have got done on a certain specification of PC, compared to the amount you DID get done).
Hell, I've spent literally minutes just staring boot screens, logon screens, hourglasses and everything else just to load up a web browser this morning. It's so bad, I use suspend rather than shutdown by habit now. But still I can't approach the simplicity and productivity that I'd get if someone made LibreOffice work on Windows 3.11, even if I ran it through an emulated environment.
What would you like us to do about it?
What would the impact of those measures be?
Because, so far, nobody's really come up with an answer for the first, and all possible answers for the second have such a HUMONGOUS impact on how everyone on the planet lives (more so than the perceived risk of being under 2m more water in a few hundred years) that maybe we shouldn't rush it before we know.
Seriously. What should we do? What is the plan? Stop using all oil, coal, gas? You just killed energy production (and thus almost all industry, almost all heating, vast swathes of the elderly, entire developing countries, etc.) overnight.
Or would you want us to fund "clean" energy sources? Because we are. And have been. And haven't got very far, and not for lack of funds - the technology just isn't there yet (actually, it is - it's called nuclear but there's VAST political opposition to it because idiots don't understand the term "relative risk").
What you're saying is that we have a problem. And we should do something about it. Something more drastic than anything that humans have ever done to each other on a global scale. And we're to do it, how? And when? And get unanimous international cooperation in doing it? And sod the impact on the little people who actually vote the people who have the say into power? Can you see how well anything like that goes down in an age where people still riot across a city like London and up and down the UK for weeks because a policeman shot an armed drug dealer?
The problem with people is that they have knee-jerk reactions. That's what scientists, true scientists, DON'T do. Assuming we're breaking something. Fine. Now see what is broken, how to fix it and what the impact is. Don't immediately knee-jerk into the most drastic actions ever performed on the planet because of it.
In fact, pretty much, in a modern political, social, economic, hell even educational environment, there is NOTHING we can do to fix the problem at the moment, only make other aspects worse. Fixing some form of hypothetical (and arguable) climate change isn't much good if it starts World War III, incites nationwide riots, destroys the economy or (most embarrassingly) just plain doesn't work after having done all those.
We sit. We wait. We watch. We come up with a solution should a problem be confirmed. If the solution is more drastic than the problem, we go around the circle again.
Just what, precisely, would you have the world do about this problem at the moment? How about signing up to international agreements to reduce carbon emissions? Oh. Done that. Except some countries didn't want to play ball as it was, even with a half-hearted measure.
When CFC's were proven to damage the atmosphere, and viable alternatives were found, the change was legislated and completed with decades and you now only find CFC's in VERY old fridges. It's not that we can't do something once we have a solution - it's that we have no solutions. And the way to find them is to find out EXACTLY what is wrong and what's likely to happen when we try to fix it.
It's like the difference between a keyboard-swapping IT monkey, and a senior datacenter engineer. Let's not just start ripping things up in the hope we'll stumble on a fix. Let's sit and think until we have an actual, measured problem and a viable solution that's less painful than the original consequences.
Increasing longevity would presumably increase the useful working life of a person too. That increases taxes. Every year you get out of a person before they retire is another nine months they can "live for free" once they do retire (think about it - you work for, say, 45 years and you're retired for, what? 20-30?). Assuming that longevity also brings increase in health and working ages (which historically it has done - people used to die before they reached 30, now 65 is the retirement age!)
As people get live longer, they also feel less need to breed immediately. This means fewer children, more widely spaced. This is why women are now putting off having children until into their thirties while a few generations ago that was impossible and they were more likely pregnant before 20. This, however, means that not only are there fewer children to support, but fewer working adults to support the generation about them later on (so it's 50-50).
But there are numerous unquantifiable side-benefits. Living longer as an individual means that things like scientific research can go on for longer. We don't lose talent just through old-age. We keep geniuses around who have 50+ years experience of quantum physics, who can teach the next generation. This also means better education, better research, but comes at the cost of longer-held positions, less job opportunities, and longer time spent in education.
So, basically, it's not an all-lose situation. Longevity has been increasing for centuries, if not millennia. It has advantages and disadvantages that, on the whole, balance out and even provide "profit".
The problem we have is not longevity, per se - it's failing to adequately save for that retirement when working, and stopping working too early because we've hit an arbitrary age. The UK health system is also set up to encourage people to not save for private healthcare, which can be a problem when it comes to an ageing population (but I wouldn't give it up for the world, despite all the problems with it!) - other systems fare better under this sort of strain.
Longer lives do not mean longer retirements, necessarily. If it works out, it means longer working life, shorter retirements, better pension coverage and MORE tax, not less.
Put it this way:
If you left partly because that guy was someone you didn't want to work with, burning bridges in that case actually works FOR you. Because if you ever run into a place where he's in any position where he has a say over you job - you've AUTOMATICALLY and PURPOSELY stopped yourself submitting to the same problems all over again.
Of course, it matters how / when / what you do, but burning bridges isn't necessarily a death-knell. If I hate working with you, enough to complain about it when I left, the chances of ever wanting to work with you ever again are slim. And if you'll ever have a say over whether or not I get a job (and thus, whether or not I continue to have that job in the future), I probably WANT you to veto me, even if I never knew it happened.
Burning bridges just to let off steam is immature. But sometimes you burn a bridge because you KNOW you will never, ever want to go back over that river again and doing so stops you even if you lapse in your willpower.
Please: Stop using hyphens.
Because not having your password appear on a single leaked list of a limited number of usernames hacked from Yahoo by an SQL injection from a public site from an unhashed database is obviously reason to just relax and know that everything is okay.
Who cares if you're on the list? If you're using Yahoo, change your password, change your account, change your online service provider to anything but Yahoo.
SQL injection on public sites with unhashed passwords stored in open databases. This is like saying "Hell, my house wasn't burgled this week - Phew! I can continue using the security company whose alarms don't work, their security personnel never arrive and they leave all my doors unlocked!"
1) To show they can
2) To make Yahoo look bad (and boy should they look ashamed at the moment!)
3) To highlight a security flaw that Yahoo may have been knowingly ignoring
4) Because they stumbled across it and realised they COULD dump all the passwords and then it snowballed.
Or a million and one other reasons. Hell, I've found sites where I could have done all sorts of damage via SQL. Not everyone is nice enough to inform them and if you inform them and are ignored ("nobody would ever try to do that on our live website, so we won't fix it"), would you rather someone else found out, or you forced that site to tighten up?
Just think - if they hadn't done it, 450,000 people would have their emails and passwords floating around on hacker forums eventually anyway and it wouldn't make the news at all.
I don't know, it seems to be quite limited. There's tons of gmail and other domain addresses in there. I think it could be either what you signed up to Yahoo Voice as, or what you signed up to Yahoo as and they only got some addresses before they got caught (or aren't posting all the adddreses they captured).
There's even a few old Geocities addresses in there, which were later changed to "username.geo@yahoo.XXX" addresses when Yahoo took over:
http://dazzlepod.com/yahoo/?email=.geo%40yahoo
If nothing else, given their lax security and data protection (Completely unhashed passwords? Really?), I'd change any account password on a Yahoo account, and any password on an account you've used on Yahoo (e.g. if you've plugged your GMail or messenger or any address into your Yahoo acccount for whatever reason - e.g. POP3 collection of other accounts or whatever).
When you have billions (in value or cash), it's easy to be philanthropic.
I'm infinitely more impressed by the guy who was earning 20k and had pledged to give a million away within ten years. And was doing it.
That's my basic response.
If this matters to you, talk to your employer. If they push it through without taking on board your concerns - that's precisely how much you are worth to them.
That doesn't mean quit if they don't give in (that's up to you), but either they will listen and adjust (and thus, problem solved), or they will ignore EVERYTHING you do (and thus, lots of energy not wasted trying to get them to change).
Do you really think a huge company will just arrive at such a scheme overnight? Do you really think they will take kindly to you knowing better than whatever CEO instituted or approved that scheme? Do you really think they care that some people are marked as underachieving when they are not. If they did, they wouldn't have such a scheme already.
Make your concerns known (if you dare), and then suck it up. Either play the game or get out. That's a business rule that applies to 100% of such schemes, no matter what the size of the organisation. And the fact that you are in that position means that your predecessors and co-workers sucked it up when it was first proposed or they joined the company.
This is more akin to predicting that, say, a particular town, on a particular planet, in a particular star system, looks like Paris - even though NOBODY human has ever been there before and we had no other information but some complicated (and mostly previously unobserved) science to help us.
And then going there and it turning out to be the case (or at least substantially correct if not a perfect Paris replica).
Yeah, really suspicious, what with the position being posted on Wikipedia as the Wow! signal (named by a SETI researcher themselves) and linked to from even the SETI homepage.
There's no "cover up", they couldn't do a damn thing that would reproduce the signal, nor could thousands of independent scientists who looked at the same places. If it was a cover up, you wouldn't have pictures of the printed output with "Wow!" written on it, the exact coordinates, or hear about it anywhere.
There's nothing special about the Arecibo telescope - it's old, decrepit, outclassed and there's thousands of the damn things out there. And people with those telescopes have looked into that signal and region many times since trying to reproduce it. And found NOTHING. At worst, it was a spy sat wandering across the sky that they're not allowed to say they can see up there or just completely random blip.
It's like thinking you heard a tiny click in the night. You don't rush up, run around the house, start knocking down walls looking for an intruder. You listen harder, and if you hear anything else THEN you act. And if you don't hear anything - back to sleep.
The Wow! signal was sent "back to sleep" decades ago. Seriously, 1977, one barely-increasing signal on one radio telescope and NOTHING since then, even looking into that EXACT position. Hell, the scientists in Italy thought they'd messed up the speed of light and it turned out to be a faulty connector on a fibre optic cable. These things happen, times one billion.
SETI shouldn't be scrapped because they "missed" anything. They should be scrapped because the chances of them finding ANYTHING (even in a highly populated universe full of ultra-intelligent beings) is so ludicrously close to zero, and there's BUGGER ALL we can do if they do find anything (and it's been suggested, by Hawking no less, that the best strategy for human survival is to keep our mouths shut and not respond!), that even penny spent would be better placed on just travelling to the Moon, let alone communicating with a possibly distant "civilisation" whose speed-of-light communications time is probably on the order of millions, if not billions of years.
I got a 5-year cert from GoDaddy for $50. It's really not that much if you've bothered to have an SSL port exposed to the world. It scores "A" on that site and doesn't produce any kind of cert warning in any browser that I know of (and Opera is particularly fussy about SSL certs).
Beyond that, a number of SSL suppliers give out free certs now for the lower end (not saying you'd score "A" but they probably wouldn't error out in most browsers and would give you a basic "padlock").
Just watch out. There are some companies (like my server host) trying to charge me £89 a year for something that I can get for $50 for 5 years. Just shop around, there's lots of cheap certs to be had and because it's a standard and they are signed by pretty much the same entities in the end, if it passes the browser tests, it's the same no matter what you paid for it.
Oh, and steer clear of EV certs. What a scam. You won't find a cheap one of those at all.
My sites score an A, but are vulnerable to BEAST.
The problem I have is that I'm running an up-to-date Ubuntu LTS edition that apparently is vulnerable, so there's little I can do about BEAST short of recompiling everything myself from what I see.
But, to be honest, the SSL isn't protecting anything vital and is only really used by myself so BEAST is pretty much a non-issue.
My SSL cert cost me $50 for 5 years, so I'm not really worried but it does put it in perspective when it comes to how easy getting an "A" can be, even when you are vulnerable to a known attack. Kinda makes their rating pretty worthless, actually.
The only person I know who actually owns a copy of AutoCAD is an interior designer.
Good luck lifting all those living-room designs. I think the inbox associated with the worm overflowed for a reason - nobody ever bothered to check it after the first several million examples, samples, minor designs and things totally uninteresting to anyone but the person who made the files (e.g. a house plan of some unknown suburban semi so they could see where the sofa could fit).
Don't be a prat.
"I didn't break into your house to get photos of your wife, you used a lock that wasn't compliant to British Standard BS3621 as required by most insurer's and I overpowered the only person in the house who was your granny. I just exploited your vulnerabilities."
Sorry, can't do me for breaking-and-entering, criminal damage, theft, assault, copyright infringement, privacy invasion, ....
I don't think they WANT people with home connections. They're more interested in people who run their own servers in a remote datacenter or even VPS servers. They need always-on, not "on whenever the user isn't on holiday".
And on that basis, I don't know of a VPS provider that *doesn't* just provide 100's or even 1000's of GB's of traffic to each user.
My current host has a limit of 1TB of data per month, for example, and costs less than £20 a month. And that's not even a particularly cheap example.
I think pornography is the last of your worries online.
Tumblr is filled with self-harm sites, for example. A couple of nipples or a picture of a naked woman doing just about anything is nothing compared to the sort of things that used to roam around on sites like rotten.com and the ilk.
I know, I work in schools and spend my life trying to stop them getting on that junk (actually, I don't - I spend my life making sure that it's hard to get on that kind of junk and if they do we know about it and punish them for it, because actually STOPPING them is virtually impossible without switching off all the computers).
For my child, my online concerns would be much more focused on things other than pornography (though there is still a boundary with some things in that category - simple intercourse or sexual acts are just the START of your problems there). I wouldn't want them looking up self-harm sites, because that's something that could easily propagate in private with all the good parenting in the world if the kid gets stressed or worried and reads that "cutting makes you feel better". Similarly for anorexia, bulimia, etc. which aren't naturally-occurring conditions but socially-provoked.
I'd be worried about encouragement towards drugs, inappropriate communication online (e.g. someone trying to talk them into stealing from me, sending others pictures of themselves, etc.), and things like just talking to little arseholes of their own age online who I wouldn't let them hang around in real life. If I wouldn't let them hang out with a kid in a playground, why would I give them the opportunity to talk to similar kids online?
The biggest problem, even being as open a parent as you can be, is not what they see necessarily, but what they read and are told by others. I assure you, their online "peers" have more influence over their desires and experimentation than their parents. People, even other children, can be *incredibly* convincing and manipulative online. We're not talking paedophiles talking your kid into meeting them - that's at the extreme end - but even something as simple as someone telling them that if they sniff a magic marker it gets them high or whatever.
The feedback loop of having a "peer" online tell them to do something that they ultimately enjoy, so they seek out more "peers" and more things to do is one of the biggest problems. And only stand-over-everything-they-do parenting can really combat that.
By comparison, them seeing a sexual act that most people perform twice a week on average is nothing. Hell, even those "once-a-year" sexual acts that the wife allows aren't even worth bothering to worry about for your own child. But there are categories of porn beyond that that even I can find distasteful, and that's still MINOR compared to my child being in a game that has a chat facility with "Stevie (15), YourHomeTown" and what they could end up discussing.
Standard porn won't hurt your child. Hell, they will be in their own "porn" at some point in their adult lives anyway, even if that doesn't stretch to filming it. But there's a lot worse out there than what pops up on Google Image Search. Just one depressed teenager on the other side of the world can cause more damage to your kid than the entirety of Playboy's back catalogue.
Apart from the obvious "don't let software parent your kids", with all the associated problems that brings, why not just do something simple?
Install VNC on the machine (use the modes where the icon is not visible and you may not quit the client). Tell them you can see their screen from anywhere, even on your phone. Demonstrate it by putting their computer screen onto the living room TV. Tell them you're watching everything they do and if they break your established rules (no chatrooms, no contact with strangers, NO GOOGLE for a start - it is NOT kid-safe, even with SafeSearch, etc.) you'll punish them.
Hell, tell them you are recording it onto your computer so you can play it back later and anything they do on the machine can be used in evidence against them.
It doesn't mean you actually HAVE to do all that (but it might not be a bad idea to just flick over or review history occasionally at least), just put the fear of it into them so that the only infractions are going to be accidental and unavoidable anyway.
I work IT in schools, there is no perfect filter, and certainly not a free one, and they will see worse things on your authorised sites than they will anywhere else, and they shouldn't be going on Google at all (we force safe-search in this school, and have OpenDNS filtering, and have internal filters too, and still we get 6-year-olds hitting on perfectly innocent searches that return undesirable results).
Don't rely on software to do your job. Either accept that it won't (and thus is pretty useless, and you might as well just let them loose and rely on their common sense and ingrained discipline - you DO instil discipline in your children, yes?), or do the job yourself.
Install a second monitor in the living room, next to the TV, and have it mirroring their display (wherever they happened to be - VNC or a HDMI over standard network cable is hardly difficult) all the time, and enforce logon restrictions so they CAN'T use it when you're not around or in the middle of the night.
But, to be honest, what I'd really do is just tell them the PC can only be used while I'm there, and in sight of me. And only after a big, long "family meeting"-type talk to draw their attention to the problems I would have with them breaching my laid-down rules on what they can do on it. I probably *don't* need to look at the screen at all. But I would, just to show them I do check up.
People said similar things about SCO at one point.
Because combining LGPL code and proprietary code is a dubious legal area, nothing to do with idealism, and would have required that code to ship in a DLL or shared object that was separate from Wine and only loaded by it. That would mean creating an API that ANY "mouse function" DLL could be replaced by it (kinda a condition of the LGPL, in fact), which means you've got to create, manage and maintain that API pretty much forever (wouldn't you be pissed if the next version of Wine broke that interface after you paid for that module?). And the very act of creating that API fixes the problem forever, for everyone, with just a few more lines of code (and still doesn't circumvent things like patent laws in some countries because ANYTHING that plugs into that module might be considered within the scope of the patent and, thus, the code itself to support that might be subject to patent infringement!)
It's not that there's some secret coven determined to make things free. It's that if you want to manage a free-alternative to Windows API calls as a project, you keep it free. You don't then go and sell parts of it off because then you could have just created a "Windows-clone" product yourslef and started closed-source from the beginning.
Cedega's existence proves that ANYONE could have done this. They did. They went out of business because they couldn't make profit doing it. TransGaming do similar things. They didn't do badly, but they still aren't any more popular than Wine is. I know, I'm a Crossover subscriber of old. I can't remember the last time I loaded it up in preference to Wine. They had to GIVE the software away for a day in the end.
I don't know what this "mouse issue" is that you're so adamant about, nor why it ABSOLUTELY REQUIRES a closed-source module. The only reason to do that is presumably patents. Paying patent licenses for functionality is not what open-source is about - the point is to avoid black-boxes and unknown code doing magical things, free or not.
And by the same token we could have just "bought" a DIB engine, and a window themer, and a Securom layer, and every single bit of Wine. And we'd have ended up with Windows, basically.
Even Windows isn't immune to this - did you own valid MPEG2 codecs for Windows XP? Only if you bought something else from a company other than Microsoft because, by default, XP couldn't play DVD's because of software licensing for codecs! Windows 8 is supposed to have the same restriction, according to a The Register article I read a few months back.
It's not a question of "You can't do it". It's a question of "Why should we support that? How much does it cost to support that API? What if we need to change something in a year's time? What are the licensing and other legal - e.g. patent - implications? Who's going to manage that closed source software for us? How do we verify that module is legal for our users to use? Can anyone even sell that software in some jurisdictions at all?..."
There are a billion and one problems. And if you want to run Windows programs and use that particular functionality, you still have options outside of Wine trunk (hell, use Windows!). So use them. But Wine trunk is there to be a pure source of only code that is licensed consistently and can be distributed anywhere. It's there to make an alternative to Windows that DOES NOT NEED black boxes and mysterious payments to third-parties for normal functionality.
It's like complaining that the people writing LibreOffice don't just use closed-source Office plugin filters. You've missed the point. Office software are ten-a-penny. Nobody buys them because if you're using those sorts of plugins, you might as well just have bought Microsoft Office. The point is that, this particular software project, we know what every line of code it executes is and can fix problems in all those parts whenever we want without having to worry about 20+ year old compatibility layers and licensing issues.
If you want to pay the fee and get on w
Slashdot doesn't say anywhere that it's US-centric. In fact most of the articles for the past few months have been about the Raspberry Pi, PirateBay and UK legislation.
I have always assumed it is US, but there's no reason to pretend this is the ONLY launch date in the world, especially not when it's one of the LAST countries to get it.
And when UK-centric sites announce launch dates, even for UK products, they always clarify it if there are other launch dates out there. It's common courtesy. The "Inter" in "Internet" stands for something, you know. I'd be shocked if more than 70% of the visitors were permanently residing in the US.
There's no reason to continue to be an arse, just because the rest of the world thinks you already believe US = World.