All I wanted was to make a "kiosk"-type computer that ran Opera and nothing else.
After 2 hours, I got bored of switching options and the fecking side-bar thing popping up and just put the system in place (its only for temporary usage anyway, to replace a "classic" Ubuntu machine running the last LTS release).
Seriously, I couldn't find any options that I went hunting for and all the tutorials on the Internet to get rid of the thing were basically "uninstall all that crap and install Gnome".
I can understand needing to hide functionality from dumb users but, seriously, I'd just installed, just in as my first and only user and I could not find any options to hide, say, the network connection information, the mail icon, the side-bar, nothing. I couldn't see any options for a screensaver at all (apparently, all that's "old hat" now but I also couldn't stop it blanking the monitor when it felt like it). Hell, it took me several minutes to realise the side-bar WAS the program launching menu too even though it looked more just a taskbar. It took me a good few minutes to even get near a terminal.
All the things I've read basically say remove it. I can see why. If I installed that crap over my last big deployment of Ubuntu (on 50 netbooks for a school), then I'd be fired. It is literally that bad and unconfigurable.
Ironically, I now use Ubuntu LTS for a server and Slackware for desktops...
Can't remember the last time a maths lesson covered the most efficient way to search for a string in a large body of text, or parallel programming techniques, or any of a million and one REAL COMPUTER SCIENCE techniques that have little relevance elsewhere.
I did Maths & Computer Science. Coding Theory - mathematical base but almost 100% computer science applications. Graph Theory - 50-50. Logic - Almost entirely computer science.
There really is a vast distinction there that, if you don't grasp, probably means you are neither a mathematician or a computer scientist.
But that account, we should merge CS into EE and Maths. And Chemistry is really just applied physics, so merge that into Physics. And then merge Physics into Maths.... and what you end up with is a) Maths and b) Art. And then some git comes up with a course on mathematical fractals, or a chemical explanation of the arrangement of pigment on paper and you just end up teaching "University" as one large course.
Please, go look through a decent uni's CS-only courses in the later years. If you see anything there marked as a CS-course that a mathematician would have more than a passing interest in, shout.
Then maybe being forced to FIX the problem (which is likely to be cultural and systemic rather than some random event) rather than just ignore it and sack people is a good thing.
Now you have to tell people they are sacked because they do a crap job, not just "because we don't want a CS department any more". You can best do that by hiring better people and not renewing contracts.
And "tenure" is really the most ridiculous concept I've ever encountered. It seems to be a US-only thing, too.
Some banks barely have counters any more, and my last bank had one serving member of staff for a whole branch (imagine lunchtimes, where all the local businesses come in to put their cash in, or end-of-the-day queues).
Sure, there are funny machines you can do it on, but not if you're a business, not if you're paying cash, not if the Moon is in the seventh quadrant...
And guess what, the queue forms for the cashier because THEY NEED THE CASHIER, because their concerns cannot be met online or by a machine (mainly because the banks stop you doing anything but giving them money by those processes).
You can book an appointment days in advance if you want, so long as it's not at the weekend, or outside normal business hours, and speak to a human for about 10 minutes. Who will then log into the bank's private computer system and do what you need. But if you don't book and you wait in the queue, chances are it'll take hours for a real human to come see you because a) there's one cashier and b) everyone else booked appointments.
Literally, in 2001, my bank had three counter staff, one milling around in the public area to answer questions, and managers were available by appointment or on request. By 2006, there was one single counter staff and NOBODY else except if you kicked up a fuss (like I was forced to several times). I stopped going into banks shortly afterwards. And was it only this bank? No. All three banks in the same town, all large branches of major UK highstreet banks, barely had people visible. Those that were were there to tell you how to use the machines in the branch (which couldn't do 90% of things people use a bank for).
That's *why* online banks took off. If your bank is entirely online (which a few banks are now), then you can do EVERYTHING yourself at your convenience 24 hours a day. Even closing the damn account, which can take HOURS in person.
It used to work. Then the banks realised they could save on people's pensions, so they removed all the staff and went online (some to the extent that they only trade online). Want to speak to a human? Either make an enormous fuss or (nowadays) tell them you'll be applying for a mortgage (they'll fall over themselves to give you an appointment, and then you can discuss their stupid fees for going overdrawn only because they charged you other fees instead).
And how many thought in binary? Although I don't count every day in binary (the indoctrination into the decimal system is almost impossible to avoid in the Western world), I often catch myself finding binary patterns and thinking about things in a binary way (and if someone asks me to remember a number, the best way is to try to calculate its binary expression - the calculation and the resulting string fix into my memory a lot easier). Hell, when I run out of fingers counting in decimal, it's easier for me to switch to binary (and then I can get up to 1024 on my fingers alone!).
I have used binary and boolean algebra to explain to my child that when I say "would you like an ice cream or some sweets" that it's an exclusive-OR.
And, it's been said a million times but it deserves reiteration, two people NEVER LEARN THE SAME WAY. They don't. It's impossible. Their brains are completely different and had different experiences and react to new experiences differently.
Trying to teach "the one true way" means you shouldn't be teaching. There are much more important things that we use to teach children that are deserving of much more attention (there are much more intuitive and effective number systems entirely, multiplication and division methods, etc.). The problem is, do we get to adulthood and NOT understand those things? My Italian girlfriend still laughs because I jokingly pretended to use the "crocodiles" that I was taught existed on the ends of the greater-than, less-than operators once. She finds it hilarious but I after the concept is embedded, you don't need the analogy any more and never think about it.
I don't not see little numbers bouncing along lines when I do addition, nor do I see little columns marked with powers of 2 in binary, nor do I need to formulate a problem involving sweetshops and unpriced bags to solve a simultaneous equation. So I doubt that the entire way we teach children about numbers is really worth overhauling globally on the word of one guy who did a (very poor) study in one area.
Shouldn't your first thought be to change bank then? And inform them WHY you've changed bank?
Security tokens are a pain in the bum but there are banks that offer them in just about any country you want to pick.
And, how, precisely would it have stopped this attack? He typed security information (which would also include his one-time tokens) into a website that was fraudulent. There's nothing stopping them recording those tokens and typing them into the REAL account just the same and nobody would know until a) he noticed his bank account was empty or b) he tried to log in online on the proper website using the token and it wouldn't accept it.
That's certainly true, if you think that a reverse-engineer's time is free.
There have been successful reverse-engineering projects, of course, but nowadays it's pretty much out of most people's realm unless there's EXTREME interest in doing so. By the same token, you could say that you could "just" reverse-engineer Windows and it's as simple as that. Not quite. You could "just" reverse-engineer Steam, too, but that's not really been done either.
Modern software projects are HUGE compared to even 10 years ago. A 50Mb executable barely raises eyebrows anymore, and that's not even getting all the associated libraries and DLL's. Of course it's possible, but it's far from viable unless you have some extreme impetus to do so and are willing to spend years.
It took something like 5 years to "reverse engineer" Transport Tycoon (the OpenTTD project is from a reverse-engineering of the original DOS executables by ludde, I believe, the same guy who started ScummVM by reverse-engineering the SCUMM-engine games) - and that used lots of modern tools on a tiny, ancient DOS executable for a game that used well-known standard languages of the time and still took years to do. To my knowledge, still nobody knows how to defeat the copy-protection on the original Master of Orion properly (GoG.com just give you a copy of the protection sheet as a PDF).
Now think about any decent size modern software project and the chances are that it would take either a VERY dedicated team years, or a particular individual decades to get close to reverse-engineering it (in which time, they could quite literally just write an equivalent themselves anyway). VMWare is hardly a simple piece of software, probably one of the most complicated you can make, what with having to have intimate and perfect knowledge of the machine you're on and the one you're emulating and dealing with all the middle-layers in-between to ensure it works. You probably couldn't reverse-engineer it (certainly not "clean-room" standard) for less than the time/price it would cost to just build your own.
There was a time when you could just throw an executable through simple utilities to get equivalent C source and then work from there to add detail so that you end up with C source that compiles back to the original (or equivalent) and that can be understood by your average programmer. You still can, in fact. But it's not an Sunday afternoon job. And now it's orders-of-magnitude more complex than it used to be back in the hey-day of reverse-engineering executables.
The chances of any modern program being manually reverse-engineered (honestly - this isn't something that can be done automatically and the results understood enough to actually do anything useful with) are slim just because of the sheer extent of the effort involved and the complexity of modern software. You know how people complain that a Hello World is now a 1Mb executable? Multiply that up by something like VMWare's complexity.
And above all that, reverse-engineering is one of THE most difficult things to do on a piece of software. The majority of programmers would never be able to do it. Why do you think there's no "free" program that can connect to Skype (which we have DOZENS of executables for and not one open-source reimplementation), or why Pidgin can't do video over most of the protocols it supports (that DO support video in the official client), or why ReactOS just barely runs and Wine has taken years to get to the point where it can only just run most things after HUGE investment of time and money from thousands of programmers when all it needed to "know" was the public API that everyone was programming against anyway, not even how Windows implements it?
It's technically correct. I wouldn't rely on a program to hold some "secret" way of connecting to somewhere. But unless someone huge (government or corporate) has a really vested interested in breaking your program, reverse-engineering is probably never going to happen.
There's a difference between agreeing the data is correct, and agreeing WHY it's like that.
I would probably agree that their data is correct and temperatures are rising.
Somehow linking that to humans, that's the REALLY controversial part and it's MUCH harder to provide fact in that case. Almost impossible. At least without a several-million-year-long scientifically controlled investigation (and, no, fossil records, ice-cores, etc. do NOT give us the reason, they give us some facts).
WHY Earth is heating is still completely unknown - why it's EVER heated has always been unknown. We don't even know what prompted ice-ages in the past and they were seriously major events. Thus, forming government policy or charging me indirectly via my tax for related green initiatives because "humans are warming the planet" is ludicrous at best.
Facts are easy to confirm or deny - and anyone who goes against them is usually an idiot. It's the WHY of the facts and the things that you CAN'T collect facts for - that's where science is made.
- Most games won't come across without DRM. Some will, most won't."
- Most games don't support Linux at the moment.
You use logic to see what the statement:
- Bringing across a viable, market-proven, popular DRM scheme to Linux, with the potential for some large, hugely-anticipated gaming titles too.
does in that case. And most gamers would agree that out of all the possible DRM's out there, the one you'd choose to come across if you had to would be the Steam DRM.
Compare and contrast with any other DRM scheme, for instance.
I don't like DRM. I do like Steam. Because it respects me, the customer, and doesn't tell me how many machines I can install on, or have to run in the background all day long when I'm doing nothing, or slowly destroy my Windows setup, or force me to work around it all the time.
In terms of trade-off (game availability vs burden of DRM), Steam DRM wins by MILES.
And still it was worth them producing Mac versions, continuing to produce Mac versions, other people producing Mac versions and still selling and supporting Mac versions.
I think they're just thinking of Linux as the next logical step, given that. The more people on Steam, on whatever platform they choose, the more buying games.
And think "indie bundle". All of them have had cross-platform games in most of their offerings and all of them have been hugely profitable (Humble bundles typically make millions of dollars each, for instances).
Did you miss the bit about the source engine coming across too? That would mean *all* Valve games, basically.
And there's a suspiciously large couple of games waiting in the wings with people DYING to get their hands on them - Half Life 2 Ep3, DOTA 2, etc. - not to mention there's been major new releases in the last, what, April - Portal 2.
That's hardly a "decade old". Niche market or not, Source engine and Steam on Linux could CREATE its own new gaming market in a matter of days after release. And at worst, we have a shed-load of games come across and a native client to install already-ported indie titles that seem to be VERY popular at the moment (has a large indie bundle taken less than a few million in pure profit recently?).
Just because all the big name publishers ignored Linux gamers and missed the boat for the last ten years doesn't mean that you should join them.
Big business decision (though I still class it as rumour) that I've seen from a tech company in a long-time.
Would you rather Steam-on-Linux or Instagram-on-Facebook in your daily news?
I wouldn't necessarily pay for a Linux-only title. I'm not sure it would get the use on its own.
But I would add, say, 10% to get a "TriplePlay" Windows/Linux/Mac entitlement on Steam to a game that I'm buying, so that I can play on any platform for just a little extra.
Hell, I'd happily pay to upgrade games I *already* have on my Steam account to triple-play like that, but only a reasonable price.
And if HL3/Ep3 comes out and it's available on both - hell, yes, I'd pay a bit extra to have it on Linux like a shot.
Already, quite a few of the indie titles I have are Windows/Linux and some are Windows/Mac/Linux. Some of what pushed this is, I'm sure, the indie bundles which make a big show when they are cross-platform (and we've even had a Windows/Android one already too). If Steam-Linux would give me a Linux copy of those, as well as my Windows copy, in retrospect or for a small price that would be perfect.
With Steam on the platform (closed or not), it provides an easy and viable source of customers for companies that produce games. Now there's no excuse not to make Windows, Mac & Linux versions when you already push out Windows & Mac versions.
Sure there'll be a lot of die-hards but they can waddle off into their gameless PC's if they want. But the gamers who currently have Windows and Linux PC's - this gives them incentive to game on Linux, which gives others incentive to make games for Linux.
A lot of the big indie titles already work on Linux, it's just a matter of there not being enough and Steam revolutionised Windows gaming when it arrived, why not Linux gaming now? There are any number of app-stores out there for Linux but a gaming-centric, game-developer-supported one is a big plus.
Linux-native versions of quite a lot of games, and support for cross-platform programming being rife even if under-used, this could really boost the casual/indie game market and also mean that maybe some of the big developers that we've been telling people for YEARS should just be pushing out a Linux binary too might actually follow suit. There's no reason that gaming on Linux can't be as popular and successful as gaming on Windows.
And having a few hundred indie games shoved onto the platform with a "one-click download" install that users are familiar with and might even get "free" games for (if they own the Mac/Windows version, for example) can't be a bad thing, even if it never really takes off.
And if you're really that bothered - bugger off and buy a cheap VPS with loads of disk space and roll your own. It takes literally MINUTES to set up with something like FTP or WebDAV and SSH/SSL.
And you can even do full encryption on that storage if you don't even trust your host.
Or you could accept that Google are putting out a product for consumers, not hard-core-tech-geeks that want the ultimate in everything for free.
Because 5Gb total space for your email that sits virtually idle all the time and rarely searches back through the history of it (especially if your email client does it for you, like mine) is a very different matter to 5Gb that you intend to fill to the brim and use all the time with all your documents and share with dozens of other people.
Not only in terms of read access, but also in terms of sheer bandwidth to transmit like that (e.g. you CAN send 5Gb to 20 people on a 5Gb account whenever you like, but you can't do that with email!).
They won't catch on because there are still THOUSANDS of universities across the world and each one serves the end-products of hundreds of other, smaller schools. And yet, every school you go into has a different set of books, every teacher uses different books to teach from, and every one has a different idea about which is the best book.
So collating that into a single resource that, what? You expect everyone in the world (or a significant majority of people ANYWHERE) to just pick up and use as the sole source for everything on that particular subject? That totally destroys the value of teachers (whether really or just perceived) and provides a monoculture that cannot possibly suit everyone.
There's a thousand Algebra books because there are a thousand times that number of teachers and all have their own preferences. Throughout school and university, I never viewed a book as anything more than a recommendation and I was forced to buy precisely ONE book (and that because the teacher set exercises by page number, which is nothing to do with the book itself - but it does make you wonder who got the back-hander). Most teachers would take things from multiple books all the time because they would all do different things "better" and even then some children understood one more than the other.
Modern teaching is not only firmly embedded into society, but has ideas about teaching children as "individually" as possible because of things like learning styles, learning disabilities, different entry requirements, etc. It doesn't happen, but blanket-teaching from the same book everywhere would effectively cut out a lot of students that need something extra. And if you have to buy something else to fill that gap, well you have two competing books, or more, and they all have their own way of doing things and we're back to square one where they compete (even in free vs paid).
I can learn just about any skill or mathematic I like by googling for it and finding a tutorial. Almost certainly the best one won't be the first one, or the most popular one, or the simplest one, or any other descriptor you could differentiate them on. You can quite literally "learn C in a month", to the same standard it would be taught in a school, from free resources on the Internet if you put the work in and its written in a way you find interesting. But you can't say that what worked for you works for everyone, or that the particular resource you used is somehow "definitive".
Open textbooks are great things to have but, like all things, and especially all things open, the best driver is competition. One "definitive" resource is worthless. Schools are not going to throw everything away and only use that one document, even if algebra hasn't changed in decades (and it has, and the children have, and the teachers have, and the facilities available have, but that's besides the point). It's not even stubbornness, it's just good sense.
Let every university put up their resources and immediately the global value is increased, the possibility of locating errors is enhanced, reputations and competition mean that the quality will only improve over time. Yes, it's a duplication of effort. But so is every junior programmer who writes their own "memset" routine or whatever. The duplication of effort results in 1.01 versions of the final document, on average. That 0.01 is the crucial bit that makes one document "better" than the other and they will BOTH have that and in a way that you can't combine in one document/explanation/analogy without repeating yourself. And for every extra version, you'll get more value that CANNOT be combined into a single, concise document.
Open textbooks were around when I was in university - there were websites written in HTML1 that linked to various free online courses from major universities. My university lecturers distributed their own material and provided textbook recommendations. With the exception of blatant cashing-in by not
You can have Internet access on the computer next to it - what's that got to do with having critical control systems accessible over the Internet?
1) Separate the two PHYSICAL networks.
2) Make sure that there are only authorised devices sit on the control network and NEVER anything else (big, huge, red lights and warnings when something new is detected).
3) Make sure that even pulling the Internet cable out does not in any way affect the control system, and that tampering with the control system or even detecting a single packet destined for or originating from anything other than authorised devices sets off so many warnings people wouldn't even try.
4) IF YOU REALLY MUST - make the control system expose only the absolute minimum of controls (i.e. don't trust user input and act only on a given, set, limited protocol of commands) over an encrypted protocol to only authorised devices from authorised networks that know all the one-time-passwords and whatever else you want to use to secure it. And never expose any interface that has the potential to be compromised autonomously (e.g. web interfaces etc.) - there's no need for it and the interface should NEVER be able to do anything but issue valid commands with all appropriate normal safeguards applied to them.
You do NOT need a general purpose operating system to run a nuclear reactor - it's not only an incredibly bad idea, they warn you against doing things like that in the OS EULA itself because it's JUST NOT GOOD ENOUGH and provides too much scope for mischief.
One day, someone is going to end up running a nuclear reactor on Windows or something because they're just too thick to realise that's a problem and the slow creep of GPOS's into our lives will mean they will see nothing wrong with it.
More likely, the brain knows that it HASN'T GOT A CLUE about the answer and works harder to find one. It goes out of its normal operation to find memories, skills, techniques that it could use to perform the operation and get an answer and thus activates areas of the brain not normally activated for a question you DO know how to answer.
These idiots then suggest we should take the problem away from them at that point and feed them an easier/different question.
The brain has lots of subconscious thoughts but knowing the answer to a high-level abstract question when the conscious part doesn't is incredibly unlikely.
They are not detecting wrong answers or internal bickering between the conscious and sub-conscious. What they are detecting is confusion.
I bet you could do better than 80% just by looking at their faces.
Then get some decent staff and raise the prices if necessary (or raise the number of students, which would probably be easier).
If a WHOLE DEPARTMENT wasn't publishing good stuff, you need to start again from scratch. To my mind, that's no different to a WHOLE COMPANY having people who just sit on their bums all day.
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I tried it for the first time this week.
All I wanted was to make a "kiosk"-type computer that ran Opera and nothing else.
After 2 hours, I got bored of switching options and the fecking side-bar thing popping up and just put the system in place (its only for temporary usage anyway, to replace a "classic" Ubuntu machine running the last LTS release).
Seriously, I couldn't find any options that I went hunting for and all the tutorials on the Internet to get rid of the thing were basically "uninstall all that crap and install Gnome".
I can understand needing to hide functionality from dumb users but, seriously, I'd just installed, just in as my first and only user and I could not find any options to hide, say, the network connection information, the mail icon, the side-bar, nothing. I couldn't see any options for a screensaver at all (apparently, all that's "old hat" now but I also couldn't stop it blanking the monitor when it felt like it). Hell, it took me several minutes to realise the side-bar WAS the program launching menu too even though it looked more just a taskbar. It took me a good few minutes to even get near a terminal.
All the things I've read basically say remove it. I can see why. If I installed that crap over my last big deployment of Ubuntu (on 50 netbooks for a school), then I'd be fired. It is literally that bad and unconfigurable.
Ironically, I now use Ubuntu LTS for a server and Slackware for desktops...
Can't remember the last time a maths lesson covered the most efficient way to search for a string in a large body of text, or parallel programming techniques, or any of a million and one REAL COMPUTER SCIENCE techniques that have little relevance elsewhere.
I did Maths & Computer Science. Coding Theory - mathematical base but almost 100% computer science applications. Graph Theory - 50-50. Logic - Almost entirely computer science.
There really is a vast distinction there that, if you don't grasp, probably means you are neither a mathematician or a computer scientist.
But that account, we should merge CS into EE and Maths. And Chemistry is really just applied physics, so merge that into Physics. And then merge Physics into Maths.... and what you end up with is a) Maths and b) Art. And then some git comes up with a course on mathematical fractals, or a chemical explanation of the arrangement of pigment on paper and you just end up teaching "University" as one large course.
Please, go look through a decent uni's CS-only courses in the later years. If you see anything there marked as a CS-course that a mathematician would have more than a passing interest in, shout.
Then maybe being forced to FIX the problem (which is likely to be cultural and systemic rather than some random event) rather than just ignore it and sack people is a good thing.
Now you have to tell people they are sacked because they do a crap job, not just "because we don't want a CS department any more". You can best do that by hiring better people and not renewing contracts.
And "tenure" is really the most ridiculous concept I've ever encountered. It seems to be a US-only thing, too.
Duff link to the translation.
Editors? Firehose? What, precisely, is the point of having them?
I was informed previously that MOO's copy protection isn't a "get it wrong and get thrown out".
What happens is that the game gets stupidly, impossibly hard if you fail the copy protection checks but it takes a long time to see the actual effect.
Try it in some countries.
Some banks barely have counters any more, and my last bank had one serving member of staff for a whole branch (imagine lunchtimes, where all the local businesses come in to put their cash in, or end-of-the-day queues).
Sure, there are funny machines you can do it on, but not if you're a business, not if you're paying cash, not if the Moon is in the seventh quadrant...
And guess what, the queue forms for the cashier because THEY NEED THE CASHIER, because their concerns cannot be met online or by a machine (mainly because the banks stop you doing anything but giving them money by those processes).
You can book an appointment days in advance if you want, so long as it's not at the weekend, or outside normal business hours, and speak to a human for about 10 minutes. Who will then log into the bank's private computer system and do what you need. But if you don't book and you wait in the queue, chances are it'll take hours for a real human to come see you because a) there's one cashier and b) everyone else booked appointments.
Literally, in 2001, my bank had three counter staff, one milling around in the public area to answer questions, and managers were available by appointment or on request. By 2006, there was one single counter staff and NOBODY else except if you kicked up a fuss (like I was forced to several times). I stopped going into banks shortly afterwards. And was it only this bank? No. All three banks in the same town, all large branches of major UK highstreet banks, barely had people visible. Those that were were there to tell you how to use the machines in the branch (which couldn't do 90% of things people use a bank for).
That's *why* online banks took off. If your bank is entirely online (which a few banks are now), then you can do EVERYTHING yourself at your convenience 24 hours a day. Even closing the damn account, which can take HOURS in person.
It used to work. Then the banks realised they could save on people's pensions, so they removed all the staff and went online (some to the extent that they only trade online). Want to speak to a human? Either make an enormous fuss or (nowadays) tell them you'll be applying for a mortgage (they'll fall over themselves to give you an appointment, and then you can discuss their stupid fees for going overdrawn only because they charged you other fees instead).
And how many thought in binary? Although I don't count every day in binary (the indoctrination into the decimal system is almost impossible to avoid in the Western world), I often catch myself finding binary patterns and thinking about things in a binary way (and if someone asks me to remember a number, the best way is to try to calculate its binary expression - the calculation and the resulting string fix into my memory a lot easier). Hell, when I run out of fingers counting in decimal, it's easier for me to switch to binary (and then I can get up to 1024 on my fingers alone!).
I have used binary and boolean algebra to explain to my child that when I say "would you like an ice cream or some sweets" that it's an exclusive-OR.
And, it's been said a million times but it deserves reiteration, two people NEVER LEARN THE SAME WAY. They don't. It's impossible. Their brains are completely different and had different experiences and react to new experiences differently.
Trying to teach "the one true way" means you shouldn't be teaching. There are much more important things that we use to teach children that are deserving of much more attention (there are much more intuitive and effective number systems entirely, multiplication and division methods, etc.). The problem is, do we get to adulthood and NOT understand those things? My Italian girlfriend still laughs because I jokingly pretended to use the "crocodiles" that I was taught existed on the ends of the greater-than, less-than operators once. She finds it hilarious but I after the concept is embedded, you don't need the analogy any more and never think about it.
I don't not see little numbers bouncing along lines when I do addition, nor do I see little columns marked with powers of 2 in binary, nor do I need to formulate a problem involving sweetshops and unpriced bags to solve a simultaneous equation. So I doubt that the entire way we teach children about numbers is really worth overhauling globally on the word of one guy who did a (very poor) study in one area.
Shouldn't your first thought be to change bank then? And inform them WHY you've changed bank?
Security tokens are a pain in the bum but there are banks that offer them in just about any country you want to pick.
And, how, precisely would it have stopped this attack? He typed security information (which would also include his one-time tokens) into a website that was fraudulent. There's nothing stopping them recording those tokens and typing them into the REAL account just the same and nobody would know until a) he noticed his bank account was empty or b) he tried to log in online on the proper website using the token and it wouldn't accept it.
That's certainly true, if you think that a reverse-engineer's time is free.
There have been successful reverse-engineering projects, of course, but nowadays it's pretty much out of most people's realm unless there's EXTREME interest in doing so. By the same token, you could say that you could "just" reverse-engineer Windows and it's as simple as that. Not quite. You could "just" reverse-engineer Steam, too, but that's not really been done either.
Modern software projects are HUGE compared to even 10 years ago. A 50Mb executable barely raises eyebrows anymore, and that's not even getting all the associated libraries and DLL's. Of course it's possible, but it's far from viable unless you have some extreme impetus to do so and are willing to spend years.
It took something like 5 years to "reverse engineer" Transport Tycoon (the OpenTTD project is from a reverse-engineering of the original DOS executables by ludde, I believe, the same guy who started ScummVM by reverse-engineering the SCUMM-engine games) - and that used lots of modern tools on a tiny, ancient DOS executable for a game that used well-known standard languages of the time and still took years to do. To my knowledge, still nobody knows how to defeat the copy-protection on the original Master of Orion properly (GoG.com just give you a copy of the protection sheet as a PDF).
Now think about any decent size modern software project and the chances are that it would take either a VERY dedicated team years, or a particular individual decades to get close to reverse-engineering it (in which time, they could quite literally just write an equivalent themselves anyway). VMWare is hardly a simple piece of software, probably one of the most complicated you can make, what with having to have intimate and perfect knowledge of the machine you're on and the one you're emulating and dealing with all the middle-layers in-between to ensure it works. You probably couldn't reverse-engineer it (certainly not "clean-room" standard) for less than the time/price it would cost to just build your own.
There was a time when you could just throw an executable through simple utilities to get equivalent C source and then work from there to add detail so that you end up with C source that compiles back to the original (or equivalent) and that can be understood by your average programmer. You still can, in fact. But it's not an Sunday afternoon job. And now it's orders-of-magnitude more complex than it used to be back in the hey-day of reverse-engineering executables.
The chances of any modern program being manually reverse-engineered (honestly - this isn't something that can be done automatically and the results understood enough to actually do anything useful with) are slim just because of the sheer extent of the effort involved and the complexity of modern software. You know how people complain that a Hello World is now a 1Mb executable? Multiply that up by something like VMWare's complexity.
And above all that, reverse-engineering is one of THE most difficult things to do on a piece of software. The majority of programmers would never be able to do it. Why do you think there's no "free" program that can connect to Skype (which we have DOZENS of executables for and not one open-source reimplementation), or why Pidgin can't do video over most of the protocols it supports (that DO support video in the official client), or why ReactOS just barely runs and Wine has taken years to get to the point where it can only just run most things after HUGE investment of time and money from thousands of programmers when all it needed to "know" was the public API that everyone was programming against anyway, not even how Windows implements it?
It's technically correct. I wouldn't rely on a program to hold some "secret" way of connecting to somewhere. But unless someone huge (government or corporate) has a really vested interested in breaking your program, reverse-engineering is probably never going to happen.
There's a difference between agreeing the data is correct, and agreeing WHY it's like that.
I would probably agree that their data is correct and temperatures are rising.
Somehow linking that to humans, that's the REALLY controversial part and it's MUCH harder to provide fact in that case. Almost impossible. At least without a several-million-year-long scientifically controlled investigation (and, no, fossil records, ice-cores, etc. do NOT give us the reason, they give us some facts).
WHY Earth is heating is still completely unknown - why it's EVER heated has always been unknown. We don't even know what prompted ice-ages in the past and they were seriously major events. Thus, forming government policy or charging me indirectly via my tax for related green initiatives because "humans are warming the planet" is ludicrous at best.
Facts are easy to confirm or deny - and anyone who goes against them is usually an idiot. It's the WHY of the facts and the things that you CAN'T collect facts for - that's where science is made.
- Most games won't come across without DRM. Some will, most won't."
- Most games don't support Linux at the moment.
You use logic to see what the statement:
- Bringing across a viable, market-proven, popular DRM scheme to Linux, with the potential for some large, hugely-anticipated gaming titles too.
does in that case. And most gamers would agree that out of all the possible DRM's out there, the one you'd choose to come across if you had to would be the Steam DRM.
Compare and contrast with any other DRM scheme, for instance.
I don't like DRM. I do like Steam. Because it respects me, the customer, and doesn't tell me how many machines I can install on, or have to run in the background all day long when I'm doing nothing, or slowly destroy my Windows setup, or force me to work around it all the time.
In terms of trade-off (game availability vs burden of DRM), Steam DRM wins by MILES.
And still it was worth them producing Mac versions, continuing to produce Mac versions, other people producing Mac versions and still selling and supporting Mac versions.
I think they're just thinking of Linux as the next logical step, given that. The more people on Steam, on whatever platform they choose, the more buying games.
And think "indie bundle". All of them have had cross-platform games in most of their offerings and all of them have been hugely profitable (Humble bundles typically make millions of dollars each, for instances).
Hello troll.
Did you miss the bit about the source engine coming across too? That would mean *all* Valve games, basically.
And there's a suspiciously large couple of games waiting in the wings with people DYING to get their hands on them - Half Life 2 Ep3, DOTA 2, etc. - not to mention there's been major new releases in the last, what, April - Portal 2.
That's hardly a "decade old". Niche market or not, Source engine and Steam on Linux could CREATE its own new gaming market in a matter of days after release. And at worst, we have a shed-load of games come across and a native client to install already-ported indie titles that seem to be VERY popular at the moment (has a large indie bundle taken less than a few million in pure profit recently?).
Just because all the big name publishers ignored Linux gamers and missed the boat for the last ten years doesn't mean that you should join them.
Big business decision (though I still class it as rumour) that I've seen from a tech company in a long-time.
Would you rather Steam-on-Linux or Instagram-on-Facebook in your daily news?
I wouldn't necessarily pay for a Linux-only title. I'm not sure it would get the use on its own.
But I would add, say, 10% to get a "TriplePlay" Windows/Linux/Mac entitlement on Steam to a game that I'm buying, so that I can play on any platform for just a little extra.
Hell, I'd happily pay to upgrade games I *already* have on my Steam account to triple-play like that, but only a reasonable price.
And if HL3/Ep3 comes out and it's available on both - hell, yes, I'd pay a bit extra to have it on Linux like a shot.
Already, quite a few of the indie titles I have are Windows/Linux and some are Windows/Mac/Linux. Some of what pushed this is, I'm sure, the indie bundles which make a big show when they are cross-platform (and we've even had a Windows/Android one already too). If Steam-Linux would give me a Linux copy of those, as well as my Windows copy, in retrospect or for a small price that would be perfect.
Thought this might be handy for those who wonder what else they might be able to get on Linux Steam:
http://steamlinux.flibitijibibo.com/index.php?title=Native_Games
I don't think so.
With Steam on the platform (closed or not), it provides an easy and viable source of customers for companies that produce games. Now there's no excuse not to make Windows, Mac & Linux versions when you already push out Windows & Mac versions.
Sure there'll be a lot of die-hards but they can waddle off into their gameless PC's if they want. But the gamers who currently have Windows and Linux PC's - this gives them incentive to game on Linux, which gives others incentive to make games for Linux.
A lot of the big indie titles already work on Linux, it's just a matter of there not being enough and Steam revolutionised Windows gaming when it arrived, why not Linux gaming now? There are any number of app-stores out there for Linux but a gaming-centric, game-developer-supported one is a big plus.
Linux-native versions of quite a lot of games, and support for cross-platform programming being rife even if under-used, this could really boost the casual/indie game market and also mean that maybe some of the big developers that we've been telling people for YEARS should just be pushing out a Linux binary too might actually follow suit. There's no reason that gaming on Linux can't be as popular and successful as gaming on Windows.
And having a few hundred indie games shoved onto the platform with a "one-click download" install that users are familiar with and might even get "free" games for (if they own the Mac/Windows version, for example) can't be a bad thing, even if it never really takes off.
And if you're really that bothered - bugger off and buy a cheap VPS with loads of disk space and roll your own. It takes literally MINUTES to set up with something like FTP or WebDAV and SSH/SSL.
And you can even do full encryption on that storage if you don't even trust your host.
Or you could accept that Google are putting out a product for consumers, not hard-core-tech-geeks that want the ultimate in everything for free.
Because 5Gb total space for your email that sits virtually idle all the time and rarely searches back through the history of it (especially if your email client does it for you, like mine) is a very different matter to 5Gb that you intend to fill to the brim and use all the time with all your documents and share with dozens of other people.
Not only in terms of read access, but also in terms of sheer bandwidth to transmit like that (e.g. you CAN send 5Gb to 20 people on a 5Gb account whenever you like, but you can't do that with email!).
Amazing how many things are the "first step in establishing a permanent human presence in space".
You'd think by now we'd actually HAVE one.
Doh.
My mistake. Can't read years properly.
But still, how pointless to put the OLD data in the summary and the 4+ years more modern data in the article?
How comes the summary list doesn't correlate at all with the list on the article?
And you know your language is dead when it's less popular than Lisp.
It's a short-sighted response, certainly.
They won't catch on because there are still THOUSANDS of universities across the world and each one serves the end-products of hundreds of other, smaller schools. And yet, every school you go into has a different set of books, every teacher uses different books to teach from, and every one has a different idea about which is the best book.
So collating that into a single resource that, what? You expect everyone in the world (or a significant majority of people ANYWHERE) to just pick up and use as the sole source for everything on that particular subject? That totally destroys the value of teachers (whether really or just perceived) and provides a monoculture that cannot possibly suit everyone.
There's a thousand Algebra books because there are a thousand times that number of teachers and all have their own preferences. Throughout school and university, I never viewed a book as anything more than a recommendation and I was forced to buy precisely ONE book (and that because the teacher set exercises by page number, which is nothing to do with the book itself - but it does make you wonder who got the back-hander). Most teachers would take things from multiple books all the time because they would all do different things "better" and even then some children understood one more than the other.
Modern teaching is not only firmly embedded into society, but has ideas about teaching children as "individually" as possible because of things like learning styles, learning disabilities, different entry requirements, etc. It doesn't happen, but blanket-teaching from the same book everywhere would effectively cut out a lot of students that need something extra. And if you have to buy something else to fill that gap, well you have two competing books, or more, and they all have their own way of doing things and we're back to square one where they compete (even in free vs paid).
I can learn just about any skill or mathematic I like by googling for it and finding a tutorial. Almost certainly the best one won't be the first one, or the most popular one, or the simplest one, or any other descriptor you could differentiate them on. You can quite literally "learn C in a month", to the same standard it would be taught in a school, from free resources on the Internet if you put the work in and its written in a way you find interesting. But you can't say that what worked for you works for everyone, or that the particular resource you used is somehow "definitive".
Open textbooks are great things to have but, like all things, and especially all things open, the best driver is competition. One "definitive" resource is worthless. Schools are not going to throw everything away and only use that one document, even if algebra hasn't changed in decades (and it has, and the children have, and the teachers have, and the facilities available have, but that's besides the point). It's not even stubbornness, it's just good sense.
Let every university put up their resources and immediately the global value is increased, the possibility of locating errors is enhanced, reputations and competition mean that the quality will only improve over time. Yes, it's a duplication of effort. But so is every junior programmer who writes their own "memset" routine or whatever. The duplication of effort results in 1.01 versions of the final document, on average. That 0.01 is the crucial bit that makes one document "better" than the other and they will BOTH have that and in a way that you can't combine in one document/explanation/analogy without repeating yourself. And for every extra version, you'll get more value that CANNOT be combined into a single, concise document.
Open textbooks were around when I was in university - there were websites written in HTML1 that linked to various free online courses from major universities. My university lecturers distributed their own material and provided textbook recommendations. With the exception of blatant cashing-in by not
You can have Internet access on the computer next to it - what's that got to do with having critical control systems accessible over the Internet?
1) Separate the two PHYSICAL networks.
2) Make sure that there are only authorised devices sit on the control network and NEVER anything else (big, huge, red lights and warnings when something new is detected).
3) Make sure that even pulling the Internet cable out does not in any way affect the control system, and that tampering with the control system or even detecting a single packet destined for or originating from anything other than authorised devices sets off so many warnings people wouldn't even try.
4) IF YOU REALLY MUST - make the control system expose only the absolute minimum of controls (i.e. don't trust user input and act only on a given, set, limited protocol of commands) over an encrypted protocol to only authorised devices from authorised networks that know all the one-time-passwords and whatever else you want to use to secure it. And never expose any interface that has the potential to be compromised autonomously (e.g. web interfaces etc.) - there's no need for it and the interface should NEVER be able to do anything but issue valid commands with all appropriate normal safeguards applied to them.
You do NOT need a general purpose operating system to run a nuclear reactor - it's not only an incredibly bad idea, they warn you against doing things like that in the OS EULA itself because it's JUST NOT GOOD ENOUGH and provides too much scope for mischief.
One day, someone is going to end up running a nuclear reactor on Windows or something because they're just too thick to realise that's a problem and the slow creep of GPOS's into our lives will mean they will see nothing wrong with it.
More likely, the brain knows that it HASN'T GOT A CLUE about the answer and works harder to find one. It goes out of its normal operation to find memories, skills, techniques that it could use to perform the operation and get an answer and thus activates areas of the brain not normally activated for a question you DO know how to answer.
These idiots then suggest we should take the problem away from them at that point and feed them an easier/different question.
The brain has lots of subconscious thoughts but knowing the answer to a high-level abstract question when the conscious part doesn't is incredibly unlikely.
They are not detecting wrong answers or internal bickering between the conscious and sub-conscious. What they are detecting is confusion.
I bet you could do better than 80% just by looking at their faces.
Then get some decent staff and raise the prices if necessary (or raise the number of students, which would probably be easier).
If a WHOLE DEPARTMENT wasn't publishing good stuff, you need to start again from scratch. To my mind, that's no different to a WHOLE COMPANY having people who just sit on their bums all day.