I once went to the house of a teacher at the school where I worked, to do an IT job for them. Their child (7/8 years old) was home and playing on the console while I sat at the PC.
It wasn't until *I* mentioned it that she realised that the South Park videogame they were playing lets you launch dildos at the other players. At first, she thought I was joking, then she thought it was just us mis-interpreting it, then she read the instruction manual.
Then she started to actually WATCH South Park with her child and realised that it wasn't just a cartoon for kids. Bear in mind that she would spend every working day herding children and making sure they didn't say anything untoward, or see anything they shouldn't, and she hadn't noticed even though she'd bought the games the kids asked for after seeing the cartoon on TV and they'd been playing them for months.
A lot of parents are fecking idiots. Sure there are some that are deliberately liberal and accommodating, but there are a lot that just don't care / know what their kids are doing. And, no, a violent video game, or even a sexually explicit one, isn't going to harm your child. But the lack of parenting that can result in them doing those things you never realised were available to them can and will harm your child.
That's where the link is - not the games making your child violent or unsociable - its the laxity of parenting that can often result in both things appearing at once. If you're really just buying games for your kids with no question of their content despite their age ratings, that's a parenting problem.
But hell, when I was younger I would watch 18-rated films with my parents - they were never "scary" because it was only a film (i.e. not real life) but it's only my upbringing that taught me that, and when I was that young my parents would *know* what I was watching because they'd have seen it first or had a rough idea of the content of it before they watched it with me.
Game ratings are as useless as film ratings. They only work if the parent is so lazy that they rely on them exclusively. If they are just a lazy parent, they won't even bother to check the age. If your parent knows what they are doing, the age-rating is neither here nor there - they will decide whether or not you get to watch it and not have to read a box on the back of the DVD case, and 99.9% of the time will let you watch it when you are younger than it says.
I don't think there's anything wrong with a well-brought-up child of 11 playing an 18-rated game, or watching an 18-rated movie. So long as they are mature enough to handle it and you KNOW that's what they are doing.
The worst of modern diseases is having no idea what your kids are doing, and not caring even when you do. I bet a lot of those parents that whine about their children becoming violent after playing GrandTheftAuto never bother to mention that their kids were allowed out until all-hours anyway, that they never knew where they were, that they didn't know where the games (or the money to buy them) came from, etc. that the kid has all the latest games consoles but plays in no team sports, etc.
Today, other people are the perfect targets to play for YOUR bad parenting. If you tell your kid to be home at 8, they are home at 8. There is no "but what if" they don't turn up. They *WILL* be home at 8. It's very simple. But nobody bothers to enforce the little things until the big things have already bred in habits.
There are animals that are completely immune to the effects of cancer and "live forever" (try and age most lobster-species - you can't because they literally "regrow" their cells all the time). There are human groups that are vastly more immune to certain types of cancer (and some vastly more susceptible) - and yet they would probably die if you gave them the flu.
Cancer is merely the result of a cell going haywire and instead of dying it reproduces like mad and keeps going. It's a DNA mutation caused by the presence of a chance of something going wrong every time a cell splits or reproduces. It's not some mystical, magical disease - we can pinpoint the cause virtually all of the time. The problem is that this makes it inherently more difficult to "attack" - it's not foreign, so to speak, it's just a normal part of us spinning out of control
At the moment, cancer is an inevitable thing caused by sheer statistics - if you live long enough, and have enough cells, one of them will "go rogue" and start a chain reaction that gives you cancerous tumours, etc. Thousands of years ago we rarely suffered from cancer because people just weren't living long enough to hit those sorts of probabilities (of course they happened, in the same way that babies can get cancer today, and they happened more if you were exposed to carcinogens, but it rarely had time for symptoms to affect your life so drastically as to kill you).
The problem is that, currently, treatment consists of obliterating obviously-cancerous cells plus a sufficient margin around them (to catch any we can't see) by a variety of pretty crude means (amputation, irradiation, chemical death, etc.). It's hardly "high-tech". In fact, our treatment of cancer is something that belongs in the era where we didn't suffer from it at all.
The problem with cancer is not "where's the magic pill", like it can be with actual diseases, viruses, etc. It's "how do we change your entire genetic makeup so this doesn't have a chance of happening". Hence what this article shows - you have to basically change the immune system cells artificially and then re-insert them into the patient.
You're basically changing their blood and immune system for one that their own genetics could *never* have produced (unlike, say, diseases that you can immunise against). In effect, you're genetically engineering parts for a human that attack the cancers they would normally be susceptible to.
10 years is optimistic, because of the sheer variety of cancers and the sheer magnitude of changes that can happen when ANY part of a DNA strand is "corrupted" when it's copied. And this is all cutting-edge stuff that has huge ramifications on your body (and just wait until people start equating "genetically modified" with things being inserted into human tissue!) and is pretty unique to each person / cell type / mutation. It can take 20 years to get something through clinical trials even if there are no adverse effects on tests.
Cancer will be with us for a LONG time. We may be able to control it "soon", i.e. years to decades, but to stop people dying of it is going to take a lot longer. It's the most heavily funded medical research there's ever been, and been running for almost all of modern medicine's existence - and STILL the most effective treatment is chemicals that kill parts of you, radiation that kills parts of you and a lot of hope and guesswork.
Computer analogy: If cells are like NULL-terminated strings stored on a hard drive, cancer is what happens when they lose the NULL. Eventually the drive will (inevitably) corrupt a single byte and if that loses the NULL terminator, everything can go tits-up. Our treatment at the moment consists of zeroing the drive areas around the string. It can work but there's nothing guaranteed about the rest of the data on the disk. This treatment is kinda like a RAID checksum algorithm running over the disk - a byte wrong here or there can be detected or fixed. The cure, though, is to make a drive that doesn't corr
I think the run-on sentence confused you. I know what Syndicate Wars was - that sentence wasn't supposed to be related to the next one where I complain about THIS remake being a 3D FPS.
First, "brilliant storytelling"? I don't remember much of that in Syndicate at all. The intro consisted of someone getting run over, turned into a cyborg and then shooting the "viewer". The rest of the cutscenes were a guy in a blimp throwing his lamp, and a party underneath the blimp, to my knowledge. The in-game text consisted mostly of "kill this guy for this reason" or similar.
That's part of what made Syndicate great - no junk, nothing getting in your way (every cutscene was skippable with any keypress), just you, a target, and a city to hunt them down in. Syndicate was simplicity and atmosphere - I can remember my brother crowing about the Blade-Runner-ness of it all, from the cutscenes to the pre-game interface to the cities. And who can forget that voice that confirmed your commands - "Ser-lected"?
Syndicate was simple, fun gaming. You didn't need a million keys on your keyboard to play (1, 2, 3, 4 and space if I remember rightly - and everything else on mouse), you weren't forced down any one avenue and the dynamics of "hyping" your agents, controlling four separate agents, loading weapons, the persuadertron, and controllable vehicles were relatively new and interesting (First ever game to feature car-jackings?).
It ran on everything (386 with 2MB if I remember), didn't need a ton of power, worked virtually intuitively, had decent saves, and the only downside was an impossibly unbalanced last mission (which was weird because all the others were pitched just fine).
But it sold because it was simple to play. Start New Game, take the default load-out, click to move, right-click to shoot, both-click (a vastly underused input mechanic) to hype temporarily. To enter car, click. To leave car, click. To change weapon, click. To separate your agents, click between them. It was a grown-up Cannon Fodder, with a bit of resource management thrown in (persuade everyone you can, then sell their weapons for upgrades). Hell, it even had radar so you could never get lost.
Syndicate Wars itself was a bit of blasphemy to the Syndicate fan because it lost a great amount of the simplicity. Full-3D FPS? Why? What's wrong with a 3D-esque layout that players can change if they want? It's C&C:Generals all over again - let's take an estabished isometric Dune-like game franchise and turn it into an FPS. Would you do the same the other way around?
Personally, it can stay in development for ever. But the second the original comes up on GOG.com, (they've already done a few Bullfrog titles this year) I'll be buying it.
If there's only one guy paying for support for package X, it won't be long before the maintainer of package X (the larger / more complex it is, the WORSE) is actually spending more time on fixing it than they are being paid.
At that point, support becomes incredibly expensive or non-existent. Just because it's open-source doesn't automatically mean that herds of students will turn up to maintain it for you. Though you *should* be able to hire a programmer (at incredible expense) who might be able to do that for you (but, again, it's whether that's cost-effective or not), that's no more a solution than keeping the old system running on a virtualised environment or similar.
Proprietary software is worse, I agree, but OS doesn't "solve" that problem, it just makes it slightly more convenient to handle. There may be absolutely nobody (not even a paid programmer) who wants to put the time/effort into understanding and fixing that code (and OS projects die all the time because they get too big and complex, or the focus changes, and people stop contributing).
Example: If someone dumped OpenOffice/Gnome/KDE/CUPS/etc. on your lap and said "I'll pay you to maintain that because the original authors won't", the answer would not be an automatic "yes" unless you were literally able to charge the Earth and employ dozens or even hundreds of programmers. Hell, even a large IT department, all of former programmers, wouldn't want to take on even quite simple applications let alone things that the company *relies* upon exclusively to do those jobs.
When support drops, it drops whether you're paying or not, and whether the code is OS or not. There's a reason that commercial companies bow out of offering support, backwards compatibility, etc. - because it's just not cost-effective in many cases. Even in government terms, IBM aren't going to be wandering in and picking up the slack of thousands of programmers - it's more cost-effective to just develop a complete replacement (and there having the original OS code *may* help). But if you have open standards, any replacement wouldn't NEED to have a single line of code in common with any other.
For myself personally - if I was to assume that every software I use commercially suddenly became unsupported and all the original programmers weren't willing to make my needed changes for "free", then I'd have to go elsewhere - there's no way on Earth I can maintain even the simplest of applications on a professional basis, no way that my employers would want to bring in programmers in order for us to do that, and no way that any of that would cost less than just buying "next version up" even if it was hideously crippled but did what we needed it to do.
OS plays a big part in my life, but I see no need for pointless evangelism. Having an OS application suite isn't going to keep me going forever - it just gives me more control and freedom and greater negotiating rights. In ten years time, there is *no* guarantee that LibreOffice (with all the support in the world) will be at all useful in a modern workplace even if, today, it can do a damn good job of replacing MS Office.
I don't care about open-source so much (despite being a heavy advocate for its use and even contributing myself). That's neither here nor there in terms of government projects and it's hardly likely to make a difference either way.
But when you define a standard, say a document interoperability format, etc. then you should damn well be able to do what you like to implement it, and shouldn't have to license anything or pay any money to use it.
I don't care if we standardise on Word 2000 format - so long as there is a way for EVERYONE, even Joe Bloggs who works in government department X and is sick of dealing with the software's inconsistencies, to knock up something that can do a better job because he has a copy of the standard and EVERY POSSIBLE VARIATION that could occur in a file like that. I don't care if he then goes on to leave government, start a company and sells the software he makes back to government - that's just healthy enterprise.
Schools have a "common transfer format" file for telling other schools which pupils they are sending there. It's a simple standard, works perfectly and everywhere and it doesn't matter one iota what software is on the other end. I've seen the file import straight into large management systems, and hand-edited some of my one to pipe through batch files. The point is that it's either standards-compliant or not. If my utility/application can't handle a standard-compliant format, then it's NOT standards-compliant. If it can, it doesn't matter WHO made it or how much it cost.
What I care about is that the standard should exist and do what a standard should do - be a definitive, complete, reference to a particular way of doing things that ANYONE can become compliant with. It really wouldn't matter if every dentist in Britain used a different piece of healthcare software (as they no doubt do for finance, PAYE, taxation, etc.) - if they stuck to the standard, it would all just work and then you'd have some true competition to get into dentist's surgeries form software companies.
Open source is another matter entirely, to do with transparency and code-security (both arguments of which have a point but are really things that matter infinitely less than just giving the locked-in proprietary vendors a kick-up-the-arse by making them deal with standards-compliant competitors).
Open standards, however, are a no-brainer. The only reason NOT to have an open standard is to give one of the bidders an unfair advantage. That's it.
Please let me apply my Windows purchasing checklist to the new product:
1) Can I buy a permanent, non-revocable license to use the software at a reasonable price per seat (not per user) without requiring activation servers on my network and the possibility of the damn thing just switching off one day because it's unhappy? (I class "reasonable" as lower than the most expensive piece of application software I plan to run on the machine) Also, can I work out what version and license option I need, and find somewhere that will actually sell it to me, without spending a week researching the options (hint: I work in education in the UK and apparently it's just not possible to offer me a perpetual license at a sensible price because I don't have enough MS software on the premises)
2) Can I turn the desktop back to what I want it to be - basic, empty, simple, not requiring a full-3D graphics card just to load up?
3) Can I control EVERY aspect of the computer from a network server without waiting years for an appropriate Group Policy and/or other hack to appear? (I had to wait until Vista to control things like Power Policies effectively without using third-party software, I imagine there's a whole swathe of similar problems with newer OS too). This means being able to turn off pop-up warnings, taskbar icons, and EVERYTHING that might provide an avenue for a user to get to a dialog that I've deliberately locked them out of.
4) Can I just image a working machine byte-for-byte if something breaks (takes minutes) for diagnosis/repair/recovery/replacement without having to reinstall the entire damn thing or worrying about the licensing going apeshit?
5) Can my users use the damn thing on their own initiative, alone, without retraining, or do I have to rejig every single machine so that it's more familiar to them and yet still never quite get it to look/work the same as previous OS?
6) Can I install it on the same machines that I have now without things running slower? (Why is this such a big problem, especially if I want to run in "classic" modes?)
7) Can it run everything that previous versions did without requiring months of tweaking, testing, and crossing fingers?
My guess is that basically zero of those are true of Windows 8 (certainly, Windows 7 fails too, which is why we haven't deployed that yet). I don't think these are onerous demands, either, and if the newer versions of Windows offered even some of them, it would be infinitely more attractive. As it is, though, Microsoft are slowly pushing people out of their own market.
Seriously, you spend decades creating a product, and don't think that some of your big corporate users might want to exist without having to "activate" their own licensing from a server they have to pay for?
I bet all those NZ guys are eagerly awaiting the price-drop on all media then, given that piracy is provably (*COUGH*) lessened by these laws and so they have no need to take legal action, extraneous measures (DRM etc.).
And sales of CD's, DVD's, Blu-Ray, etc. will go through the roof. Just you watch. Keep watching. Any second now. Wait for it. Just a minute longer...
As someone who graduated from a UK university (Maths primarily, CS second, part of the University of London) and works in education, I'll tell you why.
- The people who enter CS degrees have zero CS experience or knowledge when they join. Blame the A-Level's and/or CS being "playing with computers" in their eyes. On my courses, I didn't meet a single person who'd programmed for themselves (i.e. something other than a fill-in-the-blanks coursework) before they started university. I was sitting there spotting flaws in MSc project's code as a first year and being consulted by them about problems they were having, it was that bad.
- The people who do have A-levels have nothing useful in terms of actual computer science as opposed to "computing" (i.e. using the device). If you're REALLY lucky they may have done a year or two of some programming language (which could be anything from BASIC to Java). Blame GCSE's.
- The people who took GCSE Computer Science learned about the difference between batch processing and real-time processing (not what you think - basically a one-line answer that's hardly relevant any more) and how to draw pretty flow diagrams but no ACTUAL Computer Science and anything more modern than the 60's is generally something like "What program would you use to browse the Internet on?" (seriously, without distinctions between "Internet" and "WWW" and everything), or "What is antivirus for?". If you're really lucky, they'll have done some 1990's HTML to knock up the most awful web pages you've ever seen.
- The people who totally 100% ignore the curriculum, have an interest in the subject beforehand, do their own thing, get all the relevant qualifications, get into university and start their CS course have absolutely ZERO idea why they are doing it or what it's about. In most of my university courses, people joined courses because of the title (e.g. Compilers & Interpreters, Introduction to Logic, etc.) rather than what they knew, did best at, or would help them later on. The number of first-lecture-leavers for courses was unbelievable.
- CS people have ZERO knowledge of mathematics, usually, except for the handful that did Maths primarily. This severely cripples them unless they've bothered to learn binary arithmetic, logical thinking, etc. alongside their computing. Professors used to get really frustrated because they would have to spend hours going through binary addition. Hell, most students couldn't even work out Big-O notation without a TON of lectures on it. How on earth do you work out the efficiency of an algorithm, or how a hashtable works, without basic knowledge of maths?
- The universities can't keep up with the cutting-edge AND bring up to standard the crap that they suck in from the schools. Graduating back in 2000, in uni I was taught Java on Windows only - literally from scratch in the first two years of lectures - you could pass the BSc having never touched a programming language in your life because you had two years to learn one (it wasn't used until the third year) and you were spoon-fed it if required. MSc did the same, but in groups. Only PhD's touched other languages / techniques.
It was an old version of Java, an old version of Windows and you did nothing that pushed boundaries - I watched an MSc student applying minimax to a chess game in Java as a final-year course for his study group (for MSc you had to work together, for BSc, you did the entire course on your own). I kid you not. Hell, I debugged the damn thing for them.
Admittedly they had dual-boot Linux/Windows setups on every machine but they were NEVER mentioned except by the IT service guys. I was the only student I ever saw use the Linux tools, even among the MSc's (I assume the PhD's would have used them but they had a separate lab). Because of this, most people's work wouldn't run when it got to their course supervisor's marking stages - they had no idea how to program platform-independently (in Java, fffs!) and so lost marks because the program just
The fax *MACHINE* died years ago, if not decades ago.
But fax as a transmission medium has several advantages - it's real-time, it's guaranteed delivery (to the point that courts will accept a valid transmission log as evidence of reception at the other end), it's direct (and thus pretty certain to be secure - at least as secure as your phone line), it's cheaper than a phone call and it allows you to send arbitrary images (i.e. not just a particular format / language / layout / etc.). Ever tried scribbling a diagram on a computer to send to someone to, e.g. know how to turn off a burglar alarm, or where you left that file? It takes ten times longer than sketching it on paper and faxing it.
The school I work for still were running an old fax machine. I moved them to a network fax driver and they haven't looked back. But faxes are still sent and received every day from themselves, their suppliers, the parents, etc. When you want to see a signature (i.e. did the kid sign his own "permission slip"?), a fax is infinitely easier than some electronic method - it also arrives instantly and the sender knows immediately whether or not we received it ("Please send Johnny home to wait at his aunt's house because I won't be able to pick him up"), and you can keep it forever in its original format as legally-binding evidence.
The cost is neither here nor there - because it's actually cheaper than a phone call or even a text for single-page items, and not many people have the need to fax internationally - if you do, the cost is a drop in the ocean to your operations and there's nothing stopping you doing it over your already-"free" VoIP link for example.
And sending them is no more complicated than printing them out (however, it's MUCH simpler than printing them out, only to then fax them, which is a ridiculous idea) and can be done from any workstation or even via email - you can even pool them until phone calls are particularly cheap or send them from remote company fax servers (i.e. one on this continent, one on another, email/print to the appropriate one to save costs).
As a communications medium, it's quick ENOUGH, simple ENOUGH, cheap ENOUGH, reliable ENOUGH and prevalent ENOUGH (probably easier to fax the North Pole than it would be to send them a large image, I should think) and the installation knowledge is basically zero (hell, printers have come with fax built-in for decades now - plug them into your phone line and you're done).
I bought my house via fax only a few years ago. I was on holiday in Corfu and the lawyers needed a signature within 8 hours to finalise the deal (yes, it really was THAT close to losing the house) - the accepted formats? In person or by fax. Not even a mention of any other way of doing it. Now it may be a ridiculous requirement but it's there for a reason - fax is accepted in courts where other media might not be (at least not without an awful lot of extraneous evidence proving its integrity). How long did it take us to find a fax machine? First hotel we walked in, who did it for nothing even though we weren't guests. How long did it take us to find an Internet connection? The first three days were spent doing so and it cost £1.50 a hour, no scanning facility and dodgy PC's (everyone logged in as the same user and it was crawling with malware).
A full network, with scanning facility, international links and clients who all have the same - yeah, you can probably abandon fax. But for the cost of it, it's worth keeping if it brings in even ONE more customer (or even just satisfies one even a tiny amount) - and integration with a large network is a ten-minute job even for hundreds of users (e.g. Hylafax and fax-to-email/email-to-fax).
Worse than that - their all-Windows servers (including the signing server) were all part of the same domain and so all could be logged into with a single set of credentials (which is what the intruder had, by brute-forcing that crappy password) and all joined to the same networks.
Because, if you understood anything about PKI, you'd know that all major browsers would have trusted these certificates by default for over a month for sites such as Google, Windows Update and a myriad other popular sites.
And still we don't know what else may have slipped through the net and got certified. The hack was hardly social engineering either - they brute-force cracked Windows domain passwords after gaining entry through compromised web-based servers.
Yes, the CA is an idiot (first, they were running Windows servers in the same domain for certificate generation and day-to-day management, for God's sake!), and they should have noticed... but to the end-user and even associated techies (like the entire Dutch government IT who were trusting these certificates) it's big news.
Next time you go on Google, be thankful your browser has been checking OSCP revocations and hope that you DIDN'T visit Google in the time before the revocations occurred (several weeks).
And the "full pass" costs exactly the same as buying the game on Steam / in the store and owning it forever, on as many computers as you like, and being able to play it offline, etc.
That's not really a "good" thing. Even at the same price, the service is substandard - you don't get the full effect of the game (latency, moving image compression, etc.) and end up paying more for your broadband because of it (in most countries that have bandwidth limits, etc.). A PC is a one-off cost, and you have to have SOMETHING to play even OnLive on even if it's just a client, and once paid you have no ongoing costs. Buy the game you want, for the same price, and stick it on that PC and play it forever. It beats OnLive in terms of performance, quality, etc. and requires virtually zero bandwidth.
Additionally, you're no reliant on a 3rd-party to keep playing the game (unless you've bought something with hideous DRM).
OnLive isn't a solution to any problem that I know of.
That's why. Basically, there is no such thing at the moment, especially in certain countries, and OnLive's techniques make the problem worse.
Rather than the display in front of me drawing the results of a (slightly) delayed and INCREDIBLY TINY message from elsewhere, OnLive has to receive your local controller data, draw the results, compress the output in realtime and then ship that image back to you using a relatively-high-bandwidth image.
That doubles latency you would expect from an online game (and even online games can be laggy, don't forget) and defeats a lot of things like client-side prediction (because the "client" is actually OnLive's datacenter, NOT you - you're just a remote viewer) or worse - my upload dies a death when a large download is in progress and this would pretty much kill my broadband connection.
Basically, you're VNC'ing into a games console somewhere else on the planet. And have you seen the quality of the compression they use? You basically lose most of the image of the game, especially on anything fast-moving.
Add to that all the problems with such online services - the games go away the second you stop paying, the games cost as much as normal, you're limited in the choice and configuration of games, bandwidth limits / costs etc. - and you have a substandard service.
In some European countries, it would end up costing you a LOT more than you think just to play a game you could get on Steam or from the local shop (in terms of time, effort, money and inconvenience) - you'd barely be able to play the damn thing before you got kicked off your ISP or put onto a "high-usage" tariff/QoS which would make continuing to play it impossible.
And all for an undemanding strategy game or two? Sure, if you could run the really high performance games at top-whack in perfect quality, the idea would work. But basically the games it works best on are the ones you wouldn't want to go through the hassle / expense to play and even the most basic laptop would handle it.
OnLive is the Internet cafe of the modern day - by the time you actually have enough people that know what it is and how it works, everyone has the capability to do it themselves for the same price by just buying their own computer / broadband.
Internet cafes died a death in my country because this was true - they only survive in countries where owning a computer / broadband connection is out of the reach of the common user. This will be true for OnLive - it will only really be used by people who can't afford a PC because of the local economy. Everyone else will just buy a PC and do it themselves because the costs and technical hassle of OnLive just don't make up for having to run your own, personal, general-purpose computer anyway.
To be honest, I'm shocked that this service still gets press at all. It should have collapsed under its own weight years ago. I can only assume they have a very good marketing team and are hoping to capitalise VERY quickly before their users start figuring it out.
My employers, not particularly tech-literate, have even seen this and learned it first-hand, and have had to get themselves out of the habit that "moving that server to new hardware means configuring a new one, effectively".
Move a Windows server - you can be in for a world of hurt unless you want to fresh-deploy it every time. Move a Windows-client, historically you'd be prepared for blue-screens because you have the "wrong" processor type (Intel vs AMD - requires disabling some randomly named service via the recovery console, for example), reinstalling the vast majority of the drivers (probably from a 640x480 safe mode) and even then can't be guaranteed to get anything back and working - not to mention activation, DRM, different boot hardware (e.g. IDE vs SATA), etc.
Move a Linux server - unless your OWN scripts do something incredibly precise and stupid with an exact piece of hardware, it will just move over. At worst, you'll have to reassign your eth ports to the names you expect using their MAC address (two seconds in Linux, up to 20 minutes in Windows and a couple of reboots).
Hell, you can even change the kernel entirely, or the underlying filesystem type or any one of a million factors and it will carry on just as before, maybe with a complaint or two if you do anything too drastic but almost always with no ill-effects and a 2-second resolution.
The only piece of hardware on Linux that I have to "fiddle" is a USB-Fax modem that has ZERO identification difference between two examples of itself. You literally have no way to assign them to fax0 and fax1 except guesswork - or relying on the particular USB port name which wouldn't translate between computers. But the install has moved through four machines (from an ancient office workstation with IDE - sacrificial hardware to prove my point about its usefulness -, to a state-of-the-art server class machine with SAS RAID6 and redundant power supplies) without so much as a byte-change - just me swapping the fax modems over rather than bothering to code the change.
And if the hardware breaks? No big deal - pull out the old machine and/or any random desktop machine (or even laptop) with enough ports, image it across byte-for-byte and carry on regardless.
People don't get that this is a BIG feature that they should be pushing - whereas with Windows I've heard (and seen) horror stories about RAID cards not working without the exact controller/firmware/driver combo that they were setup with, blue-screens and hangs and activation dialogs when you attempt something like that, not to mention HOURS of fiddling to get the image running exactly how it was on the original machine (if that's even possible). It goes along with the "plaintext" / "plain file" backup strategy (hell, my/etc/ is under automatic version control with two commands!), etc.
The point of an OS is to make the software independent of the underlying hardware. Windows lost that independence a LONG while ago (Windows NT / 95). Linux still has it because of the underlying design of the whole thing.
Don't even get me started on restoring an "NT Backup" without having the exact correct hotfix/service pack setup that you were backing up from...
I'm only a casual programmer - I've been doing it for the last 20+ years, I've used it in my career, there are schools still running on my code, and I've written any tool that I needed and couldn't find a decent utility for elsewhere. I don't consider it a serious pursuit for myself and write more games and one-off utilities than I do serious projects.
Listed in order, this is every physical "programming" book I've ever read in those 20+ years:
- ZX Spectrum BASIC manual - INPUT series (from Marshal Cavendish) - O'Reilly Java in a Nutshell (probably 2nd/3rd edition, I can't remember) - O'Reilly Physics for Game Developers - OpenGL Superbible, 4th edition
The first one got me programming all on its own. The second helped immensely and allowed me to get a rough grasp of things that I couldn't quite understand at that age. It also taught me how to break the problems down and generate code rather than just showing me how their code worked.
After those, I was writing games, utilities, network management tools, I removed the CD protection on my copies of Desert Strike using only MS DOS debug (but never distributed the code which was already out there anyway), contributing to open-source projects (everything from games to single-floppy-linux-distros), and basically able to write anything I needed given enough time and enthusiasm. Hell, I taught my own sixth-form (Year 12/13) classmates for two years because I understood programming better than my teachers.
Then, YEARS later, I read the Java book (because I was starting uni and they made a Java course compulsory and I just wanted a quick reference and that book was cheap - I never attended those programming lectures for two years after I'd got the hang of Java syntax in the first week, and passed them with flying colours - that was my first introduction to OO, even).
Again, YEARS after graduating, I read the physics one and didn't do a damn thing about it because I thought it was horrible, Windows- and even compiler-specific and physics was the only subject that I ever really "failed" (i.e. did terribly on, or actually failed) despite everyone telling me that I'd be good at it because I was good at maths. I binned it after a single reading - I knew exactly what it was trying to teach me but in terms of actually walking away knowing something, it was worthless.
And this year I read the OpenGL book because I thought I'd finally see what all the fuss was about (gaming for me is 2D - it's what I was brought up on, it's easier to program and do the art, and it's much less demanding and never really goes out of fashion - and I wanted to use OpenGL acceleration on my 2D games). That, admittedly, is one of the best "programming" books that I've ever read except they have a tendency to butcher previous versions for each iteration in order to keep it "up-to-date".
Now, I have a Maths & CS degree, I've run my own business in and worked in IT since graduating. I'm responsible for school systems and quite a bit of my own code makes that possible.
I've been exposed to Knuth, etc. but if you asked me what book I've give my younger-self, it would have to be the first two and the OpenGL one.
To me, learning programming isn't about the memorisation of coroutine techniques, but about the ability to formulate a problem into code and have the computer solve it. I don't think books can really teach that and I only use books, references and guides in order to learn the *syntax* of a language, or to learn about a particular technique (e.g. the matrix-operations that OpenGL performs are a wonderful insight into how something quite removed (conceptually) from computing can be formulated in a way which fits into a computing technique really well).
Until you actually sit and do it on a computer for a project you need yourself, you're just nodding along going "This is cool" with no knowledge of how practical is it to apply to a project (I've seen no end of people start a ten-line utility by writing flow-charts and a
That is, of course, assuming you've not done the DNS lookup after the attack, that the IP never changes, that they aren't running a DNS load-balanced setup, that they aren't running virtual HTTP servers (where an IP doesn't tell you which of the million-and-one websites that IP hosts that you actually want), etc.
DNS is there for a reason. It shouldn't be possible to arbitrarily change the DNS details for a domain you don't own - for a start, it means you can receive all their email or, worse, really mess with their settings without them actually knowing until they specifically check DNS (e.g. add a false SPF record to their site, add two A addresses with the first one false to slow-down all accesses to their site).
The problem here is the idiots controlling the DNS for The Register (and partly the Reg themselves for not being paranoid enough to have something check those settings religiously, or run their own nameservers) who allowed an SQL injection attack on their web interfaces that control the DNS and thus, presumably, bypass any authentication. Someone malicious could have done the same thing and routed all their traffic (including email) through a set of proxy servers and nobody would have noticed for ages.
I'd give it a month before we see the NS servers for the Reg change permanently to someone else, purely because of this incident.
Er, yeah, you have got to love people who complain about things like this. It's a totally valid complaint, software-wise. But if such changes affected you IN ANY WAY then you're just asking for trouble by having insufficient testing. Especially if you have the magic word "SSL" in your server description - obviously something was important enough for you to encrypt traffic, but not to test adequately.
I'm not saying the OP didn't test - but from the way it sounds, they didn't find out until the upgrade (which means that a) they weren't testing, b) they weren't keeping up with events and c) they didn't bother to wait to see if other people hit problems).
Any upgrade, change, or tweak can completely destroy any system you care to mention and even without that, things can go wrong very quickly. A major UPS manufacturer once was forced to issue a patch because they had an internal certificate embedded inside a Java app used by the UPS software that expired and, when it did, it generally took Windows Servers down with it to the point you could not log in to fix the problem. How long do you think it would take you to track that down on an affected server without having a proper known-good environment or a decent testing regime?
That's not the sort of thing you can catch in everyday testing but is ALSO the sort of thing that can happen to you at any time, for any reason, with any tiny change you ever make. If you're honestly reliant on a server continuing to work you really need to test extremely thoroughly and take WORKING backups at each stage that you deem "tested". Even a hotfix, or a config tweak, or even a reboot which fails to write a byte to disk can destroy your machine's configuration, let alone a human tinkering.
The first thing that any deployment should have is a way to deploy the entire hardware again, seamlessly, quickly, guaranteed and to a known working state. Without something like that, you're wasting your time even trying to keep things up, or diagnose problems. And with it, such "problems" are spotted in seconds after a test upgrade and instantly reverted.
It's amazing how many places have *NO* idea how to redeploy their gear to a known-working state, even with claims of backups being present.
Good luck with that. There's a little legal jargon called "unclean hands" which might cause you no end of problems.
Basically, someone doing something illegal which affects you only because you were doing something illegal in the first place is unlikely to be heard in court. It's like a pimp trying to sue his prostitute, or a burglar suing the manufacturer of the television he stole.
And, unlike some litigious countries, the UK courts probably won't tolerate such things and The Guardian only really operates within the jurisdiction of the UK (and any other countries where the book might have been published are equally likely to just laugh at such a lawsuit).
Also, where does Wikileaks think it will find the money to go up against a media giant in the UK? Unless they're planning on using the money the papers gave them for the information in the first place in order to sue those same papers over that information?
It seems odd and pretty much an empty threat. I'd be surprised if it got through without a summary judgement happening very quickly, and be incredibly surprised if they ever manage to prove anything to a courts satisfaction.
Nobody (with standing) has EVER claimed that a vaccine is 100% effective at stopping whatever it is supposed to. It's impossible. For a start, evolution dictates that something stronger and more powerful and able to overcome the vaccine will, eventually, come along (that's what MRSA is, for instance) - and it's actually (in avoiding natural selection terms) worse if only a tiny minority of people are susceptible to the disease/virus/whatever than if everyone is susceptible or everyone is immune. It provides greater scope for a successful mutation to arise.
As always, dickheads with zero medical experience telling people what they should or should not do have been the bane of humanity and cost more lives than the accidents of doctors, or an ineffective vaccine.
You don't get vaccinated for YOU. You get vaccinated for OTHERS. Those with compromised immune systems, those who you would spread the disease to, those you would be an asymptomatic carrier for (Typhoid Mary), etc. You don't get immunised against German Measles (Rubella) for yourself - you do it so that you DON'T give it to that pregnant woman in your family, or who lives down the road.
That said, I haven't had any vaccinations since my school days (for purely selfish reasons that have nothing to do with their safety), but then I avoid almost everything that otherwise normal people think is "essential" in medicine nowadays - including headache tablets, stomach remedies, cold remedies and just about anything that comes in a blister-pack.
In terms of medicine, a vaccination will never be perfect, but that doesn't mean it can't eradicate a disease to the point that it leaves living memory either permanently (smallpox), or in first-world countries (polio).
Did you know that houses were the favoured target of burglars? Quick! Sell your house and buy a bungalow! Even though only 1% of houses are bungalows, they're attacked only 1% of the time if you consider all burglaries!
It's like saying "cars most likely target in car thefts".
Slashdot Mirror
I once went to the house of a teacher at the school where I worked, to do an IT job for them. Their child (7/8 years old) was home and playing on the console while I sat at the PC.
It wasn't until *I* mentioned it that she realised that the South Park videogame they were playing lets you launch dildos at the other players. At first, she thought I was joking, then she thought it was just us mis-interpreting it, then she read the instruction manual.
Then she started to actually WATCH South Park with her child and realised that it wasn't just a cartoon for kids. Bear in mind that she would spend every working day herding children and making sure they didn't say anything untoward, or see anything they shouldn't, and she hadn't noticed even though she'd bought the games the kids asked for after seeing the cartoon on TV and they'd been playing them for months.
A lot of parents are fecking idiots. Sure there are some that are deliberately liberal and accommodating, but there are a lot that just don't care / know what their kids are doing. And, no, a violent video game, or even a sexually explicit one, isn't going to harm your child. But the lack of parenting that can result in them doing those things you never realised were available to them can and will harm your child.
That's where the link is - not the games making your child violent or unsociable - its the laxity of parenting that can often result in both things appearing at once. If you're really just buying games for your kids with no question of their content despite their age ratings, that's a parenting problem.
But hell, when I was younger I would watch 18-rated films with my parents - they were never "scary" because it was only a film (i.e. not real life) but it's only my upbringing that taught me that, and when I was that young my parents would *know* what I was watching because they'd have seen it first or had a rough idea of the content of it before they watched it with me.
Game ratings are as useless as film ratings. They only work if the parent is so lazy that they rely on them exclusively. If they are just a lazy parent, they won't even bother to check the age. If your parent knows what they are doing, the age-rating is neither here nor there - they will decide whether or not you get to watch it and not have to read a box on the back of the DVD case, and 99.9% of the time will let you watch it when you are younger than it says.
I don't think there's anything wrong with a well-brought-up child of 11 playing an 18-rated game, or watching an 18-rated movie. So long as they are mature enough to handle it and you KNOW that's what they are doing.
The worst of modern diseases is having no idea what your kids are doing, and not caring even when you do. I bet a lot of those parents that whine about their children becoming violent after playing GrandTheftAuto never bother to mention that their kids were allowed out until all-hours anyway, that they never knew where they were, that they didn't know where the games (or the money to buy them) came from, etc. that the kid has all the latest games consoles but plays in no team sports, etc.
Today, other people are the perfect targets to play for YOUR bad parenting. If you tell your kid to be home at 8, they are home at 8. There is no "but what if" they don't turn up. They *WILL* be home at 8. It's very simple. But nobody bothers to enforce the little things until the big things have already bred in habits.
There are animals that are completely immune to the effects of cancer and "live forever" (try and age most lobster-species - you can't because they literally "regrow" their cells all the time). There are human groups that are vastly more immune to certain types of cancer (and some vastly more susceptible) - and yet they would probably die if you gave them the flu.
Cancer is merely the result of a cell going haywire and instead of dying it reproduces like mad and keeps going. It's a DNA mutation caused by the presence of a chance of something going wrong every time a cell splits or reproduces. It's not some mystical, magical disease - we can pinpoint the cause virtually all of the time. The problem is that this makes it inherently more difficult to "attack" - it's not foreign, so to speak, it's just a normal part of us spinning out of control
At the moment, cancer is an inevitable thing caused by sheer statistics - if you live long enough, and have enough cells, one of them will "go rogue" and start a chain reaction that gives you cancerous tumours, etc. Thousands of years ago we rarely suffered from cancer because people just weren't living long enough to hit those sorts of probabilities (of course they happened, in the same way that babies can get cancer today, and they happened more if you were exposed to carcinogens, but it rarely had time for symptoms to affect your life so drastically as to kill you).
The problem is that, currently, treatment consists of obliterating obviously-cancerous cells plus a sufficient margin around them (to catch any we can't see) by a variety of pretty crude means (amputation, irradiation, chemical death, etc.). It's hardly "high-tech". In fact, our treatment of cancer is something that belongs in the era where we didn't suffer from it at all.
The problem with cancer is not "where's the magic pill", like it can be with actual diseases, viruses, etc. It's "how do we change your entire genetic makeup so this doesn't have a chance of happening". Hence what this article shows - you have to basically change the immune system cells artificially and then re-insert them into the patient.
You're basically changing their blood and immune system for one that their own genetics could *never* have produced (unlike, say, diseases that you can immunise against). In effect, you're genetically engineering parts for a human that attack the cancers they would normally be susceptible to.
10 years is optimistic, because of the sheer variety of cancers and the sheer magnitude of changes that can happen when ANY part of a DNA strand is "corrupted" when it's copied. And this is all cutting-edge stuff that has huge ramifications on your body (and just wait until people start equating "genetically modified" with things being inserted into human tissue!) and is pretty unique to each person / cell type / mutation. It can take 20 years to get something through clinical trials even if there are no adverse effects on tests.
Cancer will be with us for a LONG time. We may be able to control it "soon", i.e. years to decades, but to stop people dying of it is going to take a lot longer. It's the most heavily funded medical research there's ever been, and been running for almost all of modern medicine's existence - and STILL the most effective treatment is chemicals that kill parts of you, radiation that kills parts of you and a lot of hope and guesswork.
Computer analogy: If cells are like NULL-terminated strings stored on a hard drive, cancer is what happens when they lose the NULL. Eventually the drive will (inevitably) corrupt a single byte and if that loses the NULL terminator, everything can go tits-up. Our treatment at the moment consists of zeroing the drive areas around the string. It can work but there's nothing guaranteed about the rest of the data on the disk. This treatment is kinda like a RAID checksum algorithm running over the disk - a byte wrong here or there can be detected or fixed. The cure, though, is to make a drive that doesn't corr
I think the run-on sentence confused you. I know what Syndicate Wars was - that sentence wasn't supposed to be related to the next one where I complain about THIS remake being a 3D FPS.
First, "brilliant storytelling"? I don't remember much of that in Syndicate at all. The intro consisted of someone getting run over, turned into a cyborg and then shooting the "viewer". The rest of the cutscenes were a guy in a blimp throwing his lamp, and a party underneath the blimp, to my knowledge. The in-game text consisted mostly of "kill this guy for this reason" or similar.
That's part of what made Syndicate great - no junk, nothing getting in your way (every cutscene was skippable with any keypress), just you, a target, and a city to hunt them down in. Syndicate was simplicity and atmosphere - I can remember my brother crowing about the Blade-Runner-ness of it all, from the cutscenes to the pre-game interface to the cities. And who can forget that voice that confirmed your commands - "Ser-lected"?
Syndicate was simple, fun gaming. You didn't need a million keys on your keyboard to play (1, 2, 3, 4 and space if I remember rightly - and everything else on mouse), you weren't forced down any one avenue and the dynamics of "hyping" your agents, controlling four separate agents, loading weapons, the persuadertron, and controllable vehicles were relatively new and interesting (First ever game to feature car-jackings?).
It ran on everything (386 with 2MB if I remember), didn't need a ton of power, worked virtually intuitively, had decent saves, and the only downside was an impossibly unbalanced last mission (which was weird because all the others were pitched just fine).
But it sold because it was simple to play. Start New Game, take the default load-out, click to move, right-click to shoot, both-click (a vastly underused input mechanic) to hype temporarily. To enter car, click. To leave car, click. To change weapon, click. To separate your agents, click between them. It was a grown-up Cannon Fodder, with a bit of resource management thrown in (persuade everyone you can, then sell their weapons for upgrades). Hell, it even had radar so you could never get lost.
Syndicate Wars itself was a bit of blasphemy to the Syndicate fan because it lost a great amount of the simplicity. Full-3D FPS? Why? What's wrong with a 3D-esque layout that players can change if they want? It's C&C:Generals all over again - let's take an estabished isometric Dune-like game franchise and turn it into an FPS. Would you do the same the other way around?
Personally, it can stay in development for ever. But the second the original comes up on GOG.com, (they've already done a few Bullfrog titles this year) I'll be buying it.
Sorry, that assertion isn't necessarily true.
If there's only one guy paying for support for package X, it won't be long before the maintainer of package X (the larger / more complex it is, the WORSE) is actually spending more time on fixing it than they are being paid.
At that point, support becomes incredibly expensive or non-existent. Just because it's open-source doesn't automatically mean that herds of students will turn up to maintain it for you. Though you *should* be able to hire a programmer (at incredible expense) who might be able to do that for you (but, again, it's whether that's cost-effective or not), that's no more a solution than keeping the old system running on a virtualised environment or similar.
Proprietary software is worse, I agree, but OS doesn't "solve" that problem, it just makes it slightly more convenient to handle. There may be absolutely nobody (not even a paid programmer) who wants to put the time/effort into understanding and fixing that code (and OS projects die all the time because they get too big and complex, or the focus changes, and people stop contributing).
Example: If someone dumped OpenOffice/Gnome/KDE/CUPS/etc. on your lap and said "I'll pay you to maintain that because the original authors won't", the answer would not be an automatic "yes" unless you were literally able to charge the Earth and employ dozens or even hundreds of programmers. Hell, even a large IT department, all of former programmers, wouldn't want to take on even quite simple applications let alone things that the company *relies* upon exclusively to do those jobs.
When support drops, it drops whether you're paying or not, and whether the code is OS or not. There's a reason that commercial companies bow out of offering support, backwards compatibility, etc. - because it's just not cost-effective in many cases. Even in government terms, IBM aren't going to be wandering in and picking up the slack of thousands of programmers - it's more cost-effective to just develop a complete replacement (and there having the original OS code *may* help). But if you have open standards, any replacement wouldn't NEED to have a single line of code in common with any other.
For myself personally - if I was to assume that every software I use commercially suddenly became unsupported and all the original programmers weren't willing to make my needed changes for "free", then I'd have to go elsewhere - there's no way on Earth I can maintain even the simplest of applications on a professional basis, no way that my employers would want to bring in programmers in order for us to do that, and no way that any of that would cost less than just buying "next version up" even if it was hideously crippled but did what we needed it to do.
OS plays a big part in my life, but I see no need for pointless evangelism. Having an OS application suite isn't going to keep me going forever - it just gives me more control and freedom and greater negotiating rights. In ten years time, there is *no* guarantee that LibreOffice (with all the support in the world) will be at all useful in a modern workplace even if, today, it can do a damn good job of replacing MS Office.
I don't care about open-source so much (despite being a heavy advocate for its use and even contributing myself). That's neither here nor there in terms of government projects and it's hardly likely to make a difference either way.
But when you define a standard, say a document interoperability format, etc. then you should damn well be able to do what you like to implement it, and shouldn't have to license anything or pay any money to use it.
I don't care if we standardise on Word 2000 format - so long as there is a way for EVERYONE, even Joe Bloggs who works in government department X and is sick of dealing with the software's inconsistencies, to knock up something that can do a better job because he has a copy of the standard and EVERY POSSIBLE VARIATION that could occur in a file like that. I don't care if he then goes on to leave government, start a company and sells the software he makes back to government - that's just healthy enterprise.
Schools have a "common transfer format" file for telling other schools which pupils they are sending there. It's a simple standard, works perfectly and everywhere and it doesn't matter one iota what software is on the other end. I've seen the file import straight into large management systems, and hand-edited some of my one to pipe through batch files. The point is that it's either standards-compliant or not. If my utility/application can't handle a standard-compliant format, then it's NOT standards-compliant. If it can, it doesn't matter WHO made it or how much it cost.
What I care about is that the standard should exist and do what a standard should do - be a definitive, complete, reference to a particular way of doing things that ANYONE can become compliant with. It really wouldn't matter if every dentist in Britain used a different piece of healthcare software (as they no doubt do for finance, PAYE, taxation, etc.) - if they stuck to the standard, it would all just work and then you'd have some true competition to get into dentist's surgeries form software companies.
Open source is another matter entirely, to do with transparency and code-security (both arguments of which have a point but are really things that matter infinitely less than just giving the locked-in proprietary vendors a kick-up-the-arse by making them deal with standards-compliant competitors).
Open standards, however, are a no-brainer. The only reason NOT to have an open standard is to give one of the bidders an unfair advantage. That's it.
Any country with "Free", "Democratic" or "People's" in its name is, almost without exception, anything but.
Please let me apply my Windows purchasing checklist to the new product:
1) Can I buy a permanent, non-revocable license to use the software at a reasonable price per seat (not per user) without requiring activation servers on my network and the possibility of the damn thing just switching off one day because it's unhappy? (I class "reasonable" as lower than the most expensive piece of application software I plan to run on the machine) Also, can I work out what version and license option I need, and find somewhere that will actually sell it to me, without spending a week researching the options (hint: I work in education in the UK and apparently it's just not possible to offer me a perpetual license at a sensible price because I don't have enough MS software on the premises)
2) Can I turn the desktop back to what I want it to be - basic, empty, simple, not requiring a full-3D graphics card just to load up?
3) Can I control EVERY aspect of the computer from a network server without waiting years for an appropriate Group Policy and/or other hack to appear? (I had to wait until Vista to control things like Power Policies effectively without using third-party software, I imagine there's a whole swathe of similar problems with newer OS too). This means being able to turn off pop-up warnings, taskbar icons, and EVERYTHING that might provide an avenue for a user to get to a dialog that I've deliberately locked them out of.
4) Can I just image a working machine byte-for-byte if something breaks (takes minutes) for diagnosis/repair/recovery/replacement without having to reinstall the entire damn thing or worrying about the licensing going apeshit?
5) Can my users use the damn thing on their own initiative, alone, without retraining, or do I have to rejig every single machine so that it's more familiar to them and yet still never quite get it to look/work the same as previous OS?
6) Can I install it on the same machines that I have now without things running slower? (Why is this such a big problem, especially if I want to run in "classic" modes?)
7) Can it run everything that previous versions did without requiring months of tweaking, testing, and crossing fingers?
My guess is that basically zero of those are true of Windows 8 (certainly, Windows 7 fails too, which is why we haven't deployed that yet). I don't think these are onerous demands, either, and if the newer versions of Windows offered even some of them, it would be infinitely more attractive. As it is, though, Microsoft are slowly pushing people out of their own market.
Seriously, you spend decades creating a product, and don't think that some of your big corporate users might want to exist without having to "activate" their own licensing from a server they have to pay for?
Congratulations.
They invented the cordless mouse.
Apparently. Can't see this one standing up against Nintendo's lawyers.
I bet all those NZ guys are eagerly awaiting the price-drop on all media then, given that piracy is provably (*COUGH*) lessened by these laws and so they have no need to take legal action, extraneous measures (DRM etc.).
And sales of CD's, DVD's, Blu-Ray, etc. will go through the roof. Just you watch. Keep watching. Any second now. Wait for it. Just a minute longer...
As someone who graduated from a UK university (Maths primarily, CS second, part of the University of London) and works in education, I'll tell you why.
- The people who enter CS degrees have zero CS experience or knowledge when they join. Blame the A-Level's and/or CS being "playing with computers" in their eyes. On my courses, I didn't meet a single person who'd programmed for themselves (i.e. something other than a fill-in-the-blanks coursework) before they started university. I was sitting there spotting flaws in MSc project's code as a first year and being consulted by them about problems they were having, it was that bad.
- The people who do have A-levels have nothing useful in terms of actual computer science as opposed to "computing" (i.e. using the device). If you're REALLY lucky they may have done a year or two of some programming language (which could be anything from BASIC to Java). Blame GCSE's.
- The people who took GCSE Computer Science learned about the difference between batch processing and real-time processing (not what you think - basically a one-line answer that's hardly relevant any more) and how to draw pretty flow diagrams but no ACTUAL Computer Science and anything more modern than the 60's is generally something like "What program would you use to browse the Internet on?" (seriously, without distinctions between "Internet" and "WWW" and everything), or "What is antivirus for?". If you're really lucky, they'll have done some 1990's HTML to knock up the most awful web pages you've ever seen.
- The people who totally 100% ignore the curriculum, have an interest in the subject beforehand, do their own thing, get all the relevant qualifications, get into university and start their CS course have absolutely ZERO idea why they are doing it or what it's about. In most of my university courses, people joined courses because of the title (e.g. Compilers & Interpreters, Introduction to Logic, etc.) rather than what they knew, did best at, or would help them later on. The number of first-lecture-leavers for courses was unbelievable.
- CS people have ZERO knowledge of mathematics, usually, except for the handful that did Maths primarily. This severely cripples them unless they've bothered to learn binary arithmetic, logical thinking, etc. alongside their computing. Professors used to get really frustrated because they would have to spend hours going through binary addition. Hell, most students couldn't even work out Big-O notation without a TON of lectures on it. How on earth do you work out the efficiency of an algorithm, or how a hashtable works, without basic knowledge of maths?
- The universities can't keep up with the cutting-edge AND bring up to standard the crap that they suck in from the schools. Graduating back in 2000, in uni I was taught Java on Windows only - literally from scratch in the first two years of lectures - you could pass the BSc having never touched a programming language in your life because you had two years to learn one (it wasn't used until the third year) and you were spoon-fed it if required. MSc did the same, but in groups. Only PhD's touched other languages / techniques.
It was an old version of Java, an old version of Windows and you did nothing that pushed boundaries - I watched an MSc student applying minimax to a chess game in Java as a final-year course for his study group (for MSc you had to work together, for BSc, you did the entire course on your own). I kid you not. Hell, I debugged the damn thing for them.
Admittedly they had dual-boot Linux/Windows setups on every machine but they were NEVER mentioned except by the IT service guys. I was the only student I ever saw use the Linux tools, even among the MSc's (I assume the PhD's would have used them but they had a separate lab). Because of this, most people's work wouldn't run when it got to their course supervisor's marking stages - they had no idea how to program platform-independently (in Java, fffs!) and so lost marks because the program just
The fax *MACHINE* died years ago, if not decades ago.
But fax as a transmission medium has several advantages - it's real-time, it's guaranteed delivery (to the point that courts will accept a valid transmission log as evidence of reception at the other end), it's direct (and thus pretty certain to be secure - at least as secure as your phone line), it's cheaper than a phone call and it allows you to send arbitrary images (i.e. not just a particular format / language / layout / etc.). Ever tried scribbling a diagram on a computer to send to someone to, e.g. know how to turn off a burglar alarm, or where you left that file? It takes ten times longer than sketching it on paper and faxing it.
The school I work for still were running an old fax machine. I moved them to a network fax driver and they haven't looked back. But faxes are still sent and received every day from themselves, their suppliers, the parents, etc. When you want to see a signature (i.e. did the kid sign his own "permission slip"?), a fax is infinitely easier than some electronic method - it also arrives instantly and the sender knows immediately whether or not we received it ("Please send Johnny home to wait at his aunt's house because I won't be able to pick him up"), and you can keep it forever in its original format as legally-binding evidence.
The cost is neither here nor there - because it's actually cheaper than a phone call or even a text for single-page items, and not many people have the need to fax internationally - if you do, the cost is a drop in the ocean to your operations and there's nothing stopping you doing it over your already-"free" VoIP link for example.
And sending them is no more complicated than printing them out (however, it's MUCH simpler than printing them out, only to then fax them, which is a ridiculous idea) and can be done from any workstation or even via email - you can even pool them until phone calls are particularly cheap or send them from remote company fax servers (i.e. one on this continent, one on another, email/print to the appropriate one to save costs).
As a communications medium, it's quick ENOUGH, simple ENOUGH, cheap ENOUGH, reliable ENOUGH and prevalent ENOUGH (probably easier to fax the North Pole than it would be to send them a large image, I should think) and the installation knowledge is basically zero (hell, printers have come with fax built-in for decades now - plug them into your phone line and you're done).
I bought my house via fax only a few years ago. I was on holiday in Corfu and the lawyers needed a signature within 8 hours to finalise the deal (yes, it really was THAT close to losing the house) - the accepted formats? In person or by fax. Not even a mention of any other way of doing it. Now it may be a ridiculous requirement but it's there for a reason - fax is accepted in courts where other media might not be (at least not without an awful lot of extraneous evidence proving its integrity). How long did it take us to find a fax machine? First hotel we walked in, who did it for nothing even though we weren't guests. How long did it take us to find an Internet connection? The first three days were spent doing so and it cost £1.50 a hour, no scanning facility and dodgy PC's (everyone logged in as the same user and it was crawling with malware).
A full network, with scanning facility, international links and clients who all have the same - yeah, you can probably abandon fax. But for the cost of it, it's worth keeping if it brings in even ONE more customer (or even just satisfies one even a tiny amount) - and integration with a large network is a ten-minute job even for hundreds of users (e.g. Hylafax and fax-to-email/email-to-fax).
Worse than that - their all-Windows servers (including the signing server) were all part of the same domain and so all could be logged into with a single set of credentials (which is what the intruder had, by brute-forcing that crappy password) and all joined to the same networks.
Because, if you understood anything about PKI, you'd know that all major browsers would have trusted these certificates by default for over a month for sites such as Google, Windows Update and a myriad other popular sites.
And still we don't know what else may have slipped through the net and got certified. The hack was hardly social engineering either - they brute-force cracked Windows domain passwords after gaining entry through compromised web-based servers.
Yes, the CA is an idiot (first, they were running Windows servers in the same domain for certificate generation and day-to-day management, for God's sake!), and they should have noticed... but to the end-user and even associated techies (like the entire Dutch government IT who were trusting these certificates) it's big news.
Next time you go on Google, be thankful your browser has been checking OSCP revocations and hope that you DIDN'T visit Google in the time before the revocations occurred (several weeks).
And the "full pass" costs exactly the same as buying the game on Steam / in the store and owning it forever, on as many computers as you like, and being able to play it offline, etc.
That's not really a "good" thing. Even at the same price, the service is substandard - you don't get the full effect of the game (latency, moving image compression, etc.) and end up paying more for your broadband because of it (in most countries that have bandwidth limits, etc.). A PC is a one-off cost, and you have to have SOMETHING to play even OnLive on even if it's just a client, and once paid you have no ongoing costs. Buy the game you want, for the same price, and stick it on that PC and play it forever. It beats OnLive in terms of performance, quality, etc. and requires virtually zero bandwidth.
Additionally, you're no reliant on a 3rd-party to keep playing the game (unless you've bought something with hideous DRM).
OnLive isn't a solution to any problem that I know of.
"with a low latency connection"
That's why. Basically, there is no such thing at the moment, especially in certain countries, and OnLive's techniques make the problem worse.
Rather than the display in front of me drawing the results of a (slightly) delayed and INCREDIBLY TINY message from elsewhere, OnLive has to receive your local controller data, draw the results, compress the output in realtime and then ship that image back to you using a relatively-high-bandwidth image.
That doubles latency you would expect from an online game (and even online games can be laggy, don't forget) and defeats a lot of things like client-side prediction (because the "client" is actually OnLive's datacenter, NOT you - you're just a remote viewer) or worse - my upload dies a death when a large download is in progress and this would pretty much kill my broadband connection.
Basically, you're VNC'ing into a games console somewhere else on the planet. And have you seen the quality of the compression they use? You basically lose most of the image of the game, especially on anything fast-moving.
Add to that all the problems with such online services - the games go away the second you stop paying, the games cost as much as normal, you're limited in the choice and configuration of games, bandwidth limits / costs etc. - and you have a substandard service.
In some European countries, it would end up costing you a LOT more than you think just to play a game you could get on Steam or from the local shop (in terms of time, effort, money and inconvenience) - you'd barely be able to play the damn thing before you got kicked off your ISP or put onto a "high-usage" tariff/QoS which would make continuing to play it impossible.
And all for an undemanding strategy game or two? Sure, if you could run the really high performance games at top-whack in perfect quality, the idea would work. But basically the games it works best on are the ones you wouldn't want to go through the hassle / expense to play and even the most basic laptop would handle it.
OnLive is the Internet cafe of the modern day - by the time you actually have enough people that know what it is and how it works, everyone has the capability to do it themselves for the same price by just buying their own computer / broadband.
Internet cafes died a death in my country because this was true - they only survive in countries where owning a computer / broadband connection is out of the reach of the common user. This will be true for OnLive - it will only really be used by people who can't afford a PC because of the local economy. Everyone else will just buy a PC and do it themselves because the costs and technical hassle of OnLive just don't make up for having to run your own, personal, general-purpose computer anyway.
To be honest, I'm shocked that this service still gets press at all. It should have collapsed under its own weight years ago. I can only assume they have a very good marketing team and are hoping to capitalise VERY quickly before their users start figuring it out.
Never have I had to agree with a post more.
My employers, not particularly tech-literate, have even seen this and learned it first-hand, and have had to get themselves out of the habit that "moving that server to new hardware means configuring a new one, effectively".
Move a Windows server - you can be in for a world of hurt unless you want to fresh-deploy it every time. Move a Windows-client, historically you'd be prepared for blue-screens because you have the "wrong" processor type (Intel vs AMD - requires disabling some randomly named service via the recovery console, for example), reinstalling the vast majority of the drivers (probably from a 640x480 safe mode) and even then can't be guaranteed to get anything back and working - not to mention activation, DRM, different boot hardware (e.g. IDE vs SATA), etc.
Move a Linux server - unless your OWN scripts do something incredibly precise and stupid with an exact piece of hardware, it will just move over. At worst, you'll have to reassign your eth ports to the names you expect using their MAC address (two seconds in Linux, up to 20 minutes in Windows and a couple of reboots).
Hell, you can even change the kernel entirely, or the underlying filesystem type or any one of a million factors and it will carry on just as before, maybe with a complaint or two if you do anything too drastic but almost always with no ill-effects and a 2-second resolution.
The only piece of hardware on Linux that I have to "fiddle" is a USB-Fax modem that has ZERO identification difference between two examples of itself. You literally have no way to assign them to fax0 and fax1 except guesswork - or relying on the particular USB port name which wouldn't translate between computers. But the install has moved through four machines (from an ancient office workstation with IDE - sacrificial hardware to prove my point about its usefulness -, to a state-of-the-art server class machine with SAS RAID6 and redundant power supplies) without so much as a byte-change - just me swapping the fax modems over rather than bothering to code the change.
And if the hardware breaks? No big deal - pull out the old machine and/or any random desktop machine (or even laptop) with enough ports, image it across byte-for-byte and carry on regardless.
People don't get that this is a BIG feature that they should be pushing - whereas with Windows I've heard (and seen) horror stories about RAID cards not working without the exact controller/firmware/driver combo that they were setup with, blue-screens and hangs and activation dialogs when you attempt something like that, not to mention HOURS of fiddling to get the image running exactly how it was on the original machine (if that's even possible). It goes along with the "plaintext" / "plain file" backup strategy (hell, my /etc/ is under automatic version control with two commands!), etc.
The point of an OS is to make the software independent of the underlying hardware. Windows lost that independence a LONG while ago (Windows NT / 95). Linux still has it because of the underlying design of the whole thing.
Don't even get me started on restoring an "NT Backup" without having the exact correct hotfix/service pack setup that you were backing up from...
I'm only a casual programmer - I've been doing it for the last 20+ years, I've used it in my career, there are schools still running on my code, and I've written any tool that I needed and couldn't find a decent utility for elsewhere. I don't consider it a serious pursuit for myself and write more games and one-off utilities than I do serious projects.
Listed in order, this is every physical "programming" book I've ever read in those 20+ years:
- ZX Spectrum BASIC manual
- INPUT series (from Marshal Cavendish)
- O'Reilly Java in a Nutshell (probably 2nd/3rd edition, I can't remember)
- O'Reilly Physics for Game Developers
- OpenGL Superbible, 4th edition
The first one got me programming all on its own. The second helped immensely and allowed me to get a rough grasp of things that I couldn't quite understand at that age. It also taught me how to break the problems down and generate code rather than just showing me how their code worked.
After those, I was writing games, utilities, network management tools, I removed the CD protection on my copies of Desert Strike using only MS DOS debug (but never distributed the code which was already out there anyway), contributing to open-source projects (everything from games to single-floppy-linux-distros), and basically able to write anything I needed given enough time and enthusiasm. Hell, I taught my own sixth-form (Year 12/13) classmates for two years because I understood programming better than my teachers.
Then, YEARS later, I read the Java book (because I was starting uni and they made a Java course compulsory and I just wanted a quick reference and that book was cheap - I never attended those programming lectures for two years after I'd got the hang of Java syntax in the first week, and passed them with flying colours - that was my first introduction to OO, even).
Again, YEARS after graduating, I read the physics one and didn't do a damn thing about it because I thought it was horrible, Windows- and even compiler-specific and physics was the only subject that I ever really "failed" (i.e. did terribly on, or actually failed) despite everyone telling me that I'd be good at it because I was good at maths. I binned it after a single reading - I knew exactly what it was trying to teach me but in terms of actually walking away knowing something, it was worthless.
And this year I read the OpenGL book because I thought I'd finally see what all the fuss was about (gaming for me is 2D - it's what I was brought up on, it's easier to program and do the art, and it's much less demanding and never really goes out of fashion - and I wanted to use OpenGL acceleration on my 2D games). That, admittedly, is one of the best "programming" books that I've ever read except they have a tendency to butcher previous versions for each iteration in order to keep it "up-to-date".
Now, I have a Maths & CS degree, I've run my own business in and worked in IT since graduating. I'm responsible for school systems and quite a bit of my own code makes that possible.
I've been exposed to Knuth, etc. but if you asked me what book I've give my younger-self, it would have to be the first two and the OpenGL one.
To me, learning programming isn't about the memorisation of coroutine techniques, but about the ability to formulate a problem into code and have the computer solve it. I don't think books can really teach that and I only use books, references and guides in order to learn the *syntax* of a language, or to learn about a particular technique (e.g. the matrix-operations that OpenGL performs are a wonderful insight into how something quite removed (conceptually) from computing can be formulated in a way which fits into a computing technique really well).
Until you actually sit and do it on a computer for a project you need yourself, you're just nodding along going "This is cool" with no knowledge of how practical is it to apply to a project (I've seen no end of people start a ten-line utility by writing flow-charts and a
That is, of course, assuming you've not done the DNS lookup after the attack, that the IP never changes, that they aren't running a DNS load-balanced setup, that they aren't running virtual HTTP servers (where an IP doesn't tell you which of the million-and-one websites that IP hosts that you actually want), etc.
DNS is there for a reason. It shouldn't be possible to arbitrarily change the DNS details for a domain you don't own - for a start, it means you can receive all their email or, worse, really mess with their settings without them actually knowing until they specifically check DNS (e.g. add a false SPF record to their site, add two A addresses with the first one false to slow-down all accesses to their site).
The problem here is the idiots controlling the DNS for The Register (and partly the Reg themselves for not being paranoid enough to have something check those settings religiously, or run their own nameservers) who allowed an SQL injection attack on their web interfaces that control the DNS and thus, presumably, bypass any authentication. Someone malicious could have done the same thing and routed all their traffic (including email) through a set of proxy servers and nobody would have noticed for ages.
I'd give it a month before we see the NS servers for the Reg change permanently to someone else, purely because of this incident.
Er, yeah, you have got to love people who complain about things like this. It's a totally valid complaint, software-wise. But if such changes affected you IN ANY WAY then you're just asking for trouble by having insufficient testing. Especially if you have the magic word "SSL" in your server description - obviously something was important enough for you to encrypt traffic, but not to test adequately.
I'm not saying the OP didn't test - but from the way it sounds, they didn't find out until the upgrade (which means that a) they weren't testing, b) they weren't keeping up with events and c) they didn't bother to wait to see if other people hit problems).
Any upgrade, change, or tweak can completely destroy any system you care to mention and even without that, things can go wrong very quickly. A major UPS manufacturer once was forced to issue a patch because they had an internal certificate embedded inside a Java app used by the UPS software that expired and, when it did, it generally took Windows Servers down with it to the point you could not log in to fix the problem. How long do you think it would take you to track that down on an affected server without having a proper known-good environment or a decent testing regime?
That's not the sort of thing you can catch in everyday testing but is ALSO the sort of thing that can happen to you at any time, for any reason, with any tiny change you ever make. If you're honestly reliant on a server continuing to work you really need to test extremely thoroughly and take WORKING backups at each stage that you deem "tested". Even a hotfix, or a config tweak, or even a reboot which fails to write a byte to disk can destroy your machine's configuration, let alone a human tinkering.
The first thing that any deployment should have is a way to deploy the entire hardware again, seamlessly, quickly, guaranteed and to a known working state. Without something like that, you're wasting your time even trying to keep things up, or diagnose problems. And with it, such "problems" are spotted in seconds after a test upgrade and instantly reverted.
It's amazing how many places have *NO* idea how to redeploy their gear to a known-working state, even with claims of backups being present.
As the fecking article says, the patch:
"weeds out or simplifies requests deemed too unwieldy."
Otherwise, it wouldn't be much of a patch because it wouldn't fix this problem at all.
Good luck with that. There's a little legal jargon called "unclean hands" which might cause you no end of problems.
Basically, someone doing something illegal which affects you only because you were doing something illegal in the first place is unlikely to be heard in court. It's like a pimp trying to sue his prostitute, or a burglar suing the manufacturer of the television he stole.
And, unlike some litigious countries, the UK courts probably won't tolerate such things and The Guardian only really operates within the jurisdiction of the UK (and any other countries where the book might have been published are equally likely to just laugh at such a lawsuit).
Also, where does Wikileaks think it will find the money to go up against a media giant in the UK? Unless they're planning on using the money the papers gave them for the information in the first place in order to sue those same papers over that information?
It seems odd and pretty much an empty threat. I'd be surprised if it got through without a summary judgement happening very quickly, and be incredibly surprised if they ever manage to prove anything to a courts satisfaction.
"and all others"
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a4/Measles_incidence_England%26Wales_1940-2007.png/220px-Measles_incidence_England%26Wales_1940-2007.png
Nobody (with standing) has EVER claimed that a vaccine is 100% effective at stopping whatever it is supposed to. It's impossible. For a start, evolution dictates that something stronger and more powerful and able to overcome the vaccine will, eventually, come along (that's what MRSA is, for instance) - and it's actually (in avoiding natural selection terms) worse if only a tiny minority of people are susceptible to the disease/virus/whatever than if everyone is susceptible or everyone is immune. It provides greater scope for a successful mutation to arise.
As always, dickheads with zero medical experience telling people what they should or should not do have been the bane of humanity and cost more lives than the accidents of doctors, or an ineffective vaccine.
You don't get vaccinated for YOU. You get vaccinated for OTHERS. Those with compromised immune systems, those who you would spread the disease to, those you would be an asymptomatic carrier for (Typhoid Mary), etc. You don't get immunised against German Measles (Rubella) for yourself - you do it so that you DON'T give it to that pregnant woman in your family, or who lives down the road.
That said, I haven't had any vaccinations since my school days (for purely selfish reasons that have nothing to do with their safety), but then I avoid almost everything that otherwise normal people think is "essential" in medicine nowadays - including headache tablets, stomach remedies, cold remedies and just about anything that comes in a blister-pack.
In terms of medicine, a vaccination will never be perfect, but that doesn't mean it can't eradicate a disease to the point that it leaves living memory either permanently (smallpox), or in first-world countries (polio).
Did you know that houses were the favoured target of burglars? Quick! Sell your house and buy a bungalow! Even though only 1% of houses are bungalows, they're attacked only 1% of the time if you consider all burglaries!
It's like saying "cars most likely target in car thefts".
Dickhead.