No, just thinking the same way that everyone who I've ever seen hire IT staff thinks (hint: they generally have no knowledge of IT). I have games on my CV too. And I *have* had this line thrown back at me.
Then you're doing something wrong. I'm sorry for this, but I can't stand people who blame job markets for being unemployed. There's *always* work, so long as you know where to look.
If you have a CMU degree, developing software at home *casually* for 20 years is hardly an endorsement. I could say that same thing and I'm only 30. Being unemployed for 6 out of 7 years is also very, very bad. I'd think twice about even touching you for *any* job if I found that out. Hell, working in MacD's would have looked better - I've recommended IT staff for employment even though they've been working at supermarkets, etc. lately because I *know* it's a tough market and they need to take what they can get. It also makes me wonder what the hell you *have* been doing for those years, if you weren't working. Maybe you travelled, maybe you lived off your savings, maybe you started your own business, maybe you did other things, but hell - 6 entire years of unemployment is a bad place to start from. You think you're going to land an MS job with that on your record (not that I've ever seen the big deal with MS jobs, to be honest)?
And I've found jobs online and offline - the best ones are normally online but I've landed some lovely places offline too, usually by word-of-mouth (90% of my clients over the last nine years have been by word-of-mouth). And I don't mean "keyboard shuffler" jobs. I make a good living providing IT management to schools (state and private, primary, secondary, college, already supported for IT or not) in London - hardly an "easy" job to land, especially for a kid straight out of university, especially for one with *NO* work experience when they started, especially for nine years of full employment in a row (seven self-employed but often working for only a handful of clients on a regular basis) and *especially* when I was actually hired to work on critical IT systems in preference to the existing, "free", borough services provided to those schools & colleges. It's a matter of persistence and having something to show. Getting an interview and getting a job are vastly different things - the interview is HARD to get, the job shouldn't be if you've got to interview.
Something about your post suggests to me that you have FAR too high an expectation based on the fact that you have a skill that you have rarely demonstrated in a work environment, but mostly "at home" on toy projects. I can program in C, Z80 and x86 assembly. I can manage SQL databases. I've made my own toy operating systems. I can build and manage networks. None of that matters, even though I use it as part of my job. I'd love to have a job doing certain parts of that, but it's just not possible to fill my hours with the tasks I enjoy the most. I have dozens of those sorts of qualifications, projects, etc. too, they appear on my CV, but equally I have a full history of employment in a relevant sector. Recession? Stop blaming external factors for your expectations. England is in one of it's worst ever "recessions"... at the height of it, I left one job to seek out another because I wasn't enjoying it. I have a house with substantial mortgage, a wife who earns her share and (at the time) a newborn child. I competed for the new role against 50-year experienced IT managers, in a London borough, and walked into the job - not because I was cheap, not because I was perceived as being easily led, but because my history spoke for itself even though my employers understood 0.1% of what was on my CV.
I don't think "no one wanted to hire"... I think "no one wanted to hire YOU". I'd probably bin your CV if you have a six year unexplained gap in it and your biggest project was an MMORPG (I'm sorry, but it's a game... unless I'm a game developer, I *will* just ignore that project as nothing more than a hobby). I'd be worried that you can't find a job online (I view submissions from skilled IT people who submit on paper with suspicion if they could have filed online) - that's where the *best* IT jobs are... they are shor
It's a payroll system. Yeah, it's a biggee, and yeah, it's got a lot of old information in it most probably. It's written in an old language (Oh no! The end of the world! Soon we might not be able to understand our systems! Hold on... we just had three attempts and replacing it with something new and FAILED because we didn't know half the stuff it was running). But you're not telling me that MILLIONS of dollars and YEARS of work by supposedly professional IT companies isn't enough to get ANYTHING working well enough to say "We don't need to worry about that part any more". You can get an OS written for that sort of money, or kit out an entire borough of schools with an integrated network.
What's *more* disgusting is that by the looks of it, the IT people at the University are probably barely getting a look in - it's being project-managed by external companies. Come on, stop faffing about; seriously, this is just stupid. Get your *existing* IT team, hire a bunch of programmers directly (hey, you're a University... I wonder where you can get a crapload of cheap, intellectual labour nearby, trained in the art of programming properly and designing the systems from the start, supervised and educated by people who have spent years using their technical, professional and theoretical expertise in the subject?) and just write the damn thing from the ground up. It wouldn't cost anywhere near as much money/time as you have wasted on a single company out of those that tried to sell you crap. Oh, and you can make it do what YOU want any time and you'll have the programmer's hanging around for the next few years with an incentive to keep the system running properly ("What grade did I give you for that paper on your design of the new payroll system? I've revised it, it just crashed.").
If it's THAT damn big, you want to start breaking the thing up into pieces, anyway. Anything that you can't find out all that it does in that many YEARS, you really want to be breaking into smaller and smaller parts and replicating them one at a time. Don't pretend that you're the only place on Earth that has that amount of employees, that amount of computer data, and require mordernisation.
Get rid of the project managing companies, get rid of the "slice-off-50%-for-myself" companies, get rid of the stupid contracts that REWARD failure, and give the project to people who will give you a system that will not only last for ever but be documented and updated and revised and bug-fixed and converted for ever and a day.
Oh, wow. Thanks. I've never heard of this and just had my new laptop repaired with what appears to be an identical problem.
It was a Clevo with a 9300M on it and the symptoms sound exactly the same - 6 months in, the graphics starting playing up to the point that the computer just hung if you touched the keyboard or moved it in any way, always with graphical corruption, and sometimes Linux/Windows would just carry on regardless, but with corrupt graphics. Sometimes there'd be a kernel panic or freeze, but the graphics were the main culprit all the time.
I've just had the mainboard replaced - let's hope that they replaced it with one of the "newer" designs.
"If I were the head of Microsoft I'd be tempted to simply say, "Fine. Goodbye" and pull all Microsoft products off the shelves permanently. Then let's see who starts screaming, the lawyers, or the consumers. Microsoft (or any company) can never satisfy a bunch of lawyers out to rack up legal bills and who really don't give a damn one way or the other but need the work."
Oh, please, please, do. The majority of Microsoft revenue comes from the EU. Please do this, now, Microsoft! What better way to "win" than to pull out of your largest market, force people to look into alternatives such as OO.Org, demonstrate that reliance on even the largest closed-source company actually puts governments and businesses into a WORSE position, and forces people to think "Fine. Goodbye." the next time they think about buying an MS or similar product.
It will never happen, but everyone who *knows* IT would want to this happen. It'd guarantee work for the next five years for me, converting over people to OS alternatives (which I already do, as well as work with MS day-in-day-out). The consumers WOULDN'T scream, they just wouldn't be able to get an MS PC for a while, maybe a year or two, and they probably wouldn't notice. And then instantly Dell, etc. would just start selling Linux or whatever the hell they wanted and suddenly save a TON of money that they can profit from by charging the "normal" price (+Windows tax).
This is what **I** want. What MS does is immaterial at this point, it's up to the EU. But pulling out would be the most STUPID business decision in the history of the world... in fact MS Eire / UK would probably be sued out of existence by its shareholders within a year.
Like all things, this can't be a blanket warning - you can't say "tech's can do what they want your computer" (Data Protection Act, etc. would then pretty much mean that you could NEVER use an external tech), and you can't say "tech's can ignore illegal content they find accidentally".
Let's have a car analogy - If you put your car into service, and the garage finds bloodspots in the boot or bits of flesh or a dead body, damn yes they should be calling the cops to take it further. But should they be scraping DNA off the handles and running it through the national databases? No.
If I was to stumble across something illegal, or some outside factor made me suspect, I would expect to be able to use that as evidence. To not be able to because it might invade the person's privacy is stupid. Similarly, allowing me a license to snoop into anything I want just because I've been asked to look at a computer is stupid (much like a garage mechanic pulling your GPS logs from your car and seeing everywhere you've been when you only took it in to change a bulb). And in this case, it's suggested/assumed/proven? that the technician in question was doing things reasonably in line with his job.
Quite often I will open the first document in My Documents, or load up the first image I find in order to check file associations etc. work - I usually ask for an "example" file for the problem that the user then points me to, but if the user isn't around, I have to just pick one at random. Hell, I've searched for "a" in the Find File dialogs before now and then hit the first file that crops up. If I'm restoring backups, or copying files, I *need* to do this to ensure my job was done properly. The tech did nothing wrong here, unless they were snooping into every folder just on the off-chance of finding something. If the customer's manner or the programs installed, or even just a vague hint in an email they happened to flick through while checking the connection worked suggested that illegal content was on the computer, then the tech is in a very tricky position. They can't just ignore the possibility and they can't go reporting grandmas to the police because of a bit of misdirected spam. If the AV finds a virus on a machine in a file named "underage girls" or similar and pops it up in a big red warning message, then that tech HAS to be certain of what that contains. If it's illegal, when he DOES report it the current law in most countries means he'll be crapping himself until the trial in case the police decide to arrest him for having seen it.
As an example that I've dealt with: A staff laptop had a virus. In order to get at the data on the machine, I had to look up the virus details and block its entry points and get a list of files that would be *potentially* infected by it (this was all done on an enclosed system, obviously, but the laptop had been running with the virus for several days). The list of possibly affected files happened to include "randomly-created filenames" in some sub-folders of Windows. When I checked whether they existed, I found a randomly-named subdir with thousands of sub-folders, each with hundreds of large files in. The names of the folders hinted at the sort of illegal activity we're discussing here. In the end, it was actually quite innocent because the folders were Kazaa honey-traps - the virus ran a P2P client and hoped to trick people into downloading copies of itself by putting itself in files/folders named after other things it found on Kazaa (which happened to include some extremely illegal stuff). Do you report that to the police or not? Does a named folder automatically incriminate a user even if they're unaware of its existence? Is it worth wasting police time checking *every* computer that gets that virus for every filename and having it run through a police lab, possibly taking months or years to come back with a result? (Wasting police time is an offence, too, you know).
Everything comes down to "reasonable" behaviour. Is it reasonable for someone who do
GS are not required to help, support, or boost someone else's business model - they just give customers what they want in exchange for the most that those customers will pay. They have found a way to do that and make a tidy profit. If they aren't around in a year's time, that's *nothing* to do with the games industry. If that means that your release date sees less sales, tough. If the price was lower, you'd see more sales over a longer period and would make more money (even Valve admit this for DLC - they make more money on the repeated weekend sales than they do at big launches).
If Gamestop want to ruin their business, that's not your problem. From what you say, it will HELP you, so you should be encouraging them to under-pre-order in order to force you to solve the problem and thus put them out of business. If you're finding yourself having to *circumvent* people buying less of your product and selling it on (legitimately) for a lower price to customers who want to buy it, then there's something wrong. If someone can make an entire *business* out of re-selling your games (but of significantly less physical quality) cheaper, then there's something wrong *your* end that you're not taking care of.
And if you *deliberately* buy a product because of the principle of supporting an industry you know is struggling, then you're an idiot, whether you work in that industry or not - coal miners didn't go out and burn more coal at home when the industry started to fade. It's like saying "I know all the car companies are going bust, I'm going to go and pay them twice as much for the same car". Any *normal* person is actually thinking "They're going bust, I can screw them for a lower price", EVEN IF they spend their days hating people who do exactly that thing to them. People generally do *not* pay for things because of the principle behind it (and certainly not in the hopes that it will save their own jobs) and they *definitely* don't do this en masse once you take an average of the collective mindset. If you genuinely think that you're helping in *any* way by doing this, then the industry is in a much worse position than I thought.
You really think that there isn't a SINGLE Apple employee who couldn't get hold of a Pre if they wanted to, or that they don't already have one? Even in their hardware, PR, developer etc. departments? And that "revelation" was basically revealed by plugging the device in and looking at the usbid... lsusb would have done it in a single command and there are even prettier interfaces for Windows for free.
Obscurity is a waste of time when you're hoping the *designers* of a system don't realise how you've worked around it - it's like "telling" the DVD forum about the CSS hack - they already know *how* you circumvent it, but they may not know the exact method by which you discovered it (that's the bit that *doesn't* matter). The designers of any such system already know, or it would take seconds to make 10 guesses at how, and it would take minutes to actually discover how even without basic knowledge - you just run it through a debug version of iTunes and see what happens.
Don't be silly. It's like saying Microsoft don't know how people are installing pirate copies of Windows, or upping the TCP connection limit, or Nintendo not knowing how the Wii hacks work. It takes *seconds* for them to work it out once it's been revealed, even if they would never have thought of it. They DESIGNED the system, after all.
Looks like PC gaming is likely to be heading more and more towards procedural generation of the universe. Real-time shadows, dynamic lighting and now, dynamic sounds.
It'll all make it more realistic (but at a high CPU cost!) - being able to not have "splish, splosh, splish, splosh" when wading through water but a full-on sound relative to individual parts - bullet shells, limbs, objects in the water, etc. We won't see it *practically* for years, but gaming is getting closer and closer to that dream of "virtual reality", where you won't be able to tell the difference between a real scene and a computer generated one without touching it.
I think you can make uses of it in gaming too, extending the basic science to a consumer level - skim stones across water that sound like they're being skimmed (and with proper fluid physics similar to that which we already have, individual sploshes and waves etc. affecting that stone) - or be able to throw a coin into water behind an enemy and see if you can use it to distract him. Maybe even, the bubbles that you breath underwater hitting the surface with their true sounds, thus giving your position away if you were hoping that holding your breath would let that enemy walk past you without hearing you.
When you play games, you don't notice the "cheats" at first - the static sounds that just play on certain events, the pre-lit textures, the echoing of sounds generated inside a certain fixed area. Even in things like HL2, boxes thrown into water either splosh or don't, splosh based on certain primitive criteria that provide a few levels of believability. But as new technology comes along to make it possible to actually *create* that effect rather than script it, everything suddenly feels much more alive.
Dynamic sound has to be one of the next "big" areas - hitting a wall with an axe in a game used to give "Doink", then it gave a selection of "Doink, Donk, Doink, Donk" sounds each time. Moving forwards, the only way is to actually determine exact angles, shapes of the wall (proper destructible objects for everything are, sadly, still only a dream) and to generate a simulation of the sound it would produce (how cool would it be that if you strike the axe slightly off, you get a reverberating axe coming back at you, with a horrible sound that tells you not to do it?. Maybe even with the axe breaking on a critical point if you mis-use it too much, e.g. try and chop at a steel wall).
We already have proper echoing and other effects available and 7.1 surround can take away the whole "Where the hell did that come from?" effect if it's too clinically applied. But having sounds *generated* by the interactions within an environment... wow. Imagine Left4Dead-style atmosphere, but with proper echo effects... you walk towards a corner and from around it, a zombie stumbles into a puddle - suddenly the sound not only tells you there's something near, but the echoes from the corners confuse just as in real life, and the sound is only the tiniest little splish, and it may even be possible to determine the *type* of zombie around the corner by the type of splash it makes - something with a large flat foot would create an enormous popping bubble of a sound, something with stick-like appendages would generate barely a ripple.
This will have a small but critical effect on gaming and, I imagine, a million other uses. But we're *years* away from seeing it used.
Hotmail's buttons regularly break in Opera (basically a few days just after every new version of Opera is released for the past five, six versions?). "Junk" broke in Opera a few months back (would not execute the Javascript, so you couldn't junk messages). Then message highlighting. Attachments broke a while back too. It happens quite regularly, and reliably. At one point, it was even impossible to do anything under "Options" with Opera once you logged in. However, if you set EVERYTHING to pretend to be IE for about 5 sub-domains of live.com and hotmail.com and hotmail.msn.com then it will work just fine most of the time. At least, until they break something again. With stuff set to Identify As Opera, a lot more breaks or you get the "basic HTML" versions.
I login to Hotmail every day, with the latest version of Opera, and about once every other month myself and my brother (completely seperate network, ISP, machine, version of Opera, even operating system) notice breakage simultaneously and warn each other. Whenever it happens, IE and Firefox work just fine.
But to be honest, if you've hit that point for an "enthusiast" user, then you're already on your last legs. If you ain't got a backup, forget it - the chances of getting one particular file you've lost might be good, the chances of recovering any significant amounts and being able to verify their integrity are bad.
Plus, with SSD's, flash, memory cards, etc. the chances of being able to recover *anything* from a faulty drive without professional equipment are fast approaching zero. Most USB Flash drives just "die" when they hit their write limits, rather than fail gracefully into read-only mode.
"I checked the site statistics for my site and IE6 went from 15% of the hits in April to 0% in May."
Well, duh, because no sod can see anything in IE6 - visit once and never come back again.
This is the sort of crap that Opera has thrown at it - email a complaint to MSN, the BBC, any large website about parts not working in Opera (although they all do now), and you only ever got "nobody uses Opera to visit us"... OF COURSE NOT! BECAUSE IT DOESN'T BLOODY WORK!
It's like saying "Since we started banning unhappy people, our store recorded that 100% of customers in the store were happy with us!"
Do I know you? If not, bugger off. Do I trust that you know what you're doing enough to not click Delete etc. ? If not, bugger off. Do I think that you'll lend it on again, let anyone else use it, or are using it where it's likely someone will "steal" it for a laugh or take it over or pass it around or make off with it? If so, bugger off. Do you understand the importance that the use of that laptop, and the data on it, means to me? If not, bugger off.
I'm wary of lending my PC to even family, it rarely comes back the same way it was given and 99% of everybody has a laptop in the big colleges/universities nowadays - it's one of those "Mum and Dad bought me this for college" items.
And the magic word is "No". If you don't want to do it, just don't do it. Of course they'll whinge and moan, but then that's up to THEM to get their own laptop and guess what? When people borrow theirs and start breaking it, they'll whinge and moan too. And when they then refuse to lend it, they'll get whinged and moaned at.
I never lend personal laptops except to a (literal) handful of people, I *NEVER* lend work laptops at all. If someone wants to be left *unsupervised* with a laptop of mine, I have to *know* that it'll come back in the same state it left. And if a guest wants to use a laptop, I have old, crappy spares - enough to load a webpage, not enough for them to be happy using it for anything other than the essentials (e.g. checking for *vital* emails).
Hell, I've got a previous post on here about how I lock down my wireless so that guests staying with me *can't* use it unless I specifically let them (not just a WPA key or similar) and when they *do* use it, they know that everything is monitored and filtered.
Call me unsociable, or uncooperative, or untrusting, I don't care. It's *my* property, it's *incredibly* expensive property, it's incredibly fragile property and it's loaded to the hilt with data that's important to me and will cost me a lot of time to recreate (even if it's only the icon layout, or a particular set of settings).
When I was starting out in programming, I just wanted results. I wasn't concerned about performance because the computer was a million times faster than me. I was most concerned about how many "non-vital" keywords were necessary to describe what I wanted the machine to do (e.g. "void main(...)" isn't *vital* because it's just boilerplate. However "if", "for", "while" etc. would be vital - and even for/while are just cousins), and how many of the vital keywords (i.e. those that specifically interfered with the way my program would *actually* operate... a "static" here or there would hardly matter in the course of most programs) were "obvious". Java failed miserably at this... I mean, come on: System.out.println() and the standard wrapping take up too much room.
So, BASIC was an *ideal* first language (sorry, but it was, and the reason nobody uses it much now is because EVERYONE has used it and moved on to something else - doesn't mean it "breaks" people). In this regard, even things like C aren't too bad - 30-50 keywords / operators depending on the flavour, all quite simple - you could memorise them perfectly in an afternoon. However things like Forth and Perl can be hideous.
And even C++ is tending towards the stupid. Believe it or not, even things like bash scripting come out quite well under that test. And, to me, that correlates with the amount of effort I have to put in to write in a particular language. If I just want to automate something, bash scripting is fast and easy. Most of the stuff I write is a "one-job program" that will never be reused. If I want to write a program to work something out or show somebody how something is done programmatically, BASIC is a *perfect* prototyping language (no standard boilerplate, no guessing obscure keywords, etc.). If I want to write a program that does things fast, or accurately, or precisely, or for something else to build upon, C is perfect.
I see no real need to learn other languages in depth past what I'm required to know for my work. I have *zero* interest in spending weeks and weeks and weeks learning YAPL (Yet Another Programming Language) just to spent 90% of that time memorising obscure keywords, boilerplate and the language's shortcuts to things like vectors, string parsing, etc. If I was going to do that, I'd just learn a C library or similar.
I think that these graphs correlate quite well with that thinking. Let's be honest, 99% of programming is reusing other code or shortcuts - short of programming in a Turing machine, C is one of the simplest languages to learn because it *doesn't* have a million shortcuts... you want to iterate over an array or create a hash / linked list, etc. you have to do it yourself from basic elements. In modern programming, that means a one line include of a well-written library. As far as I was concerned when learning it, even the "pointer++ increases by the size of the pointer" was far too smarty-pants for me, but incredibly useful.
But with C++, I instantly lost interest because it's just too damn verbose to do a simple job. Java OOP is slightly better but still nasty once things get complicated and the underlying "functional" language is basically a C-a-like.
I'm a fuddy-duddy. Old fashioned. If I write a program, the damn computer will damn well do instruction 1 followed by instruction 2 with the minimum of flying off into libraries and class systems. If I want 4 bytes of memory to change type, then I will damn well have them change type. And I'll even get to specify *what* 4 bytes of RAM if I want and I'll clean up after them if it's necessary. That's how I think, so things like C match perfectly when I want to code. The fact that C is damn powerful, fast, low-level and so common also add to it's appeal.
I worry about what will happen when people *only* code in OOP languages. The abstraction is so large that people forget that they are still telling a computer to handle bits and bytes and suddenly they get lazy. M
"in my country we have one, with fingerprints and everything, and it's far safer to purchase anything with a credit card, etc."
A misconception. How is it *safer* to buy something using a fingerprint (whether that's used directly or via some sort of remote verification because of some card you hold with one on it)? To be of *any* practical use day-to-day you would need a fingerprint *reader* on every machine that could possibly be used to sell you things. And that means that the hardware is common, and thus usually very easily hacked (fake, hacked and compromised Chip&PIN terminals were doing the rounds within months of its release, if not before, in the UK). Let's not even get into how easy it is to fake a fingerprint *unnoticeably* in front of the casual user. And guess where I can get a copy of your fingerprint? Anywhere you touch, ever, in your entire life. Like those millions of payment machines, posssibly? So I can make a fake ID with your fingerprint, or fake your fingerprint from your ID. It really is a pathetic biometric. I wouldn't trust it to open my garage door, let alone my bank account.
That card you carry, with fingerprint data, is NO better than any other card you carry. I agree wholeheartedly that they should be centralised to be effective (it helps catch fraudsters to do that) but fingerprinting DOES NOT HELP, especially not with the current state of the technology.
The trouble is that a centralised repository of such information weakens EVERY link - it becomes MUCH easier to fake an identity in its entirety from the inside of the organisations controlling it, it becomes easier to attack, it standardises on a format which aids forgeries (especially if that standard is international - make a fake passport for some horrible third-world country where nobody has the capability to even check it's genuine and you can roam internationally on a fake ID).
As a little factette - government statistics revealed last year that there are over 80m unique, official "identifications" (National Insurance numbers, driving licences, passports, etc. issued directly by the proper authorities, NOT fakes) in the UK, and a confirmed population including immigrants, illegal or otherwise, of only 60m; thus every fourth ID that exists is fake, but has official documents to proof their identity and an entry on the database. Large criminals are often caught with dozens, if not hundreds, of officially-supplied ID's in false names. Do you think that comes about through making an accident when filling in a form, or by supplying only actual, genuine documents to obtain them?
My daughter was born not too long ago. The *entire* proof of her existence was a hospital record and a birth certificate - none of which could record her blood group or any other identifying details without my permission. She was never required to be subjected to ANY tests (DNA, blood, fingerprint, etc.). She never left my or my wife's sight during all her time in hospital, for even a fraction of a second. My wife was quite within my rights to remove her from hospital after signing only the birth certificate if she wanted. It contains a name that we gave her, a data and time, an official-looking stamp and a serial number (presumably unique). Somewhere, there is a copy of that information in her medical records and maybe a database.
That's the ONLY reliable evidence that my daughter exists - because even if I didn't sign it, the hospital would file a missing person's report for her the second she left the hospital. She hasn't needed fingerprints, or DNA tests or photographs to prove who she is, and she won't do even when she's 18 (with any luck). My wife and I are both eligible for government tax breaks because she exists. We get government-approved childcare. She gets a guaranteed school place. My wife gets free healthcare until she's a year old. We get *actual cash* from the Government every month because she exists. She even has a bank account (a Child Trust Fund). All on the basis that there's
Yeah but where would you stick the bodies? That controversy would generate more NIMBY's and form an infinite loop - maybe if we burned all the bodies, we could stick some sort of steam-powered turbine on the fire and with our infinite supply of NIMBY's (bouyed up to excess with those NIMBY's who don't like the stench from the fire)...
"So what if they want to fingerprint travelers entering the country? I think this is a good idea" "So what if they want to fingerprint travelers exiting the country? I think this is a good idea" "So what if they want to fingerprint travelers changing flights at the country? I think this is a good idea" "So what if they want to fingerprint travelers flying past the country? I think this is a good idea" "So what if they want to fingerprint drivers? I think this is a good idea" "So what if they want to fingerprint cyclists? I think this is a good idea" "So what if they want to fingerprint pedestrians? I think this is a good idea" "So what if they want to fingerprint everyone? I think this is a good idea"
It's called "unnecessary feature creep". Providing fingerprints at a border helps no more than providing other, non-biometric, information at the border, whether you've just murdered someone or not. Either you're on the database (and thus can be flagged in an instant by having an A.P.B. put out) or you're not. But unnecessary feature creep paves the way to a surveillance society. 50 years ago we didn't even *have* this technology, now it's being made compulsory if you want to fly, drive, cycle,... and eventually it's just compulsory.
Plus, that data is *personal* under most country's definitions of personal data. In the EU that means it's subject to the Data Protection Act which means I have a legal assurance (whether it's carried out or not is another matter) that the data will be kept private, not be disclosed except for explicit purposes and that only authorised people will see it. The US does not, and never has, provided such guarantees to visitors (even if it intended to break them anyway once they were on paper)
"Please tell me how this is an infringement on your 'rights'?"
I have the right to pass freely through almost every port in the world without undue let or hindrance. The US just removed that. I also have the right to protect my personal information and to refuse to give biometric data if I so wish. That right was just lost. Just because in America you didn't HAVE those rights in the first place, that's no reason to not understand why other people are upset (and we are by definition talking about international travellers here).
"The DHS/ICE already do biometric scanning of all *permanent* residents when they're entering the country, and I mean fingerprinting all the fingers in both of your hands. People with US Passports, by comparison, are waived through, which I think is a incredibly stupid thing."
Yep. Because you've just scanned the fingerprints of someone that, by definition, you have zero record of anywhere else (because they are not a US citizen until that time). Yet you let known criminals walk through because they have a US passport. That's just STUPID. And another nail in the "we need this" coffin. It's an *unnecessary* measure.
"Besides, the EU has been doing this for quite some time. Get over it."
No they haven't. I am an EU citizen and have NEVER provided my fingerprints EVER for ANY purpose in ANY country - I even have a 10 year British passport, a 10-year British driving license (both with EU-certified RFID etc. in them) and never had to provide anything but an authenticated photo and documentation (for the next renewal in a decade's time it might be more tricky to avoid being fingerprinted if people don't stand up to this crap NOW) - and only last year I travelled through 10 countries in the EU within two weeks on a cruise ship. In fact, that's why I'm not flying to the US ever again - that and the "we need the right to copy your laptop data and not tell you what we did with it" - that's a KILLER for me, because it means I would be breaking the law in my own country by disclosing private, personalised business data.
You're throwing a right away every time you say "I don't see a problem with it, so okay". What you should be saying is "I don't see the need. So why should I?". Whethe
And so *those* customers have a broken SLA and can do whatever is necessary to recover that. If they have a brain, it includes some sort of financial compensation and/or going to a different provider - standard contract terms, in other words. But that's no excuse for branding the whole of Google "enterprise-worthy" without being party to such an SLA.
Because they want to make SURE it works before they remove the label? I don't get the modern obsession with releasing stuff on day one and then patching endlessly. I'd much rather wait until a company says "Right, we're finally happy with it" before they start tagging things with version numbers. If that were the case, "Windows XP" would actually mean what we now call "XP SP2/SP3", "Windows 95" would have meant "Windows 98SE" and "Windows 7" would have meant "Vista SP2 with knobs on" - which happen to have been my exact definitions for usable systems in those particular product lines. And, to be honest, I'm not even happy deploying Vista/Windows 7 at the moment because there's just too many changes and problems to say that it's good, stable, reliable, etc. with most business software and network integrations.
A network admin does not just install software the second it is released. It takes *years* of testing, literally, before something is able to be categorised as good/working or not in a corporate environment. Just because there are a lot of cowboys who slap Automatic Updates on, along with every latest version they can find does not mean that's the best way to do things. Pick a version that works, stick with it, TEST it, and analyse every update for the exact impact (which means more testing). Otherwise, things are likely to just break "for no reason". Most educational establishments I've worked for still run XP with Office 2003. Why? Because it works and they know every nook, cranny and problem. When they get to that level of knowledge for Vista or (more likely) Windows 7, then they will think about deploying it.
If my company *relied* on Gmail, I'd want an SLA. It's that simple. If they won't provide one, then I wouldn't use them. And if your company is relying on Gmail *today* without an SLA, you're an idiot, pure and simple, or your needs are very rudimentary. As such, Gmail will not be taken seriously in an enterprise environment until that SLA exists and is to the satisfaction of both sides - it doesn't matter if they call it Beta, Alpha, or Zebedee. But when it does become available with a suitable SLA, what would I rather use for any company I work for? A webmail that's had five years of extremely public testing with millions or users, or something knocked off the back of Squirrelmail and stuck into an appliance hosted in some cheap "webmail" company's racks that gets a few customers a year? There are other, much more insurmountable problems with using Gmail for business than the name - SLA's, contracts, privacy and legal issues. All of those cost Gmail a million times more business customers than that magic word "Beta".
The "value" is not non-existent. It's just further down the food chain.
The users *themselves* don't have to be doing code-reviews. It's probably impossible for them to do so properly. I put my trust in a vast majority of the code I use every day to do the job it's supposed to. But I still prefer OS code, because I know that *someone* can look at it without bias and that there *are* people looking at it, looking for security holes and other problems. I can't find weaknesses in SSH or SSL code - bloody hell, that can get ridiculously deep and mathematical and I *have* a Maths/Computing degree. But *someone* can, someone who knows better than me and can find the problem. The fact that *I* can look at the code too is purely incidental. I have, in the past, modified the code of my kernel in order to do something that *I* needed to do there and then. That's beyond the value of any operating system that I can't modify.
For everyone else, the value comes from the fact that *someone* could do it. It's like TomTom map sharing - 99.99% of individuals will NEVER make a change to their maps and those that do won't necessarily upload it. But if they do, everyone can (potentially) benefit - if they choose to accept those changes. If the facility *wasn't* available, though, nobody would benefit.
The value comes from the ability of "an unbiased third-party user" (not any particular one, or even every one) being able to contribute back and improve the quality of the code/data. You don't WANT every user contributing back (you will get far too many conflicts and arguments and crap code), but you need the *potential* for them to do so, in order for the tiny minority that do want to and can contribute to improve the codebase for everyone.
What users need, and what the OS crowd are delivering are two entirely different concepts and THIS is the part that everybody fails to recognise. The OS crowd are interested in open code, interesting code, useful code, code that people can play with and learn from. The fact that it happens to make a damn good operating system / web browser too is just a bonus.
Please stop making the classic mistake that OS has to have a business case, become dominant on the desktop, cater to commercial needs, be used by Grandma's etc. It's a falsehood propogated by companies and individuals that make a lot of money by packaging up OS software in a convenient business-oriented way and selling it. There's a simple test for this - try and get a piece of code (properly licensed) that enables a new device into Linux without a proper code audit... you won't do it, or at best you'll get sidelined into an extremely experimental section and never enabled by default (and removed if the code isn't "fixed"). The purity of the code wins over the "business case" of having that device work at all. It doesn't stop certain companies bundling that code in a pre-compiled kernel or similar, but you've strayed out of the OS-arena long before you get that far.
Open Source is an academic pursuit to, in a way, prove that an OS, or a web browser, or a web server, or an email client can be fast, modern, more secure and still have understandable code while running on the same systems as the expensive, proprietry, insecure, slow systems that we see people buy every day.
As a percentage, less than 0.1% of people using OS code will *EVER* even see a line of code. Probably only about 25% actually even see the compilation process. And the number of people understanding, contributing, reviewing a particular piece of code will be literally in single digits for anything not world-wide. It doesn't matter, though, we *all* know that and we're not asking *anyone* to dig out a C manual, or learn gawk (what a way to carry an argument to absurdity). That's not the point. The point is that people can if they want things to change. And having *one* user want to change things benefits everyone, even if they never actually manage to make any changes - just questioning the code is useful. Past that,
Yeah, and when I read this story on TheReg / BBC, having read the previous stories covering the desired price increase, I nearly pissed myself. Well done to Google / Youtube for calling their bluff. This price *drop* (instead of their intended price increase) just goes to show that they can't afford to lose the exposure of being on YouTube (UK). So what does that tell you about their business model? It's not about "1 CD = 1 customer", it's about general brand, advertising, overall exposure and the majority of people wanting to just download and listen to music cheaply with restrictions.
They tried to profiteer, Google told them to get stuffed, they didn't listen, so Google pulled the plug (in the UK at least, you couldn't access YouTube music vids for certain songs), suddenly they're crawling back with a rate LOWER than they had started out from, because something's better than nothing. If they'd just kept their greed to themselves, they would have been on that original, higher rate.
"What isn't forgivable is that one of the columns on this bug spreadsheet is "Publicly Available" which implies to me that there is a list I'm not seeing of fixed bugs which would be annoying and probably even non-fixed bugs they purposefully suppress from public knowledge which is alarming!"
Hello. Closed source software. I damn well *expect* there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in Windows until someone "finds" them and posts about them publically, security related or not. I doubt even the militarised versions of Windows have *everything* they know about fixed - it's easier to just say "don't do this" or not include a certain tool/utility/feature than it is to fix it and document it.
Why on Earth would you ever find this alarming, or unforgivable? It's the whole point of closed-source software, so that you *never* know what's going on with the code and (hopefully) never see it.
Basically, Bletchley Park wants to be a museum. This is a significant attraction and would make it a lot of money. The House of Lords transcripts show that *everybody* recognises this. The trouble is, until it gets there (which may be several years), it can't afford to fund itself without what basically amounts to charity from third-parties.
Once it's an "official" museum, and it has spent the money it needs on re-building the falling down parts, it can attract thousands of visitors a year, and keep itself ticking over. Until then, they are just throwing money away on basic maintenance.
It *should* be a museum, or at the very least a permanently-funded attraction. It's probably one of the most humanitarian British achievements in centuries. They crunched numbers, invented great mathematics and the entire field of Computer Science, saved lives and ended wars by the application of skill and knowledge. What better inspiration can there be to a modern generation? Nobody was assassinated, no countries were trampled over, no indiginous peoples were wiped out by the work done there (which is already better than 99% of English history).
A post office engineer, a few mathematicians, a whole new invention, application of sheer brain power, whole new areas of science and mathematics discovered, a handful of people to flick switches and they save millions of lives and bring a war to an end without hurting *anyone*. For God's sake, what more do you need to stick the entire place into a big glass box and preserve it for a thousand years?
$260 for the version I saw, plus a new mouse, keyboard, monitor. Windows licensing? Dunno how that would work but I assume it's not allowed to use 2 people on 1 PC any more than it's allowed to use Terminal Services in similar situations without a licence.
Stop faffing about, and just damn a new damn machine. For the price of the gear mentioned above (which may or may not work with your particular application and/or 3D acceleration, is non-standard, hard to replace if it breaks etc.) you could easily get another PC without the hassle.
I can see only limited uses for Applica - EPOS possibly? - in those uses, almost always, a shared multi-seat X-Windows variant would easily do the job without buying any special cards. This is one of those products that you will never see in a shop and very, very rarely second-hand because so few people buy into it.
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No, just thinking the same way that everyone who I've ever seen hire IT staff thinks (hint: they generally have no knowledge of IT). I have games on my CV too. And I *have* had this line thrown back at me.
Then you're doing something wrong. I'm sorry for this, but I can't stand people who blame job markets for being unemployed. There's *always* work, so long as you know where to look.
If you have a CMU degree, developing software at home *casually* for 20 years is hardly an endorsement. I could say that same thing and I'm only 30. Being unemployed for 6 out of 7 years is also very, very bad. I'd think twice about even touching you for *any* job if I found that out. Hell, working in MacD's would have looked better - I've recommended IT staff for employment even though they've been working at supermarkets, etc. lately because I *know* it's a tough market and they need to take what they can get. It also makes me wonder what the hell you *have* been doing for those years, if you weren't working. Maybe you travelled, maybe you lived off your savings, maybe you started your own business, maybe you did other things, but hell - 6 entire years of unemployment is a bad place to start from. You think you're going to land an MS job with that on your record (not that I've ever seen the big deal with MS jobs, to be honest)?
And I've found jobs online and offline - the best ones are normally online but I've landed some lovely places offline too, usually by word-of-mouth (90% of my clients over the last nine years have been by word-of-mouth). And I don't mean "keyboard shuffler" jobs. I make a good living providing IT management to schools (state and private, primary, secondary, college, already supported for IT or not) in London - hardly an "easy" job to land, especially for a kid straight out of university, especially for one with *NO* work experience when they started, especially for nine years of full employment in a row (seven self-employed but often working for only a handful of clients on a regular basis) and *especially* when I was actually hired to work on critical IT systems in preference to the existing, "free", borough services provided to those schools & colleges. It's a matter of persistence and having something to show. Getting an interview and getting a job are vastly different things - the interview is HARD to get, the job shouldn't be if you've got to interview.
Something about your post suggests to me that you have FAR too high an expectation based on the fact that you have a skill that you have rarely demonstrated in a work environment, but mostly "at home" on toy projects. I can program in C, Z80 and x86 assembly. I can manage SQL databases. I've made my own toy operating systems. I can build and manage networks. None of that matters, even though I use it as part of my job. I'd love to have a job doing certain parts of that, but it's just not possible to fill my hours with the tasks I enjoy the most. I have dozens of those sorts of qualifications, projects, etc. too, they appear on my CV, but equally I have a full history of employment in a relevant sector. Recession? Stop blaming external factors for your expectations. England is in one of it's worst ever "recessions"... at the height of it, I left one job to seek out another because I wasn't enjoying it. I have a house with substantial mortgage, a wife who earns her share and (at the time) a newborn child. I competed for the new role against 50-year experienced IT managers, in a London borough, and walked into the job - not because I was cheap, not because I was perceived as being easily led, but because my history spoke for itself even though my employers understood 0.1% of what was on my CV.
I don't think "no one wanted to hire"... I think "no one wanted to hire YOU". I'd probably bin your CV if you have a six year unexplained gap in it and your biggest project was an MMORPG (I'm sorry, but it's a game... unless I'm a game developer, I *will* just ignore that project as nothing more than a hobby). I'd be worried that you can't find a job online (I view submissions from skilled IT people who submit on paper with suspicion if they could have filed online) - that's where the *best* IT jobs are... they are shor
I'm sorry, but what a heap of crap.
It's a payroll system. Yeah, it's a biggee, and yeah, it's got a lot of old information in it most probably. It's written in an old language (Oh no! The end of the world! Soon we might not be able to understand our systems! Hold on... we just had three attempts and replacing it with something new and FAILED because we didn't know half the stuff it was running). But you're not telling me that MILLIONS of dollars and YEARS of work by supposedly professional IT companies isn't enough to get ANYTHING working well enough to say "We don't need to worry about that part any more". You can get an OS written for that sort of money, or kit out an entire borough of schools with an integrated network.
What's *more* disgusting is that by the looks of it, the IT people at the University are probably barely getting a look in - it's being project-managed by external companies. Come on, stop faffing about; seriously, this is just stupid. Get your *existing* IT team, hire a bunch of programmers directly (hey, you're a University... I wonder where you can get a crapload of cheap, intellectual labour nearby, trained in the art of programming properly and designing the systems from the start, supervised and educated by people who have spent years using their technical, professional and theoretical expertise in the subject?) and just write the damn thing from the ground up. It wouldn't cost anywhere near as much money/time as you have wasted on a single company out of those that tried to sell you crap. Oh, and you can make it do what YOU want any time and you'll have the programmer's hanging around for the next few years with an incentive to keep the system running properly ("What grade did I give you for that paper on your design of the new payroll system? I've revised it, it just crashed.").
If it's THAT damn big, you want to start breaking the thing up into pieces, anyway. Anything that you can't find out all that it does in that many YEARS, you really want to be breaking into smaller and smaller parts and replicating them one at a time. Don't pretend that you're the only place on Earth that has that amount of employees, that amount of computer data, and require mordernisation.
Get rid of the project managing companies, get rid of the "slice-off-50%-for-myself" companies, get rid of the stupid contracts that REWARD failure, and give the project to people who will give you a system that will not only last for ever but be documented and updated and revised and bug-fixed and converted for ever and a day.
Oh, wow. Thanks. I've never heard of this and just had my new laptop repaired with what appears to be an identical problem.
It was a Clevo with a 9300M on it and the symptoms sound exactly the same - 6 months in, the graphics starting playing up to the point that the computer just hung if you touched the keyboard or moved it in any way, always with graphical corruption, and sometimes Linux/Windows would just carry on regardless, but with corrupt graphics. Sometimes there'd be a kernel panic or freeze, but the graphics were the main culprit all the time.
I've just had the mainboard replaced - let's hope that they replaced it with one of the "newer" designs.
"If I were the head of Microsoft I'd be tempted to simply say, "Fine. Goodbye" and pull all Microsoft products off the shelves permanently. Then let's see who starts screaming, the lawyers, or the consumers. Microsoft (or any company) can never satisfy a bunch of lawyers out to rack up legal bills and who really don't give a damn one way or the other but need the work."
Oh, please, please, do. The majority of Microsoft revenue comes from the EU. Please do this, now, Microsoft! What better way to "win" than to pull out of your largest market, force people to look into alternatives such as OO.Org, demonstrate that reliance on even the largest closed-source company actually puts governments and businesses into a WORSE position, and forces people to think "Fine. Goodbye." the next time they think about buying an MS or similar product.
It will never happen, but everyone who *knows* IT would want to this happen. It'd guarantee work for the next five years for me, converting over people to OS alternatives (which I already do, as well as work with MS day-in-day-out). The consumers WOULDN'T scream, they just wouldn't be able to get an MS PC for a while, maybe a year or two, and they probably wouldn't notice. And then instantly Dell, etc. would just start selling Linux or whatever the hell they wanted and suddenly save a TON of money that they can profit from by charging the "normal" price (+Windows tax).
This is what **I** want. What MS does is immaterial at this point, it's up to the EU. But pulling out would be the most STUPID business decision in the history of the world... in fact MS Eire / UK would probably be sued out of existence by its shareholders within a year.
Like all things, this can't be a blanket warning - you can't say "tech's can do what they want your computer" (Data Protection Act, etc. would then pretty much mean that you could NEVER use an external tech), and you can't say "tech's can ignore illegal content they find accidentally".
Let's have a car analogy - If you put your car into service, and the garage finds bloodspots in the boot or bits of flesh or a dead body, damn yes they should be calling the cops to take it further. But should they be scraping DNA off the handles and running it through the national databases? No.
If I was to stumble across something illegal, or some outside factor made me suspect, I would expect to be able to use that as evidence. To not be able to because it might invade the person's privacy is stupid. Similarly, allowing me a license to snoop into anything I want just because I've been asked to look at a computer is stupid (much like a garage mechanic pulling your GPS logs from your car and seeing everywhere you've been when you only took it in to change a bulb). And in this case, it's suggested/assumed/proven? that the technician in question was doing things reasonably in line with his job.
Quite often I will open the first document in My Documents, or load up the first image I find in order to check file associations etc. work - I usually ask for an "example" file for the problem that the user then points me to, but if the user isn't around, I have to just pick one at random. Hell, I've searched for "a" in the Find File dialogs before now and then hit the first file that crops up. If I'm restoring backups, or copying files, I *need* to do this to ensure my job was done properly. The tech did nothing wrong here, unless they were snooping into every folder just on the off-chance of finding something. If the customer's manner or the programs installed, or even just a vague hint in an email they happened to flick through while checking the connection worked suggested that illegal content was on the computer, then the tech is in a very tricky position. They can't just ignore the possibility and they can't go reporting grandmas to the police because of a bit of misdirected spam. If the AV finds a virus on a machine in a file named "underage girls" or similar and pops it up in a big red warning message, then that tech HAS to be certain of what that contains. If it's illegal, when he DOES report it the current law in most countries means he'll be crapping himself until the trial in case the police decide to arrest him for having seen it.
As an example that I've dealt with: A staff laptop had a virus. In order to get at the data on the machine, I had to look up the virus details and block its entry points and get a list of files that would be *potentially* infected by it (this was all done on an enclosed system, obviously, but the laptop had been running with the virus for several days). The list of possibly affected files happened to include "randomly-created filenames" in some sub-folders of Windows. When I checked whether they existed, I found a randomly-named subdir with thousands of sub-folders, each with hundreds of large files in. The names of the folders hinted at the sort of illegal activity we're discussing here. In the end, it was actually quite innocent because the folders were Kazaa honey-traps - the virus ran a P2P client and hoped to trick people into downloading copies of itself by putting itself in files/folders named after other things it found on Kazaa (which happened to include some extremely illegal stuff). Do you report that to the police or not? Does a named folder automatically incriminate a user even if they're unaware of its existence? Is it worth wasting police time checking *every* computer that gets that virus for every filename and having it run through a police lab, possibly taking months or years to come back with a result? (Wasting police time is an offence, too, you know).
Everything comes down to "reasonable" behaviour. Is it reasonable for someone who do
Then you're a pillock.
GS are not required to help, support, or boost someone else's business model - they just give customers what they want in exchange for the most that those customers will pay. They have found a way to do that and make a tidy profit. If they aren't around in a year's time, that's *nothing* to do with the games industry. If that means that your release date sees less sales, tough. If the price was lower, you'd see more sales over a longer period and would make more money (even Valve admit this for DLC - they make more money on the repeated weekend sales than they do at big launches).
If Gamestop want to ruin their business, that's not your problem. From what you say, it will HELP you, so you should be encouraging them to under-pre-order in order to force you to solve the problem and thus put them out of business. If you're finding yourself having to *circumvent* people buying less of your product and selling it on (legitimately) for a lower price to customers who want to buy it, then there's something wrong. If someone can make an entire *business* out of re-selling your games (but of significantly less physical quality) cheaper, then there's something wrong *your* end that you're not taking care of.
And if you *deliberately* buy a product because of the principle of supporting an industry you know is struggling, then you're an idiot, whether you work in that industry or not - coal miners didn't go out and burn more coal at home when the industry started to fade. It's like saying "I know all the car companies are going bust, I'm going to go and pay them twice as much for the same car". Any *normal* person is actually thinking "They're going bust, I can screw them for a lower price", EVEN IF they spend their days hating people who do exactly that thing to them. People generally do *not* pay for things because of the principle behind it (and certainly not in the hopes that it will save their own jobs) and they *definitely* don't do this en masse once you take an average of the collective mindset. If you genuinely think that you're helping in *any* way by doing this, then the industry is in a much worse position than I thought.
You really think that there isn't a SINGLE Apple employee who couldn't get hold of a Pre if they wanted to, or that they don't already have one? Even in their hardware, PR, developer etc. departments? And that "revelation" was basically revealed by plugging the device in and looking at the usbid... lsusb would have done it in a single command and there are even prettier interfaces for Windows for free.
Obscurity is a waste of time when you're hoping the *designers* of a system don't realise how you've worked around it - it's like "telling" the DVD forum about the CSS hack - they already know *how* you circumvent it, but they may not know the exact method by which you discovered it (that's the bit that *doesn't* matter). The designers of any such system already know, or it would take seconds to make 10 guesses at how, and it would take minutes to actually discover how even without basic knowledge - you just run it through a debug version of iTunes and see what happens.
Don't be silly. It's like saying Microsoft don't know how people are installing pirate copies of Windows, or upping the TCP connection limit, or Nintendo not knowing how the Wii hacks work. It takes *seconds* for them to work it out once it's been revealed, even if they would never have thought of it. They DESIGNED the system, after all.
Looks like PC gaming is likely to be heading more and more towards procedural generation of the universe. Real-time shadows, dynamic lighting and now, dynamic sounds.
It'll all make it more realistic (but at a high CPU cost!) - being able to not have "splish, splosh, splish, splosh" when wading through water but a full-on sound relative to individual parts - bullet shells, limbs, objects in the water, etc. We won't see it *practically* for years, but gaming is getting closer and closer to that dream of "virtual reality", where you won't be able to tell the difference between a real scene and a computer generated one without touching it.
I think you can make uses of it in gaming too, extending the basic science to a consumer level - skim stones across water that sound like they're being skimmed (and with proper fluid physics similar to that which we already have, individual sploshes and waves etc. affecting that stone) - or be able to throw a coin into water behind an enemy and see if you can use it to distract him. Maybe even, the bubbles that you breath underwater hitting the surface with their true sounds, thus giving your position away if you were hoping that holding your breath would let that enemy walk past you without hearing you.
When you play games, you don't notice the "cheats" at first - the static sounds that just play on certain events, the pre-lit textures, the echoing of sounds generated inside a certain fixed area. Even in things like HL2, boxes thrown into water either splosh or don't, splosh based on certain primitive criteria that provide a few levels of believability. But as new technology comes along to make it possible to actually *create* that effect rather than script it, everything suddenly feels much more alive.
Dynamic sound has to be one of the next "big" areas - hitting a wall with an axe in a game used to give "Doink", then it gave a selection of "Doink, Donk, Doink, Donk" sounds each time. Moving forwards, the only way is to actually determine exact angles, shapes of the wall (proper destructible objects for everything are, sadly, still only a dream) and to generate a simulation of the sound it would produce (how cool would it be that if you strike the axe slightly off, you get a reverberating axe coming back at you, with a horrible sound that tells you not to do it?. Maybe even with the axe breaking on a critical point if you mis-use it too much, e.g. try and chop at a steel wall).
We already have proper echoing and other effects available and 7.1 surround can take away the whole "Where the hell did that come from?" effect if it's too clinically applied. But having sounds *generated* by the interactions within an environment... wow. Imagine Left4Dead-style atmosphere, but with proper echo effects... you walk towards a corner and from around it, a zombie stumbles into a puddle - suddenly the sound not only tells you there's something near, but the echoes from the corners confuse just as in real life, and the sound is only the tiniest little splish, and it may even be possible to determine the *type* of zombie around the corner by the type of splash it makes - something with a large flat foot would create an enormous popping bubble of a sound, something with stick-like appendages would generate barely a ripple.
This will have a small but critical effect on gaming and, I imagine, a million other uses. But we're *years* away from seeing it used.
Hotmail's buttons regularly break in Opera (basically a few days just after every new version of Opera is released for the past five, six versions?). "Junk" broke in Opera a few months back (would not execute the Javascript, so you couldn't junk messages). Then message highlighting. Attachments broke a while back too. It happens quite regularly, and reliably. At one point, it was even impossible to do anything under "Options" with Opera once you logged in. However, if you set EVERYTHING to pretend to be IE for about 5 sub-domains of live.com and hotmail.com and hotmail.msn.com then it will work just fine most of the time. At least, until they break something again. With stuff set to Identify As Opera, a lot more breaks or you get the "basic HTML" versions.
I login to Hotmail every day, with the latest version of Opera, and about once every other month myself and my brother (completely seperate network, ISP, machine, version of Opera, even operating system) notice breakage simultaneously and warn each other. Whenever it happens, IE and Firefox work just fine.
ddrescue
But to be honest, if you've hit that point for an "enthusiast" user, then you're already on your last legs. If you ain't got a backup, forget it - the chances of getting one particular file you've lost might be good, the chances of recovering any significant amounts and being able to verify their integrity are bad.
Plus, with SSD's, flash, memory cards, etc. the chances of being able to recover *anything* from a faulty drive without professional equipment are fast approaching zero. Most USB Flash drives just "die" when they hit their write limits, rather than fail gracefully into read-only mode.
"I checked the site statistics for my site and IE6 went from 15% of the hits in April to 0% in May."
Well, duh, because no sod can see anything in IE6 - visit once and never come back again.
This is the sort of crap that Opera has thrown at it - email a complaint to MSN, the BBC, any large website about parts not working in Opera (although they all do now), and you only ever got "nobody uses Opera to visit us"... OF COURSE NOT! BECAUSE IT DOESN'T BLOODY WORK!
It's like saying "Since we started banning unhappy people, our store recorded that 100% of customers in the store were happy with us!"
Do I know you? If not, bugger off.
Do I trust that you know what you're doing enough to not click Delete etc. ? If not, bugger off.
Do I think that you'll lend it on again, let anyone else use it, or are using it where it's likely someone will "steal" it for a laugh or take it over or pass it around or make off with it? If so, bugger off.
Do you understand the importance that the use of that laptop, and the data on it, means to me? If not, bugger off.
I'm wary of lending my PC to even family, it rarely comes back the same way it was given and 99% of everybody has a laptop in the big colleges/universities nowadays - it's one of those "Mum and Dad bought me this for college" items.
And the magic word is "No". If you don't want to do it, just don't do it. Of course they'll whinge and moan, but then that's up to THEM to get their own laptop and guess what? When people borrow theirs and start breaking it, they'll whinge and moan too. And when they then refuse to lend it, they'll get whinged and moaned at.
I never lend personal laptops except to a (literal) handful of people, I *NEVER* lend work laptops at all. If someone wants to be left *unsupervised* with a laptop of mine, I have to *know* that it'll come back in the same state it left. And if a guest wants to use a laptop, I have old, crappy spares - enough to load a webpage, not enough for them to be happy using it for anything other than the essentials (e.g. checking for *vital* emails).
Hell, I've got a previous post on here about how I lock down my wireless so that guests staying with me *can't* use it unless I specifically let them (not just a WPA key or similar) and when they *do* use it, they know that everything is monitored and filtered.
Call me unsociable, or uncooperative, or untrusting, I don't care. It's *my* property, it's *incredibly* expensive property, it's incredibly fragile property and it's loaded to the hilt with data that's important to me and will cost me a lot of time to recreate (even if it's only the icon layout, or a particular set of settings).
This kind of fits in with my thinking.
When I was starting out in programming, I just wanted results. I wasn't concerned about performance because the computer was a million times faster than me. I was most concerned about how many "non-vital" keywords were necessary to describe what I wanted the machine to do (e.g. "void main(...)" isn't *vital* because it's just boilerplate. However "if", "for", "while" etc. would be vital - and even for/while are just cousins), and how many of the vital keywords (i.e. those that specifically interfered with the way my program would *actually* operate... a "static" here or there would hardly matter in the course of most programs) were "obvious". Java failed miserably at this... I mean, come on: System.out.println() and the standard wrapping take up too much room.
So, BASIC was an *ideal* first language (sorry, but it was, and the reason nobody uses it much now is because EVERYONE has used it and moved on to something else - doesn't mean it "breaks" people). In this regard, even things like C aren't too bad - 30-50 keywords / operators depending on the flavour, all quite simple - you could memorise them perfectly in an afternoon. However things like Forth and Perl can be hideous.
And even C++ is tending towards the stupid. Believe it or not, even things like bash scripting come out quite well under that test. And, to me, that correlates with the amount of effort I have to put in to write in a particular language. If I just want to automate something, bash scripting is fast and easy. Most of the stuff I write is a "one-job program" that will never be reused. If I want to write a program to work something out or show somebody how something is done programmatically, BASIC is a *perfect* prototyping language (no standard boilerplate, no guessing obscure keywords, etc.). If I want to write a program that does things fast, or accurately, or precisely, or for something else to build upon, C is perfect.
I see no real need to learn other languages in depth past what I'm required to know for my work. I have *zero* interest in spending weeks and weeks and weeks learning YAPL (Yet Another Programming Language) just to spent 90% of that time memorising obscure keywords, boilerplate and the language's shortcuts to things like vectors, string parsing, etc. If I was going to do that, I'd just learn a C library or similar.
I think that these graphs correlate quite well with that thinking. Let's be honest, 99% of programming is reusing other code or shortcuts - short of programming in a Turing machine, C is one of the simplest languages to learn because it *doesn't* have a million shortcuts... you want to iterate over an array or create a hash / linked list, etc. you have to do it yourself from basic elements. In modern programming, that means a one line include of a well-written library. As far as I was concerned when learning it, even the "pointer++ increases by the size of the pointer" was far too smarty-pants for me, but incredibly useful.
But with C++, I instantly lost interest because it's just too damn verbose to do a simple job. Java OOP is slightly better but still nasty once things get complicated and the underlying "functional" language is basically a C-a-like.
I'm a fuddy-duddy. Old fashioned. If I write a program, the damn computer will damn well do instruction 1 followed by instruction 2 with the minimum of flying off into libraries and class systems. If I want 4 bytes of memory to change type, then I will damn well have them change type. And I'll even get to specify *what* 4 bytes of RAM if I want and I'll clean up after them if it's necessary. That's how I think, so things like C match perfectly when I want to code. The fact that C is damn powerful, fast, low-level and so common also add to it's appeal.
I worry about what will happen when people *only* code in OOP languages. The abstraction is so large that people forget that they are still telling a computer to handle bits and bytes and suddenly they get lazy. M
Surely you can't be serious?
"in my country we have one, with fingerprints and everything, and it's far safer to purchase anything with a credit card, etc."
A misconception. How is it *safer* to buy something using a fingerprint (whether that's used directly or via some sort of remote verification because of some card you hold with one on it)? To be of *any* practical use day-to-day you would need a fingerprint *reader* on every machine that could possibly be used to sell you things. And that means that the hardware is common, and thus usually very easily hacked (fake, hacked and compromised Chip&PIN terminals were doing the rounds within months of its release, if not before, in the UK). Let's not even get into how easy it is to fake a fingerprint *unnoticeably* in front of the casual user. And guess where I can get a copy of your fingerprint? Anywhere you touch, ever, in your entire life. Like those millions of payment machines, posssibly? So I can make a fake ID with your fingerprint, or fake your fingerprint from your ID. It really is a pathetic biometric. I wouldn't trust it to open my garage door, let alone my bank account.
That card you carry, with fingerprint data, is NO better than any other card you carry. I agree wholeheartedly that they should be centralised to be effective (it helps catch fraudsters to do that) but fingerprinting DOES NOT HELP, especially not with the current state of the technology.
The trouble is that a centralised repository of such information weakens EVERY link - it becomes MUCH easier to fake an identity in its entirety from the inside of the organisations controlling it, it becomes easier to attack, it standardises on a format which aids forgeries (especially if that standard is international - make a fake passport for some horrible third-world country where nobody has the capability to even check it's genuine and you can roam internationally on a fake ID).
As a little factette - government statistics revealed last year that there are over 80m unique, official "identifications" (National Insurance numbers, driving licences, passports, etc. issued directly by the proper authorities, NOT fakes) in the UK, and a confirmed population including immigrants, illegal or otherwise, of only 60m; thus every fourth ID that exists is fake, but has official documents to proof their identity and an entry on the database. Large criminals are often caught with dozens, if not hundreds, of officially-supplied ID's in false names. Do you think that comes about through making an accident when filling in a form, or by supplying only actual, genuine documents to obtain them?
My daughter was born not too long ago. The *entire* proof of her existence was a hospital record and a birth certificate - none of which could record her blood group or any other identifying details without my permission. She was never required to be subjected to ANY tests (DNA, blood, fingerprint, etc.). She never left my or my wife's sight during all her time in hospital, for even a fraction of a second. My wife was quite within my rights to remove her from hospital after signing only the birth certificate if she wanted. It contains a name that we gave her, a data and time, an official-looking stamp and a serial number (presumably unique). Somewhere, there is a copy of that information in her medical records and maybe a database.
That's the ONLY reliable evidence that my daughter exists - because even if I didn't sign it, the hospital would file a missing person's report for her the second she left the hospital. She hasn't needed fingerprints, or DNA tests or photographs to prove who she is, and she won't do even when she's 18 (with any luck). My wife and I are both eligible for government tax breaks because she exists. We get government-approved childcare. She gets a guaranteed school place. My wife gets free healthcare until she's a year old. We get *actual cash* from the Government every month because she exists. She even has a bank account (a Child Trust Fund). All on the basis that there's
Yeah but where would you stick the bodies? That controversy would generate more NIMBY's and form an infinite loop - maybe if we burned all the bodies, we could stick some sort of steam-powered turbine on the fire and with our infinite supply of NIMBY's (bouyed up to excess with those NIMBY's who don't like the stench from the fire)...
"So what if they want to fingerprint travelers entering the country? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint travelers exiting the country? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint travelers changing flights at the country? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint travelers flying past the country? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint drivers? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint cyclists? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint pedestrians? I think this is a good idea"
"So what if they want to fingerprint everyone? I think this is a good idea"
It's called "unnecessary feature creep". Providing fingerprints at a border helps no more than providing other, non-biometric, information at the border, whether you've just murdered someone or not. Either you're on the database (and thus can be flagged in an instant by having an A.P.B. put out) or you're not. But unnecessary feature creep paves the way to a surveillance society. 50 years ago we didn't even *have* this technology, now it's being made compulsory if you want to fly, drive, cycle, ... and eventually it's just compulsory.
Plus, that data is *personal* under most country's definitions of personal data. In the EU that means it's subject to the Data Protection Act which means I have a legal assurance (whether it's carried out or not is another matter) that the data will be kept private, not be disclosed except for explicit purposes and that only authorised people will see it. The US does not, and never has, provided such guarantees to visitors (even if it intended to break them anyway once they were on paper)
"Please tell me how this is an infringement on your 'rights'?"
I have the right to pass freely through almost every port in the world without undue let or hindrance. The US just removed that. I also have the right to protect my personal information and to refuse to give biometric data if I so wish. That right was just lost. Just because in America you didn't HAVE those rights in the first place, that's no reason to not understand why other people are upset (and we are by definition talking about international travellers here).
"The DHS/ICE already do biometric scanning of all *permanent* residents when they're entering the country, and I mean fingerprinting all the fingers in both of your hands. People with US Passports, by comparison, are waived through, which I think is a incredibly stupid thing."
Yep. Because you've just scanned the fingerprints of someone that, by definition, you have zero record of anywhere else (because they are not a US citizen until that time). Yet you let known criminals walk through because they have a US passport. That's just STUPID. And another nail in the "we need this" coffin. It's an *unnecessary* measure.
"Besides, the EU has been doing this for quite some time. Get over it."
No they haven't. I am an EU citizen and have NEVER provided my fingerprints EVER for ANY purpose in ANY country - I even have a 10 year British passport, a 10-year British driving license (both with EU-certified RFID etc. in them) and never had to provide anything but an authenticated photo and documentation (for the next renewal in a decade's time it might be more tricky to avoid being fingerprinted if people don't stand up to this crap NOW) - and only last year I travelled through 10 countries in the EU within two weeks on a cruise ship. In fact, that's why I'm not flying to the US ever again - that and the "we need the right to copy your laptop data and not tell you what we did with it" - that's a KILLER for me, because it means I would be breaking the law in my own country by disclosing private, personalised business data.
You're throwing a right away every time you say "I don't see a problem with it, so okay". What you should be saying is "I don't see the need. So why should I?". Whethe
And so *those* customers have a broken SLA and can do whatever is necessary to recover that. If they have a brain, it includes some sort of financial compensation and/or going to a different provider - standard contract terms, in other words. But that's no excuse for branding the whole of Google "enterprise-worthy" without being party to such an SLA.
Because they want to make SURE it works before they remove the label? I don't get the modern obsession with releasing stuff on day one and then patching endlessly. I'd much rather wait until a company says "Right, we're finally happy with it" before they start tagging things with version numbers. If that were the case, "Windows XP" would actually mean what we now call "XP SP2/SP3", "Windows 95" would have meant "Windows 98SE" and "Windows 7" would have meant "Vista SP2 with knobs on" - which happen to have been my exact definitions for usable systems in those particular product lines. And, to be honest, I'm not even happy deploying Vista/Windows 7 at the moment because there's just too many changes and problems to say that it's good, stable, reliable, etc. with most business software and network integrations.
A network admin does not just install software the second it is released. It takes *years* of testing, literally, before something is able to be categorised as good/working or not in a corporate environment. Just because there are a lot of cowboys who slap Automatic Updates on, along with every latest version they can find does not mean that's the best way to do things. Pick a version that works, stick with it, TEST it, and analyse every update for the exact impact (which means more testing). Otherwise, things are likely to just break "for no reason". Most educational establishments I've worked for still run XP with Office 2003. Why? Because it works and they know every nook, cranny and problem. When they get to that level of knowledge for Vista or (more likely) Windows 7, then they will think about deploying it.
If my company *relied* on Gmail, I'd want an SLA. It's that simple. If they won't provide one, then I wouldn't use them. And if your company is relying on Gmail *today* without an SLA, you're an idiot, pure and simple, or your needs are very rudimentary. As such, Gmail will not be taken seriously in an enterprise environment until that SLA exists and is to the satisfaction of both sides - it doesn't matter if they call it Beta, Alpha, or Zebedee. But when it does become available with a suitable SLA, what would I rather use for any company I work for? A webmail that's had five years of extremely public testing with millions or users, or something knocked off the back of Squirrelmail and stuck into an appliance hosted in some cheap "webmail" company's racks that gets a few customers a year? There are other, much more insurmountable problems with using Gmail for business than the name - SLA's, contracts, privacy and legal issues. All of those cost Gmail a million times more business customers than that magic word "Beta".
The "value" is not non-existent. It's just further down the food chain.
The users *themselves* don't have to be doing code-reviews. It's probably impossible for them to do so properly. I put my trust in a vast majority of the code I use every day to do the job it's supposed to. But I still prefer OS code, because I know that *someone* can look at it without bias and that there *are* people looking at it, looking for security holes and other problems. I can't find weaknesses in SSH or SSL code - bloody hell, that can get ridiculously deep and mathematical and I *have* a Maths/Computing degree. But *someone* can, someone who knows better than me and can find the problem. The fact that *I* can look at the code too is purely incidental. I have, in the past, modified the code of my kernel in order to do something that *I* needed to do there and then. That's beyond the value of any operating system that I can't modify.
For everyone else, the value comes from the fact that *someone* could do it. It's like TomTom map sharing - 99.99% of individuals will NEVER make a change to their maps and those that do won't necessarily upload it. But if they do, everyone can (potentially) benefit - if they choose to accept those changes. If the facility *wasn't* available, though, nobody would benefit.
The value comes from the ability of "an unbiased third-party user" (not any particular one, or even every one) being able to contribute back and improve the quality of the code/data. You don't WANT every user contributing back (you will get far too many conflicts and arguments and crap code), but you need the *potential* for them to do so, in order for the tiny minority that do want to and can contribute to improve the codebase for everyone.
What users need, and what the OS crowd are delivering are two entirely different concepts and THIS is the part that everybody fails to recognise. The OS crowd are interested in open code, interesting code, useful code, code that people can play with and learn from. The fact that it happens to make a damn good operating system / web browser too is just a bonus.
Please stop making the classic mistake that OS has to have a business case, become dominant on the desktop, cater to commercial needs, be used by Grandma's etc. It's a falsehood propogated by companies and individuals that make a lot of money by packaging up OS software in a convenient business-oriented way and selling it. There's a simple test for this - try and get a piece of code (properly licensed) that enables a new device into Linux without a proper code audit... you won't do it, or at best you'll get sidelined into an extremely experimental section and never enabled by default (and removed if the code isn't "fixed"). The purity of the code wins over the "business case" of having that device work at all. It doesn't stop certain companies bundling that code in a pre-compiled kernel or similar, but you've strayed out of the OS-arena long before you get that far.
Open Source is an academic pursuit to, in a way, prove that an OS, or a web browser, or a web server, or an email client can be fast, modern, more secure and still have understandable code while running on the same systems as the expensive, proprietry, insecure, slow systems that we see people buy every day.
As a percentage, less than 0.1% of people using OS code will *EVER* even see a line of code. Probably only about 25% actually even see the compilation process. And the number of people understanding, contributing, reviewing a particular piece of code will be literally in single digits for anything not world-wide. It doesn't matter, though, we *all* know that and we're not asking *anyone* to dig out a C manual, or learn gawk (what a way to carry an argument to absurdity). That's not the point. The point is that people can if they want things to change. And having *one* user want to change things benefits everyone, even if they never actually manage to make any changes - just questioning the code is useful. Past that,
Yeah, and when I read this story on TheReg / BBC, having read the previous stories covering the desired price increase, I nearly pissed myself. Well done to Google / Youtube for calling their bluff. This price *drop* (instead of their intended price increase) just goes to show that they can't afford to lose the exposure of being on YouTube (UK). So what does that tell you about their business model? It's not about "1 CD = 1 customer", it's about general brand, advertising, overall exposure and the majority of people wanting to just download and listen to music cheaply with restrictions.
They tried to profiteer, Google told them to get stuffed, they didn't listen, so Google pulled the plug (in the UK at least, you couldn't access YouTube music vids for certain songs), suddenly they're crawling back with a rate LOWER than they had started out from, because something's better than nothing. If they'd just kept their greed to themselves, they would have been on that original, higher rate.
"What isn't forgivable is that one of the columns on this bug spreadsheet is "Publicly Available" which implies to me that there is a list I'm not seeing of fixed bugs which would be annoying and probably even non-fixed bugs they purposefully suppress from public knowledge which is alarming!"
Hello. Closed source software. I damn well *expect* there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in Windows until someone "finds" them and posts about them publically, security related or not. I doubt even the militarised versions of Windows have *everything* they know about fixed - it's easier to just say "don't do this" or not include a certain tool/utility/feature than it is to fix it and document it.
Why on Earth would you ever find this alarming, or unforgivable? It's the whole point of closed-source software, so that you *never* know what's going on with the code and (hopefully) never see it.
You haven't kept up with the story elsewhere.
Basically, Bletchley Park wants to be a museum. This is a significant attraction and would make it a lot of money. The House of Lords transcripts show that *everybody* recognises this. The trouble is, until it gets there (which may be several years), it can't afford to fund itself without what basically amounts to charity from third-parties.
Once it's an "official" museum, and it has spent the money it needs on re-building the falling down parts, it can attract thousands of visitors a year, and keep itself ticking over. Until then, they are just throwing money away on basic maintenance.
It *should* be a museum, or at the very least a permanently-funded attraction. It's probably one of the most humanitarian British achievements in centuries. They crunched numbers, invented great mathematics and the entire field of Computer Science, saved lives and ended wars by the application of skill and knowledge. What better inspiration can there be to a modern generation? Nobody was assassinated, no countries were trampled over, no indiginous peoples were wiped out by the work done there (which is already better than 99% of English history).
A post office engineer, a few mathematicians, a whole new invention, application of sheer brain power, whole new areas of science and mathematics discovered, a handful of people to flick switches and they save millions of lives and bring a war to an end without hurting *anyone*. For God's sake, what more do you need to stick the entire place into a big glass box and preserve it for a thousand years?
$260 for the version I saw, plus a new mouse, keyboard, monitor. Windows licensing? Dunno how that would work but I assume it's not allowed to use 2 people on 1 PC any more than it's allowed to use Terminal Services in similar situations without a licence.
Stop faffing about, and just damn a new damn machine. For the price of the gear mentioned above (which may or may not work with your particular application and/or 3D acceleration, is non-standard, hard to replace if it breaks etc.) you could easily get another PC without the hassle.
I can see only limited uses for Applica - EPOS possibly? - in those uses, almost always, a shared multi-seat X-Windows variant would easily do the job without buying any special cards. This is one of those products that you will never see in a shop and very, very rarely second-hand because so few people buy into it.