I think you're too concerned with the mechanics rather than the end result.
Okay, what about the modern technology of the flashbang, smoke grenade, tear gas, mustard gas and other chemical warfare agents, water cannons and the pain beam?
D&D wizards have an equivalent of pretty much all of that. Flashbang: blindness/deafness Smoke grenade: obscuring mist Tear gas: stinking cloud Mustard gas: horrid wilting, cloudkill Water cannon: grease (sort of, no reason they couldn't put oil in a water cannon)
And I'm pretty sure some of those must have been possible in medieval times. Somebody must have tried to make a smoke screen at some point, and there's the thing about using polished shields to blind the enemy.
machine gun does not control anyone. it does not prevent you from moving your finger.
No? Why did all those people suddenly start digging trenches then?
Of course it doesn't physically prevent them from moving, it simply makes it suicidal to do so in some cases. But this isn't about the mechanics of it, but about the result it has.
Also, Agincourt is very much a "crowd control" sort of setting. Just imagine a wizard summoned the rain.
you hurl a grenade to the emplacement, and it ends the thing.
You hurl a throwing axe at the wizard, and it ends the thing too. I fail to see much difference.
show me 3 battles in which tree trunks were rolled thus effectively. braveheart doesnt create historical commonplace.
Choosing the field of battle is a form of crowd control, so is the building of fortifications. In modern times, you have tear gas and flashbangs.
in rpgs you dont have armies. 4 people do not constitute an army.
I wasn't talking about armies in the previous sentence.
Having an unbalanced group is simply suicidal. If you're some kind of hero on a quest, it won't take long for your enemies to figure out that a few archers could easily deal with a few people with swords and no horses.
arch demons, strong and smart enough to marshal entire armies stupidly attacking some party member designated as 'tank', and getting its ass spanked. 'threat' my ass.
I think it makes sense for the most part, you just see the consequences in-game and not what actually happens.
Eg, suppose you're going against a fighter and a wizard. You really want to get the wizard. But the wizard knows he's squishy and hides behind the fighter, and the fighter knows the wizard is squishy and gets right in your face. You could try to go around him, but the fighter is going to use the chance to stab you in the back if you try. So you don't. So the fighter provides a threat by just being there, and a reason not to try to attack somebody else.
It wouldn't work that way with an archer or a wizard as if they don't have their equipment ready they can't attack at a moment's notice.
Agree about that archers should be more effective, though.
insanely powerful, stupid mage class. press a button, and freeze 10 enemies to sleep or something. spells 'ignore' armor. the 'crowd control' stupidity, which has never existed in any real battle situation,
Sure it does exist, the crowd controller is the guy with the machinegun, or flamethrower. In medieval times, it'd be the guy who sets off some elaborate trap, like making a tree trunk roll down the battlefield.
Wizards would naturally fall into that role too. If you can magically set somebody on fire, it seems logical that the effect doesn't have to be limited to a single person. You can set an area on fire and make things very inconvenient for a group of people.
no flexibility. you HAVE to have a tank, a healer, a controller and a damage dealer. the same old shit everywhere, every game. no variation. no room for an all melee warband or all archer bandit squad.
You can do it, it just wouldn't work well. In a game you're in for a long time engagement. If your team is all guys with swords, at some point archers in the trees will snipe all of you with no effort. If all archers, fighters can ambush you. There's a reason why armies aren't all made of archers.
Porn is fine and all, but I doubt a channel that would show it right after spongebob (or whatever they air these days) would get a very good reception, even from the people that like the porn.
You can screw up your life with pretty much anything if you try.
You could destroy your life with astronomy for instance by buying too much expensive equipment and staying up until 4 AM to look at pretty stuff in the sky, then getting fired for falling asleep at work. Really everything can be done to excess.
Back when I was younger it happened quite often that I would be a complete zombie at school and not understand anything, because I decided LOTR was just too interesting and spent until 5 AM with the book in the bed. As you can see even before I had a computer at all I could find a reason to skip sleep.
Oddly enough nobody ever considers that reading can be addictive, while I often find it very tempting to try to finish a book today. I'd find myself reading at 3 AM thinking that there are only 60 pages left and I really want to know how it ends!
Stealing $5 from you isn't so much an annoyance as it is downright illegal. That's a different matter entirely.
First, they don't have to outright steal it. Then can easily bury somewhere in the contract in a 3pt font that for instance you get to check your voicemail for free once per day, and a second check is going to cost you $5. Or something else of that sort.
Second, how is that not regulation? I don't see how "It's illegal to take $5 unlawfully" is not regulation, but "It's illegal to make ads annoyingly loud" is.
But again, way to miss the point. Even if stealing $5 is illegal, how many people are going to get into a lawsuit or to switch provider over that? Even getting into small claims court is going to cost you considerably more than $5. Switching provider, if it costs even $1/month more is going to be more expensive as well. Just plain dealing with the cancellations department will probably take enough time that you could earn more than what you lost by doing that amount of overtime.
Yeah, maybe you and a few people will do it on principle. Congrats, you have your $5 back. But the company still earns enough from the people that ignored it even with having to ocassionally give the money back and losing a few customers. It still makes financial sense for them to keep doing it. So from their point of view there's little downside. And there's no reason why every other company wouldn't take note and do the same thing, since it makes money overall.
Then I'd suggest nothing needs to be done. I don't think the state needs to step in to remove annoyances. At the end of the day people voluntarily decide to watch TV. No-one forces them to.
But then people are free to annoy you a little bit.
Suppose your phone company screws you out of $500. That one is easy. Huge outcry, lots of people switch, company feels how it backfires even without the government stepping in.
Now suppose your phone company screws you out of $5. Virtually for everybody, just calling and complaining to the company probably isn't worth it. Cancelling service over that is a huge pain and overall much more costly than the damage done. And chances are, every company does something on this level, leaving you without a choice that doesn't result in getting screwed somehow.
However, $5 for every subscriber is quite a bit of cash, that was obtained in an illegitimate manner.
My argument is, there has to be regulation preventing small issues, because on the individual level it's hard to effectively deal with them. If small offenses aren't punished consistently, you're effecively saying that doing some kind of damage to everybody is okay, so long it's a tiny bit.
Yes, we do. We do not have to watch channels that have tactics we do not like.
Yeah, but this is a tiny thing. If you're going to stop watching a channel over this as the sole reason, then with a standard so tight you probably will end up not watching TV at all.
We can circumvent advertising with digital recorders.
I suspect nobody will care. It'll still be useful to make commercials more noticeable to people without the technology.
And since this is pretty much free they can keep doing it even if everybody works around it.
That's a valid response. If the masses stood up and said "we'll support the station that doesn't have loud ads", then those broadcasters would eventually listen.
I agree in the general case, but let's be realistic. It's a tiny issue. If they started showing porn during the day, yeah, there'd be plenty outrage, and lots of cancelled subscriptions. But I doubt there's going to be a noticeable boycott over ad volume.
Regulation is bad. Period. The loudness of advertising is none of the states business.
The problem is, I think that without regulation you won't get anywhere. There exists a large class of small annoyances that most people won't bother taking any action over.
How many people are going to stop watching their favourite TV show to protest against ads being too loud? How many people will stop buying from a company that ocassionally overcharges them by a quarter?
I think regulation has much better chances of having an effect in cases like that. The individual damage some things cause is very small, but if you let them get away with it, everybody is going to be inconvenienced a little, and over enough people and time that adds up to quite a lot.
Why? Have you tried writing a dbus-aware program in C, and then in C#? There is a world of difference, in favor of the C# version.
But the problem has nothing to do with C#'s technical merits.
This irrational fear of all-things-Microsoft is out of control. There are good engineers at Microsoft, and some of them are even free software proponents.
The potential problem isn't the engineers, it's the lawyers.
Regardless all that, Mono is a GPL language, free in every sense.
No, it isn't. It's covered by patents.
The basic issue is: MS created a language, patented parts of it, but also said "We're not going to sue you for implementing this. Though we reserve the right to change our mind at any time". They also created a standard that might be safe, doesn't cover all that much, so most useful programs will go beyond that into the less certain patented territory.
You can write GPL/whatever licensed code all you want, if somebody has a patent on your algorithm that won't save you from the trouble.
That is the problem. It's not about C#'s technical merits, or MS's engineers' abilities, it's about what could possibly happen if MS decides to change their mind. And there's ample evidence of that getting involved with Microsoft too deeply is almost a guarantee for getting screwed.
Well, programming isn't that easy either. I mean, in theory, all you need is a computer, but in practice it takes a lot of time to learn properly.
I think that getting started in electronics wouldn't be that expensive. Soldering irons are cheap, and components like capacitors are sold for prices like $0.05/unit. Of course microcontrollers and such are more expensive, but you don't need those in large amounts.
Picture somebody in your favourite enviromental organization speaking of acquiring material from an organization that keeps dumping poison into the river. At most, the leadership would probably be unhappy with such things.
GNU is dedicated to Free Software, and as such proprietary software isn't something they're interested in supporting, less inside their own organization. Proprietary software may be legitimate in the world at large, but it's not legitimate in a GNU project.
I'm not sure that what you are asking, is reasonable.
Thing is, you've not seen the device I'm talking about. It's not scanner "2.0", which is much improved over the previous version. It's not even that old, it was bought maybe a year before the switch to the 64 bit version.
No, the new model is pretty much version 1.1. It looks identical. It has identical specs, as far as I can tell. The changes made to it are effectively cosmetic. It probably even talks pretty much the same protocol as the previous one. Linux certainly has no problems with talking to both of them, it's only Windows what has an issue.
You bought a scanner that worked with the PC you bought. Then you upgraded your PC or bought a new one. And now you complain that the vendor dos not help you for free with the upgrade.
See, that's not the way I see it. The way I see it, is that I didn't buy a scanner for Win XP, I bought a scanner, period. It shouldn't ever stop working for any reasons besides physically breaking, becoming so technically obsolete that it makes no sense to keep using it, or becoming impossible to connect (like if USB some day disappears).
Linux fulfills this idea of mine. I can still use a Creative Webcam 5 on it, which is positively ancient by modern standards (it's a USB 1 webcam). There are no XP 64 drivers of course, but 64 bit Linux works perfectly fine with it.
I think long term, so I consistently choose standards and openness whenever possible, because it's not in my interest to replace things that work perfectly fine just because the manufacturer would prefer to have a bigger number in the bank account.
Just because it is a printer driver, which is software, does not mean that it is easy or free to make. Or that it was included in the printer price.
So give me specs and the source, I'll fix it, and even submit a patch to the upstream.
If you were to read my post carefully, you'll see that I made a clear distinction between cloning and inspiration, and how they are both misused.
The author of the clone had a perfectly good reason though: the inexistence of the game on his chosen platform.
As for your assumption that innovation and evolution only happens in competition, it is a false one. Innovation and evolution happens because of necessity, no matter if there's competition or not.
Sure. But one big reason for needing to improve what you made is the existence of competition.
Few people will spend the time on improving their creations just for the sake of it. See for instance how IE was developed to compete, then stagnated when competition became insignificant, then started getting better again when the competition caught up.
This irks some free software hippies and it also makes using Nvidia hardware on unsupported hardware platforms more difficult.
It also irks people who noticed that a huge amount of devices didn't get 64 bit Windows drivers, because it was a lot more profitable to get people to buy new scanners, printers and webcams. Precisely thanks to this I now have a perfectly good color laser printer and scanner that my brother can't use anymore.
Experience shows that if you trust the manufacturer will release updated drivers when they become needed, you're going to get screwed sooner or later. His new scanner (also made by Canon, guess he doesn't learn) looks nearly identical, and has pretty much the same specs. The only difference is that the light has been replaced with LEDs, but really he didn't gain anything from the new model.
Then they confuse correlation with causation. "The industrial age started the same time we see temperatures going up." Ok. Correlation. And then ignore all the times the temperature went up when the industrial age was still tens of thousands of years away.
It's not so difficult.
Suppose you take an empty building, stick a temperature sensor into it, and graph it over time. Of course the graph is going to go up and down as the ambient temperature changes.
Now you take the building and put some computer hardware into it. The sensor will of course show the temperature going up.
Are you seriously going to say, that because temperature went up before, the current increase can't possibly have to do with the newly installed equipment, even if the graph has a big bump that starts on the installation date, and that there's no way you could tell from the graph that something unusual is going on?
Yes, duh, temperature goes up and down. The thing is that when the industrial age happened it started changing faster.
And then forget that science requires the ability to test hypotheses, like "if CO2 is causing the increase, taking the CO2 away will make it stop."
So let's do an experiment then. Let's stop adding CO2, or try to add less of it, and see if anything changes.
I get annoyed by people who constantly point out "vanilla (or distro X) does not have that problem". Double standards. Some compare to Windows ("it is worse") as if I did care about Windows at all.
I think, where Linux is concerned, you always have to talk about a distribution, because that's what people actually use.
The vanilla kernel isn't really seen much in the wild. Talking about it is like talking about the latest internal Windows kernel build -- it exists, a few developers may actually run it, and it may have a set of characteristics that are good or bad, but all that is largely irrelevant because it's not what people actually use.
Also, distributions show considerable changes. There exist for instance enormous differences between:
Gentoo, with a hardened kernel with address space randomization, gcc with stack protection, NX emulation and SELinux enabled.
The at one point existing Lindows, which ran everything as root.
A minimalist Linux distro made to run in 4MB RAM, using kernel 2.4, busybox, and a very minimal amount of functionality that doesn't include a GUI.
They certainly have lots of things in common, but when discussing specifics like security you can't really just say "Linux", as there's a lot of variation there. Currently, for the purpose of discussing the usual situation, I'd refer to Ubuntu when talking about desktops, and Red Hat/SuSE when discussing corporate servers. I think it's pretty fair to ignore the oddball configurations -- I'm pretty sure that no modern distributions have the user login as root, for instance.
Same with Debian, or actually pretty much any distro, people say "it has huge number of programs" as a good thing. Well, deal with it! Windows does not. Don't whine!
But Windows has lots of the same programs. If you count a firefox vulnerability as a Linux security issue, you must count it as a Windows vulnerability too. The repository's existence is largely irrelevant for this purpose, as that it's in it doesn't mean it's going to be installed or used, and it's trivial to obtain on Windows.
I think the most useful comparison you could make is: given a newly installed box, with all defaults, if you let a normal person use it, which is more likely to get rooted? Because that's what people usually refer to when discussing security.
I am really sick'n'tired of cherry picking the view - either Linux is a single kernel or it is a huge number of incompatible distros, please do not try to have it both ways picking the definition which suits the argument best, changing it between the problems I lay out.
You're cherry picking yourself though. If you're going to claim that every single security bug reported on the Debian security list counts because it could possibly be installed, even if it's an obscure bioinformatics package 99% of the population doesn't know even what it does, then you must do the equivalent for Windows, and count the security issues of everything you could possibly install on a Windows box. That will include a good part of what's available on a Linux distro, plus a huge amount of dodgy programs like Bonzi Buddy, and shoddily developed vertical applications most people never see.
So you agree "vanilla" kernel sucks as no one uses it?
Not really, they do use it, they just patch it, often added experimental patches like grsecurity and new drivers.
Lots of software in pretty much any linux distro isn't the pristine upstream source.
Also, having a patch get into several distributions is something that's said to considerably help inclusion into the official kernel. The developers are careful with new features and significant changes, so real world testing is very desirable.
Does "This medium contains software intended to be automatically started. Would you like to run it?" ring any bells? Or "A volume with software packages has been detected. Would you like to open it with the package manager?" (OpenSolaris does the former too, not sure about the latter)
Not really, no. But that's probably signed packages. If not, then it's retarded and should be removed.
I am not certain Linux can be made more secure than Windows today. This was trivially true some years ago, but with Windows 7 and IE8 I am no longer so sure. BTW, I follow Debian security mailing list: the sheer volume of that list is quite telling.
The debian security list, AFAIK applies to all of Debian, a good deal of which applies to Windows as well. For instance, if you're going to count an OpenOffice exploit as a Linux security problem, you should count is as a Windows security problem too.
Also you never know how many things in Windows don't go reported, and get quietly patched as a part of some other update.
There's also the question of which kind of security issues you're talking about. Local root exploits aren't all that relevant for malware, since like everybody says, users care about user data. You don't need to be root to insert a malicious plugin into a browser that collects credit card numbers.
So to within the world of literature. After many ground breaking works; like say Tolkien, there were multitudes of new works from aspiring authors that wanted to write that type of literature; with a range of quality from piss poor to works that could be called unique in their own way.
Indeed. Pretty much all modern fantasy owes something to Tolkien. Tolkien redefined elves, for instance. There have been also bigger works based on it, for instance, Nik Perumov wrote a sequel to LOTR.
But it shouldn't be forgotten that Tolkien heavily borrowed from mythology.
Sorry, I don't give a damn about originality. I care about what matches my needs. Obviously a straight 1 to 1 feature clone isn't terribly interesting, but once you're there, you're probably going to want to differentiate your clone somehow, so you'll have to add improvements somewhere. That's where it gets interesting.
It fosters innovation by the virtue of competition. For instance, you make a text editor and have the idea of adding syntax highlighting. Somebody else goes and makes their own editor, also with syntax highlighting. Now you need to do something new to be a better choice, so you add code folding. Then do too, and add a spell checker. And so on. There's your fostering of innovation.
If you had the only editor in existence you wouldn't have a lot of motivation to make it better, you could just keep selling 10 year old code. But that wouldn't be very innovative.
If you're so worried about somebody else copying your idea, get off your ass and improve your.
First, there's no theft. There could possibly be copyright infringement if somebody is using somebody else's graphics.
Second, there doesn't seem to be any copyright infringement, since as far as I can tell nothing is being copied. Copyright only applies to copies of the original material. Making your own graphics that look a lot like something else is not copyright infringement.
There could possibly be trademark infringement, but that's most definitely not theft.
And what's the big deal, anyway? For every successful game, there have always been a few clones.
Eh? It took far too long for NX to be admitted into kernel, as if software has no bugs NX does not help.
Similar functionality was available in grsecurity long before. Most distros don't ship the vanilla kernel anyway.
Linux does have autorun, it just asks "are you sure". We all know how this is going to end up.
No, it doesn't. Ubuntu will ask things like "Would you like to see the files on this CD, or download photos from it?", but that's not autorun. What I was referring to is running binaries from newly inserted media. AFAIK no Linux distro does that, even after asking.
1. Linux market share matters, a lot. But then again I have had over ten virus and antivirus free years and most likely will still have some.
IMO, antiviruses are a flawed security model and shouldn't be needed in a well secured system. Antiviruses only work against known threats, which means somebody must have got hit by them previously, and the antivirus vendor must have noticed.
It's much better when the system makes a virus' execution unlikely enough that it doesn't manage to spread.
2. Not all OS's are same. Capabilities, chroot, jail, zones, virtual machines, sandboxes and managed languages, NX, etc. should be used much more. IE8 is interesting, as are e.g. Chrome and Lobo browsers. This all was started by OpenSsh "privilege separation". 5. You can protect your machine against stupid users (see second point). Quite well, actually, it is just matter of priorities. But in no OS is security #1.
That doesn't add up. If there is such a thing as an OS that's better protected, some of them are better and some are worse protected, therefore one of those is #1, or at the very least there are security tiers, where some are definitely worse than others.
3. Linux is not ahead of virus writers. No OS is. 6. Getting root is not necessary. Reinstalling Linux takes half an hour, reinstalling all my documents takes eternity (how do I know my backups are not infected). 7. As long as there is money to be made, viruses will be made. Or power (intelligency agencies).
You seem to be intent on assuming I'm arguing there's such a thing as 100% effective security. But I'm not. I'm arguing that there's such a thing as better security. Linux can be more secure than Windows, while still being vulnerable to some things.
Also, IMO, that a virus can be technically written for Linux isn't very relevant. The important thing isn't whether it can be done, it's whether it will spread. If it won't spread it'll never be a credible threat, and will remain an academic exercise.
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I think you're too concerned with the mechanics rather than the end result.
Okay, what about the modern technology of the flashbang, smoke grenade, tear gas, mustard gas and other chemical warfare agents, water cannons and the pain beam?
D&D wizards have an equivalent of pretty much all of that.
Flashbang: blindness/deafness
Smoke grenade: obscuring mist
Tear gas: stinking cloud
Mustard gas: horrid wilting, cloudkill
Water cannon: grease (sort of, no reason they couldn't put oil in a water cannon)
And I'm pretty sure some of those must have been possible in medieval times. Somebody must have tried to make a smoke screen at some point, and there's the thing about using polished shields to blind the enemy.
The rain, the muddy ground, and the pikes hammered into the ground to stop the cavalry had nothing to do with it, then?
No? Why did all those people suddenly start digging trenches then?
Of course it doesn't physically prevent them from moving, it simply makes it suicidal to do so in some cases. But this isn't about the mechanics of it, but about the result it has.
Also, Agincourt is very much a "crowd control" sort of setting. Just imagine a wizard summoned the rain.
You hurl a throwing axe at the wizard, and it ends the thing too. I fail to see much difference.
Choosing the field of battle is a form of crowd control, so is the building of fortifications. In modern times, you have tear gas and flashbangs.
I wasn't talking about armies in the previous sentence.
Having an unbalanced group is simply suicidal. If you're some kind of hero on a quest, it won't take long for your enemies to figure out that a few archers could easily deal with a few people with swords and no horses.
I think it makes sense for the most part, you just see the consequences in-game and not what actually happens.
Eg, suppose you're going against a fighter and a wizard. You really want to get the wizard. But the wizard knows he's squishy and hides behind the fighter, and the fighter knows the wizard is squishy and gets right in your face. You could try to go around him, but the fighter is going to use the chance to stab you in the back if you try. So you don't. So the fighter provides a threat by just being there, and a reason not to try to attack somebody else.
It wouldn't work that way with an archer or a wizard as if they don't have their equipment ready they can't attack at a moment's notice.
Agree about that archers should be more effective, though.
Sure it does exist, the crowd controller is the guy with the machinegun, or flamethrower. In medieval times, it'd be the guy who sets off some elaborate trap, like making a tree trunk roll down the battlefield.
Wizards would naturally fall into that role too. If you can magically set somebody on fire, it seems logical that the effect doesn't have to be limited to a single person. You can set an area on fire and make things very inconvenient for a group of people.
You can do it, it just wouldn't work well. In a game you're in for a long time engagement. If your team is all guys with swords, at some point archers in the trees will snipe all of you with no effort. If all archers, fighters can ambush you. There's a reason why armies aren't all made of archers.
That's why I said during the day.
Porn is fine and all, but I doubt a channel that would show it right after spongebob (or whatever they air these days) would get a very good reception, even from the people that like the porn.
You can screw up your life with pretty much anything if you try.
You could destroy your life with astronomy for instance by buying too much expensive equipment and staying up until 4 AM to look at pretty stuff in the sky, then getting fired for falling asleep at work. Really everything can be done to excess.
Back when I was younger it happened quite often that I would be a complete zombie at school and not understand anything, because I decided LOTR was just too interesting and spent until 5 AM with the book in the bed. As you can see even before I had a computer at all I could find a reason to skip sleep.
Oddly enough nobody ever considers that reading can be addictive, while I often find it very tempting to try to finish a book today. I'd find myself reading at 3 AM thinking that there are only 60 pages left and I really want to know how it ends!
First, they don't have to outright steal it. Then can easily bury somewhere in the contract in a 3pt font that for instance you get to check your voicemail for free once per day, and a second check is going to cost you $5. Or something else of that sort.
Second, how is that not regulation? I don't see how "It's illegal to take $5 unlawfully" is not regulation, but "It's illegal to make ads annoyingly loud" is.
But again, way to miss the point. Even if stealing $5 is illegal, how many people are going to get into a lawsuit or to switch provider over that? Even getting into small claims court is going to cost you considerably more than $5. Switching provider, if it costs even $1/month more is going to be more expensive as well. Just plain dealing with the cancellations department will probably take enough time that you could earn more than what you lost by doing that amount of overtime.
Yeah, maybe you and a few people will do it on principle. Congrats, you have your $5 back. But the company still earns enough from the people that ignored it even with having to ocassionally give the money back and losing a few customers. It still makes financial sense for them to keep doing it. So from their point of view there's little downside. And there's no reason why every other company wouldn't take note and do the same thing, since it makes money overall.
But then people are free to annoy you a little bit.
Suppose your phone company screws you out of $500. That one is easy. Huge outcry, lots of people switch, company feels how it backfires even without the government stepping in.
Now suppose your phone company screws you out of $5. Virtually for everybody, just calling and complaining to the company probably isn't worth it. Cancelling service over that is a huge pain and overall much more costly than the damage done. And chances are, every company does something on this level, leaving you without a choice that doesn't result in getting screwed somehow.
However, $5 for every subscriber is quite a bit of cash, that was obtained in an illegitimate manner.
My argument is, there has to be regulation preventing small issues, because on the individual level it's hard to effectively deal with them. If small offenses aren't punished consistently, you're effecively saying that doing some kind of damage to everybody is okay, so long it's a tiny bit.
Yeah, but this is a tiny thing. If you're going to stop watching a channel over this as the sole reason, then with a standard so tight you probably will end up not watching TV at all.
I suspect nobody will care. It'll still be useful to make commercials more noticeable to people without the technology.
And since this is pretty much free they can keep doing it even if everybody works around it.
I agree in the general case, but let's be realistic. It's a tiny issue. If they started showing porn during the day, yeah, there'd be plenty outrage, and lots of cancelled subscriptions. But I doubt there's going to be a noticeable boycott over ad volume.
The problem is, I think that without regulation you won't get anywhere. There exists a large class of small annoyances that most people won't bother taking any action over.
How many people are going to stop watching their favourite TV show to protest against ads being too loud? How many people will stop buying from a company that ocassionally overcharges them by a quarter?
I think regulation has much better chances of having an effect in cases like that. The individual damage some things cause is very small, but if you let them get away with it, everybody is going to be inconvenienced a little, and over enough people and time that adds up to quite a lot.
The community promise only applies to core .NET though. It doesn't apply to database code, web services, or Windows Forms, for instance.
So, should MS decide to start suing people they'll probably find something to sue for in every non-trivial application.
But the problem has nothing to do with C#'s technical merits.
The potential problem isn't the engineers, it's the lawyers.
No, it isn't. It's covered by patents.
The basic issue is: MS created a language, patented parts of it, but also said "We're not going to sue you for implementing this. Though we reserve the right to change our mind at any time". They also created a standard that might be safe, doesn't cover all that much, so most useful programs will go beyond that into the less certain patented territory.
You can write GPL/whatever licensed code all you want, if somebody has a patent on your algorithm that won't save you from the trouble.
That is the problem. It's not about C#'s technical merits, or MS's engineers' abilities, it's about what could possibly happen if MS decides to change their mind. And there's ample evidence of that getting involved with Microsoft too deeply is almost a guarantee for getting screwed.
Well, programming isn't that easy either. I mean, in theory, all you need is a computer, but in practice it takes a lot of time to learn properly.
I think that getting started in electronics wouldn't be that expensive. Soldering irons are cheap, and components like capacitors are sold for prices like $0.05/unit. Of course microcontrollers and such are more expensive, but you don't need those in large amounts.
What's surprising about it?
Picture somebody in your favourite enviromental organization speaking of acquiring material from an organization that keeps dumping poison into the river. At most, the leadership would probably be unhappy with such things.
GNU is dedicated to Free Software, and as such proprietary software isn't something they're interested in supporting, less inside their own organization. Proprietary software may be legitimate in the world at large, but it's not legitimate in a GNU project.
Thing is, you've not seen the device I'm talking about. It's not scanner "2.0", which is much improved over the previous version. It's not even that old, it was bought maybe a year before the switch to the 64 bit version.
No, the new model is pretty much version 1.1. It looks identical. It has identical specs, as far as I can tell. The changes made to it are effectively cosmetic. It probably even talks pretty much the same protocol as the previous one. Linux certainly has no problems with talking to both of them, it's only Windows what has an issue.
See, that's not the way I see it. The way I see it, is that I didn't buy a scanner for Win XP, I bought a scanner, period. It shouldn't ever stop working for any reasons besides physically breaking, becoming so technically obsolete that it makes no sense to keep using it, or becoming impossible to connect (like if USB some day disappears).
Linux fulfills this idea of mine. I can still use a Creative Webcam 5 on it, which is positively ancient by modern standards (it's a USB 1 webcam). There are no XP 64 drivers of course, but 64 bit Linux works perfectly fine with it.
I think long term, so I consistently choose standards and openness whenever possible, because it's not in my interest to replace things that work perfectly fine just because the manufacturer would prefer to have a bigger number in the bank account.
So give me specs and the source, I'll fix it, and even submit a patch to the upstream.
The author of the clone had a perfectly good reason though: the inexistence of the game on his chosen platform.
Sure. But one big reason for needing to improve what you made is the existence of competition.
Few people will spend the time on improving their creations just for the sake of it. See for instance how IE was developed to compete, then stagnated when competition became insignificant, then started getting better again when the competition caught up.
It also irks people who noticed that a huge amount of devices didn't get 64 bit Windows drivers, because it was a lot more profitable to get people to buy new scanners, printers and webcams. Precisely thanks to this I now have a perfectly good color laser printer and scanner that my brother can't use anymore.
Experience shows that if you trust the manufacturer will release updated drivers when they become needed, you're going to get screwed sooner or later. His new scanner (also made by Canon, guess he doesn't learn) looks nearly identical, and has pretty much the same specs. The only difference is that the light has been replaced with LEDs, but really he didn't gain anything from the new model.
It's not so difficult.
Suppose you take an empty building, stick a temperature sensor into it, and graph it over time. Of course the graph is going to go up and down as the ambient temperature changes.
Now you take the building and put some computer hardware into it. The sensor will of course show the temperature going up.
Are you seriously going to say, that because temperature went up before, the current increase can't possibly have to do with the newly installed equipment, even if the graph has a big bump that starts on the installation date, and that there's no way you could tell from the graph that something unusual is going on?
Yes, duh, temperature goes up and down. The thing is that when the industrial age happened it started changing faster.
So let's do an experiment then. Let's stop adding CO2, or try to add less of it, and see if anything changes.
I think, where Linux is concerned, you always have to talk about a distribution, because that's what people actually use.
The vanilla kernel isn't really seen much in the wild. Talking about it is like talking about the latest internal Windows kernel build -- it exists, a few developers may actually run it, and it may have a set of characteristics that are good or bad, but all that is largely irrelevant because it's not what people actually use.
Also, distributions show considerable changes. There exist for instance enormous differences between:
They certainly have lots of things in common, but when discussing specifics like security you can't really just say "Linux", as there's a lot of variation there. Currently, for the purpose of discussing the usual situation, I'd refer to Ubuntu when talking about desktops, and Red Hat/SuSE when discussing corporate servers. I think it's pretty fair to ignore the oddball configurations -- I'm pretty sure that no modern distributions have the user login as root, for instance.
But Windows has lots of the same programs. If you count a firefox vulnerability as a Linux security issue, you must count it as a Windows vulnerability too. The repository's existence is largely irrelevant for this purpose, as that it's in it doesn't mean it's going to be installed or used, and it's trivial to obtain on Windows.
I think the most useful comparison you could make is: given a newly installed box, with all defaults, if you let a normal person use it, which is more likely to get rooted? Because that's what people usually refer to when discussing security.
You're cherry picking yourself though. If you're going to claim that every single security bug reported on the Debian security list counts because it could possibly be installed, even if it's an obscure bioinformatics package 99% of the population doesn't know even what it does, then you must do the equivalent for Windows, and count the security issues of everything you could possibly install on a Windows box. That will include a good part of what's available on a Linux distro, plus a huge amount of dodgy programs like Bonzi Buddy, and shoddily developed vertical applications most people never see.
Not really, they do use it, they just patch it, often added experimental patches like grsecurity and new drivers.
Lots of software in pretty much any linux distro isn't the pristine upstream source.
Also, having a patch get into several distributions is something that's said to considerably help inclusion into the official kernel. The developers are careful with new features and significant changes, so real world testing is very desirable.
Not really, no. But that's probably signed packages. If not, then it's retarded and should be removed.
The debian security list, AFAIK applies to all of Debian, a good deal of which applies to Windows as well. For instance, if you're going to count an OpenOffice exploit as a Linux security problem, you should count is as a Windows security problem too.
Also you never know how many things in Windows don't go reported, and get quietly patched as a part of some other update.
There's also the question of which kind of security issues you're talking about. Local root exploits aren't all that relevant for malware, since like everybody says, users care about user data. You don't need to be root to insert a malicious plugin into a browser that collects credit card numbers.
I don't think it's so much one-upmanship as a backlash against the entire idea.
As a developer myself I think the concept has proven to be such an incredible pain in the ass that we'd be better without it.
I can distinguish it, but don't really care.
A good game is a good game regardless of who wrote it, or who came up with the original idea. The logo on the box is unimportant.
Indeed. Pretty much all modern fantasy owes something to Tolkien. Tolkien redefined elves, for instance. There have been also bigger works based on it, for instance, Nik Perumov wrote a sequel to LOTR.
But it shouldn't be forgotten that Tolkien heavily borrowed from mythology.
Sorry, I don't give a damn about originality. I care about what matches my needs. Obviously a straight 1 to 1 feature clone isn't terribly interesting, but once you're there, you're probably going to want to differentiate your clone somehow, so you'll have to add improvements somewhere. That's where it gets interesting.
It fosters innovation by the virtue of competition. For instance, you make a text editor and have the idea of adding syntax highlighting. Somebody else goes and makes their own editor, also with syntax highlighting. Now you need to do something new to be a better choice, so you add code folding. Then do too, and add a spell checker. And so on. There's your fostering of innovation.
If you had the only editor in existence you wouldn't have a lot of motivation to make it better, you could just keep selling 10 year old code. But that wouldn't be very innovative.
If you're so worried about somebody else copying your idea, get off your ass and improve your.
First, there's no theft. There could possibly be copyright infringement if somebody is using somebody else's graphics.
Second, there doesn't seem to be any copyright infringement, since as far as I can tell nothing is being copied. Copyright only applies to copies of the original material. Making your own graphics that look a lot like something else is not copyright infringement.
There could possibly be trademark infringement, but that's most definitely not theft.
And what's the big deal, anyway? For every successful game, there have always been a few clones.
Similar functionality was available in grsecurity long before. Most distros don't ship the vanilla kernel anyway.
No, it doesn't. Ubuntu will ask things like "Would you like to see the files on this CD, or download photos from it?", but that's not autorun. What I was referring to is running binaries from newly inserted media. AFAIK no Linux distro does that, even after asking.
IMO, antiviruses are a flawed security model and shouldn't be needed in a well secured system. Antiviruses only work against known threats, which means somebody must have got hit by them previously, and the antivirus vendor must have noticed.
It's much better when the system makes a virus' execution unlikely enough that it doesn't manage to spread.
That doesn't add up. If there is such a thing as an OS that's better protected, some of them are better and some are worse protected, therefore one of those is #1, or at the very least there are security tiers, where some are definitely worse than others.
You seem to be intent on assuming I'm arguing there's such a thing as 100% effective security. But I'm not. I'm arguing that there's such a thing as better security. Linux can be more secure than Windows, while still being vulnerable to some things.
Also, IMO, that a virus can be technically written for Linux isn't very relevant. The important thing isn't whether it can be done, it's whether it will spread. If it won't spread it'll never be a credible threat, and will remain an academic exercise.