As for the point about the characters, it is true. of course you can always describe the characters in a carefully written post, but the point is that if you ask a kid who saw TPM or a kid who saw ANH to describe a character then the kid who saw TPM would say "piss off, that is a kids movie".
I'm sorry, but my "carefully written post" was the exact thing that came to mind while watching the video where he was interviewing these friends of his who seemingly could not remember the films well enough to summarize the characters that fell into rather obvious and easily summarized buckets.
The problem that I think the Slashdot crowd has, here, is trying to separate disliking these films from evaluating a poorly constructed set of videos about them.
The question I pose to you is, even if you are more capable than the people he interviewed to come up with descriptors, do you honestly feel the characters in the more recently-produced films are as strong or stronger than those in the originals films?
That's a straw man argument. The review wasn't claiming that, on the whole, the original films were better. He was claiming a complete lack of characterization to an extent that painted modern-Lucas as utterly incompetent as a screenwriter. While I do agree that the original films were far better, this video misses its mark by a wide margin.
Also, what's with the editing? It looks like he added his voice to video-from-still images and then edited them for time...
That was all done on purpose - he was going for a "feel" to his work.
If the "feel" was "I can't edit my own short" then it worked. Beyond that... no, I think you're reading incompetence as a thematic choice, and that's always dangerous ground.
I do not believe in security through obscurity myself
2 unrelated points:
1) Google hasn't proposed security through obscurity. Any game theorist will tell you that any system of sufficient complexity, open to a large user base, which contains "winning conditions" can be manipulated to the benefit of a few of the participants at the expense of the others. This isn't a matter of "security" at all, but the desire to keep ad and search from becoming the stock market. To do that, you need to keep the rules of the game both fluid and secret while basing them on a set of relatively open and obvious axioms (e.g. the published parts of PageRank) that all users can use to their collective and individual advantage.
The difference between a system like this and security is that security is designed to allow access to only a privileged few. Systems like this are designed to allow everyone to participate without being able to exercise undue influence. While this might sound similar, there are quite a few fundamental differences that prevent approaching them similarly.
2) Security through obscurity isn't security through secrets. Passwords and private keys, for example, are secrets that work very well as part of a security plan. Obscurity is where you have an insecure element in your security plan which you rely on due to its obfuscation. In the real world, a good example would be leaving your back door unlocked. Anyone who attempts to enter your house from the front will find the door locked, but those who know that you leave your back door unlocked can come and go at will. At first, this seems logical until you consider that someone might accidentally try your back door or observe a friend entering without a key, and then can mount an attack (walk in) at any time of their choosing.
Certainly, if Google were doing security, here, their unpublished (and frequently changing) PageRank and other metrics would be an example of security through obscurity, but that's now what they're doing.
Flaws?! OK, I'll grant that TPM had flaws... lots of em. But I'm not sure that I heard any of them described in part one of this excruciating mess (and no, I refuse to suffer through parts 2-7) other than a vaguely sidewise slap at Jar-Jar (as easy targets go, that one was an elephant at 3 foot range, and he still only got in a glancing blow).
Points he broughtup:
No one can describe QGJ without using his character's profession or wardrobe as descriptors. OK, let's try that one:
A mentor archetype whose quite reserve conveys the inner peace to which his order aspire. Often lacking in praise, but always supportive. Older-brotherly.
The people he got to comment could only come up with "stern." Really?!
The other one was Queen Amidala. Now to be fair, that's a trick question, since most of the film you spend watching a stand-in for the Queen and interacting with the real Amidala as "Padme". So the question should have been about Padme or the stand-in Queen Amidala. Still, let's assume they mean Padme.
An outwardly sure of herself leader whose independence covers a sense that her world is not entirely in her control. A woman trapped within the role that she feels she has to play, both literally and figuratively.
That's as far as I can go, since Amidala's character is best described in terms of her relationship to her wardrobe, which is a constantly shifting front intended to obscure her from the public eye while highlighting the significance of her role. That can't be said within the strictures that he set up, though and what I did manage to cover does seem to cover more than the idiots he interviewed who don't seem to remember who she was.
Also, what's with the editing? It looks like he added his voice to video-from-still images and then edited them for time, chopping himself off in several mid-syllable lines. If he's having trouble working any of the free movie-making tools out there, perhaps he shouldn't be doing a video review. Podcasts work just fine.
"Now that Google has started censoring sites at their discretion"
Nope, I don't read anything above which in any way suggests that it's at their discretion. The only example that might imply that we have too little detail to know for sure (the local government official that got Google to delist a page, which Google initially refused, but then complied... implying that there's an intermediate conversation we're not privy to).
This all seems to run the usual route: when compelled to remove information by law, or when certain information presents an obvious legal and financial liability to Google (e.g. exposing credit card numbers), they delist pages as technical means of identification allow, as a matter of compliance.
This is exactly what Google and every other search engine have been doing since the dawn of Web search, and it's the only reasonably correct solution.
Google will predict this cycle happening and thus won't bother trying such a stupid scheme, or
That's exactly right. The problem with people who try to come up with nightmare scenarios for how Google could screw you over is that 90% of them begin with the assumption that Google is populated by people who can't quite figure out that actions have consequences (and probably can't find their way out of their house in the morning).
Realistically, Google's single largest asset as an advertiser is their relationship with the millions of users that take advantage of their products. The moment they start abusing that relationship for short-term profits, they end their position as the premier ad vendor, and they know it.
you miss the point entirely. Yes google would turn over the data and yes microsoft would turn over the data. The fact is that google is the one storing all of this data and microsoft is not.
.... second take on a reply. I, like you and many other readers didn't actually RTFA, nor did we read the terms that it linked to. The FA is simply wrong.
Here's what Microsoft says:
When you conduct a search, Microsoft will collect the search terms you provide, along with your IP address, the unique identifiers contained in the cookies, the time and date of your search, and your browser configuration. You can use your browser settings to remove or block cookies on your computer....
Finally, as described in the Display of Advertising section of the Microsoft Online Privacy Statement, we may use search query data for the purpose of personalizing the ads we display to you as you use our services. The search terms you enter in Search are categorized and certain user segments are inferred based on those terms. For example, if you search on terms associated with sports, we may associate a “sports segment” with the unique identifier contained in your cookie, and you will then be more likely to see ads related to sports.
We store our Search service search terms (and the cookie IDs associated with search terms) separately from any account information that directly identifies the user, such as name, e-mail address, or phone numbers. Further, we have built-in technological and procedural safeguards designed to prevent the unauthorized correlation of this data. We take additional steps to protect the privacy of stored search information by removing the entirety of the IP address, cookies and other cross session identifiers, after 18 months....
Using the search terms you enter and the results you click on, Search History provides an easy way to revisit the sites and searches you've used before. You may remove your search history from appearing on the site by following the steps provided here Removing your history removes it from the Search History service and prevents that history from being displayed on the site, but does not delete information from our standard search logs, which are retained and anonymized as described above.
So, please note that Microsoft will store your data. They'll store it in pretty much the same way Google stores it, allow you to "opt out" just about as much as Google will, and in the end, when the Feds come knocking, all of it will be traced back to you by IP address (note they never suggest that they throw that away, just your account name) just like Google.
Where exactly is this difference we're supposed to be spotting?
Once again, as Google rightly pointed out: if you want to keep something secret, don't tell the Internet about it.
Your statement is true. however you miss the point entirely. Yes google would turn over the data and yes microsoft would turn over the data. The fact is that google is the one storing all of this data and microsoft is not.
If you believe that, then I welcome you to get in bed with Microsoft. I look at their track record and that of Yahoo! (the Chinese dissident's worst nightmare) and decide that I'm not interested in trusting either organization. Google's crime thus far has been in retaining data. Microsoft's has been in abusing every business and end-user relationship they've ever entered into.
No, Google does and always has taken user privacy seriously. But the fact is, and Schmidt is being quite frank, here, they don't have the right to deny requests from law enforcement agencies, and as long as that's true, no company will fail to communicate everything you've ever done to the feds whenever they want to know about it.
Look at it this way: would you expect Balmer to point out that giving Microsoft any information about you would ultimately lead to it being in the hands of the Federal government? No, of course not. Microsoft will quite happily hide that fact from you and make you feel more secure. Google will warn you about it up-front, but they ALREADY LOST THAT CASE IN COURT (yep, Google tried to refuse to hand over search histories).
So, you get to ask yourself: who do you want to do business with: the company that warns you about risks to your privacy so that you can moderate your behavior accordingly or the company that tells you that everything is just fine. Schmidt made me uncomfortable, and that's a good thing.
How does it compare with Manos: The Hands of Fate (without MST)?
Manos is so bad it's funny. It's just a sloppily hacked-together sequence of poorly filmed bits.
This is Star Wars, written by what appear to be a team of people who had no idea what Star Wars was and thought somewhere between Carol Burnett and Star Wars, there was a perfect balance to be struck. Had they been right, we'd never have known, because they hired the Three's Company writers to get really stoned and then start working on it. It features only one funny scene, and IT is funny only in the lurid, "I get to watch Carrie Fisher be stoned at the hight of her drug problems," sense. Other than that, it is quite possibly the most obscene thing anyone has ever done in front of a television camera.
The musical numbers make you want to die. Not die laughing. Not "hey, that's the dumbest thing I've ever seen, let's call Joe and get HIM to watch it." Just curl-up-and-die bad.
The jokes arent.
The Wookies are essentially tall Ewoks with strong Christian overtones. The Empire are, I believe some hackish analog of comunism trying to stamp out religion crossed with a rather ham-handed Nazi/Anne Frank riff. No, I'm not kidding.
When fans tell you, "it's so bad it's worth avoiding," that's not a hint that you'll like it. Fans will tell you, "it's so bad it has to be seen." When they say run away... that's no moon.
EVE can handle over one thousand players in a single system/"zone". Places like Jita (THE trade hub of EVE) regularily pass 1300 concurrent active users at one time. In one star system. Admittedly though the vast majority of Jita players are "passing through" or conducting trade and not shooting each other in the face. Star systems out in the areas of space where players create their own empires can have fleet battles that push past 400 people per side, though admittedly there are occurences of heavy lag.
That's impressive.
WoW has serious latency problems when numbers get past about 2-400 in a single place (Lake Wintergrasp battles come to mind).
But of course, the two games are modeling totally different things. In the end, they're both fun for different reasons. I'd love to see a WoW-like game that has a single "realm" or "server" but there are serious technical limitations that prevent it right now, and some very creative work will be required to get from here to there. Until then, I appreciate both types of games.
And yet you can only communicate with how many other players on WoW? 1000 or something?
You can communicate with all of them (everyone gets a forum account). What you can't do is walk up to their character and wave. For that, you have a few tens of thousands of other players to choose from (it's not thousands... if it were, there would have to be thousands of realms to make up the 11 or so million users that make up the WoW community last I checked the official stats, which don't include trial accounts or inactive accounts).
At least on EVE you can interact with every other EVE player. I really feel this is a huge advantage. I know several people who play WoW and I would like to join them, but since they're all on different servers, I will have to choose one of my friends to play with and ignore the others.
Or, if they want to all play together, they can pay a small fee to have their characters transferred to one server, but I agree. The inability to play with your friends is WoW's Achilles' heal. To solve that they need to introduce better ways to group with mixed-level friends in a way that rewards everyone and to allow people to migrate more freely between servers. I'm hopeful that the noises they've made about Cataclysm point to at least the first part of that being addressed, and they have reduced the time between server moves, but it's still not where I think it needs to be.
"The fact is that most people don't actually want to play a "massively" multiplayer online role-playing game. They (and I) want to play a multi-player online game." Then why not play such a game in the first place instead of playing a different type of game and waiting until its publisher ends up into turning it into the kind of game you want?
But WoW has always been both. I know players who have barely ever seen the outside world. They've been summoned to every instance, done no questing except required class quests, and never leave major cities.
I know other players who almost never step into an instance and do all of their game-playing out in the world, exploring, farming, questing and generally appreciating the scope of the world.
It takes all kinds, and if WoW lost either of those types of players (among many others) it would be the less for it.
See, people aren't really sharing a single universe. They just do instanced content together. instanced content means that your party gets its own private copy of a level and do some dungeon crawling in there.
Meanwhile in other news, trade channel is full of "LFG premade for random heroic" and still everyone on the server interacts with each other over trade skills, questing, etc, etc.
This mechanic never made the game hard. Removing it won't make it easy. What they've done is made an annoying mechanic go away.
To use any Meeting Stone, it is only required that the character's minimum level be 15. There is no maximum character level requirement for any Meeting Stone.
That's right, and guess why they did that. Literally thousands of people complained when they added seasonal events in low-level dungeons and people couldn't summon their level-80 friends to fight a level-80 boss because they were higher than level 40. Easy had nothing to do with it. Intended use being broken was what it had to do with. It's also true that there are dozens of cases where you legitimately have a player summoning who out-ranks the instance. There's no reason to deny them.
However, clearly power-levelers will benefit from that, and I for one see no problem there. Power-leveling, twinking, leveling only through instances, and many other modes of play are all perfectly reasonable things to do.
Creatures attacking a player from behind can no longer cause players level 1-5 to be dazed, and have a reduced chance to cause players level 6-10 to be dazed
Given that levels 1-10 go by in a night for nearly all players, this simply represents the opportunity to ease into the game. It's no easier really (if you were going to die, you probably still will).
These regeneration rates have been increased by up to 200% for low level characters.
This is a change that I seriously approve of. Blizzard finally noticed that all low-level characters were required to melee, even those who, after level 10, would be fools to ever do so again (mage, lock, priest). There was no point in breaking low-level characters like this, so now they don't even get auto-attack on their bar, and spells are intended to be their only low-level tool until they get a wand.
Any party member may mark targets
What the heck?! You think allowing non-leaders to mark somehow makes the game "easier"?! Pass the doobie, I wanna try some of that stuff;-)
So their aim seems to be to get players to level up faster...
They've increased leveling speed several times and will continue to do so. They're essentially taking the time it took to get from level 1 to ready-to-raid in the original game and continuing to try to make the pre-end-game take that long. To do so, they've sped up many aspects of leveling and max-level, pre-raid gear grinding. None of this makes it any easier, since you still have to spend the same amount of time overall, and still have to learn the same things.
but I feel that's taking away some of the fun of the game.
On the contrary, I suspect you really feel that the new players aren't having to suffer through some of the things you found distasteful like asking someone to pass leader so you could mark and having to melee at level 1. Shucks.
You're taking one sentence with no context FROM THE REGISTER and repeated on Slashdot and extrapolating a world-view. I'm sorry, Google hater or Google fan boy, you should take no information from this article.
The impression I get is that since it's younger than perl, its implementation isn't quite as solid, and its libraries aren't quite as complete. As a language matures, the rate at which old code breaks decreases; I think perl is futher along than python in that regard.
It is, but that's not a function of age, it's a function of adoption. Because Python was around for longer than Perl was before its adoption took off, the fact that they're of comparable age isn't as interesting as their timelines.
That said, Python has its own problems. It's been built on a foundation of axiomatic correctness in a realm that has no absolutes, and thus often finds itself having to compromise in difficult ways (ternary operator that isn't quite a postfix conditional even though those are evil, partial lambdas, and many other odd warts are a result of this struggle to maintain the illusion that there are correct and incorrect choices in language design).
I enjoy Python and work in it often, but I'll be happy when I can switch fully over to Perl 6 because I'll be able to return to a world where best practices are hammered out over time with the deliberation of thousands of programmers, not enshrined up-front by someone who's going with a feeling.
Is it just my memory, or is this over five years on one upgrade.
Perl 6 is not an upgrade to Perl 5.
This is something that many folks misunderstand, and frankly, it's a failure of the Perl development team to correctly communicate (an open source project with poor PR skills... shocking). Perl 6 isn't a new language either, though you'll find many who will say that it is (even within the project, where it's a sort of shorthand way of interrupting the long conversation that ensues if you don't call it a new language).
What Perl 6 is is the logical progression of Perl into the realm of modern, highly dynamic language. That means it's drawing on the concepts that come from many popular (and some not so popular) modern languages and blending them in a way that has never been done before. False starts, long implementation paths and re-designs triggered by new insights are par for the course.
But I want to take exception to the idea that "this has taken too long." How long is too long? If Perl 6 were released 2 days after you died of old age, would that be too long? What about 10 years from now? 5? 2? What's it mean to take too long? There were an abundance of languages that were popular when Perl 6 work started and there will be an abundance of them when Perl 6 lands. What Perl has lost is momentum. Perl 6 will not have the easy conversion of a massive Perl user base to start with, but then Perl didn't have that when it started.
Perl was a success because it solved a problem. It gave developers a tool for writing simple programs quickly without sacrificing features that they depended on in lower level languages such as binary data, arbitrary size strings and system call access, the three of which did not, as far as I can recall, exist in any other high level language at the time, outside of Lisp and unlike Lisp, Perl felt comfortable and familiar to the average Unix user at the time.
What will Perl 6 have going for it?
It will be the first language to give you the rich dynamic OO features of Ruby and Smalltalk, blended with the self-hosted language introspection of Common Lisp and the still-familiar feel of Unix/Linux systems all on a portable and language-neutral VM. Will that be a draw to the same sorts of users that cared strongly about Perl 5? Some yes and some no, but there will be a brand new segment of the programming community that will care strongly about Perl 6 features.
That's really all that matters, not how long it takes.
"Perl is more than just the vagaries of syntax. Perl is philosophy; Perl is custom; Perl is architectual edifice; Perl is community."
And Perl6 is a jump over the shark.
That's meaningless. You could say that about any new technology (I'm sure someone said it about the DVD).
I've seen snippets of Perl6 and it does indeed look rather different from previous versions of Perl.
In some ways yes, and in some ways, no. Perl 4 looked like this:
require "foo.pl"; local($foo); $foo = 10;
Perl 5 looked like this:
package Foo; my $foo = 10;
Perl 6 looks like this:
module Foo; my $foo = 10;
You tell me which was a larger leap.
Perl 6 is, conceptually, a massive shift and arguably a language of its own. But in terms of raw syntax and ease-of-learning for current Perl 5 users, it's not as large a change as one might have thought.
The older users had more than 4x the friends each, on average, than the young.
It's like older users know more people than younger users, and that's just not possible. Kids know everything, just ask them.
More to the point, I don't see why this is an issue. I don't store anything on Facebook that's private and I don't trust any links that anyone that I don't know personally shares with me (not to mention my use of noscript's XSS-busting features). So what do I have to lose in accepting a friend request from a plastic frog, exactly?
I'd assumed as much, since a consumer OS without accelerated graphics would be a rather dismal failure. Even for non-gaming, you need to be able to write software that presents a 3D UI for all sorts of purposes these days.
Streaming is irrelevant. The patent is about downloading and managing subscriptions to audio files. It covers fetching new files when they're updated and making room on local storage by deleting older files.
Come to think of it, the best prior art for this is Usenet. Audio newsgroups contained audio files that were subscribed to by the user and news server software would make room for new files by deleting the old.
Yep, I think that'd about do it.
Also, the RSS standards history can probably point to some earlier implementations of client-side file management if you follow it down the rabbit hole far enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoooooosh!
(and, no, that's not an X-Wing flying over your head)
2/10. Sorry, but as trolls go, that's rather weak.
As for the point about the characters, it is true. of course you can always describe the characters in a carefully written post, but the point is that if you ask a kid who saw TPM or a kid who saw ANH to describe a character then the kid who saw TPM would say "piss off, that is a kids movie".
I'm sorry, but my "carefully written post" was the exact thing that came to mind while watching the video where he was interviewing these friends of his who seemingly could not remember the films well enough to summarize the characters that fell into rather obvious and easily summarized buckets.
The problem that I think the Slashdot crowd has, here, is trying to separate disliking these films from evaluating a poorly constructed set of videos about them.
The question I pose to you is, even if you are more capable than the people he interviewed to come up with descriptors, do you honestly feel the characters in the more recently-produced films are as strong or stronger than those in the originals films?
That's a straw man argument. The review wasn't claiming that, on the whole, the original films were better. He was claiming a complete lack of characterization to an extent that painted modern-Lucas as utterly incompetent as a screenwriter. While I do agree that the original films were far better, this video misses its mark by a wide margin.
Also, what's with the editing? It looks like he added his voice to video-from-still images and then edited them for time...
That was all done on purpose - he was going for a "feel" to his work.
If the "feel" was "I can't edit my own short" then it worked. Beyond that... no, I think you're reading incompetence as a thematic choice, and that's always dangerous ground.
I do not believe in security through obscurity myself
2 unrelated points:
1) Google hasn't proposed security through obscurity. Any game theorist will tell you that any system of sufficient complexity, open to a large user base, which contains "winning conditions" can be manipulated to the benefit of a few of the participants at the expense of the others. This isn't a matter of "security" at all, but the desire to keep ad and search from becoming the stock market. To do that, you need to keep the rules of the game both fluid and secret while basing them on a set of relatively open and obvious axioms (e.g. the published parts of PageRank) that all users can use to their collective and individual advantage.
The difference between a system like this and security is that security is designed to allow access to only a privileged few. Systems like this are designed to allow everyone to participate without being able to exercise undue influence. While this might sound similar, there are quite a few fundamental differences that prevent approaching them similarly.
2) Security through obscurity isn't security through secrets. Passwords and private keys, for example, are secrets that work very well as part of a security plan. Obscurity is where you have an insecure element in your security plan which you rely on due to its obfuscation. In the real world, a good example would be leaving your back door unlocked. Anyone who attempts to enter your house from the front will find the door locked, but those who know that you leave your back door unlocked can come and go at will. At first, this seems logical until you consider that someone might accidentally try your back door or observe a friend entering without a key, and then can mount an attack (walk in) at any time of their choosing.
Certainly, if Google were doing security, here, their unpublished (and frequently changing) PageRank and other metrics would be an example of security through obscurity, but that's now what they're doing.
Flaws?! OK, I'll grant that TPM had flaws... lots of em. But I'm not sure that I heard any of them described in part one of this excruciating mess (and no, I refuse to suffer through parts 2-7) other than a vaguely sidewise slap at Jar-Jar (as easy targets go, that one was an elephant at 3 foot range, and he still only got in a glancing blow).
Points he broughtup:
No one can describe QGJ without using his character's profession or wardrobe as descriptors. OK, let's try that one:
A mentor archetype whose quite reserve conveys the inner peace to which his order aspire. Often lacking in praise, but always supportive. Older-brotherly.
The people he got to comment could only come up with "stern." Really?!
The other one was Queen Amidala. Now to be fair, that's a trick question, since most of the film you spend watching a stand-in for the Queen and interacting with the real Amidala as "Padme". So the question should have been about Padme or the stand-in Queen Amidala. Still, let's assume they mean Padme.
An outwardly sure of herself leader whose independence covers a sense that her world is not entirely in her control. A woman trapped within the role that she feels she has to play, both literally and figuratively.
That's as far as I can go, since Amidala's character is best described in terms of her relationship to her wardrobe, which is a constantly shifting front intended to obscure her from the public eye while highlighting the significance of her role. That can't be said within the strictures that he set up, though and what I did manage to cover does seem to cover more than the idiots he interviewed who don't seem to remember who she was.
Also, what's with the editing? It looks like he added his voice to video-from-still images and then edited them for time, chopping himself off in several mid-syllable lines. If he's having trouble working any of the free movie-making tools out there, perhaps he shouldn't be doing a video review. Podcasts work just fine.
Google's page rank is part proprietary, part public.
There are, of course, many who believe they've found ways to exploit it.
"Now that Google has started censoring sites at their discretion"
Nope, I don't read anything above which in any way suggests that it's at their discretion. The only example that might imply that we have too little detail to know for sure (the local government official that got Google to delist a page, which Google initially refused, but then complied... implying that there's an intermediate conversation we're not privy to).
This all seems to run the usual route: when compelled to remove information by law, or when certain information presents an obvious legal and financial liability to Google (e.g. exposing credit card numbers), they delist pages as technical means of identification allow, as a matter of compliance.
This is exactly what Google and every other search engine have been doing since the dawn of Web search, and it's the only reasonably correct solution.
Either:
That's exactly right. The problem with people who try to come up with nightmare scenarios for how Google could screw you over is that 90% of them begin with the assumption that Google is populated by people who can't quite figure out that actions have consequences (and probably can't find their way out of their house in the morning).
Realistically, Google's single largest asset as an advertiser is their relationship with the millions of users that take advantage of their products. The moment they start abusing that relationship for short-term profits, they end their position as the premier ad vendor, and they know it.
Viruses... viruses... I'm not finding that. What do I apt-get to install that?
you miss the point entirely. Yes google would turn over the data and yes microsoft would turn over the data. The fact is that google is the one storing all of this data and microsoft is not.
.... second take on a reply. I, like you and many other readers didn't actually RTFA, nor did we read the terms that it linked to. The FA is simply wrong.
Here's what Microsoft says:
When you conduct a search, Microsoft will collect the search terms you provide, along with your IP address, the unique identifiers contained in the cookies, the time and date of your search, and your browser configuration. You can use your browser settings to remove or block cookies on your computer. ...
Finally, as described in the Display of Advertising section of the Microsoft Online Privacy Statement, we may use search query data for the purpose of personalizing the ads we display to you as you use our services. The search terms you enter in Search are categorized and certain user segments are inferred based on those terms. For example, if you search on terms associated with sports, we may associate a “sports segment” with the unique identifier contained in your cookie, and you will then be more likely to see ads related to sports.
We store our Search service search terms (and the cookie IDs associated with search terms) separately from any account information that directly identifies the user, such as name, e-mail address, or phone numbers. Further, we have built-in technological and procedural safeguards designed to prevent the unauthorized correlation of this data. We take additional steps to protect the privacy of stored search information by removing the entirety of the IP address, cookies and other cross session identifiers, after 18 months. ...
Using the search terms you enter and the results you click on, Search History provides an easy way to revisit the sites and searches you've used before. You may remove your search history from appearing on the site by following the steps provided here Removing your history removes it from the Search History service and prevents that history from being displayed on the site, but does not delete information from our standard search logs, which are retained and anonymized as described above.
So, please note that Microsoft will store your data. They'll store it in pretty much the same way Google stores it, allow you to "opt out" just about as much as Google will, and in the end, when the Feds come knocking, all of it will be traced back to you by IP address (note they never suggest that they throw that away, just your account name) just like Google.
Where exactly is this difference we're supposed to be spotting?
Once again, as Google rightly pointed out: if you want to keep something secret, don't tell the Internet about it.
Your statement is true. however you miss the point entirely. Yes google would turn over the data and yes microsoft would turn over the data. The fact is that google is the one storing all of this data and microsoft is not.
If you believe that, then I welcome you to get in bed with Microsoft. I look at their track record and that of Yahoo! (the Chinese dissident's worst nightmare) and decide that I'm not interested in trusting either organization. Google's crime thus far has been in retaining data. Microsoft's has been in abusing every business and end-user relationship they've ever entered into.
No, Google does and always has taken user privacy seriously. But the fact is, and Schmidt is being quite frank, here, they don't have the right to deny requests from law enforcement agencies, and as long as that's true, no company will fail to communicate everything you've ever done to the feds whenever they want to know about it.
Look at it this way: would you expect Balmer to point out that giving Microsoft any information about you would ultimately lead to it being in the hands of the Federal government? No, of course not. Microsoft will quite happily hide that fact from you and make you feel more secure. Google will warn you about it up-front, but they ALREADY LOST THAT CASE IN COURT (yep, Google tried to refuse to hand over search histories).
So, you get to ask yourself: who do you want to do business with: the company that warns you about risks to your privacy so that you can moderate your behavior accordingly or the company that tells you that everything is just fine. Schmidt made me uncomfortable, and that's a good thing.
How does it compare with Manos: The Hands of Fate (without MST)?
Manos is so bad it's funny. It's just a sloppily hacked-together sequence of poorly filmed bits.
This is Star Wars, written by what appear to be a team of people who had no idea what Star Wars was and thought somewhere between Carol Burnett and Star Wars, there was a perfect balance to be struck. Had they been right, we'd never have known, because they hired the Three's Company writers to get really stoned and then start working on it. It features only one funny scene, and IT is funny only in the lurid, "I get to watch Carrie Fisher be stoned at the hight of her drug problems," sense. Other than that, it is quite possibly the most obscene thing anyone has ever done in front of a television camera.
The musical numbers make you want to die. Not die laughing. Not "hey, that's the dumbest thing I've ever seen, let's call Joe and get HIM to watch it." Just curl-up-and-die bad.
The jokes arent.
The Wookies are essentially tall Ewoks with strong Christian overtones. The Empire are, I believe some hackish analog of comunism trying to stamp out religion crossed with a rather ham-handed Nazi/Anne Frank riff. No, I'm not kidding.
When fans tell you, "it's so bad it's worth avoiding," that's not a hint that you'll like it. Fans will tell you, "it's so bad it has to be seen." When they say run away... that's no moon.
EVE can handle over one thousand players in a single system/"zone". Places like Jita (THE trade hub of EVE) regularily pass 1300 concurrent active users at one time. In one star system. Admittedly though the vast majority of Jita players are "passing through" or conducting trade and not shooting each other in the face. Star systems out in the areas of space where players create their own empires can have fleet battles that push past 400 people per side, though admittedly there are occurences of heavy lag.
That's impressive.
WoW has serious latency problems when numbers get past about 2-400 in a single place (Lake Wintergrasp battles come to mind).
But of course, the two games are modeling totally different things. In the end, they're both fun for different reasons. I'd love to see a WoW-like game that has a single "realm" or "server" but there are serious technical limitations that prevent it right now, and some very creative work will be required to get from here to there. Until then, I appreciate both types of games.
And yet you can only communicate with how many other players on WoW? 1000 or something?
You can communicate with all of them (everyone gets a forum account). What you can't do is walk up to their character and wave. For that, you have a few tens of thousands of other players to choose from (it's not thousands... if it were, there would have to be thousands of realms to make up the 11 or so million users that make up the WoW community last I checked the official stats, which don't include trial accounts or inactive accounts).
At least on EVE you can interact with every other EVE player. I really feel this is a huge advantage. I know several people who play WoW and I would like to join them, but since they're all on different servers, I will have to choose one of my friends to play with and ignore the others.
Or, if they want to all play together, they can pay a small fee to have their characters transferred to one server, but I agree. The inability to play with your friends is WoW's Achilles' heal. To solve that they need to introduce better ways to group with mixed-level friends in a way that rewards everyone and to allow people to migrate more freely between servers. I'm hopeful that the noises they've made about Cataclysm point to at least the first part of that being addressed, and they have reduced the time between server moves, but it's still not where I think it needs to be.
"The fact is that most people don't actually want to play a "massively" multiplayer online role-playing game. They (and I) want to play a multi-player online game."
Then why not play such a game in the first place instead of playing a different type of game and waiting until its publisher ends up into turning it into the kind of game you want?
But WoW has always been both. I know players who have barely ever seen the outside world. They've been summoned to every instance, done no questing except required class quests, and never leave major cities.
I know other players who almost never step into an instance and do all of their game-playing out in the world, exploring, farming, questing and generally appreciating the scope of the world.
It takes all kinds, and if WoW lost either of those types of players (among many others) it would be the less for it.
Actually what they did in WoW is rather awful.
See, people aren't really sharing a single universe. They just do instanced content together. instanced content means that your party gets its own private copy of a level and do some dungeon crawling in there.
Meanwhile in other news, trade channel is full of "LFG premade for random heroic" and still everyone on the server interacts with each other over trade skills, questing, etc, etc.
The sky is not, nor has it ever been falling.
Knockbacks no longer dismount players
This mechanic never made the game hard. Removing it won't make it easy. What they've done is made an annoying mechanic go away.
To use any Meeting Stone, it is only required that the character's minimum level be 15. There is no maximum character level requirement for any Meeting Stone.
That's right, and guess why they did that. Literally thousands of people complained when they added seasonal events in low-level dungeons and people couldn't summon their level-80 friends to fight a level-80 boss because they were higher than level 40. Easy had nothing to do with it. Intended use being broken was what it had to do with. It's also true that there are dozens of cases where you legitimately have a player summoning who out-ranks the instance. There's no reason to deny them.
However, clearly power-levelers will benefit from that, and I for one see no problem there. Power-leveling, twinking, leveling only through instances, and many other modes of play are all perfectly reasonable things to do.
Creatures attacking a player from behind can no longer cause players level 1-5 to be dazed, and have a reduced chance to cause players level 6-10 to be dazed
Given that levels 1-10 go by in a night for nearly all players, this simply represents the opportunity to ease into the game. It's no easier really (if you were going to die, you probably still will).
These regeneration rates have been increased by up to 200% for low level characters.
This is a change that I seriously approve of. Blizzard finally noticed that all low-level characters were required to melee, even those who, after level 10, would be fools to ever do so again (mage, lock, priest). There was no point in breaking low-level characters like this, so now they don't even get auto-attack on their bar, and spells are intended to be their only low-level tool until they get a wand.
Any party member may mark targets
What the heck?! You think allowing non-leaders to mark somehow makes the game "easier"?! Pass the doobie, I wanna try some of that stuff ;-)
So their aim seems to be to get players to level up faster...
They've increased leveling speed several times and will continue to do so. They're essentially taking the time it took to get from level 1 to ready-to-raid in the original game and continuing to try to make the pre-end-game take that long. To do so, they've sped up many aspects of leveling and max-level, pre-raid gear grinding. None of this makes it any easier, since you still have to spend the same amount of time overall, and still have to learn the same things.
but I feel that's taking away some of the fun of the game.
On the contrary, I suspect you really feel that the new players aren't having to suffer through some of the things you found distasteful like asking someone to pass leader so you could mark and having to melee at level 1. Shucks.
You're taking one sentence with no context FROM THE REGISTER and repeated on Slashdot and extrapolating a world-view. I'm sorry, Google hater or Google fan boy, you should take no information from this article.
The impression I get is that since it's younger than perl, its implementation isn't quite as solid, and its libraries aren't quite as complete. As a language matures, the rate at which old code breaks decreases; I think perl is futher along than python in that regard.
It is, but that's not a function of age, it's a function of adoption. Because Python was around for longer than Perl was before its adoption took off, the fact that they're of comparable age isn't as interesting as their timelines.
That said, Python has its own problems. It's been built on a foundation of axiomatic correctness in a realm that has no absolutes, and thus often finds itself having to compromise in difficult ways (ternary operator that isn't quite a postfix conditional even though those are evil, partial lambdas, and many other odd warts are a result of this struggle to maintain the illusion that there are correct and incorrect choices in language design).
I enjoy Python and work in it often, but I'll be happy when I can switch fully over to Perl 6 because I'll be able to return to a world where best practices are hammered out over time with the deliberation of thousands of programmers, not enshrined up-front by someone who's going with a feeling.
Is it just my memory, or is this over five years on one upgrade.
Perl 6 is not an upgrade to Perl 5.
This is something that many folks misunderstand, and frankly, it's a failure of the Perl development team to correctly communicate (an open source project with poor PR skills... shocking). Perl 6 isn't a new language either, though you'll find many who will say that it is (even within the project, where it's a sort of shorthand way of interrupting the long conversation that ensues if you don't call it a new language).
What Perl 6 is is the logical progression of Perl into the realm of modern, highly dynamic language. That means it's drawing on the concepts that come from many popular (and some not so popular) modern languages and blending them in a way that has never been done before. False starts, long implementation paths and re-designs triggered by new insights are par for the course.
But I want to take exception to the idea that "this has taken too long." How long is too long? If Perl 6 were released 2 days after you died of old age, would that be too long? What about 10 years from now? 5? 2? What's it mean to take too long? There were an abundance of languages that were popular when Perl 6 work started and there will be an abundance of them when Perl 6 lands. What Perl has lost is momentum. Perl 6 will not have the easy conversion of a massive Perl user base to start with, but then Perl didn't have that when it started.
Perl was a success because it solved a problem. It gave developers a tool for writing simple programs quickly without sacrificing features that they depended on in lower level languages such as binary data, arbitrary size strings and system call access, the three of which did not, as far as I can recall, exist in any other high level language at the time, outside of Lisp and unlike Lisp, Perl felt comfortable and familiar to the average Unix user at the time.
What will Perl 6 have going for it?
It will be the first language to give you the rich dynamic OO features of Ruby and Smalltalk, blended with the self-hosted language introspection of Common Lisp and the still-familiar feel of Unix/Linux systems all on a portable and language-neutral VM. Will that be a draw to the same sorts of users that cared strongly about Perl 5? Some yes and some no, but there will be a brand new segment of the programming community that will care strongly about Perl 6 features.
That's really all that matters, not how long it takes.
"Perl is more than just the vagaries of syntax. Perl is philosophy; Perl is custom; Perl is architectual edifice; Perl is community."
And Perl6 is a jump over the shark.
That's meaningless. You could say that about any new technology (I'm sure someone said it about the DVD).
I've seen snippets of Perl6 and it does indeed look rather different from previous versions of Perl.
In some ways yes, and in some ways, no. Perl 4 looked like this:
require "foo.pl";
local($foo);
$foo = 10;
Perl 5 looked like this:
package Foo;
my $foo = 10;
Perl 6 looks like this:
module Foo;
my $foo = 10;
You tell me which was a larger leap.
Perl 6 is, conceptually, a massive shift and arguably a language of its own. But in terms of raw syntax and ease-of-learning for current Perl 5 users, it's not as large a change as one might have thought.
The older users had more than 4x the friends each, on average, than the young.
It's like older users know more people than younger users, and that's just not possible. Kids know everything, just ask them.
More to the point, I don't see why this is an issue. I don't store anything on Facebook that's private and I don't trust any links that anyone that I don't know personally shares with me (not to mention my use of noscript's XSS-busting features). So what do I have to lose in accepting a friend request from a plastic frog, exactly?
I'd assumed as much, since a consumer OS without accelerated graphics would be a rather dismal failure. Even for non-gaming, you need to be able to write software that presents a 3D UI for all sorts of purposes these days.
Streaming is irrelevant. The patent is about downloading and managing subscriptions to audio files. It covers fetching new files when they're updated and making room on local storage by deleting older files.
Come to think of it, the best prior art for this is Usenet. Audio newsgroups contained audio files that were subscribed to by the user and news server software would make room for new files by deleting the old.
Yep, I think that'd about do it.
Also, the RSS standards history can probably point to some earlier implementations of client-side file management if you follow it down the rabbit hole far enough.