Re:Okay, I did well on my verbal SATs, but...
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
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· Score: 2
What the hell does
magisterial caesura mean?
It's pompusassese, meaning roughly, "look how damn clever I am for using largely dead and unused words.
Later on he also uses, "raison d'etre", which literally translates as "reason for being", but is idiomatically translated "I'm a smarmy git who gratuitiously uses foreign phrases when perfectly servicable english phrases exist in an effort to look
Almost all U.S. families live in areas
where a high-speed Internet connection is
available...
On the other hand, relatively few U.S. families
live in areas where there is competition for
high-speed Internet access. Even fewer have
competition beyond their single cable modem
provider and their single DSL provider.
Cable companies and phone companies have fought
like mad to protect their monopolies and their
investments are now paying off. High-speed
internet access is unlikely to to see big growth
until customer have real choices, encouraging
lower prices and higher quality service.
At 3840x2400 on a display marginally bigger than
this one, the icons will be about 1cm square.
The problem isn't the monitor, the problem is our
windowing systems, be they MS Windows, X-Windows, MacOS, or
otherwise. 150 dpi was the effective upper limit on
resolution for so long that people started treating it like
it was carved in stone.
A good windowing system (and any software under it),
should assume that 1,500 dpi monitor might appear tomorrow.
How will you make use of it? Don't just assume that I'll
still want my text to be 30 pixels high. We should all be
enjoying 150 dpi text on screen now, and looking
forward to 300 dpi soon. Resolution improvements in
printeres from 150 to 300 to 600 to 1200 were heralded as
great improvements, but no one seems excited about nice
crisp text on screen!
Most modern
systems handle fonts pretty well, but the setting isn't
obvious or easy enough. (I've know too many people who keep
MS Windows in 640x480 "because the text is bigger" instead
of increasing the resolution and the font size.) Less
correctly handled are icons and buttons. Apple has made
some improvements by requiring high resolutions bitmaps for
their new task manager bar thing. As a result, high
resolution displays get nicer looking icons. Some systems
support vector based icons that will scale to any size
(Irix's default file manager comes to mind).
But if your windowing system shows you unusuable small
icons or other widgets on high resolution monitors, complain
to your windowing system/operating system provider!
Sometimes I just want to get together with some friends,
relax, chat some, and play a role-playing game. Something
simple, something that every gamer knows inside and out,
something that gamemaster can easily whip something up for,
something with some of the guilty viseral pleasure of
beating up bad guys and taking their stuff. Something simple,
both in rules and roles.
When I began playing RPGs, I played D&D because it was the default.
When I matured, I played more serious, innovative games like
Vampire: The Masquerade, GURPs, and other games. I derided D&D
as a waste. Now that I'm older, busy with work and other things,
I appreciate D&D again. My life is complex and full or hard choices.
The D&D game I play in is a simple pleasure, low stress for everyone.
Also, you cannot ignore that 3e D&D has really helped revitalize the RPG industry. Things were slowing down and growth minimal. D&D brought the simple excitement back, brough back people who hadn't played in years, and brought in new players. Potential new players generally aren't going to try a more experimental system. They're looking for something simple that they can appreciate instantly. That game is D&D. And those new players will be looking for new games in a few years. That's your opportunity to introduce them to more mature games. Everyone wins!
There is a place for every sort of game, be they mature or not. I still run Deadlands, Psychosis,
Call of Cthulhu, and other more "mature" games, and I love them.
Don't insult D&D, it still has a place in my life and the lives of
millions of other gamers. If it isn't your cup of tea, just
leave it be.
Re:They can Coast a long for quite a while...
on
Layoffs at WotC
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· Score: 1
Apparently the Epic (levels higher than 20) rules D&D are already
designed so they have their next cash cow in the bag already.
Not only is it designed, it's been on store shelves for some time.
Refusing to sign documents can work pretty well.
I never signed the employment agreement at my last job
because they repeated failed to get me the changes they
promised. ("Hey, Alan, could you sign the employment agreement?"
"Sure, as soon as you get me a revised agreement per our
verbal agreement when I accepted the position." "Oh, sure, I'll
have that soon." Repeat every four months until I left.)
A similar technique worked for a friend.
However, signing a false name to the documents (John Doe),
is pretty clearly fraud and could get you in trouble if the
company pressed the issue in court. Don't do it.
I don't get it. If I moved from n to 1 on the
list of a vendor's customers, why wouldn't I see increased
leverage with my vendor? The story implies that being the
number one customer of Microsoft is tantamount to losing
leverage ("more dependant")?
Markets stop working correctly in the presence of a
monopoly. Microsoft has monopoly power over sales of
Microsoft Windows (that's what copyright does). Compaq/HP
doesn't see any feasible options other than Windows. HP on
its own had significant profit in other areas: printers,
scanners, calculators, and other hardware. Compaq increased
HP's investment in Microsoft Windows driven computers and
made HP more vulnerable.
I can't help but think of the similaries to addictive
drugs. The bigger a customer you are to a pusher, the more
dependant you are on the pusher.
Re:Why are we trying to do this at all?
on
XBox Linux HOWTOs
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· Score: 2
And don't give me the line about how every xbox sale
is a loss to microsoft. A sale is a sale on a quarterly earnings
report, which is all the stockholders care about
anyways.
Wow, clearly Microsoft should start selling XBoxes for a
dollar a piece (with the DVD support), their sales would go
through the roof and their stockholders would be in heaven.
Meanwhile, here on earth, shareholders tend to be interested
in profits, which is the difference between revenue and expenses.
An XBox costs more to make and ship than they profit from it.
Revenue for XBoxes is less than expenses. Negative profit, or a
loss.
Not that all losses are a problem. Eating a loss to develop a
powerful web browse and giving it away may be a great way to
protect your very profitable operating system monopoly. Eating a
loss because the vast majority of XBoxes will be profitable
through game purchases isn't so bad either.
Sure, you can build an similar system for a similar price.
However, it's going to take my time to assemble and debug the
hardware. For $200 I can build something that will match the
technical specs, but will generally use lower quality components
(bigger, noisier, flakier). What sort of case am I getting for
$20? I don't see terribly good 3d acceleration on that
motherboard you suggest.
(I've seen the argument that an XBox that doesn't sell is a
bigger loss to Microsoft. True, assuming that the XBox wasn't
going to sell. The question is, would that XBox have sold? If
Microsoft is still producing new XBoxes, the previous ones must
be selling. Microsoft has enough of a marketing research to
minimize the risk of ending up with a large backstock that they
can't move.)
Since UltraHLE i've never bought a console system.
Why? If I put that $200 into my system, in a couple of years
someone will write an emulator that can play it.
If it works for you, great. Meanwhile, I want to play the
games sooner than later, I want a system that is a breeze to set
up, I want a system that has rock solid stability, I'm not
interested in hanging around warez sites downloading various
copies until I find one that works, and I want to support authors
of high quality games by actually paying for them. To each his
own.
Re:The HOWTO sounds useful...
on
XBox Linux HOWTOs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Why?
The first, and perhaps most important reason is "Because
I can." We're geeks. Geeks modify things just to show that
they can, to excersize their geek skills, to reveal in the
technology.
Second, for $200 I can get a machine with a stereo
eqiupment form factor that will me a great mp3 and ogg
vorbis player with visualization on my TV (great for
parties), plays dvds, plays many classic games (courtesy of
MAME, ScummVM, and others), browses the web (say,
tvguide.com for listings), and if you're desperate can be
used to ssh into work to fix something. For that, it's
pretty good deal.
I've read lots of papers like this, going back to
Eric Raymond's rants. And you know, it sounds great on paper. It
really does. And I love the idea of the GPL. But in practice,
we're just not seeing all the innovation that you would expect.
The classic examples are always cited--Perl, gcc, Emacs, Apache,
the Linux kernel--but for a model that's supposed to be so
superior, the success stories are fewer than you'd expect.
Fewer than you would expect? If by "success" you mean "market
penetration", yes, we have problems. But we also lack dedicated
marketing departments. If by success you mean "large, useful,
stable, worthwhile", we're doing great. The Wine project is
making amazing progress on effectively reimplementing Windows.
It's to the point where Microsoft Office runs. Gnumeric isn't
perfect, but for 90% of the world's spreadsheet needs, it's
great. AbiWord and KWord are lagging a bit, but making great
progress. I've been using GnuCash for almost a year and haven't
missed MS Money in the slightest. Sure, the Gimp has some issues
that make it difficult to use for professional image publishing,
but it's more than adaquete for your average person, or someone
doing web images. (A friend who does photo editing work for a
local newspaper says that the Gimp has everything she needs to
replace Photoshop.) Playing music: XMMS. DVDs, DivX:-), and many
other video format: Xine. Email: Evolution. Highly standards
compliant web browser: Mozilla. Every single one of these is a
huge success story to me, they've allowed me to replace Windows
as my primary work system without missing anything.
One striking example is that the GPLed games for
Linux always tend to variations of Tetris, Boulder Dash, Missile
Command, etc. You would expect the innovative games to be coming
out for Linux: no pressure from marketing, free development
tools, big community. But the games with spark, like The Sims and
Grand Theft Auto 3 are coming from elsewhere.
There are a number of reasons why Free Software games tend to
be more simplistic. The biggest is art, sound, and music.
Programmers can whip up simple icons for their word processor,
but generating the hundreds of textures, dozens of sounds, and
music for a game isn't something we're as good at. And the
concept of "Free" hasn't infected the artists and musicians to
the extent that it has programmers. (This may be because
programmers have a great deal of incentive to share code. It's
harder to take another artist's work and tweak it a bit for your
own needs.)
That said, Free Software games aren't totally dead, just
small. Nethack avoids the art problem entirely and remains one
of the most innovative computer hack and slash games available.
Freeciv is highly derivative, but has an innovating client-server
set up. Tools like SCUMMVM and MAME show a great deal of
innovation in reverse engineering and improved visual displays of
existing content. Crystal Space is an excellent 3D engine mostly
suffering from lack of content created with it.
What is the Jedi doctrine? Do they even/pretend/ to adhere to it
other than when filling out a Census form? Does it otherwise affect their lives
in a significant way?
Sadly, many "believers" of more mainstream religions couldn't describe any
significant portion of their doctrine, don't really adhere to it, or really
allow it to affect their lives in any significant way. If you removed all of
the "Sunday Christians" or the "Christmas Christians", I expect you would cut
the number of North Americian Christians in half.
Great, a proprietary system recording my vote. I have no way to audit it
for correctness. Even if it was open source, if a problem is found, there is
no way to recount.
Any voting system needs to be auditable and recountable. My local county (Dane County in Wisconsin) has a great system. The ballot is a big piece of paper with a broken arrow next to each candidate. Something like this:
President
Albert Gore (Democrat) <-- ---
George Bush (Republican) <-- ---
Ralph Nader (Green) <-- ---
You use a provided pen to complete the line pointing to the candidate you
want. You then take your sheet and feed it into the locked tabulating machine.
The machine refuses your ballot if there are obvious errors and you're sent
back to try again with a new ballot.
The result: The interface is easy for anyone to understand. The
tabulating machines make it possible to quickly generate tallies. The system
is auditable since you can randomly hand count the ballots in a particular
machine to verify the totals. In the event of problems, you can simply hand
count the easy to read ballots (unlike trying to read holes in a punchcard).
Unfortunately shiny computer screens are easier to sell that boring grey boxes and paper ballots.
Putting copy protection on products is identical to putting
anti-theft tags on pocketable good, with mirrors and cameras and pickups by the
door to stop shoplifters.
Exactly! Why don't more people see this? Just yesterday I purchased a new
set of expensive headphones. To help ensure that the headphones weren't
stolen, they were designed to only work with stereos in North America. And
nothing helps prevent shoplifting like the build in ASS (audio scrambling
system) that ensure that the headphones can only be connected to certified
stereos. And I shudder to of how badly ravaged the electronics industry would
be if people were free to disassemble or modify headphones!
Hmmm, wait a minute. Now that I think about it, anti-theft tags are
nothing like copy restriction technology. Once I've paid for
something with an anti-theft tag, the tag is removed and I'm free to enjoy my
purchase however I want. Once I've paid for something with technical copy and
use restrictions, it follows me home and limits my use forever.
You're free to ignore ads however you want. Advertisers, however,
are free to do whatever they want to stop you from ignoring them.
There are limits to both my freedom to avoid ads, and advertisers freedom to
circumvent my actions.
Clearly it would be illegal and unethical for a user to break into the
advertising server and delete all of the ad images.
Conversely, it would be illegal for advertisers to trick my computer into
running software without my permission whose only purpose is to defeat software
I want.
In a technical race, the advertisers are going to lose, because ultimately
they need to trust my computer on my desktop to show the ad. There is no
purely technical solution that can't be spoofed. Because they are ultimately
doomed, escalating the race and pissing off potential customers in the process
is a stupid mistake. Instead, try to find a balancing point. If this
balancing point means that web ads aren't worth very much and many sites will
go out of business, well, that's unfortunate, but it can't be stopped.
Finally while I don't believe it's illegal to call people who use
ad-blockers thieves, it's rude and unsupported by law and history.
If the service is bad, then don't use it, full
stop. If you use anti-banner software you are effectively
cheating the webmaster into providing you his service,
without paying for it. It's like going to a restaurant and
not paying because you didn't want to see the ads on the
inside cover of the menu.
Yeah! It's exactly like that. Expect for the part where
it's nothing like that.
Where did you come up with that bizarre comparison?
Theft of product (food in your example), has nothing to do
with refusing to to look at ads.
Am I thief because when I get a magazine I rip out pages
with advertisements on both sides? Have I stolen anything
when I pay a clipping service to cut articles out of papers
and send them to me, allowing me to avoid seeing the ads?
When I fast forward through ads when I tape the
Simpsons, have I stolen college money from some
network exec's child? Egad, I never knew that all these
years I've been using the restroom during ads on live
television, that's I've actually been stealing
programming.
Bah, humbug. I'm free to ignore ads however I want.
Once you've provided your copyright protected material to
me, I'm free to mangle that copy any way I want for my
personal use. This includes using automated tools to do it.
Your web site asked to my computer to display an ad. I've
asked my computer to decline to do so. My call, not yours.
Will this spell the death of the web? No. The
non-commercial part has blundered along happily without ads
of any sort for some time. The commericial part will simply
have to grow up and stop whining. Perhaps the answer is
less aggressive advertising so users don't seek out anti-ad
technology (I block heavily animated ads and popup ads, but
I'll leave minimally animated, non-flash banner ads alone.
I even like Google's text ads). Perhaps the answer
is more pay-for-subscription sites. (I pay for two sites of
value to me). Maybe the margins will be smaller, maybe
fewer sites will be financially possible. That's life.
Branding your users as theives for taking control of their
own computer is just stupid.
At lot of people are saying that this is an application level problem and
not a flaw in Windows. That is wrong.
The core result of the attack is that it is impossible for a high privilege
program to display a GUI interface to a low privilege user. That is a silly
limitation, certainly one that that other GUI systems like X Windows do not
share. Sure, you can work around the weakness by having a low privilege GUI
talk to a high privilege service over a local socket, but it shouldn't be
necessary. This gross "fix" will complicate the situation, potentially opening
additional security holes.
Microsoft tried to deflect the issue by hiding behind, "If the user is local
to the machine, or can run his own binaries, he owns your machine." It sounds
nice in theory, but falls apart when the "user" in question is actually an
opportunistic virus looking to add the machine to a distributed denial of
service cluster. Many corporate environments lock down the machines not for
fear of user attack, but to limit the damage of viruses and other malware. If
the malware can exploit this technique to gain elevated privileges, your
security steps are worthless.
Ultimately, with a bit of care, a high privilege program should be able to
safely interact with a user through any means, be it command line, GUI,
network, or otherwise. If the operating system makes this impossible, the
operation system has a flaw.
I suspect that the anonymous coward is joking, but
please, if you care about your source code at all,
do not use Visual SourceSafe.
Visual SourceSafe is awful software that plagued my existance for five years.
If you are using Visual SourceSafe, or are considering it,
please see this page on Visual SourceSafe's faults.
Re:Why do interviewers use "riddles"?
on
Tech-Interview Riddles
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· Score: 3, Informative
A couple of years ago I was asked: How many gas stations are there in
the US?
My answer: I don't know, I'd probably check a search engine.
After I insisted that I couldn't come up with an answer on my own, I
was informed that they were looking for people who "think out of the
box" and only people that hazarded a guess made it to level two
interviews.
It sounds like the interviewer remembered a typical "impossible" question,
but forgot why you ask it. The purpose isn't to think out of the box, the
purpose is to examine problem solving skills with a problem the applicant has
never seen before. Sure, you don't know anything about gas station density in
the US, but you'll eventually be required to answer a question you don't really
know anything about. "We've been asked to implement a simple web browser that
will run on an embedded system that doesn't exist yet. Give me an estimate for
how long it will take." It sucks, but you're going to need to do it.
Because most engineers are loathe to pull estimates out of thin air, it's
only fair to explain that you're only looking for a very rough estimate. If
the engineer continues to resist, explain that you know he doesn't have good
input to work with.
That said, your answer, "check a search engine" isn't that bad of a place to
start. (That's what reference materials are for!). When you're told that it's
a good place to start, but that it's not an option, start making up numbers and
guessing. Make it clear when you're guessing at numbers. "Well, there are
about 300 million people in the US, about half don't have cards, so 150 million
cars. You typically get gas once per week. A gas station can serve 100 people
per day. That's 700 people per week, or about 1,000 for ease of doing the
calculation. So you'll need about 150,000 gas stations." I promise that I
pulled that answer out of the air. I have no idea how many people are in the
US, let alone any of the other numbers, but I'm pretty sure that I'm within an
order of magnitude. In fact, quickly searching the web it looks like I'm very
close.
Similar logic can get you surprisingly accurate numbers for the volume of
water that flows out of the Mississippi each minute, the number of malls,
police stations, high schools in the US, or other seemingly hard to know
things. Just take what you do know and make educated guesses.
The string hash function was just stupid, although it might have helped to
ask the interviewer what properties he wanted out of the hash. In general,
bouncing questions about the problem off the interviewer looks good and can
often make the solution easy. The question does sound like an esoteric
knowledge question, and those are the worst.
Being asked to solve a tricky technical question? Well, it's a legit, real
problem. It's a fair way to gauge your problem solving ability (did you
stumble across the same things they did? Good. Did you suggest something new?
Great.). I wouldn't worry about their "stealing" your answer. If the problem
really is hard, it's unlikely in the ten or twenty minute interview question
that you'll find a superior answer to them.
All that the BSA does is make sure the software companies are
adequately compensated for their particular licenses.
...by sending threatening letters, forcing expensive audits, and assuming
that failure to locate a license equals theft.
Businesses should darn well acquire their software legally. If the software
they want is commercial, it should be paid for. However, the BSA assumes that
every user is convicted thief who must be monitored. The cost of an audit can
devastate a school district or city.
If can go to Best Buy and purchase a DVD player, a PS2 game, a big screen
televison, some music CDs, some magazines, a car stereo, some speakers, a phone
card, a strategy guide book, and some computer software. How I pay for each of
things looks identical. Only the computer software attempts to change the sale
into a license after I get it home and try to use it. With the exception of
the computer software, I'm free to modify or copy any of these things (Assuming
I'm capable of copying them) for my personal use. And only the computer
software exposes me to the possibility of having to pay to have an audit prove
that I didn't steal it.
The BSA is leading this charge, "You're a thief unless you can prove
otherwise." They damn well deserve all the flak they get.
Tempting review? Go see the show. I dislike cooking shows, but I religiously watch every episode of Good Eats, even the ones about food I hate. Why? Because Alton is a huge geek. You'll learn some recipes from him, sure, but more importantly you'll learn why things work. His chocolate chip cookie episode is brilliant. You learn what variables to adjust to tweak the cookies to your desired mix of chewy / puffy / flat. And you learn the science about why tweaking those variables matters. Excellent show.
I thot that PNG was more for line-art type images.... PNG would
result in a lot of dithering (pixel spots) in your porn for example.
While PNG is best at line-art, PNG is a loseless format. It will
represent your photos perfectly well, slightly better than JPEG in fact. For
storing of high quality original images, PNG is superior to JPEG. However,
because it is loseless, it will tend to be larger than an equivalent JPEG file, often much larger..
Just to recap, if you own a car, the government already knows
about it. They're not really that interested in you though.
You're missing the point. I think the part were I wrote my name, address,
and bunches of other information on a form I handed in might be a subtle clue
that they have access to my name, address, and bunches of other information.
The point is that system would give them information they never had before.
With this system they can track your movements. At the very least they can
track when you enter and exit the area in question. Armed with a pervasive
enough system of cameras, you specific movements via car can easily be tracked.
Shrugging this off as unimportant because the government knows where you
were 30 years ago (assuming you're 30) is stupid.
....but that (LCD gizmo to make the plate invisble to cameras)
would be tax evasion, which is criminal, and rightly so. Why is this suggestion
moderated up? Hey, Microsoft charge $250 for XP - if only I had some heavy
mates, then we could smash our way into the warehouse and steal as many copies
as we want, 'eh?
You were fine up to the implication that avoiding a traffic fee is similar
to breaking, entering, and physical theft. Have a sense of scale. Tax evasion
is nothing like physical theft. Both are illegal, and I believe both to be
unethical. But to lump them together is silly.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pompusassese, meaning roughly, "look how
damn clever I am for using largely dead
and unused words.
Later on he also uses, "raison d'etre", which literally
translates as "reason for being", but is idiomatically
translated "I'm a smarmy git who gratuitiously
uses foreign phrases when perfectly servicable
english phrases exist in an effort to look
Quoth the article:
On the other hand, relatively few U.S. families live in areas where there is competition for high-speed Internet access. Even fewer have competition beyond their single cable modem provider and their single DSL provider.
Cable companies and phone companies have fought like mad to protect their monopolies and their investments are now paying off. High-speed internet access is unlikely to to see big growth until customer have real choices, encouraging lower prices and higher quality service.
The problem isn't the monitor, the problem is our windowing systems, be they MS Windows, X-Windows, MacOS, or otherwise. 150 dpi was the effective upper limit on resolution for so long that people started treating it like it was carved in stone.
A good windowing system (and any software under it), should assume that 1,500 dpi monitor might appear tomorrow. How will you make use of it? Don't just assume that I'll still want my text to be 30 pixels high. We should all be enjoying 150 dpi text on screen now, and looking forward to 300 dpi soon. Resolution improvements in printeres from 150 to 300 to 600 to 1200 were heralded as great improvements, but no one seems excited about nice crisp text on screen! Most modern systems handle fonts pretty well, but the setting isn't obvious or easy enough. (I've know too many people who keep MS Windows in 640x480 "because the text is bigger" instead of increasing the resolution and the font size.) Less correctly handled are icons and buttons. Apple has made some improvements by requiring high resolutions bitmaps for their new task manager bar thing. As a result, high resolution displays get nicer looking icons. Some systems support vector based icons that will scale to any size (Irix's default file manager comes to mind).
But if your windowing system shows you unusuable small icons or other widgets on high resolution monitors, complain to your windowing system/operating system provider!
Sometimes I just want to get together with some friends, relax, chat some, and play a role-playing game. Something simple, something that every gamer knows inside and out, something that gamemaster can easily whip something up for, something with some of the guilty viseral pleasure of beating up bad guys and taking their stuff. Something simple, both in rules and roles.
When I began playing RPGs, I played D&D because it was the default. When I matured, I played more serious, innovative games like Vampire: The Masquerade, GURPs, and other games. I derided D&D as a waste. Now that I'm older, busy with work and other things, I appreciate D&D again. My life is complex and full or hard choices. The D&D game I play in is a simple pleasure, low stress for everyone.
Also, you cannot ignore that 3e D&D has really helped revitalize the RPG industry. Things were slowing down and growth minimal. D&D brought the simple excitement back, brough back people who hadn't played in years, and brought in new players. Potential new players generally aren't going to try a more experimental system. They're looking for something simple that they can appreciate instantly. That game is D&D. And those new players will be looking for new games in a few years. That's your opportunity to introduce them to more mature games. Everyone wins!
There is a place for every sort of game, be they mature or not. I still run Deadlands, Psychosis, Call of Cthulhu, and other more "mature" games, and I love them. Don't insult D&D, it still has a place in my life and the lives of millions of other gamers. If it isn't your cup of tea, just leave it be.
Not only is it designed, it's been on store shelves for some time.
However, signing a false name to the documents (John Doe), is pretty clearly fraud and could get you in trouble if the company pressed the issue in court. Don't do it.
Markets stop working correctly in the presence of a monopoly. Microsoft has monopoly power over sales of Microsoft Windows (that's what copyright does). Compaq/HP doesn't see any feasible options other than Windows. HP on its own had significant profit in other areas: printers, scanners, calculators, and other hardware. Compaq increased HP's investment in Microsoft Windows driven computers and made HP more vulnerable.
I can't help but think of the similaries to addictive drugs. The bigger a customer you are to a pusher, the more dependant you are on the pusher.
Wow, clearly Microsoft should start selling XBoxes for a dollar a piece (with the DVD support), their sales would go through the roof and their stockholders would be in heaven.
Meanwhile, here on earth, shareholders tend to be interested in profits, which is the difference between revenue and expenses. An XBox costs more to make and ship than they profit from it. Revenue for XBoxes is less than expenses. Negative profit, or a loss.
Not that all losses are a problem. Eating a loss to develop a powerful web browse and giving it away may be a great way to protect your very profitable operating system monopoly. Eating a loss because the vast majority of XBoxes will be profitable through game purchases isn't so bad either.
Sure, you can build an similar system for a similar price. However, it's going to take my time to assemble and debug the hardware. For $200 I can build something that will match the technical specs, but will generally use lower quality components (bigger, noisier, flakier). What sort of case am I getting for $20? I don't see terribly good 3d acceleration on that motherboard you suggest.
(I've seen the argument that an XBox that doesn't sell is a bigger loss to Microsoft. True, assuming that the XBox wasn't going to sell. The question is, would that XBox have sold? If Microsoft is still producing new XBoxes, the previous ones must be selling. Microsoft has enough of a marketing research to minimize the risk of ending up with a large backstock that they can't move.)
If it works for you, great. Meanwhile, I want to play the games sooner than later, I want a system that is a breeze to set up, I want a system that has rock solid stability, I'm not interested in hanging around warez sites downloading various copies until I find one that works, and I want to support authors of high quality games by actually paying for them. To each his own.
Why?
The first, and perhaps most important reason is "Because I can." We're geeks. Geeks modify things just to show that they can, to excersize their geek skills, to reveal in the technology.
Second, for $200 I can get a machine with a stereo eqiupment form factor that will me a great mp3 and ogg vorbis player with visualization on my TV (great for parties), plays dvds, plays many classic games (courtesy of MAME, ScummVM, and others), browses the web (say, tvguide.com for listings), and if you're desperate can be used to ssh into work to fix something. For that, it's pretty good deal.
Fewer than you would expect? If by "success" you mean "market penetration", yes, we have problems. But we also lack dedicated marketing departments. If by success you mean "large, useful, stable, worthwhile", we're doing great. The Wine project is making amazing progress on effectively reimplementing Windows. It's to the point where Microsoft Office runs. Gnumeric isn't perfect, but for 90% of the world's spreadsheet needs, it's great. AbiWord and KWord are lagging a bit, but making great progress. I've been using GnuCash for almost a year and haven't missed MS Money in the slightest. Sure, the Gimp has some issues that make it difficult to use for professional image publishing, but it's more than adaquete for your average person, or someone doing web images. (A friend who does photo editing work for a local newspaper says that the Gimp has everything she needs to replace Photoshop.) Playing music: XMMS. DVDs, DivX:-), and many other video format: Xine. Email: Evolution. Highly standards compliant web browser: Mozilla. Every single one of these is a huge success story to me, they've allowed me to replace Windows as my primary work system without missing anything.
There are a number of reasons why Free Software games tend to be more simplistic. The biggest is art, sound, and music. Programmers can whip up simple icons for their word processor, but generating the hundreds of textures, dozens of sounds, and music for a game isn't something we're as good at. And the concept of "Free" hasn't infected the artists and musicians to the extent that it has programmers. (This may be because programmers have a great deal of incentive to share code. It's harder to take another artist's work and tweak it a bit for your own needs.)
That said, Free Software games aren't totally dead, just small. Nethack avoids the art problem entirely and remains one of the most innovative computer hack and slash games available. Freeciv is highly derivative, but has an innovating client-server set up. Tools like SCUMMVM and MAME show a great deal of innovation in reverse engineering and improved visual displays of existing content. Crystal Space is an excellent 3D engine mostly suffering from lack of content created with it.
Sadly, many "believers" of more mainstream religions couldn't describe any significant portion of their doctrine, don't really adhere to it, or really allow it to affect their lives in any significant way. If you removed all of the "Sunday Christians" or the "Christmas Christians", I expect you would cut the number of North Americian Christians in half.
Great, a proprietary system recording my vote. I have no way to audit it for correctness. Even if it was open source, if a problem is found, there is no way to recount.
Any voting system needs to be auditable and recountable. My local county (Dane County in Wisconsin) has a great system. The ballot is a big piece of paper with a broken arrow next to each candidate. Something like this: President
Albert Gore (Democrat) <-- ---
George Bush (Republican) <-- ---
Ralph Nader (Green) <-- ---
You use a provided pen to complete the line pointing to the candidate you want. You then take your sheet and feed it into the locked tabulating machine. The machine refuses your ballot if there are obvious errors and you're sent back to try again with a new ballot.
The result: The interface is easy for anyone to understand. The tabulating machines make it possible to quickly generate tallies. The system is auditable since you can randomly hand count the ballots in a particular machine to verify the totals. In the event of problems, you can simply hand count the easy to read ballots (unlike trying to read holes in a punchcard).
Unfortunately shiny computer screens are easier to sell that boring grey boxes and paper ballots.
Exactly! Why don't more people see this? Just yesterday I purchased a new set of expensive headphones. To help ensure that the headphones weren't stolen, they were designed to only work with stereos in North America. And nothing helps prevent shoplifting like the build in ASS (audio scrambling system) that ensure that the headphones can only be connected to certified stereos. And I shudder to of how badly ravaged the electronics industry would be if people were free to disassemble or modify headphones!
Hmmm, wait a minute. Now that I think about it, anti-theft tags are nothing like copy restriction technology. Once I've paid for something with an anti-theft tag, the tag is removed and I'm free to enjoy my purchase however I want. Once I've paid for something with technical copy and use restrictions, it follows me home and limits my use forever.
There are limits to both my freedom to avoid ads, and advertisers freedom to circumvent my actions.
Clearly it would be illegal and unethical for a user to break into the advertising server and delete all of the ad images.
Conversely, it would be illegal for advertisers to trick my computer into running software without my permission whose only purpose is to defeat software I want.
In a technical race, the advertisers are going to lose, because ultimately they need to trust my computer on my desktop to show the ad. There is no purely technical solution that can't be spoofed. Because they are ultimately doomed, escalating the race and pissing off potential customers in the process is a stupid mistake. Instead, try to find a balancing point. If this balancing point means that web ads aren't worth very much and many sites will go out of business, well, that's unfortunate, but it can't be stopped.
Finally while I don't believe it's illegal to call people who use ad-blockers thieves, it's rude and unsupported by law and history.
Yeah! It's exactly like that. Expect for the part where it's nothing like that.
Where did you come up with that bizarre comparison? Theft of product (food in your example), has nothing to do with refusing to to look at ads.
Am I thief because when I get a magazine I rip out pages with advertisements on both sides? Have I stolen anything when I pay a clipping service to cut articles out of papers and send them to me, allowing me to avoid seeing the ads? When I fast forward through ads when I tape the Simpsons, have I stolen college money from some network exec's child? Egad, I never knew that all these years I've been using the restroom during ads on live television, that's I've actually been stealing programming.
Bah, humbug. I'm free to ignore ads however I want. Once you've provided your copyright protected material to me, I'm free to mangle that copy any way I want for my personal use. This includes using automated tools to do it. Your web site asked to my computer to display an ad. I've asked my computer to decline to do so. My call, not yours.
Will this spell the death of the web? No. The non-commercial part has blundered along happily without ads of any sort for some time. The commericial part will simply have to grow up and stop whining. Perhaps the answer is less aggressive advertising so users don't seek out anti-ad technology (I block heavily animated ads and popup ads, but I'll leave minimally animated, non-flash banner ads alone. I even like Google's text ads). Perhaps the answer is more pay-for-subscription sites. (I pay for two sites of value to me). Maybe the margins will be smaller, maybe fewer sites will be financially possible. That's life. Branding your users as theives for taking control of their own computer is just stupid.
At lot of people are saying that this is an application level problem and not a flaw in Windows. That is wrong.
The core result of the attack is that it is impossible for a high privilege program to display a GUI interface to a low privilege user. That is a silly limitation, certainly one that that other GUI systems like X Windows do not share. Sure, you can work around the weakness by having a low privilege GUI talk to a high privilege service over a local socket, but it shouldn't be necessary. This gross "fix" will complicate the situation, potentially opening additional security holes.
Microsoft tried to deflect the issue by hiding behind, "If the user is local to the machine, or can run his own binaries, he owns your machine." It sounds nice in theory, but falls apart when the "user" in question is actually an opportunistic virus looking to add the machine to a distributed denial of service cluster. Many corporate environments lock down the machines not for fear of user attack, but to limit the damage of viruses and other malware. If the malware can exploit this technique to gain elevated privileges, your security steps are worthless.
Ultimately, with a bit of care, a high privilege program should be able to safely interact with a user through any means, be it command line, GUI, network, or otherwise. If the operating system makes this impossible, the operation system has a flaw.
I think it would be a lot of fun if I had a nerf rocket launcher capable of hitting someone a block away inside of a house.
I suspect that the anonymous coward is joking, but please, if you care about your source code at all, do not use Visual SourceSafe. Visual SourceSafe is awful software that plagued my existance for five years. If you are using Visual SourceSafe, or are considering it, please see this page on Visual SourceSafe's faults.
It sounds like the interviewer remembered a typical "impossible" question, but forgot why you ask it. The purpose isn't to think out of the box, the purpose is to examine problem solving skills with a problem the applicant has never seen before. Sure, you don't know anything about gas station density in the US, but you'll eventually be required to answer a question you don't really know anything about. "We've been asked to implement a simple web browser that will run on an embedded system that doesn't exist yet. Give me an estimate for how long it will take." It sucks, but you're going to need to do it.
Because most engineers are loathe to pull estimates out of thin air, it's only fair to explain that you're only looking for a very rough estimate. If the engineer continues to resist, explain that you know he doesn't have good input to work with.
That said, your answer, "check a search engine" isn't that bad of a place to start. (That's what reference materials are for!). When you're told that it's a good place to start, but that it's not an option, start making up numbers and guessing. Make it clear when you're guessing at numbers. "Well, there are about 300 million people in the US, about half don't have cards, so 150 million cars. You typically get gas once per week. A gas station can serve 100 people per day. That's 700 people per week, or about 1,000 for ease of doing the calculation. So you'll need about 150,000 gas stations." I promise that I pulled that answer out of the air. I have no idea how many people are in the US, let alone any of the other numbers, but I'm pretty sure that I'm within an order of magnitude. In fact, quickly searching the web it looks like I'm very close.
Similar logic can get you surprisingly accurate numbers for the volume of water that flows out of the Mississippi each minute, the number of malls, police stations, high schools in the US, or other seemingly hard to know things. Just take what you do know and make educated guesses.
The string hash function was just stupid, although it might have helped to ask the interviewer what properties he wanted out of the hash. In general, bouncing questions about the problem off the interviewer looks good and can often make the solution easy. The question does sound like an esoteric knowledge question, and those are the worst.
Being asked to solve a tricky technical question? Well, it's a legit, real problem. It's a fair way to gauge your problem solving ability (did you stumble across the same things they did? Good. Did you suggest something new? Great.). I wouldn't worry about their "stealing" your answer. If the problem really is hard, it's unlikely in the ten or twenty minute interview question that you'll find a superior answer to them.
Businesses should darn well acquire their software legally. If the software they want is commercial, it should be paid for. However, the BSA assumes that every user is convicted thief who must be monitored. The cost of an audit can devastate a school district or city.
If can go to Best Buy and purchase a DVD player, a PS2 game, a big screen televison, some music CDs, some magazines, a car stereo, some speakers, a phone card, a strategy guide book, and some computer software. How I pay for each of things looks identical. Only the computer software attempts to change the sale into a license after I get it home and try to use it. With the exception of the computer software, I'm free to modify or copy any of these things (Assuming I'm capable of copying them) for my personal use. And only the computer software exposes me to the possibility of having to pay to have an audit prove that I didn't steal it.
The BSA is leading this charge, "You're a thief unless you can prove otherwise." They damn well deserve all the flak they get.
Tempting review? Go see the show. I dislike cooking shows, but I religiously watch every episode of Good Eats, even the ones about food I hate. Why? Because Alton is a huge geek. You'll learn some recipes from him, sure, but more importantly you'll learn why things work. His chocolate chip cookie episode is brilliant. You learn what variables to adjust to tweak the cookies to your desired mix of chewy / puffy / flat. And you learn the science about why tweaking those variables matters. Excellent show.
While PNG is best at line-art, PNG is a loseless format. It will represent your photos perfectly well, slightly better than JPEG in fact. For storing of high quality original images, PNG is superior to JPEG. However, because it is loseless, it will tend to be larger than an equivalent JPEG file, often much larger..
You're missing the point. I think the part were I wrote my name, address, and bunches of other information on a form I handed in might be a subtle clue that they have access to my name, address, and bunches of other information.
The point is that system would give them information they never had before. With this system they can track your movements. At the very least they can track when you enter and exit the area in question. Armed with a pervasive enough system of cameras, you specific movements via car can easily be tracked.
Shrugging this off as unimportant because the government knows where you were 30 years ago (assuming you're 30) is stupid.
You were fine up to the implication that avoiding a traffic fee is similar to breaking, entering, and physical theft. Have a sense of scale. Tax evasion is nothing like physical theft. Both are illegal, and I believe both to be unethical. But to lump them together is silly.