Here's a radical idea. How about if the search engine returns results that are ACTUALLY WHAT I'M SEARCHING FOR.
One day I was trying to find a particular video clip. No matter how i tried to refine my search query, all I got was completely irrelevant bullshit. Now, the video I was looking for was somewhat old and obscure and so its entirely possible that it doesn't exist anywhere on the Internet. That's fine. I can accept that.
But, if that's the case, then my search should return zero results. Not thousands of irrelevant results.
But seriously. This is humorous and ironic, but not at all surprising. Every organization that has engaged in extensive "anti-piracy" actions has been found, almost without exception, to be involved in some sort of piracy themselves.
in order to make native Apple apps to seem better.
That makes no sense. They don't achieve anything if their apps look better than the other apps on the device, they just make the entire experience worse. It would be like cutting off their nose to spite their face.
The iPads weren't standalone education devices â" they were supposed to work in conjunction with another device carrying curriculum from a company named Pearson. But the district now says the combined tech didn't meet their needs, and they want their money back.
So... They didn't test the iPad / content combo to establish usability / feasibility / usefulness prior to dropping all this cash?
Anyone with half a brain could see that this whole thing had FIASCO written all over it in bright red letters. The whole thing reeks of one giant scam.
-- The school district signed an initial $30 million deal with Apple in a program that was supposed to eventually cost up to $1.3 billion. As part of the program, the LA School District would buy iPads from Apple at $768 each
You can go into any store an buy the most expensive iPad for $699. The school system is spending a billion dollars and didn't negotiate a discount on the price? They're actually paying $79 over retail !!?? What the fucking fuck.
-- and then Pearson, a subcontractor with Apple, would provide math and science curriculum for the tablets at an additional $200 per unit.
$200 per unit for some shitty software? You've now jacked up the price to nearly a thousand dollars per iPad. Again, they're spending a billion dollars and don't negotiate a discount?
-- Less than 2 months after the program started, the school district reported that one-third of the 2,100 iPads distributed during the initial rollout of the program, had gone missing.
Seriously? You didn't see this coming from a mile away?
-- And best of all, the schools district's Assistant Superintendent, essentially the number 2 person in charge of the entire school system, is a former executive with Pearson, the company providing the software, and he was heavily involved in helping Pearson land the contract..
So everyone is penalized because women are inferior to men. Nice.
But the bigger issue is why negotiating even exists at all. Too many companies want to make the hiring process like buying a used car, offering you a low figure, hoping you'll take it, and only offering more if you "negotiate harder".
If they go under they aren't going to give a crap about you and if another company buys Valve and shuts it down they aren't going to care about you either.
It isn't just a question of Valve going out of business.
Sony bought OnLive to get their patent portfolio. It's the only thing Sony cared about. That's why they bought them and shut them down.
No matter what Valve says, the same thing could happen to them. And when it happens, they won't be able to do any of the things they have promised because someone else is calling the shots and they no longer have any say in it.
If you have to pay a fee to get the job -- it's a scam. Except in this case, they're not even bothering to guarantee you the job. Because it's so exciting, they need only promise you the opportunity. And then further down the road, they'll likely ask for more money, "to get further up the ladder, still".
About every ten months, somebody new discovers the Notepad file encoding problem. Let's see what else there is to say about it.
First of all, can we change Notepad's detection algorithm? The problem is that there are a lot of different text files out there. Let's look just at the ones that Notepad supports.
8-bit ANSI (of which 7-bit ASCII is a subset). These have no BOM; they just dive right in with bytes of text. They are also probably the most common type of text file.
UTF-8. These usually begin with a BOM but not always.
Unicode big-endian (UTF-16BE). These usually begin with a BOM but not always.
Unicode little-endian (UTF-16LE). These usually begin with a BOM but not always.
If a BOM is found, then life is easy, since the BOM tells you what encoding the file uses. The problem is when there is no BOM. Now you have to guess, and when you guess, you can guess wrong. For example, consider this file:
D0 AE
Depending on which encoding you assume, you get very different results.
If you assume 8-bit ANSI (with code page 1252), then the file consists of the two characters U+00D0 U+00AE, or "". Sure this looks strange, but maybe it's part of the word VATNI which might be the name of an Icelandic hotel.
If you assume UTF-8, then the file consists of the single Cyrillic character U+042E
If you assume Unicode big-endian, then the file consists of the Korean Hangul syllable U+D0AE
If you assume Unicode little-endian, then the file consists of the Korean Hangul syllable U+AED0
Some people might say that the rule should be "All files without a BOM are 8-bit ANSI." In that case, you're going to misinterpret all the files that use UTF-8 or UTF-16 and don't have a BOM. Note that the Unicode standard even advises against using a BOM for UTF-8, so you're already throwing out everybody who follows the recommendation.
Okay, given that the Unicode folks recommend against using a BOM for UTF-8, maybe your rule is "All files without a BOM are UTF-8." Well, that messes up all 8-bit ANSI files that use characters above 127.
Maybe you're willing to accept that ambiguity, and use the rule, "If the file looks like valid UTF-8, then use UTF-8; otherwise use 8-bit ANSI, but under no circumstances should you treat the file as UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE." In other words, "never auto-detect UTF-16". First, you still have ambiguous cases, like the file above, which could be either 8-bit ANSI or UTF-8. And second, you are going to be flat-out wrong when you run into a Unicode file that lacks a BOM, since you're going to misinterpret it as either UTF-8 or (more likely) 8-bit ANSI. You might decide that programs that generate UTF-16 files without a BOM are broken, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. For example,
cmd/u/c dir >results.txt
This generates a UTF-16LE file without a BOM. If you poke around your Windows directory, you'll probably find other Unicode files without a BOM. (For example, I found COM+.log.) These files still "worked" under the old IsTextUnicode algorithm, but now they are unreadable. Maybe you consider that an acceptable loss.
The point is that no matter how you decide to resolve the ambiguity, somebody will win and somebody else will lose. And then people can start experimenting with the "losers" to find one that makes your algorithm look stupid for choosing "incorrectly".
Make no mistake. This is a literal and direct attack on Linux. OEM's will not care about the few people who use Linux and will omit this ability essentially killing Linux off. This is Microsoft's attempt at the final nail in the coffin of Linux.
This isn't about Linux (although I'm sure Microsoft's hatred of Linux has something to do with it). People who buy a pre-built system from one of the big OEMs have no intention of installing an alternative OS, so this is a non-issue for them.
If you do buy a pre-built system from one of the big OEMs so you can put Linux on it, you're too stupid to be allowed near a computer.
Buy the components and build it yourself and you won't be bothered with any of this bullshit. Anyone who knows which end of a screwdriver to hold can easily do it.
And what makes you think that Rust will be any better? What makes you think Mozilla will "get it right" and not create just another language full of new/different vulnerabilities.
By building the browser yourself (with CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS and even CC and CXX set to something unusual — such as to target only your specific -march) — rather than downloading prebuilt binaries — you make the attacker's job much harder. To successfully exploit your browser, he'll now need to make a custom exploit just for you.
And, if you include -fstack-protector or equivalent among your compiler-flags, you may even be able to make such attacks impossible for good.
Technically, this is correct.
However, I've tried to make my own custom builds of Firefox and it's a nightmare. The build process used by Firefox is so complicated and convoluted, it would make Rube Goldberg laugh. I haven't tried building Chrome, but reading the build instructions, it appears to be only marginally better.
What really matters is the final performance, using the universal standard measure of FoC(3), aka "Frames (per second) of Crysis3".
Except it's not. Not even close. Some of us have never even played a Crysis game.
But it's still a good benchmark even if you never play any of the Crysis games.
If the card gives a good performance in "Frames (per second) of Crysis3" then that's a reasonably good indicator that you'll get good performance in other applications -- it's at least better than AMD or Nvidia's meaningless marketing doublespeak.
It's worth putting all this out there because it has been one gigantic clusterfuck ever since Windows 8's features were revealed. And I will continue to point out that PR firms and fanbois have harmed Microsoft more than help them. I really hope Windows 10 can put this awkward, uncomfortable, frustrating dynamic to bed. The social costs of Windows 8 have undermined its value as an OS, and that's so damn silly that it's a shame I have to type it. In the Army, we called that "Mickey Mouse bullshit." All that should matter is the OS itself, and I'm optimistic about Windows 10 in that regard.
I some time running the Windows 10 Technical preview that was released in January. Although it's an early, nowhere-near-finished- pre-beta version, it shows where Microsoft's thinking is headed. And it's not good.
While they have made some improvements over the clusterfuck that is Windows 8, in most cases they have doubled-down on stupid, keeping the vast majority of bad design decisions that were made with Windows 8. Even bringing back the Start Menu was botched. It still isn't as functional as Windows 7.
And the whole thing is just fucking ugly. More and more people spend an enormous amount of time in front of a computer, not just for social/entertainment purposes but for work as well. Aesthetics matter and Windows 8/10 fail horribly. This picture sums it all up perfectly:
I can't believe it took them TWO FULL VERSIONS to realize they needed the feature. This should have been implemented back in Windows 8, or 9 at least...
Getting out of a metro app is a mystery to me. I want to kill the video, not have it running in the background. The only way I can find is to swipe to the metro start screen, click on the desktop icon, go to task manager, find the metro app I want to kill, and end the process.
Why can't they let me exit the metro app directly?
Because Microsoft knows better than you.
This is part of the absurd new mindset at Microsoft. You aren't supposed to exit the application. When the application has been idle for a while the OS (supposedly) will suspend it.
This design makes no sense, but neither do the other 1000 bad design decisions they made with Windows 8/10, so it's not surprising.
The next generation of "trolls" will only be more careful. Hope he feels proud of himself for stooping to their level.
Unfortunately (for the Internet trolls) being "more careful" isn't necessarily an option. What Curt Schilling actually demonstrated is that it's trivially easy to "out" or "dox" most people due to their blindly spewing every last bit of personal information about themselves all over the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a radical idea. How about if the search engine returns results that are ACTUALLY WHAT I'M SEARCHING FOR.
One day I was trying to find a particular video clip. No matter how i tried to refine my search query, all I got was completely irrelevant bullshit. Now, the video I was looking for was somewhat old and obscure and so its entirely possible that it doesn't exist anywhere on the Internet. That's fine. I can accept that.
But, if that's the case, then my search should return zero results. Not thousands of irrelevant results.
Is this Slashdot or The Onion?
both will make you cry...
ZING!!
But seriously. This is humorous and ironic, but not at all surprising. Every organization that has engaged in extensive "anti-piracy" actions has been found, almost without exception, to be involved in some sort of piracy themselves.
That makes no sense. They don't achieve anything if their apps look better than the other apps on the device, they just make the entire experience worse. It would be like cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Because no company has ever done that before.
What's worse than the apps on an Apple watch?
A 2 hour podcast about the Apple watch.
The iPads weren't standalone education devices â" they were supposed to work in conjunction with another device carrying curriculum from a company named Pearson. But the district now says the combined tech didn't meet their needs, and they want their money back.
So... They didn't test the iPad / content combo to establish usability / feasibility / usefulness prior to dropping all this cash?
Anyone with half a brain could see that this whole thing had FIASCO written all over it in bright red letters. The whole thing reeks of one giant scam.
-- The school district signed an initial $30 million deal with Apple in a program that was supposed to eventually cost up to $1.3 billion. As part of the program, the LA School District would buy iPads from Apple at $768 each
You can go into any store an buy the most expensive iPad for $699. The school system is spending a billion dollars and didn't negotiate a discount on the price? They're actually paying $79 over retail !!?? What the fucking fuck.
-- and then Pearson, a subcontractor with Apple, would provide math and science curriculum for the tablets at an additional $200 per unit.
$200 per unit for some shitty software? You've now jacked up the price to nearly a thousand dollars per iPad. Again, they're spending a billion dollars and don't negotiate a discount?
-- Less than 2 months after the program started, the school district reported that one-third of the 2,100 iPads distributed during the initial rollout of the program, had gone missing.
Seriously? You didn't see this coming from a mile away?
-- And best of all, the schools district's Assistant Superintendent, essentially the number 2 person in charge of the entire school system, is a former executive with Pearson, the company providing the software, and he was heavily involved in helping Pearson land the contract..
"Men negotiate harder than women do"
So everyone is penalized because women are inferior to men. Nice.
But the bigger issue is why negotiating even exists at all. Too many companies want to make the hiring process like buying a used car, offering you a low figure, hoping you'll take it, and only offering more if you "negotiate harder".
Because manholes are round.
Correct.
The human body is more or less cylindrical, therefore manholes are round, therefore manhole covers are round.
That is the correct answer.
to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018.
$230 per kilowatt-hour is a completely meaningless number. How much is it going to cost me to replace the battery pack. $1,000? $5,000? $10,000?
*THAT* is what's important.
And you believe them? Talk about naive...
If they go under they aren't going to give a crap about you and if another company buys Valve and shuts it down they aren't going to care about you either.
It isn't just a question of Valve going out of business.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...
Sony bought OnLive to get their patent portfolio. It's the only thing Sony cared about. That's why they bought them and shut them down.
No matter what Valve says, the same thing could happen to them. And when it happens, they won't be able to do any of the things they have promised because someone else is calling the shots and they no longer have any say in it.
No. This should be titled "No chance in hell".
The people who currently control congress are the same people who created the Patriot Act.
If you have to pay a fee to get the job -- it's a scam. Except in this case, they're not even bothering to guarantee you the job. Because it's so exciting, they need only promise you the opportunity. And then further down the road, they'll likely ask for more money, "to get further up the ladder, still".
http://www.scamwatch.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/694333
Maybe Mars One should partner with Amway.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnew...
About every ten months, somebody new discovers the Notepad file encoding problem. Let's see what else there is to say about it.
First of all, can we change Notepad's detection algorithm? The problem is that there are a lot of different text files out there. Let's look just at the ones that Notepad supports.
8-bit ANSI (of which 7-bit ASCII is a subset). These have no BOM; they just dive right in with bytes of text. They are also probably the most common type of text file.
UTF-8. These usually begin with a BOM but not always.
Unicode big-endian (UTF-16BE). These usually begin with a BOM but not always.
Unicode little-endian (UTF-16LE). These usually begin with a BOM but not always.
If a BOM is found, then life is easy, since the BOM tells you what encoding the file uses. The problem is when there is no BOM. Now you have to guess, and when you guess, you can guess wrong. For example, consider this file:
D0 AE
Depending on which encoding you assume, you get very different results.
If you assume 8-bit ANSI (with code page 1252), then the file consists of the two characters U+00D0 U+00AE, or "". Sure this looks strange, but maybe it's part of the word VATNI which might be the name of an Icelandic hotel.
If you assume UTF-8, then the file consists of the single Cyrillic character U+042E
If you assume Unicode big-endian, then the file consists of the Korean Hangul syllable U+D0AE
If you assume Unicode little-endian, then the file consists of the Korean Hangul syllable U+AED0
Some people might say that the rule should be "All files without a BOM are 8-bit ANSI." In that case, you're going to misinterpret all the files that use UTF-8 or UTF-16 and don't have a BOM. Note that the Unicode standard even advises against using a BOM for UTF-8, so you're already throwing out everybody who follows the recommendation.
Okay, given that the Unicode folks recommend against using a BOM for UTF-8, maybe your rule is "All files without a BOM are UTF-8." Well, that messes up all 8-bit ANSI files that use characters above 127.
Maybe you're willing to accept that ambiguity, and use the rule, "If the file looks like valid UTF-8, then use UTF-8; otherwise use 8-bit ANSI, but under no circumstances should you treat the file as UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE." In other words, "never auto-detect UTF-16". First, you still have ambiguous cases, like the file above, which could be either 8-bit ANSI or UTF-8. And second, you are going to be flat-out wrong when you run into a Unicode file that lacks a BOM, since you're going to misinterpret it as either UTF-8 or (more likely) 8-bit ANSI. You might decide that programs that generate UTF-16 files without a BOM are broken, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. For example,
cmd /u /c dir >results.txt
This generates a UTF-16LE file without a BOM. If you poke around your Windows directory, you'll probably find other Unicode files without a BOM. (For example, I found COM+.log.) These files still "worked" under the old IsTextUnicode algorithm, but now they are unreadable. Maybe you consider that an acceptable loss.
The point is that no matter how you decide to resolve the ambiguity, somebody will win and somebody else will lose. And then people can start experimenting with the "losers" to find one that makes your algorithm look stupid for choosing "incorrectly".
You;re thinking of North Korea.
Make no mistake. This is a literal and direct attack on Linux. OEM's will not care about the few people who use Linux and will omit this ability essentially killing Linux off. This is Microsoft's attempt at the final nail in the coffin of Linux.
This isn't about Linux (although I'm sure Microsoft's hatred of Linux has something to do with it). People who buy a pre-built system from one of the big OEMs have no intention of installing an alternative OS, so this is a non-issue for them.
If you do buy a pre-built system from one of the big OEMs so you can put Linux on it, you're too stupid to be allowed near a computer.
Buy the components and build it yourself and you won't be bothered with any of this bullshit. Anyone who knows which end of a screwdriver to hold can easily do it.
Why do you think Mozilla is working on Rust?
And what makes you think that Rust will be any better? What makes you think Mozilla will "get it right" and not create just another language full of new/different vulnerabilities.
Technically, this is correct.
However, I've tried to make my own custom builds of Firefox and it's a nightmare. The build process used by Firefox is so complicated and convoluted, it would make Rube Goldberg laugh. I haven't tried building Chrome, but reading the build instructions, it appears to be only marginally better.
"We've put in useless shit that you'll never be able to use anyway! And charged you a premium for it!"
That's called Marketing.
What really matters is the final performance, using the universal standard measure of FoC(3), aka "Frames (per second) of Crysis3".
Except it's not. Not even close. Some of us have never even played a Crysis game.
But it's still a good benchmark even if you never play any of the Crysis games.
If the card gives a good performance in "Frames (per second) of Crysis3" then that's a reasonably good indicator that you'll get good performance in other applications -- it's at least better than AMD or Nvidia's meaningless marketing doublespeak.
It's worth putting all this out there because it has been one gigantic clusterfuck ever since Windows 8's features were revealed. And I will continue to point out that PR firms and fanbois have harmed Microsoft more than help them. I really hope Windows 10 can put this awkward, uncomfortable, frustrating dynamic to bed. The social costs of Windows 8 have undermined its value as an OS, and that's so damn silly that it's a shame I have to type it. In the Army, we called that "Mickey Mouse bullshit." All that should matter is the OS itself, and I'm optimistic about Windows 10 in that regard.
I some time running the Windows 10 Technical preview that was released in January. Although it's an early, nowhere-near-finished- pre-beta version, it shows where Microsoft's thinking is headed. And it's not good.
While they have made some improvements over the clusterfuck that is Windows 8, in most cases they have doubled-down on stupid, keeping the vast majority of bad design decisions that were made with Windows 8. Even bringing back the Start Menu was botched. It still isn't as functional as Windows 7.
And the whole thing is just fucking ugly. More and more people spend an enormous amount of time in front of a computer, not just for social/entertainment purposes but for work as well. Aesthetics matter and Windows 8/10 fail horribly. This picture sums it all up perfectly:
http://i.imgur.com/iiXQRtN.jpg
I can't believe it took them TWO FULL VERSIONS to realize they needed the feature. This should have been implemented back in Windows 8, or 9 at least...
Windows 10 IS Windows 9.
Getting out of a metro app is a mystery to me. I want to kill the video, not have it running in the background. The only way I can find is to swipe to the metro start screen, click on the desktop icon, go to task manager, find the metro app I want to kill, and end the process.
Why can't they let me exit the metro app directly?
Because Microsoft knows better than you.
This is part of the absurd new mindset at Microsoft. You aren't supposed to exit the application. When the application has been idle for a while the OS (supposedly) will suspend it.
This design makes no sense, but neither do the other 1000 bad design decisions they made with Windows 8/10, so it's not surprising.
As long as Uranus doesn't get any closer to me, I'm OK with it.
Do you really think that the 'fake' watches don't come from the same Chinese factory as the 'real' ones?
The good news here is that the aclu and eff are participating. These orgs are very savvy and wouldn't waste time on a suit with no chance.
You forgot the sarcasm tag.
The next generation of "trolls" will only be more careful. Hope he feels proud of himself for stooping to their level.
Unfortunately (for the Internet trolls) being "more careful" isn't necessarily an option. What Curt Schilling actually demonstrated is that it's trivially easy to "out" or "dox" most people due to their blindly spewing every last bit of personal information about themselves all over the Internet.