And them meddling kids at Wikileaks had the audacity, the AUDACITY, to think of these eventualities and actually make it pretty damned hard to "remove" the "site" from the "net". As we can see now, for good reason.
According to him. And of course, it is in-frickin'-conceiveable that he might inadvertently (or purposely) let slip something that he shouldn't. Are we really supposed to trust the methods and motives of the guy who took the Apache attack video and edited it into a piece of propaganda?
... while at the very same time giving us the complete, unedited source video file, additional information, an extensive amount of research and reporting beyond the video, etc? Wikileaks' motives are clear. They do not claim to be unbiased, "fair and balanced", etc. like so many propagandist organizations do.
Wikileaks gave you all the source material. Feel free to come to a different conclusion than they have. I did not.
I'm in favor of freedom of the press, I'm glad Wikileaks exists, and I'm glad that Iceland took the step recently of declaring themselves a free-press safe haven. But this guys isn't a journalist in my eyes.
Correct. He never claimed to be a proper journalist. In fact, Wikileaks invites "proper journalists" to cooperate with them to give their take on the material provided. Unlike the "regular" press, however, Wikileaks' source protection actually has some teeth.
He's obviously got an axe to grind, and has no compunctions about using/abusing his position to promote his agenda. That makes him untrustworthy.
If you applied this logic to all news and journalism you consume, am I to conclude that you find them all untrustworthy?
You said it yourself -- the bias is obvious. Thing is, here are the sources. Come to your own conclusions. You are welcome to. You do not/need/ to trust his judgment, position, or editorializing. You have the tools to effectively reach your own conclusions. That is what wikileaks enables you to do.
It's not just American soldiers who were put in danger. Afghan civilians (and their families) who cooperated with us were also put in danger.
"us" ? Were you there, on the ground? Do you wholeheartedly agree with everything the military does? Do you consider it to speak in your name?
And the real question is not whether somebody was put in danger for cooperating (they are going to be in danger/no matter what/, especially if there is any sort of record), it is whether the release of this information serves a worthwhile purpose. To me, it does. It is not like they released a list of "10 people who helped the dirty, dirty Americans." They release an almost complete archive of the record on the ground. This is, in my mind, very, very valuable. And if somebody is going to try to take the moral high ground about lives being put into jeopardy : no shit Sherlock. It's a fucking war.
I don't know about you, but I don't throw my clothes away due to some tear or rip. We have plenty of tools at our disposal to actually fix these things.
[quote]Crysis is a well known example of a video game. While technically profitable, it was not competitively profitable, in that it performed much worse than other games of its scope in the past (for example, Doom 3) as a consequence of piracy.[/quote]
and this is proven... how? Doom 3 is by id Software. Makers of Doom 1, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 3 Arena, etc., and coded by John Carmack. There are lots of people who would anything from that development house at that time, unseen.
Now Crysis was not bad, but not exactly great, either. It's the same genre, but really not the same thing.
[quote] This would imply a substantive loss due to piracy.[/quote]
There is no mention on Crysis in that article, and no mention of piracy harming their business model either.
[quote]Later, piracy would prove to damage his game Demigod's short term viability, though technical measures (DRM in abstraction, though in practice just a method to detect pirated copies of the games) recovered it from likely failure. [/quote]
Backup, please? As asked in the original question?
[quote]Piracy is perceived to be a sufficiently significant problem that dealing with piracy is as important as dealing with marketing, deadlines, etc.[/quote]
Indeed. And all I can read out of that is that it's greed at work -- after all, if you have 100k pirates playing your game, the greedy mind will think "wow, 100k sales !" and go on to try to implement DRM, restrictive licensing, crappy always-online "protections", etc. to make that happen -- which does nothing to actually curb 100k pirates, and it really doesn't convert 100k pirates into sales. But a greedy mind will still feel as if they just lost 100k sales. (Not to say pirates are not greedy, I am looking at it from the other side in this argument).
[quote]It's a core business concern. What you're asking for then is "prove to me that measles is a horrible disease. Can you show me evidence of large populations dying due to measles in recent history?" You won't accept the answer, "we vaccinate against measles, everyone knows its bad but there aren't population-wide failures precisely because we vaccinate." [/quote]
Bad analogies and trying to subsume other people's reasoning is not exactly a good discussion tactic.
[quote]DRM and other measures have made serious problems due to piracy unlikely, but they still harm the product.[/quote]
How have DRM made serious problems due to piracy unlikely? Backup, please? Data?
[quote]You also are problematic with "provably": "provably" by mathematical standards or by, say, business standards? No one can "prove" why a product is a success or failure, but merely provide persuasive evidence for it. I would imagine you have the same misunderstanding with the legal system, which does not require proof of "no possible doubt" but rather proof of "no reasonable doubt." [/quote]
Again you assume unrelated things in this discussion. It makes you look stupid.
[quote]There is no reasonable doubt that piracy harmed Crysis, making it (compared to other games) a financial failure for Crytek.[/quote]
But indeed there is reasonable doubt. One could ask whether its system requirements were simply too high, whether its marketing plan was decently executed, whether its prospective customer base
You assume, of course, that this bug is recent, 4chan was the first to discover it, and that there hasn't been any subtile, massively successful abuse for weeks.
Now think about the flip-side, please. The big problem with browser security, zombie computers, botnets, malware, etc. is non-updated software once security holes are found. People are either lazy, ignorant, or incompetent when it comes to timely updates -- and I mean people as a big, large blob of people, not anyone in particular like you.
Much like automatic updates in Windows, Chrome automatic updates actually attempt to prevent problems stemming from outdated, insecure software. It's not at all perfect (in either implementation), but IMHO it's a whole lot better than the alternative (even bigger botnets, even less trustable computing).
In my experience, Chrome does not eat up hundreds of megabytes for updates per month. Please don't use hyperbole. It undermines you.
Any implementation can be improved of course -- including leaving old files around or not. Maybe a constructive post about that particular bug would be useful, in the Chrome Google Groups -- or perhaps on the Chromium development lists.
Your conclusion is incorrect. I may not like paying for Murdoch's news, and in the end he will have to close shop.
The tongue-in-cheek comments of other posters here are spot on. The world is a better place without his rags out there. Now if only we could get Fox to erect a paywall around their TV station (Tea-Wall ?), and other low-life rags and outlets lose their funding, we might be getting somewhere.
I would welcome a way to preserve actual journalism, or rather to give it a proper financial footing, though. But not at the expense of carrying Murdoch-"News" through with them.
I wonder why you attribute the lack of outstanding games to piracy being rampant -- the industry has been bitching and moaning about that for over 20 years now. That can't be the reason or we would not have a videogame-industry at all.
Few game developers are willing to do risky things though, and countless remakes of the same games just don't really appeal to all that many gamers -- add to that that gaming itself is being transformed (or rather, the marketplace is changing with mobile games becoming a pastime of millions, there actually being a LOT of games out there from the years prior, etc.), and I can see some reasons for that. Add to that the fact that asset-development (ugh) for modern games can be magnitudes more expensive than for old "outstanding" games and you see that the financials have changed quite a bit as well -- you can no longer just produce an AAA title in a team of 2-4 people in a basement -- the tools simply have not caught up yet.
I would not count out GPGPU as a niche product just yet -- it's true, paradigms change, but the mere fact that x86 cores are becoming more plentiful is leading to more tool support, more heads thinking about the problems and solutions involved, and more people getting used to concurrent programming. Once you know how to use 6 or 8 cores well, it will not be too much of a jump to the 300-500 threads a GPU will handle. I hope for great things in this area though admittedly I personally like it for the sciency stuff:)
Lowest common denominator, not. Degrading gracefully to it, yes. Games traditionally push the envelope, and will continue to do so -- unless the console-model and mobile gaming overtakes the entire market.
ARM-based devices have their uses, but to be quite honest -- I like a spiffy desktop.
Be VERY careful clicking those links. Ubisoft is only able to censor posts relating to cracks and such, but NOT goatse, all manner of shock pictures (mutilations, diseases, decomposition, bodily fluids, all manner of fecal matter, etc.) on their forums.
Repeat : that forum post contains tubgirl, goatse, dead people, etc. Do not click it unless you want to see just how depraved the mods at Ubisoft are to let/that/ slide but censor links to cracks.
IMHO this is good news, even though it kills the "if they don't use it" argument dead. I have left quite a bit of money at gog.com (no DRM on any of their games, compatibility fixes, decent support, etc.) and was quite surprised that Activision would open their back catalogue to them at all.
It seems as though the poster wants to imply that there is something inherently wrong with accepting CNNIC as a CA -- but does not state why it is the case apart from rumor and that the Chinese government "may" be controlling this entity.
It escapes me what the problem is; there are lots and lots of CAs listed as trusted roots -- any number of which could do malicious things without anybody being the wiser (and some of which will gladly hand out certificates to microsoft.com and others, if only either your story is good enough ("internal test server"), or their interface is bad enough). "Trusted CA" is a misnomer in any browser distribution -- I sure as heck do not trust half the companies in that list, and neither should you -- since you never even heard about most of them.
None of this actually impacts the security of SSL. Let's face it, the PKI for SSL is broken. Anybody can claim to be anybody and somebody will sign off on it. You won't even be notified when that happens to "your" domain. There is no such thing as a central registry -- as with DNS, for instance. There is no such thing as proper delegation -- as with DNS, for instance. If you trust a SSL certificate because it is signed by some "trusted" CA in a browser, you are doing it wrong. Not that it really matters -- people do not check certificate chains or even particularly care about changed certs so long as the "Buy now" button works on Amazon.
There is no inherent value in a certificate signed by a "trusted" CA over a self-signed certificate. Both result in a stream-cipher-encrypted connection. That is about all SSL is good for, unless you have a local CA and that local CA is the only trusted CA in any of your CA-aware applications -- and, of course, you have cryptography-savvy users. I'll wait a while for the laughter to die down.
I ask people their preferences. Most say cash. Some say they would say cash, but have been brought up not to.
And yes, gift giving is all about the giver. Think about it. Maybe not in the way you mean, but it is usually a display of affection or comes with expectations; both of which reflect on the giver in the recipient's mind, no matter how thoughtful the gift.
Now run along and assume things. You do that best.
Sorry, but I don't buy the "use it responsibly" angle. If you need permission to have fun with your very own money, there is something wrong. And if you really wanted to put that gift certificate into savings, go to eBay, sell it, and put the proceeds into savings. There, I just ruined all your gift certificates for you:P
A gift certificate gives exactly the same message as cash (depending on your point of view that would be "I didn't have any idea what to get !" or "I'd rather you choose the perfect gift yourself !"). Personally I like to buy myself stuff you can't buy at stores that sell gift certificates.
Sorry, but you are glossing over something here -- it's not the "megabytes per minute" thing that bothers, it's the "many small writes" thing. Even the very best wear leveling algorithm can't do much about that, unless they use a write cache (which most SSDs do not; I do not know the exact procedere of the Intel offering (which is ahead of its competitors at the moment), but I would be somewhat surprised if the chip waited overly long to commit). A one-byte-write will, in the worst case, cause an entire 128kb slice to be overwritten. This can quickly become significant, especially considering that the operating system does not necessarily attempt to group writes, likes to overwrite data in sectors, and even sometimes will insist on flushes (think security logfiles) even if you had the foresight to enable write caching -- which still won't help much if you have multiple open files.
Desktop users in particular need to think about this stuff. Observe your Windows page file. Observe how it gets used NO MATTER how much free memory you have. (don't believe it ? Open 10 windows. Go away from your computer for 10 minutes. Optionally start a large I/O job (say, copying a few gigs of files), though this is not usually necessary and just serves to illustrate the point more clearly. Switch between those 10 windows. No matter whether you have 512m, 2g, or 10g of free memory, they will have been paged to disk. Yes, it's braindead, and yes, it happens at default settings. There are some diagnostic tools which will tell you the average rate of rewritten slices on SSDs; I don't have it handy atm, but Google will find it (or failing that, the OCZ forums are pretty nifty for this kind of thing, even though their SSDs are somewhat inferior to the Intel offering).
You might also want to run procmon on your Windows system in an ostensibly idle system (possibly with a few open applications) and see what actually happens at the file system level.
Of course it goes beyond just Linux. Microsoft is aware of the problem and working on improving its SSD performance (they already did some things in Vista as the article states, and Windows 7 has more in store; google around to find a few slides from WinHEC on the topic).
The problem with Windows w.r.t. optimizing for SSDs is that it LOVES to do lots and lots of tiny writes all the time, even when the system is idle (and moreso when it is not). Try moving the "prefetch" folder to a different drive. Try moving the system log event files to a different drive. And try to keep an eye out for applications that use the system drive for small writes, extensively (or muck about in the registry a lot). These are the hard parts. The easier parts would be to make sure hibernation is disabled, pagefiles are not on the SSD (good luck in getting Windows to not use pagefiles at all; possible, but painful even if you have a dozen gigs of memory), prefetching is disabled, the filesystem is properly aligned, printer spools, etc. With only the things Windows provides, it is painful to attempt to prolong your SSD's life (this is not just about performance; remember that you only have a limited amount of erases until the drive becomes toast).
There are some solutions; MFT for Windows (http://www.easyco.com/) provides a block device that consolidates many small writes into larger ones and does not overwrite anything unless absolutely necessary (i.e. changes are written onto the disk sequentially; overwriting only takes place once you run out of space). It is very, very costly, but it does its job well. Performance skyrockets, drive longevity improves by an order of magnitude.
You can also use hacks such as Windows SteadyState; This also streamlines writes (but adds another layer of indirection). Performance improves, but you get to deal with SteadyState-issues. EFT also works (and is less of a GUI-y system, though largely providing the same services even on Windows 2000/XP); you have got to be careful though, if your system tends to lose power or crash, all the changes since the last boot will be lost; EFT can be made to write out all the changes it has accumulated -- but after that, the only way to reenable it is to restart the system.
Windows is not particularly nice to SSDs when used as a system disk. For data partition it is not quite as bad (although if you deal with many small writes, you might still run into heaps of trouble). The optimizations related here for Linux are applicable to Windows as well (aligning filesystem blocks to erase-blocks and 4k nand-sectors). You would also want to attempt to move stuff that does lots of small writes to a different (spinning) disk -- system logs, for instance, and most spool directories. You'd also want to make absolutely sure that you do not have access time updates enabled; each of those is, essentially, a write (even if ultimately consolidated).
No, "calling the cops" is NOT "pretty much the only option".
These are teenagers and minors. They are in school. They are going to be rebellious every now and then. They have always been. It's part of growing up -- some are more annoying than others. Remember how there is this concept of "detention" ? Yeah, it still exists. Remember how you can make them to extra work to pass ? Yeah, you can punish them with that. Remember how you can talk to the parents about it ? Yeah, those kids, by and large, DO have parents.
Confiscate the cellphone by all means, call the parents, MAYBE even have the parents come and pick her up.
Calling the police ? Yeah, that's gonna set 'er straight ! She's NEVER gonna misbehave again ! It's FORBIDDEN ! After all, she now really, really trusts her teachers, safety officers, principals, counselors, etc. to work on her behalf and with her, instead of against her. Right ? RIGHT ?
Fucking Idiots. I know teens can be annoying. If you do not know how to deal with that, don't become a teacher for them. Why you'd waste everybody's time and money by getting her in a courtroom for what is, essentially, nothing more than note-passing (remember when you did that in school ?) is ridiculous and should, quite honestly, lead to several people being harshly reprimanded and possibly fired.
Especially since you seem to want to patch holes when you find them instead of designing your code with security in mind. If you do not learn about security and secure programming, you will run into problems again and again. Even the "best" outside help will not be able to completely overhaul your insecure system if you regard security as something to be "patched in" instead of something to be designed for.
If you are going to wait for your sites to be compromised to figure out if anything went wrong (and let's face it, if you did not pay attention to security until now, it will), you better be sure not to be handling any sensitive information (such as ANY personal information of other people, email addresses, payment records, etc.), have very good backups, and have a way to spot whether you have been compromised (contrary to popular opinion, "hackers" don't usually/always deface your website or send you threatening emails or the like; ask yourself whether you would know that somebody is abusing your servers if that did not happen... But that would also require security-aware programming).
I'd like to get the fulltext and meta pages of all of these repords in pdf and txt form so I can store them locally and work on them locally (the site is often overloaded at the moment, and advanced full text search is not available). I searched for a way to do that easily. No dice. The only way, it appears, would be to hammer the server with wget and recursively download everything on there. Bad form.
Almost all EULAs claim to limit users right to resell the software, however this is unenforceable due to the First-sale doctrine.
... And now, try to get that enforced. Start in operating systems, then have a whack at iTunes (the DRMed kind), and once you're done go have fun with the games industry (I hear EA is eagerly awaiting your lawsuits).
The best of luck to you. Really.
Hell, Microsoft ist selling non-resellable OEM copies without media now, as well as several versions of Windows designed to only work on the first computer they are installed on, codified in the so-called license. Have fun.
Slashdot Mirror
And them meddling kids at Wikileaks had the audacity, the AUDACITY, to think of these eventualities and actually make it pretty damned hard to "remove" the "site" from the "net". As we can see now, for good reason.
According to him. And of course, it is in-frickin'-conceiveable that he might inadvertently (or purposely) let slip something that he shouldn't. Are we really supposed to trust the methods and motives of the guy who took the Apache attack video and edited it into a piece of propaganda?
... while at the very same time giving us the complete, unedited source video file, additional information, an extensive amount of research and reporting beyond the video, etc? Wikileaks' motives are clear. They do not claim to be unbiased, "fair and balanced", etc. like so many propagandist organizations do.
Wikileaks gave you all the source material. Feel free to come to a different conclusion than they have. I did not.
I'm in favor of freedom of the press, I'm glad Wikileaks exists, and I'm glad that Iceland took the step recently of declaring themselves a free-press safe haven. But this guys isn't a journalist in my eyes.
Correct. He never claimed to be a proper journalist. In fact, Wikileaks invites "proper journalists" to cooperate with them to give their take on the material provided. Unlike the "regular" press, however, Wikileaks' source protection actually has some teeth.
He's obviously got an axe to grind, and has no compunctions about using/abusing his position to promote his agenda. That makes him untrustworthy.
If you applied this logic to all news and journalism you consume, am I to conclude that you find them all untrustworthy?
You said it yourself -- the bias is obvious. Thing is, here are the sources. Come to your own conclusions. You are welcome to. You do not /need/ to trust his judgment, position, or editorializing. You have the tools to effectively reach your own conclusions. That is what wikileaks enables you to do.
It's not just American soldiers who were put in danger. Afghan civilians (and their families) who cooperated with us were also put in danger.
"us" ? Were you there, on the ground? Do you wholeheartedly agree with everything the military does? Do you consider it to speak in your name? And the real question is not whether somebody was put in danger for cooperating (they are going to be in danger /no matter what/, especially if there is any sort of record), it is whether the release of this information serves a worthwhile purpose. To me, it does. It is not like they released a list of "10 people who helped the dirty, dirty Americans." They release an almost complete archive of the record on the ground. This is, in my mind, very, very valuable. And if somebody is going to try to take the moral high ground about lives being put into jeopardy : no shit Sherlock. It's a fucking war.
I don't know about you, but I don't throw my clothes away due to some tear or rip. We have plenty of tools at our disposal to actually fix these things.
[quote]Crysis is a well known example of a video game. While technically profitable, it was not competitively profitable, in that it performed much worse than other games of its scope in the past (for example, Doom 3) as a consequence of piracy.[/quote]
and this is proven ... how? Doom 3 is by id Software. Makers of Doom 1, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 3 Arena, etc., and coded by John Carmack. There are lots of people who would anything from that development house at that time, unseen.
Now Crysis was not bad, but not exactly great, either. It's the same genre, but really not the same thing.
[quote]
This would imply a substantive loss due to piracy.[/quote]
Again, proven how?
[quote]Try Googling crysis piracy, or read a link here: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19203%5B/quote%5D
Which is full of speculation -- and not backed up by even a speck of actual data.
Don't get me wrong -- Crysis sure was pirated.
[quote]The CEO of Stardock wrote an excellent article explaining business models for accounting for piracy, specifically commenting on the Crysis case. http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512%5B/quote%5D
There is no mention on Crysis in that article, and no mention of piracy harming their business model either.
[quote]Later, piracy would prove to damage his game Demigod's short term viability, though technical measures (DRM in abstraction, though in practice just a method to detect pirated copies of the games) recovered it from likely failure. [/quote]
Backup, please? As asked in the original question?
[quote]Piracy is perceived to be a sufficiently significant problem that dealing with piracy is as important as dealing with marketing, deadlines, etc.[/quote]
Indeed. And all I can read out of that is that it's greed at work -- after all, if you have 100k pirates playing your game, the greedy mind will think "wow, 100k sales !" and go on to try to implement DRM, restrictive licensing, crappy always-online "protections", etc. to make that happen -- which does nothing to actually curb 100k pirates, and it really doesn't convert 100k pirates into sales. But a greedy mind will still feel as if they just lost 100k sales. (Not to say pirates are not greedy, I am looking at it from the other side in this argument).
[quote]It's a core business concern. What you're asking for then is "prove to me that measles is a horrible disease. Can you show me evidence of large populations dying due to measles in recent history?" You won't accept the answer, "we vaccinate against measles, everyone knows its bad but there aren't population-wide failures precisely because we vaccinate." [/quote]
Bad analogies and trying to subsume other people's reasoning is not exactly a good discussion tactic.
[quote]DRM and other measures have made serious problems due to piracy unlikely, but they still harm the product.[/quote]
How have DRM made serious problems due to piracy unlikely? Backup, please? Data?
[quote]You also are problematic with "provably": "provably" by mathematical standards or by, say, business standards? No one can "prove" why a product is a success or failure, but merely provide persuasive evidence for it. I would imagine you have the same misunderstanding with the legal system, which does not require proof of "no possible doubt" but rather proof of "no reasonable doubt." [/quote]
Again you assume unrelated things in this discussion. It makes you look stupid.
[quote]There is no reasonable doubt that piracy harmed Crysis, making it (compared to other games) a financial failure for Crytek.[/quote]
But indeed there is reasonable doubt. One could ask whether its system requirements were simply too high, whether its marketing plan was decently executed, whether its prospective customer base
You assume, of course, that this bug is recent, 4chan was the first to discover it, and that there hasn't been any subtile, massively successful abuse for weeks.
Now think about the flip-side, please. The big problem with browser security, zombie computers, botnets, malware, etc. is non-updated software once security holes are found. People are either lazy, ignorant, or incompetent when it comes to timely updates -- and I mean people as a big, large blob of people, not anyone in particular like you.
Much like automatic updates in Windows, Chrome automatic updates actually attempt to prevent problems stemming from outdated, insecure software. It's not at all perfect (in either implementation), but IMHO it's a whole lot better than the alternative (even bigger botnets, even less trustable computing).
In my experience, Chrome does not eat up hundreds of megabytes for updates per month. Please don't use hyperbole. It undermines you.
Any implementation can be improved of course -- including leaving old files around or not. Maybe a constructive post about that particular bug would be useful, in the Chrome Google Groups -- or perhaps on the Chromium development lists.
firmware from the manufacturer of everything out there for free, because,
So you have never used Cisco gear then ?
Your conclusion is incorrect. I may not like paying for Murdoch's news, and in the end he will have to close shop.
The tongue-in-cheek comments of other posters here are spot on. The world is a better place without his rags out there. Now if only we could get Fox to erect a paywall around their TV station (Tea-Wall ?), and other low-life rags and outlets lose their funding, we might be getting somewhere.
I would welcome a way to preserve actual journalism, or rather to give it a proper financial footing, though. But not at the expense of carrying Murdoch-"News" through with them.
I wonder why you attribute the lack of outstanding games to piracy being rampant -- the industry has been bitching and moaning about that for over 20 years now. That can't be the reason or we would not have a videogame-industry at all.
Few game developers are willing to do risky things though, and countless remakes of the same games just don't really appeal to all that many gamers -- add to that that gaming itself is being transformed (or rather, the marketplace is changing with mobile games becoming a pastime of millions, there actually being a LOT of games out there from the years prior, etc.), and I can see some reasons for that. Add to that the fact that asset-development (ugh) for modern games can be magnitudes more expensive than for old "outstanding" games and you see that the financials have changed quite a bit as well -- you can no longer just produce an AAA title in a team of 2-4 people in a basement -- the tools simply have not caught up yet.
I would not count out GPGPU as a niche product just yet -- it's true, paradigms change, but the mere fact that x86 cores are becoming more plentiful is leading to more tool support, more heads thinking about the problems and solutions involved, and more people getting used to concurrent programming. Once you know how to use 6 or 8 cores well, it will not be too much of a jump to the 300-500 threads a GPU will handle. I hope for great things in this area though admittedly I personally like it for the sciency stuff :)
Lowest common denominator, not. Degrading gracefully to it, yes. Games traditionally push the envelope, and will continue to do so -- unless the console-model and mobile gaming overtakes the entire market.
ARM-based devices have their uses, but to be quite honest -- I like a spiffy desktop.
Be VERY careful clicking those links. Ubisoft is only able to censor posts relating to cracks and such, but NOT goatse, all manner of shock pictures (mutilations, diseases, decomposition, bodily fluids, all manner of fecal matter, etc.) on their forums.
Repeat : that forum post contains tubgirl, goatse, dead people, etc. Do not click it unless you want to see just how depraved the mods at Ubisoft are to let /that/ slide but censor links to cracks.
King's Quest got released on gog.com recently, so it is still being sold (or rather, again being sold).
http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/king's_quest_4_5_6
IMHO this is good news, even though it kills the "if they don't use it" argument dead. I have left quite a bit of money at gog.com (no DRM on any of their games, compatibility fixes, decent support, etc.) and was quite surprised that Activision would open their back catalogue to them at all.
"It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software."
Other than Silverlight. Gee, that solves the problem.
Other than general paranoia, of course. There is no reason to assume it has not been broken, either -- just anecdotal evidence ! :P
It seems as though the poster wants to imply that there is something inherently wrong with accepting CNNIC as a CA -- but does not state why it is the case apart from rumor and that the Chinese government "may" be controlling this entity.
It escapes me what the problem is; there are lots and lots of CAs listed as trusted roots -- any number of which could do malicious things without anybody being the wiser (and some of which will gladly hand out certificates to microsoft.com and others, if only either your story is good enough ("internal test server"), or their interface is bad enough). "Trusted CA" is a misnomer in any browser distribution -- I sure as heck do not trust half the companies in that list, and neither should you -- since you never even heard about most of them.
None of this actually impacts the security of SSL. Let's face it, the PKI for SSL is broken. Anybody can claim to be anybody and somebody will sign off on it. You won't even be notified when that happens to "your" domain. There is no such thing as a central registry -- as with DNS, for instance. There is no such thing as proper delegation -- as with DNS, for instance. If you trust a SSL certificate because it is signed by some "trusted" CA in a browser, you are doing it wrong. Not that it really matters -- people do not check certificate chains or even particularly care about changed certs so long as the "Buy now" button works on Amazon.
There is no inherent value in a certificate signed by a "trusted" CA over a self-signed certificate. Both result in a stream-cipher-encrypted connection. That is about all SSL is good for, unless you have a local CA and that local CA is the only trusted CA in any of your CA-aware applications -- and, of course, you have cryptography-savvy users. I'll wait a while for the laughter to die down.
And the big answer is "if you assume it is, you are an idiot". Use something you can audit.
You are, of course, assuming that "all the data, code, levels" actually exist. It does not take much cynicism to believe otherwise.
Struck a nerve, eh ?
I ask people their preferences. Most say cash. Some say they would say cash, but have been brought up not to.
And yes, gift giving is all about the giver. Think about it. Maybe not in the way you mean, but it is usually a display of affection or comes with expectations; both of which reflect on the giver in the recipient's mind, no matter how thoughtful the gift.
Now run along and assume things. You do that best.
Sorry, but I don't buy the "use it responsibly" angle. If you need permission to have fun with your very own money, there is something wrong. And if you really wanted to put that gift certificate into savings, go to eBay, sell it, and put the proceeds into savings. There, I just ruined all your gift certificates for you :P
A gift certificate gives exactly the same message as cash (depending on your point of view that would be "I didn't have any idea what to get !" or "I'd rather you choose the perfect gift yourself !"). Personally I like to buy myself stuff you can't buy at stores that sell gift certificates.
Sorry, but you are glossing over something here -- it's not the "megabytes per minute" thing that bothers, it's the "many small writes" thing. Even the very best wear leveling algorithm can't do much about that, unless they use a write cache (which most SSDs do not; I do not know the exact procedere of the Intel offering (which is ahead of its competitors at the moment), but I would be somewhat surprised if the chip waited overly long to commit). A one-byte-write will, in the worst case, cause an entire 128kb slice to be overwritten. This can quickly become significant, especially considering that the operating system does not necessarily attempt to group writes, likes to overwrite data in sectors, and even sometimes will insist on flushes (think security logfiles) even if you had the foresight to enable write caching -- which still won't help much if you have multiple open files.
Desktop users in particular need to think about this stuff. Observe your Windows page file. Observe how it gets used NO MATTER how much free memory you have. (don't believe it ? Open 10 windows. Go away from your computer for 10 minutes. Optionally start a large I/O job (say, copying a few gigs of files), though this is not usually necessary and just serves to illustrate the point more clearly. Switch between those 10 windows. No matter whether you have 512m, 2g, or 10g of free memory, they will have been paged to disk. Yes, it's braindead, and yes, it happens at default settings.
There are some diagnostic tools which will tell you the average rate of rewritten slices on SSDs; I don't have it handy atm, but Google will find it (or failing that, the OCZ forums are pretty nifty for this kind of thing, even though their SSDs are somewhat inferior to the Intel offering).
You might also want to run procmon on your Windows system in an ostensibly idle system (possibly with a few open applications) and see what actually happens at the file system level.
Of course it goes beyond just Linux. Microsoft is aware of the problem and working on improving its SSD performance (they already did some things in Vista as the article states, and Windows 7 has more in store; google around to find a few slides from WinHEC on the topic).
The problem with Windows w.r.t. optimizing for SSDs is that it LOVES to do lots and lots of tiny writes all the time, even when the system is idle (and moreso when it is not). Try moving the "prefetch" folder to a different drive. Try moving the system log event files to a different drive. And try to keep an eye out for applications that use the system drive for small writes, extensively (or muck about in the registry a lot). These are the hard parts. The easier parts would be to make sure hibernation is disabled, pagefiles are not on the SSD (good luck in getting Windows to not use pagefiles at all; possible, but painful even if you have a dozen gigs of memory), prefetching is disabled, the filesystem is properly aligned, printer spools, etc. With only the things Windows provides, it is painful to attempt to prolong your SSD's life (this is not just about performance; remember that you only have a limited amount of erases until the drive becomes toast).
There are some solutions; MFT for Windows (http://www.easyco.com/) provides a block device that consolidates many small writes into larger ones and does not overwrite anything unless absolutely necessary (i.e. changes are written onto the disk sequentially; overwriting only takes place once you run out of space). It is very, very costly, but it does its job well. Performance skyrockets, drive longevity improves by an order of magnitude.
You can also use hacks such as Windows SteadyState; This also streamlines writes (but adds another layer of indirection). Performance improves, but you get to deal with SteadyState-issues. EFT also works (and is less of a GUI-y system, though largely providing the same services even on Windows 2000/XP); you have got to be careful though, if your system tends to lose power or crash, all the changes since the last boot will be lost; EFT can be made to write out all the changes it has accumulated -- but after that, the only way to reenable it is to restart the system.
Windows is not particularly nice to SSDs when used as a system disk. For data partition it is not quite as bad (although if you deal with many small writes, you might still run into heaps of trouble). The optimizations related here for Linux are applicable to Windows as well (aligning filesystem blocks to erase-blocks and 4k nand-sectors). You would also want to attempt to move stuff that does lots of small writes to a different (spinning) disk -- system logs, for instance, and most spool directories. You'd also want to make absolutely sure that you do not have access time updates enabled; each of those is, essentially, a write (even if ultimately consolidated).
No, "calling the cops" is NOT "pretty much the only option".
These are teenagers and minors. They are in school. They are going to be rebellious every now and then. They have always been. It's part of growing up -- some are more annoying than others.
Remember how there is this concept of "detention" ? Yeah, it still exists. Remember how you can make them to extra work to pass ? Yeah, you can punish them with that. Remember how you can talk to the parents about it ? Yeah, those kids, by and large, DO have parents.
Confiscate the cellphone by all means, call the parents, MAYBE even have the parents come and pick her up.
Calling the police ? Yeah, that's gonna set 'er straight ! She's NEVER gonna misbehave again ! It's FORBIDDEN ! After all, she now really, really trusts her teachers, safety officers, principals, counselors, etc. to work on her behalf and with her, instead of against her. Right ? RIGHT ?
Fucking Idiots. I know teens can be annoying. If you do not know how to deal with that, don't become a teacher for them. Why you'd waste everybody's time and money by getting her in a courtroom for what is, essentially, nothing more than note-passing (remember when you did that in school ?) is ridiculous and should, quite honestly, lead to several people being harshly reprimanded and possibly fired.
Especially since you seem to want to patch holes when you find them instead of designing your code with security in mind. If you do not learn about security and secure programming, you will run into problems again and again. Even the "best" outside help will not be able to completely overhaul your insecure system if you regard security as something to be "patched in" instead of something to be designed for.
If you are going to wait for your sites to be compromised to figure out if anything went wrong (and let's face it, if you did not pay attention to security until now, it will), you better be sure not to be handling any sensitive information (such as ANY personal information of other people, email addresses, payment records, etc.), have very good backups, and have a way to spot whether you have been compromised (contrary to popular opinion, "hackers" don't usually/always deface your website or send you threatening emails or the like; ask yourself whether you would know that somebody is abusing your servers if that did not happen ... But that would also require security-aware programming).
I'd like to get the fulltext and meta pages of all of these repords in pdf and txt form so I can store them locally and work on them locally (the site is often overloaded at the moment, and advanced full text search is not available). I searched for a way to do that easily. No dice. The only way, it appears, would be to hammer the server with wget and recursively download everything on there. Bad form.
Almost all EULAs claim to limit users right to resell the software, however this is unenforceable due to the First-sale doctrine.
... And now, try to get that enforced. Start in operating systems, then have a whack at iTunes (the DRMed kind), and once you're done go have fun with the games industry (I hear EA is eagerly awaiting your lawsuits).
The best of luck to you. Really.
Hell, Microsoft ist selling non-resellable OEM copies without media now, as well as several versions of Windows designed to only work on the first computer they are installed on, codified in the so-called license. Have fun.