you chuck it and buy a new one. By then the tech is outdated anyways.
Only one problem with this "disposable IT" model:
'It just works' has been IT job security since before Gates and Moore thought x86 was a good idea.
Outdated is no reason to not continue to pour millions of (otherwise profit) monies into supporting something.
Hands up for those of you who didn't start a new job at a place with a ancient white elephant?
You Novel Netware people with 'end-of-life a decade ago and still can't turn it off' servers can put your hands down too. Same for you Windows admins trying to hide those desktop towers running Windows 95 for some ugly little app by a company that died before google.com even got registered in DNS.
However, I'm betting someone corporate could mention this to their EMC or netapp sales rep and get quite a few free nice lunches out of it.
And here we have an example: An American thinks his local usage is just "the default" for everyone. Light switches, for instance in Australia, are up for off and down for on. (Cue Simpsons jokes).
Local usage? There is a wiring pattern called a traveler circuit used with three-way or four-way switches. It's used to hook one light to two switches among other things. It's very common in America since we have these things called houses that often come with long hallways.
One of the side effects of this is that when you flip one switch to on or off, you invert the meaning of the other switch. So, if one switch was up for on and down for off then flipping the other switch makes it up for off and down for on.
When an electrician installs your light switch, the default is for up to mean ON, and down to mean OFF.
While I've yet to see a house in America with toggle-switch lighting controls facing sideways, it is certainly possible to install them or change them to be so. But as even a quick search on Wikipedia would reveal, the direction has a lot to do with city/state/country zoning ordinances and more than a little cultural inertia.
As is, this seems relatively easy to defeat and well within reach of available technology.
Google's image search could even provide a loophole. Just get the images onto Google images and let users tag them for free.
The good thing however is that 3d models have enough flexibility so that one could conquer many attacks
Instead of asking 'what is in this picture' all the time, how about asking hard semantic questions about this picture?
The article showed a CAPTCHA with a fork, toilet and plane. Asking which one of these is best if I just drank too much beer and need to puke would be a lot harder than the typical list these things.
With a little metadata and a large enough bank of questions, this object recognition CAPTCHA plus semantic question becomes difficult to brute force without resorting to the free porn exploit.
The generating program could ask which of these is commonly kept in a house. That should be harder for a non-turing grade computer program (and possibly for some AIG executives) to guess. Just using simple lookups to provide the questions could force the attacker to reason deeply about the images and draw on real-world knowledge not commonly inputed into computers.
Putting a time limit similar to Google's Goggles might help deter those throwing less than a cluster of corpus searchers and image parsers at it. But as long as the question remains a fixed 'type what you see in the box' then all you need is slightly better image recognition software and some time with your friendly Romanian hacker.
They say that one of the benefits, if not an outright goal, of some Linux distributions is to be a great platform to develop software on.
At one time Linux looked downright competitive as a platform (if certainly not market,) so what happended since 2002?
I do think one thing that would help is for OSS games to have much better tools. Make it easy for people to add assets, build levels and so on. Maybe more people would be willing to do so.
Well, games are not just software. The software is simply there to make the game go.
Perhaps the reason that there are so few (or in some opinions no) good games on Linux is that for developing games, Linux sucks?
What happened to those Open Source game engines that were going to let you MOD your way for WoW 2.0? Perhaps they are still there, waiting for content.
Handyman's rule: all tools are hammers except chisels which are screwdrivers. What you buy something for may not be what it gets used to do.
Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt:
People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.
Then explain the number of pristine, never to be used and decidedly overpowered tools sitting in many 'crasftsman' garages? I always felt Levitt was missing the mark. A lot of purchase decisions are about having the rights quarter-inch drill, regardless of its utility for making holes.
People will buy a car to drive on a road, but what car they buy and why may have nothing at all to do with driving. Operating Systems today are not a choice about practicality or functionality, but of style and ethos. The hobbyist feel and methods of Linux are not that far removed from the home mechanic tinkering with his hot rod that never leaves the driveway.
Linux won't garner marketshare based on being the quarter-inch hole maker of Personal Computers. We have Macs and corporate-desktop Windows for that.
Linux.com has to differentiate Linux from its competitors and show that it's the sexiest drill in the cabinet. Pasty nerds arguing over the last donut doesn't do either of these. Honestly, Ubuntu's graphics artists and Novell's XGL efforts did more to make people say "I want that on my computer" than 5 years of making Office 20XD6 work a little better on crappy hardware.
How long does it take your transistor radio to switch on? What about your television? (Unless it is decades old, it is probably two seconds or less.) When you turn on your kitchen tap, how long is it before water starts coming out
General purpose computers with complex operating systems that start dozens of applications during boot are relatively new technology compared with what you list. The PC is what, 20-30 years old depending on your definition of Personal and Computing?
I bought a house that had been in probate for a year. The water lines had been flushed with air. When I got the water running, it took maybe 30-40 seconds for the water to pressurize the line and come out the faucet.
Also, I've used old restored radios from the 1920s that had to warm up the tubes before they worked. 'Boot' times on those were around 2-3 minutes. Beautiful pieces of wood furniture, but horrible impractical compared with an 'almost instant' boot iPod.
To use a car analogy, One hundred and twenty years of innovation can do a lot. When you got into your automobile this morning did you remember to manually advance the engine timing and work the clutch leavers while someone cranked over the engine to get it started? No, you put the key in ignition and turned it.
But it's still nice to see someone taking note that Ubuntu can be dog slow starting up. Just one more reason to keep the system running yourfavoritedistributedapp while away.
1. End users making their own changes but still complaining about error that may or may not be a result of their unauthorized modifications
Happens anyway. Users will request support about: '2nd-party add-ons, edits to scripts with headers that warn not to edit them and even binary patches (including No CD and Anti-DRM that they - the paying customer doesn't want you to know about. Do you ever wonder why the help desk insists on trying that you 're-installing in a clean environment' as part of the troubleshooting process?
They are users. If you sold needle-drugs, they'd file bug reports that injecting heroin into their eyes makes them go blind.
2. Afraid that other competitors will 'leverage' your investment
Get real. If it's that good, they'll steal it anyway. Ever seen a license audit at a large company? There's a reason they make middle managers sweat like their stock dropped before the options vest.
3. They don't want anyone to know that they 'leveraged' your investment
4. They didn't bother to patent anything and they're relying on being hidden
See number 2 above. Running strings on random binaries in corporate-ware packages is left as an exercise to the reader. Bonus points if you buy a piece of software with code access and find your own product(s) inside.
I also love the continual arguments for 'shrouded' or 'obfuscated' source. Was that function tag345() or object2345.method76()? Those arguments come up on code forums pretty much annually. It's like Usenet in September until someone points out the obvious.
To the assembler programmer and the hacker, all programs are shipped with source code. It just may not be in the (high-level) language you prefer to code.
So pick your license - or better yet contract - carefully but prepare to back it up with audits, lawyers and calls to that boogeyman, the BSA.
CCP is claiming that they can't count the number of wine users because wine reports 'as windows' and not as 'wine on Linux.' Bullet meet foot.
FTA,
The Eve Online Linux client is as native as notepad.exe.
What do you expect?
file "~/.cedega/EVE Online/c_drive/Program Files/CCP/EVE/eve.exe" eve.exe: MS-DOS executable PE for MS Windows (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit
Throw away for a moment the fact that Direct X translation to OpenGl is super slow compared with native OpenGL.
Wine >> winex.
Cedega = winex + no development updates + horrible hacks and workarounds for certain games.
The Eve-Online client is still a windows program. It is unsurprising that the best windows API on Linux would work better. CCP picked Transgaming to do the "porting." They once had the leading implementation of DirectX on Linux, but their tiny team worked on their private and increasingly hacked up fork of ancient wineX code.
Duplication of effort and waste all in the name of greed. And now it's the Linux users who get to pay.
I'm surprised that the employment contracts for those employees did not stipulate that all employee email passing through their systems was subject to search. Compared with the USA under King George and Prince Chaney, any country with "laws blocking companies from monitoring employee emails" sounds like a privacy paradise.
It seems that Nokia's lobbyists can push an unconstitutional law through the legislature at will.
I know we're all for humanizing these collective fictions called corporations. Even going so far as to equate them to real people in law.
Now, let's be realistic: someone inside Nokia decided that they personally wanted this law. I guess it's nice to have none of the responsibility for your actions yet the power to have them executed. Some single manager held a meeting and told people to do this, even though it is the whole company that will be judged based on this.
While the employees are paid to be tools of the company, it is a single, living an breathing idiot somewhere inside Nokia that wants to play voyeur. Who? Unless it's a VP or CO level person, we may never know. All we know is that someone might be trying to stop the flow of confidential information out of the company.
People usually don't sign up for Open Source or Free Software. They just do stuff, put it out there and let other people use it. To quote one Mr. Torvalds, real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.
I have customer service skills godddammnit! Anyway, I'd hope to be able to help. Like I said, where do I sign up? Is it with Canonical, or is there a generic "Linux" marketing effort someplace?
Have you thought about starting a blog?
How about taking an active part in one or more major distribution's forum?
But with quality source code from Its Been Mangled engineering, there is much for young people to learn!
Techniques for fast, lightweight code. Oh, wait, isn't version 8 built on Eclipse?
Methods for Workflow design. From the company whose logo could be 'Have it our way'?
Tricks for building scalable databases. You ever restored an ntf file? The Domino admin forgot to disable replication on that ntf file and Domnio puked all over the db, you say? Restore the file again, George.
The Apple application is for the use of a room-like setting where there is organization of visual elements along the "floor", "walls", and "ceiling" of the room. This is definitely different than looking glass
Not looking glass, but it does resemble one computing horror I remember.
Microsoft Bob.
Apple's huge graphics design and industrial engineering efforts could polish poop to the point people would pay to just put it on their shelf. As cool as the bumptop desktop demo and compiz are, showing that 3d UI on a 2d monitor can enable useful modes of computer use, they are very far from 'home office in the computer.'
As much as I hope they could pull it off, this is known dangerous territory. The computer is not a magic box, if Apple puts garbage into it garbage will come out of it. (And it will still probably sell to 8% of the market, but hey, that's Jobs^H^H^H^H Apple for you.)
In Chandler, AZ park lights have had the wire removed for miles.
So part of AZ has less light pollution.
If cable theft is a serious problem with outdoor lights, have park owners considered individual solar powered lights?
At what point does the replacement cost of the cables exceed the cost of solar lights?
It is an easy way to get cash with very limited risks.
Or to be proactive, could you have reclaimed the copper before the thieves, sold it back and paid for upgraded lights? Including theft deterrent housing?
Because I am the only developer or user of my code?
Seriously, I really really like the model of GIT has for group development. But when by myself I can just cp filename.ext{,.bak} if I'm feeling lazy.
And that is the key. I am typically the only developer on most of my projects. If I hadn't gone out of my way to learn to version control files on my own, I wouldn't have even known about it until my first real programming job. I still work with people who either use tape backup or the cp.1.2..old.bak to manage their files after decades as developers or sysadmins.
FTA:
Youâ(TM)d like to work on each of your 4 features A, B, C, and D independently and somewhat in parallel,
You start working on A and youâ(TM)re about 100 lines of code into it when you get stumped on a math function. The math wiz on your team is out for the day and youâ(TM)d rather not continue until you consult him.... So now we can work smoothly between multiple branches without worry of the consequences of interruption.
Working on my own personal projects means I don't have a 'math wiz' to ask...
Git offers power by putting collaboration up front before commits are public for all to see.
Most projects on sourceforge.net have 1 developer. But then most are essentially dead so probably not the best.
To quote Linus Torvalds on Subversion vs Git:
Subversion used to say CVS done right: with that slogan there is nowhere you can go. There is no way to do cvs right. No comments.
Git is wonderful for group work. And if you are introducing version control to a group environment you can probably start out with it.
For some of the solo developers, subversion is just CVS with nicer features and the old, familiar workflow.
To quote Linus again:
If you like using cvs, you should be in some kind of mental institution or somewhere else
Ever hear the story about the sanitarium? It was for insane people only, so to be safe they had the contractor build it inside out.
Indeed, the most irritating thing about Wikipedia is the whole "notable" requirement that the Powers that Be seem to take very seriously.
Unless you are Mao Zedong, everything you do is irrelevant to about 1 billion Chinese. How notable will what you do be when they are the majority and you are the fringe consumer, edge market or outlier statistic?
I can't understand someone who would want to restrict the amount of information available.
People need to be informed to make correct decisions. Markets and Capitalism in particular depend totally on valid information. Censorship, the selective restriction of the amount of information available, ensures that people have only information that makes them decide in ways that you want. Truthiness at it's best.
Linux on the desktop isn't all that common, and Linux on the desktop in a gaming situation is extremely rare
I'm not so sure. For many of the people I know that run a Linux Desktop, just being system administrator of it is the video game they play on their PC.
Dodgy binary driver strikes your memory manager, dealing 100Mb of damage. Process beagle needs CPU time badly. You are in a twisty directory of files, all alike. (S)ave, (Q)uit to Windows or (R)m -rf/* now?
Someone once said that to have a market you have to have both supply and demand. Not just one or the other, but the combination defines a market.
Admittedly, I pulled the numbers out of my ass,
Published games are business endeavors. Business live and die on real, hard numbers but people pulling fake numbers out of their asses have killed more ideas than just Gaming on Linux. No supply, no market. Remember?
Like I said, my numbers are probably too high. You are talking about a vanishingly small segment of the market.
I ran some numbers on this in 2005 based on Linux market share from IDC, counter.li.org, www.win2000mag.com and Forster Research. These number have only gotten better since then (largely thanks to Ubuntu.) An excerpt from my 2005 analysis.
Let's talk about the high-end.
If Linux desktops = 0.025% (0.0125% gamers) of all desktops, then WoW for Linux would have sold 144 copies in it's first 6 weeks in the US market alone. Note that transgaming.com needs far more customer votes than this to start work on a title, and WoW has been voted #1 priority by transgaming.com customers for several months.
If Linux desktops = 1.12 percent (the highest number of Linux desktop games being 0.56 percent) then WoW for Linux would have sold 3,000 copies in it's first 6 weeks at $39-50.
That means between $7,200 and $150,000 could have been spent by Linux desktop users on WoW. While $7k will only pay a Bangladeshi salary, $150,000 would nicely cover one or two interns to make sure WoW compiles and runs on Linux. (not to mention the $15 per month implies $2,160 to $45,000 a month to keep that Linux port updated.)
In perspective, though:
6% to 12% of WoW went to Mac users who traded in $1.8million to $3.6million for the privilege of paying $540,000 to $1.08million EVERY month to Blizzard.
On the low end, the numbers still work out. Heck if KoL can support 3 people's salary with badly drawn pictures of knob goblins, how much can you make for a little effort?
If I could get 50,000 Linux people (the average per game population on battle.net) to play my online game for 1 year at $15 per month then I'd be $9,000,000 richer (minus expenses like $3 million in bandwidth or whatever.) If only 5,000 customers play my game for a $5/month then I'm still getting $300k a year for running servers. If I charge $10 for the game media, then I've paid one $50,000 salary or other costs.
Really, the only competition you have for gaming on Linux is that so many Linux users play at running their system. Linux itself becomes their game. That tells me their is demand. So where is the supply?
2-3% of the market is a lot of money at $15 a month.
However, please, do realize that games are typically sold for 6 months and supported for 1 year and 99% on a single platform (Win/XBox). Very few things are developed as cross-platform - and it is NOT because of OpenGL, more like commercial realities (cross-platform development is hard and doesn't make a lot of sense for ~2-3% of the market, especially for an app that will be sold for one season).
I am developing OpenGL applications for a decade now and all are still running and being used. How many 10 year old games can you actually get working today?
I'm glad you spent the time to maintain all that code.
All the software I developed "with OpenGL" either uses a graphics engine that switches to DirectX on Windows or is so out of date that finding compilable libraries old enough to match the non-OpenGL pieces is an exercise in futility. I have plenty of 1.2 OpenGL code that is essentially dead.
A good Go method is one that wins - not (necessarily) one that wins the way you would play.
Possibly. One method is to shoot the opponent dead and win by default. However, this tells us nothing useful about intelligence (simulated, artificial or machine.)
But then in my eyes the computer did not win this game vs. a man. A team of people who played via code and steel did. The machine was just a tool to help them win. If you claim computers doing these fast tree searches are intelligent, it is a fundamentally different approach, a machine intelligence, with different properties than the chemical brains of animals like man.
In my opinion, AI as a general research field took a huge step back when everything became a 'search the tree' algorithm. Instead of better 'smarts' we just build faster and faster tree searchers. Fortunately for us, a lot of problems can be solved in reasonable time doing this (trivial pathfinding an A* for instance.) But that says nothing about how existing chemical brains, the only known intelligence, solve the problem.
.. they pay for dialup ($120 a year) and compare it to the cost of broadband; cable internet in my area is at least $45/month ($540 a year...
3 hours a day of surfing and online gaming is around 90 hours a month, or something like 2 hours of fat-pipe hookup for a buck. I wish my car got gas milage a tenth that good. And that's just directly replacing 1970s "Good Christian American" nuclear family couch time, not counting the all weekend gaming parties or midnight emergency porn.
$4.50 a pack deathsticks (cigarettes). Some people in the local ghetto apartments are on pack a day habits.
Getting the objectives right then, and revising them to fit the objectives now are two very different things. It's easy to write hack code, but very hard to maintain it. It still impresses me that compilers can output binaries from some of the C++ they get fed. (To be honest, it impresses me more that debuggers can handle the resulting binary output.)
I do have one big nitpick:
So, an efficient, object oriented version of C was probably exactly what was need
C++ is neither an object-oriented language nor C with objects. Java isn't object-oriented. Javascript is. Even Bjarne Stroustrup is clear on this matter:
FTA:
Where does the name C++ come from?
As "C with Classes" (my ancestor to C++) became popular within Bell Labs, some people found that name too much of a mouthful and started to call it C.
You write and design classes that your running program implements as objects. This extra bit of indirection has huge consequences for the language and code written into it. For one, programming in C++ is the job of telling the computer how to define a memory store that objects can be used on. This is no different a difficult than defining a complex structure in C.
FTA:
These days, object-oriented programming is just about everywhere,
but not in C++. It's still turtles (class architecture) all the way down. Language theorists can talk about 'message passing' and 'behaviors.' Bleh, Syntax sugar for programmers with diabetes. They are just procedural programming functions that get an extra pre-allocated pointer passed in like a global variable and suspect to the same kinds of bugs. I love side effects, don't you?
As an aside, I am sick of dealing with novice code from people who are desperately trying to write object-oriented programs in a class-oriented language. The quality of the resulting code sucks (yes, I'm looking at you random video game programmer. Just put the global singleton pattern down and walk away, slowly.) Eventually they will get it or fail, even if they will continue to call it object-oriented programming while they carefully assemble their classes.
So, yes, I see C++ used for many things that I had not predicted and used in many ways that I had not anticipated, but usually I'm not completely stunned. I expected to be surprised, I designed for it. For example, I was very surprised by the structure of the STL and the look of code using it - I thought I knew what good container uses looked like
For what it's worth, STL and template metaprograming equals job security, if you can get the damn thing to compile. To paraphrase a famous quote: "Dear Stroustrup, I have no problem with you, but your followers are another matter." And don't get me started about the abuses of composition and inheritance.
I know this is a typo in the article, or a really funny Freudian slip, but it's going in my scrapbook:
C++ inherited the weaknesses and the strengths of C++, and I think that we have done a decent job at compensating for the weaknesses without compromising the strengths. -- Bjarne Stroustrup
Really if you are a planning on being a space-fairing species a lot of this is junk weight.
Human spaceflight is fascinating, but right now it's utterly useless for exploring our own solar system, let alone further afield. There's just way too much sodding plumbing you have to take along too.
And most that plumbing is to support a GI and musculature for surviving on the Savanah and the reproductive system to make more of the same.
A radiation-hardened processor controlling a space probe is one thing, but the necessary life support mechanisms, living area, exercise machines, lavatory facilities, windows to look out of, paper underpants, DVD players, Tang, freeze-dried noodles and the machinery necessary to reprocess piss and shit into something more palatable... Humans just aren't designed for spaceflight.
Then redesign them?
Seriously, if you are already past your reproductive years you're looking forward to increased medical needs to support aging heart, bone and other organs. Why not ditch it all for a brain in a box? Barring stroke or brain cancer, you in your new shiny and easily repaired robot body (No warranty expressed or implied) could be doing geology in the asteroid belt, homesteading the Ice of Europa or taking in a few rounds of vacuum golf on the moon.
And for the Retalians out there, just sacrifice a neuron or two to grow you a brainless clone to house your transplantable crainium if you ever feel the need to press the flesh in person again.
Rather than banning certain activities like shaving, talking on a cell, fiddling with the radio, or tending to unruly children, train new lumberjacks on how to use their chainsaws with common every-day distractions,
Fixed that for you.
If you are going to operate lethal equipment in an inappropriate manner, please do so far away from me. If you don't think driving a car can easily kill people, please retake your high-school drivers education course.
In case you missed the joke, a car is not the driver's personal
shaving parlor
telephone booth
concert
blowjob chair at the stripclub
daycare/baby's room
If you really feel the need to discipline your children or yack on the phone, pull off of the road and be late. You are risking everyone's life so you can get the dirt on the office secretary or apologize at 80mph because you are late to work for hitting the snooze bar one too many times. And personally, if your kid is acting up enough to interrupt you while you are my driver, I'm going to ask you to pull over so I can spank it's little ass.
To put this simply: There are two rates that effect Opensource with respect to the economy. The rate of:
new people available to projects
old people now unavailable to project
I observe that at this time, the increase in new people on the Internet dwarfs changes in either rate. True, the loss of key players can kill a project. Just because more middle-class white males may be forces to stop working on 'F/OSS' will not mean the end of F/OSS. OpenSource is not a business in competition with proprietary software. And as long as a project is Opensource, someone can dig up the old tapes and start patching away. The pool of raw talent is growing. Invite these new people in, they might be able to help.
Inability to upgrade, leads to more intense skill sets.
I agree that manufactures have been dumbing down the documentation. This is done not only to be friendly to the Aunt Mable crowd, but also protect this new "Intellectual Property" that the marketing department has gotten the legal department worked up about.
However, real - or open - standards vs fake - de-facto / Microsoft - standards are published in their gory detail. Many many books are published today on the details of how things work, worked and will work. However, you must go to your library and read them to benefit. Today many people want instahacking sk1llz at the push of button. Unfortunately, the real world is also garbage-in/garbage-out. Those 3rd world folks are required to put in the effort to make work what is just a push-of-a-button away for 1st world people. The difference if subtle: they have to read, you ought to read.
And, to top it off, I resent the SourceForge and all such "organizations". I much enjoy and miss, the days when each project had it's off-beat web-site hanging off of some obscure computer connection, or even hosted by some free hosting site like Geocities. Greatly enhanced the fealing of individuality and added a lot of color to the Linux community. When Sourceforge came around, it so much feals corporate, institutionalized and all the horrible things that most of us hate.
Enhanced the fealing (sic) of individuality? Don't you mean ugly?
Hmmm, let's see: sourceforge provides webhosting and other tools for a project, but how many still have their own websites?
And that was just from clicking randomly on the top 10 downloads page. (Technically I also hit sourceforge's own project, but can you really blame sourceforge for hosting at sourceforge?) I don't really see the addition of a useful 'professional' index really impacting the 'feals' (sic) of the projects. I think it's less geocites and more "it's only 100 bucks, just register the domain already."
You still end up at some obscure computer connection for many projects. Not everything is a myproject.sourceforce.com site. However, for tiny projects they get free hosting and somedofairly
Slashdot Mirror
Only one problem with this "disposable IT" model:
'It just works' has been IT job security since before Gates and Moore thought x86 was a good idea.
Outdated is no reason to not continue to pour millions of (otherwise profit) monies into supporting something.
Hands up for those of you who didn't start a new job at a place with a ancient white elephant?
You Novel Netware people with 'end-of-life a decade ago and still can't turn it off' servers can put your hands down too. Same for you Windows admins trying to hide those desktop towers running Windows 95 for some ugly little app by a company that died before google.com even got registered in DNS.
However, I'm betting someone corporate could mention this to their EMC or netapp sales rep and get quite a few free nice lunches out of it.
Local usage? There is a wiring pattern called a traveler circuit used with three-way or four-way switches. It's used to hook one light to two switches among other things. It's very common in America since we have these things called houses that often come with long hallways.
One of the side effects of this is that when you flip one switch to on or off, you invert the meaning of the other switch. So, if one switch was up for on and down for off then flipping the other switch makes it up for off and down for on.
While I've yet to see a house in America with toggle-switch lighting controls facing sideways, it is certainly possible to install them or change them to be so. But as even a quick search on Wikipedia would reveal, the direction has a lot to do with city/state/country zoning ordinances and more than a little cultural inertia.
Then change the questions and the image.
Google's image search could even provide a loophole. Just get the images onto Google images and let users tag them for free.
Instead of asking 'what is in this picture' all the time, how about asking hard semantic questions about this picture?
The article showed a CAPTCHA with a fork, toilet and plane. Asking which one of these is best if I just drank too much beer and need to puke would be a lot harder than the typical list these things.
With a little metadata and a large enough bank of questions, this object recognition CAPTCHA plus semantic question becomes difficult to brute force without resorting to the free porn exploit.
The generating program could ask which of these is commonly kept in a house. That should be harder for a non-turing grade computer program (and possibly for some AIG executives) to guess. Just using simple lookups to provide the questions could force the attacker to reason deeply about the images and draw on real-world knowledge not commonly inputed into computers.
Putting a time limit similar to Google's Goggles might help deter those throwing less than a cluster of corpus searchers and image parsers at it. But as long as the question remains a fixed 'type what you see in the box' then all you need is slightly better image recognition software and some time with your friendly Romanian hacker.
They say that one of the benefits, if not an outright goal, of some Linux distributions is to be a great platform to develop software on.
At one time Linux looked downright competitive as a platform (if certainly not market,) so what happended since 2002?
Well, games are not just software. The software is simply there to make the game go.
Perhaps the reason that there are so few (or in some opinions no) good games on Linux is that for developing games, Linux sucks?
Perhaps it is time to admit that OpenGL is a not the only kid on the block and start providing another popular API that other developers want to use?
Perhaps it is time to stop throwing away all that boatload of artwork with each release and start saving anything under a usable license to an appropriate gathering spot?
Perhaps it is time to put down that cumulative-xml2pd-custom-package-colored-pretty-printer patch and answer some basic questions in such a way that new people don't hate us?
What happened to those Open Source game engines that were going to let you MOD your way for WoW 2.0? Perhaps they are still there, waiting for content.
Perhaps what Linux Gaming needs is a little less CompSci and a little more Bachelors of Arts?
Handyman's rule: all tools are hammers except chisels which are screwdrivers. What you buy something for may not be what it gets used to do.
Then explain the number of pristine, never to be used and decidedly overpowered tools sitting in many 'crasftsman' garages? I always felt Levitt was missing the mark. A lot of purchase decisions are about having the rights quarter-inch drill, regardless of its utility for making holes.
People will buy a car to drive on a road, but what car they buy and why may have nothing at all to do with driving. Operating Systems today are not a choice about practicality or functionality, but of style and ethos. The hobbyist feel and methods of Linux are not that far removed from the home mechanic tinkering with his hot rod that never leaves the driveway.
Linux won't garner marketshare based on being the quarter-inch hole maker of Personal Computers. We have Macs and corporate-desktop Windows for that.
Linux.com has to differentiate Linux from its competitors and show that it's the sexiest drill in the cabinet. Pasty nerds arguing over the last donut doesn't do either of these. Honestly, Ubuntu's graphics artists and Novell's XGL efforts did more to make people say "I want that on my computer" than 5 years of making Office 20XD6 work a little better on crappy hardware.
General purpose computers with complex operating systems that start dozens of applications during boot are relatively new technology compared with what you list. The PC is what, 20-30 years old depending on your definition of Personal and Computing?
I bought a house that had been in probate for a year. The water lines had been flushed with air. When I got the water running, it took maybe 30-40 seconds for the water to pressurize the line and come out the faucet.
Also, I've used old restored radios from the 1920s that had to warm up the tubes before they worked. 'Boot' times on those were around 2-3 minutes. Beautiful pieces of wood furniture, but horrible impractical compared with an 'almost instant' boot iPod.
To use a car analogy, One hundred and twenty years of innovation can do a lot. When you got into your automobile this morning did you remember to manually advance the engine timing and work the clutch leavers while someone cranked over the engine to get it started? No, you put the key in ignition and turned it.
But it's still nice to see someone taking note that Ubuntu can be dog slow starting up. Just one more reason to keep the system running your favorite distributed app while away.
Ah, the myths of closed source development.
1. End users making their own changes but still complaining about error that may or may not be a result of their unauthorized modifications
Happens anyway. Users will request support about: '2nd-party add-ons, edits to scripts with headers that warn not to edit them and even binary patches (including No CD and Anti-DRM that they - the paying customer doesn't want you to know about. Do you ever wonder why the help desk insists on trying that you 're-installing in a clean environment' as part of the troubleshooting process?
They are users. If you sold needle-drugs, they'd file bug reports that injecting heroin into their eyes makes them go blind.
2. Afraid that other competitors will 'leverage' your investment
Get real. If it's that good, they'll steal it anyway. Ever seen a license audit at a large company? There's a reason they make middle managers sweat like their stock dropped before the options vest.
3. They don't want anyone to know that they 'leveraged' your investment
4. They didn't bother to patent anything and they're relying on being hidden
See number 2 above. Running strings on random binaries in corporate-ware packages is left as an exercise to the reader. Bonus points if you buy a piece of software with code access and find your own product(s) inside.
I also love the continual arguments for 'shrouded' or 'obfuscated' source. Was that function tag345() or object2345.method76()? Those arguments come up on code forums pretty much annually. It's like Usenet in September until someone points out the obvious.
To the assembler programmer and the hacker, all programs are shipped with source code. It just may not be in the (high-level) language you prefer to code.
So pick your license - or better yet contract - carefully but prepare to back it up with audits, lawyers and calls to that boogeyman, the BSA.
CCP is claiming that they can't count the number of wine users because wine reports 'as windows' and not as 'wine on Linux.' Bullet meet foot.
FTA,
What do you expect?
file "~/.cedega/EVE Online/c_drive/Program Files/CCP/EVE/eve.exe"
eve.exe: MS-DOS executable PE for MS Windows (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit
Throw away for a moment the fact that Direct X translation to OpenGl is super slow compared with native OpenGL.
Wine >> winex.
Cedega = winex + no development updates + horrible hacks and workarounds for certain games.
The Eve-Online client is still a windows program. It is unsurprising that the best windows API on Linux would work better. CCP picked Transgaming to do the "porting." They once had the leading implementation of DirectX on Linux, but their tiny team worked on their private and increasingly hacked up fork of ancient wineX code.
Duplication of effort and waste all in the name of greed. And now it's the Linux users who get to pay.
I'm surprised that the employment contracts for those employees did not stipulate that all employee email passing through their systems was subject to search. Compared with the USA under King George and Prince Chaney, any country with "laws blocking companies from monitoring employee emails" sounds like a privacy paradise.
I know we're all for humanizing these collective fictions called corporations. Even going so far as to equate them to real people in law.
Now, let's be realistic: someone inside Nokia decided that they personally wanted this law. I guess it's nice to have none of the responsibility for your actions yet the power to have them executed. Some single manager held a meeting and told people to do this, even though it is the whole company that will be judged based on this.
While the employees are paid to be tools of the company, it is a single, living an breathing idiot somewhere inside Nokia that wants to play voyeur. Who? Unless it's a VP or CO level person, we may never know. All we know is that someone might be trying to stop the flow of confidential information out of the company.
People usually don't sign up for Open Source or Free Software. They just do stuff, put it out there and let other people use it. To quote one Mr. Torvalds, real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.
Have you thought about starting a blog?
How about taking an active part in one or more major distribution's forum?
Just publishing (in a reusable format under a nice CC License)
If your work is of high quality, it would make an impact.
It's as much a robot as a RC toy car.
However, take that awesome chassis and put it on a Basil and you have a real robot bartender.
And not one that looks like a slow showpiece for robotic arms and how not to display a face (on a low-grade industrial laptop screen.)
So give the drink elevators a bit more speed. The ice bin at the bottom is pretty much wasted space but then you'd need someplace for the AI anyway.
But with quality source code from Its Been Mangled engineering, there is much for young people to learn!
Not looking glass, but it does resemble one computing horror I remember.
Microsoft Bob.
Apple's huge graphics design and industrial engineering efforts could polish poop to the point people would pay to just put it on their shelf. As cool as the bumptop desktop demo and compiz are, showing that 3d UI on a 2d monitor can enable useful modes of computer use, they are very far from 'home office in the computer.'
As much as I hope they could pull it off, this is known dangerous territory. The computer is not a magic box, if Apple puts garbage into it garbage will come out of it. (And it will still probably sell to 8% of the market, but hey, that's Jobs^H^H^H^H Apple for you.)
So part of AZ has less light pollution.
If cable theft is a serious problem with outdoor lights, have park owners considered individual solar powered lights?
At what point does the replacement cost of the cables exceed the cost of solar lights?
Or to be proactive, could you have reclaimed the copper before the thieves, sold it back and paid for upgraded lights? Including theft deterrent housing?
Because I am the only developer or user of my code?
Seriously, I really really like the model of GIT has for group development. But when by myself I can just cp filename.ext{,.bak} if I'm feeling lazy.
And that is the key. I am typically the only developer on most of my projects. If I hadn't gone out of my way to learn to version control files on my own, I wouldn't have even known about it until my first real programming job. I still work with people who either use tape backup or the cp .1 .2. .old .bak to manage their files after decades as developers or sysadmins.
FTA:
And I already mastered branching using other VCSes. This is just Yet Another Version Control Syntax. (YAVCS? Sounds like a disease...)
Working on my own personal projects means I don't have a 'math wiz' to ask...
Most projects on sourceforge.net have 1 developer. But then most are essentially dead so probably not the best.
To quote Linus Torvalds on Subversion vs Git:
Git is wonderful for group work. And if you are introducing version control to a group environment you can probably start out with it.
For some of the solo developers, subversion is just CVS with nicer features and the old, familiar workflow.
To quote Linus again:
Ever hear the story about the sanitarium? It was for insane people only, so to be safe they had the contractor build it inside out.
Unless you are Mao Zedong, everything you do is irrelevant to about 1 billion Chinese. How notable will what you do be when they are the majority and you are the fringe consumer, edge market or outlier statistic?
People need to be informed to make correct decisions. Markets and Capitalism in particular depend totally on valid information. Censorship, the selective restriction of the amount of information available, ensures that people have only information that makes them decide in ways that you want. Truthiness at it's best.
I'm not so sure. For many of the people I know that run a Linux Desktop, just being system administrator of it is the video game they play on their PC.
Dodgy binary driver strikes your memory manager, dealing 100Mb of damage. Process beagle needs CPU time badly. You are in a twisty directory of files, all alike. (S)ave, (Q)uit to Windows or (R)m -rf /* now?
Someone once said that to have a market you have to have both supply and demand. Not just one or the other, but the combination defines a market.
Published games are business endeavors. Business live and die on real, hard numbers but people pulling fake numbers out of their asses have killed more ideas than just Gaming on Linux. No supply, no market. Remember?
I ran some numbers on this in 2005 based on Linux market share from IDC, counter.li.org, www.win2000mag.com and Forster Research. These number have only gotten better since then (largely thanks to Ubuntu.) An excerpt from my 2005 analysis.
Let's talk about the high-end.
If Linux desktops = 0.025% (0.0125% gamers) of all desktops, then WoW for Linux would have sold 144 copies in it's first 6 weeks in the US market alone. Note that transgaming.com needs far more customer votes than this to start work on a title, and WoW has been voted #1 priority by transgaming.com customers for several months.
If Linux desktops = 1.12 percent (the highest number of Linux desktop games being 0.56 percent) then WoW for Linux would have sold 3,000 copies in it's first 6 weeks at $39-50.
That means between $7,200 and $150,000 could have been spent by Linux desktop users on WoW. While $7k will only pay a Bangladeshi salary, $150,000 would nicely cover one or two interns to make sure WoW compiles and runs on Linux. (not to mention the $15 per month implies $2,160 to $45,000 a month to keep that Linux port updated.)
In perspective, though:
6% to 12% of WoW went to Mac users who traded in $1.8million to $3.6million for the privilege of paying $540,000 to $1.08million EVERY month to Blizzard.
On the low end, the numbers still work out. Heck if KoL can support 3 people's salary with badly drawn pictures of knob goblins, how much can you make for a little effort?
If I could get 50,000 Linux people (the average per game population on battle.net) to play my online game for 1 year at $15 per month then I'd be $9,000,000 richer (minus expenses like $3 million in bandwidth or whatever.) If only 5,000 customers play my game for a $5/month then I'm still getting $300k a year for running servers. If I charge $10 for the game media, then I've paid one $50,000 salary or other costs.
Really, the only competition you have for gaming on Linux is that so many Linux users play at running their system. Linux itself becomes their game. That tells me their is demand. So where is the supply?
2-3% of the market is a lot of money at $15 a month.
Except today's big money hauling games are sub-scription based, +5 year supported commercial platforms. This doesn't eliminate shrink wrapped abandonware any more than Linux killed the proprietary operating system. These games restort to emulation of Direct X to get multi-platform support instead of using OpenGL.
I'm glad you spent the time to maintain all that code.
All the software I developed "with OpenGL" either uses a graphics engine that switches to DirectX on Windows or is so out of date that finding compilable libraries old enough to match the non-OpenGL pieces is an exercise in futility. I have plenty of 1.2 OpenGL code that is essentially dead.
Possibly. One method is to shoot the opponent dead and win by default. However, this tells us nothing useful about intelligence (simulated, artificial or machine.)
But then in my eyes the computer did not win this game vs. a man. A team of people who played via code and steel did. The machine was just a tool to help them win. If you claim computers doing these fast tree searches are intelligent, it is a fundamentally different approach, a machine intelligence, with different properties than the chemical brains of animals like man.
In my opinion, AI as a general research field took a huge step back when everything became a 'search the tree' algorithm. Instead of better 'smarts' we just build faster and faster tree searchers. Fortunately for us, a lot of problems can be solved in reasonable time doing this (trivial pathfinding an A* for instance.) But that says nothing about how existing chemical brains, the only known intelligence, solve the problem.
3 hours a day of surfing and online gaming is around 90 hours a month, or something like 2 hours of fat-pipe hookup for a buck. I wish my car got gas milage a tenth that good. And that's just directly replacing 1970s "Good Christian American" nuclear family couch time, not counting the all weekend gaming parties or midnight emergency porn.
$4.50 a pack deathsticks (cigarettes). Some people in the local ghetto apartments are on pack a day habits.
But, then this slashdot comment pretty much covers it.
Getting the objectives right then, and revising them to fit the objectives now are two very different things. It's easy to write hack code, but very hard to maintain it. It still impresses me that compilers can output binaries from some of the C++ they get fed. (To be honest, it impresses me more that debuggers can handle the resulting binary output.)
I do have one big nitpick:
C++ is neither an object-oriented language nor C with objects. Java isn't object-oriented. Javascript is. Even Bjarne Stroustrup is clear on this matter:
FTA:
You write and design classes that your running program implements as objects. This extra bit of indirection has huge consequences for the language and code written into it. For one, programming in C++ is the job of telling the computer how to define a memory store that objects can be used on. This is no different a difficult than defining a complex structure in C.
FTA:
but not in C++. It's still turtles (class architecture) all the way down. Language theorists can talk about 'message passing' and 'behaviors.' Bleh, Syntax sugar for programmers with diabetes. They are just procedural programming functions that get an extra pre-allocated pointer passed in like a global variable and suspect to the same kinds of bugs. I love side effects, don't you?
As an aside, I am sick of dealing with novice code from people who are desperately trying to write object-oriented programs in a class-oriented language. The quality of the resulting code sucks (yes, I'm looking at you random video game programmer. Just put the global singleton pattern down and walk away, slowly.) Eventually they will get it or fail, even if they will continue to call it object-oriented programming while they carefully assemble their classes.
For what it's worth, STL and template metaprograming equals job security, if you can get the damn thing to compile. To paraphrase a famous quote: "Dear Stroustrup, I have no problem with you, but your followers are another matter." And don't get me started about the abuses of composition and inheritance.
I know this is a typo in the article, or a really funny Freudian slip, but it's going in my scrapbook:
And most that plumbing is to support a GI and musculature for surviving on the Savanah and the reproductive system to make more of the same.
Then redesign them?
Seriously, if you are already past your reproductive years you're looking forward to increased medical needs to support aging heart, bone and other organs. Why not ditch it all for a brain in a box? Barring stroke or brain cancer, you in your new shiny and easily repaired robot body (No warranty expressed or implied) could be doing geology in the asteroid belt, homesteading the Ice of Europa or taking in a few rounds of vacuum golf on the moon.
I am not the first to mention this.
And for the Retalians out there, just sacrifice a neuron or two to grow you a brainless clone to house your transplantable crainium if you ever feel the need to press the flesh in person again.
Fixed that for you.
If you are going to operate lethal equipment in an inappropriate manner, please do so far away from me. If you don't think driving a car can easily kill people, please retake your high-school drivers education course.
In case you missed the joke, a car is not the driver's personal
If you really feel the need to discipline your children or yack on the phone, pull off of the road and be late. You are risking everyone's life so you can get the dirt on the office secretary or apologize at 80mph because you are late to work for hitting the snooze bar one too many times. And personally, if your kid is acting up enough to interrupt you while you are my driver, I'm going to ask you to pull over so I can spank it's little ass.
To put this simply: There are two rates that effect Opensource with respect to the economy. The rate of:
I observe that at this time, the increase in new people on the Internet dwarfs changes in either rate. True, the loss of key players can kill a project. Just because more middle-class white males may be forces to stop working on 'F/OSS' will not mean the end of F/OSS. OpenSource is not a business in competition with proprietary software. And as long as a project is Opensource, someone can dig up the old tapes and start patching away. The pool of raw talent is growing. Invite these new people in, they might be able to help.
I agree that manufactures have been dumbing down the documentation. This is done not only to be friendly to the Aunt Mable crowd, but also protect this new "Intellectual Property" that the marketing department has gotten the legal department worked up about.
However, real - or open - standards vs fake - de-facto / Microsoft - standards are published in their gory detail. Many many books are published today on the details of how things work, worked and will work. However, you must go to your library and read them to benefit. Today many people want instahacking sk1llz at the push of button. Unfortunately, the real world is also garbage-in/garbage-out. Those 3rd world folks are required to put in the effort to make work what is just a push-of-a-button away for 1st world people. The difference if subtle: they have to read, you ought to read.
Enhanced the fealing (sic) of individuality? Don't you mean ugly?
Hmmm, let's see: sourceforge provides webhosting and other tools for a project, but how many still have their own websites?
And that was just from clicking randomly on the top 10 downloads page. (Technically I also hit sourceforge's own project, but can you really blame sourceforge for hosting at sourceforge?) I don't really see the addition of a useful 'professional' index really impacting the 'feals' (sic) of the projects. I think it's less geocites and more "it's only 100 bucks, just register the domain already."
You still end up at some obscure computer connection for many projects. Not everything is a myproject.sourceforce.com site. However, for tiny projects they get free hosting and some do fairly