I've been waiting years for the mainstream media to stop using the term "computer virus" to describe Windows viruses.
Since regular people rely on mainstream media for information, it's about damn time they started pointing out that it is the fault of Windows, not the result of simply having a computer.
I don't expect the media to start reading Mac or Linux or BSD commercials. But I do expect them to accurately describe where the blame lies.
If more consumers were aware of the crap OS they're forced to buy when they get a PC, things might just start to change.
For some reason, the Hulk movie is a movie people love to hate. I liked it. Sure, it isn't perfect, but it's damn good.
Leave it to an LA publication to compare it to Crouching Tiger. If there's a place where people are in love with rehashing the same thing until it's run into the ground, it's LA. "Take no risks! Just write and direct another Crouching Tiger!"
The movie isn't like like Crouching Tiger because Ang Lee didn't want to make another Crouching Tiger. God, it's like people telling Robin Williams to do some Mork lines.
I do feel like Banner's repressed violence should have been portrayed more subtly, but we all know how things like that hit the cutting room floor. Critics may be won over by subtlety, but general audiences can barely spell the word.
To stay on topic... I very much agree with his assessment on the games. The Banner element is good as long it's not more than a tiny part of the gameplay. For instance, I might like a game where you play as the Hulk constantly but are haunted by Banner's thoughts and must piece them together. And obviously just smashing a city is going to wear thin, for players over the age of ten. A really successful game will be one that can find a balance.
Gosh, it's almost as if the real complaint of administrators and slashdotters is that Microsoft is putting out a lot of badly written software.
Perhaps a corollary of the complaint is that Microsoft seems to have enough money that they could afford some QA on their code. Considering their exploits result in crippling the economy, a little responsibility doesn't seem like a lot to ask.
No one can write software that's 100% bug free, but they could get a lot closer to 100% than this.
Why would you want to let ordinary users install packages? Isn't that what leads to Sony rootkits etc.?
Package installation probably should have a warning like old newsreaders had:
"Please be sure you know what you are doing."
In fact, any software installation should have it. Some malware gets on Windows machines instantly through Outlook or IE exploits, but great deal of it gets there because non-tech-savvy users see a "Click OK to install the UltraCoolSlickLinksToolBar plugin" dialog and don't know the difference between that and a "Click OK to install the Macromedia Flash plugin" dialog.
Users should be made aware that installing software is like tinkering with your car's engine: it's important to know what you're doing.
Requiring someone to enter a mode of operation specifically designed to modify the system seems like a strength to me.
Mostly curmudgeony grousing on the article's part, but obviously there's a fair amount of truth in there: the games industry mostly sucks. Or, as a wise fellow once said, 90% of anything is crud.
I don't think a crash is imminent, because we have a different pricing model than we had in the 80s.
Back then, a 2600 game would typically cost $30, unless it was a "hot" title from Atari themselves, in which case it was $40 or $50. Most of the Atari titles did not disappoint, but zillions of third party developers jumped in with horrendous garbage that made the buyer want to shed tears for having been forced to view such a pitiful excuse for gameplay on his television. I think if I'd paid $30 for Mythicon's "Sorcerer" I'd be very unlikely to ever buy another game. Trying out games at kiosks is something only kids have time for.
Nowadays, games (and all technology) come down in price pretty predictably. After a year, a game is $20. ($30 if it's really popular.) After two years, it's $15 or less. After three years, it's in bargain bins, unless it's been sent back to the distributor's warehouse.
I routinely wait two years before getting most games. Maybe that's because I play a lot of single-player and not much multiplayer, so I don't have to worry about whether I'll be able to find a server. For a long time I knew hardly anyone who did the same thing, but I'm starting to encounter increasing numbers of people who practice the same buying strategy.
This is the market in action. Most games suck, and they're not worth $50. I know it. Others have been stung enough that they're starting to notice it. I don't think the gaming industry is in for a crash; I think it's in for a fall. I think starting sometime in the next few years, most games will be $20 or less when they hit the shelves. If that doesn't pay the bills for the extravagant graphics and movie licensing... too bad, guess they should have spent more of that money on gameplay. If "Tetris" didn't teach the lesson that a great game doesn't need great graphics, I don't know what will.
Which brings up another point: true occasional revitalization of the industry comes from true innovations like Tetris. A game concept that's completely unlike anything else. A genre unto itself. Those things are very hard to come up with, obviously, but they do still happen. I think the gaming industry would have fallen a long time ago if Tetris hadn't injected a whole new genre into it. In the 80s, most developers were trying to come up with a new genre; now it's rare but it does still happen once in a while.
Oh, and Charlie... it's the Atari 7800, not the Atari 7200.
Then they'll stop making things stamped with the Sony brand name.
If Sears can call itself Kenmore, I'm sure Sony can manage to label its products Trustworthytronics or something.
They may not fool you the first few times, but do you really have time to keep up with every front company they'll create? They'll sneak it in eventually.
Nice, but... plus-style joypads suck for diagonal movement. And a lot of Atari 800 games depended on diagonal movement. He mentions playing Robotron: 2084 with them. Considering how difficult diagonal movement (and firing) would be, I expect it won't be very enjoyable.
At least he had the good sense to put in regular joystick ports for those times when whoever uses the machine doesn't want to make do with those plus-pads.
This is precisely why operator overloading is both unneeded and unwelcome. Like an earlier post said, the benefit doesn't even come close to outweighing the price. "<=>" is a perfect, classical example of how programmers get positively drunk with freedom and treat operator overloading like a shiny new toy. Code full of that instead of "compareTo" is an instant eyesore. I'd rather spend my time developing, not deciphering.
I was given 61 screenshots (blithely dubbed "program requirements"), each its own Word document. Each containing only a (weirdly scaled) picture, of course.
We already have technology commercially available that accomplishes this.
Remember those cheesy "MedSafe" (or whatever) pendant commercials that came on late at night, some years ago? Not the "I've fallen and I can't get up" ones; the later ones, advertising a pendant you could wear containing your medical information.
I'm pretty sure a number of elderly Americans actually wear these.
Why would anyone want a chip implanted, when a 10g pendant accomplishes the same thing with negligible inconvenience?
And how are lawmakers going to argue the case for such an obscenely Orwellian device, when a 10g pendant accomplishes the same thing with negligible inconvenience?
I have my doubts about whether this will actually work, but I'm not sure it matters.
I just think getting thousands of complaints should be the natural result of pissing off thousands of people.
The psychopathic behavior of a spammer wouldn't be tolerated for an instant if he were face-to-face with his victims. Try attending a ballet or opera, and yelling "I have cheese in my butt!" at top volume.
Whether it works or not, what Blue Sec is doing should be an expected inconvenience of spamming. Even if it just causes spammers to set up their own filters, at least it will weed out some would-be casual spammers.
No, it's Victorian Christian decency. There is no evidence that the image of a nude human body has ever harmed a child of any age. If that were the case, every kid who's ever been to a nudist resort would be a frothing psychopath.
Sun keyboards do this, and I love it. (Though Sun keyboards have a number of other qualities which I don't love....)
If, like me, you're a keyboard power user, then having those left function keys, like Open, Front, Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Props and so on is a godsend. And from a user interface standpoint, they're a lot smarter than expecting novice users to know Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V, and Ctrl-Z. (And it would be nice if novice users didn't keep trying to get those combinations to work in Unix shells.)
It may make the keyboard bigger, but I'm not aware of any key combos comprised of both a left function key and some other key.
I believe this idea first occurred to me 15 years ago, when it seemed like every IBM PS/2 in the lab had someone's WordPerfect 5.x cardboard function key reference "template" left on the keyboard. (I never used WordPerfect 5.x for DOS, as I found it atrocious and there were many superior shareware alternatives.)
This leads me to realize that we don't need most of the keys to be visually configurable. I mean, okay, as many others have pointed out, the ability to switch languages or switch layouts could be useful, but that doesn't happen very often. The need for such flexibility would be limited to kiosks and the like.
Where we frequently need configurable descriptions is the function keys. They're the only keys on the keyboard whose functionality is not apparent. Everything else is either alphanumeric, punctuation, or an easy guess.
Come to think of it, can you say what will happen if you were to press any particular function key right now? (Most windowed browsers should use F1 as help and F10 as menu focus, but I've even seen those standards forsaken.)
Regardless, there can't possibly be room for a useful description of the function keys on the keyboard itself. And ergonomically, if the user has to keep looking down at his keyboard, it's going to really screw up his productivity, as he'll keep losing his place on the screen.
This makes me believe that desktops should provide a general API for function key descriptions, displayed in a designated area. For instance:
(I would not want apps to have control over the location of it; that's for the user and only the user to decide. And users should have a "never show it udner any circumstances" preference available as well.)
On-screen function key descriptions aren't really an innovation, of course. It was common for text-mode apps to use the bottom one or two rows of the screen for this very purpose, back in the 80s. But now 1600x1200 screens are fairly common, and a function key description area isn't going to eat into our screen real estate nearly as much as it would have 20 years ago.
They'll buy it, sure. But they won't choose to buy it.
They'll buy it because it comes with their Dell PC and even if Dell were to offer to put Linux or BSD on it, Dell would still be charging people for Longhorn because Dell was forced to buy a Longhorn license for every PC they sell.
Granted, not many people will ask Dell for Linux or BSD. But many of them would love to opt for an older and much cheaper version of Windows, because even average users seem to be noticing that the latest version of a Microsoft product offers very little for a lot of money.
Too bad. Dell had to pay for a new Longhorn license, therefore the people will have to pay for a new Longhorn license.
If you work for the US government or any of its contractors, writing down any passwords to classified information or resources is a bad idea. I'm pretty sure it's a punishable offense.
Exactly. They'll do it with XML processing instructions. A processing instruction is a way to embed free-form text in an XML document. It's a comment-that's-not-a-comment.
I expect Microsoft will use these in a manner similar to how they raped^H^H^H^H^Hembraced and extended Java by adding magic code-generating javadoc comment tags like "@dll". For instance:
<?mso-normal some-style load DOTNETCRAP.DLL?>
Microsoft was part of the consortium that designed XML. Processing instructions aren't in there by accident.
This actually seems like a much more useful application: hands-free CB radio. Something that lets drivers communicate with each other.
The main reason asshole drivers exist in such painful proportions is that they don't face any consequences. If they did any of those things outside the context of a motor vehicle, like, say, in a crowded store, the very least they'd get would be numerous angry stares. The boiling hatred of those affronted is a powerful motivator. On the road, most people aren't gutsy enough to honk at an asshole driver, and asshole drivers don't even notice lights flashed at them.
Imagine if that blissfully vacuous bleached-blonde soccer mom hears, "Get out of the passing lane, you retarded hosebag!" Now imagine if she hears that from twenty people in a one-minute period. Only the very dullest of idiot drivers will have such a thick skin that they can ignore an unending flood of insults and invectives.
But social pressure isn't the only application. If we make this an actual network, then sell simple voice-activated little boxes which hook into this network whenever the driver says things like "Report Alabama JDT 8771, swerving and aggressive driving," and let law enforcement keep a database of such "reports" so they can go have a talk with someone who has, say, fifty reports against them, we can bring some responsible driving back to the roads and save some lives (and commuting time).
Slashdot Mirror
If understand things correctly, this code will trigger the vulnerability:
Image img = Tooklit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage(filename);
While this will not:
Image img = ImageIO.read(new File(filename));
Since the former invokes native libraries while the latter is pure Java.
I don't have Windows (or the spare time to wipe an infected machine) so I can't verify this.
Actually, it's extraordinary reporting.
I've been waiting years for the mainstream media to stop using the term "computer virus" to describe Windows viruses.
Since regular people rely on mainstream media for information, it's about damn time they started pointing out that it is the fault of Windows, not the result of simply having a computer.
I don't expect the media to start reading Mac or Linux or BSD commercials. But I do expect them to accurately describe where the blame lies.
If more consumers were aware of the crap OS they're forced to buy when they get a PC, things might just start to change.
For some reason, the Hulk movie is a movie people love to hate. I liked it. Sure, it isn't perfect, but it's damn good.
Leave it to an LA publication to compare it to Crouching Tiger. If there's a place where people are in love with rehashing the same thing until it's run into the ground, it's LA. "Take no risks! Just write and direct another Crouching Tiger!"
The movie isn't like like Crouching Tiger because Ang Lee didn't want to make another Crouching Tiger. God, it's like people telling Robin Williams to do some Mork lines.
I do feel like Banner's repressed violence should have been portrayed more subtly, but we all know how things like that hit the cutting room floor. Critics may be won over by subtlety, but general audiences can barely spell the word.
To stay on topic... I very much agree with his assessment on the games. The Banner element is good as long it's not more than a tiny part of the gameplay. For instance, I might like a game where you play as the Hulk constantly but are haunted by Banner's thoughts and must piece them together. And obviously just smashing a city is going to wear thin, for players over the age of ten. A really successful game will be one that can find a balance.
Perhaps a corollary of the complaint is that Microsoft seems to have enough money that they could afford some QA on their code. Considering their exploits result in crippling the economy, a little responsibility doesn't seem like a lot to ask.
No one can write software that's 100% bug free, but they could get a lot closer to 100% than this.
Why would you want to let ordinary users install packages? Isn't that what leads to Sony rootkits etc.?
Package installation probably should have a warning like old newsreaders had:
"Please be sure you know what you are doing."
In fact, any software installation should have it. Some malware gets on Windows machines instantly through Outlook or IE exploits, but great deal of it gets there because non-tech-savvy users see a "Click OK to install the UltraCoolSlickLinksToolBar plugin" dialog and don't know the difference between that and a "Click OK to install the Macromedia Flash plugin" dialog.
Users should be made aware that installing software is like tinkering with your car's engine: it's important to know what you're doing.
Requiring someone to enter a mode of operation specifically designed to modify the system seems like a strength to me.
Mostly curmudgeony grousing on the article's part, but obviously there's a fair amount of truth in there: the games industry mostly sucks. Or, as a wise fellow once said, 90% of anything is crud.
I don't think a crash is imminent, because we have a different pricing model than we had in the 80s.
Back then, a 2600 game would typically cost $30, unless it was a "hot" title from Atari themselves, in which case it was $40 or $50. Most of the Atari titles did not disappoint, but zillions of third party developers jumped in with horrendous garbage that made the buyer want to shed tears for having been forced to view such a pitiful excuse for gameplay on his television. I think if I'd paid $30 for Mythicon's "Sorcerer" I'd be very unlikely to ever buy another game. Trying out games at kiosks is something only kids have time for.
Nowadays, games (and all technology) come down in price pretty predictably. After a year, a game is $20. ($30 if it's really popular.) After two years, it's $15 or less. After three years, it's in bargain bins, unless it's been sent back to the distributor's warehouse.
I routinely wait two years before getting most games. Maybe that's because I play a lot of single-player and not much multiplayer, so I don't have to worry about whether I'll be able to find a server. For a long time I knew hardly anyone who did the same thing, but I'm starting to encounter increasing numbers of people who practice the same buying strategy.
This is the market in action. Most games suck, and they're not worth $50. I know it. Others have been stung enough that they're starting to notice it. I don't think the gaming industry is in for a crash; I think it's in for a fall. I think starting sometime in the next few years, most games will be $20 or less when they hit the shelves. If that doesn't pay the bills for the extravagant graphics and movie licensing... too bad, guess they should have spent more of that money on gameplay. If "Tetris" didn't teach the lesson that a great game doesn't need great graphics, I don't know what will.
Which brings up another point: true occasional revitalization of the industry comes from true innovations like Tetris. A game concept that's completely unlike anything else. A genre unto itself. Those things are very hard to come up with, obviously, but they do still happen. I think the gaming industry would have fallen a long time ago if Tetris hadn't injected a whole new genre into it. In the 80s, most developers were trying to come up with a new genre; now it's rare but it does still happen once in a while.
Oh, and Charlie... it's the Atari 7800, not the Atari 7200.
Then they'll stop making things stamped with the Sony brand name.
If Sears can call itself Kenmore, I'm sure Sony can manage to label its products Trustworthytronics or something.
They may not fool you the first few times, but do you really have time to keep up with every front company they'll create? They'll sneak it in eventually.
Nice, but... plus-style joypads suck for diagonal movement. And a lot of Atari 800 games depended on diagonal movement. He mentions playing Robotron: 2084 with them. Considering how difficult diagonal movement (and firing) would be, I expect it won't be very enjoyable.
At least he had the good sense to put in regular joystick ports for those times when whoever uses the machine doesn't want to make do with those plus-pads.
Yeah, that's a lot more readable.
This is precisely why operator overloading is both unneeded and unwelcome. Like an earlier post said, the benefit doesn't even come close to outweighing the price. "<=>" is a perfect, classical example of how programmers get positively drunk with freedom and treat operator overloading like a shiny new toy. Code full of that instead of "compareTo" is an instant eyesore. I'd rather spend my time developing, not deciphering.
Did anyone else catch the bit in the rust-colored box about a movie producer who has the "film rights to Deus Ex"?
I just hope Denton doesn't spend all his time in the movie hacking bank terminals.
You think that's bad?
I was given 61 screenshots (blithely dubbed "program requirements"), each its own Word document. Each containing only a (weirdly scaled) picture, of course.
61 Word documents.
We already have technology commercially available that accomplishes this.
Remember those cheesy "MedSafe" (or whatever) pendant commercials that came on late at night, some years ago? Not the "I've fallen and I can't get up" ones; the later ones, advertising a pendant you could wear containing your medical information.
I'm pretty sure a number of elderly Americans actually wear these.
Why would anyone want a chip implanted, when a 10g pendant accomplishes the same thing with negligible inconvenience?
And how are lawmakers going to argue the case for such an obscenely Orwellian device, when a 10g pendant accomplishes the same thing with negligible inconvenience?
I have my doubts about whether this will actually work, but I'm not sure it matters.
I just think getting thousands of complaints should be the natural result of pissing off thousands of people.
The psychopathic behavior of a spammer wouldn't be tolerated for an instant if he were face-to-face with his victims. Try attending a ballet or opera, and yelling "I have cheese in my butt!" at top volume.
Whether it works or not, what Blue Sec is doing should be an expected inconvenience of spamming. Even if it just causes spammers to set up their own filters, at least it will weed out some would-be casual spammers.
Tomorrow's Slashdot news:
Games: Sims 2 sales up 45%
No, it's Victorian Christian decency. There is no evidence that the image of a nude human body has ever harmed a child of any age. If that were the case, every kid who's ever been to a nudist resort would be a frothing psychopath.
Mature, sane people already know this.
Sun keyboards do this, and I love it. (Though Sun keyboards have a number of other qualities which I don't love....)
If, like me, you're a keyboard power user, then having those left function keys, like Open, Front, Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Props and so on is a godsend. And from a user interface standpoint, they're a lot smarter than expecting novice users to know Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V, and Ctrl-Z. (And it would be nice if novice users didn't keep trying to get those combinations to work in Unix shells.)
It may make the keyboard bigger, but I'm not aware of any key combos comprised of both a left function key and some other key.
I believe this idea first occurred to me 15 years ago, when it seemed like every IBM PS/2 in the lab had someone's WordPerfect 5.x cardboard function key reference "template" left on the keyboard. (I never used WordPerfect 5.x for DOS, as I found it atrocious and there were many superior shareware alternatives.)
This leads me to realize that we don't need most of the keys to be visually configurable. I mean, okay, as many others have pointed out, the ability to switch languages or switch layouts could be useful, but that doesn't happen very often. The need for such flexibility would be limited to kiosks and the like.
Where we frequently need configurable descriptions is the function keys. They're the only keys on the keyboard whose functionality is not apparent. Everything else is either alphanumeric, punctuation, or an easy guess.
Come to think of it, can you say what will happen if you were to press any particular function key right now? (Most windowed browsers should use F1 as help and F10 as menu focus, but I've even seen those standards forsaken.)
Regardless, there can't possibly be room for a useful description of the function keys on the keyboard itself. And ergonomically, if the user has to keep looking down at his keyboard, it's going to really screw up his productivity, as he'll keep losing his place on the screen.
This makes me believe that desktops should provide a general API for function key descriptions, displayed in a designated area. For instance:
void setFunctionKeyDescription(int number, String description);
void setFunctionKeyDescriptionsShown(boolean show);
(I would not want apps to have control over the location of it; that's for the user and only the user to decide. And users should have a "never show it udner any circumstances" preference available as well.)
On-screen function key descriptions aren't really an innovation, of course. It was common for text-mode apps to use the bottom one or two rows of the screen for this very purpose, back in the 80s. But now 1600x1200 screens are fairly common, and a function key description area isn't going to eat into our screen real estate nearly as much as it would have 20 years ago.
They'll buy it, sure. But they won't choose to buy it.
They'll buy it because it comes with their Dell PC and even if Dell were to offer to put Linux or BSD on it, Dell would still be charging people for Longhorn because Dell was forced to buy a Longhorn license for every PC they sell.
Granted, not many people will ask Dell for Linux or BSD. But many of them would love to opt for an older and much cheaper version of Windows, because even average users seem to be noticing that the latest version of a Microsoft product offers very little for a lot of money.
Too bad. Dell had to pay for a new Longhorn license, therefore the people will have to pay for a new Longhorn license.
If you work for the US government or any of its contractors, writing down any passwords to classified information or resources is a bad idea. I'm pretty sure it's a punishable offense.
I expect Microsoft will use these in a manner similar to how they raped^H^H^H^H^Hembraced and extended Java by adding magic code-generating javadoc comment tags like "@dll". For instance:
<?mso-normal some-style load DOTNETCRAP.DLL?>
Microsoft was part of the consortium that designed XML. Processing instructions aren't in there by accident.
What leads you to believe MS Office 13 won't use a slightly different (or very different) XML schema?
The only difference will be the legibility of the format changes between versions.
Here's two examples of prior art.
This, of course, could also be neatly solved by Windows having symbolic links.
This actually seems like a much more useful application: hands-free CB radio. Something that lets drivers communicate with each other.
The main reason asshole drivers exist in such painful proportions is that they don't face any consequences. If they did any of those things outside the context of a motor vehicle, like, say, in a crowded store, the very least they'd get would be numerous angry stares. The boiling hatred of those affronted is a powerful motivator. On the road, most people aren't gutsy enough to honk at an asshole driver, and asshole drivers don't even notice lights flashed at them.
Imagine if that blissfully vacuous bleached-blonde soccer mom hears, "Get out of the passing lane, you retarded hosebag!" Now imagine if she hears that from twenty people in a one-minute period. Only the very dullest of idiot drivers will have such a thick skin that they can ignore an unending flood of insults and invectives.
But social pressure isn't the only application. If we make this an actual network, then sell simple voice-activated little boxes which hook into this network whenever the driver says things like "Report Alabama JDT 8771, swerving and aggressive driving," and let law enforcement keep a database of such "reports" so they can go have a talk with someone who has, say, fifty reports against them, we can bring some responsible driving back to the roads and save some lives (and commuting time).