Ask yourself: Is yet another P2P solution really what we need as a society?
Freenet has lots of other uses. For example, let's say I accidentally create a popular web comic. Many web comics are suffering because they want readers, they want to give away their work for free, but can't afford the bandwidth. Freenet creates an automatic caching system that lets them distribute their content over a cheap modem connection once. Their entire site can be hosted through Freenet. As long as they remain popular, their work will be cached online for free. Web providers will like it because Freenet acts as an automatic cache, saving their upstream bandwidth bills. Everyone wins.
Also, Freenet makes it easy and safe to publish material that you may feel is ethical and important to publish, but puts you at risk. Let's say I live in a moderate repressive country and have video of human rights abuses. I can't publish the content in my own name for fear of retaliation. Or perhaps I have evidence of a company's safety violations, but know that the company will use the DMCA and other tactics to shut down sites exposing it, perhaps simply bankrupting me with a string of groundless lawsuits. Footage of your governments troops committing war crimes that would be censored under the grounds of "national security" can be distributed. Freenet provides a place that can't be shut down to host the information and protects the publisher from possibly unearned retaliation.
If that's not a benefit to society, I don't know what is.
2.
This is a
hoax.
Worse, this is any old hoax. Someone has just filed off the original dates provided and changed them to 2003.
The first mention I can find is this 1998 post which might represent the original version.
3. By failing to link to any original source or otherwise provide attribution (other than the incorrect claim that it's a from an interview with IEEE's Computer), you are at best infringing on someone else's copyright, or at worst misrepresenting the work as your own.
Three strikes, you're out.
The article does humorously point out some of C++'s shortcomings, but to just repost it here now is wrong.
Re:My story from just last week...
on
Family Tech Support
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...I "am good at computers"...makes you an instant expert at anything powered by electricity.
Actually, it's basically true.
"Good at computers" often just means, "pays attention to what is going on, reads the screen, reads the directions, and isn't deathly afraid of simple experimentation." This is why little kids often find computers easy, they don't have any fear and they view reading the documentation as an acceptable price to pay for playing with the cool toy.
Given those qualifications, you're qualified to do lots of things and look like a hero to others. You may not know the specifics of the stereo, but I expect you'll be comfortable skimming the docs and plugging things in. If it doesn't work, you'll not panic, you'll just jiggle cords and try testing each connection one at a time until it does work.
Information wants to be free, right? All information, that is, except for personally identifiable information and your personal information.
You seem to be confusing unrelated things. "Information wants to be free" has nothing to do with what I want or what anyone else wants. "Information wants to be free" in much the same way that than object in motion wants to stay in motion. Keeping information from being free is hard. It requires lots of laws and technical measures. In the absense of laws (like copyright) and technical measures (like DRM), there would be no limit on how information spread. Even with these laws and technical measures, supposedly controlled information spreads anyway.
Anyone claiming that "information wants to be free" is some sort of moral imperative needs to be beaten with a clue-by-four. "Information wants to be free" is a reminder of the nature order of things, that efforts to stop information's freedom will be difficult, expensive, and ultimately cannot work 100%.
Have you ever considered calling up the local Game Spot or EB and ask them to stock your game?
Big chains like EB are actually paid by publishers to put the game on their shelves. They also don't pay the publisher for the game until it actually sells. If it doesn't sell, the publisher has to pay shipping to take it back (or they can retroactively lower the price, which is why bargin bins exist). In some cases a store makes more money from publishers than from actually selling the game. Furthermore, purchases are done in huge quantities by central warehouses, not on a store-by-store basis. They don't want to talk to you unless you can supply 1,000 copies (two copies per store). So, you get to pay them to take 1,000 copies of your game which they can return to you if they decide it won't sell.
The game is hostile to small companies and individuals. Not out of malice, but simple economics. This system works well for them, talking to you just isn't reasonable.
To have any hope, you're going to need to find management for your local store willing to make an exception. The big chains often have rules that simply won't allow your little deal to go through. If no such rule exists, the local management may simply quickly check the numbers and realize that even if your game is moderately successful (and the odds are against it), it will cost them more to stock it than they will make in profit. You need to find someone with the freedom to put your product on their shelves and a willingness to make a high-risk, low-benefit move. Really, you're looking for someone willing to take on your product out of a desire to do good, not simple greed. They're out there, but it's a small number. Since you're working on a store-to-store basis, you'll be hard-pressed to get widespread availability.
Your best bet will be truly independent game stores. They certainly exist. Of course, your potential market shrinks even further.
Like all too many things, economies of scale have lead to a situation where the lone creator has serious problems entering the market. Fortunately the internet makes it easy and financially possible to start selling a product, get a few people to try it out, and use work of mouth to spread the word. Thanks to the Internet I've found bands and games I would never otherwise have discovered.
By and large people aren't opposed to Flash all the time, but they are opposed to bad uses of Flash. Take the Opencroquet site: they use Flash for a trivial navigation menu. The menu could have easily been implemented with Javascript rollovers, or ever pure CSS. Both would have been faster to load and more friendly to a variety of web clients (including cell phones, text only browsers, and web browsers for the blind (both for braille displays and spoken))
Too many sites are using Flash because they're under the mistaken assumption that having their menu bar shimmer and flicker will improve their site. These people are obsessing about superficial detail and ignoring real content. If I visit your auto-dealership to consider a car purchase anything that slows down my experience is a problem. There is no need for the menus to dance, just show me the damn cars!
In general, adding Flash causes a usability decrease. (The linked article is a bit old, but still valid.)
Now, there is a place for Flash. But too many clueless superficial web designers are actually detracting from the value of their web site by needlessly involving Flash.
Personally, I use a password that's a 'l33t'-ified word (with absolutely no signifance to me... it was a random word I saw as I glanced down at my desk while trying to think of a new password), which some Linux boxes seem to reject.
Good for those Linux boxes! You're using a weak password.
First, the word you selected happened to be on your desk. Most likely it's a not-uncommon term in either English, your native language (if not English), or a technical term. Any good password cracker dictionary will include all three.
Second, any good password cracker is going to try variations on the words in its dictionary. Minor misspellings, appending numbers, or translation into l33t-speak. Trying every possible minor misspelling and l33t-speak variant is relatively cheap compared to searching the entire key space. Expect them to do it!
Any test the passwd filter is doing is likely based on an attack already in use by a password cracker. It would be nice if the program gave you a reason the password was rejected (I've had apparently random password rejected), but ultimately it doesn't matter. If the passwd filter doesn't like it, a cracking program probably will like it.
While perldoc (especially perldoc -f functionname) is keen, for those of us who like scroll bars, proportionally spaced fonts, and links, check out perldoc.com. It has documentation for multiple versions and a solid search engine. It also documents almost everything in the insanely useful CPAN.
Human languages are an ambigious mess. Computers only want unambigious constructs. Having programmed in COBOL and and a few so called "fourth generation languages", let me say that writing in something that is close to English is really irritating. It's never quire English enough to allow me to express myself. You end up having to learn a specialized language that isn't really quite English. If I'm going to learn a specialized language, I might as well learn something that is easy to type and easy to scan visually.
Perl is a big, complex language, yes. But like real languages, you can learn it with very simple steps. You can get complex, productive things done with a just a quick introduction. If you want more power, it will take more learning, but it's available. Perl 6 aims to accomplish this evem better tham Perl 5.
Yes, the example given in the article are a bit convoluted. The entire point of the article is to explore all of Perl 6, not just the commonly used bits. In fact, one of main goals of Perl 6 is to make the common case and the introductory case less confusing than in Perl 5. Really. And everything revealed so far has supported this, it's just that Larry doesn't make it too clear.
Take for example expressing that a function takes three arguments in Perl 5. The best you can do is:
sub my_function($$$) { ....my($arg1, $arg2, $arg3) = @_; }
(The "...." represents spaces because Slashdot's code filter is crap.)
In this example, Perl will not check that callers do the right thing. In Perl 6, you get this:
sub my_fuction($arg1, $arg2, $arg3) { }
A clear improvement, and Perl will actually verify that callers do the right thing when calling you, usually catching an error at compile time!
In general Lary's Apocalypses have been a bit obscure. He's focusing on the big picture and the little details.
Damien's Exegesis's is generally alot easier to read for people less interested in deep thought and more interested in concrete details. Wait a week or two for Exegesis 6 and give that a read. I think you'll find that the common case is slightly simplier and more obvious than in Perl 5, while the system also allows for more complex expressions that weren't well supported in the Perl 5.
1. As you mention, MSIE is broken and doesn't correctly handle PNGs.
2. PNGs don't support animations. GIF does. PNG's sister format, MNG is supposed to solve this, but MNG support is flaky at best in many popular browsers. It doesn't help that the reference implementation, according to the MNG site, "implements almost all of the MNG spec for decoding".
Of course personally, I think there are too many animated graphics, but they are popular. MNG either needs to build widespread support, or we're stuck with GIF's for the immediate future.
Still, I do my part and am moving to PNGs as much as possible. Every site that uses PNGs and looks bad in IE in incentive for Microsoft to fix their crap browser.
If you had your business on the net, and/. linked to it, causing it to go down, would/. be liabel?
That's just silly. Of course not.
By putting something on the net with not access restrictions, you're implicitly welcoming the public to visit. An external site (like Slashdot) has no way of knowing you're capable of handling the load. It happens that many sites (especially businesses) are perfectly capable of handling a Slashdotting and are pleased to get the exposure.
It's certainly not a DoS attack, the people visiting have no intent to cause harm. They simply want to see the web page that was put up.
Slashdot is no more liable than I am for telling my friends about my favorite restaurant, not realizing that the restaurant can't cope with a sudden influx of potential customers. I don't think "making you more popular than you wanted to be" is much of a crime.
The United States is founded on the idea that the most hate filled, selfish, racist, sexist, asshole is free to collect up few hundred friends and march through the streets to spread their message of hate. I just fail to see public copulation as beign nearly has harmful to kids.
My biggest concern would be for the poor couple. Wouldn't the asphalt be a bit... chafing?
If the parties involved are actively seeking to fix the problem, in a timely manner, I see no harm in not shouting from the mountain top what the problem is.
The problem is that just because I (an innocent user of the product) don't know about the vulnerability doesn't mean that the evil crackers don't know about it. Sure, a public announcement increases the number of crackers who know about it, but also gives me enough information to react. There is a security hole in sendmail, but no patch yet? Well, without real information, I can't confirm if my particular installation is at risk. Once I know about it, I can take reactive steps. With enough information I could try to patch the vulnerability myself. With enough information I could try to limit my risk (say, changing my sendmail configuration to limit what an attacker can get, or adding a wrapper to detect the attack and terminate the connection). With enough information I reasonably weigh the options of disabling sendmail for security reasons versus keeping it up for my users.
With no information, I'll just keep ignorantly running the vulnerable version, possibly getting attacked by crackers who already knew about it. With a little information, I don't have enough information to decide if I'm really at risk and to weigh my possible solutions.
Look at Suzuki's work. How many of those games do you have really fond memories of? How many are truly innovative versus how many sequels and clones of existing games? He's a typical, non-inspired game designer. He shouldn't be allowed in the same room as a true genius like
Miyamoto. But Suzuki's publisher needed a "star" to draw attraction like Miyamoto and Suzuki got the job. What was his big game, this masterpiece? Shenmue, an embarrasment to the industry. Sure, it had neat graphics, changing weather, and the ability to wander around randomly. But the plot was innane, plot holes abounded (apparently skipping school for a month isn't a big deal for Shenmue), and the actual gameplay was extremely linear. The action sequeces were extremely linear, in many cases as simple as "hit the button when the game tells you to." Miss the button? Redo the scene until you succeed. Being able to buy stupid trinkets from a vending machine and play an emulated version of Hang On does not compelling game play make. (And if Shenmue is really so interested tracking down his father's killer, why is he wasting time raising kittens?)
When Suziki comes out with something truly innovative again, maybe I'll be interested in listening to him. (And to be fair, Virtual Fighter was pretty innovative, as were several of his 1980s games.) In the mean time he deserves the anonymity most game designers have.
Part of the problem with what we call the "free market" today is that consumers are not following the "free market" model, and the parent post is an excellent example of this.
I'd feel bad, but the businesses aren't too keen on a truly free market either. I didn't sign anything with Lexmark promising to not buy and use third party supplies. The third party supplier didn't sign anything with Lexmark promising to not manufacture and sell supplies. Once I've purchase the printer, and transactions between me and third parties should be none of Lexmark's business.
Printing in small letters "only accepts Lexmark ink cartridges" isn't a legal agreement between me and Lexmark. It's a warning to me that the printer is of reduced value to me as a consumer and that I'll have to take unusual steps to fix the problem.
Lexmark is trying to use the legal system to limit a truly free market, and that sucks.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City does have it's weaknesses. It's hung on me several times. Bad guys have the amazing ability to shoot through walls. The save your partner mission was particularlly difficult given that someone I needed to kill was inside an object. In certain parts of the city, if you're zipping along quickly, it can't load geometry fast enogh, sometimes causing an object to pop into view just as you hit it. The missions by and large lack the "fun" that Grand Theft Auto 3 had.
But it's all worth it for the motorcycles. Roaring down the streets on the PCJ-600, leaning slightly forward to get the slight speed boost (nice touch in the game), racing between cars, knowing that a slight miscalculation will throw you a hundred feet. That's my addiction.
Now that they've been awarded a patent for page-rank, it's required for them to make it public so that people can license it.
They're required to make it public so that people can learn from it. They're under no requirement to license it. They're free to refuse to license it to anyone, effectively stopping any real research in that direction for 17 years. Hopefully Google will play a bit nicer than that...
...many of the free TrueType or OpenType fonts available on the Internet aren't exactly the best fonts, primarily when printing or used in any high-resolution, anti-aliased, and/or large font size scenarios. It all has to do with how the fonts are hinted, constructed, tweaked and tuned. It's a painful process, even for professionals who spend their work hours producing fonts.
Actually, high resolution, anti-aliasing, and large font sizes are extremely forgiving of low quality. The only thing that making a font really big might reveal is that the creator didn't make lines quite horizontal or vertical. Given the ease of making exactly horizontal or vertical lines in any font editing program, this isn't a real issue.
As you point out, the devil is in the hinting. Hinting really only matters when you need to display a character in as few pixels as possible. Typically on screen in small font sizes, but also on low resolution printers (is anyone really using dot matrix anymore), or for very small fonts (on a typical low end 300 dpi laser printer we're talking smaller than about 6 point). As screen resolutions improve hinting will become less important.
Because of all this, free fonts on the web (or the cheapo font knockoffs you can buy) are perfectly fine for use in printed materials or for large font use. It's when you're trying to read body text in a poorly hinted font that you really appreciate what you get with a higher quality font.
Interestingly hinting is largely irrelevant for X users. Hinting in TrueType is patented. Every distributor (including FreeType themselves) disables hinting support as a result. Unless you're willing to build a patent infringing copy of FreeType yourself (it's a simple change), you'll never benefit from high quality hinting information. If you don't mind anti-aliased fonts it's probably not a big deal, between FreeType's non-infringing auto-hinting and anti-aliasing support it's a minimal drop in quality.
Technically, the Bells really should be able to lay down the law when it comes to who access their cables. I mean, it's their cables.
And it's the government's land that those cables were run under and through.
The majority of that cable was run by AT&T back when they were still a monopoly. They got sweatheart deals on running those lines, deals not available to potential competitors. The expectation was that in exchange for these great deals that the phone company would largely run the system for the public's benefit. At this time granting a single company monopoly access to those lines is not the public's interest.
If you have ever been ripped off or defrauded on ebay, you would look at this from a different perspective. The last thing I want to do when someone defrauds me using ebay is jump through the many legal hoops to obtain a warrant.
Very true. Similarly, if you've ever been robbed or your home burglarized, I'd look at that whole "illegal search and seizure" thing from a different perspective. The last thing I want the police to have to do when someone steals from me is be bothered by pesky constitutional rights.
(I'm perfectly aware that Ebay is not legally required to protect my privacy, only the government is. But just because something is legal doesn't make it ethically right.)
As stated, this information can only be requested by law enforcement, and trust me, law enforcement officials don't get off of from violating your privacy and requesting it just for kicks.
First, it doesn't sound like they do much checking on the credentials of people claiming to be law enforcement officials. This opens up one avenue of abuse. Two, while law enforcement officials don't invade privacy randomly, there have been multiple cases where law enforcement officials used their access to otherwise private information for illegal personal or political gain. If the money is good enough there are some people who will sell out. Third, perhaps the law enforcement official has been misled and the person claiming damages is lying solely to get
Let's say I sell something perfectly legal that irritates something. Perhaps copies of Scientology books, or mod-chips for consoles. In each case there is a company that would love to identify me to harass me with bogus lawsuits. They could use any of the three above abuses to get my information.
I don't know why someone would donate mega-$$$ for this to be accomplished. Seems like an egotrip. The money could be put some truly worthy cause. I hear cancer hasn't been cured yet...
It's his $200,000 to use however he wants. Presumably he values the result, or at least is entertained by it. Do you similarly complain about billions of wasted dollars spent on video games, or movies? How about the hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted each year on snow globes? Heck, you could save some money by never eating out and donating that money to cancer research. If you could convince a mere 2,000 people to eat out one fewer time each month for a year and donate the savings to cancer research, you could raise that $200,000 you seem so eager for yourself.
And all the crying about their monopoly is silly. Hardware vendors
have restricted software that can run on their hardware for eons. It's largely
for quality control reasons, but Nintendo and Sony have long killed projects
after seeing distasteful material. "Thrill Kill", anyone? It's the way the
industry works. Anything else and you'd see a total collapse of the console
industry--not merely Microsoft's interest in it.
Quality control? Bwuhuhahahahaha. Do you really believe that?
Console manufacturers maintain their monopoly so they can make a profit by
charging a licensing fee to developers. That's it. The console industry
would not collapse if anyone could develop whatever they wanted for it. While
it's not as successful as the console industry (the $1,200 entry price tag
having alot to do with that), the PC gaming industry continues to roar along
producing brilliant and innovative games. Sure, lots of crap gets produced,
but the market lets it sink to the bottom.
Distasteful? Well, given that they are the single point that reviews every
game, it would look bad if a game was released for their system that pissed
important people off. But that wouldn't be a problem if the system was open.
It's only a problem because they chose to interpose themselves in the creation
process. And how seriously can they take acting as such a filter? Nintendo,
traditional guardian of all things innocent and safe released Conker's Bad Fur
Day (A brilliant, but really distasteful game). Oh, and Thrill
Kill? Killed by the publisher, EA, not by the console maker. That it got
as far as it did suggests that Sony had already given it teneative approval. If EA wouldn't have bought out the original publisher (Virigin Interactive), it almost certainly would have shipped.
Microsoft is responsible for making sure that only quality software (err... let's ignore stuff like Kabuki Warriors, eh? All consoles have to have their share of stinkers...) is released for their console. Otherwise, we'd be right back in 1984 and the last video game crash. A major contributing factor was Atari's lack of certification for games, and the subsequent glut of pure crap. Do we want to go back to that? I know I don't.
Egad, hopefully that won't happen. Picture what would happen if there was a successful gaming system that anyone could write games for? What would that be like? Oh, yeah. Just like modern PCs. Sure, there is a lot of crap, but it is ignored and the good stuff rises to the top.(Obviously good marketing can help a good game, but ultimately crap sinks, and quality succeeds.) The PC game industry seems to have done pretty well given that it really demands at least a $600 "console" to play and only caters to people willing to purchase a $1,200 "console".
No, Microsoft's only interest in restricting who can publish is based on simple greed. Microsoft makes money from publishing their own games and from licensing fees from other companies. Microsoft isn't going to be interested in companies making games without paying them. Microsoft doesn't really care about "quality software" for the X-Box, but they are interested in controlling the market and limiting their own competition. This is an old console-monopolists trick (Nintendo regularly delayed approval on competitors games so that their in house product could be on shelves first). This is a stunning example of the dangers of a monopoly and why console manufacturers work so hard to keep monopoly control over their systems. The fear becoming the PC game market, where games have to succeed or fail on their own strengths and they have to compete fairly.
Microsoft makes money licensing the right to produce games for the X-Box. Effectively when you pay Microsoft to let you release a game you're only paying for them to sign your game. They X-Box itself loses money. If Linux is available for free, some game developers will write X-Box games that target the freely available Linux, depriving Microsoft of licensing revenue. This is a losing option for Microsoft.
This guy is an whiner with almost no valid complaints.
Points 1, 2, 3, 4 can be summarized "Google collects the same information
that every single commercial web site does. Google does market research to
find out what people want from it and how to improve their site.
Point 5 (Google hires spooks), can be summarized in two parts: "Google hires
people who are good at automating information organization" (It should be no
big shock that ex-NSA geeks have lots of skills useful to writing search
engines.), and "Google wants to sell Google technology to the government."
(Remember when it was discovered that the FBI's case database was so out of
date it only allowed a single search term per search? Maybe it's time to
replace it with an internal Google server.)
Points 6 and 7 (the toolbar is spyware and the cache is illegal) are
potentially valid (even a blind dog occasionally finds a bone), but not as
horrible as suggested.
Point 9 is a bit random: Yes, as the largest search engine Google collects
alot of information. Of course, this is true of any large search
engine. It was true of Altavista when they rules the roost.
But hidden near the bottom, in point 8, ah, we have the meat of his
complaints.
8. Google is not your friend: Young, stupid script kiddies and
many bloggers still think Google is "way kool," so by now Google enjoys a 75
percent monopoly for all external referrals to most websites. No webmaster can
avoid seeking Google's approval these days, assuming he wants to increase
traffic to his site. If he tries to take advantage of some of the known
weaknesses in Google's semi-secret algorithms, he may find himself penalized by
Google, and his traffic disappears. There are no detailed, published standards
issued by Google, and there is no appeal process for penalized sites. Google is
completely unaccountable. Most of the time they don't even answer email from
webmasters.
I'm not a blogger, so apparently I'm a "young, stupid script kiddie" because
I think Google is "way kool."
Of course, here we have the meat of the argument: I tried to abuse Google's
system to get an un-earned high ranking for my pages. When Google caught me
abusing the system, they penalized me.
Google is popular because their search results are uniformly useful. If
they let idiots like this one have their way, Google's search result quality
would plunge, much like other search engines did during the late 90s.
The secret to getting high ratings? Write high quality, useful web pages.
Let other people know about them in acceptable ways (write to related sites
suggesting that they might be interested, post pointers on appropriate message
boards, usenet groups, and mailing lists). When other people learn about you,
if you're really providing good content you'll get links, and with links comes
Google's approval. It's no secret. If you start with an area in which there
isn't yet a strong primary source, it's easy to dominate the results.
I've got a solid dozen web pages that appear in Google's top five results
for common search terms. With one exception, I've never promoted any of them.
I just wrote some good content (but not great, it's just a hobby), and waited.
I've enjoyed the first result spot for a number of searches for a long time, including
driver's license number,
nerf wildfire,
visual c++ tricks,
gen con survival guide,
sourcesafe sucks (I'll admit promoting that last link with my Slashdot sig). If I, as a strict ameteur, am able to do this well without gaming the system, what's his problem?
Google isn't his friend because he's a weasel who tried to sell artificially
generated Page-Rank. Google is a friend to all legit webmasters and users.
Slashdot Mirror
Freenet has lots of other uses. For example, let's say I accidentally create a popular web comic. Many web comics are suffering because they want readers, they want to give away their work for free, but can't afford the bandwidth. Freenet creates an automatic caching system that lets them distribute their content over a cheap modem connection once. Their entire site can be hosted through Freenet. As long as they remain popular, their work will be cached online for free. Web providers will like it because Freenet acts as an automatic cache, saving their upstream bandwidth bills. Everyone wins.
Also, Freenet makes it easy and safe to publish material that you may feel is ethical and important to publish, but puts you at risk. Let's say I live in a moderate repressive country and have video of human rights abuses. I can't publish the content in my own name for fear of retaliation. Or perhaps I have evidence of a company's safety violations, but know that the company will use the DMCA and other tactics to shut down sites exposing it, perhaps simply bankrupting me with a string of groundless lawsuits. Footage of your governments troops committing war crimes that would be censored under the grounds of "national security" can be distributed. Freenet provides a place that can't be shut down to host the information and protects the publisher from possibly unearned retaliation.
If that's not a benefit to society, I don't know what is.
1. C++ is clearly off topic.
2. This is a hoax. Worse, this is any old hoax. Someone has just filed off the original dates provided and changed them to 2003. The first mention I can find is this 1998 post which might represent the original version.
3. By failing to link to any original source or otherwise provide attribution (other than the incorrect claim that it's a from an interview with IEEE's Computer), you are at best infringing on someone else's copyright, or at worst misrepresenting the work as your own.
Three strikes, you're out.
The article does humorously point out some of C++'s shortcomings, but to just repost it here now is wrong.
Actually, it's basically true.
"Good at computers" often just means, "pays attention to what is going on, reads the screen, reads the directions, and isn't deathly afraid of simple experimentation." This is why little kids often find computers easy, they don't have any fear and they view reading the documentation as an acceptable price to pay for playing with the cool toy.
Given those qualifications, you're qualified to do lots of things and look like a hero to others. You may not know the specifics of the stereo, but I expect you'll be comfortable skimming the docs and plugging things in. If it doesn't work, you'll not panic, you'll just jiggle cords and try testing each connection one at a time until it does work.
You seem to be confusing unrelated things. "Information wants to be free" has nothing to do with what I want or what anyone else wants. "Information wants to be free" in much the same way that than object in motion wants to stay in motion. Keeping information from being free is hard. It requires lots of laws and technical measures. In the absense of laws (like copyright) and technical measures (like DRM), there would be no limit on how information spread. Even with these laws and technical measures, supposedly controlled information spreads anyway.
Anyone claiming that "information wants to be free" is some sort of moral imperative needs to be beaten with a clue-by-four. "Information wants to be free" is a reminder of the nature order of things, that efforts to stop information's freedom will be difficult, expensive, and ultimately cannot work 100%.
Big chains like EB are actually paid by publishers to put the game on their shelves. They also don't pay the publisher for the game until it actually sells. If it doesn't sell, the publisher has to pay shipping to take it back (or they can retroactively lower the price, which is why bargin bins exist). In some cases a store makes more money from publishers than from actually selling the game. Furthermore, purchases are done in huge quantities by central warehouses, not on a store-by-store basis. They don't want to talk to you unless you can supply 1,000 copies (two copies per store). So, you get to pay them to take 1,000 copies of your game which they can return to you if they decide it won't sell.
The game is hostile to small companies and individuals. Not out of malice, but simple economics. This system works well for them, talking to you just isn't reasonable.
To have any hope, you're going to need to find management for your local store willing to make an exception. The big chains often have rules that simply won't allow your little deal to go through. If no such rule exists, the local management may simply quickly check the numbers and realize that even if your game is moderately successful (and the odds are against it), it will cost them more to stock it than they will make in profit. You need to find someone with the freedom to put your product on their shelves and a willingness to make a high-risk, low-benefit move. Really, you're looking for someone willing to take on your product out of a desire to do good, not simple greed. They're out there, but it's a small number. Since you're working on a store-to-store basis, you'll be hard-pressed to get widespread availability.
Your best bet will be truly independent game stores. They certainly exist. Of course, your potential market shrinks even further.
Like all too many things, economies of scale have lead to a situation where the lone creator has serious problems entering the market. Fortunately the internet makes it easy and financially possible to start selling a product, get a few people to try it out, and use work of mouth to spread the word. Thanks to the Internet I've found bands and games I would never otherwise have discovered.
By and large people aren't opposed to Flash all the time, but they are opposed to bad uses of Flash. Take the Opencroquet site: they use Flash for a trivial navigation menu. The menu could have easily been implemented with Javascript rollovers, or ever pure CSS. Both would have been faster to load and more friendly to a variety of web clients (including cell phones, text only browsers, and web browsers for the blind (both for braille displays and spoken))
Too many sites are using Flash because they're under the mistaken assumption that having their menu bar shimmer and flicker will improve their site. These people are obsessing about superficial detail and ignoring real content. If I visit your auto-dealership to consider a car purchase anything that slows down my experience is a problem. There is no need for the menus to dance, just show me the damn cars! In general, adding Flash causes a usability decrease. (The linked article is a bit old, but still valid.)
Now, there is a place for Flash. But too many clueless superficial web designers are actually detracting from the value of their web site by needlessly involving Flash.
Good for those Linux boxes! You're using a weak password.
First, the word you selected happened to be on your desk. Most likely it's a not-uncommon term in either English, your native language (if not English), or a technical term. Any good password cracker dictionary will include all three.
Second, any good password cracker is going to try variations on the words in its dictionary. Minor misspellings, appending numbers, or translation into l33t-speak. Trying every possible minor misspelling and l33t-speak variant is relatively cheap compared to searching the entire key space. Expect them to do it!
Any test the passwd filter is doing is likely based on an attack already in use by a password cracker. It would be nice if the program gave you a reason the password was rejected (I've had apparently random password rejected), but ultimately it doesn't matter. If the passwd filter doesn't like it, a cracking program probably will like it.
While perldoc (especially perldoc -f functionname) is keen, for those of us who like scroll bars, proportionally spaced fonts, and links, check out perldoc.com. It has documentation for multiple versions and a solid search engine. It also documents almost everything in the insanely useful CPAN.
I certainly don't look forward to COBOLScript.
Human languages are an ambigious mess. Computers only want unambigious constructs. Having programmed in COBOL and and a few so called "fourth generation languages", let me say that writing in something that is close to English is really irritating. It's never quire English enough to allow me to express myself. You end up having to learn a specialized language that isn't really quite English. If I'm going to learn a specialized language, I might as well learn something that is easy to type and easy to scan visually.
Perl is a big, complex language, yes. But like real languages, you can learn it with very simple steps. You can get complex, productive things done with a just a quick introduction. If you want more power, it will take more learning, but it's available. Perl 6 aims to accomplish this evem better tham Perl 5.
Yes, the example given in the article are a bit convoluted. The entire point of the article is to explore all of Perl 6, not just the commonly used bits. In fact, one of main goals of Perl 6 is to make the common case and the introductory case less confusing than in Perl 5. Really. And everything revealed so far has supported this, it's just that Larry doesn't make it too clear.
Take for example expressing that a function takes three arguments in Perl 5. The best you can do is:
(The "...." represents spaces because Slashdot's code filter is crap.)
In this example, Perl will not check that callers do the right thing. In Perl 6, you get this:
A clear improvement, and Perl will actually verify that callers do the right thing when calling you, usually catching an error at compile time!
In general Lary's Apocalypses have been a bit obscure. He's focusing on the big picture and the little details. Damien's Exegesis's is generally alot easier to read for people less interested in deep thought and more interested in concrete details. Wait a week or two for Exegesis 6 and give that a read. I think you'll find that the common case is slightly simplier and more obvious than in Perl 5, while the system also allows for more complex expressions that weren't well supported in the Perl 5.
Two reaons:
1. As you mention, MSIE is broken and doesn't correctly handle PNGs.
2. PNGs don't support animations. GIF does. PNG's sister format, MNG is supposed to solve this, but MNG support is flaky at best in many popular browsers. It doesn't help that the reference implementation, according to the MNG site, "implements almost all of the MNG spec for decoding".
Of course personally, I think there are too many animated graphics, but they are popular. MNG either needs to build widespread support, or we're stuck with GIF's for the immediate future.
Still, I do my part and am moving to PNGs as much as possible. Every site that uses PNGs and looks bad in IE in incentive for Microsoft to fix their crap browser.
That's just silly. Of course not.
By putting something on the net with not access restrictions, you're implicitly welcoming the public to visit. An external site (like Slashdot) has no way of knowing you're capable of handling the load. It happens that many sites (especially businesses) are perfectly capable of handling a Slashdotting and are pleased to get the exposure.
It's certainly not a DoS attack, the people visiting have no intent to cause harm. They simply want to see the web page that was put up.
Slashdot is no more liable than I am for telling my friends about my favorite restaurant, not realizing that the restaurant can't cope with a sudden influx of potential customers. I don't think "making you more popular than you wanted to be" is much of a crime.
Compared to some of the things legally allowed on the streets, what harm is a little sex?
The United States is founded on the idea that the most hate filled, selfish, racist, sexist, asshole is free to collect up few hundred friends and march through the streets to spread their message of hate. I just fail to see public copulation as beign nearly has harmful to kids.
My biggest concern would be for the poor couple. Wouldn't the asphalt be a bit... chafing?
The problem is that just because I (an innocent user of the product) don't know about the vulnerability doesn't mean that the evil crackers don't know about it. Sure, a public announcement increases the number of crackers who know about it, but also gives me enough information to react. There is a security hole in sendmail, but no patch yet? Well, without real information, I can't confirm if my particular installation is at risk. Once I know about it, I can take reactive steps. With enough information I could try to patch the vulnerability myself. With enough information I could try to limit my risk (say, changing my sendmail configuration to limit what an attacker can get, or adding a wrapper to detect the attack and terminate the connection). With enough information I reasonably weigh the options of disabling sendmail for security reasons versus keeping it up for my users.
With no information, I'll just keep ignorantly running the vulnerable version, possibly getting attacked by crackers who already knew about it. With a little information, I don't have enough information to decide if I'm really at risk and to weigh my possible solutions.
Look at Suzuki's work. How many of those games do you have really fond memories of? How many are truly innovative versus how many sequels and clones of existing games? He's a typical, non-inspired game designer. He shouldn't be allowed in the same room as a true genius like Miyamoto. But Suzuki's publisher needed a "star" to draw attraction like Miyamoto and Suzuki got the job. What was his big game, this masterpiece? Shenmue, an embarrasment to the industry. Sure, it had neat graphics, changing weather, and the ability to wander around randomly. But the plot was innane, plot holes abounded (apparently skipping school for a month isn't a big deal for Shenmue), and the actual gameplay was extremely linear. The action sequeces were extremely linear, in many cases as simple as "hit the button when the game tells you to." Miss the button? Redo the scene until you succeed. Being able to buy stupid trinkets from a vending machine and play an emulated version of Hang On does not compelling game play make. (And if Shenmue is really so interested tracking down his father's killer, why is he wasting time raising kittens?)
When Suziki comes out with something truly innovative again, maybe I'll be interested in listening to him. (And to be fair, Virtual Fighter was pretty innovative, as were several of his 1980s games.) In the mean time he deserves the anonymity most game designers have.
I'd feel bad, but the businesses aren't too keen on a truly free market either. I didn't sign anything with Lexmark promising to not buy and use third party supplies. The third party supplier didn't sign anything with Lexmark promising to not manufacture and sell supplies. Once I've purchase the printer, and transactions between me and third parties should be none of Lexmark's business.
Printing in small letters "only accepts Lexmark ink cartridges" isn't a legal agreement between me and Lexmark. It's a warning to me that the printer is of reduced value to me as a consumer and that I'll have to take unusual steps to fix the problem.
Lexmark is trying to use the legal system to limit a truly free market, and that sucks.
But it's all worth it for the motorcycles. Roaring down the streets on the PCJ-600, leaning slightly forward to get the slight speed boost (nice touch in the game), racing between cars, knowing that a slight miscalculation will throw you a hundred feet. That's my addiction.
They're required to make it public so that people can learn from it. They're under no requirement to license it. They're free to refuse to license it to anyone, effectively stopping any real research in that direction for 17 years. Hopefully Google will play a bit nicer than that...
Actually, high resolution, anti-aliasing, and large font sizes are extremely forgiving of low quality. The only thing that making a font really big might reveal is that the creator didn't make lines quite horizontal or vertical. Given the ease of making exactly horizontal or vertical lines in any font editing program, this isn't a real issue.
As you point out, the devil is in the hinting. Hinting really only matters when you need to display a character in as few pixels as possible. Typically on screen in small font sizes, but also on low resolution printers (is anyone really using dot matrix anymore), or for very small fonts (on a typical low end 300 dpi laser printer we're talking smaller than about 6 point). As screen resolutions improve hinting will become less important.
Because of all this, free fonts on the web (or the cheapo font knockoffs you can buy) are perfectly fine for use in printed materials or for large font use. It's when you're trying to read body text in a poorly hinted font that you really appreciate what you get with a higher quality font.
Interestingly hinting is largely irrelevant for X users. Hinting in TrueType is patented. Every distributor (including FreeType themselves) disables hinting support as a result. Unless you're willing to build a patent infringing copy of FreeType yourself (it's a simple change), you'll never benefit from high quality hinting information. If you don't mind anti-aliased fonts it's probably not a big deal, between FreeType's non-infringing auto-hinting and anti-aliasing support it's a minimal drop in quality.
And it's the government's land that those cables were run under and through.
The majority of that cable was run by AT&T back when they were still a monopoly. They got sweatheart deals on running those lines, deals not available to potential competitors. The expectation was that in exchange for these great deals that the phone company would largely run the system for the public's benefit. At this time granting a single company monopoly access to those lines is not the public's interest.
Very true. Similarly, if you've ever been robbed or your home burglarized, I'd look at that whole "illegal search and seizure" thing from a different perspective. The last thing I want the police to have to do when someone steals from me is be bothered by pesky constitutional rights.
(I'm perfectly aware that Ebay is not legally required to protect my privacy, only the government is. But just because something is legal doesn't make it ethically right.)
First, it doesn't sound like they do much checking on the credentials of people claiming to be law enforcement officials. This opens up one avenue of abuse. Two, while law enforcement officials don't invade privacy randomly, there have been multiple cases where law enforcement officials used their access to otherwise private information for illegal personal or political gain. If the money is good enough there are some people who will sell out. Third, perhaps the law enforcement official has been misled and the person claiming damages is lying solely to get
Let's say I sell something perfectly legal that irritates something. Perhaps copies of Scientology books, or mod-chips for consoles. In each case there is a company that would love to identify me to harass me with bogus lawsuits. They could use any of the three above abuses to get my information.
It's his $200,000 to use however he wants. Presumably he values the result, or at least is entertained by it. Do you similarly complain about billions of wasted dollars spent on video games, or movies? How about the hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted each year on snow globes? Heck, you could save some money by never eating out and donating that money to cancer research. If you could convince a mere 2,000 people to eat out one fewer time each month for a year and donate the savings to cancer research, you could raise that $200,000 you seem so eager for yourself.
Quality control? Bwuhuhahahahaha. Do you really believe that?
Console manufacturers maintain their monopoly so they can make a profit by charging a licensing fee to developers. That's it. The console industry would not collapse if anyone could develop whatever they wanted for it. While it's not as successful as the console industry (the $1,200 entry price tag having alot to do with that), the PC gaming industry continues to roar along producing brilliant and innovative games. Sure, lots of crap gets produced, but the market lets it sink to the bottom.
Distasteful? Well, given that they are the single point that reviews every game, it would look bad if a game was released for their system that pissed important people off. But that wouldn't be a problem if the system was open. It's only a problem because they chose to interpose themselves in the creation process. And how seriously can they take acting as such a filter? Nintendo, traditional guardian of all things innocent and safe released Conker's Bad Fur Day (A brilliant, but really distasteful game). Oh, and Thrill Kill? Killed by the publisher, EA, not by the console maker. That it got as far as it did suggests that Sony had already given it teneative approval. If EA wouldn't have bought out the original publisher (Virigin Interactive), it almost certainly would have shipped.
Egad, hopefully that won't happen. Picture what would happen if there was a successful gaming system that anyone could write games for? What would that be like? Oh, yeah. Just like modern PCs. Sure, there is a lot of crap, but it is ignored and the good stuff rises to the top.(Obviously good marketing can help a good game, but ultimately crap sinks, and quality succeeds.) The PC game industry seems to have done pretty well given that it really demands at least a $600 "console" to play and only caters to people willing to purchase a $1,200 "console".
No, Microsoft's only interest in restricting who can publish is based on simple greed. Microsoft makes money from publishing their own games and from licensing fees from other companies. Microsoft isn't going to be interested in companies making games without paying them. Microsoft doesn't really care about "quality software" for the X-Box, but they are interested in controlling the market and limiting their own competition. This is an old console-monopolists trick (Nintendo regularly delayed approval on competitors games so that their in house product could be on shelves first). This is a stunning example of the dangers of a monopoly and why console manufacturers work so hard to keep monopoly control over their systems. The fear becoming the PC game market, where games have to succeed or fail on their own strengths and they have to compete fairly.
Microsoft makes money licensing the right to produce games for the X-Box. Effectively when you pay Microsoft to let you release a game you're only paying for them to sign your game. They X-Box itself loses money. If Linux is available for free, some game developers will write X-Box games that target the freely available Linux, depriving Microsoft of licensing revenue. This is a losing option for Microsoft.
This guy is an whiner with almost no valid complaints.
Points 1, 2, 3, 4 can be summarized "Google collects the same information that every single commercial web site does. Google does market research to find out what people want from it and how to improve their site.
Point 5 (Google hires spooks), can be summarized in two parts: "Google hires people who are good at automating information organization" (It should be no big shock that ex-NSA geeks have lots of skills useful to writing search engines.), and "Google wants to sell Google technology to the government." (Remember when it was discovered that the FBI's case database was so out of date it only allowed a single search term per search? Maybe it's time to replace it with an internal Google server.)
Points 6 and 7 (the toolbar is spyware and the cache is illegal) are potentially valid (even a blind dog occasionally finds a bone), but not as horrible as suggested.
Point 9 is a bit random: Yes, as the largest search engine Google collects alot of information. Of course, this is true of any large search engine. It was true of Altavista when they rules the roost.
But hidden near the bottom, in point 8, ah, we have the meat of his complaints.
I'm not a blogger, so apparently I'm a "young, stupid script kiddie" because I think Google is "way kool."
Of course, here we have the meat of the argument: I tried to abuse Google's system to get an un-earned high ranking for my pages. When Google caught me abusing the system, they penalized me.
Google is popular because their search results are uniformly useful. If they let idiots like this one have their way, Google's search result quality would plunge, much like other search engines did during the late 90s.
The secret to getting high ratings? Write high quality, useful web pages. Let other people know about them in acceptable ways (write to related sites suggesting that they might be interested, post pointers on appropriate message boards, usenet groups, and mailing lists). When other people learn about you, if you're really providing good content you'll get links, and with links comes Google's approval. It's no secret. If you start with an area in which there isn't yet a strong primary source, it's easy to dominate the results.
I've got a solid dozen web pages that appear in Google's top five results for common search terms. With one exception, I've never promoted any of them. I just wrote some good content (but not great, it's just a hobby), and waited. I've enjoyed the first result spot for a number of searches for a long time, including driver's license number, nerf wildfire, visual c++ tricks, gen con survival guide, sourcesafe sucks (I'll admit promoting that last link with my Slashdot sig). If I, as a strict ameteur, am able to do this well without gaming the system, what's his problem?
Google isn't his friend because he's a weasel who tried to sell artificially generated Page-Rank. Google is a friend to all legit webmasters and users.