"Q: Is AutoPatcher legal? A: Yes, Antonis Kaladis (our project manager) once spoke to a Microsoft employee and apparently they know about us but don't care what we do! The AutoPatcher project has been going strong since 2003 and never had a sniff of trouble from Microsoft."
How 'bout getting that in writing next time? Welcome to the real world, folks.
On the other hand, the only thing I can think of that they're doing wrong might be to redistribute Microsoft patches from their own servers or media. (Not familiar enough with AutoPatcher to know that for sure.) In my own experience as a Windows developer, I've tangled with Microsoft a number of times about being able to redistribute a particular hotfix, etc. - the answer's basically, "no, patches need to come directly from Microsoft."
This sounds like how the typical programmer seems to think when designing progress bars. Sure, it only took 5 minutes to churn through the first 95%, but the last 5% is SO important, it's OK to wait another 10 minutes or so.
(If you've ever installed Visual Studio, you KNOW what I'm talking about!)
If you found out about it, you admitted you would avoid it by stashing your character which could be equated to avoiding the area where the disease is. Isn't that a behavior that could relate to a real life outbreak?
Not really. An in-game pandemic's "location" could be "anywhere in the game", so I wouldn't play the game until it blew over. In real life, a pandemic's "location" would also be "anywhere in the world", but I don't have the option of shutting down my bio functions until it blows over, so I'd have to make a different decision.
The point is to see how people react. Sure it is a virtual world, but it can give some insight as to how people may react to an epidemic.
I still doubt it. A smarter thing to do would probably be to study actual epidemics and other disasters and then see what people actually did in those situations.
Statisticians could also tear the "WoW as a model for life" thing easily apart for other reasons, one of which that the average WoW demographic is more/less intelligent/informed/mobile/infirm/family-oriented than the general population, and would thus make decisions differently.
The Times is reporting on a paper by researchers in the US who argue that the spread of 'corrupted blood' in World of Warcraft might provide clues to the way a real world population would cope with the prospect of a global pandemic. In the study, to be published in The Lancet next month, Professor Lofgren of Rutgers University and Professor Fefferman of Tufts University, suggest that: 'If, God forbid, a disease broke out in London, you could see what would happen if people were told immediately of the risk. Would there be panic and chaos, or would it allow them to psychologically accept the danger and act accordingly?
Well, WoW is really just a silly game. So...if there was an in-game disease, I'd probably either stash my character for a few days and check out the offline boards to figure out what to do or go a-questing to be a disease-staving-off hero. If my character got toasted, I'd probably just say "f*** it," cancel my account and then go see how DnD Online is doing these days.
In real life, I have a wife, children, parents and other family to think about. My reaction to a rapidly spreading pandemic would be much, much different.
In other words, this study sounds like junk. Coming from Tufts and Rutgers, I'm not surprised...
We can only hope the rest of the fan base follows. It would make it much easier for their mothers to dust around them when they cleaned their basements.
...anonymous source claims that BrandX is merely waiting for BrandY to release their ProductX before they clobber them with ProductY.
Classic marketing FUD broadcast by Slashdot: it warms my business-school-educated heart!
AMD and Intel are in for a long and tough battle ahead.
Wow, you're saying that two close competitors in a competitive industry are wading into a bruising battle? I would have never guessed. Yes, please, keep me posted with more insights like this!
Adobe may launch its own office-application suite...
Yeah, that would be fun.
"Loading document...(screen goes white)...CRASH"
How about working on making the free PDF writer stable enough for daily browser use first? (I've given up trying to launch PDFs on most browsers; I always download them to disk and then use a local reader that I can kill when it freezes rather than have to nuke my browser.)
These factory towns are so supported by the local and national Chinese governments, that anything goes.
Often the national Chinese government wants to clamp down on the factories but can't because they lack the resources to do so and are opposed by the factory's home government. (Similar to the U.S. EPA vs. city governments bought and sold by the local factory.)
Also, since most of the Chinese government wants to have people working in these factories to keep their economy growing...
Actually, the Chinese government is now more concerned about making sure China builds out its white collar jobs more now; the factories are doing fine on their own.
We're back to the dark ages of the Industrial Revolution, but now it's government-enforced.
Even in the U.S., the government was quite active on the side of the factories during the Industrial Revolution - look up "strike riot united states" for taste of some of that.
Yay globalization!
As opposed to what? Living in mud huts making stone necklaces for each other?
Wow that rant went a lot of places, didn't it?
Yes, it kind of did. Maybe it's time to hit the books a little harder...
I know that when we started working with Splash Damage on Enemy Territory they wanted large, detailed outdoor terrains, and they had some ideas on how to dynamically load the textures and everything, and John [Carmack] said, 'Why don't we try this new approach and make the entire terrain one massive texture, and then just load blocks of texture in dynamically that you can see at any one given time
"Only load what you need from a large set of data" is a new concept in computer science?
No wonder these games continually have performance problems.
Of course, simply stating that product X has taken 1M orders is marketing too: it helps those sitting on the fence feel like they can safely join the herd.
This is why many of these "new product coming soon or now available" PR pieces you see on SlashDot and other sites will frequently refer to a large number of early adopters: they want to make you feel safer as a buyer because you're going in with a crowd.
Don't you mean "according to the publisher"?
on
OpenGL SuperBible
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
According to the authors it 'strives to provide the world's best introduction to not only OpenGL, but 3D graphics programming in general.'
Don't you mean "according to the publisher"? You need some kind of marketing background to write that sort of bloated statement. A real tech writer wouldn't try to oversell himself like that.
I think that's possible. They mentioned Vista's built-in firewall (which in XP didn't allow fine control over outbound connections) as something they wished they did better.
Riley also fessed up that Microsoft cocked up XP from a security perspective. "We let you down with XP," he said.
What's the big security problem with XP? It installed by default with a firewall that denied inbound connections. It allowed people to easily give the kids and the wife non-admin access to a shared system. It automatically tells me when new security patches are available from Microsoft, and it always installs them without incident. It even complains (through a tray icon) when my virus-checker's images were getting out of date. I've been running the same XP system on my laptop now for about three years; I haven't had any spyware, viruses or worms yet, and the system still boots as fast as the day I got it. So...what's the beef with security?
Sci-fi novelist William Gibson has given up trying to predict the future -- because he says it's become far too difficult.
More likely: all his money from his books went to hookers and blow, and writing the next book for a bunch of whiny fanboys doesn't sound that appealing anymore.
Maybe it's time for Gibson to go the Isaac Asimov route and cash completely out of the sci-fi genre by putting his name on anything that moves.
Thanks for the memories, Bill.
Hell no. Just make sure I can search it.
on
Creative Documentation
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Will making documentation more entertaining actually work to get people to read it?
Hell no. Just make sure I can search it when I get stuck.
Even the author of TFA thinks this doc is crap (you need "grep" to get off the first page?):
At this point it's not immediately obvious what we're supposed to do next....quick grep of the driver's makefile reveals that it was a very big hint
I love how this is sounding, so kinda RTS with a little RPG added.
Nah, I still think RTS + RGP = Suckatude.
I remember the silly "ghost" or "squad" missions from Starcraft and the increased emphasis on core units in WC3 missions (such as "march your Terran hero and his beasts through the shooting gallery" one). On all those missions, I kept hoping for a "skip the lame RPG-ish levels" option (other than the cheat codes, of course).
Thank god Blizzard still let you skip right past the cheesy cut-scenes.
Long story short - just gimme a good RTS and I'll be happy.
However, the name and target audience are probably a good fit: you would need some serious free time to process all the crap from the Firehose but a large proportion of Slashdotters are highly single and have no responsibilities other than to get themselves to and from work five days a week.;)
I agree with everything you said with one exception where Microsoft is better than Google's idea: with the Microsoft package you get to keep local control of your files and data, whereas with Google you upload them to a central repository.
However, the Microsoft package will still probably want to read the content of files, send something (???) back to Microsoft and then serve ads appropriately. (Snooping content for ad tie-ins is key to Google's success; just today in the Wall Street Journal that talked about how Google is trying to do this with other content so, for example, they can serve ads to your cell phone.)
By using small meshes of many machines that share a pipeline to the net instead of relying on lots of parallel connections, experts say they can create a system that is more intelligent and less prone to attack.
That sounds like a man-in-the-middle attacker's dream. I like today's system of "connect directly from my desktop to my bank". Count me out.
..."the whole [PC] industry is disappointed with Windows Vista". Lanci claimed that Microsoft's new operating system had not boosted PC sales, due to concerns over its stability and overall maturity.'"
Why is this a surprise to "the [PC] industry"? Vista's a new piece of software; at the begining it's bound to be less mature and less stable than it will be in the future.
Hell, my computer purchases have NEVER been about the OS; that's just the plumbing. I pick my applications first and then see what they need to run on. (One could claim it works the same way in the game console industry: major "application" titles drive console "OS" sales these days, not the other way around.)
Slashdot Mirror
"Anonymous" sellers? How does that work - cash payments left under a bench somewhere?
How 'bout getting that in writing next time? Welcome to the real world, folks.
On the other hand, the only thing I can think of that they're doing wrong might be to redistribute Microsoft patches from their own servers or media. (Not familiar enough with AutoPatcher to know that for sure.) In my own experience as a Windows developer, I've tangled with Microsoft a number of times about being able to redistribute a particular hotfix, etc. - the answer's basically, "no, patches need to come directly from Microsoft."
This sounds like how the typical programmer seems to think when designing progress bars. Sure, it only took 5 minutes to churn through the first 95%, but the last 5% is SO important, it's OK to wait another 10 minutes or so.
(If you've ever installed Visual Studio, you KNOW what I'm talking about!)
Not really. An in-game pandemic's "location" could be "anywhere in the game", so I wouldn't play the game until it blew over. In real life, a pandemic's "location" would also be "anywhere in the world", but I don't have the option of shutting down my bio functions until it blows over, so I'd have to make a different decision.
I still doubt it. A smarter thing to do would probably be to study actual epidemics and other disasters and then see what people actually did in those situations.
Statisticians could also tear the "WoW as a model for life" thing easily apart for other reasons, one of which that the average WoW demographic is more/less intelligent/informed/mobile/infirm/family-oriente
Well, WoW is really just a silly game. So...if there was an in-game disease, I'd probably either stash my character for a few days and check out the offline boards to figure out what to do or go a-questing to be a disease-staving-off hero. If my character got toasted, I'd probably just say "f*** it," cancel my account and then go see how DnD Online is doing these days.
In real life, I have a wife, children, parents and other family to think about. My reaction to a rapidly spreading pandemic would be much, much different.
In other words, this study sounds like junk. Coming from Tufts and Rutgers, I'm not surprised...
We can only hope the rest of the fan base follows. It would make it much easier for their mothers to dust around them when they cleaned their basements.
Classic marketing FUD broadcast by Slashdot: it warms my business-school-educated heart!
Wow, you're saying that two close competitors in a competitive industry are wading into a bruising battle? I would have never guessed. Yes, please, keep me posted with more insights like this!
In other words, it's dead wrong then?
Yeah, that would be fun.
"Loading document...(screen goes white)...CRASH"
How about working on making the free PDF writer stable enough for daily browser use first? (I've given up trying to launch PDFs on most browsers; I always download them to disk and then use a local reader that I can kill when it freezes rather than have to nuke my browser.)
Often the national Chinese government wants to clamp down on the factories but can't because they lack the resources to do so and are opposed by the factory's home government. (Similar to the U.S. EPA vs. city governments bought and sold by the local factory.)
Actually, the Chinese government is now more concerned about making sure China builds out its white collar jobs more now; the factories are doing fine on their own.
Even in the U.S., the government was quite active on the side of the factories during the Industrial Revolution - look up "strike riot united states" for taste of some of that.
As opposed to what? Living in mud huts making stone necklaces for each other?
Yes, it kind of did. Maybe it's time to hit the books a little harder...
You know it's a slow news day when the "articles" that get approved on SlashDot are real articles from a real newspaper.
Next time why not just get to the point: "Quit wasting time reading SlashDot, there's more interesting stuff going on in the Wall Street Journal."
Of course, simply stating that product X has taken 1M orders is marketing too: it helps those sitting on the fence feel like they can safely join the herd.
This is why many of these "new product coming soon or now available" PR pieces you see on SlashDot and other sites will frequently refer to a large number of early adopters: they want to make you feel safer as a buyer because you're going in with a crowd.
Don't you mean "according to the publisher"? You need some kind of marketing background to write that sort of bloated statement. A real tech writer wouldn't try to oversell himself like that.
I think that's possible. They mentioned Vista's built-in firewall (which in XP didn't allow fine control over outbound connections) as something they wished they did better.
What's the big security problem with XP? It installed by default with a firewall that denied inbound connections. It allowed people to easily give the kids and the wife non-admin access to a shared system. It automatically tells me when new security patches are available from Microsoft, and it always installs them without incident. It even complains (through a tray icon) when my virus-checker's images were getting out of date. I've been running the same XP system on my laptop now for about three years; I haven't had any spyware, viruses or worms yet, and the system still boots as fast as the day I got it. So...what's the beef with security?
More likely: all his money from his books went to hookers and blow, and writing the next book for a bunch of whiny fanboys doesn't sound that appealing anymore.
Maybe it's time for Gibson to go the Isaac Asimov route and cash completely out of the sci-fi genre by putting his name on anything that moves.
Thanks for the memories, Bill.
Hell no. Just make sure I can search it when I get stuck.
Even the author of TFA thinks this doc is crap (you need "grep" to get off the first page?):
There's your referral. That will be $213,134.56, please.
Nah, I still think RTS + RGP = Suckatude.
I remember the silly "ghost" or "squad" missions from Starcraft and the increased emphasis on core units in WC3 missions (such as "march your Terran hero and his beasts through the shooting gallery" one). On all those missions, I kept hoping for a "skip the lame RPG-ish levels" option (other than the cheat codes, of course).
Thank god Blizzard still let you skip right past the cheesy cut-scenes.
Long story short - just gimme a good RTS and I'll be happy.
I've tried the Slashdot Firehose. It sucks.
;)
However, the name and target audience are probably a good fit: you would need some serious free time to process all the crap from the Firehose but a large proportion of Slashdotters are highly single and have no responsibilities other than to get themselves to and from work five days a week.
I agree with everything you said with one exception where Microsoft is better than Google's idea: with the Microsoft package you get to keep local control of your files and data, whereas with Google you upload them to a central repository.
However, the Microsoft package will still probably want to read the content of files, send something (???) back to Microsoft and then serve ads appropriately. (Snooping content for ad tie-ins is key to Google's success; just today in the Wall Street Journal that talked about how Google is trying to do this with other content so, for example, they can serve ads to your cell phone.)
That sounds like a man-in-the-middle attacker's dream. I like today's system of "connect directly from my desktop to my bank". Count me out.
Here's a better link:
;)
http://www.gamecriticsawards.com/winners.html
(What moron posted a "Newsweek" link for God's sake?)
Yeah - I need the karma.
Why is this a surprise to "the [PC] industry"? Vista's a new piece of software; at the begining it's bound to be less mature and less stable than it will be in the future.
Hell, my computer purchases have NEVER been about the OS; that's just the plumbing. I pick my applications first and then see what they need to run on. (One could claim it works the same way in the game console industry: major "application" titles drive console "OS" sales these days, not the other way around.)
Screw CP/M - it never had the mindshare or marketshare that Windows, Linux or the Mac OS did.