Gaan naai jou ma, jou hoerskont. As ek jou kry, gat ek jou ballas plattrap soos posseels.
I spent 12 years living in SA, six of them in a rural area and six in Hillbrow, downtown Johannesburg. I'm afraid I have to agree that parts of the country are scarily violent and dangerous. Consider, though, the fact that poverty is endemic in SA and that there are very many weapons still circulating that were hidden during the Apartheid era, and the violence moves into perspective.
I very much doubt anyone in their right mind will put Romero in charge of a dev team after this one. Best option for him would probably be to go back to what he does well, which is level design IMO, and to leave game design and company management to people who can do a competent job at it.
Pity about Tom Hall, though. I don't see him as being responsible for the ongoing disaster that is Ion Storm; my guess is he chose to back Romero and made one of those "If you fire him, you have to fire me too" statements that can and do blow up in your face on occasion.
I'm probably not the first to comment on the irony attendant in Ion Storm now being headed by Warren Spector; I'd think he must be feeling very much vindicated now.
Half-Life is built on a heavily modified Quake I engine, not Quake 2. Most of the Q2 engine's advances over the Q1 engine have been added to the Half-Life engine by hacks and tricks.
While it's pretty neat to see just how far Valve has managed to push a five-year-old engine, it's time they stopped resting on their laurels and put together something new, as opposed to merely milking the cash cow (Blue Shift, anyone?)
Since Wolf3D was almost the first shooter I played, and the first one that really grabbed me, I'm looking forward to the new game. I do hope, though, that the level designers take a cue from the likes of Half-Life and Deus Ex and make the gameplay a little more diverse and complex. Not to be badmouthing, but the gameplay in most FPS moves like it's on rails.
Why did I *know* that child pornography argument was going to get wheeled out again by somebody supporting these Big Brother tactics?
Why don't we just go a step further and track all sales of photographic and video film equipment? After all, producing child porn requires film. Oh, and electric power, and batteries; so we may just want to bug the homes of everyone connected to the electric grid, to be on the totally safe side.
By the way, what exactly is your problem with "liberals"? If sticking up for human rights to privacy is so wrong in your book, then I deeply pity you.
NT 4.0 out of the box has both the OS/2 and POSIX subsystems enabled (easily attacked), as well as file permissions for all volumes set to full access and shared on the network at full access ('hidden' via appending a $ to the drive letter - laughable). In addition, default permissions for the entire filesystem are full access for everyone (this includes not merely registered users, but everybody, even people connecting via the internet). Personally, I'd not call that very secure. Win2K goes one step further and makes it impossible to remove 'Everyone' from the ACL. Windows can be made secure enough for most purposes, but doing so requires as much knowledge as securing a Unix box; the difference is merely that with most open Unix implementations, security issues are more easily found (a benefit of peer review vs. the MS security-through-obscurity approach). I'm an MCSE, and I agree that Windows has its place on the network, but I'm finding it more and more difficult to follow the MS party line on other systems. If a client's needs are more adequately served by a Linux box than a MS one, personally I tell them to install a Linux box.
Re:What they won't show, perhaps ever...
on
15 Minutes
·
· Score: 2
I spent several years living in Saudi Arabia when i was a young'un, and I can tell you that executions were in fact transmitted live on Saudi TV at that time (late seventies through early eighties). They were generally held on Saturday mornings, too. Right between the cartoon programming that's almost all that was being shown on TV there at the time.
They won't introduce that in America though, for the same reason nobody's seriously proposing live broadcasts from slaughterhouses. The reality of the execution itself might harm the illusion the media tries to create that everyone on death row is a depraved beast who must be killed for Law-Abiding Citizens Everywhere to feel safe.
Gates deliberately set out with the goal of dominating the software industry and has, throughout his career, stooped to practices most hackers wouldn't even admit to knowing about. I think it's not violating hacker ethics to expect him to run true to his usual scumbag form. He is first and foremost a businessman, and his tactics are typical of the underhand approach taught behind the smoker's shed at Harvard School of Business.
Besides which, let's say a hacker's water main breaks, and I happen to have a plumber on permanent retainer. If I decide not to ask him how to fix it, make no effort otherwise to learn how it's done, and end up flooding my house, I am not being true to the hacker ethic, I am being stump dumb and unneccessarily arrogant.
All the replies here saying that Microsoft is still far from being brought down are right. MS is sitting on a great deal of money and a huge market share. They won't simply go away overnight.
But...the antitrust case, and especially Chairman Bill's handling of it, has hurt them badly in terms of public image. Here in Europe, where many state departments are slowly ditching their old (mainframe-based) computer systems in favor of newer tech, a lot of institutions that would otherwise have installed NT without a second thought are more predisposed towards alternatives, especially Open Source ones such as Linux or BSD. Sure, the evangelists in the OS movement had something to do with that, but the media flap attached to the antitrust case also made a lot of government officials, especially the ones who decide what gets bought, to think twice about what they're doing. Also, many people in government (among them Germany's minister of the interior, who has quite some influence within the EU) see proprietary software as being unsuitable for secure applications, and have gone on the record to that effect. Those institutions and companies aren't going to wait for the entire appeal process to run its course - they're going to be looking hard at the alternatives to MS products, and in a lot of cases those alternatives are going to be used. That's quite a few doors that even a divested Microsoft won't be getting another foot into. And don't forget that for the first time in MS' history, there's no axis with IBM that'll artificially flood the coffers with sales. IBM seems more interested these days in finding some way to market their own semi-proprietary Linux version than in selling bundled NT licenses.
Yes, they're not dead yet, but unless they start doing a lot of things right they might well find themselves in serious trouble a few years down the road, at least in terms of OS and server software.
I second that. Maybe not killing them, but kicking the crap out of them is definitely warranted.
I *hate* people whose only way to interact with the world is to fuck things up for everybody else. I think the gene pool would be much improved by having algae like that removed from it.
You think having Win2K running on your workstations as opposed to NT4 is a good thing? Are you on some weird planet where new M$ products are actually better than the stuff they replace?
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Gaan naai jou ma, jou hoerskont. As ek jou kry, gat ek jou ballas plattrap soos posseels.
I spent 12 years living in SA, six of them in a rural area and six in Hillbrow, downtown Johannesburg. I'm afraid I have to agree that parts of the country are scarily violent and dangerous. Consider, though, the fact that poverty is endemic in SA and that there are very many weapons still circulating that were hidden during the Apartheid era, and the violence moves into perspective.
I very much doubt anyone in their right mind will put Romero in charge of a dev team after this one. Best option for him would probably be to go back to what he does well, which is level design IMO, and to leave game design and company management to people who can do a competent job at it. Pity about Tom Hall, though. I don't see him as being responsible for the ongoing disaster that is Ion Storm; my guess is he chose to back Romero and made one of those "If you fire him, you have to fire me too" statements that can and do blow up in your face on occasion. I'm probably not the first to comment on the irony attendant in Ion Storm now being headed by Warren Spector; I'd think he must be feeling very much vindicated now.
Half-Life is built on a heavily modified Quake I engine, not Quake 2. Most of the Q2 engine's advances over the Q1 engine have been added to the Half-Life engine by hacks and tricks.
While it's pretty neat to see just how far Valve has managed to push a five-year-old engine, it's time they stopped resting on their laurels and put together something new, as opposed to merely milking the cash cow (Blue Shift, anyone?)
Since Wolf3D was almost the first shooter I played, and the first one that really grabbed me, I'm looking forward to the new game. I do hope, though, that the level designers take a cue from the likes of Half-Life and Deus Ex and make the gameplay a little more diverse and complex. Not to be badmouthing, but the gameplay in most FPS moves like it's on rails.
Why did I *know* that child pornography argument was going to get wheeled out again by somebody supporting these Big Brother tactics? Why don't we just go a step further and track all sales of photographic and video film equipment? After all, producing child porn requires film. Oh, and electric power, and batteries; so we may just want to bug the homes of everyone connected to the electric grid, to be on the totally safe side. By the way, what exactly is your problem with "liberals"? If sticking up for human rights to privacy is so wrong in your book, then I deeply pity you.
NT 4.0 out of the box has both the OS/2 and POSIX subsystems enabled (easily attacked), as well as file permissions for all volumes set to full access and shared on the network at full access ('hidden' via appending a $ to the drive letter - laughable). In addition, default permissions for the entire filesystem are full access for everyone (this includes not merely registered users, but everybody, even people connecting via the internet). Personally, I'd not call that very secure. Win2K goes one step further and makes it impossible to remove 'Everyone' from the ACL. Windows can be made secure enough for most purposes, but doing so requires as much knowledge as securing a Unix box; the difference is merely that with most open Unix implementations, security issues are more easily found (a benefit of peer review vs. the MS security-through-obscurity approach). I'm an MCSE, and I agree that Windows has its place on the network, but I'm finding it more and more difficult to follow the MS party line on other systems. If a client's needs are more adequately served by a Linux box than a MS one, personally I tell them to install a Linux box.
I spent several years living in Saudi Arabia when i was a young'un, and I can tell you that executions were in fact transmitted live on Saudi TV at that time (late seventies through early eighties). They were generally held on Saturday mornings, too. Right between the cartoon programming that's almost all that was being shown on TV there at the time. They won't introduce that in America though, for the same reason nobody's seriously proposing live broadcasts from slaughterhouses. The reality of the execution itself might harm the illusion the media tries to create that everyone on death row is a depraved beast who must be killed for Law-Abiding Citizens Everywhere to feel safe.
Pardon the mixed tenses on that last sentence. This is why one should preview before one posts.
Gates deliberately set out with the goal of dominating the software industry and has, throughout his career, stooped to practices most hackers wouldn't even admit to knowing about. I think it's not violating hacker ethics to expect him to run true to his usual scumbag form. He is first and foremost a businessman, and his tactics are typical of the underhand approach taught behind the smoker's shed at Harvard School of Business.
Besides which, let's say a hacker's water main breaks, and I happen to have a plumber on permanent retainer. If I decide not to ask him how to fix it, make no effort otherwise to learn how it's done, and end up flooding my house, I am not being true to the hacker ethic, I am being stump dumb and unneccessarily arrogant.
All the replies here saying that Microsoft is still far from being brought down are right. MS is sitting on a great deal of money and a huge market share. They won't simply go away overnight.
But...the antitrust case, and especially Chairman Bill's handling of it, has hurt them badly in terms of public image. Here in Europe, where many state departments are slowly ditching their old (mainframe-based) computer systems in favor of newer tech, a lot of institutions that would otherwise have installed NT without a second thought are more predisposed towards alternatives, especially Open Source ones such as Linux or BSD. Sure, the evangelists in the OS movement had something to do with that, but the media flap attached to the antitrust case also made a lot of government officials, especially the ones who decide what gets bought, to think twice about what they're doing. Also, many people in government (among them Germany's minister of the interior, who has quite some influence within the EU) see proprietary software as being unsuitable for secure applications, and have gone on the record to that effect. Those institutions and companies aren't going to wait for the entire appeal process to run its course - they're going to be looking hard at the alternatives to MS products, and in a lot of cases those alternatives are going to be used. That's quite a few doors that even a divested Microsoft won't be getting another foot into. And don't forget that for the first time in MS' history, there's no axis with IBM that'll artificially flood the coffers with sales. IBM seems more interested these days in finding some way to market their own semi-proprietary Linux version than in selling bundled NT licenses.
Yes, they're not dead yet, but unless they start doing a lot of things right they might well find themselves in serious trouble a few years down the road, at least in terms of OS and server software.
I second that. Maybe not killing them, but kicking the crap out of them is definitely warranted. I *hate* people whose only way to interact with the world is to fuck things up for everybody else. I think the gene pool would be much improved by having algae like that removed from it.
You think having Win2K running on your workstations as opposed to NT4 is a good thing? Are you on some weird planet where new M$ products are actually better than the stuff they replace?