At least in my case, yes, MMORPG's suck my dollars away from other games, but that's only part of the problem. Oblivion was the last game that really caught my interest as 'must-have', and Spore is the next one I'll be looking to buy. That's a really long gap between games, and it's not like I'm picky about genre, either. Console RPG like Final Fantasy and racing games like Gran Turismo, PC single player-focused FPS like F.E.A.R., online FPS like Day of Defeat: Source or UT2K4 or Battlefield, PC Strategy like Warcraft III or Civ IV, PC RPG like Oblivion...
There are lots of games types that I love and will happily pay for, but the fact of the matter is, there aren't very many quality games, regardless of platform or genre, being released lately. Oh, I'm sure I'll get a few replies to this pointing out people's personal favorites, but how many games have come out in '06 that really jump to the forefront of your mind as something that you heard about, planned to buy, -did- buy, and were very happy with -and- was widely popular? Let's see, TES IV: Oblivion, and...uhhhhm.........see? Games companies are in the same boat as Hollywood last summer. Sure, there are some factors relating to changes in customer behavior that are hurting sales a bit, but when you get down to it, the industry simply is not releasing much, and what little they are releasing is, by and large, crap.
This is what drives me nuts in government, the case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. We have an agency 'A', the sole purpose of which is the study and application of security. Agency 'A' has published a document clearly describing the process of redacting a document for PDF distribution. Also, we have an agency 'B'. Agency 'B' employs at least one individual, whose job (in whole or in part), is to redact documents prior to PDF distribution. How the fuck does it come about that studying the guide from agency 'A' was not a required aspect of the agency 'B's training for the redacter*?
*This may or may not be a word. I'm not gonna bother looking it up to find out, but I'm sure you know what I mean by it.
Ok, first off, if you read the updates on the stolen sidekick site, the $50 on a subway platform story is bogus. They told the guy running the site that they had paid $100 for it, and from a cabby. Secondly, if they wanted money for it, they had their chance. A reward was offered at the beginning of the whole thing for the return of the sidekick. The offer was retracted due to the way the thieves handled the situation, but they had their chance to get paid and they screwed it up. Also, lastly, the address given for the chance to come get it turned out to be fake. NYT really dropped the ball on not following up on the mother's claims.
Frankly, this idea scares the living shit out of me. The only way I would consider running this on my computer would be if said computer was buried at the center of a 1000ft^3 block of cement, with no wires in or out, and a couple faraday cages wrapped around the outside. And drop it in quicksand somewhere in the Sahara.
Ok, first off I gotta get this outta the way. This is a top-level reply which does not in any remote way touch upon TFA. I call offtopic, or at least 'interesting' or 'insightful'. But not 'informative'. Now then...
Re: IIS 6: First off, it's closed source. You would generally expect fewer vulnerabilities, although I admit that 2 in 4 years is pretty good. But second, not all that many people use it; a sizeable chunk of those who do use it only use it for internal purposes, not websites; and it's closed source. Between those three things, there just won't be much interest in exploiting it, when you can just browse the source for other servers, find a vulnerability, and then release an exploit knowing that it will affect assloads of people. Your argument is a lot like arguments that Apple is more secure than WinXP. Yeah, ok, it probably is...but not by near as much of a margin as your statistics would seem to indicate, simply due to a lack of interest from shady hackers. You're just giving too much credit to MS, especially if you are, in fact, correct. Why? Because the VAST majority of the exploits for their software in recent memory have come from more popular applications, such as Photo Viewer, IE, WindowsXP, and Office. Why haven't they fixed these? Wouldn't they have more success in cutting back on bad press and bad feelings if they fixed these more common apps? Wouldn't it be more cost effective to fix the hundreds or thousands of web browsers or word processors that connect to each of their individual servers? Just because they managed to do a moderate to good job securing a single, small market share app doesn't really mean that they can, let alone will, improve security on the whole. I'm as interested as the next guy in their upcoming software, but my expectations are very, very low.
I certainly forsee computer sales in the first quarter of 2007, when the vendors try to get rid of their soon-to-be not-compatible hardware.
Maybe, maybe not. I'm thinking more like late 3rd / early 4th, because I'm not expecting there to be a great deal of interest in upgrading, and so OEM's have no reason to clear out their cheap, high-sales stock and replace it with expensive, Vista Premium-capable stuff across the board.
Most people are fairly happy with XP, and they'll wait for a killer app (or two or three). Office 2K7 probably will not be enough for the consumer market. Also, you have to consider the 'geek factor'. If granny asks you to recommend a new computer for her next February, are you really going to recommend Vista? I know I won't, not until it's gone through it's first service pack or at least year of being banged on by the black hats, crackers, and spyware vendors.
Yanno what? From now on, if you find yourself writing a sentence that contains the words 'Microsoft' and any form of 'innovate', just scrub it and start over. Your IQ in the eyes of your readers takes a dip every time you write a sentence like that. This needs to be added to English textbooks, right under double negatives.
The market for installable applications is far from dead.... And yes, some linux distros give it away for free
Oooh...you -almost- nailed it there, but ended up just beating around the bush. Installed software will not die for a veryvery long time, if for no other reason than security. I work in IT for a city government, and I can assure you that our police department's dispatch center will not be doing it's word processing on somebody else's server (or be visible to / be able to see anybody outside the 'MZ', save for tightly controlled pipes to other agencies, for that matter) -any- time soon. The future...and you almost nailed this...is in service-oriented business (i.e., RedHat, Apache, MySQL) IMHO. Businesses where you basically give your stuff away, but the profit comes by offering tech support and / or 'consulting' (custom code tweaking).
Ok. Who are the black hats, are they any good, and how stupid is MS? Either these are actually white hats and MS is trying to look cool, or else they just hired a bunch of people who would love nothing more than to break Vista and -not- tell MS about it.
I used to use one of these. Unfortunately, in high temperatures (say, left uncovered in the car in ~65f outside temps in the sun) the backing screws up the CD's. I've seen this several times from lots of different folks. Get a hard plastic case or a case entirely cloth instead.
When I describe case verbally, I speak caps very loudly, so alternating caps for instance might be, "CUE double-u EE ar TEE why." I developed this by myself as an easy way to remember passwords, because I have an excellent memory for sounds / tones. Many years down the road, I got my current job and found that my boss does the exact same thing. Try it, it works great!
Why is this YRO? People signed up for a free service on a website, abused that service, and so their QoS was decreased. This is no different than the way angelfire / geocities won't let you use images stored on their sites as avatars on web forums (without some creative workarounds, at least). Is that a story worthy of YRO?
Is it just me, or does that look -really- close to the banks? And the banks don't look much higher than the water, either. Looks to me like this is taunting Murphy in the worst way...
Well, hopefully at the very least it will be a case similar to many (most?) FPS's currently out, where custom maps may be created. It would be trivial to make maps very similar to 'official' maps, or even the normal fully-custom maps, without ads. I know for instance that on DoD:S custom servers that have decent download rates and good policing are VERY popular.
All I'm saying is that -if-, as indicated by TFA, MS wants to work with GPL folks (I was arguing under the presupposition that there were not ulterior motives), then the reasons that they can't aren't entirely their fault. It doesn't matter if there are other licenses or other ways. TFA, and thus my response, are about GPL. Not any other aspect of *nix, not other licenses, nothing. GPL software. Secondly, -you- missed -my- point that it's not just MS. It's -anybody- trying to connect their non-GPL code to code that does use the GPL.
It is perfectly reasonable and possible to create your own libraries and applications...
So you think it's perfectly fair and reasonable to ask others, be it MS or random Joe Coder, to reinvent the wheel simply because the license on your software precludes their use of your code with theirs, possibly due to reasons outide their control. How was it, again, that you are better than MS?
Slashdot Mirror
At least in my case, yes, MMORPG's suck my dollars away from other games, but that's only part of the problem. Oblivion was the last game that really caught my interest as 'must-have', and Spore is the next one I'll be looking to buy. That's a really long gap between games, and it's not like I'm picky about genre, either. Console RPG like Final Fantasy and racing games like Gran Turismo, PC single player-focused FPS like F.E.A.R., online FPS like Day of Defeat: Source or UT2K4 or Battlefield, PC Strategy like Warcraft III or Civ IV, PC RPG like Oblivion...
... ...see? Games companies are in the same boat as Hollywood last summer. Sure, there are some factors relating to changes in customer behavior that are hurting sales a bit, but when you get down to it, the industry simply is not releasing much, and what little they are releasing is, by and large, crap.
There are lots of games types that I love and will happily pay for, but the fact of the matter is, there aren't very many quality games, regardless of platform or genre, being released lately. Oh, I'm sure I'll get a few replies to this pointing out people's personal favorites, but how many games have come out in '06 that really jump to the forefront of your mind as something that you heard about, planned to buy, -did- buy, and were very happy with -and- was widely popular? Let's see, TES IV: Oblivion, and...uhhhhm...
Acid2 link from article is dead. You can find the test here.
What is up with all this captcha talk? I've never seen one on slashdot. Anywhere, for any reason. Ever.
This is what drives me nuts in government, the case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. We have an agency 'A', the sole purpose of which is the study and application of security. Agency 'A' has published a document clearly describing the process of redacting a document for PDF distribution. Also, we have an agency 'B'. Agency 'B' employs at least one individual, whose job (in whole or in part), is to redact documents prior to PDF distribution. How the fuck does it come about that studying the guide from agency 'A' was not a required aspect of the agency 'B's training for the redacter*?
*This may or may not be a word. I'm not gonna bother looking it up to find out, but I'm sure you know what I mean by it.
Crackdown on spam, or just a convenient way to employ 20k citizens while getting good international PR in one fell swoop?
Ok, first off, if you read the updates on the stolen sidekick site, the $50 on a subway platform story is bogus. They told the guy running the site that they had paid $100 for it, and from a cabby. Secondly, if they wanted money for it, they had their chance. A reward was offered at the beginning of the whole thing for the return of the sidekick. The offer was retracted due to the way the thieves handled the situation, but they had their chance to get paid and they screwed it up. Also, lastly, the address given for the chance to come get it turned out to be fake. NYT really dropped the ball on not following up on the mother's claims.
Frankly, this idea scares the living shit out of me. The only way I would consider running this on my computer would be if said computer was buried at the center of a 1000ft^3 block of cement, with no wires in or out, and a couple faraday cages wrapped around the outside. And drop it in quicksand somewhere in the Sahara.
Ok, first off I gotta get this outta the way. This is a top-level reply which does not in any remote way touch upon TFA. I call offtopic, or at least 'interesting' or 'insightful'. But not 'informative'. Now then...
Re: IIS 6: First off, it's closed source. You would generally expect fewer vulnerabilities, although I admit that 2 in 4 years is pretty good. But second, not all that many people use it; a sizeable chunk of those who do use it only use it for internal purposes, not websites; and it's closed source. Between those three things, there just won't be much interest in exploiting it, when you can just browse the source for other servers, find a vulnerability, and then release an exploit knowing that it will affect assloads of people.
Your argument is a lot like arguments that Apple is more secure than WinXP. Yeah, ok, it probably is...but not by near as much of a margin as your statistics would seem to indicate, simply due to a lack of interest from shady hackers. You're just giving too much credit to MS, especially if you are, in fact, correct. Why? Because the VAST majority of the exploits for their software in recent memory have come from more popular applications, such as Photo Viewer, IE, WindowsXP, and Office. Why haven't they fixed these? Wouldn't they have more success in cutting back on bad press and bad feelings if they fixed these more common apps? Wouldn't it be more cost effective to fix the hundreds or thousands of web browsers or word processors that connect to each of their individual servers?
Just because they managed to do a moderate to good job securing a single, small market share app doesn't really mean that they can, let alone will, improve security on the whole. I'm as interested as the next guy in their upcoming software, but my expectations are very, very low.
Yeah, just look at what a colossal failure Slashdot is...
Maybe, maybe not. I'm thinking more like late 3rd / early 4th, because I'm not expecting there to be a great deal of interest in upgrading, and so OEM's have no reason to clear out their cheap, high-sales stock and replace it with expensive, Vista Premium-capable stuff across the board.
Most people are fairly happy with XP, and they'll wait for a killer app (or two or three). Office 2K7 probably will not be enough for the consumer market. Also, you have to consider the 'geek factor'. If granny asks you to recommend a new computer for her next February, are you really going to recommend Vista? I know I won't, not until it's gone through it's first service pack or at least year of being banged on by the black hats, crackers, and spyware vendors.
This isn't discoloration. It's sweat stains. Wipe your palms and / or lay of the pr0n, Apple geeks!
I thought they meant 'available in pdf' as in 'free to download'. Maybe someday I'll be able to afford to learn that game...
Yanno what? From now on, if you find yourself writing a sentence that contains the words 'Microsoft' and any form of 'innovate', just scrub it and start over. Your IQ in the eyes of your readers takes a dip every time you write a sentence like that. This needs to be added to English textbooks, right under double negatives.
Oooh...you -almost- nailed it there, but ended up just beating around the bush.
Installed software will not die for a very very long time, if for no other reason than security. I work in IT for a city government, and I can assure you that our police department's dispatch center will not be doing it's word processing on somebody else's server (or be visible to / be able to see anybody outside the 'MZ', save for tightly controlled pipes to other agencies, for that matter) -any- time soon.
The future...and you almost nailed this...is in service-oriented business (i.e., RedHat, Apache, MySQL) IMHO. Businesses where you basically give your stuff away, but the profit comes by offering tech support and / or 'consulting' (custom code tweaking).
Ok. Who are the black hats, are they any good, and how stupid is MS? Either these are actually white hats and MS is trying to look cool, or else they just hired a bunch of people who would love nothing more than to break Vista and -not- tell MS about it.
I used to use one of these. Unfortunately, in high temperatures (say, left uncovered in the car in ~65f outside temps in the sun) the backing screws up the CD's. I've seen this several times from lots of different folks. Get a hard plastic case or a case entirely cloth instead.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/accessories/65a c/
AOL + web 2.0 community sites...this is gonna be so awesome. Finally, all the lusers in the world, conveniently staying located at a single site.
When I describe case verbally, I speak caps very loudly, so alternating caps for instance might be, "CUE double-u EE ar TEE why." I developed this by myself as an easy way to remember passwords, because I have an excellent memory for sounds / tones. Many years down the road, I got my current job and found that my boss does the exact same thing. Try it, it works great!
Why is this YRO? People signed up for a free service on a website, abused that service, and so their QoS was decreased. This is no different than the way angelfire / geocities won't let you use images stored on their sites as avatars on web forums (without some creative workarounds, at least). Is that a story worthy of YRO?
Is it just me, or does that look -really- close to the banks? And the banks don't look much higher than the water, either. Looks to me like this is taunting Murphy in the worst way...
Well, hopefully at the very least it will be a case similar to many (most?) FPS's currently out, where custom maps may be created. It would be trivial to make maps very similar to 'official' maps, or even the normal fully-custom maps, without ads. I know for instance that on DoD:S custom servers that have decent download rates and good policing are VERY popular.
Ok. But by your own logic, they are getting room and board for an equivalent of $5k/yr. Not a bad deal by a LONG shot.
So you think it's perfectly fair and reasonable to ask others, be it MS or random Joe Coder, to reinvent the wheel simply because the license on your software precludes their use of your code with theirs, possibly due to reasons outide their control. How was it, again, that you are better than MS?