As a grammar nazi, I can't help but laugh at the fact that "I haven't even mentioned..." is inevitably followed by that which has not been mentioned, thus making "I haven't even mentioned..." effectively void, and a mere attempt at making one's post seem to be an incomplete whole, while in fact showing the limited number of incidents or points that the poster was able to come up with.
Maybe airplane designers should delve into the fossil record a little more.
The first and only known rear-limb delta-wing-glider type creature. Oh, and it's extinct. Maybe the rear-oriented delta-wing airplane design isn't such a great idea after all? >:P
One tiny problem, but it more than tips the scales IMHO: Boards. Hop over to newegg and look for boards with full support for the C2D's capabilities. Not just "if you plug it in it will boot", but meeting the FSB speed, DDR2, plenty of slots and plugs, etc. The variety is lacking and untried. The E6300 looks -very- appealing right now, but until there is more choice among boards (and until they've had 3 - 6 months to work out BIOS kinks), C2D is not something I'll be giving much consideration.
* All the 'missions' are 'take this item from here to here, and talk to this person'. You were doing the wrong mission types (using the wrong agent). I'm guessing Administrative or Legal. If you use a Security or Internal Security agent, it's ALL kill missions. There are also agents for mining and item manufacturing, if that's your thing.
* Maybe there's the occasional 'kill the pirate' (but they're way too easy). No grouping (definately no group missions0, Again, using the wrong agent. If you take the time to get Connections skill to level 3 (roughly 1 - 3 days training time for most people), you should be able to get to Level 3 agents fairly quickly (say, 8 - 16 hours running Level 2 missions. Closer to 8 I'd guess). Those are challenging for anything less than Battleship pilots or very experienced Battlecruiser pilots. Level 4 missions, the next step up, are usually impossible to very difficult even for BS pilots. You generally need a gang to take them on.
* and you rarely if ever actually see another player. Then you didn't look very hard. You have only to open your map and select the option to color stars by number of pilots in system. Systems like Jita, Rens, and Saila regularly see hundreds of pilots on at the same time, with many more in surrounding systems. You don't have to be in high-sec, either. Places like Hibi -> R3-K7K area (0.5 -> 0.0 security) are very high population, as well as major outposts for all alliances, clear to the edge of the galaxy. If you didn't see many players, it's probably because you went off solo. You need to join a corp and put yourself where the action is if you want to see Eve for all it really can be.
This is more a situation of, "I feel there's not enough being done to curb gun violence in Oakland, CA, so every day in July I'm going to disclose to the public one case of a cop failing to prosecute a known black market arms dealer, felon in posession of a firearm, or murderer, because it wasn't convenient for the Police Department's schedule."
A related option is a keyboard with a built-in touchpad. Lots of folks here use the ergonomic layout with these here where I work. You get a full size, ergonomic keyboard (unlike with a laptop) but still have the touchpad. They're quite handy.
Alternatively, check out the Logitech Marble Mouse. Your thumb becomes the left-clicker (like with a touchpad), and that's the only thing it does. You work the trackball with your index finger and right-click with middle finger. A guy in our office with pretty painful carpal tunnel swears it was a godsend for him.
So...you're on a boat. It's slowly sinking. You begin to analyze the situation, and you discover what appears to be a large hole below the water line, which is taking on water at a pretty high rate. Do you: A) Plug the hole as fast as you can, or B) Make note of it, and any other holes you may find, but simply continue your analysis until you are sure you know everything there is (or was, before it sank) to know about the ship?
Doubt it, unless this was an industry-wide thing. More likely, launch sales would be crap as people waited for reviews, and companies not using the tech would see a significant bump in market share as well.
I guess you missed the smiley, or you would have realized I was (mostly) joking. Still, though, I do have fair reason to dislike Lotus. Notes is miserable to work with for me simply because I'm the lone IT guy in a small local government. There's no entire department dedicated to scripting it, there's no 24/7 staff on-site to support it, and on top of it all, it's not something we use across the board. The only place that uses it is the Police, and they only use it because it's required as an aspect of the whole package that is provided by an outside company for access to records and for making offsite backups of data and other stuff. It's a hell of a bitch to try to get Lotus working with ArcGIS working with MS software working with WordPerfect working with every version of Windows from NT 4.0 to Server 2k3, '98 to XP, across a VPN set up over the local cable broadband provider, and of course it has to meet all kinds of security rules to touch DCI, so there are some computers that can see some stuff and some that see other...and have it have 24/7 uptime when you're the only guy and going over 40hrs a week is -heavily- frowned upon (yay government work). And clustering / scalability / etc. is a non-issue, obviously. 4 of our 5 servers are WinNT 4.0 (we have 5 servers because there is one per building for the different departments like rec center, public works, city hall, etc.) The one that isn't is the one that runs the Police Dept...we won't be worrying about clustering ANY time soon. As it stands we can barely justify the servers we have, except that it makes printer management and backups easier. None of the things that might make Notes attractive to many people really apply here; it's simply a necessary evil to accomplish a few small goals, and trying to add in fresh-off-the-presses Linux + Notes is a level of complexity that is just WAY too much for our situation, so actually, yeah...I wouldn't feel the least bit untruthful if some marketing dude made my boss all starry-eyed over Linux + Notes and I told him it wasn't a feasible option, under current circumstances. Not at all.
By the way, I am not responsible for this mess...I inherited the nightmare when I took this job 9mo. ago. I'm slowly-but-surely massaging the budget towards a standardized, modern system...but it's gonna be years to go yet.
While I can see this as one more reason not to be tied to Windows, TBH I'd rather tell my boss that no, Notes simply won't work on Linux, so in the process of migrating we will simply have to use something... ANYTHING... else.;)
What about the PS3, though? Haven't they started manufacturing? Lined up parts orders? All that good stuff? Doesn't this basically fux0r Sony for the first few hundred thousand units? It will be interesting to see how (if) they recover from this.
1) The agent had full access for some quasi-legit reason. Probably the database was like MS Windows: Shitty design made it difficult for low security tasks to be accomplished without high level clearance. 2) This was abstracted on some level, for instance by only implementing stuff into the GUI's used to access the DB for accessing stuff that was needed to do a specific job. Accounting's software might only have access routines for grabbing names, addresses, pay, and time card info. They have access to the whole DB, but the software on their machine only knows how to fetch certain parts of the DB. 3) This is the important one: The users were not aware of this. In their minds, they just opened the accounting software, for instance, and it magically came up with all the data they needed and none of the data they didn't need. So somebody calls accounting and asks for non-accounting info and they say, "I'm sorry, I don't have access to that information." Bzzt, wrong. Your program doesn't know how to access it. It's a subtle difference, but in the user's mind it's the same thing. Probably, when the agent handed over their login, they had no idea what kind of access they were giving away. This is why abstracting away complexity in the name of usability so often leads to behavior on the part of users that superficially seems retarded, but in fact is a fairly reasonable train of thought leading off of an incorrect assumption.
the criminals responsible are obviously making money from their code, otherwise they'd give up the game
Least insightful comment in the whole article. I think many, maybe most, of the most successfull viruses / worms / trojans have been written and started mostly as a 'gee-whiz' thing or out of spite, not to make money. Taking the income out of it would go a long ways, but I think the most innovative (and thus, most successful) viruses etc. will generally come from black hats that aren't in it for the money.
I would vote for a 'copyright tax' of, say, $0.25/disc, for instance, on one condition: All or most of the money can go directly to RIAA, but they have to STFU and cut DRM. FOREVER.
Re:A big waste, considering the commodity...
on
Encrypted Ammunition?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'd speculate that the idea is going to be more along the lines of only allowing certain bullet types to be fired from certain guns by certain people. For instance, a round specially designed for military or police use could only be fired by a military / police gun, and only if the gun was being operated by a soldier / police officer. Perhaps a 2nd transmitter in a wrist band or ring on a finger, so there are 2 stages of security. Ring ID's with gun ID's with bullet. That way, in the course of an investigation, they could use standard forensics to determine that a certain bullet was fired from a certain gun, and from there have a high level of certainty that the bullet was fired by the officer assigned to that gun.
Some day somebody will write a worm that will finally do something really distructive, like spread for a year undetected and then format 75% of the world's HDD's on the same day.
And the day after that, somebody will point out that MS was alerted to the issue 18mo ago, but they swept it under the rug as a low-risk DoS.
Then we'll actually see if real security and chastizing wannabe hackers would've perhaps been better than stupid theories, except it will be too late.
Either that, or there will be a few big companies that won't be affected, even though they should've been. When we investigate to find out why, we'll find out that they all used the same independent security anaylyst on contract. Turns out, they knew about the problem, but instead of reporting it, they just started quietly patching client systems with unofficial patches, because they were afraid that if they reported it, they'd have feds in SWAT gear busting into their house.
Key word there is 'were'. Past tense. Once upon a time, before computer, internet, GarageBand, etc., yes, the RIAA had a purpose. This is no longer the case. If they went away, radio, satellite radio, MTV, concert venues, and of course the artists...ALL of them could and would adapt without much effort. The RIAA is a solution to a problem which no longer exists, i.e., mass publication / distribution.
Interesting that you mention new takes on old games...just last weekend I dug out 'Final Fantasy Origins', which is a re-release of FF and FF2 on a single PSX disc, and burned about 30hrs on the original Final Fantasy (they changed some names and graphics a -tad-, but basically the same game...) I ordered some PSX mem cards off ebay (couldn't find mine...) and kept saving to the system memory until they arrived, hehe. What really blows my mind, more than anything else, is that games are progressively becoming shorter, more expensive, and less replayable. I have, for the most part, memorized the location / timing / best approach method / best weapon for killing the majority of enemies in F.E.A.R. without getting shot or with barely getting shot. I have only beat this game once, but there is -zero- replay value, except for online play, because enemies do the EXACT SAME THING every time. Same thing goes for Splinter Cell and Raven Shield (and their sequels). Wolf3D (the original) has more replay value. Yeah, the enemies come straight for you, but at least they weave somewhat randomly. The worst part, though, is that my favorite games for NES or my old Tandy 2000 took about the same length of time OR MORE to beat as many of my favorite games on PSX / PS2 / PC last couple years. I would be WAY happier if the focus on graphics was put on the backburner to focus on duration and replay value instead.
Slashdot Mirror
If by 'interactive' they mean 'can be blown up', then rock on, I say.
As a grammar nazi, I can't help but laugh at the fact that "I haven't even mentioned..." is inevitably followed by that which has not been mentioned, thus making "I haven't even mentioned..." effectively void, and a mere attempt at making one's post seem to be an incomplete whole, while in fact showing the limited number of incidents or points that the poster was able to come up with.
One tiny problem, but it more than tips the scales IMHO: Boards. Hop over to newegg and look for boards with full support for the C2D's capabilities. Not just "if you plug it in it will boot", but meeting the FSB speed, DDR2, plenty of slots and plugs, etc. The variety is lacking and untried. The E6300 looks -very- appealing right now, but until there is more choice among boards (and until they've had 3 - 6 months to work out BIOS kinks), C2D is not something I'll be giving much consideration.
* All the 'missions' are 'take this item from here to here, and talk to this person'.
You were doing the wrong mission types (using the wrong agent). I'm guessing Administrative or Legal. If you use a Security or Internal Security agent, it's ALL kill missions. There are also agents for mining and item manufacturing, if that's your thing.
* Maybe there's the occasional 'kill the pirate' (but they're way too easy). No grouping (definately no group missions0,
Again, using the wrong agent. If you take the time to get Connections skill to level 3 (roughly 1 - 3 days training time for most people), you should be able to get to Level 3 agents fairly quickly (say, 8 - 16 hours running Level 2 missions. Closer to 8 I'd guess). Those are challenging for anything less than Battleship pilots or very experienced Battlecruiser pilots. Level 4 missions, the next step up, are usually impossible to very difficult even for BS pilots. You generally need a gang to take them on.
* and you rarely if ever actually see another player.
Then you didn't look very hard. You have only to open your map and select the option to color stars by number of pilots in system. Systems like Jita, Rens, and Saila regularly see hundreds of pilots on at the same time, with many more in surrounding systems. You don't have to be in high-sec, either. Places like Hibi -> R3-K7K area (0.5 -> 0.0 security) are very high population, as well as major outposts for all alliances, clear to the edge of the galaxy. If you didn't see many players, it's probably because you went off solo. You need to join a corp and put yourself where the action is if you want to see Eve for all it really can be.
Before anybody has the chance to point it out, yes I know I screwed up. -prosecute +arrest. >:P
This is more a situation of, "I feel there's not enough being done to curb gun violence in Oakland, CA, so every day in July I'm going to disclose to the public one case of a cop failing to prosecute a known black market arms dealer, felon in posession of a firearm, or murderer, because it wasn't convenient for the Police Department's schedule."
A related option is a keyboard with a built-in touchpad. Lots of folks here use the ergonomic layout with these here where I work. You get a full size, ergonomic keyboard (unlike with a laptop) but still have the touchpad. They're quite handy. Alternatively, check out the Logitech Marble Mouse. Your thumb becomes the left-clicker (like with a touchpad), and that's the only thing it does. You work the trackball with your index finger and right-click with middle finger. A guy in our office with pretty painful carpal tunnel swears it was a godsend for him.
So...you're on a boat. It's slowly sinking. You begin to analyze the situation, and you discover what appears to be a large hole below the water line, which is taking on water at a pretty high rate. Do you:
A) Plug the hole as fast as you can, or
B) Make note of it, and any other holes you may find, but simply continue your analysis until you are sure you know everything there is (or was, before it sank) to know about the ship?
Doubt it, unless this was an industry-wide thing. More likely, launch sales would be crap as people waited for reviews, and companies not using the tech would see a significant bump in market share as well.
I guess you missed the smiley, or you would have realized I was (mostly) joking. Still, though, I do have fair reason to dislike Lotus. Notes is miserable to work with for me simply because I'm the lone IT guy in a small local government. There's no entire department dedicated to scripting it, there's no 24/7 staff on-site to support it, and on top of it all, it's not something we use across the board. The only place that uses it is the Police, and they only use it because it's required as an aspect of the whole package that is provided by an outside company for access to records and for making offsite backups of data and other stuff. It's a hell of a bitch to try to get Lotus working with ArcGIS working with MS software working with WordPerfect working with every version of Windows from NT 4.0 to Server 2k3, '98 to XP, across a VPN set up over the local cable broadband provider, and of course it has to meet all kinds of security rules to touch DCI, so there are some computers that can see some stuff and some that see other...and have it have 24/7 uptime when you're the only guy and going over 40hrs a week is -heavily- frowned upon (yay government work). And clustering / scalability / etc. is a non-issue, obviously. 4 of our 5 servers are WinNT 4.0 (we have 5 servers because there is one per building for the different departments like rec center, public works, city hall, etc.) The one that isn't is the one that runs the Police Dept...we won't be worrying about clustering ANY time soon. As it stands we can barely justify the servers we have, except that it makes printer management and backups easier. None of the things that might make Notes attractive to many people really apply here; it's simply a necessary evil to accomplish a few small goals, and trying to add in fresh-off-the-presses Linux + Notes is a level of complexity that is just WAY too much for our situation, so actually, yeah...I wouldn't feel the least bit untruthful if some marketing dude made my boss all starry-eyed over Linux + Notes and I told him it wasn't a feasible option, under current circumstances. Not at all.
By the way, I am not responsible for this mess...I inherited the nightmare when I took this job 9mo. ago. I'm slowly-but-surely massaging the budget towards a standardized, modern system...but it's gonna be years to go yet.
While I can see this as one more reason not to be tied to Windows, TBH I'd rather tell my boss that no, Notes simply won't work on Linux, so in the process of migrating we will simply have to use something ... ANYTHING ... else. ;)
What about the PS3, though? Haven't they started manufacturing? Lined up parts orders? All that good stuff? Doesn't this basically fux0r Sony for the first few hundred thousand units? It will be interesting to see how (if) they recover from this.
If we reform English to be easy, how will I tell the 12 year olds from the rest on IRC?
On a more serious note...will this make multiple spellings for the same word all be legit due to regional accents? If not, whose accent do we use?
Here's a very likely scenario:
1) The agent had full access for some quasi-legit reason. Probably the database was like MS Windows: Shitty design made it difficult for low security tasks to be accomplished without high level clearance.
2) This was abstracted on some level, for instance by only implementing stuff into the GUI's used to access the DB for accessing stuff that was needed to do a specific job. Accounting's software might only have access routines for grabbing names, addresses, pay, and time card info. They have access to the whole DB, but the software on their machine only knows how to fetch certain parts of the DB.
3) This is the important one: The users were not aware of this. In their minds, they just opened the accounting software, for instance, and it magically came up with all the data they needed and none of the data they didn't need. So somebody calls accounting and asks for non-accounting info and they say, "I'm sorry, I don't have access to that information." Bzzt, wrong. Your program doesn't know how to access it. It's a subtle difference, but in the user's mind it's the same thing. Probably, when the agent handed over their login, they had no idea what kind of access they were giving away.
This is why abstracting away complexity in the name of usability so often leads to behavior on the part of users that superficially seems retarded, but in fact is a fairly reasonable train of thought leading off of an incorrect assumption.
Least insightful comment in the whole article. I think many, maybe most, of the most successfull viruses / worms / trojans have been written and started mostly as a 'gee-whiz' thing or out of spite, not to make money. Taking the income out of it would go a long ways, but I think the most innovative (and thus, most successful) viruses etc. will generally come from black hats that aren't in it for the money.
Did anybody else read the summary and think, "Corel made a linux?"
I think I'd prefer Opposing Force 2...
Looks like FF XII may be my last FF game, unless Square comes back to Nintendo.
I would vote for a 'copyright tax' of, say, $0.25/disc, for instance, on one condition: All or most of the money can go directly to RIAA, but they have to STFU and cut DRM. FOREVER.
I'd speculate that the idea is going to be more along the lines of only allowing certain bullet types to be fired from certain guns by certain people. For instance, a round specially designed for military or police use could only be fired by a military / police gun, and only if the gun was being operated by a soldier / police officer. Perhaps a 2nd transmitter in a wrist band or ring on a finger, so there are 2 stages of security. Ring ID's with gun ID's with bullet. That way, in the course of an investigation, they could use standard forensics to determine that a certain bullet was fired from a certain gun, and from there have a high level of certainty that the bullet was fired by the officer assigned to that gun.
And the day after that, somebody will point out that MS was alerted to the issue 18mo ago, but they swept it under the rug as a low-risk DoS.
Either that, or there will be a few big companies that won't be affected, even though they should've been. When we investigate to find out why, we'll find out that they all used the same independent security anaylyst on contract. Turns out, they knew about the problem, but instead of reporting it, they just started quietly patching client systems with unofficial patches, because they were afraid that if they reported it, they'd have feds in SWAT gear busting into their house.
Key word there is 'were'. Past tense. Once upon a time, before computer, internet, GarageBand, etc., yes, the RIAA had a purpose. This is no longer the case. If they went away, radio, satellite radio, MTV, concert venues, and of course the artists...ALL of them could and would adapt without much effort.
The RIAA is a solution to a problem which no longer exists, i.e., mass publication / distribution.
Interesting that you mention new takes on old games...just last weekend I dug out 'Final Fantasy Origins', which is a re-release of FF and FF2 on a single PSX disc, and burned about 30hrs on the original Final Fantasy (they changed some names and graphics a -tad-, but basically the same game...) I ordered some PSX mem cards off ebay (couldn't find mine...) and kept saving to the system memory until they arrived, hehe.
What really blows my mind, more than anything else, is that games are progressively becoming shorter, more expensive, and less replayable. I have, for the most part, memorized the location / timing / best approach method / best weapon for killing the majority of enemies in F.E.A.R. without getting shot or with barely getting shot. I have only beat this game once, but there is -zero- replay value, except for online play, because enemies do the EXACT SAME THING every time. Same thing goes for Splinter Cell and Raven Shield (and their sequels). Wolf3D (the original) has more replay value. Yeah, the enemies come straight for you, but at least they weave somewhat randomly. The worst part, though, is that my favorite games for NES or my old Tandy 2000 took about the same length of time OR MORE to beat as many of my favorite games on PSX / PS2 / PC last couple years. I would be WAY happier if the focus on graphics was put on the backburner to focus on duration and replay value instead.