Please mod up the parent comment - it definitely deserves a "+1, Insightful". If you put every last bit of functionality into one device, you'll end up with one gadget that can do everything but excels at nothing. I don't want to say camera phones aren't useful, for example, but the fact that my cell phone has a built-in cam does not mean I'm going to get rid of my digital camera. The former is good for taking quick snapshots when you don't care about what they actually look like (for example, when you just want to show something to a friend at a later point), but if I want lasting pictures, I'd never use a camera phone.
The same goes for MP3 players and other things, too.
1. Create a Cafépress shop based on a random, idiotic idea. 2. Submit a story to Slashdot on April Fool's Day, where apparently every crappy submission is posted, so that hordes of people will look at your shop - and some will actually buy your stuff, too. 3. Profit!!!
Seriously, though... dear Slashdot editors, has anyone ever told you that April Fool's jokes are supposed to be FUNNY? Look it up...
Linux at least *does* have support for a number of TPM chips (these reside in drivers/char/tpm. You don't have to enable the relevant drivers, of course, but chances are your mainstream distribution has done so.
Whether that actually *means* anything is another matter entirely, of course, and as long as you stick to free software, you shouldn't have to worry about anything really (one should hope). But it's not true that Linux doesn't support these things.
I don't know... I don't agree with that. I often post critical comments as well, but so far I'm still reading Slashdot - the criticism is mostly intended as a "you're wading into dangerous waters, guys, so please try to keep the quality up a bit".
Of course, you may say that whether I (or, for that matter, the GP) read Slashdot doesn't matter, but that's not true: Slashdot's ultimate goal is to make money (by showing ads), and the "news for nerds" are just a way of making people come back and ensure ad impressions. So in that sense, we *do* matter. It's all a tit-for-tat, really - readers get news they're (presumably) interested in; Slashdot gets ad impressions, which make them money.
I'm sure you can see by now what the problem is, too: Slashdot's quality has slowly but steadily declined, and this story is just a perfect example of what's going wrong. If Slashdot isn't living up to its promise of delivering interesting, meaningful content anymore ("stuff that matters"), then readers are effectively being cheated, and *will* leave. And of course, that's something the Slashdot folks won't want to happen - as said above, readers mean ad impressions, which mean money.
You may ask why *we* care, of course, and why we don't simply leave when the site becomes crappier and crappier. Well, the reason is simply that we don't dislike Slashdot as such - we just dislike what it has become. I at least don't want to leave Slashdot for good, or at least not until I've tried to improve things again. I could burn all bridges and leave, but I'd much rather have Slashdot become a news site with at least *some* quality again - the way it used to be in the past.
That's why I'm complaining, and that (I guess) is why others are complaining, too. If you feel that stories like this one are fine, that's OK (although I'd really have to question your sanity in that case), but you should also respect others' disagreement with you.
And in particular, you shouldn't use reasoning that amounts to, essentially, "put up or shut up" - it just shows that you don't have any real arguments.
Or, in words that might be easier to understand: "If you are disliking grandparent comment, leave it. Go away. Don't read; mainly, don't post!":)
The funny thing about that is that "Arial" is just M$'s new name for the Helvetica font cut - which, of course, is named after and was developed in Switzerland (and thus in Europe). Given that, "arial bombardment" is ironic on more than one level...
He does have a point, though. It *is* possible to use the standard C library string functions in a safe manner, but it's difficult and error-prone - and if you make just one mistake, it might well be enough to open an exploitable hole in your program.
It's important to realise that programmers aren't perfect. "unsafe" programmers, as you call them, are not something you'll ever be able to get rid of; your best bet is thus to give them tools that make it as easy as possible to write safe code and that will mitigate the impact when things *do* go wrong - in other words, tools that will fail in a defined and safe manner.
One of the problems with C (actually, one of its strengths, too, of course, depending your point of view) is that it's really only optimised for speed, and a lot of compromises were and still are made there. Similarly, another problem is that C is intended as a very low-level language - a hardware-independent macro-assembler with automatic register allocation, if you will. This makes it very suitable for certain low-level tasks (like OS kernel programming), but it also creates problems when you move higher up in the level hierarchy, away from the bare metal.
C does have its place, but if you want to develop an application that's not closely tied to the hardware etc., C probably isn't as ideal a choice as you might think - and at the very least, if you *do* decide to use it after all, you should be aware of its weaknesses and pitfalls so you can avoid them.
It's just like with guns. Guns can be handled in a safe manner, but that doesn't mean you should give everyone a loaded and unlocked gun who's never touched one before in his life - chances are that accidents *will* happen. And while you can say that it's handler's fault, not the gun's, well... accidents still will happen. It's better to get off of one's high horse and try to minimise the number of actual incidents (and the severity of those incidents that do happen), since that's what counts in the end.
The best analogy would be having your Mom tell you can't get into the cookie jar so you turn around and ask Dad (at least in my house, we learned that you don't do that because bad things happen)
An even better analogy would be this: you're at your neighbour's house (maybe playing with their kids), and the neighbour tells you you can't raid their cookie jar, so you go to your own Mom and Dad to ask *them* for permission - and of course, they tell you they won't interfere with your neighbours' right to take care of their own affairs and manage their own cookies.
Some things can even be proven to be unpredictable; for instance, the Blum-Blum-Shub PRNG has been proven to be unpredictable if you don't have a copy of its internal state, because it is mathematically intractable to derive the state from the output.
Not quite true: it's been proven that telling apart the bits output by a BBS PRNG from truly random bits is at least as difficult as integer factorisation. Of course, that's still better than most other PRNGs, and generally good enough.
Indeed... with that reasoning, one could also advocate adding extra radioactivity to the Chernobyl region to make sure the level stays (more or less) constant. After all, if it doesn't change, people will just adapt, right?
No, but ever since I watched the Simpsons, I know that a lazy eye can be cured by wearing thick-rimmed glasses for two weeks. Oh, and while you're at it, also rub some medicated salve into your scalp to cure your dry skin and wear clunky shoes to fix your fallen arches.
I don't know, but I remember feeling the same way when DOOM first came out in 1993 - how more realistic could a video game get? But time has told that a *lot* of things could still be improved, and time will tell the same thing 10 or 12 years down the road from now again, too.
Keep in mind that in hindsight, everything's obvious - the fact that it's much easier for you to look back at the progress already made than it is to envision the progress that still lies in the future does not mean that there won't be any significant progress in the future anymore.
They're not going free, not at all. Look at the facts:
1) Fodder accounts are limited to BR6. That's *nothing* - you can go up to 24 at least if you pay. 2) Fodder accounts are time-limited - and what's more, they all expire at the same time. If you sign up now, you still have almost a year; if you sign up in early 2007, you'll only have a few months. 3) Fodder accounts are not able to use many of the better vehicles.
Also, keep in mind that you're competing against players who are more experienced (both in in-game and out-of-game terms) - you pretty much won't stand a chance unless you team up with a few experienced friends with paid accounts.
Oh yeah, and also don't forget that paid accounts aren't actually going away - they still make money off of those. And don't forget the in-game advertisements, either - unobtrusive, yes, but they exist, and SOE will definitely make some profit with those, too. Oh yeah, and if you want to be able to use BFRs, you'll also have to buy the add-on pack for that - even more money thrown at SOE.
All this is very, very far from allowing people to play for free. What they *are* doing is providing fodder for the more experienced (paying) players. Think about it: the only people SOE actually cares about are those who pay. Sure, showing the game to some in hopes of getting them to sign up eventually is also an idea, but I think the main idea behind this is to make things more fun for those who already are paying. Those who actually sign up for the free accounts are getting conned, and they probably don't even realise it - but then, the same thing's true in real life, too, so I should probably commend PlanetSide for being realistic in that area, at least.
Oh, come on. LOTR jumped the shark when that idiot Peter Jackson decided to butcher it in an attempt to get filthy rich (possibly earlier than that, too, given the animated movies from the 70s, but I don't think those were mainstream enough to really count).
Eh. Yeah, you're right, of course - I don't know what's wrong with me today.:P This is the second embarassing mistake already...
(And what's even more embarassing is that I originally *did* think of the Cantor set, but then dismissed that thought because "that one's countable". Ouch - I'm *really* stupid today. >_<)
For the same reason that business class flights are expensive. The majority of these are paid for by companies who don't care *that* much about whether a book costs 20 bucks or 80 - and this makes sense, too, since even if it only saves a few man-hours in the end, those few man-hours probably would've cost more than the 80 bucks the company shelled out for the book.
Well they mean "almost everywhere", which has a very precise meaning. i.e. except at a set of measure zero (finite or countably infinite set of points.)
It's perfectly possible for a non-countable set to have measure zero, too. It's been a while, but IIRC, the transcendental numbers are the (or at least, a) standard example for this.
Slashdot Mirror
Please mod up the parent comment - it definitely deserves a "+1, Insightful". If you put every last bit of functionality into one device, you'll end up with one gadget that can do everything but excels at nothing. I don't want to say camera phones aren't useful, for example, but the fact that my cell phone has a built-in cam does not mean I'm going to get rid of my digital camera. The former is good for taking quick snapshots when you don't care about what they actually look like (for example, when you just want to show something to a friend at a later point), but if I want lasting pictures, I'd never use a camera phone.
The same goes for MP3 players and other things, too.
It's not an application. It's a plain old HTML "500 Internal Server Error" page sent by the server with a braindead content type, that's all.
1. Create a Cafépress shop based on a random, idiotic idea.
2. Submit a story to Slashdot on April Fool's Day, where apparently every crappy submission is posted, so that hordes of people will look at your shop - and some will actually buy your stuff, too.
3. Profit!!!
Seriously, though... dear Slashdot editors, has anyone ever told you that April Fool's jokes are supposed to be FUNNY? Look it up...
I like it, actually. Is there any chance that we'll be able to keep this, as a user-selectable skin or something similar? :)
For a year? A couple of thousands.
Linux at least *does* have support for a number of TPM chips (these reside in drivers/char/tpm . You don't have to enable the relevant drivers, of course, but chances are your mainstream distribution has done so.
Whether that actually *means* anything is another matter entirely, of course, and as long as you stick to free software, you shouldn't have to worry about anything really (one should hope). But it's not true that Linux doesn't support these things.
What, you believe that changing focus settings in TweakUI actually does anything useful? How I wish I still was that naive. >_>
I don't know... I don't agree with that. I often post critical comments as well, but so far I'm still reading Slashdot - the criticism is mostly intended as a "you're wading into dangerous waters, guys, so please try to keep the quality up a bit".
:)
Of course, you may say that whether I (or, for that matter, the GP) read Slashdot doesn't matter, but that's not true: Slashdot's ultimate goal is to make money (by showing ads), and the "news for nerds" are just a way of making people come back and ensure ad impressions. So in that sense, we *do* matter. It's all a tit-for-tat, really - readers get news they're (presumably) interested in; Slashdot gets ad impressions, which make them money.
I'm sure you can see by now what the problem is, too: Slashdot's quality has slowly but steadily declined, and this story is just a perfect example of what's going wrong. If Slashdot isn't living up to its promise of delivering interesting, meaningful content anymore ("stuff that matters"), then readers are effectively being cheated, and *will* leave. And of course, that's something the Slashdot folks won't want to happen - as said above, readers mean ad impressions, which mean money.
You may ask why *we* care, of course, and why we don't simply leave when the site becomes crappier and crappier. Well, the reason is simply that we don't dislike Slashdot as such - we just dislike what it has become. I at least don't want to leave Slashdot for good, or at least not until I've tried to improve things again. I could burn all bridges and leave, but I'd much rather have Slashdot become a news site with at least *some* quality again - the way it used to be in the past.
That's why I'm complaining, and that (I guess) is why others are complaining, too. If you feel that stories like this one are fine, that's OK (although I'd really have to question your sanity in that case), but you should also respect others' disagreement with you.
And in particular, you shouldn't use reasoning that amounts to, essentially, "put up or shut up" - it just shows that you don't have any real arguments.
Or, in words that might be easier to understand: "If you are disliking grandparent comment, leave it. Go away. Don't read; mainly, don't post!"
Time to switch to F-Secure. At least Finland is still a relatively sane place (from what I hear, anyway)...
The funny thing about that is that "Arial" is just M$'s new name for the Helvetica font cut - which, of course, is named after and was developed in Switzerland (and thus in Europe). Given that, "arial bombardment" is ironic on more than one level...
He does have a point, though. It *is* possible to use the standard C library string functions in a safe manner, but it's difficult and error-prone - and if you make just one mistake, it might well be enough to open an exploitable hole in your program.
It's important to realise that programmers aren't perfect. "unsafe" programmers, as you call them, are not something you'll ever be able to get rid of; your best bet is thus to give them tools that make it as easy as possible to write safe code and that will mitigate the impact when things *do* go wrong - in other words, tools that will fail in a defined and safe manner.
One of the problems with C (actually, one of its strengths, too, of course, depending your point of view) is that it's really only optimised for speed, and a lot of compromises were and still are made there. Similarly, another problem is that C is intended as a very low-level language - a hardware-independent macro-assembler with automatic register allocation, if you will. This makes it very suitable for certain low-level tasks (like OS kernel programming), but it also creates problems when you move higher up in the level hierarchy, away from the bare metal.
C does have its place, but if you want to develop an application that's not closely tied to the hardware etc., C probably isn't as ideal a choice as you might think - and at the very least, if you *do* decide to use it after all, you should be aware of its weaknesses and pitfalls so you can avoid them.
It's just like with guns. Guns can be handled in a safe manner, but that doesn't mean you should give everyone a loaded and unlocked gun who's never touched one before in his life - chances are that accidents *will* happen. And while you can say that it's handler's fault, not the gun's, well... accidents still will happen. It's better to get off of one's high horse and try to minimise the number of actual incidents (and the severity of those incidents that do happen), since that's what counts in the end.
An even better analogy would be this: you're at your neighbour's house (maybe playing with their kids), and the neighbour tells you you can't raid their cookie jar, so you go to your own Mom and Dad to ask *them* for permission - and of course, they tell you they won't interfere with your neighbours' right to take care of their own affairs and manage their own cookies.
Not quite true: it's been proven that telling apart the bits output by a BBS PRNG from truly random bits is at least as difficult as integer factorisation. Of course, that's still better than most other PRNGs, and generally good enough.
Indeed... with that reasoning, one could also advocate adding extra radioactivity to the Chernobyl region to make sure the level stays (more or less) constant. After all, if it doesn't change, people will just adapt, right?
No shit, sherlock... after all, TFA says, quite clearly,
Note: this is not an official splashscreen; we cobbled it together by adding an Apple logo to the member list.
So, sorry, but there's nothing particularly sinister about the photoshopped image.
No, but ever since I watched the Simpsons, I know that a lazy eye can be cured by wearing thick-rimmed glasses for two weeks. Oh, and while you're at it, also rub some medicated salve into your scalp to cure your dry skin and wear clunky shoes to fix your fallen arches.
I don't know, but I remember feeling the same way when DOOM first came out in 1993 - how more realistic could a video game get? But time has told that a *lot* of things could still be improved, and time will tell the same thing 10 or 12 years down the road from now again, too.
Keep in mind that in hindsight, everything's obvious - the fact that it's much easier for you to look back at the progress already made than it is to envision the progress that still lies in the future does not mean that there won't be any significant progress in the future anymore.
They're not going free, not at all. Look at the facts:
1) Fodder accounts are limited to BR6. That's *nothing* - you can go up to 24 at least if you pay.
2) Fodder accounts are time-limited - and what's more, they all expire at the same time. If you sign up now, you still have almost a year; if you sign up in early 2007, you'll only have a few months.
3) Fodder accounts are not able to use many of the better vehicles.
Also, keep in mind that you're competing against players who are more experienced (both in in-game and out-of-game terms) - you pretty much won't stand a chance unless you team up with a few experienced friends with paid accounts.
Oh yeah, and also don't forget that paid accounts aren't actually going away - they still make money off of those. And don't forget the in-game advertisements, either - unobtrusive, yes, but they exist, and SOE will definitely make some profit with those, too. Oh yeah, and if you want to be able to use BFRs, you'll also have to buy the add-on pack for that - even more money thrown at SOE.
All this is very, very far from allowing people to play for free. What they *are* doing is providing fodder for the more experienced (paying) players. Think about it: the only people SOE actually cares about are those who pay. Sure, showing the game to some in hopes of getting them to sign up eventually is also an idea, but I think the main idea behind this is to make things more fun for those who already are paying. Those who actually sign up for the free accounts are getting conned, and they probably don't even realise it - but then, the same thing's true in real life, too, so I should probably commend PlanetSide for being realistic in that area, at least.
It's called astroturfing...
Thanks - you summed up my feelings quite perfectly, and I wish I had some mod points to give you a +1 Insightful...
The content part of Sony took over, and the hardware part was subdued.
Oh, come on. LOTR jumped the shark when that idiot Peter Jackson decided to butcher it in an attempt to get filthy rich (possibly earlier than that, too, given the animated movies from the 70s, but I don't think those were mainstream enough to really count).
Eh. Yeah, you're right, of course - I don't know what's wrong with me today. :P This is the second embarassing mistake already...
(And what's even more embarassing is that I originally *did* think of the Cantor set, but then dismissed that thought because "that one's countable". Ouch - I'm *really* stupid today. >_<)
For the same reason that business class flights are expensive. The majority of these are paid for by companies who don't care *that* much about whether a book costs 20 bucks or 80 - and this makes sense, too, since even if it only saves a few man-hours in the end, those few man-hours probably would've cost more than the 80 bucks the company shelled out for the book.