Looks like The Guardian is smearing its FUD around again. As far as I can tell they have managed to do what the passport was designed for. Firstly, the key is on the inside of the passport for a good reason. It's not there to stop anyone reading the data, it's there to stop everyone reading it. You need to be in possession of the passport to read the key and gain access to the data on it, which is better than having (as someone else said) a "master key" that can read any passport. Nobody can steal your identity by holding a RFID reader next to you on the Tube since the data is encrypted with a key that can only be found by someone in possession of your passport. The postman scenario suggested by the article is quite unlikely and if this is the best way of finding the key they can come up with it's a pretty sorry attempt.
Also, the data that you could actually read is printed on the passport anyway, so if someone stole it they wouldn't need to crack it and read the data to steal your identity. They already stole it by stealing your passport.
It's also good that the data is stored on the passport rather than in a centralised database that could be compromised with catastrophic implications.
It sounds like the passport will allow check in to be more secure and quicker. The 20% error rate in the face recognition is high, but this can be reduced by scanning a set number of times to eliminate any false results. I would be more worried that they're using face recognition in place of a more proven biometric such as a fingerprint.
I would say that this new system presents a more technical hurdle for forgers. They may be able to overcome it in time, but without any ability to rewrite the contents of a passport (at least none yet shown) it seems likely that they would have to create their own RFIDs. I'm sure that forgeries will be produced given time, but right now I don't see this as anything to get worked up about. People fear computers, especially the general public, and they're right to fear government computer projects because they're usually both expensive and flawed due to excessive compromise, but we who read slashdot should be able to look at this with a degree of balance and question any articles printed in the mainstream media that weigh in heavily on one side of a debate.
Seriously, I've seen this guy on various interviews and TV appearances, read about him online, and the guy seems completely mad. I'm not being facetious, the poor man is literally crazy, and looks like he's tearing himself apart in a continual battle between what's coming out of his mouth and reality.
Look at him, he's always jumpy, he has a huge vein in his head that throbs all the time, he screams really loud whenever he gets the chance to extoll the virtues of XBox 360 or Windows Vista, but has a constant grimace of a smile hoisted across his face when being asked difficult questions. He shakes his head before everything he says when he's lying (e.g. when he says how they're On Track for Vista) as if he doesn't believe it. He's so tense it makes me feel tense just watching him.
The guy needs to rest, or leave Microsoft. Banning his kids from google or ipods is just symptomatic of his increasing panic as he tries his very best to banish anything that suggests Microsoft is losing the race from his life. Any rational man would realise that Google and iPod are great products and it doesn't matter if his kids use it. It would be something to aim at. I would be saying "You think that iPod is fucking awesome, son, well just you wait for the crazy shit daddy is going to pull out of his ass," I certainly wouldn't be banning them from my household. I would use one.
I'm genuinely concerned for his health. He really shouldn't be in the position that he's in, his buddy Bill Gates put him there to act as a forcefield between Gates and the reality of Microsoft. And while BillyG sits back with a fat spliff and chills between dictating endless new features for Vista, poor old Ballmer is shipped around the country to give uncomfortable interviews and spew his insane Microsoft evangelism. I think he's the only Microsoft evangelist there is right now, and he's trying his best to be a one man army. Shame he's losing the battle.
Netstat. Ooh I'm connected to some weird server. Ethereal, ooh I see a password being sent to join this IRC server/channel. Choose a suitable name with X-Chat or BitchX and join the channel, see the commands fly by. But don't say anything.
I've done it many times whenever I've managed to isolate one of these trojans in Virtual PC. I've also watched the commanders having a great big "LOL" in channel, and felt awful that if I said anything it'd blow my cover. Try it today.
And Unipage, from what I can tell from the article, is not. Or it is only as safe as the reader software. It supports JavaScript, Flash and all this other crap that would easily make me wary of opening any unipage document. Plus isn't this more of a.doc killer than a pdf killer? The whole point of PDF is that it's portable, which does not mean it's portable to different architectures, it means it's portable to different methods of reproduction, and will look the same on whatever media it's viewed on. While this isn't very beneficial to those who read everything on a screen, it is beneficial to anyone who wants to ensure that their document looks right when they send it to the printers.
I also thought IE did this years ago with those MHT files (Web Archive) that nobody ever used...
I wouldn't care if Microsoft had Jimmi Hendrix doing their startup sound, let alone Fripp. I have never been able to tolerate any of the Windows startup sounds for more than a few weeks. Every Windows startup sound has an air of grandeur that does not befit an operating system. Every time my computer boots it yells "I AM WONDERFUL" at me, rather than "I am ready" or "welcome", right back from "TA-DAAAAAA" in Windows 3.1. Every time it starts up my OS feels the need to tell me how impressive it is. Every time it starts up, I know that its air of self satisfaction is misplaced. Douglas Adams predicted this.
Why are Microsoft getting old prog rockers to make their startup sounds? I watched the video and they're all so full of horse shit. I would like to personally inform Microsoft that an operating system should not be an experience, and it certainly should not aim to be one. An OS should generally work so well that the user doesn't even think about it. Talk to any Windows user, and ask them what their experience of Windows is. They'll tell you that it's a bastard when Windows search doesn't find stuff you know is there, they'll tell you that it's annoying when autorun won't remember to take no action on CDs that contain one jpeg, or when popups appear asking you whether you want to run ActiveX controls, or that it's slow to start up, or whatever. They probably won't list anything good about it, and you know why that is? It's because they use it every day, and bad things carry so much more weight than good things.
So, when Microsoft considers what its OS should sound like they should remember one thing: if the user notices the sounds, they're crap. If the user even remembers the sounds easily, they're crap. A six second sample on boot is an exceptionally bad idea.
I'm not a Mac zealot, but they've got it right. Turn it on, and it goes 'bong', and that's it. 'Bong' says it all. It says 'I've turned on, I'm booting, and everything is cool.' It's a simple, reassuring noise. Microsoft's equivalent is 'wooowooowooowoooziiininininintiwiwiwiddlewiddlewi ddlewoo', which is too long, slightly sinister, and suggests an air of flakyness, a slightly misplaced attempt to sound impressive. It's certainly not a sound that conveys solidarity or reliability. It suggests that the OS is crap, but we've given it a really impressive boot sound in the hope you won't notice.
This post has turned out rather long and rambling, especially since it's about something as simple as a windows boot noise, but I'll finish off with some points for Microsoft to follow when considering their Windows Vista soundscape:
1. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
2. Boot/shutdown sound no longer than 2 seconds, informational/alert sounds no longer than a second.
3. When you talk about confident sounds for Windows, please don't try to make Windows Vista sound like it is confident, but try to give me, the user, a feeling of confidence. Reassure me.
4. Don't hire old prog rockers. They have spent too long trying to be noticed and trying to sound impressive. You can use them for the sound that plays at the start of your keynotes, but not the sound that plays whenever I turn on my computer.
The DNA of the virus is not the important part. The important part recognised by the immune system is the protein shell around the DNA (or RNA) known as the capsid, which is recognised as foreign by the immune system. In order to immunize people to a particular virus we need an antigen that bears a close (or exact) resemblance to the protein structure of the capsid of the pathogen in question so that antibodies may recognise the foreign structure swiftly in future, preferably disposing of them before they infect cells.
The genetic materials inside the capsid do not have any effect until a cell is infected. Pumping viral DNA into your bloodstream will do nothing. It will be assimilated and you will still be susceptible to the pathogen 0from which it was copied.
If future technologies could synthesise a viral capsid with no genetic code inside, then we might be on the right track. We would still get the common cold, though.
Quake III was all stand-alone areas because they had to mishmash what the art and level design folks were doing into a coherent game. Id was going through a rough patch during Quake III, Romero fucked off and Carmack had no vision of how the game should look or play, therefore there was no leadership on the project, so no story, and no fluidity. All the levels were stand alone not by design, but really by chance and failure to manage the project properly.
Quake 3 was built during a really trying time for id, and its quite shocking that it got the respect it did when compared with arguably more interesting and capable games like the original UT out there, which could support more players in bigger environments but admittedly had an equally vague backstory.
This guy has pretty much just covered Amiga WorkBench, probably one of the most friendly and logical desktops ever. It used an "AppFolder" concept way back in 1985. Even whole diskettes could be appfolders, so when you put a disk in a huge fat icon appeared for the game/program that you could just double click to run (or right click to open/browse/whatever). This is so much nicer than Windows autorun. Essentially it was a slightly nicer MacOS, from my point of view anyway.
Workbench was ahead of its time, and it's "gadgets, tools, drawers, projects" paradigm makes a lot more sense today than "widgets, applications, folders, documents". For instance, my video editing program and IDE both save projects, not documents, and I use tools to perform tasks, not "applications", which makes no grammatical sense.
This article is pretty much correct. There are simply too many applications written for Windows where some enterprising young bastard has done away with the familiar and practical Windows widgets in favour of some overcomplex (or often over simplified) toolkit or skinning system. Most of these applications are therefore not compatible with accessibility features like tooltips and scalable fonts, international fonts, keyboard shortcuts, or even proper copy and pasting.
There is too much of this bad innovation that's spurred by the fact that MFC/WTL isn't terribly exciting and doesn't have enough pictures of naked animé girls. As you might have guessed, I hate skins. I think they're a prime example of a breakdown between function and form. So-called "innovative" interfaces break away from the Windows look and feel and clutter the desktop. If I have my desktop themed the way I want it, I resent applications that do not follow that theme. I resent crappy software that makes the text in the titlebar huge, italic Times New Roman, for example. I resent Quicktime Player. I would (and pretty much do) resent Winamp but I let it off the hook because by default it's a good example of skins done right. There's no useless bloat there (see Windows Media Player for the other side of the coin). My basic rule is: if you have to break away from the standard set of windowing controls presented to you by WTL because you feel your interface is not ergonomic, this is a failure state.
There are some special cases where it's not possible to use standard Windows controls, such as cross-platform software. But even here, suites like wxWidgets exist to allow you to keep the standard look-and-feel of the target OS.
I guess what I'm arguing for is for my desktop to be consistent across applications. It may be fair to say that Windows does not satisfy interface designers because it doesn't allow them to customize as freely as they may want to, but I believe that some restrictions are good. I am more than certain that I prefer Microsoft's idea of what a basic user interface should look like (well, Microsoft's pre-XP idea anyway) to what a 15-year-old manga fanatic or an overly arrogant designer thinks would be a totally awesome interface. Microsoft's is generally clean and simple, as it should be.
Some notes before I go:
Yes, I know that Office 2003 totally deviates from the typical style of Windows, but Office products tend to give hints about which way Microsoft would like the general look and feel of the interface to go. It also still works like a standard Windows interface with all accessibility, tab order, and customisation and hotkey features available.
I also fully understand that Windows may not be the best interface out there, and that MFC/WTL/ATL/STL totally sucks dude lollers! It's pretty good and consistent though.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I just want something that fits elegantly into my desktop paradigm, accepts my chosen font sizes and theme, and doesn't look like a pile of ass compared to all my other apps. Longhorn does not look like it's going to help me much in this regard. I just hope they don't make everything look like WMP.
I mean, did you expect them to not be bastards about it? "Lol guys you're crooks, I've got a ton of your IP right here and substantial evidence that you're conducting illegal practices". You think the company is going to say "Oh ok then Chip yeah you're right, we never realised that before! Better clean up our act!" Bullshit. What sort of world do you live in? They're going to say "Yeah we know it's illegal and we'd rather not have problems like you. Get off our back, little man. We're going to fight you in court to save face. We know you don't stand a chance against our MegaLawyers. Now we'll just be taking all your hardware and manipulating the legal system into deleting all that IP of ours you had the right to download onto it."
Expecting Corporate America to be ethical and legal is extremely naïve. It will be as unethical and illegal as it can possibly be whilst still being able to smack down people like Chip who have a "hilarious" moral objection to their nefarious dealings. Corporations work on legal loopholes and avoiding prosecution. They certainly do not run on ethics.
Even if he is going to go smear the company's name and product (which he threatened to do in the letter, at least he mentioned that any case would get a lot of press attention and then proceeded to threaten legal action) on justifiable grounds, the company would obviously be very interested in not allowing that to happen.
In other words, even if Salzenberg has a point, the company don't want his point to get out there, so they're attacking him regarding something slightly different in order to cost him a lot of money and stop him from doing this sort of stuff again. I agree with you: Salzenberg took the wrong action. He was trying to be ethical with what looks like a totally inethical company. He should have either just resigned or gone for legal action immediately. Instead he gave the company the opportunity to shoot first, and it'll probably be a headshot.
Having just read the letter, I can only conclude that HMS was right in seeking legal defence against Salzenberg immediately to protect themselves. Perhaps he should have sought legal advice immediately instead of [i]threatening the company he works for with legal action[/i]. He made some hefty allegations in that letter, and also disclosed that he had been snooping around software that he wasn't involved with but had "the right to access" as a Senior Programmer. IANAL and I obviously haven't read Salzenberg's contract with HMS, but I would imagine that if he's not working on the code and browsing other people's projects from home in the interests of taking legal action, this gives HMS grounds to file a suit against him or at least gives them an incentive to shoot first.
This all looks to me like an ill considered vigilante mission gone horribly wrong. It's like shouting "hay guys, you're all crooked bastards and you should be in jail. I'm thinking about taking you fuckers to court! Can I keep my job though? Don't sue me!" What he should have done was file for legal action immediately, and/or resign from the company on legal/moral grounds. Resignation would have looked a lot better, would have relieved him of some of the moral issues, and would not look like he was about to try and sue the company for a ton of money.
I agree with his stance and his moral position, but this was a perfectly stupid and arrogant way to handle the situation. As a Perl hacker I wish Salzenberg the best, but I can't agree with the way he's fought this battle so far.
I think a legion of slashdot readers blasting these contact details and sending trollish e-mails will only worsen this guy's situation: "Then he got his legion of goons to come to his defence, causing massive problems with our e-mail infrastructure and bringing our website to a crawl, before this had even got to court." That cannot be good.
I would advise any slashdot readers considering trolling this e-mail address to think carefully about the implications their messages might have on this guy, and refrain from contacting HMS unless they have something worthwhile and appropriate to contribute.
I agree with the OP, and in my opinion the market is partly to blame. As the gaming industry grows in size and competes with the movie industry, we see a focus on making more money per game which means making sound investments in sure fire games that will definitely do well. Thus, we get fewer innovative games. Things in the industry now seem to operate on the "we did this last time and it sold well, so let's do it again but with better graphics" (Halo -> Halo 2), or "someone else did this and it did really well, so let's copy it and focus on the racing missions" (GTA -> NFS:U)
In other words, it's more costly to make games and for this reason publishers aren't going to invest money into new genres and unfamiliar, original concepts because there's no market data to show how well they might do. Only a few developers/publishers have the guts to do this (Maxis are working on Spore which seems pretty original but is, as Will Wright puts it, basically all the fun bits from Populous and Civ and a bunch of other games, and Introversion recently released Cannon Fodder... Erm.. I mean, Darwinia. Both look sort of original. Lionhead's Black & White was quite original too.)
As with the music industry, the gaming equivalent of pop and r&b (FPS) tends to occupy the top of the charts, so that's what publishers make more of. The problem with the gaming industry is that small, independent developers making fun games rarely find a label/publisher to release those games on. In the music industry there are many indie labels for releasing music to the underground, and bands can use these to gain recognition and revenue and move up the ranks until they're spotted by a big label. There is no equivalent scene in the gaming industry and every attempt to run an indie publisher has pretty much failed.
I worry that the big bucks development costs of popular games scare off smaller developers who might be considering setting up a games company. There's no prospects. "You want to get into the games industry? HAR HAR HAR" is usually the response given to any aspirational young developer who wants to make their own game. They worry that they'll never find a publisher. In the past, there were shareware houses like Apogee that produced various games and funded development by small independent software houses. There's no equivalent of that now that I've heard of.
I suppose that ultimately we're headed for a revolution. To keep the industry afloat the public will demand choice and innovation, otherwise they'll simply get bored of video games. Steam, despite its reputation, was probably the first step towards a new way of publishing games that is very accessible to independent developers publishing smaller games, since it bypasses the publishers who generally aren't interested in these companies anyway. The download model also works well for shareware-style publication, i.e. you can publish the first episode of a game on your download service, and people can pay a fee to play the next episode(s). They could even buy each episode as it becomes available (obviously at relatively low cost).
Older games didn't suffer these problems because back in the 80's and early 90's all PC and home computer publishers (i.e. not Nintendo) were pretty much small, independent, and would publish nearly any half decent game they could get their hands on. So we saw more diversity and experimentation with the capabilities of new platforms. I sincerely hope that this will happen again with download platforms.
Why is this relevant? You think Microsoft would change the standard so that no existing RSS reader on any platform could handle it? That's bullshit. Since RSS is based on XML it's easy to extend and add features to it that will simply be ignored by existing readers.
Microsoft are big on XML. Their new office format will be completely open and XML compliant. I see no reason to believe that Microsoft will "basterdize" the RSS format, a format that has to be compatible with existing readers for its uptake to be guaranteed (i.e. no RSS publisher will embrace the extensions if they are incompatible with the majority of reader apps). The most Microsoft will do is say "Hey, you get a better RSS experience if you use the reader included in Longhorn since it is compatible with the new RSS extensions introduced by Microsoft".
I think this is solely to do with improving usability and enhancing user experience, which is what Microsoft desperately need to do if Longhorn is going to beat OS X, and as someone who's written RSS parsers I welcome this addition to the standard, it seems like a really practical and useful idea.
Oh god. This was rated 5? Currently there is no way to organise data in a sensible list format. For example, I'm reading an RSS news feed, but there is no RSS standard on how to date the headlines. RSS readers currently have to cache the old RSS file and look for changes to ascertain when new headlines appear and infer the date based on when the new headline appeared. A sensible ordering/dating system would make RSS a great deal more powerful, and a great deal more sensible.
Alright, I just posted a comment where I said that I wasn't going to bash Cringely this time. Well, I just read the article and he's demonstrated his ignorance and lack of cognitive ability again. Here are the answers to his questions.
What happened to the PowerPC's supposed performance advantage over Intel?
Absolutely nothing. The article he refers to in Question 2 answers his question here. The introduction of the PPC 970MP with a 90/65nm fab process would allow the G5 CPU to hit 3.5 GHz and use less power too. This wasn't bullshit. The G5 was clearly faster for raw calculating power (agreed, the linked article shows some dire results for MySQL and so on, but this is more likely down to how the OS handles threading, or how MySQL was compiled).
What happened to Apple's 64-bit operating system?
Nothing. I assume that the new Apples will not use Xeons or Itaniums, but Intel's next desktop chip (Pentium D?) with AMD64/EM64T 64-bit extensions.
Where the heck is AMD?
AMD's fab plants are running to maximum capacity, as are IBM's (all next gen consoles are using IBM's chips). They are not the sensible choice. Intel has the capacity and the know-how. Apple are also free to switch to AMD if Intel turns out to suck, although this will cause another uproar.
Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers?
To prepare corporate customers and their user base for the switch. To give developers time to port software to the new architecture so that it will be ready on release of the new system. Cringely's answer to this question is stolen from The Register, and it is unlikely that Apple will suffer greatly from this. They have other products such as their iPod and iTunes services to support themselves. Sure, sales will fall, but it's my prediction that AAPL will fall and then pick up as market analysts predict a rise in Apple sales in the next few months due to a new product release (Intel Macs). The Osborne Effect doesn't really hold water, Apple already have a development system available, and have already ported their OS. They have been planning this for five years. They do have a product to deliver, and they are very, very good at hype.
Is this all really about Digital Rights Management?
He's right on this one. No.
He then bangs on about Microsoft for a bit, as if Apple would ever be a threat to Microsoft, who have a whole new OS on the cards and have been running on these fabled Intel processor things for decades. I'll tell you the real reason: IBM have given Apple the cold shoulder. Look at it this way: Apple represents so little business for IBM that it doesn't make sense to keep developing new chips for them. IBM have their work cut out with the next gen consoles, and Apple is a teeny tiny spec compared to the massive quantity of chips IBM will have to produce to meet demand for these consoles.
AMD aren't that interesting to Apple, they're already at maximum capacity as I mentioned, and they're quite happy producing chips for PCs. They also don't have the marketing clout of Intel and they're less well known. Apple chose Intel because they've been dumped by IBM, and Intel are more than happy to help Apple out because it secures them some more market penetration, which they need because they've made a considerable amount of blunders recently. Both are helping eachother out. It's simple symbiosis. If they didn't, their futures are unpredictable.
Intel could still have bought Apple as Cringely states, but I deem this to be highly unlikely. Intel is not in a good position to make acquisitions like this, and value their PC market a lot too.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh dear me. From http://www.3dvisual.com.au/html/vortex.html
"The Vortex System Console
- Windows XP Platform- 7.1 20-bit Audio THX Cirtified
- Entertainment Interface Shell- Dolby Digital-EX & DTS-ES
- 3D Profile Settings- 24 Bit Crystalizer
- Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz, 800 MHZ FSB - 109 db SNR Playback
- 2 GB DDR2 SDRAM- IR Remote Control
- Data Storage BFG Nvidia 6800 GTOC
- 2 7,200 RPM 300 GB drives- 256 MB GDDR3
- External 16 x Dual Layer DVD RAN Drive - 370 MHz Core Clock
- Ethernet Port- 1000 MHz Mem Clock
- 6 LISB 2.0 & 1 Firewire 400 Port555 million verticesIsec
- 32.0 GBIsec Mean Bandwidth"
This is meaningless nonsense. "20-bit Audio THX Cirtified". Dear god. Plus the system and glasses look awful.
Looks like The Guardian is smearing its FUD around again. As far as I can tell they have managed to do what the passport was designed for. Firstly, the key is on the inside of the passport for a good reason. It's not there to stop anyone reading the data, it's there to stop everyone reading it. You need to be in possession of the passport to read the key and gain access to the data on it, which is better than having (as someone else said) a "master key" that can read any passport. Nobody can steal your identity by holding a RFID reader next to you on the Tube since the data is encrypted with a key that can only be found by someone in possession of your passport. The postman scenario suggested by the article is quite unlikely and if this is the best way of finding the key they can come up with it's a pretty sorry attempt.
Also, the data that you could actually read is printed on the passport anyway, so if someone stole it they wouldn't need to crack it and read the data to steal your identity. They already stole it by stealing your passport.
It's also good that the data is stored on the passport rather than in a centralised database that could be compromised with catastrophic implications.
It sounds like the passport will allow check in to be more secure and quicker. The 20% error rate in the face recognition is high, but this can be reduced by scanning a set number of times to eliminate any false results. I would be more worried that they're using face recognition in place of a more proven biometric such as a fingerprint.
I would say that this new system presents a more technical hurdle for forgers. They may be able to overcome it in time, but without any ability to rewrite the contents of a passport (at least none yet shown) it seems likely that they would have to create their own RFIDs. I'm sure that forgeries will be produced given time, but right now I don't see this as anything to get worked up about. People fear computers, especially the general public, and they're right to fear government computer projects because they're usually both expensive and flawed due to excessive compromise, but we who read slashdot should be able to look at this with a degree of balance and question any articles printed in the mainstream media that weigh in heavily on one side of a debate.
Seriously, I've seen this guy on various interviews and TV appearances, read about him online, and the guy seems completely mad. I'm not being facetious, the poor man is literally crazy, and looks like he's tearing himself apart in a continual battle between what's coming out of his mouth and reality.
Look at him, he's always jumpy, he has a huge vein in his head that throbs all the time, he screams really loud whenever he gets the chance to extoll the virtues of XBox 360 or Windows Vista, but has a constant grimace of a smile hoisted across his face when being asked difficult questions. He shakes his head before everything he says when he's lying (e.g. when he says how they're On Track for Vista) as if he doesn't believe it. He's so tense it makes me feel tense just watching him.
The guy needs to rest, or leave Microsoft. Banning his kids from google or ipods is just symptomatic of his increasing panic as he tries his very best to banish anything that suggests Microsoft is losing the race from his life. Any rational man would realise that Google and iPod are great products and it doesn't matter if his kids use it. It would be something to aim at. I would be saying "You think that iPod is fucking awesome, son, well just you wait for the crazy shit daddy is going to pull out of his ass," I certainly wouldn't be banning them from my household. I would use one.
I'm genuinely concerned for his health. He really shouldn't be in the position that he's in, his buddy Bill Gates put him there to act as a forcefield between Gates and the reality of Microsoft. And while BillyG sits back with a fat spliff and chills between dictating endless new features for Vista, poor old Ballmer is shipped around the country to give uncomfortable interviews and spew his insane Microsoft evangelism. I think he's the only Microsoft evangelist there is right now, and he's trying his best to be a one man army. Shame he's losing the battle.
Netstat. Ooh I'm connected to some weird server. Ethereal, ooh I see a password being sent to join this IRC server/channel. Choose a suitable name with X-Chat or BitchX and join the channel, see the commands fly by. But don't say anything.
I've done it many times whenever I've managed to isolate one of these trojans in Virtual PC. I've also watched the commanders having a great big "LOL" in channel, and felt awful that if I said anything it'd blow my cover. Try it today.
And Unipage, from what I can tell from the article, is not. Or it is only as safe as the reader software. It supports JavaScript, Flash and all this other crap that would easily make me wary of opening any unipage document. Plus isn't this more of a .doc killer than a pdf killer? The whole point of PDF is that it's portable, which does not mean it's portable to different architectures, it means it's portable to different methods of reproduction, and will look the same on whatever media it's viewed on. While this isn't very beneficial to those who read everything on a screen, it is beneficial to anyone who wants to ensure that their document looks right when they send it to the printers.
I also thought IE did this years ago with those MHT files (Web Archive) that nobody ever used...
I wouldn't care if Microsoft had Jimmi Hendrix doing their startup sound, let alone Fripp. I have never been able to tolerate any of the Windows startup sounds for more than a few weeks. Every Windows startup sound has an air of grandeur that does not befit an operating system. Every time my computer boots it yells "I AM WONDERFUL" at me, rather than "I am ready" or "welcome", right back from "TA-DAAAAAA" in Windows 3.1. Every time it starts up my OS feels the need to tell me how impressive it is. Every time it starts up, I know that its air of self satisfaction is misplaced. Douglas Adams predicted this.
i ddlewoo', which is too long, slightly sinister, and suggests an air of flakyness, a slightly misplaced attempt to sound impressive. It's certainly not a sound that conveys solidarity or reliability. It suggests that the OS is crap, but we've given it a really impressive boot sound in the hope you won't notice.
Why are Microsoft getting old prog rockers to make their startup sounds? I watched the video and they're all so full of horse shit. I would like to personally inform Microsoft that an operating system should not be an experience, and it certainly should not aim to be one. An OS should generally work so well that the user doesn't even think about it. Talk to any Windows user, and ask them what their experience of Windows is. They'll tell you that it's a bastard when Windows search doesn't find stuff you know is there, they'll tell you that it's annoying when autorun won't remember to take no action on CDs that contain one jpeg, or when popups appear asking you whether you want to run ActiveX controls, or that it's slow to start up, or whatever. They probably won't list anything good about it, and you know why that is? It's because they use it every day, and bad things carry so much more weight than good things.
So, when Microsoft considers what its OS should sound like they should remember one thing: if the user notices the sounds, they're crap. If the user even remembers the sounds easily, they're crap. A six second sample on boot is an exceptionally bad idea.
I'm not a Mac zealot, but they've got it right. Turn it on, and it goes 'bong', and that's it. 'Bong' says it all. It says 'I've turned on, I'm booting, and everything is cool.' It's a simple, reassuring noise. Microsoft's equivalent is 'wooowooowooowoooziiininininintiwiwiwiddlewiddlew
This post has turned out rather long and rambling, especially since it's about something as simple as a windows boot noise, but I'll finish off with some points for Microsoft to follow when considering their Windows Vista soundscape:
1. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
2. Boot/shutdown sound no longer than 2 seconds, informational/alert sounds no longer than a second.
3. When you talk about confident sounds for Windows, please don't try to make Windows Vista sound like it is confident, but try to give me, the user, a feeling of confidence. Reassure me.
4. Don't hire old prog rockers. They have spent too long trying to be noticed and trying to sound impressive. You can use them for the sound that plays at the start of your keynotes, but not the sound that plays whenever I turn on my computer.
The DNA of the virus is not the important part. The important part recognised by the immune system is the protein shell around the DNA (or RNA) known as the capsid, which is recognised as foreign by the immune system. In order to immunize people to a particular virus we need an antigen that bears a close (or exact) resemblance to the protein structure of the capsid of the pathogen in question so that antibodies may recognise the foreign structure swiftly in future, preferably disposing of them before they infect cells.
The genetic materials inside the capsid do not have any effect until a cell is infected. Pumping viral DNA into your bloodstream will do nothing. It will be assimilated and you will still be susceptible to the pathogen 0from which it was copied.
If future technologies could synthesise a viral capsid with no genetic code inside, then we might be on the right track. We would still get the common cold, though.
Quake III was all stand-alone areas because they had to mishmash what the art and level design folks were doing into a coherent game. Id was going through a rough patch during Quake III, Romero fucked off and Carmack had no vision of how the game should look or play, therefore there was no leadership on the project, so no story, and no fluidity. All the levels were stand alone not by design, but really by chance and failure to manage the project properly.
Quake 3 was built during a really trying time for id, and its quite shocking that it got the respect it did when compared with arguably more interesting and capable games like the original UT out there, which could support more players in bigger environments but admittedly had an equally vague backstory.
This guy has pretty much just covered Amiga WorkBench, probably one of the most friendly and logical desktops ever. It used an "AppFolder" concept way back in 1985. Even whole diskettes could be appfolders, so when you put a disk in a huge fat icon appeared for the game/program that you could just double click to run (or right click to open/browse/whatever). This is so much nicer than Windows autorun. Essentially it was a slightly nicer MacOS, from my point of view anyway.
Workbench was ahead of its time, and it's "gadgets, tools, drawers, projects" paradigm makes a lot more sense today than "widgets, applications, folders, documents". For instance, my video editing program and IDE both save projects, not documents, and I use tools to perform tasks, not "applications", which makes no grammatical sense.
This article is pretty much correct. There are simply too many applications written for Windows where some enterprising young bastard has done away with the familiar and practical Windows widgets in favour of some overcomplex (or often over simplified) toolkit or skinning system. Most of these applications are therefore not compatible with accessibility features like tooltips and scalable fonts, international fonts, keyboard shortcuts, or even proper copy and pasting.
There is too much of this bad innovation that's spurred by the fact that MFC/WTL isn't terribly exciting and doesn't have enough pictures of naked animé girls. As you might have guessed, I hate skins. I think they're a prime example of a breakdown between function and form. So-called "innovative" interfaces break away from the Windows look and feel and clutter the desktop. If I have my desktop themed the way I want it, I resent applications that do not follow that theme. I resent crappy software that makes the text in the titlebar huge, italic Times New Roman, for example. I resent Quicktime Player. I would (and pretty much do) resent Winamp but I let it off the hook because by default it's a good example of skins done right. There's no useless bloat there (see Windows Media Player for the other side of the coin). My basic rule is: if you have to break away from the standard set of windowing controls presented to you by WTL because you feel your interface is not ergonomic, this is a failure state.
There are some special cases where it's not possible to use standard Windows controls, such as cross-platform software. But even here, suites like wxWidgets exist to allow you to keep the standard look-and-feel of the target OS.
I guess what I'm arguing for is for my desktop to be consistent across applications. It may be fair to say that Windows does not satisfy interface designers because it doesn't allow them to customize as freely as they may want to, but I believe that some restrictions are good. I am more than certain that I prefer Microsoft's idea of what a basic user interface should look like (well, Microsoft's pre-XP idea anyway) to what a 15-year-old manga fanatic or an overly arrogant designer thinks would be a totally awesome interface. Microsoft's is generally clean and simple, as it should be.
Some notes before I go:
Yes, I know that Office 2003 totally deviates from the typical style of Windows, but Office products tend to give hints about which way Microsoft would like the general look and feel of the interface to go. It also still works like a standard Windows interface with all accessibility, tab order, and customisation and hotkey features available.
I also fully understand that Windows may not be the best interface out there, and that MFC/WTL/ATL/STL totally sucks dude lollers! It's pretty good and consistent though.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I just want something that fits elegantly into my desktop paradigm, accepts my chosen font sizes and theme, and doesn't look like a pile of ass compared to all my other apps. Longhorn does not look like it's going to help me much in this regard. I just hope they don't make everything look like WMP.
I mean, did you expect them to not be bastards about it? "Lol guys you're crooks, I've got a ton of your IP right here and substantial evidence that you're conducting illegal practices". You think the company is going to say "Oh ok then Chip yeah you're right, we never realised that before! Better clean up our act!" Bullshit. What sort of world do you live in? They're going to say "Yeah we know it's illegal and we'd rather not have problems like you. Get off our back, little man. We're going to fight you in court to save face. We know you don't stand a chance against our MegaLawyers. Now we'll just be taking all your hardware and manipulating the legal system into deleting all that IP of ours you had the right to download onto it."
Expecting Corporate America to be ethical and legal is extremely naïve. It will be as unethical and illegal as it can possibly be whilst still being able to smack down people like Chip who have a "hilarious" moral objection to their nefarious dealings. Corporations work on legal loopholes and avoiding prosecution. They certainly do not run on ethics.
Even if he is going to go smear the company's name and product (which he threatened to do in the letter, at least he mentioned that any case would get a lot of press attention and then proceeded to threaten legal action) on justifiable grounds, the company would obviously be very interested in not allowing that to happen.
In other words, even if Salzenberg has a point, the company don't want his point to get out there, so they're attacking him regarding something slightly different in order to cost him a lot of money and stop him from doing this sort of stuff again. I agree with you: Salzenberg took the wrong action. He was trying to be ethical with what looks like a totally inethical company. He should have either just resigned or gone for legal action immediately. Instead he gave the company the opportunity to shoot first, and it'll probably be a headshot.
Chip threatened his own employers with legal action. What do you expect them to do?
curse you bulletin boards for making be use square brackets instead of HTML.
Having just read the letter, I can only conclude that HMS was right in seeking legal defence against Salzenberg immediately to protect themselves. Perhaps he should have sought legal advice immediately instead of [i]threatening the company he works for with legal action[/i]. He made some hefty allegations in that letter, and also disclosed that he had been snooping around software that he wasn't involved with but had "the right to access" as a Senior Programmer. IANAL and I obviously haven't read Salzenberg's contract with HMS, but I would imagine that if he's not working on the code and browsing other people's projects from home in the interests of taking legal action, this gives HMS grounds to file a suit against him or at least gives them an incentive to shoot first.
This all looks to me like an ill considered vigilante mission gone horribly wrong. It's like shouting "hay guys, you're all crooked bastards and you should be in jail. I'm thinking about taking you fuckers to court! Can I keep my job though? Don't sue me!" What he should have done was file for legal action immediately, and/or resign from the company on legal/moral grounds. Resignation would have looked a lot better, would have relieved him of some of the moral issues, and would not look like he was about to try and sue the company for a ton of money.
I agree with his stance and his moral position, but this was a perfectly stupid and arrogant way to handle the situation. As a Perl hacker I wish Salzenberg the best, but I can't agree with the way he's fought this battle so far.
I think a legion of slashdot readers blasting these contact details and sending trollish e-mails will only worsen this guy's situation: "Then he got his legion of goons to come to his defence, causing massive problems with our e-mail infrastructure and bringing our website to a crawl, before this had even got to court." That cannot be good.
I would advise any slashdot readers considering trolling this e-mail address to think carefully about the implications their messages might have on this guy, and refrain from contacting HMS unless they have something worthwhile and appropriate to contribute.
Thanks. The "For now" is encouraging, but if anyone has a cache I'd still like to see it. It seems to have caused quite a stir with /.
Damnit I was reading that. Offer up your local caches, people. If they pulled it I definitely want to read it all now.
I agree with the OP, and in my opinion the market is partly to blame. As the gaming industry grows in size and competes with the movie industry, we see a focus on making more money per game which means making sound investments in sure fire games that will definitely do well. Thus, we get fewer innovative games. Things in the industry now seem to operate on the "we did this last time and it sold well, so let's do it again but with better graphics" (Halo -> Halo 2), or "someone else did this and it did really well, so let's copy it and focus on the racing missions" (GTA -> NFS:U)
In other words, it's more costly to make games and for this reason publishers aren't going to invest money into new genres and unfamiliar, original concepts because there's no market data to show how well they might do. Only a few developers/publishers have the guts to do this (Maxis are working on Spore which seems pretty original but is, as Will Wright puts it, basically all the fun bits from Populous and Civ and a bunch of other games, and Introversion recently released Cannon Fodder... Erm.. I mean, Darwinia. Both look sort of original. Lionhead's Black & White was quite original too.)
As with the music industry, the gaming equivalent of pop and r&b (FPS) tends to occupy the top of the charts, so that's what publishers make more of. The problem with the gaming industry is that small, independent developers making fun games rarely find a label/publisher to release those games on. In the music industry there are many indie labels for releasing music to the underground, and bands can use these to gain recognition and revenue and move up the ranks until they're spotted by a big label. There is no equivalent scene in the gaming industry and every attempt to run an indie publisher has pretty much failed.
I worry that the big bucks development costs of popular games scare off smaller developers who might be considering setting up a games company. There's no prospects. "You want to get into the games industry? HAR HAR HAR" is usually the response given to any aspirational young developer who wants to make their own game. They worry that they'll never find a publisher. In the past, there were shareware houses like Apogee that produced various games and funded development by small independent software houses. There's no equivalent of that now that I've heard of.
I suppose that ultimately we're headed for a revolution. To keep the industry afloat the public will demand choice and innovation, otherwise they'll simply get bored of video games. Steam, despite its reputation, was probably the first step towards a new way of publishing games that is very accessible to independent developers publishing smaller games, since it bypasses the publishers who generally aren't interested in these companies anyway. The download model also works well for shareware-style publication, i.e. you can publish the first episode of a game on your download service, and people can pay a fee to play the next episode(s). They could even buy each episode as it becomes available (obviously at relatively low cost).
Older games didn't suffer these problems because back in the 80's and early 90's all PC and home computer publishers (i.e. not Nintendo) were pretty much small, independent, and would publish nearly any half decent game they could get their hands on. So we saw more diversity and experimentation with the capabilities of new platforms. I sincerely hope that this will happen again with download platforms.
What timestamp?
Why is this relevant? You think Microsoft would change the standard so that no existing RSS reader on any platform could handle it? That's bullshit. Since RSS is based on XML it's easy to extend and add features to it that will simply be ignored by existing readers.
Microsoft are big on XML. Their new office format will be completely open and XML compliant. I see no reason to believe that Microsoft will "basterdize" the RSS format, a format that has to be compatible with existing readers for its uptake to be guaranteed (i.e. no RSS publisher will embrace the extensions if they are incompatible with the majority of reader apps). The most Microsoft will do is say "Hey, you get a better RSS experience if you use the reader included in Longhorn since it is compatible with the new RSS extensions introduced by Microsoft".
I think this is solely to do with improving usability and enhancing user experience, which is what Microsoft desperately need to do if Longhorn is going to beat OS X, and as someone who's written RSS parsers I welcome this addition to the standard, it seems like a really practical and useful idea.
Oh god. This was rated 5? Currently there is no way to organise data in a sensible list format. For example, I'm reading an RSS news feed, but there is no RSS standard on how to date the headlines. RSS readers currently have to cache the old RSS file and look for changes to ascertain when new headlines appear and infer the date based on when the new headline appeared. A sensible ordering/dating system would make RSS a great deal more powerful, and a great deal more sensible.
Since RSS is an XML-based standard, it would be relatively simple to add new functionality to it without breaking existing implementations.
- What happened to the PowerPC's supposed performance advantage over Intel?
- What happened to Apple's 64-bit operating system?
- Where the heck is AMD?
- Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers?
- Is this all really about Digital Rights Management?
He then bangs on about Microsoft for a bit, as if Apple would ever be a threat to Microsoft, who have a whole new OS on the cards and have been running on these fabled Intel processor things for decades. I'll tell you the real reason: IBM have given Apple the cold shoulder. Look at it this way: Apple represents so little business for IBM that it doesn't make sense to keep developing new chips for them. IBM have their work cut out with the next gen consoles, and Apple is a teeny tiny spec compared to the massive quantity of chips IBM will have to produce to meet demand for these consoles.Absolutely nothing. The article he refers to in Question 2 answers his question here. The introduction of the PPC 970MP with a 90/65nm fab process would allow the G5 CPU to hit 3.5 GHz and use less power too. This wasn't bullshit. The G5 was clearly faster for raw calculating power (agreed, the linked article shows some dire results for MySQL and so on, but this is more likely down to how the OS handles threading, or how MySQL was compiled).
Nothing. I assume that the new Apples will not use Xeons or Itaniums, but Intel's next desktop chip (Pentium D?) with AMD64/EM64T 64-bit extensions.
AMD's fab plants are running to maximum capacity, as are IBM's (all next gen consoles are using IBM's chips). They are not the sensible choice. Intel has the capacity and the know-how. Apple are also free to switch to AMD if Intel turns out to suck, although this will cause another uproar.
To prepare corporate customers and their user base for the switch. To give developers time to port software to the new architecture so that it will be ready on release of the new system. Cringely's answer to this question is stolen from The Register, and it is unlikely that Apple will suffer greatly from this. They have other products such as their iPod and iTunes services to support themselves. Sure, sales will fall, but it's my prediction that AAPL will fall and then pick up as market analysts predict a rise in Apple sales in the next few months due to a new product release (Intel Macs). The Osborne Effect doesn't really hold water, Apple already have a development system available, and have already ported their OS. They have been planning this for five years. They do have a product to deliver, and they are very, very good at hype.
He's right on this one. No.
AMD aren't that interesting to Apple, they're already at maximum capacity as I mentioned, and they're quite happy producing chips for PCs. They also don't have the marketing clout of Intel and they're less well known. Apple chose Intel because they've been dumped by IBM, and Intel are more than happy to help Apple out because it secures them some more market penetration, which they need because they've made a considerable amount of blunders recently. Both are helping eachother out. It's simple symbiosis. If they didn't, their futures are unpredictable.
Intel could still have bought Apple as Cringely states, but I deem this to be highly unlikely. Intel is not in a good position to make acquisitions like this, and value their PC market a lot too.
Time for my annual Cringely bash. Actually, I'll skip it this year. Why do so many people respect Cringely?