Which points up (no pun intended) the semantic confusion of using "." ("period", "full stop") as a version component separator. Semantically, it's not a decimal radix point. Therefore, the second component of your hypothetical version is not 99/100, it's integer 99. Therefore, integer 100 is indeed > integer 99, and the "." shouldn't be pronounced as part of it.
That doesn't happen, of course; we all* say "point 99" or the like, which is exactly the same as if the "." were, in fact, a decimal point.
*Not strictly "all"; I usually say "dot" instead of "point", partly because of this confusion. This usage became mainstream with "dot Net" since the string "Net" makes no sense as a real number "r" such that 0 > r > 1.
I don't think it's going to be World of Starcraft.
I agree, but it's a shame. The ominous proclamation "Nuclear launch detected" would have a lot more visceral impact if you knew you were standing around ground zero.
but I can't see them doing another fantasy genre MMO
Well, they do have the Diablo milieu, but I don't see much opportunity for innovation there. Besides, they can't even get the 3rd title in the normal isometric-scroller game series out the door.
Nostalgia. This is the PC he grew up with. His parents weren't cool like I was (and you, or your parents, depending on your age). I knew enough to buy an Amiga rather than an XT-clone in 1986, but if that's not the personal history you're trying to re-capture, "it's waaaay cooler" is irrelevant.
This, from a a PC hoarder who has 3 CP/M systems, 3 XT or AT-class machines, 4 Amigas, 4 pre-OS/X Macs, a TRS-80 Model I, a TI 99/4a, A C64, an Apple IIGS... that's what I can recall off the cuff.
Nostalgia is part of a lot of my selections, but collector-mania was responsible for the rest. (Pokemon didn't invent the "gotta catch 'em all" mindset.)
I'm better now.
I don't make a point of taking anything else, but OTOH I won't dispose of any. Not after I've gone to the trouble of restoring, upgrading, and making runnable all those systems. My basement is like a museum.
Well, it's doable. And yes, the CD-ROM driver and MSCDEX will have to run in conventional RAM.
OTOH, maybe the intended approach was:
download the CD-ROM of FREEDOS
extract the floppy images from it
copy them to diskettes
boot the diskettes to install
NB: The first 3 steps would be performed on a relatively "modern" system, not the Epson. Also, "???" and "Profit!" are left as an exercise to the reader.
There exist numerous product safety laws that could affect the criminal culpability of decision makers in a company who refuse to address serious known safety concerns in their products.
As of 2008, with the passing of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, the criminal penalty for "knowing, willful violation" is 5 years instead of only 1 year per the original 1972 Comsumer Product Safety Act. So yeah, the risk of imprisonment is something company officers have to consider, outside of a simple cost/benefit analysis. But realistically, if you play the game right, you may be able to stonewall and obfuscate well enough to make "willful, knowing" violation unprovable, taking that risk off the table. After that, consumer protection penalties are just another number in the "cost" side of the equation, with a "probability of occurrence" value that gets artificially deflated (because that stuff never happens to us).
Ditto. Northstar Horizon (1982, I think). Osborne 1 (blue, so that makes it about 1982 also?). Morrow Microdecison MD-2 (with 2/3-height 5.25" floppies!).
Much weirdness about some of these installations. For instance, I'm running a Tandy 1000/RL DOS machine (8088, MS-DOS 3.2) as the console terminal for the Northstar. Yes, that's right, the more powerful computer is the dumb terminal for the less powerful one. It was cheaper than trying to track down a working serial dumb terminal, and gave me an excuse to set up the Tandy as well.
Just because something is customary doesn't mean it's mandatory. RFC1035 explicitly states TTL should be set to 0 (zero) if the "[Resource Record] can only be used for the transaction in progress, and should not be cached" or "for extremely volatile data."
The article you mention (which btw. seems to be a wikipedia invention)
would be done with custom DNS anyway, otherwise it's easily blocked by the ISP setting its cache to ignore a TTL less than a couple of hours (as most do.. hell, my even my home DNS does that).
It would be done by setting your DNS record (yes, a DNS RR you are responsible for) to have a short TTL. Not a custom DNS server, just administrative rights to the DNS record associated with one or more resources. And if, by setting the TTL to a low value, I tell you that my DNS record is going to be quite volatile, you can disagree with me all you want (by "ignor[ing] a TTL less than a couple of hours"), but don't be surprised when your cache goes stale.
Gosh, I wish I could live in the world you live in, with deathless and ultrastable interfaces and static network architectures. You could probably get by with just a really big "hosts" file. But out in the real world, sometimes you need short DNS TTLs for stuff like warm-failover high-availability architectures.
And why do mini-vans escape the wrath of the anti-car crowd?
Their mini-van-driving soccer-mom wives would kill them.
Ha, ha, only serious. I'm not particularly anti-SUV or anti-car, or even anti-anything (though I'm not real big on stupidity), but my wife drives a mini-van and would see every other human being on Earth dead and rotting before she'd give it up.
Seriously. DotA, first-person perspective. You and 39 of your closest friends plus auto-spawning NPC combatants slugging it out to advance battle lines and destroy opposing infrastructure. The other faction, doing exactly the same thing. And trying to kill you in the process, just like you're trying to do to them.
Add combat vehicles... maybe aircraft with dogfighting... yeah. That's what Blizz shoulda done.
If you want to play a real game of Missile Command, you need an Atari 5200, and it's giant ass trackball.
0_o
Oh, ok. I get it. English isn't your native language, so it's natural to drop those pesky indefinite articles.
Here's your sentence, expanded and grammatically correct:
...you need an Atari 5200; it is a giant ass trackball.
Now, I was always partial to the Amiga back in the era of the Atari ST/Amiga flamewar, but I'd never call the 5200 a trackball. It was a legitimate console.
Wait. I think I misinterpreted that. You're saying that the Atari 5200 was a very large trackball intended to be manipulated by the user's butt. Am I right? That would be quite a peripheral, kinda like a ur-Wii Fit controller.
BTW, if I recall correctly, the original Missile Command controller was digital (rotary quadrature encoding, like optomechanical mice). The Atari 2600 Trackball was also quad-encoded digital, and pretty easy to retrofit for use with the Amiga, the mouse interface of which was based on quad encoding.
Whoa. fMRI is just measuring "current flow" across coarsely-defined regions of the "CPU"? And not instantaneous measurements, but time-integrated ones? And with only a fairly crude map of CPU area->function, trying to deduce exactly what instructions and data the CPU is processing?
And the network equivalent of the "It was my car, but I wasn't driving" defense is "someone haxx0red my (system|network)". Or, maybe, the "secure my wireless network? what do you mean?" defense.
Historically, how well has the "I wasn't driving" defense worked out?
Well, the semantic of "mobile" in this context is more akin to "movable", not "moving"... "movable", as in "easily swayed, easily moved emotionally"... in other words, fickle, driven by emotion. In this respect, this is close to the distinctive meaning of the original use of "mob"... not merely a crowd of people, but one driven by strong emotion, and one subject to manipulation by emotional appeal.
And yes, "vulgus" is "commoners", but to the Roman elite (senatores or equites), the commoners were just a crowd. I suspect that the connotation was actually closer to "rabble".
It'll be rather hard for MS to sue anyone for implementing these standards after they've come out and said 'its okay, you can use them, we won't sue'.
Will it be hard to synthesize a violation of terms that nullifies the granted "permission"? All Microsoft has to do is claim you broke one of the many vague conditions of the non-license and you're faced with a choice: drop development, change your behavior to conform to the "clarified" conditions, or press on and face explicit legal risk.
Stop being so ridiculous.
Oooh, ooh, ad-hominem. I like it. I, too, have run out of things to say in this context, so I'll close out like you did.
Because the screen shows constantly changing random words, it would be difficult for someone approaching your screen to figure out exactly which point on the screen you were looking at.
Not that difficult, if the shoulder-surfer could watch for more than a few seconds. Especially if part of the screen seemed to show a consistent typeface, flowing sentences, coherent subject matter... i.e., anything not obviously random. Humans are damn good at pattern recognition. Moreso, if the shoulder-surfer has some idea what he's looking for, and the "authorized reader" is unaware he's being monitored. And don't deny that can happen. Anyone capable of concentrating sufficiently to work well is going to lose some environmental awareness, and a sufficiently sneaky voyeur would be able to benefit from that.
Overall, though, it would probably make more sense, and be cheaper, to avoid working on your private material where other people can see your screen
Yup. This smells like a solution looking to shoulder out existing and simpler solutions.
Paradoxically, the "consumer-grade" idea in TFA actually seems more valuable: The display is normal, but when your eyes leave it the whole thing blanks. This helps solve the very-real and not-well-solved problem of leaving terminals unattended.
And "bus" comes from "omnibus"... Latin for "for all".
And while we're on Latin-based linguistic trivia and public transportation, "mob" comes from the Latin phrase "vulgus mobile"... which translates to "fickle crowd". But "mob" comes specifically from "mobile", which is the "fickle" part of the phrase, not the "crowd" part. Weird.
TFA's description of the technology contains a bit of hand-waving:
Chameleon uses gaze-tracking software and camera equipment to track an authorized reader's eyes
Check, that's doable now.
to show only that one person the correct text.
How? Elfin magic? If a screen region under the "authorized reader's" field of view is displaying the protected content to the authorized reader, it's also displaying exactly the same thing to anyone else who happens to be looking at the same area.
So far as I can tell, this is the part of the proof labeled "Magic happens here". Also known as the part of the technology that needs more investment. So invest now!
Slashdot Mirror
Which points up (no pun intended) the semantic confusion of using "." ("period", "full stop") as a version component separator. Semantically, it's not a decimal radix point. Therefore, the second component of your hypothetical version is not 99/100, it's integer 99. Therefore, integer 100 is indeed > integer 99, and the "." shouldn't be pronounced as part of it.
That doesn't happen, of course; we all* say "point 99" or the like, which is exactly the same as if the "." were, in fact, a decimal point.
*Not strictly "all"; I usually say "dot" instead of "point", partly because of this confusion. This usage became mainstream with "dot Net" since the string "Net" makes no sense as a real number "r" such that 0 > r > 1.
Whadday mean, "heat transfer isn't an issue"? Of course it's an issue. How do you think they achieve "self-destruct"?
I don't think it's going to be World of Starcraft.
I agree, but it's a shame. The ominous proclamation "Nuclear launch detected" would have a lot more visceral impact if you knew you were standing around ground zero.
but I can't see them doing another fantasy genre MMO
Well, they do have the Diablo milieu, but I don't see much opportunity for innovation there. Besides, they can't even get the 3rd title in the normal isometric-scroller game series out the door.
Why bother
Nostalgia. This is the PC he grew up with. His parents weren't cool like I was (and you, or your parents, depending on your age). I knew enough to buy an Amiga rather than an XT-clone in 1986, but if that's not the personal history you're trying to re-capture, "it's waaaay cooler" is irrelevant.
This, from a a PC hoarder who has 3 CP/M systems, 3 XT or AT-class machines, 4 Amigas, 4 pre-OS/X Macs, a TRS-80 Model I, a TI 99/4a, A C64, an Apple IIGS... that's what I can recall off the cuff.
Nostalgia is part of a lot of my selections, but collector-mania was responsible for the rest. (Pokemon didn't invent the "gotta catch 'em all" mindset.)
I'm better now.
I don't make a point of taking anything else, but OTOH I won't dispose of any. Not after I've gone to the trouble of restoring, upgrading, and making runnable all those systems. My basement is like a museum.
Well, it's doable. And yes, the CD-ROM driver and MSCDEX will have to run in conventional RAM.
OTOH, maybe the intended approach was:
NB: The first 3 steps would be performed on a relatively "modern" system, not the Epson. Also, "???" and "Profit!" are left as an exercise to the reader.
Maybe in some regards, but the electrocuting ATM isn't a great example.
Oh, I dunno, it's not like there hasn't been precedent for companies systematically ignoring lethal electrocution hazards in their work.
There exist numerous product safety laws that could affect the criminal culpability of decision makers in a company who refuse to address serious known safety concerns in their products.
As of 2008, with the passing of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, the criminal penalty for "knowing, willful violation" is 5 years instead of only 1 year per the original 1972 Comsumer Product Safety Act. So yeah, the risk of imprisonment is something company officers have to consider, outside of a simple cost/benefit analysis. But realistically, if you play the game right, you may be able to stonewall and obfuscate well enough to make "willful, knowing" violation unprovable, taking that risk off the table. After that, consumer protection penalties are just another number in the "cost" side of the equation, with a "probability of occurrence" value that gets artificially deflated (because that stuff never happens to us).
Done.
Ditto. Northstar Horizon (1982, I think). Osborne 1 (blue, so that makes it about 1982 also?). Morrow Microdecison MD-2 (with 2/3-height 5.25" floppies!).
Much weirdness about some of these installations. For instance, I'm running a Tandy 1000/RL DOS machine (8088, MS-DOS 3.2) as the console terminal for the Northstar. Yes, that's right, the more powerful computer is the dumb terminal for the less powerful one. It was cheaper than trying to track down a working serial dumb terminal, and gave me an excuse to set up the Tandy as well.
It's contagious!
Well, actually, I have Jedi powers, and they don't really help with coding at all.
Now QC audits and code inspections, they help a lot.
<mind-control hand-wave>" You can find no coding standard variances in this module"
"I can't find any coding standard variances in this module."
<mind-control hand-wave> "I pass the audit with flying colors."
"You pass the audit with flying colors. Congratulations."
Or, if that doesn't work, a quick force-choke and a pithy statement about the auditor's lack of faith in single-inheritance works pretty well.
"Good non-car analogy" is to "Slashdot" as "Programming" is to "battered deep-fried origami"
That's normally between 24 hours and 7 days
Just because something is customary doesn't mean it's mandatory. RFC1035 explicitly states TTL should be set to 0 (zero) if the "[Resource Record] can only be used for the transaction in progress, and should not be cached" or "for extremely volatile data."
The article you mention (which btw. seems to be a wikipedia invention)
Damn those Wikipedians! They've poisoned SecurityFocus, Whatis.com, The EU SPAM Trackers group, and even Google!
would be done with custom DNS anyway, otherwise it's easily blocked by the ISP setting its cache to ignore a TTL less than a couple of hours (as most do.. hell, my even my home DNS does that).
It would be done by setting your DNS record (yes, a DNS RR you are responsible for) to have a short TTL. Not a custom DNS server, just administrative rights to the DNS record associated with one or more resources. And if, by setting the TTL to a low value, I tell you that my DNS record is going to be quite volatile, you can disagree with me all you want (by "ignor[ing] a TTL less than a couple of hours"), but don't be surprised when your cache goes stale.
Gosh, I wish I could live in the world you live in, with deathless and ultrastable interfaces and static network architectures. You could probably get by with just a really big "hosts" file. But out in the real world, sometimes you need short DNS TTLs for stuff like warm-failover high-availability architectures.
And have absolutely no idea where we are.
Back in the day, we in the Air Force had a saying about that: "All airspeed, no heading."
There's always the old joke "We're completely lost but making great time."
I think Werner Heisenberg may have had some insight into this phenomenon too.
The fact that you can zerg Van or Drek proves it's not DotA.
Try that with any hero character in the original WC3 DotA and die in seconds.
Restrictive terrain, swarms of aggressive and advancing NPCs, static defenses... that's DotA. WoW hasn't done it yet.
And why do mini-vans escape the wrath of the anti-car crowd?
Their mini-van-driving soccer-mom wives would kill them.
Ha, ha, only serious. I'm not particularly anti-SUV or anti-car, or even anti-anything (though I'm not real big on stupidity), but my wife drives a mini-van and would see every other human being on Earth dead and rotting before she'd give it up.
Both figuratively and literally, YMMV.
in World of Warcraft:
A PvP battleground implementation of DotA.
Seriously. DotA, first-person perspective. You and 39 of your closest friends plus auto-spawning NPC combatants slugging it out to advance battle lines and destroy opposing infrastructure. The other faction, doing exactly the same thing. And trying to kill you in the process, just like you're trying to do to them.
Add combat vehicles... maybe aircraft with dogfighting... yeah. That's what Blizz shoulda done.
If you want to play a real game of Missile Command, you need an Atari 5200, and it's giant ass trackball.
0_o
Oh, ok. I get it. English isn't your native language, so it's natural to drop those pesky indefinite articles.
Here's your sentence, expanded and grammatically correct:
Now, I was always partial to the Amiga back in the era of the Atari ST/Amiga flamewar, but I'd never call the 5200 a trackball. It was a legitimate console.
Wait. I think I misinterpreted that. You're saying that the Atari 5200 was a very large trackball intended to be manipulated by the user's butt. Am I right? That would be quite a peripheral, kinda like a ur-Wii Fit controller.
BTW, if I recall correctly, the original Missile Command controller was digital (rotary quadrature encoding, like optomechanical mice). The Atari 2600 Trackball was also quad-encoded digital, and pretty easy to retrofit for use with the Amiga, the mouse interface of which was based on quad encoding.
No, no, no! Learn Java instead, and learn Perl instead of Ruby. Or Python.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
Whoa. fMRI is just measuring "current flow" across coarsely-defined regions of the "CPU"? And not instantaneous measurements, but time-integrated ones? And with only a fairly crude map of CPU area->function, trying to deduce exactly what instructions and data the CPU is processing?
Does this sound...unreliable...to anyone else?
And the network equivalent of the "It was my car, but I wasn't driving" defense is "someone haxx0red my (system|network)". Or, maybe, the "secure my wireless network? what do you mean?" defense.
Historically, how well has the "I wasn't driving" defense worked out?
Well, the semantic of "mobile" in this context is more akin to "movable", not "moving"... "movable", as in "easily swayed, easily moved emotionally"... in other words, fickle, driven by emotion. In this respect, this is close to the distinctive meaning of the original use of "mob"... not merely a crowd of people, but one driven by strong emotion, and one subject to manipulation by emotional appeal.
And yes, "vulgus" is "commoners", but to the Roman elite (senatores or equites), the commoners were just a crowd. I suspect that the connotation was actually closer to "rabble".
It'll be rather hard for MS to sue anyone for implementing these standards after they've come out and said 'its okay, you can use them, we won't sue'.
Will it be hard to synthesize a violation of terms that nullifies the granted "permission"? All Microsoft has to do is claim you broke one of the many vague conditions of the non-license and you're faced with a choice: drop development, change your behavior to conform to the "clarified" conditions, or press on and face explicit legal risk.
Stop being so ridiculous.
Oooh, ooh, ad-hominem. I like it. I, too, have run out of things to say in this context, so I'll close out like you did.
Your mother too!
Did I do it right?
Because the screen shows constantly changing random words, it would be difficult for someone approaching your screen to figure out exactly which point on the screen you were looking at.
Not that difficult, if the shoulder-surfer could watch for more than a few seconds. Especially if part of the screen seemed to show a consistent typeface, flowing sentences, coherent subject matter... i.e., anything not obviously random. Humans are damn good at pattern recognition. Moreso, if the shoulder-surfer has some idea what he's looking for, and the "authorized reader" is unaware he's being monitored. And don't deny that can happen. Anyone capable of concentrating sufficiently to work well is going to lose some environmental awareness, and a sufficiently sneaky voyeur would be able to benefit from that.
Overall, though, it would probably make more sense, and be cheaper, to avoid working on your private material where other people can see your screen
Yup. This smells like a solution looking to shoulder out existing and simpler solutions.
Paradoxically, the "consumer-grade" idea in TFA actually seems more valuable: The display is normal, but when your eyes leave it the whole thing blanks. This helps solve the very-real and not-well-solved problem of leaving terminals unattended.
And "bus" comes from "omnibus"... Latin for "for all".
And while we're on Latin-based linguistic trivia and public transportation, "mob" comes from the Latin phrase "vulgus mobile"... which translates to "fickle crowd". But "mob" comes specifically from "mobile", which is the "fickle" part of the phrase, not the "crowd" part. Weird.
Chameleon uses gaze-tracking software and camera equipment to track an authorized reader's eyes
Check, that's doable now.
to show only that one person the correct text.
How? Elfin magic? If a screen region under the "authorized reader's" field of view is displaying the protected content to the authorized reader, it's also displaying exactly the same thing to anyone else who happens to be looking at the same area.
So far as I can tell, this is the part of the proof labeled "Magic happens here". Also known as the part of the technology that needs more investment. So invest now!
Where's my flying car, dammit?