I see a lot of attacks on MS that are silly or unfair, but yours is dead on. The reappearance of a bug like this highlights a very serious process and credibility problem on the part of Microsoft when they claim to have corrected the mistakes of the past and focused on security.
I really do think there is a lot of hysterical overreaction to some MS bugs, but this really was a massive blunder on their part.
So says some random asshat. Listen dipshit, your president is in power what more do you want? I am not going to fall all over myself to agree with the popular opinion merely because 51% of America believes that Bush has the right of it. I think Bush is a bad president and I think people who voted for him made a bad choice, I'm not going to change that opinion because some anonymous fucktard on the Internet calls me names.
You're right, I've wasted my life in senseless opposition to Bush, from this minute on I'll spend my every waking moment helping other deluded victims of the liberal media overcome their dislike of the smirking fratboy that inhabits the white house.
Oh yeah, I remember how AOL was all hot for that - joined industry groups, lobbied, released whitepapers, then a total reverse in no time flat.
It could still happen - maybe, but unless another big company were to champion the cause I don't think it will without some huge concessions to the cable companies (the sort that would allow a great increase in number of markets for example).
Plus, for reasons I explained in another post in this thread I think this sort of blocking is just being done by rural co-op carriers, the sort were they are the only phone, DSL, and network provider available in the area and see VoIP as stealing a service that they should provide. Even most cable companies don't have that sort of captive market.
I think that this blocking is being done by rural co-op phone companies as they have a history of exactly this sort of trick. I've dealt with them from a regulatory standpoint (mostly reciprocal compensation and local call completion area agreements) in the NE and NW of the US - and in quite a few areas there is *no* market, these guys are the guys you have to deal with.
and get creative about masking your traffic. Sheesh.
I may have missed the sarcasm of that post, but...
That is a battle that Vonage cannot win, the ISP is the ultimate "man in the middle" of security literature. Suppose Vonage switched to SRV records - ISP looks for SRV requests for SIP services and redirects or fails them, or they could block RTP streams themselves (even encrypted ones) with characteristics other than those of the ISP, since the ISP is guaranteed to be privy to all communications they can observe or change *anything* the customer sends or receives. Ultimately an ISP with no competition could even make using competing VOIP providers a violation of the TOS.
If your statement is true, how come none of djb's software has security holes? (qmail, tinydns, dnscache, etc).
Because they are so minimalist as to be useless in the face of the MS "feature machine" as well as actual progress in the state of the art. I agree that DJB's stuff is rock solid and is very useful for what it does, but you can't just freeze things in 1999 and pretend that you have created the solution for all time. "For what it does" when applied to DJB's software is becoming less relevant every second.
Real software grows over time, and as it gets bigger there will be bugs. You don't accept the bugs, or just say "such is software", but you accept that somehow a mistake was made and fix it.
A label that lets a concerned parent make a choice pretty much covers the moral responsibility. Even if we were to hold games to the same standards that movies and television are held to we can't expect any more than that.
Something is going have to be decided one way or the other about that smirking "well we don't torture people" policy of allowing allied or even convenient hostile nations to torture for us. In this case, especially considering how secretive and evasive the Bush whitehouse is, it will be very difficult to get actual documentation that an an American citizen was tortured by executive order.
Most jobs working for someone else are at the very least 75% boredom, politicking, drudgery, etc. Unless you happen to be very attractive, intelligent, charismatic, or born of privilege this will be true whether you work on an assembly line, at a fry vat, or in a cubicle.
Yeah, Baxter is SF junk food - I'll read it if I want something new and there is nothing else around, but he has a tendency toward glibness and repetitiveness that make his work too silly to be very good (failings he shares with his old co-author Jerry Pournelle which did not help their collaborations).
I've seen a couple Brits mention Alastair Reynolds as being worth reading, but I never find him in the bookstore - guess I'll just have to order online.
Well yeah, but that is what 'volatile' is for - most of the time the compiler is going to do an adequate job of optimization.
Really most of the time I think it is best to just let the compiler do its job. If you need to tweak a build rule or work around a bug (or even change compilers), then do so - but don't go in expecting to do all the heavy lifting yourself.
That is why the STL is so great, it lets programmers who are not computer scientists easily select the correct algorithm without worrying much about implementation.
If you are doing a sequential search and append of a huge list in an inner loop then you have a lot more to worry about than what the compiler can optimize or not, but that is a vry different issue.
I trust the compiler to optimize almost everything. Use a profiler, since hand optimized code is more difficult to code correctly and more difficult to maintain you should only do it when it matters.
But he is absolutely right when he says that google is inefficient.
Google web search is a general purpose tool, of course a specialized tool will be more effecient - but that does not mean that general purpose tools are useless. Google has already vastly improved the search experience from the late 90s, and also added several specialized search tools - since their success demands a satisfying user experience, they will be working just as hard as librarians to make sure that digitized library searches are effecient and useful.
I think it's pretty clear that this guy doesn't understand how to use search engines properly and doesn't have the patience to learn.
That is the impression I got.
It is almost like he doesn't really understand that online systems complement libraries, they don't remove the need for them. One of the first online tools I used was a BBS offered by my city library - it was basically a terminal version of the card catalogue. Very handy, and actually better than the card catalogue because it not only offered materials available by loan from other branches, cities, and universities - it allowed a simple keyword search and title search. Such tools (and I include Google in the same category) make research time more productive, they don't do the research for you.
My piece had the temerity to question the usefulness of Google digitizing millions of books and making bits of them available via its notoriously inefficient search engine. The Google phenomenon is a wonderfully modern manifestation of the triumph of hope and boosterism over reality. Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of "hits" (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order.
If he is opposed to "inefficient search" then the Dewey Decimal system must infuriate him. Google is great for getting a rough idea of what is out there, occasionally it may lead you to something really worthwhile - but most of the time it only cuts down on the early legwork, something very worth doing.
The problem was that the laws were very poorly explained (if at all) such that you never really knew if something you were going to do was randomly going to be against the law.
I somewhat agree with that, but I don't think it was bad enough to destroy the game. That was basically an interface failing, they could have just added a little 'law' icon to ever ability that would violate a law and it would have been just fine.
Agreed on Kingdom Hearts, that game sucked on more levels than I thought it was possible for a game to suck.
The FFX-2 dress sphere system was fun in the same way the the job system, the materia system, the class sphere system, and every character development system of the FF series were fun. A big part of each FF is a mini-game to optimize your character advancement. You can only play the same level/skill based RPG system so many times before it gets boring.
I agree that the story was disjointed and the characters annoying, but annoying characters are a FF tradition too.
The laws system of FFTA was not as bad as you make it out to be, it actually made some combats more interesting - you had to figure out how to win a round with different tactics, otherwise there were very later few battles in that game that could not be won in two rounds with a pair of RDM/SUM doublecast summoning and a pair of moogles giving their turns to the casters.
I don't know if I qualify as "hardcore", but I play a lot of games. The gameplay of FFTA was fun, the only thing I disliked about it was how dumb the AI was - considering the memory and cpu limitations on the GBA that is not really surprising. Overall it was tons better than Ogre Tactics for the GBA.
Bush and Co. are all about the lose of accountability. They are working very hard to convince people that information about how government is run should be secret - the obvious real reason for that is to make it impossible to hold them accountable for anything.
People are running around screaming because this move shows such utter contempt for the privacy of American citizens. Conservative thought has been trying to popularize the erosion of privacy rights for some time now, but this appointment is an actual move and not just more rhetoric. Bush is announcing that the position taken by the spyware companies is the correct one as regards your privacy.
DRM "security" initiatives, anti-reverse engineering laws, click-through-EULAs being a legal contract, and other bits of centralized control over your computer might make it so that you can't legally discuss what your own computer reports about you. The recent moves to limit freedom of information by conservatives make the possibility of tuning into the "global hacker scene" to stay informed about PC internals illegal too.
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I really do think there is a lot of hysterical overreaction to some MS bugs, but this really was a massive blunder on their part.
So says some random asshat. Listen dipshit, your president is in power what more do you want? I am not going to fall all over myself to agree with the popular opinion merely because 51% of America believes that Bush has the right of it. I think Bush is a bad president and I think people who voted for him made a bad choice, I'm not going to change that opinion because some anonymous fucktard on the Internet calls me names.
You're right, I've wasted my life in senseless opposition to Bush, from this minute on I'll spend my every waking moment helping other deluded victims of the liberal media overcome their dislike of the smirking fratboy that inhabits the white house.
Of course there are some benefits to being old frat buddies with the president aside from fond memories of keggers and coke.
It could still happen - maybe, but unless another big company were to champion the cause I don't think it will without some huge concessions to the cable companies (the sort that would allow a great increase in number of markets for example).
Plus, for reasons I explained in another post in this thread I think this sort of blocking is just being done by rural co-op carriers, the sort were they are the only phone, DSL, and network provider available in the area and see VoIP as stealing a service that they should provide. Even most cable companies don't have that sort of captive market.
I think that this blocking is being done by rural co-op phone companies as they have a history of exactly this sort of trick. I've dealt with them from a regulatory standpoint (mostly reciprocal compensation and local call completion area agreements) in the NE and NW of the US - and in quite a few areas there is *no* market, these guys are the guys you have to deal with.
I may have missed the sarcasm of that post, but...
That is a battle that Vonage cannot win, the ISP is the ultimate "man in the middle" of security literature. Suppose Vonage switched to SRV records - ISP looks for SRV requests for SIP services and redirects or fails them, or they could block RTP streams themselves (even encrypted ones) with characteristics other than those of the ISP, since the ISP is guaranteed to be privy to all communications they can observe or change *anything* the customer sends or receives. Ultimately an ISP with no competition could even make using competing VOIP providers a violation of the TOS.
Oh come on, like you never killed thousands based on a lie. Everyone makes mistakes.
Because they are so minimalist as to be useless in the face of the MS "feature machine" as well as actual progress in the state of the art. I agree that DJB's stuff is rock solid and is very useful for what it does, but you can't just freeze things in 1999 and pretend that you have created the solution for all time. "For what it does" when applied to DJB's software is becoming less relevant every second.
Real software grows over time, and as it gets bigger there will be bugs. You don't accept the bugs, or just say "such is software", but you accept that somehow a mistake was made and fix it.
A label that lets a concerned parent make a choice pretty much covers the moral responsibility. Even if we were to hold games to the same standards that movies and television are held to we can't expect any more than that.
Something is going have to be decided one way or the other about that smirking "well we don't torture people" policy of allowing allied or even convenient hostile nations to torture for us. In this case, especially considering how secretive and evasive the Bush whitehouse is, it will be very difficult to get actual documentation that an an American citizen was tortured by executive order.
Most jobs working for someone else are at the very least 75% boredom, politicking, drudgery, etc. Unless you happen to be very attractive, intelligent, charismatic, or born of privilege this will be true whether you work on an assembly line, at a fry vat, or in a cubicle.
I've seen a couple Brits mention Alastair Reynolds as being worth reading, but I never find him in the bookstore - guess I'll just have to order online.
Really most of the time I think it is best to just let the compiler do its job. If you need to tweak a build rule or work around a bug (or even change compilers), then do so - but don't go in expecting to do all the heavy lifting yourself.
If you are doing a sequential search and append of a huge list in an inner loop then you have a lot more to worry about than what the compiler can optimize or not, but that is a vry different issue.
I trust the compiler to optimize almost everything. Use a profiler, since hand optimized code is more difficult to code correctly and more difficult to maintain you should only do it when it matters.
Don't even try to use that excuse, pro-life poisoned that well long ago.
Google web search is a general purpose tool, of course a specialized tool will be more effecient - but that does not mean that general purpose tools are useless. Google has already vastly improved the search experience from the late 90s, and also added several specialized search tools - since their success demands a satisfying user experience, they will be working just as hard as librarians to make sure that digitized library searches are effecient and useful.
I think it's pretty clear that this guy doesn't understand how to use search engines properly and doesn't have the patience to learn.
That is the impression I got.
It is almost like he doesn't really understand that online systems complement libraries, they don't remove the need for them. One of the first online tools I used was a BBS offered by my city library - it was basically a terminal version of the card catalogue. Very handy, and actually better than the card catalogue because it not only offered materials available by loan from other branches, cities, and universities - it allowed a simple keyword search and title search. Such tools (and I include Google in the same category) make research time more productive, they don't do the research for you.
If he is opposed to "inefficient search" then the Dewey Decimal system must infuriate him. Google is great for getting a rough idea of what is out there, occasionally it may lead you to something really worthwhile - but most of the time it only cuts down on the early legwork, something very worth doing.
I somewhat agree with that, but I don't think it was bad enough to destroy the game. That was basically an interface failing, they could have just added a little 'law' icon to ever ability that would violate a law and it would have been just fine.
The FFX-2 dress sphere system was fun in the same way the the job system, the materia system, the class sphere system, and every character development system of the FF series were fun. A big part of each FF is a mini-game to optimize your character advancement. You can only play the same level/skill based RPG system so many times before it gets boring.
I agree that the story was disjointed and the characters annoying, but annoying characters are a FF tradition too.
The laws system of FFTA was not as bad as you make it out to be, it actually made some combats more interesting - you had to figure out how to win a round with different tactics, otherwise there were very later few battles in that game that could not be won in two rounds with a pair of RDM/SUM doublecast summoning and a pair of moogles giving their turns to the casters.
I don't know if I qualify as "hardcore", but I play a lot of games. The gameplay of FFTA was fun, the only thing I disliked about it was how dumb the AI was - considering the memory and cpu limitations on the GBA that is not really surprising. Overall it was tons better than Ogre Tactics for the GBA.
Bush and Co. are all about the lose of accountability. They are working very hard to convince people that information about how government is run should be secret - the obvious real reason for that is to make it impossible to hold them accountable for anything.
DRM "security" initiatives, anti-reverse engineering laws, click-through-EULAs being a legal contract, and other bits of centralized control over your computer might make it so that you can't legally discuss what your own computer reports about you. The recent moves to limit freedom of information by conservatives make the possibility of tuning into the "global hacker scene" to stay informed about PC internals illegal too.