If the OP was concerned about semantics, then why the specification that particularly matters for low-level coding?
Maybe the semantics in question are those which are relevant to low-level coding?
For higher-level stuff, there's less confusion. A string plus an integer, if it works, really only has one sane interpretation....maybe? I'm not sure anymore, and it seems like we mostly agree anyhow.
But your examples were all things where you had tried out the software, otherwise you would not have known that they got it right with Windows 7...
When I hear so many people saying so many good things about Windows 7, I figured it was worth a shot.
I heard enough bad things about Vista that I didn't want to try it. I did occasionally touch it when I was paid to, or to help fix a friend's computer, or just to use it for a minute. I hated every minute of it -- it was truly fascinating how slow it managed to be on new hardware.
All of which were exactly as expected. After all, XP sucked until SP2 -- before that, it was a bloatier, buggier, uglier version of 2K. But several service packs don't seem to have made Vista much better.
After that experience, trying seven was truly a breath of fresh air.
(although I would like to know why you hate Vista so much and yet like Win7 when they are more alike than different).
Simple: It fixes everything Vista fucked up.
Boot time: Several minutes for Vista to boot, and the disk is still thrashing long after. Thirty seconds for Seven to boot.
Overall performance: Vista is slower on any given hardware than XP. Seven is usually faster.
UAC: Vista bothers people enough that they turn it off -- pretty much everything I installed would have multiple separate UAC prompts, sometimes up to five, conservatively. Seven only ever bothers me when I'm installing stuff, and almost always at exactly the places I would want to be bothered -- like, once per install, if that.
The Dock: It may be ripped off from Apple (and from NextStep before Apple), but it is very cool. Maybe I just don't remember, but I don't think I saw it in Vista.
About the only thing I like about both of them is 64-bit support. This was rocky early on for Vista, but that's understandable as the fault of third-party manufacturers who needed to get with the program. It sucked on XP. But 64-bit wasn't reason enough to upgrade (downgrade?) from XP to Vista.
I could go on. Basically, aside from the real features Seven adds (keyboard shortcuts!), it pretty much fixes every complaint I had about Vista, and I haven't seen it do anything worse than XP does.
My point is that you are free to dislike their software and find fault with it, and you are free to disregard them for future consideration based on your past experiences, but you really shouldn't make public statements about a product being bad when you have no idea if it is true.
That's a good point...
You originally replied to someone saying "That's a pretty safe assumption with Microsoft products," which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say even after you disregard them for future consideration.
I feel like I know a bit more than just a "safe assumption" about Microsoft products. However, from what I do know, after about Windows 98, I felt perfectly justified deliberately avoiding Windows when I could, based on that past experience, and would've happily done so if I could.
Unfortunately, I couldn't, not really. Inevitably, I would help other people out with Win2k (hey, the floppy drive no longer locks up the whole computer! Progress!), was forced to use XP myself for work, managed to avoid Vista on my own machines (only occasionally helping others), and gave 7 a spin since I still use Windows for games or the occasional irritation (school has forced a Silverlight monstrosity onto me).
So yes, it would be contradictory if I said I never use Windows at all, and then claimed to know things about how bad it still is, based on what I know about Windows 98. But I do use Windows often enough to know some of its strengths and weaknesses, as much as I would rather never boot it again -- I did manage to go all of last semester and most of last summer without booting it. My intent is still to avoid it based on past experience, it's just that I keep being forced to use it long enough to see just how true my past experience often is.
Saying voodoo is true or false is subjective. Voodoo objectively exists, it's real on many levels, from the rituals to the concepts etc.
It sounds like you're not saying that the statement is subjective, but that it's poorly defined.
What matters is what the GP said, how these things affect our lives. If you are scared to death of voodoo you indeed might want to ban dolls.
However, whether you should be afraid of voodoo depends on whether voodoo actually works.
Consider a girl who brings a nice boy home for dinner. Her family hates him, her father might try to insist she never see this boy. She defends him and continues seeing him.
Then she finds out her family was right. The boy was a rapist and a killer. What's more, the signs were all there, her family saw them, and she only missed them because she was so infatuated.
Of course, we might imagine another scenario in which the family has the same reaction, but the boy really is a nice guy and turns out to be the love of her life. They marry, have children, and live happily ever after.
So whether the family was right or wrong -- whether their intuition that this guy was "trouble" was true or false (properly defined) -- does affect what the girl should do. If the guy is actually nice, she should stand up to her family and stand by the boy. If the guy is actually a rapist and a killer, she probably shouldn't see him again. These have nothing to do with her beliefs about the matter, it has to do with what is actually going on.
So again, you can't talk about "how these things affect our lives" without also talking about whether they're true or false. If voodoo works, it affects our lives in very different ways than if it's just a kooky religion.
The question isn't whether you're afraid of Voodoo. It's whether you should be, given the things you actually care about -- comfort, safety, the well-being of you and your family...
What is accepted or not in court is much more a matter of group-thinking than the result of any scientific approach...
Notice the key word here: should. The goal of the court is to ascertain the truth -- to discover when someone has committed a crime, beyond a reasonable doubt. Whether DNA evidence should be allowed in courts is contingent on how reliable science (and DNA testing in particular) is at discovering truth.
Similarly, the goal of laws, bans in particular, is to make us safer. If voodoo is false, we would certainly agree that banning dolls out of fear of voodoo is ridiculous.
Whether these things are actually a result of a rigorous epistemology or group-think is irrelevant. The point is that these are things which impact your life, which you should accept or reject (or fight) based on whether voodoo or science is true or false.
And that's before we get into personal motivations. For example, I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible, so I'm going with science, not voodoo, even if there weren't any practical effects.
...ultimately, we must choose which philosophy/religion we will live our lives by.
I think we're talking about different definitions of "philosophy." I'm talking about the discipline as taught in modern philosophy departments, the way of thinking by which we can try to figure out what a position actually means, and what the problems with it are.
What you're calling "philosophy", a philosopher might call a "model", I think.
We can punt on the decision, and allow popular culture to pick for us, but that just means we have even less control over our own lives, on the most fundamental questions.
I couldn't agree more, but the fact that you mentioned religion means we probably wouldn't agree on what those fundamental questions are, and I also don't think those fundamental questions have anything to do with most of what philosophy teaches.
You're probably thinking of philosophical questions like, "What happens when you die?" While this can be a profound motivating influence, it actually doesn't have too much impact on the way most people live their lives. Notice that even people who believe they're going to an eternity of happiness when they die are still sad about a loved one dying, and are still afraid to die themselves.
I love philosophy, and think that anything mind-expanding should be promoted in our schools,
Sure, but let's start with what's relevant. And I'm not talking about a career path, either. I'm talking about relevance to a person's life, to the purpose of their life, to a sense of fulfillment... That varies from person to person, but there are a few things that will be common to everyone, so that's where we start. Then we have departments to answer the rest.
For example, everyone can benefit from knowing a little math. Everyone can benefit from understanding the scientific method. These are helpful in everything from avoiding scams and pseudoscience (a little math destroys pyramid schemes, a little science destroys anti-vaccination claims) to realizing your dreams ("I wanna be an astronaut!")
Now, in what way does most philosophy expand our minds? I'd put it in the same category as literature -- it may make us better at philosophy, and it'll certainly make us richer, better-educated, more well-rounded, and so on, but understanding Hume's problem of induction won't help me understand why I should get vaccinated, and why it won't cause autism. It won't help me with the programming problem I'm working on. It won't help me balance my checkbook.
In a broader sense, the problem of induction doesn't really help society or civilization any more than artwork does -- less, because there are less people who can appreciate it.
This is precisely why I think philosophy is valuable, but these aspects of it have been absorbed into other disciplines, particularly English, mathematics, and science.
I can't speak for GP, but I'm not the type to bitch and complain because something is hard. I'm the type to make it easier, or switch to a language where it is easier.
You, on the other hand, are the type I would never hire. What right do you have to waste your employer's time and resources in a giant dick-waving contest? Sure, if it has to be fast, C++ is a good choice -- but as GP pointed out, C might be a better choice. If it doesn't have to run fast, we then need another set of skills which are just as difficult to master -- working efficiently (20 lines of Ruby versus two hundred of C++), making something maintainable and reliable (a tenth the code and infinitely fewer buffer overruns), and something flexible enough for future growth, but on the market today.
And if it's about the big bucks, or even the big important code that runs big important shit, you're better off doing COBOL. Me, I have a bit less of an ego and a bit more pride in my craft.
I don't think the point was what sort of optimizations might be employed or what the resulting binary would look like. It's not about implementation, it's about semantics.
For instance, in C, the bit shifting and boolean operators have precise and well-defined meanings. I know that anything which compiles with one of those operators is going to do exactly what that operator says. I personally don't have a problem with operator overloading (and truly miss it in Java), but in C++, the standard library co-opts those operators and perverts them into something else, to the point where when I was first learning C++ (without learning C), I thought data, which means I need bitwise operations to do what they're supposed to do.
Now, I don't think that's actually an argument against C++. If I don't want to be confused by operator overloading, I'm not forced to use it, and I think the benefits (when used properly) far outweigh the problems (when abused) -- and I think that's true of many language features people like to complain about. But I do think that's what GP was getting at -- it's not what physical instruction it might turn into, it's what the actual semantics are.
You are making a statement that is not based in reality, but in your own preconceptions.
I don't know about GP, but I would probably say much the same thing, based on my own conceptions. I'm not evaluating Microsoft prior to having experienced their products -- I've experienced enough crap Microsoft products to expect this shit by now. Windows 7, on the desktop, has been a nice exception -- but Vista was a nice mixture of everything I hated about XP with a whole bunch of brand new stuff to hate, and almost nothing to like.
It is the same as saying Linux is hard to use or administer because you tried it 10 years ago.
Except I didn't find that statement to be true eight years ago, or five years ago, or one year ago, while I have seen pretty continuous improvements from Linux. The worst I've seen in the Linux world was KDE4, which sucked in most of the ways Vista sucked, but GNOME kept working while that was being sorted out.
It doesn't help anyone to perpetuate stereotypes about computers.
science tends to produce the results that scientists want, when judged by their standards. If you have different goals or apply different standards, you might come to an equally high appreciation of, say, Voodoo.
Except science itself doesn't have any goals other than understanding what is actually going on. Usually, there are other goals in play -- but even a voodoo priest, for instance, might appreciate being able to sanitize a ritual blade. That is, science doesn't dictate these goals -- the only goal is getting close to understanding what is actually happening.
extremely vague proposals about improving education and imposing a "separation of science and state," so that scientifically dogmatic people don't crowd out everybody else in the processes for evaluating and deciding what is best.
It seems to me that there's very little issue with the goals of science. Whatever your goals, you'd be better off making an informed decision. In particular, whatever the government actually does, it'd much rather know what's actually going on -- this is also why governments have intelligence agencies, for instance. In education, it's even more obvious -- if education is about teaching students the truth, the goals of science are perfectly aligned with the goals of education.
The only question is about the standards used to evaluate a claim, and this is an epistemological problem. Again, evidentialism comes to mind, as this also seems to be the foundation of our courts system. If the government accepts evidentialism, at least in some capacities, I see no reason it shouldn't also accept science. That doesn't mean blindly accept anything a scientist says, but it does mean that, for instance, the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community on the matter of Intelligent Design (Creationism) should also be an overwhelming argument to the government that ID isn't science.
a blind believe in science because it's supposed to lead to some kind of TRUTH with a capital T and should therefore be accepted no matter what the consequences for human lives can be a very dangerous thing.
Huh? What do you mean "accepted"?
That is, are you skeptical of giving scientists free reign to do any experiment they want in the search for truth? Because I don't think anyone is arguing that.
Or are you skeptical of accepting the results of science when they happen to contradict something you want to believe? I, personally, want to believe what's true, and science seems to be the most reliable way of finding truth -- so whether I want to or not, I tend to accept the results unless there's a good reason to be skeptical.
Or are you skeptical of implementing the results of science? Because that's no longer just science anymore, that's technology.
But I still don't see this being harmful -- science is descriptive, not prescriptive. The same science that could help you repair a broken bone can also tell you how to break one, or how to repair it wrong. The same science that brought us the atom bomb also brought us nuclear power. The same science that can take us into space has been used for spy satellites, communications satellites, and could conceivably be used for orbital weapons.
In other words, it's a tool. I don't see how a tool alone has consequences for human lives.
I do not propose we replace science with voodoo. I do however agree that the choice between science and voodoo is not one that should be based on arguments that one or the other is "true" or "false" but on arguments that are based on how they affect our lives.
But these are inescapable. If voodoo is true, we should ban dolls. If science is false, DNA evidence shouldn't be allowed in courts.
The problem is, they don't seem to be of any practical importance whatsoever.
High-level English or art degrees may make it difficult to find a job, but everyone recognizes their usefulness -- you're creating something beautiful, or you're communicating better, or helping others to communicate. Even by themselves, everyone can appreciate what authors and painters do, and there's always advertising. Or combine it with any other field -- an effective communicator is valuable pretty much anywhere.
Math and physics is even more obviously useful. Math is the foundation of physics, which is the foundation of pretty much any sort of engineering -- and these are all intimately tied together. You will need the skills you learn in math if you want to solve interesting engineering problems.
Philosophy? Practically useless in the real world. Pretty much the only use for a philosophy degree is to become a philosophy professor, or maybe at the fringes of business as an ethicist. You could make an argument that it's at the foundation of math and science, and you'd be right, in a way -- but people don't really need to understand philosophy to understand math and science, and the useful bits of philosophy are spreading into other disciplines. I had an English course which attempted to teach critical thinking, and a math course which began by attempting to teach formal logic.
I like philosophy. I'm planning to minor in it. I find the way of thinking it teaches is fundamental to what makes me a good programmer and a frustrating debater, and I wish more people would at least take an intro class so they're exposed to ideas like the problem of evil, problem of justification, problem of induction, and so on -- as well as what makes something a bad argument, like Descartes' ontological argument for the existence of God.
But it's hard to make a case for a discipline which just teaches you how to think better, but leads nowhere other than academia. It's too easy to argue that philosophy is mental masturbation -- it's fun, it feels good, it's not hurting anyone, but it's still somewhat of a guilty pleasure, and you're still not really accomplishing anything.
To your point: A classic problem is universal skepticism. I'm not even sure Descartes' claim of "I am aware, therefore I exist" is justified, unless we broaden the definition of existence such that the universe itself exists as well. But how is this in any way important to anyone other than philosophers? While I can't prove to you that I exist, the reality I am presented with is consistent, and I'm going to run with it. Whether it's real or a dream is irrelevant to what I'm going to do in this reality, dream, simulation, or whatever.
It's sad, but the thing to do about it is to make philosophy relevant again.
That science, since it has no real epistemological foundation is no more justified in claiming to be discovering objective truth than, say, a voodoo priest....
It'd take a lot of definitions to back up that claim, I think. For one:
...the authority of science should only be accepted in as far as it improves our quality of life.
So long as we're arguing epistemology, how do we know it improves our quality of life? This seems circular, since the most obvious way to ask whether it improves our quality of life is to do some sort of scientific study about quality of life. Sometimes, science makes claims which will reduce our quality of life in the short term, but promise to increase it in the long term -- global warming, for instance.
Ignore for the moment whether or not it's actually true, many scientists are making the claim that you should burn less fossil fuels and generally go out of your way to be environmental, which will reduce your quality of life in the short term -- but if global warming is actually happening, and if human activity is causing it (or exacerbating it), stopping that activity would probably increase quality of life in the long term. If it's not happening, or if we can't stop it, that's a lot of short-term inconvenience for no real benefit. Even if it were happening, and we successfully reversed it and stabilized the environment, we'd still only have the claims of science to prove that it was actually going to happen.
In other words, entirely too often, claims about whether science improves our quality of life rest on the validity of science anyhow -- so if your initial objection to scientific validity was epistemological, your objection isn't really answered by appealing to quality of life.
Now, maybe I'm being naive, but I don't see this as a problem. Science itself may not have an epistemological foundation mostly because it doesn't require one; science is a process, not a philosophy. However, there are epistemologies which, if we accept them, validate science -- evidentialism comes to mind. And the evidence is that what the scientist discovers is probably a lot closer to any sort of objective truth than the voodoo priest. Of course, the voodoo priest might disagree with you on which epistemology to use, but I don't see any real solution to that in any context -- if someone wants to believe that truth is what the voices in their head tell you, they may be crazy, but you can't really make a good logical argument against that. (And if they claim that those voices are actually the voice of God or Jesus, it would be rude to even try.)
Deodorant isn't just "masking" odor with another scent -- it's not perfume. (Notice that there are unscented deodorants.) What it does is kill the bacteria which are causing that odor, which seems like a reasonable thing to do.
On user provided content, the trend seems clear enough from geocities/angelfire, to myspace, to facebook. Each required less and less work from users (by sacrificing customization capability).
Between these, however, the web versions (geocities/angelfire) were actually public websites, more akin to modern blogs. Myspace/Facebook are instead designed entirely around the idea of a user creating an account, and staying entirely within that context as much as they can.
On geocities/angelfire, people might've provided email links or "contact me" forms. On modern blogs, to ward off spam, anonymous posts might require a captcha or something similar. All of these things allow a person with just a web browser and a mail client to participate on any network, without walls -- the person with a Geocities account could link to the person with a Blogger account, who could link to the person who runs their own Wordpress server out of their basement.
On Facebook, there is no anonymity, and there is no convenient integration with any other service -- Facebook doesn't compliment email, it seeks to replace email. It's not about linking to the rest of the web so much as absorbing as much of the rest of the web into itself as possible. It is for this reason that I avoid it as much as possible.
Another issue of this is the natural aggregation of information in facebook. The users look at one page and data provided by all of their 'friends' is aggregated into one apparent stream of data. This is the tricky part to do in a distributed fashion.
Not really -- there are already standards in place, at least for the public aspect of this. For one, consider RSS -- yes, I realize most users don't use an RSS reader. But if what people really want is all their stuff on the same page, there's really no excuse anymore -- the major browsers have integrated RSS support.
If not assembled by the home routers, it would have to be a federated set of content-providers. e-mail is probably the most similar model, and that carries the problem of inefficient storage. Each user gets a disparate copy of the data.
That's also called "redundancy", and it's generally considered a Good Thing for availability. If someone else's mailserver goes down, I still have all my mail, even if some of it was a mass mailing.
Also, once out there, it cannot be edited in a single copy.
Except blogs and websites already allow this.
Basically, people explicitly want to put all their data in a *single* authoritative place, which naturally leads to things like facebook.
I don't even have a problem with that part.
What I have a problem with is that Facebook doesn't play nice with others. I don't care that many people put all their eggs in one GMail basket; so long as third-party mailservers can communicate with GMail, and third-party jabber servers can communicate with GTalk, it's still a distributed system. Facebook doesn't do this -- it essentially has its own proprietary and walled-off email and messaging service.
Do not expect a federated or home-served approach, expect another monolithic holder of all data.
What I want to understand is why this is the case, and what can be done about it. I understand that a home-server approach can't match what Facebook can do in terms of usability and reliability. I don't get why a federated approach can't do that.
i thought these machines were meant to assist in education, not for them to waste time doing worthless crap?
What "worthless crap" can you do with a tablet and not with a keyboard?
can any of YOU imagine using a touchscreen tablet for school work? because i sure can't,
Then you lack imagination.
not without a proper keyboard.
These kids may or may not have running water, let alone electricity. A software keyboard is an upgrade from no fucking computer in the first place. So...
it seems to me that the money spent on the touchscreen
Why are you assuming the touchscreen is going to cost more than the bottom half?
And that's before we consider the amount of abuse these things will have to be able to take. If someone gave you a machine you'd never have the money to buy yourself, repairs are the opposite of cheap. You want the thing to be durable.
Anything else you have to plug in is something extra to break or get lost. A hinge is easy to break. Even in my fairly comfortable first-world lifestyle, keys occasionally pop off, dust and grit gets into the keyboard, and keys wear out.
Touchscreens? Done right, the worst that happens here is smudging -- wipe it clean with a piece of cloth.
The point of failure is that if somebody uses my credentials then how can I prove they have been mis-used.
The same way you would with anything else?
Verified-by-visa is a classic case (in a long and shameful history by the banks) of claiming their systems are 100% secure and therefore the risk of anything going wrong is down to the consumer.
Is anyone doing that here? Making something more secure shouldn't necessarily make them more lax about fraud.
While the problem would exist for all connections, there are two major factors to consider. One is the ratio of the buffer to the network connection -- so take the same buffer and put it on a gigabit link and the problem is still there, but nowhere near as bad.
The other is the "clean-ness" of the connection. The fewer packets the connection itself drops, the worse the problem is.
What makes it hollow is that it has several meanings which, while not necessarily mutually-exclusive, are also not necessarily related -- and all of these things already have words. What you've described is, more or less, "outsourcing foo" where foo is 1, 2, or 3.
There was no need to sex this up with "cloud". I was fine with it when it was "Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud", since then it was just part of a name of one particular offering, but now it's just confusing. Are we using "cloud computing" if we use a traditional pay-by-the-month VPS, but we're hosting a web app we use instead of equivalent desktop software? Or is it only "cloud" if we use pay-by-the-hour pricing for on-demand VPSes, as EC2 offers? Is it "cloudier" if we use an entirely managed environment like, say, Google App Engine? (Or maybe Windows Azure? Haven't looked into it enough to know.)
When someone says "cloud", it's not entirely clear whether they mean an on-demand VPS with a thick client (think game server on Amazon EC2) or an in-house, non-virtualized web application. The fact that these things have nothing whatsoever to do with each other is what makes "cloud" so vacuous.
Like it or not, these services are commodities now.
I don't mind it at all. I like most of the stuff being marketed as "cloud", though I am of course wary of giving up control when I don't see a clear benefit. I use some "cloud" things, and some things I host myself.
What I mind is that when Microsoft says "To the cloud!" I have to stop and think. Do they mean, to my on-demand Linux VPS? No, of course, they mean servers, in the broadest possible sense -- nothing necessarily to do with Web technology (since they'll liberally apply it to native-app integration), nothing necessarily to do with virtual machines (since who knows or cares what they're hosting it on?), and their target audience would've been equally impressed with "To the Internet!"
So what is the threshold, and who do you listen to?
Yourself? I know I've heard creators (comics and cartoonists in particular) say that they only really got good when they stopped trying to make other people happy, and started trying to make themselves happy.
At the same time, that's a sample size of 1. I wouldn't change my game in a way that'd make me hate it, but there's a lot of things I might feel "meh" about that other players feel passionately about.
Your dev team? Small, incredibly biased sample. Their feelings about it are inseparable from the fact that they've been working on this thing for months, if not years. Same thing applies -- pissing your dev team off is probably a bad idea, but if they don't think something is a problem, that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a problem.
Your testers?
Now we're getting somewhere. What makes you think your testers are special? They aren't any less self-selected than the people bitching on your forums. About the only thing special about your testers is that there are a lot fewer of them, and they're probably professional.
And it may be true that people's complaint threshold is low, but their "fuck it, I'm not playing this" threshold is far lower. If you have a demo and people are leaving, you might not necessarily get feedback. If you don't have a demo, you'll get even less feedback -- I'll take one look at your game, go "Huh, no demo," and I won't buy it. You have no way of knowing that the "silent majority" likes your game -- they might hate it, and they might regret buying it, so while you've got their money, they're not likely to buy another game from you.
I don't think anyone's suggesting that you should immediately "deaden the taste," no questions asked. But take the "repair houses" suggestion above. How many would actually oppose this? Compare to the number who want it, or the number who would appreciate it, or the number who don't know what they want other than that the game is too tedious.
See here's the point you OpenIDTards are failing to grasp....
I'm waiting...
Denial - It's not just a river in Egypt.
Ad-hominem. It's not just fancy latin, it's an easy way to spot posts that probably won't be worth reading.
Let's say I use 10 web sites and have 10 different passwords for each one of them, managed by an ENCRYPTED and LOCALLY STORED ONLY password vault program.
Which means it's a single point of failure on your system. How is that better?
Jesus Christ, it's like pulling teeth to get you to connect the dots....
It'd probably be easier if you made your point instead of bitching about how stupid I am for not somehow being psychic enough to already know what you're thinking.
Breaking into *my* computer wouldn't do him any good since the passwords are not stored there in plaintext.
Sure it would -- install keylogger, wait. Hey, presto, he's got your uber-password.
Now, with OpenID there is one consistent "identity", one set of credentials that is re-used across multiple sites.
...maybe.
There certainly could be one consistent identity. Or you could create a separate account per-site. Up to you.
OpenID adds the choice of having SSO. It doesn't force you to do so.
Do I really have to bring out the email analogy again? Probably. OpenID is similar to email in its flaws and strengths. You could "put all your eggs in one basket" and have exactly one email account, which is fine for most people. Or you can have as many email accounts on as many different providers as you can manage.
Somebody compromises that one identity by any means and I'm fucked on every site I use.
Just like if somebody compromises your one master password file on your one computer.
That's the definition of a single point of failure.
Yes. Yes it is. All you've done is moved the SPOF from a web service to your local hard drive. Whether or not that's actually more secure is up to you, but note that OpenID certainly allows you to control the web service as much as you like.
Suppose I set up my own OpenID server, which I run off my own hardware. The "single point of failure" is now moved from my laptop (where you'd put it) to my Linux server, two feet to the left. I can encrypt it to my heart's content, I can protect it in exactly the same way it would be protected "locally" on my laptop.
Only now I can actually have those multiple identities online be somewhat connected, so I can prove on Reddit that I'm the same person who made that Slashdot comment -- at least, if Reddit and Slashdot both supported OpenID. It also ends up being less of a hassle, and more secure than using passwords. After all, how do passwords get compromised?
Some hacker can break into one of them.
Huh. You're going to have to be way more specific.
For example, I've got ssh access to a number of systems. My access is via a single private key, but the corresponding public key is stored on all those systems. What would it mean for "some hacker" to break in? Break into where? On my machine, that private key is encrypted, so it's just as secure as your local list of passwords. But on the remote end, it doesn't matter if they get the public key, it won't give them access to anywhere.
Worse, since it's actually key-based instead of password-based, if they were in a guessing mood, they'd have to guess 4096 bits worth in order to get access. Phishing is no help here; connecting to an untrusted server doesn't give that server access to anything else I can connect to.
OpenID can be similarly protected against these kinds of attacks. How, exactly, are they supposed to compromise that one account? Just because you authenticate against a g
Slashdot Mirror
If the OP was concerned about semantics, then why the specification that particularly matters for low-level coding?
Maybe the semantics in question are those which are relevant to low-level coding?
For higher-level stuff, there's less confusion. A string plus an integer, if it works, really only has one sane interpretation. ...maybe? I'm not sure anymore, and it seems like we mostly agree anyhow.
But your examples were all things where you had tried out the software, otherwise you would not have known that they got it right with Windows 7...
When I hear so many people saying so many good things about Windows 7, I figured it was worth a shot.
I heard enough bad things about Vista that I didn't want to try it. I did occasionally touch it when I was paid to, or to help fix a friend's computer, or just to use it for a minute. I hated every minute of it -- it was truly fascinating how slow it managed to be on new hardware.
All of which were exactly as expected. After all, XP sucked until SP2 -- before that, it was a bloatier, buggier, uglier version of 2K. But several service packs don't seem to have made Vista much better.
After that experience, trying seven was truly a breath of fresh air.
(although I would like to know why you hate Vista so much and yet like Win7 when they are more alike than different).
Simple: It fixes everything Vista fucked up.
Boot time: Several minutes for Vista to boot, and the disk is still thrashing long after. Thirty seconds for Seven to boot.
Overall performance: Vista is slower on any given hardware than XP. Seven is usually faster.
UAC: Vista bothers people enough that they turn it off -- pretty much everything I installed would have multiple separate UAC prompts, sometimes up to five, conservatively. Seven only ever bothers me when I'm installing stuff, and almost always at exactly the places I would want to be bothered -- like, once per install, if that.
The Dock: It may be ripped off from Apple (and from NextStep before Apple), but it is very cool. Maybe I just don't remember, but I don't think I saw it in Vista.
About the only thing I like about both of them is 64-bit support. This was rocky early on for Vista, but that's understandable as the fault of third-party manufacturers who needed to get with the program. It sucked on XP. But 64-bit wasn't reason enough to upgrade (downgrade?) from XP to Vista.
I could go on. Basically, aside from the real features Seven adds (keyboard shortcuts!), it pretty much fixes every complaint I had about Vista, and I haven't seen it do anything worse than XP does.
My point is that you are free to dislike their software and find fault with it, and you are free to disregard them for future consideration based on your past experiences, but you really shouldn't make public statements about a product being bad when you have no idea if it is true.
That's a good point...
You originally replied to someone saying "That's a pretty safe assumption with Microsoft products," which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say even after you disregard them for future consideration.
I feel like I know a bit more than just a "safe assumption" about Microsoft products. However, from what I do know, after about Windows 98, I felt perfectly justified deliberately avoiding Windows when I could, based on that past experience, and would've happily done so if I could.
Unfortunately, I couldn't, not really. Inevitably, I would help other people out with Win2k (hey, the floppy drive no longer locks up the whole computer! Progress!), was forced to use XP myself for work, managed to avoid Vista on my own machines (only occasionally helping others), and gave 7 a spin since I still use Windows for games or the occasional irritation (school has forced a Silverlight monstrosity onto me).
So yes, it would be contradictory if I said I never use Windows at all, and then claimed to know things about how bad it still is, based on what I know about Windows 98. But I do use Windows often enough to know some of its strengths and weaknesses, as much as I would rather never boot it again -- I did manage to go all of last semester and most of last summer without booting it. My intent is still to avoid it based on past experience, it's just that I keep being forced to use it long enough to see just how true my past experience often is.
Saying voodoo is true or false is subjective. Voodoo objectively exists, it's real on many levels, from the rituals to the concepts etc.
It sounds like you're not saying that the statement is subjective, but that it's poorly defined.
What matters is what the GP said, how these things affect our lives. If you are scared to death of voodoo you indeed might want to ban dolls.
However, whether you should be afraid of voodoo depends on whether voodoo actually works.
Consider a girl who brings a nice boy home for dinner. Her family hates him, her father might try to insist she never see this boy. She defends him and continues seeing him.
Then she finds out her family was right. The boy was a rapist and a killer. What's more, the signs were all there, her family saw them, and she only missed them because she was so infatuated.
Of course, we might imagine another scenario in which the family has the same reaction, but the boy really is a nice guy and turns out to be the love of her life. They marry, have children, and live happily ever after.
So whether the family was right or wrong -- whether their intuition that this guy was "trouble" was true or false (properly defined) -- does affect what the girl should do. If the guy is actually nice, she should stand up to her family and stand by the boy. If the guy is actually a rapist and a killer, she probably shouldn't see him again. These have nothing to do with her beliefs about the matter, it has to do with what is actually going on.
So again, you can't talk about "how these things affect our lives" without also talking about whether they're true or false. If voodoo works, it affects our lives in very different ways than if it's just a kooky religion.
The question isn't whether you're afraid of Voodoo. It's whether you should be, given the things you actually care about -- comfort, safety, the well-being of you and your family...
What is accepted or not in court is much more a matter of group-thinking than the result of any scientific approach...
Notice the key word here: should. The goal of the court is to ascertain the truth -- to discover when someone has committed a crime, beyond a reasonable doubt. Whether DNA evidence should be allowed in courts is contingent on how reliable science (and DNA testing in particular) is at discovering truth.
Similarly, the goal of laws, bans in particular, is to make us safer. If voodoo is false, we would certainly agree that banning dolls out of fear of voodoo is ridiculous.
Whether these things are actually a result of a rigorous epistemology or group-think is irrelevant. The point is that these are things which impact your life, which you should accept or reject (or fight) based on whether voodoo or science is true or false.
And that's before we get into personal motivations. For example, I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible, so I'm going with science, not voodoo, even if there weren't any practical effects.
You're right, the ability to think logically and to enquire about the truth beneath the surface reality of things...
Ah, but science does a better job of this than philosophy, and I never said science is practically useless in the real world.
...ultimately, we must choose which philosophy/religion we will live our lives by.
I think we're talking about different definitions of "philosophy." I'm talking about the discipline as taught in modern philosophy departments, the way of thinking by which we can try to figure out what a position actually means, and what the problems with it are.
What you're calling "philosophy", a philosopher might call a "model", I think.
We can punt on the decision, and allow popular culture to pick for us, but that just means we have even less control over our own lives, on the most fundamental questions.
I couldn't agree more, but the fact that you mentioned religion means we probably wouldn't agree on what those fundamental questions are, and I also don't think those fundamental questions have anything to do with most of what philosophy teaches.
You're probably thinking of philosophical questions like, "What happens when you die?" While this can be a profound motivating influence, it actually doesn't have too much impact on the way most people live their lives. Notice that even people who believe they're going to an eternity of happiness when they die are still sad about a loved one dying, and are still afraid to die themselves.
I love philosophy, and think that anything mind-expanding should be promoted in our schools,
Sure, but let's start with what's relevant. And I'm not talking about a career path, either. I'm talking about relevance to a person's life, to the purpose of their life, to a sense of fulfillment... That varies from person to person, but there are a few things that will be common to everyone, so that's where we start. Then we have departments to answer the rest.
For example, everyone can benefit from knowing a little math. Everyone can benefit from understanding the scientific method. These are helpful in everything from avoiding scams and pseudoscience (a little math destroys pyramid schemes, a little science destroys anti-vaccination claims) to realizing your dreams ("I wanna be an astronaut!")
Now, in what way does most philosophy expand our minds? I'd put it in the same category as literature -- it may make us better at philosophy, and it'll certainly make us richer, better-educated, more well-rounded, and so on, but understanding Hume's problem of induction won't help me understand why I should get vaccinated, and why it won't cause autism. It won't help me with the programming problem I'm working on. It won't help me balance my checkbook.
In a broader sense, the problem of induction doesn't really help society or civilization any more than artwork does -- less, because there are less people who can appreciate it.
Apparently you didn't read my comment.
This is precisely why I think philosophy is valuable, but these aspects of it have been absorbed into other disciplines, particularly English, mathematics, and science.
I can't speak for GP, but I'm not the type to bitch and complain because something is hard. I'm the type to make it easier, or switch to a language where it is easier.
You, on the other hand, are the type I would never hire. What right do you have to waste your employer's time and resources in a giant dick-waving contest? Sure, if it has to be fast, C++ is a good choice -- but as GP pointed out, C might be a better choice. If it doesn't have to run fast, we then need another set of skills which are just as difficult to master -- working efficiently (20 lines of Ruby versus two hundred of C++), making something maintainable and reliable (a tenth the code and infinitely fewer buffer overruns), and something flexible enough for future growth, but on the market today.
And if it's about the big bucks, or even the big important code that runs big important shit, you're better off doing COBOL. Me, I have a bit less of an ego and a bit more pride in my craft.
I don't think the point was what sort of optimizations might be employed or what the resulting binary would look like. It's not about implementation, it's about semantics.
For instance, in C, the bit shifting and boolean operators have precise and well-defined meanings. I know that anything which compiles with one of those operators is going to do exactly what that operator says. I personally don't have a problem with operator overloading (and truly miss it in Java), but in C++, the standard library co-opts those operators and perverts them into something else, to the point where when I was first learning C++ (without learning C), I thought data, which means I need bitwise operations to do what they're supposed to do.
Now, I don't think that's actually an argument against C++. If I don't want to be confused by operator overloading, I'm not forced to use it, and I think the benefits (when used properly) far outweigh the problems (when abused) -- and I think that's true of many language features people like to complain about. But I do think that's what GP was getting at -- it's not what physical instruction it might turn into, it's what the actual semantics are.
You are making a statement that is not based in reality, but in your own preconceptions.
I don't know about GP, but I would probably say much the same thing, based on my own conceptions. I'm not evaluating Microsoft prior to having experienced their products -- I've experienced enough crap Microsoft products to expect this shit by now. Windows 7, on the desktop, has been a nice exception -- but Vista was a nice mixture of everything I hated about XP with a whole bunch of brand new stuff to hate, and almost nothing to like.
It is the same as saying Linux is hard to use or administer because you tried it 10 years ago.
Except I didn't find that statement to be true eight years ago, or five years ago, or one year ago, while I have seen pretty continuous improvements from Linux. The worst I've seen in the Linux world was KDE4, which sucked in most of the ways Vista sucked, but GNOME kept working while that was being sorted out.
It doesn't help anyone to perpetuate stereotypes about computers.
I can't help it if some of them are true.
science tends to produce the results that scientists want, when judged by their standards. If you have different goals or apply different standards, you might come to an equally high appreciation of, say, Voodoo.
Except science itself doesn't have any goals other than understanding what is actually going on. Usually, there are other goals in play -- but even a voodoo priest, for instance, might appreciate being able to sanitize a ritual blade. That is, science doesn't dictate these goals -- the only goal is getting close to understanding what is actually happening.
extremely vague proposals about improving education and imposing a "separation of science and state," so that scientifically dogmatic people don't crowd out everybody else in the processes for evaluating and deciding what is best.
Be careful what you wish for.
It seems to me that there's very little issue with the goals of science. Whatever your goals, you'd be better off making an informed decision. In particular, whatever the government actually does, it'd much rather know what's actually going on -- this is also why governments have intelligence agencies, for instance. In education, it's even more obvious -- if education is about teaching students the truth, the goals of science are perfectly aligned with the goals of education.
The only question is about the standards used to evaluate a claim, and this is an epistemological problem. Again, evidentialism comes to mind, as this also seems to be the foundation of our courts system. If the government accepts evidentialism, at least in some capacities, I see no reason it shouldn't also accept science. That doesn't mean blindly accept anything a scientist says, but it does mean that, for instance, the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community on the matter of Intelligent Design (Creationism) should also be an overwhelming argument to the government that ID isn't science.
a blind believe in science because it's supposed to lead to some kind of TRUTH with a capital T and should therefore be accepted no matter what the consequences for human lives can be a very dangerous thing.
Huh? What do you mean "accepted"?
That is, are you skeptical of giving scientists free reign to do any experiment they want in the search for truth? Because I don't think anyone is arguing that.
Or are you skeptical of accepting the results of science when they happen to contradict something you want to believe? I, personally, want to believe what's true, and science seems to be the most reliable way of finding truth -- so whether I want to or not, I tend to accept the results unless there's a good reason to be skeptical.
Or are you skeptical of implementing the results of science? Because that's no longer just science anymore, that's technology.
But I still don't see this being harmful -- science is descriptive, not prescriptive. The same science that could help you repair a broken bone can also tell you how to break one, or how to repair it wrong. The same science that brought us the atom bomb also brought us nuclear power. The same science that can take us into space has been used for spy satellites, communications satellites, and could conceivably be used for orbital weapons.
In other words, it's a tool. I don't see how a tool alone has consequences for human lives.
I do not propose we replace science with voodoo. I do however agree that the choice between science and voodoo is not one that should be based on arguments that one or the other is "true" or "false" but on arguments that are based on how they affect our lives.
But these are inescapable. If voodoo is true, we should ban dolls. If science is false, DNA evidence shouldn't be allowed in courts.
And like most, they bastardized it beyond recognition.
Not that it meant much before, but now it means even less.
The problem is, they don't seem to be of any practical importance whatsoever.
High-level English or art degrees may make it difficult to find a job, but everyone recognizes their usefulness -- you're creating something beautiful, or you're communicating better, or helping others to communicate. Even by themselves, everyone can appreciate what authors and painters do, and there's always advertising. Or combine it with any other field -- an effective communicator is valuable pretty much anywhere.
Math and physics is even more obviously useful. Math is the foundation of physics, which is the foundation of pretty much any sort of engineering -- and these are all intimately tied together. You will need the skills you learn in math if you want to solve interesting engineering problems.
Philosophy? Practically useless in the real world. Pretty much the only use for a philosophy degree is to become a philosophy professor, or maybe at the fringes of business as an ethicist. You could make an argument that it's at the foundation of math and science, and you'd be right, in a way -- but people don't really need to understand philosophy to understand math and science, and the useful bits of philosophy are spreading into other disciplines. I had an English course which attempted to teach critical thinking, and a math course which began by attempting to teach formal logic.
I like philosophy. I'm planning to minor in it. I find the way of thinking it teaches is fundamental to what makes me a good programmer and a frustrating debater, and I wish more people would at least take an intro class so they're exposed to ideas like the problem of evil, problem of justification, problem of induction, and so on -- as well as what makes something a bad argument, like Descartes' ontological argument for the existence of God.
But it's hard to make a case for a discipline which just teaches you how to think better, but leads nowhere other than academia. It's too easy to argue that philosophy is mental masturbation -- it's fun, it feels good, it's not hurting anyone, but it's still somewhat of a guilty pleasure, and you're still not really accomplishing anything.
To your point: A classic problem is universal skepticism. I'm not even sure Descartes' claim of "I am aware, therefore I exist" is justified, unless we broaden the definition of existence such that the universe itself exists as well. But how is this in any way important to anyone other than philosophers? While I can't prove to you that I exist, the reality I am presented with is consistent, and I'm going to run with it. Whether it's real or a dream is irrelevant to what I'm going to do in this reality, dream, simulation, or whatever.
It's sad, but the thing to do about it is to make philosophy relevant again.
I have absolutely no idea how to do that.
That science, since it has no real epistemological foundation is no more justified in claiming to be discovering objective truth than, say, a voodoo priest....
It'd take a lot of definitions to back up that claim, I think. For one:
...the authority of science should only be accepted in as far as it improves our quality of life.
So long as we're arguing epistemology, how do we know it improves our quality of life? This seems circular, since the most obvious way to ask whether it improves our quality of life is to do some sort of scientific study about quality of life. Sometimes, science makes claims which will reduce our quality of life in the short term, but promise to increase it in the long term -- global warming, for instance.
Ignore for the moment whether or not it's actually true, many scientists are making the claim that you should burn less fossil fuels and generally go out of your way to be environmental, which will reduce your quality of life in the short term -- but if global warming is actually happening, and if human activity is causing it (or exacerbating it), stopping that activity would probably increase quality of life in the long term. If it's not happening, or if we can't stop it, that's a lot of short-term inconvenience for no real benefit. Even if it were happening, and we successfully reversed it and stabilized the environment, we'd still only have the claims of science to prove that it was actually going to happen.
In other words, entirely too often, claims about whether science improves our quality of life rest on the validity of science anyhow -- so if your initial objection to scientific validity was epistemological, your objection isn't really answered by appealing to quality of life.
Now, maybe I'm being naive, but I don't see this as a problem. Science itself may not have an epistemological foundation mostly because it doesn't require one; science is a process, not a philosophy. However, there are epistemologies which, if we accept them, validate science -- evidentialism comes to mind. And the evidence is that what the scientist discovers is probably a lot closer to any sort of objective truth than the voodoo priest. Of course, the voodoo priest might disagree with you on which epistemology to use, but I don't see any real solution to that in any context -- if someone wants to believe that truth is what the voices in their head tell you, they may be crazy, but you can't really make a good logical argument against that. (And if they claim that those voices are actually the voice of God or Jesus, it would be rude to even try.)
Deodorant isn't just "masking" odor with another scent -- it's not perfume. (Notice that there are unscented deodorants.) What it does is kill the bacteria which are causing that odor, which seems like a reasonable thing to do.
On user provided content, the trend seems clear enough from geocities/angelfire, to myspace, to facebook. Each required less and less work from users (by sacrificing customization capability).
Between these, however, the web versions (geocities/angelfire) were actually public websites, more akin to modern blogs. Myspace/Facebook are instead designed entirely around the idea of a user creating an account, and staying entirely within that context as much as they can.
On geocities/angelfire, people might've provided email links or "contact me" forms. On modern blogs, to ward off spam, anonymous posts might require a captcha or something similar. All of these things allow a person with just a web browser and a mail client to participate on any network, without walls -- the person with a Geocities account could link to the person with a Blogger account, who could link to the person who runs their own Wordpress server out of their basement.
On Facebook, there is no anonymity, and there is no convenient integration with any other service -- Facebook doesn't compliment email, it seeks to replace email. It's not about linking to the rest of the web so much as absorbing as much of the rest of the web into itself as possible. It is for this reason that I avoid it as much as possible.
Another issue of this is the natural aggregation of information in facebook. The users look at one page and data provided by all of their 'friends' is aggregated into one apparent stream of data. This is the tricky part to do in a distributed fashion.
Not really -- there are already standards in place, at least for the public aspect of this. For one, consider RSS -- yes, I realize most users don't use an RSS reader. But if what people really want is all their stuff on the same page, there's really no excuse anymore -- the major browsers have integrated RSS support.
If not assembled by the home routers, it would have to be a federated set of content-providers. e-mail is probably the most similar model, and that carries the problem of inefficient storage. Each user gets a disparate copy of the data.
That's also called "redundancy", and it's generally considered a Good Thing for availability. If someone else's mailserver goes down, I still have all my mail, even if some of it was a mass mailing.
Also, once out there, it cannot be edited in a single copy.
Except blogs and websites already allow this.
Basically, people explicitly want to put all their data in a *single* authoritative place, which naturally leads to things like facebook.
I don't even have a problem with that part.
What I have a problem with is that Facebook doesn't play nice with others. I don't care that many people put all their eggs in one GMail basket; so long as third-party mailservers can communicate with GMail, and third-party jabber servers can communicate with GTalk, it's still a distributed system. Facebook doesn't do this -- it essentially has its own proprietary and walled-off email and messaging service.
Do not expect a federated or home-served approach, expect another monolithic holder of all data.
What I want to understand is why this is the case, and what can be done about it. I understand that a home-server approach can't match what Facebook can do in terms of usability and reliability. I don't get why a federated approach can't do that.
i thought these machines were meant to assist in education, not for them to waste time doing worthless crap?
What "worthless crap" can you do with a tablet and not with a keyboard?
can any of YOU imagine using a touchscreen tablet for school work? because i sure can't,
Then you lack imagination.
not without a proper keyboard.
These kids may or may not have running water, let alone electricity. A software keyboard is an upgrade from no fucking computer in the first place. So...
it seems to me that the money spent on the touchscreen
Why are you assuming the touchscreen is going to cost more than the bottom half?
And that's before we consider the amount of abuse these things will have to be able to take. If someone gave you a machine you'd never have the money to buy yourself, repairs are the opposite of cheap. You want the thing to be durable.
Anything else you have to plug in is something extra to break or get lost. A hinge is easy to break. Even in my fairly comfortable first-world lifestyle, keys occasionally pop off, dust and grit gets into the keyboard, and keys wear out.
Touchscreens? Done right, the worst that happens here is smudging -- wipe it clean with a piece of cloth.
Interestingly, it was Dell which gave me a 100mbit network card instead of the gigabit I assumed it would have. My fault for not checking, but...
The point of failure is that if somebody uses my credentials then how can I prove they have been mis-used.
The same way you would with anything else?
Verified-by-visa is a classic case (in a long and shameful history by the banks) of claiming their systems are 100% secure and therefore the risk of anything going wrong is down to the consumer.
Is anyone doing that here? Making something more secure shouldn't necessarily make them more lax about fraud.
You forgot the tiny little fact that unless one pulls his connection to the limit with a lot of tcp connections, there isn't any problem.
You forgot to RTFA. A single TCP connection that saturates your pipe will make latency skyrocket if you've got buffer bloat.
is not to go with small buffers but to have intelligent queuing algorithms in all devices.
I agree, but that's as likely to happen as IPv6. Eventually, but not yet, and it may always be "not yet".
While the problem would exist for all connections, there are two major factors to consider. One is the ratio of the buffer to the network connection -- so take the same buffer and put it on a gigabit link and the problem is still there, but nowhere near as bad.
The other is the "clean-ness" of the connection. The fewer packets the connection itself drops, the worse the problem is.
What makes it hollow is that it has several meanings which, while not necessarily mutually-exclusive, are also not necessarily related -- and all of these things already have words. What you've described is, more or less, "outsourcing foo" where foo is 1, 2, or 3.
There was no need to sex this up with "cloud". I was fine with it when it was "Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud", since then it was just part of a name of one particular offering, but now it's just confusing. Are we using "cloud computing" if we use a traditional pay-by-the-month VPS, but we're hosting a web app we use instead of equivalent desktop software? Or is it only "cloud" if we use pay-by-the-hour pricing for on-demand VPSes, as EC2 offers? Is it "cloudier" if we use an entirely managed environment like, say, Google App Engine? (Or maybe Windows Azure? Haven't looked into it enough to know.)
When someone says "cloud", it's not entirely clear whether they mean an on-demand VPS with a thick client (think game server on Amazon EC2) or an in-house, non-virtualized web application. The fact that these things have nothing whatsoever to do with each other is what makes "cloud" so vacuous.
Like it or not, these services are commodities now.
I don't mind it at all. I like most of the stuff being marketed as "cloud", though I am of course wary of giving up control when I don't see a clear benefit. I use some "cloud" things, and some things I host myself.
What I mind is that when Microsoft says "To the cloud!" I have to stop and think. Do they mean, to my on-demand Linux VPS? No, of course, they mean servers, in the broadest possible sense -- nothing necessarily to do with Web technology (since they'll liberally apply it to native-app integration), nothing necessarily to do with virtual machines (since who knows or cares what they're hosting it on?), and their target audience would've been equally impressed with "To the Internet!"
So what is the threshold, and who do you listen to?
Yourself? I know I've heard creators (comics and cartoonists in particular) say that they only really got good when they stopped trying to make other people happy, and started trying to make themselves happy.
At the same time, that's a sample size of 1. I wouldn't change my game in a way that'd make me hate it, but there's a lot of things I might feel "meh" about that other players feel passionately about.
Your dev team? Small, incredibly biased sample. Their feelings about it are inseparable from the fact that they've been working on this thing for months, if not years. Same thing applies -- pissing your dev team off is probably a bad idea, but if they don't think something is a problem, that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a problem.
Your testers?
Now we're getting somewhere. What makes you think your testers are special? They aren't any less self-selected than the people bitching on your forums. About the only thing special about your testers is that there are a lot fewer of them, and they're probably professional.
And it may be true that people's complaint threshold is low, but their "fuck it, I'm not playing this" threshold is far lower. If you have a demo and people are leaving, you might not necessarily get feedback. If you don't have a demo, you'll get even less feedback -- I'll take one look at your game, go "Huh, no demo," and I won't buy it. You have no way of knowing that the "silent majority" likes your game -- they might hate it, and they might regret buying it, so while you've got their money, they're not likely to buy another game from you.
I don't think anyone's suggesting that you should immediately "deaden the taste," no questions asked. But take the "repair houses" suggestion above. How many would actually oppose this? Compare to the number who want it, or the number who would appreciate it, or the number who don't know what they want other than that the game is too tedious.
See here's the point you OpenIDTards are failing to grasp....
I'm waiting...
Denial - It's not just a river in Egypt.
Ad-hominem. It's not just fancy latin, it's an easy way to spot posts that probably won't be worth reading.
Let's say I use 10 web sites and have 10 different passwords for each one of them, managed by an ENCRYPTED and LOCALLY STORED ONLY password vault program.
Which means it's a single point of failure on your system. How is that better?
Jesus Christ, it's like pulling teeth to get you to connect the dots....
It'd probably be easier if you made your point instead of bitching about how stupid I am for not somehow being psychic enough to already know what you're thinking.
Breaking into *my* computer wouldn't do him any good since the passwords are not stored there in plaintext.
Sure it would -- install keylogger, wait. Hey, presto, he's got your uber-password.
Now, with OpenID there is one consistent "identity", one set of credentials that is re-used across multiple sites.
...maybe.
There certainly could be one consistent identity. Or you could create a separate account per-site. Up to you.
OpenID adds the choice of having SSO. It doesn't force you to do so.
Do I really have to bring out the email analogy again? Probably. OpenID is similar to email in its flaws and strengths. You could "put all your eggs in one basket" and have exactly one email account, which is fine for most people. Or you can have as many email accounts on as many different providers as you can manage.
Somebody compromises that one identity by any means and I'm fucked on every site I use.
Just like if somebody compromises your one master password file on your one computer.
That's the definition of a single point of failure.
Yes. Yes it is. All you've done is moved the SPOF from a web service to your local hard drive. Whether or not that's actually more secure is up to you, but note that OpenID certainly allows you to control the web service as much as you like.
Suppose I set up my own OpenID server, which I run off my own hardware. The "single point of failure" is now moved from my laptop (where you'd put it) to my Linux server, two feet to the left. I can encrypt it to my heart's content, I can protect it in exactly the same way it would be protected "locally" on my laptop.
Only now I can actually have those multiple identities online be somewhat connected, so I can prove on Reddit that I'm the same person who made that Slashdot comment -- at least, if Reddit and Slashdot both supported OpenID. It also ends up being less of a hassle, and more secure than using passwords. After all, how do passwords get compromised?
Some hacker can break into one of them.
Huh. You're going to have to be way more specific.
For example, I've got ssh access to a number of systems. My access is via a single private key, but the corresponding public key is stored on all those systems. What would it mean for "some hacker" to break in? Break into where? On my machine, that private key is encrypted, so it's just as secure as your local list of passwords. But on the remote end, it doesn't matter if they get the public key, it won't give them access to anywhere.
Worse, since it's actually key-based instead of password-based, if they were in a guessing mood, they'd have to guess 4096 bits worth in order to get access. Phishing is no help here; connecting to an untrusted server doesn't give that server access to anything else I can connect to.
OpenID can be similarly protected against these kinds of attacks. How, exactly, are they supposed to compromise that one account? Just because you authenticate against a g