Java feels way slower than anything else. My college courses were mostly in Eclipse. It runs fast enough, but it takes forever to start, which is true of many, many Java apps.
Which means that when these same programmers end up learning C/C++, they'll think Java is slow because it's "interpreted". I guess there's at least the hope that they'll wind up using C#, and thinking Java is slow because it sucks. Which is good enough, because Java sucks for other reasons, even though it isn't really slow.
But really, with Generics, Java has basically picked up most of the features and syntax of C++, added garbage collection and much more anal retentive restrictions, and called it a whole new language. The bytecode and virtual machine is really not relevant to the awfulness of the language itself -- you can write a perfectly good language for the JVM -- but the JVM, specificalyl, has its own drawbacks, in that it's hard to write more libraries for Java, and many of the existing libraries suck in profound ways compared to C/C++ alternatives, or even.NET.
Frankly, the only good thing about them learning Java is that at least for awhile, their code may be portable, because it's so hard to make OS-specific or arch-specific Java.
Instead of Slashdot "word vomiting" about what some other blog said about what David Jaffe said, why not just read what David Jaffe said? He does have some good things to say -- particularly that he doesn't think that single-player adventure games are dead, a bad medium, a bad idea, or anything like that -- he just doesn't want to work on them anymore.
Think about it -- you finish tweaking Tetris, Pong, Street Fighter, etc, you can still enjoy playing them, but by the time you finish Zelda, God of War, or Final Fantasy, not so much, because you already know every surprise, plot twist, minigame, everything the game throws at you is something you've already seen so many times. I imagine it's a bit like writing a book -- after you're finished writing it, you probably can't read it through once, that's what you need editors for -- after all, how many books do you read through more than once or twice? After you finish writing one, you've read through and written and rewritten most of it so many times that you can't stand it.
This isn't always true, and certainly not for everyone. I write differently, for instance -- when I finish writing a story, I certainly can read it again, because I only write once, straight through, only ever editing a sentence or two back from where I am. I almost never do second drafts.
But I can understand why he would be getting sick of doing that, and why it would lead him to say those things. After all, at least part of it is what we've all been thinking. On some level, most of the games we're playing are really still subject to the same complaints people have about Street Fighter -- sure, it has plot, but the plot and gameplay are completely separate. If you're lucky, you get a cinematic after defeating a particular opponent. But this is true of so many games it's not funny -- Halo (and Halo 2), GTA, Doom 3, Quake 4, Final Fantasy, Beyond Good & Evil... Very few games tell any story with the game world and the gameplay. Most just cut to cinematics -- or worse, text or voice (Doom 3's PDAs).
Every now and then, we get games that tell a significant part of the story in the gameplay and environment -- and even then, much of it is the environment. Examples would be Zelda, Half-Life (and Half-Life 2), Quake 4. Yeah, Quake 4 is both, because it does cut to cinematic in a lot of places I wish it wouldn't, but the cinematics, voiceovers (radio), text, and gameplay are woven together so well that it mostly feels like a story is being told, but you don't have to pull too far out of the gameplay and game world to tell it. And I don't mean the gimmicks like still being barely in control on the Strogg operating table. I guess being a long game helps...
And of course, there are also the games with little or no story, or where the stories you live are so much more interesting. Natural Selection, Counter-Strike, UT2004, and the few MMOs that have completely unobtrusive stories, but play well enough to justify it. Nexus TK is an example -- the only reason it's got such a great story is that it's built up over seven or eight years. MMOs are also interesting in that if they do actually advance the story (most seem too afraid to), it's like real life in that it impacts everyone differently; everyone has their own story to tell.
But then, MMOs often get accused of having little or no story, or of simply providing the forum and letting their players do everything themselves. You don't play World of Warcraft because it's a good game, you play it because that's where your friends are, that's where your guild is...
Or were you talking about writing the entire story?
Take your average Final Fantasy game -- the story alone could've taken years to write. Next to that, God of War is nothing. But you're comparing it to Ratchet and Clank? That would take a good writer maybe a week or two.
If you want to talk about story without cutscenes, I'd bring it back to Half-Life. Even Half-Life 2 definitely has some cutscenes, some characters and areas that are obviously intended to be scripted and cinematic. Half-Life leaves the player in control, with no dialog at all, for the vast majority of the game. And it still manages to tell a story.
I'd be excited about a game like that.
What God of War was good at was just being fun. The mythology was just there to help, it's easy enough to invent your own. How much do you think it took to get the basic idea for Halo? I know there's much more to it, but come on -- first game is ringworld + star wars + the Chief. Let me make a new one up for you right now: Texas hick is experimented on by the government using alien tech and is now much stronger and skilled with firearms, the Civil War is still going on, and he fights for the south for awhile -- then switches sides and crushes the south.
See? See how easy that was?
The hard part is translating that into a game and properly fleshing it out. Some people do it in cinematics, some do it in-game, some don't do it at all.
And some people choose to ignore why their badass is such a badass and simply make a game that plays well. I haven't finished God of War (rental, had to send it back) but it was a lot of fun. The gameplay was fun and unique, and the over-the-top gore just made it awesome.
Think back to Doom. So many Doom clones, so many boring FPSes -- was the original Doom that much better? Ah, but it was fun and unique!
Unfortunately, just because a new generation is growing up doesn't mean we'll want to rewrite absolutely everything. It'd be much better if things were developed rationally as soon as possible -- that reduces the total amount of legacy c/c++ code which will ultimately have to be rewritten later.
Besides, it's not a new concept, and if this generation of programmers didn't get it, neither will the new generation, because among the very first generation of programmers were people who understood Lisp machines. Of course, if a new generation really does start using mostly Ruby when the current one can't handle Lisp, we'll know it was those darned parentheses. Just as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, any sufficiently advanced language is indistinguishable from Lisp.
It will be funny to see this turned on its head, if there are ever enough, say, Python or Ruby programmers to improve python/ruby compilers/runtimes to where, a couple generations of processors later, it's C that has a lack of optimizations and is actually farther from the hardware. We may actually see a C virtual machine as a necessity!
More practically, I try to work with languages that suit the task at hand, which is really never C unless I'm dealing with a huge existing C codebase.
You might have a different view of the Internet if you could bring yourself to use MySpace. I can't decide, though -- is it more disgusting to use MySpace or to be talking to female, blond, barely legal 36-year-old men?
I'm gonna have to go with MySpace. As the more disgusting one. Yeah, MySpace really is that disgusting.
I don't get it. How is downloading and installing a Jabber client any easier than downloading and installing an IRC client?
It seems like the simplest, most obvious thing to do would be to provide the IRC information for people who have an IRC client already, and to provide a Java or AJAX IRC client right there in the web page. I know Java clients already exist, and you can set one up which defaults to or is limited to a specific server/room.
Considering what AMD is capable of, I would sell INTC shares and buy AMD shares now. Since the rest of the market will be following the Intel hype, you're going completely against the market -- and unless AMD completely dies, you'll almost certainly be able to make some money at it.
I haven't actually followed the markets, but I bet you can make a lot of money following a two-horse race this way. Let's say it's another few months, and we get some good news from AMD. Huge price drops on the AM2 chips and the dual-core stuff? Good benchmarks? Buy AMD CPUs, but sell AMD stock and buy Intel stock, and wait for Intel to pull ahead again.
NO! I know the ISPs and network hardware people have already redefined things to be in bits, not bytes, but you do NOT get to pull the same thing for storage! It's bad enough when a gigabyte is a billion bytes, instead of 1073741824 bytes, as every piece of software on the planet defines it.
It's not the AJAX, it's the DHTML. And now that there's more interest in the DHTML and use of the DOM in JavaScript (all due to AJAX), people are actually trying to do cross-browser implementations, because Firefox is also getting much more popular -- you can no longer create a DHTML (or AJAX) site that works only in IE.
I mean, you're right, it's easier than it looks to someone who doesn't know how to do it, but it's harder than it looks to someone who does.
Since the browser is doing the XML evaluating, and since a smart browser is going to be doing something like XML evaluating all day long (especially if you actually send XHTML as application/xhtml+xml), the browser probably has a very fast C or assembly XML parser. It probably isn't being evaluated in JavaScript.
So I have two questions: Is the browser's XML parser faster than the browser's JavaScript parser? (Probably, but I want benchmarks.)
And, on the server side, you have the same issue -- is it faster to generate XML (with one of many XML parsers/generators) or to generate JSON (which is simpler, but you probably end up using something written in the language -- IE, a pure perl JSON generator, or pure PHP, whereas with XML you're calling a C generator from the Perl or PHP)?
The fact that JSON is physically smaller probably matters some, though not much if you're gzipping it anyway.
It's also entirely conceivable that some custom, simpler language than either JSON or XML could be developed, that parses faster in JavaScript than either XML or JSON do in the browser. I doubt it, but as long as you're benchmarking stuff...
As others have pointed out, McAffee is actually worse than spyware. At first, I thought it was just the fault of Windows that reading stuff off the disk was taking several minutes for 10 or 20 megs of data. Or maybe the nvidia software RAID. But I disabled McAffee, and suddenly, it was as fast as it was supposed to be.
As to why it was there in the first place? College gave me lots of commercial software for free, including a copy of XP Pro. I have a legit, original, burned copy of XP Pro. Weird, I know.
More to the point, it's obvious why McAffee would blame the full disclosure people. But really, think about it: Who's to blame for a security hole? The people who wrote the fucking software! But of course, McAffee wouldn't want to blame themselves, and they certainly wouldn't want to blame Microsoft -- it might damage their relationship, and if people took them seriously, they might start using something other than Windows, effectively destroying the artificial/niche/cottage industry for antivirus software.
Really, the difference is night and day. On the other side -- open source or Mac, take your pick -- the reputation of the software actually matters, whereas on the Windows side, nobody nobody needs reputation when they can have lock-in. Thus, it's in Microsoft's best interest to do as little work as possible -- keep costs down, but do just enough work that people don't start switching away. But it's in everybody else's best interest to make the best software they possibly can.
Worse, look at the anti-virus people. It's in their best interest for a Windows computer with anti-virus software to be the most secure computer in the world. This means a few things:
If Windows was secure, no one would bother buying anti-virus. Thus, it's in their best interest for windows security to suck. They might even pay MS for this, though I doubt it.
If Windows was perceived as secure enough, no one would bother buying anti-virus. Thus, it's in their best interest for there to actually be exploits in the wild. Maybe they create some? Or send some money to the botnet authors?
If Windows + antivirus is perceived as secure enough, but other OSes are perceived as secure enough without anti-virus, people might start switching -- after all, which is cheaper, a McAffee subscription or a new Mac OS every year or two? Thus, it's in their best interest to spread the perception that other OSes are not secure, or even try to find and play up exploits themselves. It might even be a good move to have some astroturf Linux developer add a kernel vulnerability, and then call the open-source model "insecure".
In other words, it is in the best interest of MS to be lazy and for anti-virus companies to be actively evil, but it's in the best interest of the minorities to be light-years better than the leaders.
In other words, while there is some truth to what McAffee says, the real problem goes much deeper, and the real solution isn't censorship or hush money, it's developing a secure system in the first place. Unfortunately, the only way McAffee will ever support such a decision is by fundamentally changing their business model, or even their whole industry.
While we're originally making fun of him for the word "tubes", that's only because it's easily memorable/recognizable, compared to the near-incomprehensible comments about a staffer sending an Internet to him...
The real reason we're making fun of him? In the words of John Stewart, "Maybe it's because you don't know jack-shit about the Internet."
Yes, the headline is a troll. The headline of TFA, that is: "Hackers learn from open source"...
Actually, that's not too bad. But I don't think the/. headline is that much worse. And they are blaming full disclosure, which is a kind of open source.
I would very much like to have a working Freenet, including all of its evils. I don't think child pornography should be illegal, any more than lolicon currently is. I do think that actual sex with children should be illegal, although our definition of "child" might need to change a bit -- having one magic age of 18 and another one of 21 seems a bit sudden.
Personally, it pissed me off a bit -- at 17 I got to watch G. Bush get elected again. Even thought about trying to be in a campaign ad: "Hi, I'm only two months away from being able to vote, but I've never felt more passionate about a cause... Please don't waste your vote, I wish I could have one..." But I digress.
Point is, all I'd really allow to be censored is what people had already agreed not to share, and speech that's really action ("Fire" in a crowded theater). If classified material is leaked, as far as I'm concerned, game over -- especially if it's discovered independantly, like the concept of a nuclear weapon. There was a lot of friendly competition back there, prizes offered to whoever's work got classified first (I mean, really, the concept isn't that hard)... But I digress.
Point is, free speech is one of those rights that we have to cling to tightly. There was a great quote in someone's sig, don't remember where it's from: "If we don't stand up for our rights now, we won't have the right to stand up for them later."
Rotor is the shared-source implementation of.NET. You could think of it as an alternative to Mono -- it's even been ported to Linux. But there must be some reason for Mono still existing -- I'm guessing the shared-source has a bitch of a license.
The Gimp has a really great interface. When I want to get work done I could care less if there is an "intuitive" alternative. I want the best tool for the job that's the easiest/quickest route to completing that job and all future jobs in the same area. Not the tool that best suits my need to learn quickly, so I can get that first job done faster.
Something the people who pay $500 for a graphics editing program need to understand.
Unless you really think it will take $500 worth of your time to learn the better tool...
Actually, he seemed to have been very nice, and you were being a bit assy.
He was also either outright lying or completely clueless. I suspect the former. Again: Why even mention the east coast when it's obvious to any idiot that I'm in the midwest? He's only about a thousand miles off...
More to the point: "'Safe' your Website to the maximum possible Extend." It's usually a ludicrous claim, and it's plainly untrue -- not only is it fairly pointless, it's also easy to imagine an even more secure method -- simply distribute your site as a bunch of small-ish images spliced together by a table layout, and block right-clicking -- even if they do manage to duplicate it entirely, they won't be able to steal your layout and design easily. If they do, there will probably be watermarks all over it (so you can sue them), and it forces them to use Photoshop or something similar, making it a lot more effort to make it work successfully than just "view generated source" or modifying a single line of JavaScript.
Another possibility would be to do the entire thing in Java or Flash, not JavaScript. Java, especially -- decompiling and figuring out where the text is to be replaced -- or the url that fetches the text -- could certainly be a lot more effort than either the above JavaScript hack or photoshopping. They're also less efficient -- a Java app can take awhile to start, Flash is slow, both can be uglier and less flexible, and images are even slower, and none of them can be indexed by Google. But that's basically what he's doing -- making tradeoffs that really are unacceptible (load time, searchability, bandwidth) to add a barrier to would-be theives that's a bit less like Severe Tire Damage and more like a bump -- nay, a pebble in the road.
I thought those up as fast as I could type them. Either I'm really just that smart, or these ideas are so blatantly obvious that this guy must have thought of them also -- meaning he knew what he was doing when he said "safe to the max". He certainly knew when I decrypted his page and sent it back to him that his "crypto" was no good. My guess is that he didn't do any of the above because he realized they would be a bit more obviously bad for your website (visibly slow loading times) and they'd also be much more work for him.
He's offering his service, probably geared toward personal websites (Think one step above MySpace) of people who get pissed when people steal their layouts.
Keep in mind, he's charging almost $40 for a service which may stop the "one step above MySpace" ripoffs -- maybe. The downside? You pay $40 for something that problably took 10 minutes to write, your website is completely un-indexable by search engines (thus you move from "one step above MySPace" to one step below MySpace), it wastes bandwidth (mod_gzip, mod_deflate), it requires JavaScript and has no fallback for anyone without it, it disables right-click (annoying to someone wanting to, say, copy and paste his email address into a webmail -- of course, not immune to even the simplest attack) and it adds to the page load time -- not significant, but your grandmother on a Pentium 1 on dialup will definitely notice the lack of compression AND the need for JavaScript. The grandmother-on-dialup or ghetto-friend-on-dialup is certainly an important factor for the just-above-MySpace crowd.
And, as others have shown, Firefox can probably beat this automatically. It relies on being low-profile -- if it ever did become particularly popular, I could write a bookmarklet that would expose the source. If he could sell his "encryption", I could probably sell "decryption". I'm too ethical to do that, but there are plenty of smart, unethical people out there.
In other words, it's all downside, no upside. And that's just from what I've observed -- I imagine it would cause problems for anyone trying to create a dynamic site. I can't prove that, of course -- if he were to implement it as a
Does this show me what happens with this line: document.write('document.write("hi")</<nobr>s cr'+'ipt>');
I know this guy had other scripts inside the page. Being able to capture the generated code exactly where I want to means I can rip off the scripts he had also "encrypted".
Dosen't work when they disable right-click, and the bookmarklets for re-enabling it don't work with frames. Might have made it easier once I got around the frameset, though.
Do you really not have access to a Windows computer? You can at least look at the screenshots, anyway...
I'll try it under Wine/Cedega later, if you like. There are at least a few demos (though maybe not this game) reported to work perfectly under one of the two.
Anyway, why are we even still discussing this? Any high school / college computer lab would be able to play the thing. A floppy could easily hold several copies of it.
When you start knocking out the sites in entire domains and whois info's at a time, and are getting rid of mostly the spam sites hogging the top ten sites in search results, I dont think it would take too long to clean it out.
Are you sure? DNS is BIG, and I'm pretty sure you can automate buying domains -- they're pretty cheap, too. Also, remember that whois info can be faked, and often is (deliberately) by sites like GoDaddy to say that GoDaddy owns the domain, hiding the info of whoever really controls/pays for it.
And what do you do when all is said and done, and they simply use Tripod, Freewebs, and MySpace?
If they do it to keep from paying Google, Google can just stop presenting their ads.
My point is, now Google has to figure out if they are doing it to keep from paying Google. Which means either a LOT of manual work or the same kinds of problems we had with click fraud, where Google would shut down a web site that presents ads because of click fraud, now they'll shut down a web site that doesn't pay Google -- and in both cases, Google will be wrong sometimes.
The reason Bruce Schneier liked this was that it was automatic, that the security was built into the system and not into any kind of algorithm. I was just pointing out that this doesn't really apply, especially if Google has to develop an algorithm to make sure no one's cheating it this way.
In other words, the system used to be skewed such that web sites could commit click fraud and Google tried to stop them, sometimes overzealously (refusing to pay innocent sites). Now, it's skewed the other way -- web sites can commit "sales fraud" and Google can try to stop them, probably overzealously again (cancelling the ads of legitimate sites).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, hell no.
.NET.
Java feels way slower than anything else. My college courses were mostly in Eclipse. It runs fast enough, but it takes forever to start, which is true of many, many Java apps.
Which means that when these same programmers end up learning C/C++, they'll think Java is slow because it's "interpreted". I guess there's at least the hope that they'll wind up using C#, and thinking Java is slow because it sucks. Which is good enough, because Java sucks for other reasons, even though it isn't really slow.
But really, with Generics, Java has basically picked up most of the features and syntax of C++, added garbage collection and much more anal retentive restrictions, and called it a whole new language. The bytecode and virtual machine is really not relevant to the awfulness of the language itself -- you can write a perfectly good language for the JVM -- but the JVM, specificalyl, has its own drawbacks, in that it's hard to write more libraries for Java, and many of the existing libraries suck in profound ways compared to C/C++ alternatives, or even
Frankly, the only good thing about them learning Java is that at least for awhile, their code may be portable, because it's so hard to make OS-specific or arch-specific Java.
Instead of Slashdot "word vomiting" about what some other blog said about what David Jaffe said, why not just read what David Jaffe said? He does have some good things to say -- particularly that he doesn't think that single-player adventure games are dead, a bad medium, a bad idea, or anything like that -- he just doesn't want to work on them anymore.
Think about it -- you finish tweaking Tetris, Pong, Street Fighter, etc, you can still enjoy playing them, but by the time you finish Zelda, God of War, or Final Fantasy, not so much, because you already know every surprise, plot twist, minigame, everything the game throws at you is something you've already seen so many times. I imagine it's a bit like writing a book -- after you're finished writing it, you probably can't read it through once, that's what you need editors for -- after all, how many books do you read through more than once or twice? After you finish writing one, you've read through and written and rewritten most of it so many times that you can't stand it.
This isn't always true, and certainly not for everyone. I write differently, for instance -- when I finish writing a story, I certainly can read it again, because I only write once, straight through, only ever editing a sentence or two back from where I am. I almost never do second drafts.
But I can understand why he would be getting sick of doing that, and why it would lead him to say those things. After all, at least part of it is what we've all been thinking. On some level, most of the games we're playing are really still subject to the same complaints people have about Street Fighter -- sure, it has plot, but the plot and gameplay are completely separate. If you're lucky, you get a cinematic after defeating a particular opponent. But this is true of so many games it's not funny -- Halo (and Halo 2), GTA, Doom 3, Quake 4, Final Fantasy, Beyond Good & Evil... Very few games tell any story with the game world and the gameplay. Most just cut to cinematics -- or worse, text or voice (Doom 3's PDAs).
Every now and then, we get games that tell a significant part of the story in the gameplay and environment -- and even then, much of it is the environment. Examples would be Zelda, Half-Life (and Half-Life 2), Quake 4. Yeah, Quake 4 is both, because it does cut to cinematic in a lot of places I wish it wouldn't, but the cinematics, voiceovers (radio), text, and gameplay are woven together so well that it mostly feels like a story is being told, but you don't have to pull too far out of the gameplay and game world to tell it. And I don't mean the gimmicks like still being barely in control on the Strogg operating table. I guess being a long game helps...
And of course, there are also the games with little or no story, or where the stories you live are so much more interesting. Natural Selection, Counter-Strike, UT2004, and the few MMOs that have completely unobtrusive stories, but play well enough to justify it. Nexus TK is an example -- the only reason it's got such a great story is that it's built up over seven or eight years. MMOs are also interesting in that if they do actually advance the story (most seem too afraid to), it's like real life in that it impacts everyone differently; everyone has their own story to tell.
But then, MMOs often get accused of having little or no story, or of simply providing the forum and letting their players do everything themselves. You don't play World of Warcraft because it's a good game, you play it because that's where your friends are, that's where your guild is...
Kind of like MySpace, actually...
Or were you talking about writing the entire story?
Take your average Final Fantasy game -- the story alone could've taken years to write. Next to that, God of War is nothing. But you're comparing it to Ratchet and Clank? That would take a good writer maybe a week or two.
If you want to talk about story without cutscenes, I'd bring it back to Half-Life. Even Half-Life 2 definitely has some cutscenes, some characters and areas that are obviously intended to be scripted and cinematic. Half-Life leaves the player in control, with no dialog at all, for the vast majority of the game. And it still manages to tell a story.
I'd be excited about a game like that.
What God of War was good at was just being fun. The mythology was just there to help, it's easy enough to invent your own. How much do you think it took to get the basic idea for Halo? I know there's much more to it, but come on -- first game is ringworld + star wars + the Chief. Let me make a new one up for you right now: Texas hick is experimented on by the government using alien tech and is now much stronger and skilled with firearms, the Civil War is still going on, and he fights for the south for awhile -- then switches sides and crushes the south.
See? See how easy that was?
The hard part is translating that into a game and properly fleshing it out. Some people do it in cinematics, some do it in-game, some don't do it at all.
And some people choose to ignore why their badass is such a badass and simply make a game that plays well. I haven't finished God of War (rental, had to send it back) but it was a lot of fun. The gameplay was fun and unique, and the over-the-top gore just made it awesome.
Think back to Doom. So many Doom clones, so many boring FPSes -- was the original Doom that much better? Ah, but it was fun and unique!
Unfortunately, just because a new generation is growing up doesn't mean we'll want to rewrite absolutely everything. It'd be much better if things were developed rationally as soon as possible -- that reduces the total amount of legacy c/c++ code which will ultimately have to be rewritten later.
Besides, it's not a new concept, and if this generation of programmers didn't get it, neither will the new generation, because among the very first generation of programmers were people who understood Lisp machines. Of course, if a new generation really does start using mostly Ruby when the current one can't handle Lisp, we'll know it was those darned parentheses. Just as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, any sufficiently advanced language is indistinguishable from Lisp.
It will be funny to see this turned on its head, if there are ever enough, say, Python or Ruby programmers to improve python/ruby compilers/runtimes to where, a couple generations of processors later, it's C that has a lack of optimizations and is actually farther from the hardware. We may actually see a C virtual machine as a necessity!
More practically, I try to work with languages that suit the task at hand, which is really never C unless I'm dealing with a huge existing C codebase.
You might have a different view of the Internet if you could bring yourself to use MySpace. I can't decide, though -- is it more disgusting to use MySpace or to be talking to female, blond, barely legal 36-year-old men?
I'm gonna have to go with MySpace. As the more disgusting one. Yeah, MySpace really is that disgusting.
The vast majority of who'll be using Qunu has never heard of Qunu, either.
I bet it can. Name one thing you're doing that IRC can't do.
I don't get it. How is downloading and installing a Jabber client any easier than downloading and installing an IRC client?
It seems like the simplest, most obvious thing to do would be to provide the IRC information for people who have an IRC client already, and to provide a Java or AJAX IRC client right there in the web page. I know Java clients already exist, and you can set one up which defaults to or is limited to a specific server/room.
Considering what AMD is capable of, I would sell INTC shares and buy AMD shares now. Since the rest of the market will be following the Intel hype, you're going completely against the market -- and unless AMD completely dies, you'll almost certainly be able to make some money at it.
I haven't actually followed the markets, but I bet you can make a lot of money following a two-horse race this way. Let's say it's another few months, and we get some good news from AMD. Huge price drops on the AM2 chips and the dual-core stuff? Good benchmarks? Buy AMD CPUs, but sell AMD stock and buy Intel stock, and wait for Intel to pull ahead again.
NO! I know the ISPs and network hardware people have already redefined things to be in bits, not bytes, but you do NOT get to pull the same thing for storage! It's bad enough when a gigabyte is a billion bytes, instead of 1073741824 bytes, as every piece of software on the planet defines it.
BAD, BAD HP. NO COOKIE.
It's not the AJAX, it's the DHTML. And now that there's more interest in the DHTML and use of the DOM in JavaScript (all due to AJAX), people are actually trying to do cross-browser implementations, because Firefox is also getting much more popular -- you can no longer create a DHTML (or AJAX) site that works only in IE.
I mean, you're right, it's easier than it looks to someone who doesn't know how to do it, but it's harder than it looks to someone who does.
Since the browser is doing the XML evaluating, and since a smart browser is going to be doing something like XML evaluating all day long (especially if you actually send XHTML as application/xhtml+xml), the browser probably has a very fast C or assembly XML parser. It probably isn't being evaluated in JavaScript.
So I have two questions: Is the browser's XML parser faster than the browser's JavaScript parser? (Probably, but I want benchmarks.)
And, on the server side, you have the same issue -- is it faster to generate XML (with one of many XML parsers/generators) or to generate JSON (which is simpler, but you probably end up using something written in the language -- IE, a pure perl JSON generator, or pure PHP, whereas with XML you're calling a C generator from the Perl or PHP)?
The fact that JSON is physically smaller probably matters some, though not much if you're gzipping it anyway.
It's also entirely conceivable that some custom, simpler language than either JSON or XML could be developed, that parses faster in JavaScript than either XML or JSON do in the browser. I doubt it, but as long as you're benchmarking stuff...
As others have pointed out, McAffee is actually worse than spyware. At first, I thought it was just the fault of Windows that reading stuff off the disk was taking several minutes for 10 or 20 megs of data. Or maybe the nvidia software RAID. But I disabled McAffee, and suddenly, it was as fast as it was supposed to be.
As to why it was there in the first place? College gave me lots of commercial software for free, including a copy of XP Pro. I have a legit, original, burned copy of XP Pro. Weird, I know.
More to the point, it's obvious why McAffee would blame the full disclosure people. But really, think about it: Who's to blame for a security hole? The people who wrote the fucking software! But of course, McAffee wouldn't want to blame themselves, and they certainly wouldn't want to blame Microsoft -- it might damage their relationship, and if people took them seriously, they might start using something other than Windows, effectively destroying the artificial/niche/cottage industry for antivirus software.
Really, the difference is night and day. On the other side -- open source or Mac, take your pick -- the reputation of the software actually matters, whereas on the Windows side, nobody nobody needs reputation when they can have lock-in. Thus, it's in Microsoft's best interest to do as little work as possible -- keep costs down, but do just enough work that people don't start switching away. But it's in everybody else's best interest to make the best software they possibly can.
Worse, look at the anti-virus people. It's in their best interest for a Windows computer with anti-virus software to be the most secure computer in the world. This means a few things:
In other words, while there is some truth to what McAffee says, the real problem goes much deeper, and the real solution isn't censorship or hush money, it's developing a secure system in the first place. Unfortunately, the only way McAffee will ever support such a decision is by fundamentally changing their business model, or even their whole industry.
While we're originally making fun of him for the word "tubes", that's only because it's easily memorable/recognizable, compared to the near-incomprehensible comments about a staffer sending an Internet to him...
The real reason we're making fun of him? In the words of John Stewart, "Maybe it's because you don't know jack-shit about the Internet."
Stop hitting the pipes, Ted. You want to be sober for this legislation thing!
Yes, the headline is a troll. The headline of TFA, that is: "Hackers learn from open source"...
/. headline is that much worse. And they are blaming full disclosure, which is a kind of open source.
Actually, that's not too bad. But I don't think the
Why can't that one clinet application be VLC? Which doesn't work well with Windows Media, by the way, especially on a Mac.
Less than that.
I would very much like to have a working Freenet, including all of its evils. I don't think child pornography should be illegal, any more than lolicon currently is. I do think that actual sex with children should be illegal, although our definition of "child" might need to change a bit -- having one magic age of 18 and another one of 21 seems a bit sudden.
Personally, it pissed me off a bit -- at 17 I got to watch G. Bush get elected again. Even thought about trying to be in a campaign ad: "Hi, I'm only two months away from being able to vote, but I've never felt more passionate about a cause... Please don't waste your vote, I wish I could have one..." But I digress.
Point is, all I'd really allow to be censored is what people had already agreed not to share, and speech that's really action ("Fire" in a crowded theater). If classified material is leaked, as far as I'm concerned, game over -- especially if it's discovered independantly, like the concept of a nuclear weapon. There was a lot of friendly competition back there, prizes offered to whoever's work got classified first (I mean, really, the concept isn't that hard)... But I digress.
Point is, free speech is one of those rights that we have to cling to tightly. There was a great quote in someone's sig, don't remember where it's from: "If we don't stand up for our rights now, we won't have the right to stand up for them later."
Rotor is the shared-source implementation of .NET. You could think of it as an alternative to Mono -- it's even been ported to Linux. But there must be some reason for Mono still existing -- I'm guessing the shared-source has a bitch of a license.
The Gimp has a really great interface. When I want to get work done I could care less if there is an "intuitive" alternative. I want the best tool for the job that's the easiest/quickest route to completing that job and all future jobs in the same area. Not the tool that best suits my need to learn quickly, so I can get that first job done faster.
Something the people who pay $500 for a graphics editing program need to understand.
Unless you really think it will take $500 worth of your time to learn the better tool...
He was also either outright lying or completely clueless. I suspect the former. Again: Why even mention the east coast when it's obvious to any idiot that I'm in the midwest? He's only about a thousand miles off...
More to the point: "'Safe' your Website to the maximum possible Extend." It's usually a ludicrous claim, and it's plainly untrue -- not only is it fairly pointless, it's also easy to imagine an even more secure method -- simply distribute your site as a bunch of small-ish images spliced together by a table layout, and block right-clicking -- even if they do manage to duplicate it entirely, they won't be able to steal your layout and design easily. If they do, there will probably be watermarks all over it (so you can sue them), and it forces them to use Photoshop or something similar, making it a lot more effort to make it work successfully than just "view generated source" or modifying a single line of JavaScript.
Another possibility would be to do the entire thing in Java or Flash, not JavaScript. Java, especially -- decompiling and figuring out where the text is to be replaced -- or the url that fetches the text -- could certainly be a lot more effort than either the above JavaScript hack or photoshopping. They're also less efficient -- a Java app can take awhile to start, Flash is slow, both can be uglier and less flexible, and images are even slower, and none of them can be indexed by Google. But that's basically what he's doing -- making tradeoffs that really are unacceptible (load time, searchability, bandwidth) to add a barrier to would-be theives that's a bit less like Severe Tire Damage and more like a bump -- nay, a pebble in the road.
I thought those up as fast as I could type them. Either I'm really just that smart, or these ideas are so blatantly obvious that this guy must have thought of them also -- meaning he knew what he was doing when he said "safe to the max". He certainly knew when I decrypted his page and sent it back to him that his "crypto" was no good. My guess is that he didn't do any of the above because he realized they would be a bit more obviously bad for your website (visibly slow loading times) and they'd also be much more work for him.
Keep in mind, he's charging almost $40 for a service which may stop the "one step above MySpace" ripoffs -- maybe. The downside? You pay $40 for something that problably took 10 minutes to write, your website is completely un-indexable by search engines (thus you move from "one step above MySPace" to one step below MySpace), it wastes bandwidth (mod_gzip, mod_deflate), it requires JavaScript and has no fallback for anyone without it, it disables right-click (annoying to someone wanting to, say, copy and paste his email address into a webmail -- of course, not immune to even the simplest attack) and it adds to the page load time -- not significant, but your grandmother on a Pentium 1 on dialup will definitely notice the lack of compression AND the need for JavaScript. The grandmother-on-dialup or ghetto-friend-on-dialup is certainly an important factor for the just-above-MySpace crowd.
And, as others have shown, Firefox can probably beat this automatically. It relies on being low-profile -- if it ever did become particularly popular, I could write a bookmarklet that would expose the source. If he could sell his "encryption", I could probably sell "decryption". I'm too ethical to do that, but there are plenty of smart, unethical people out there.
In other words, it's all downside, no upside. And that's just from what I've observed -- I imagine it would cause problems for anyone trying to create a dynamic site. I can't prove that, of course -- if he were to implement it as a
Does this show me what happens with this line: document.write('document.write("hi")</<nobr>s cr'+'ipt>');
I know this guy had other scripts inside the page. Being able to capture the generated code exactly where I want to means I can rip off the scripts he had also "encrypted".
Dosen't work when they disable right-click, and the bookmarklets for re-enabling it don't work with frames. Might have made it easier once I got around the frameset, though.
Do you really not have access to a Windows computer? You can at least look at the screenshots, anyway...
I'll try it under Wine/Cedega later, if you like. There are at least a few demos (though maybe not this game) reported to work perfectly under one of the two.
Anyway, why are we even still discussing this? Any high school / college computer lab would be able to play the thing. A floppy could easily hold several copies of it.
Are you sure? DNS is BIG, and I'm pretty sure you can automate buying domains -- they're pretty cheap, too. Also, remember that whois info can be faked, and often is (deliberately) by sites like GoDaddy to say that GoDaddy owns the domain, hiding the info of whoever really controls/pays for it.
And what do you do when all is said and done, and they simply use Tripod, Freewebs, and MySpace?
My point is, now Google has to figure out if they are doing it to keep from paying Google. Which means either a LOT of manual work or the same kinds of problems we had with click fraud, where Google would shut down a web site that presents ads because of click fraud, now they'll shut down a web site that doesn't pay Google -- and in both cases, Google will be wrong sometimes.
The reason Bruce Schneier liked this was that it was automatic, that the security was built into the system and not into any kind of algorithm. I was just pointing out that this doesn't really apply, especially if Google has to develop an algorithm to make sure no one's cheating it this way.
In other words, the system used to be skewed such that web sites could commit click fraud and Google tried to stop them, sometimes overzealously (refusing to pay innocent sites). Now, it's skewed the other way -- web sites can commit "sales fraud" and Google can try to stop them, probably overzealously again (cancelling the ads of legitimate sites).