I know a few co-workers who'll probably all be Apple apologists about this next time I see them and promise the iPhone copy of a young woman will come soon, but I gotta say, I knew the open nature of the platform would make it possible on Android first, meaning my trusty Nexus One can...
Oh, wait, that's not what you... oh, I see. *sigh*
And I'm certain the ex-president of Namco Bandai NetworkEurope had a lot to do with Pac-Man...
...thirty or so years ago...
...and who might've just been a part of the Bandai half of the equation anyway...
...and isn't even at Namco Bandai Network Europe anymore...
So basically, this guy's cred is once (not currently) being the European president of a company which, in one of its previous, pre-merger incarnations, had its Japanese branch create some memorable games thirty or so years ago before the European branch even existed and is currently doing not much more than cash in on the IP from said games nowadays.
I'm certain that if I went to a casino and hit the jackpot tomorrow, I'd get calls from distant "relatives" with more legitimate claims to my money than this guy has any legitimate claim to being responsible for any of Namco's classic games.
After months of grueling research bombarding test subjects with all manner of loud and annoying electromagnetic devices and being told to lie just right so that the readings aren't disrupted at all, the test subjects all said they wanted to kill all the researchers in a variety of gruesome ways and didn't have any moral conundrum with doing so. As there were no noticeable flaws in the experiment, the researchers concluded that magnetism can sway the moral compasses of human beings. Case closed!
When I first read the headline, I was expecting to read about a new phone with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard wherein the slide-out mechanism moves in a manner akin to Lovecraftian abominations, defying our understanding of the laws of physics and driving people irrevocably mad from the revelations, all while trying to text their friends.
But disappointingly, it's the PATENT that's scary, not the smartphone motion. Ah, well. I'll just have to find some other way to get those dang texting kids off my lawn.
To send for repairs, you wouldn't. Not unless you wanted to slap a shipping label on it and send it back in the coffin to be a smartass and really stick it to the poor warehouse worker they hired solely to stuff replacement XBox360s in return mailing boxes! Er... "The Man". Yeah. That'll show "The Man"!
If you're going to throw it out and not do anything else with it, well, why NOT exercise your creativity a bit and have some fun? Might take some of the edge off of having an $X00 paperweight, and you'd get a conversation piece to go with it.
It’s like having a supercomputer to control a toaster. It makes no sense at all.
May I suggest a different analogy/simile? Because the more I think about that one, the more I think that the sense that idea makes is its own sheer awesomeness. All we'd need is a supercomputer-controlled coffeemaker and a supercomputer-controlled pizza oven, and we'd be set.
I get it that the software can monitor charging, report stuff, advertise...
I always wondered, with the sheer amount of portable devices which charge over USB nowdays, why not put some manner of standardized charge reporting into the specs of the next version of USB, so that we don't need to bother with nonsense like installing a new program or drivers for each device just to monitor its charging on the computer (or whatever charger), if we do want monitoring and such? That way, we could just tack a charge indicator onto whatever the OS or windowing system uses to track connected USB devices, instead of X amount of additional programs displaying it in any variety of mismatched ways.
I mean, I'll grant that many devices just report their own charge on their own respective screens, so for things like phones or whatnot, it might not be that useful. Plus, my suggested scheme would quickly get shot down by companies like Energizer in this case when they realize revenue stream conduits^W^W^W customers wouldn't have a reason to install "special" drivers and programs loaded with ads...
Oh, yeah. That IS why it wouldn't get adopted. Hrm.
It's called "diplomacy" and "dodging potential legal charges". Yes, a statement like that, given what people are saying, sounds ridiculous and utterly absurd to us, but what are you expecting them to say on official or semi-official channels? "After investigating the issue internally, it appears one of our long-term partners are fucking retards who thought they could get away with blatant fraud"? Saying anything like that would get them run up on slander in a heartbeat. Even implying it was anything remotely illegal on their distributors' ends could get them in legal hot water. Even if they could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was willfully fraudulent and a company-wide conspiracy at the distributor to screw over Newegg and its customers, they'd still have legal fees and time wasted to deal with it. Sorry, man; that's the legal system for you.
And after all is said and done, that distributor, who may have served them well for years and was suffering a single isolated incident at the time, wouldn't be so eager to continue doing business with Newegg, costing them a chunk of their supply chain. Not to mention the PR disaster that would result as cooler-headed customers would start to wonder what's going on with a company that flies off the handle and calls out their partners publicly like that.
Rather, the better answer would be to appear as diplomatic as possible in official channels, not assign blame directly, offer refunds or exchanges as customers demand, and quietly drop the distributor under breach of contract grounds if Newegg finds reason not to trust their cheating asses any more. Demanding any more from them is just letting petty bitterness boil over.
And alternatively, how much more detail were you expecting them to give in one tweet?:-)
Baloney. Only *******s benefit from an educated and healthy society.
*counts out the stars*
..."machines"? So, only machines benefit from an educated and healthy society? Gasp! You're right! What fools we've all been! The more educated we are, the more machines we make, and the more healthy we are, the more time we have to make the machines better! It's all coming together now! The machines have already taken over other countries with standardized healthcare, and they're trying to take over the United States with...
...oh, wait, that's not what you meant, is it? Eh. Mine was way more interesting.
There should be no errors. Period. Your program should not allow errors.
If i'm writing a calculator and the user types/clicks 4 / 0 - tell me what behavior is appropriate.
Well, obviously, your program should not allow errors. Ergo, the interface should, in that case, be a slider that represents the entire range of real numbers, including decimals, positive and negative, except zero. Duh.
What's that, you say? You're working with complex numbers? Well, geez, make the slider include the complex plane, too! Do I have to explain EVERYTHING to you?
Assuming you're using the X11 port of GIMP, you can tell X11.app (be it what Apple ships with or what's-its-name the most common better alternative) to behave the way that most X11 window managers behave. It defaults to making its windows behave like OS X windows (click-to-focus but don't pass that click to the program), but you can change that somewhere in preferences. Really irritated me when I first tried GIMP on OS X, too. Now... well, I still use GIMP on my Linux box most often, but in a pinch...
Note that this only applies to X11 applications. Can't help you as far as the rest of OS X goes, or if you're using a native port of GIMP.:-)
Well, yeah, if by that you mean once Eve Online's central servers go away, the entire game completely and absolutely stops, since the game can't exist in that case. After, say, Descent 3's central server lists went away, the game could still be played via informal means and direct IP address connections.
I used to be part of a community for a relatively obscure online game whose central server lists were long-abandoned by the parent company, but thanks to a registry hack and someone getting hold of the original metaserver code, not only is the game still playable via IP address connections, they now have a community-run central server list and the means to make more if need be.
Or, for instance, take FreeCiv (the standalone one, not the HTML5 experiment). That uses a central metaserver. All vanilla copies of the game come with that server as the default, but since the metaserver itself is open-source, anyone else could make their own and use it if the official ones suddenly went away, and the game makes it easy to input a new metaserver if you know where it is.
Outside of modding the XBox or hacking the games themselves, console owners generally don't have this option. And (most) MMOGs, like Eve Online, completely lose this functionality if their central servers (and thus where the persistent gameworld and content is stored) vanish.
$10, actually, and given the structure of Loathing, it's entirely possible to get those items via in-game currency anyway. Not in the "save up for ages to intentionally screw you over" sense, but in the "plausible, though still hard work" sense.
When I first saw the headline, I thought to myself, y'know, if what they were doing was doing an animated news program as in making a series of hand-drawn cel animations for the various stories and anchorpeople, as well as reasonably well-drawn though still simplified and stylized backgrounds accurate to the locations in which the news takes place, AND keep it a relatively serious program, THAT would impress the hell out of me. Granted, this would partly be due to the sheer technical infeasibility of the ordeal, now that I think about it, unless you viciously sacrifice both the quality of the character models AND any semblance of fluidity in the animation to do the job.
But just motion capping people doing reenactments? That... not so impressive or interesting. Especially if you've ever seen a live mocap job without post-production, which would most likely need to be done to allow the news to stay any bit current.
Yes - that's exactly what I am saying; if the emoticon represents a better (inherently subjective, of course) way of conveying emotion in prose, then, I am not against the idea simply because it might look out of place, when compared with today's standards.
However, in the example provided, is it really necessary or desirable to introduce emotion into the writing? Or, for that matter, to call it "prose"? For the case of a technical journal, the point is generally to convey information and research as objectively as possible. In fact, avoiding emotion is what you're really looking for so as to avoid apparent bias or ambiguity (ignoring whether there actually IS bias, you still want to avoid making it seem that way). Adding in smilies and such is not what you're looking for when the next grad student is trying to further your research and can't tell if you added that smiley to mean you were being sarcastic, or overjoyed, or just silly, or...
"Well, it IS sort of a downer that all these civilizations were just wiped out when their sun went nova and consumed their planets, and we feel for our extraterrestrial brethren. But on the bright side, check out this wicked drum solo I got out of it!"
But... if these were vulnerabilities that this firm has known about for products which have been released for some time now, plus they've been sitting on this information for a while, how exactly are they 0-day exploits?
Slashdot Mirror
I know a few co-workers who'll probably all be Apple apologists about this next time I see them and promise the iPhone copy of a young woman will come soon, but I gotta say, I knew the open nature of the platform would make it possible on Android first, meaning my trusty Nexus One can...
Oh, wait, that's not what you... oh, I see. *sigh*
And I'm certain the ex-president of Namco Bandai Network Europe had a lot to do with Pac-Man...
...thirty or so years ago...
...and who might've just been a part of the Bandai half of the equation anyway...
...and isn't even at Namco Bandai Network Europe anymore...
So basically, this guy's cred is once (not currently) being the European president of a company which, in one of its previous, pre-merger incarnations, had its Japanese branch create some memorable games thirty or so years ago before the European branch even existed and is currently doing not much more than cash in on the IP from said games nowadays.
I'm certain that if I went to a casino and hit the jackpot tomorrow, I'd get calls from distant "relatives" with more legitimate claims to my money than this guy has any legitimate claim to being responsible for any of Namco's classic games.
Look, I KNOW it's a ThinkGeek April Fool's joke, and I'm still not really that thrilled over the iPad and probably won't wind up getting one.
But really, that DOES look like it'd be pretty awesome. And technically feasible.
After months of grueling research bombarding test subjects with all manner of loud and annoying electromagnetic devices and being told to lie just right so that the readings aren't disrupted at all, the test subjects all said they wanted to kill all the researchers in a variety of gruesome ways and didn't have any moral conundrum with doing so. As there were no noticeable flaws in the experiment, the researchers concluded that magnetism can sway the moral compasses of human beings. Case closed!
Give it a few years.
When I first read the headline, I was expecting to read about a new phone with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard wherein the slide-out mechanism moves in a manner akin to Lovecraftian abominations, defying our understanding of the laws of physics and driving people irrevocably mad from the revelations, all while trying to text their friends.
But disappointingly, it's the PATENT that's scary, not the smartphone motion. Ah, well. I'll just have to find some other way to get those dang texting kids off my lawn.
To send for repairs, you wouldn't. Not unless you wanted to slap a shipping label on it and send it back in the coffin to be a smartass and really stick it to the poor warehouse worker they hired solely to stuff replacement XBox360s in return mailing boxes! Er... "The Man". Yeah. That'll show "The Man"!
If you're going to throw it out and not do anything else with it, well, why NOT exercise your creativity a bit and have some fun? Might take some of the edge off of having an $X00 paperweight, and you'd get a conversation piece to go with it.
Problem being, if they did it RIGHT, they wouldn't be able to trace it back to Google. There's your dilemma!
Well, not really, I guess you could just continue the generalized rhetoric, so yeah.
It’s like having a supercomputer to control a toaster. It makes no sense at all.
May I suggest a different analogy/simile? Because the more I think about that one, the more I think that the sense that idea makes is its own sheer awesomeness. All we'd need is a supercomputer-controlled coffeemaker and a supercomputer-controlled pizza oven, and we'd be set.
I get it that the software can monitor charging, report stuff, advertise...
I always wondered, with the sheer amount of portable devices which charge over USB nowdays, why not put some manner of standardized charge reporting into the specs of the next version of USB, so that we don't need to bother with nonsense like installing a new program or drivers for each device just to monitor its charging on the computer (or whatever charger), if we do want monitoring and such? That way, we could just tack a charge indicator onto whatever the OS or windowing system uses to track connected USB devices, instead of X amount of additional programs displaying it in any variety of mismatched ways.
I mean, I'll grant that many devices just report their own charge on their own respective screens, so for things like phones or whatnot, it might not be that useful. Plus, my suggested scheme would quickly get shot down by companies like Energizer in this case when they realize revenue stream conduits^W^W^W customers wouldn't have a reason to install "special" drivers and programs loaded with ads...
Oh, yeah. That IS why it wouldn't get adopted. Hrm.
It's called "diplomacy" and "dodging potential legal charges". Yes, a statement like that, given what people are saying, sounds ridiculous and utterly absurd to us, but what are you expecting them to say on official or semi-official channels? "After investigating the issue internally, it appears one of our long-term partners are fucking retards who thought they could get away with blatant fraud"? Saying anything like that would get them run up on slander in a heartbeat. Even implying it was anything remotely illegal on their distributors' ends could get them in legal hot water. Even if they could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was willfully fraudulent and a company-wide conspiracy at the distributor to screw over Newegg and its customers, they'd still have legal fees and time wasted to deal with it. Sorry, man; that's the legal system for you.
And after all is said and done, that distributor, who may have served them well for years and was suffering a single isolated incident at the time, wouldn't be so eager to continue doing business with Newegg, costing them a chunk of their supply chain. Not to mention the PR disaster that would result as cooler-headed customers would start to wonder what's going on with a company that flies off the handle and calls out their partners publicly like that.
Rather, the better answer would be to appear as diplomatic as possible in official channels, not assign blame directly, offer refunds or exchanges as customers demand, and quietly drop the distributor under breach of contract grounds if Newegg finds reason not to trust their cheating asses any more. Demanding any more from them is just letting petty bitterness boil over.
And alternatively, how much more detail were you expecting them to give in one tweet? :-)
Baloney. Only *******s benefit from an educated and healthy society.
*counts out the stars*
..."machines"? So, only machines benefit from an educated and healthy society? Gasp! You're right! What fools we've all been! The more educated we are, the more machines we make, and the more healthy we are, the more time we have to make the machines better! It's all coming together now! The machines have already taken over other countries with standardized healthcare, and they're trying to take over the United States with...
...oh, wait, that's not what you meant, is it? Eh. Mine was way more interesting.
There should be no errors. Period. Your program should not allow errors.
If i'm writing a calculator and the user types/clicks 4 / 0 - tell me what behavior is appropriate.
Well, obviously, your program should not allow errors. Ergo, the interface should, in that case, be a slider that represents the entire range of real numbers, including decimals, positive and negative, except zero. Duh.
What's that, you say? You're working with complex numbers? Well, geez, make the slider include the complex plane, too! Do I have to explain EVERYTHING to you?
So... this ISN'T about using Blender to make a 3D version of the classic puzzle game series, The Incredible Machine? Pfft.
Assuming you're using the X11 port of GIMP, you can tell X11.app (be it what Apple ships with or what's-its-name the most common better alternative) to behave the way that most X11 window managers behave. It defaults to making its windows behave like OS X windows (click-to-focus but don't pass that click to the program), but you can change that somewhere in preferences. Really irritated me when I first tried GIMP on OS X, too. Now... well, I still use GIMP on my Linux box most often, but in a pinch...
Note that this only applies to X11 applications. Can't help you as far as the rest of OS X goes, or if you're using a native port of GIMP. :-)
Well, yeah, if by that you mean once Eve Online's central servers go away, the entire game completely and absolutely stops, since the game can't exist in that case. After, say, Descent 3's central server lists went away, the game could still be played via informal means and direct IP address connections.
I used to be part of a community for a relatively obscure online game whose central server lists were long-abandoned by the parent company, but thanks to a registry hack and someone getting hold of the original metaserver code, not only is the game still playable via IP address connections, they now have a community-run central server list and the means to make more if need be.
Or, for instance, take FreeCiv (the standalone one, not the HTML5 experiment). That uses a central metaserver. All vanilla copies of the game come with that server as the default, but since the metaserver itself is open-source, anyone else could make their own and use it if the official ones suddenly went away, and the game makes it easy to input a new metaserver if you know where it is.
Outside of modding the XBox or hacking the games themselves, console owners generally don't have this option. And (most) MMOGs, like Eve Online, completely lose this functionality if their central servers (and thus where the persistent gameworld and content is stored) vanish.
$10, actually, and given the structure of Loathing, it's entirely possible to get those items via in-game currency anyway. Not in the "save up for ages to intentionally screw you over" sense, but in the "plausible, though still hard work" sense.
When I first saw the headline, I thought to myself, y'know, if what they were doing was doing an animated news program as in making a series of hand-drawn cel animations for the various stories and anchorpeople, as well as reasonably well-drawn though still simplified and stylized backgrounds accurate to the locations in which the news takes place, AND keep it a relatively serious program, THAT would impress the hell out of me. Granted, this would partly be due to the sheer technical infeasibility of the ordeal, now that I think about it, unless you viciously sacrifice both the quality of the character models AND any semblance of fluidity in the animation to do the job.
But just motion capping people doing reenactments? That... not so impressive or interesting. Especially if you've ever seen a live mocap job without post-production, which would most likely need to be done to allow the news to stay any bit current.
Yes - that's exactly what I am saying; if the emoticon represents a better (inherently subjective, of course) way of conveying emotion in prose, then, I am not against the idea simply because it might look out of place, when compared with today's standards.
However, in the example provided, is it really necessary or desirable to introduce emotion into the writing? Or, for that matter, to call it "prose"? For the case of a technical journal, the point is generally to convey information and research as objectively as possible. In fact, avoiding emotion is what you're really looking for so as to avoid apparent bias or ambiguity (ignoring whether there actually IS bias, you still want to avoid making it seem that way). Adding in smilies and such is not what you're looking for when the next grad student is trying to further your research and can't tell if you added that smiley to mean you were being sarcastic, or overjoyed, or just silly, or...
"Well, it IS sort of a downer that all these civilizations were just wiped out when their sun went nova and consumed their planets, and we feel for our extraterrestrial brethren. But on the bright side, check out this wicked drum solo I got out of it!"
So, something more like a bunch of Leelas from Futurama running around*? Like, whenever that thing she wore on her wrist actually did something?
*: Er... more specifically, more like a bunch of Leelas, most of whom would be male, so not as exciting as you'd think.
But... if these were vulnerabilities that this firm has known about for products which have been released for some time now, plus they've been sitting on this information for a while, how exactly are they 0-day exploits?
Anyone have a link to the actual video? The provided link just keeps playing a PBS commercial at me.
-Peter
That's how they broke it. One too many pledge drives and the poor phone just couldn't take any more...
Nah, I'd bottom it out at -4. I'd give it a +1 back for the atrocious abuse of alliteration.
Yes, I know most would rather it take an extra -20 for that, but hey.
I think the (faulty) argument is more like...
...any millwork engineer who can't maintain his/her own automobile is incompetent (hey, mechanics are mechanics, right?).
...any fluid mechanics researcher who can't maintain his/her own toilet plumbing is incompetent (they're both mostly fluid, right?).
...any pilot who can't rebuild a commercial passenger jet is incompetent (you need to know all that to fly, right?).
...any public speaker who can't redesign the firmware on his/her cell phone is incompetent (it's all communication!).
...any system administrator who can't write complex code is incompetent (because hey, computers are computers... wait, hang on...).