Actually, it's one patch that fixes five different vulnerabilities (CVE-2007-0027 through CVE-2007-0031). Some of these vulnerabilities appear in five different versions of Excel or Works; other appear in as few as three. So eWeek is closer to the truth than you think.
And yet the new definition from the IAU includes none of those points -- it includes no orbital eccentricity limits, eclipitcal variance limits or size limits. It was hastily written and badly written, and worst of all, voted on by a very small number of the scientists involved.
What they did was to make the definition fit their assumptions, which is rather backwards to me.
In the last two or three decades we have had to get comfortable with Saturn and Jupiter having dozens of satellites instead of a nice tidy small number. We've had to get comfortable knowing that Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune all have ring systems.
Just because we currently know of a nice, tidy small number of planets doesn't mean we know all the facts. For the longest time, we thought there were only six planets, after all! Why should we assume we know what we're talking about now? Today's confusion is entirely based on our realization that our models of the solar system are a lot simpler than reality.
I'm sure that a few centuries from now, we'll have this all sorted out. People might talk about the eight "major planets" (the current nine, minus Pluto), plus 135 "minor planets" like Pluto, Sedna, and the other new worlds. By then, humanity will be used to it, and even astrologers will have adjusted their fees accordingly.
For my part, right now I'd put the number at 15. Unless I've forgotten one, spherical worlds that might be considered planets include Ceres, Sedna, Quaour, and the three announced this year.
Rolling out updates to Firefox is insanely easy.
"Firefox Setup 1.0.6.exe -ms" is the command line you need for a completely silent install. I haven't needed to repackage Firefox for distribution via SMS. If I didn't have SMS, I'd just have to set up a network share for the installer and then use Scheduled Tasks to run the command line as admin. Or create a batch file to do a "runas" and put it in the login script.
If you're including extensions in your standard Firefox rollout, then you are definitely looking at repackaging Firefox with the extensions each time there's an update. It's not impossible, but it is more difficult than it should be.
Patching Windows can be made easier. I use UpdateEXPERT by St. Bernard Software to roll out patches and service packs for Windows, Office, and Internet Exploder. I don't ever have to leave my desk, and I can schedule the reboots for the middle of the night.
I couldn't run a Windows network without UpdateEXPERT. But I still don't trust Microsoft.
Linux patches I never have to worry about.
This is why I turned off Automatic Updates on every desktop in my company...never trust that a Windows patch won't break your PC.
Of course, home users have no chance to test, in most cases.
Microsoft should really have a category higher than "critical." They still do occasionally release a bulletin out of cycle when it's a huge, gasping, oh-my-god-the-dam's-breaking issue.
Otherwise, they stick to this schedule because it makes Windows sysadmins' lives much easier. Since you can't trust Microsoft patches not to break your systems, you have to spend a lot more time testing, testing and retesting before deploying the patches.
It's easier to do that with a batch of 8 patches monthly, than with individual patches on an irregular schedule.
All of this month's patches are already included in Windows 2003 Service Pack 1. If you haven't finished testing and rolling out SP1, like us, then you still get to test and install this month's patches too.
Since the original FF designer (I believe his last name is Sakaguchi) left Square a couple years ago, things have definitely changed in the FF world.
Now we're getting sequels (FF-X, this new one), MMORPG versions, cell phone games...all things that never happened with the original designer running things.
Was he holding back the franchise, or was he being smart by not letting things go hog wild?
Admit it - you loved the ghost twins and the car chase extravaganza.
Nope, thought they were respectively dull and way unbelievable. Funny how all the overpasses in the Matrix are 10 feet taller than in the real world.
You watched with mouth agape as Neo held his own against waves of Agent Smiths.
Only in the Burly Brawl. After that, I was just bored by it.
You feasted your eyes on the gunfight in the club at the beginning of Revolutions. You delighted in the apocalyptic, desparate battle between the defenders of Zion and the machines.
Nope. Couldn't get past the stupid stupid design of the mechs and ammo loading.
And finally, you still found the philosophy intriguing.
More like pretentious and, as Robert Plant once put it, "deep and meaningless."
Nevertheless, I am GLAD I paid money to see them, and so are you.
I absolutely agree. Let people know that they are doing the wrong thing, and let them decide what to do about it. Educate instead of obliterate. That could be Microsoft's new slogan.
I've seen users go to great lengths just to rid their systems of nagging messages, too. If they got the "you're running a pirate copy of Windows" message every time they ran Windows Update, they just might get themselves a legitimate copy, or switch to Linux.
Or they could stop patching their systems. That would be bad.
Re:D&D has been gone for a 2 decades
on
D&D Is 30
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· Score: 1
"Dungeons & Dragons" is still the official name of the game. The "d20 System" is what Wizards of the Coast released under the Open Game License so that third-party publishers could release supplements for D&D without having to pay licensing fees. The OGL was somewhat inspired by the GPL, and in my opinion is the main reason for the new edition's wide success.
For information on what the D20 System actually is, visit http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/welcome.
For information on Dungeons and Dragons, visit http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/welcome.
For bad information on what D&D and D20 are, just re-read the parent to this post.
If you're running a spellcaster, odds are that you'll need the MM and DMG too. Why? To get the stats for your summoned monsters, or the information you need on crafting many magic items. We've found this to be true in our groups over the last 4 years.
I think so too. However, I don't expect that D&D, or tabletop RPGs in general, will survive the deaths of the generation that first started playing it. So give it another 30 years, and I think D&D will probably be like tabletop paper-counter wargaming is today--a tiny niche hobby.
Americans routinely complain about the process of voting. Believe it or not, one of the major complaints in recent years is how long it takes to count the votes. If the results aren't available on election night, everyone sets upset. God forbid we have to wait a day or so for people to count the ballots.
So the American people wanted "faster," which of course means "automated," which in turn means machinery. Sure, the machines are supposed to be more accurate than human counting, but we've already seen it's simply not true. If you ask me, it's plain old American impatience.
The same impatience which caused a rush to a horribly flawed touchscreen system.
And even if the ballots were somehow tampered with that that time, you can still see the total number of ballots counted in 3 different places on the voting machines, and those numbers all have to be the same as the paper record of the number of voters that have received ballots that day.
Even if you know that the NUMBER of ballots is right, there's no paper trail to make sure the CONTENTS of the ballots is correct. That's the worst part of these Diebold machines.
The Diebold disaster is typical of what happens when a massive IT project is rushed forward on hard deadlines under heavy customer pressure. Testing and planning get cut back to meet the "marketing" requirements, and funny, it just doesn't work right. In the end, the project gets scrapped, and a lot of money is flushed down the toilet.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who has played EVE Online could have told you this was going to happen.
Actually, it's one patch that fixes five different vulnerabilities (CVE-2007-0027 through CVE-2007-0031). Some of these vulnerabilities appear in five different versions of Excel or Works; other appear in as few as three. So eWeek is closer to the truth than you think.
What they did was to make the definition fit their assumptions, which is rather backwards to me.
The Windows Explorer patch (KB 908531) is broken. It causes Office and IE massive problems in saving and opening files.
In the last two or three decades we have had to get comfortable with Saturn and Jupiter having dozens of satellites instead of a nice tidy small number. We've had to get comfortable knowing that Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune all have ring systems.
Just because we currently know of a nice, tidy small number of planets doesn't mean we know all the facts. For the longest time, we thought there were only six planets, after all! Why should we assume we know what we're talking about now? Today's confusion is entirely based on our realization that our models of the solar system are a lot simpler than reality.
I'm sure that a few centuries from now, we'll have this all sorted out. People might talk about the eight "major planets" (the current nine, minus Pluto), plus 135 "minor planets" like Pluto, Sedna, and the other new worlds. By then, humanity will be used to it, and even astrologers will have adjusted their fees accordingly.
For my part, right now I'd put the number at 15. Unless I've forgotten one, spherical worlds that might be considered planets include Ceres, Sedna, Quaour, and the three announced this year.
Rolling out updates to Firefox is insanely easy. "Firefox Setup 1.0.6.exe -ms" is the command line you need for a completely silent install. I haven't needed to repackage Firefox for distribution via SMS. If I didn't have SMS, I'd just have to set up a network share for the installer and then use Scheduled Tasks to run the command line as admin. Or create a batch file to do a "runas" and put it in the login script. If you're including extensions in your standard Firefox rollout, then you are definitely looking at repackaging Firefox with the extensions each time there's an update. It's not impossible, but it is more difficult than it should be.
All of the patches in yesterday's release were already included in Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, or do not affect that platform.
Patching Windows can be made easier. I use UpdateEXPERT by St. Bernard Software to roll out patches and service packs for Windows, Office, and Internet Exploder. I don't ever have to leave my desk, and I can schedule the reboots for the middle of the night. I couldn't run a Windows network without UpdateEXPERT. But I still don't trust Microsoft. Linux patches I never have to worry about.
This is why I turned off Automatic Updates on every desktop in my company...never trust that a Windows patch won't break your PC. Of course, home users have no chance to test, in most cases.
Microsoft should really have a category higher than "critical." They still do occasionally release a bulletin out of cycle when it's a huge, gasping, oh-my-god-the-dam's-breaking issue. Otherwise, they stick to this schedule because it makes Windows sysadmins' lives much easier. Since you can't trust Microsoft patches not to break your systems, you have to spend a lot more time testing, testing and retesting before deploying the patches. It's easier to do that with a batch of 8 patches monthly, than with individual patches on an irregular schedule.
All of this month's patches are already included in Windows 2003 Service Pack 1. If you haven't finished testing and rolling out SP1, like us, then you still get to test and install this month's patches too.
Cerebus is dead anyway. Though a video game based off Five Bar Gate (or whatever it was) might be amusing for ten minutes.
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3133577 &di d=1
Basically, his last real work was FF IX, which was the recent high water mark.
I wondered why FF X was so radically different and, to my mind, frustratingly linear...it's because Sakaguchi had little to do with it.
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3133577&di d=1
The designer for FF XII is the same one as for FF Tactics Advance. In fact, the two games are both set in Ivalice, the world of FFTA.
Since the original FF designer (I believe his last name is Sakaguchi) left Square a couple years ago, things have definitely changed in the FF world. Now we're getting sequels (FF-X, this new one), MMORPG versions, cell phone games...all things that never happened with the original designer running things. Was he holding back the franchise, or was he being smart by not letting things go hog wild?
Nope, thought they were respectively dull and way unbelievable. Funny how all the overpasses in the Matrix are 10 feet taller than in the real world.
You watched with mouth agape as Neo held his own against waves of Agent Smiths.
Only in the Burly Brawl. After that, I was just bored by it.
You feasted your eyes on the gunfight in the club at the beginning of Revolutions. You delighted in the apocalyptic, desparate battle between the defenders of Zion and the machines.
Nope. Couldn't get past the stupid stupid design of the mechs and ammo loading.
And finally, you still found the philosophy intriguing.
More like pretentious and, as Robert Plant once put it, "deep and meaningless."
Nevertheless, I am GLAD I paid money to see them, and so are you.
That sounds like the thinking of a machine to me.
I've seen users go to great lengths just to rid their systems of nagging messages, too. If they got the "you're running a pirate copy of Windows" message every time they ran Windows Update, they just might get themselves a legitimate copy, or switch to Linux.
Or they could stop patching their systems. That would be bad.
For information on what the D20 System actually is, visit http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/welcome.
For information on Dungeons and Dragons, visit http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/welcome.
For bad information on what D&D and D20 are, just re-read the parent to this post.
If you're running a spellcaster, odds are that you'll need the MM and DMG too. Why? To get the stats for your summoned monsters, or the information you need on crafting many magic items. We've found this to be true in our groups over the last 4 years.
I think so too. However, I don't expect that D&D, or tabletop RPGs in general, will survive the deaths of the generation that first started playing it. So give it another 30 years, and I think D&D will probably be like tabletop paper-counter wargaming is today--a tiny niche hobby.
So the American people wanted "faster," which of course means "automated," which in turn means machinery. Sure, the machines are supposed to be more accurate than human counting, but we've already seen it's simply not true. If you ask me, it's plain old American impatience.
The same impatience which caused a rush to a horribly flawed touchscreen system.
Even if you know that the NUMBER of ballots is right, there's no paper trail to make sure the CONTENTS of the ballots is correct. That's the worst part of these Diebold machines.
The Diebold disaster is typical of what happens when a massive IT project is rushed forward on hard deadlines under heavy customer pressure. Testing and planning get cut back to meet the "marketing" requirements, and funny, it just doesn't work right. In the end, the project gets scrapped, and a lot of money is flushed down the toilet.
...if we could send all the Nigerian spammers into space, wouldn't that be great?
If they have that much trouble, I say just ban telemarketing and be done with it. Put them out of our misery for good.