No, I'm arguing that stories in the format of "the answer to question 3 on page 179 of book X" are pointless: They don't mean anything to anyone who doesn't own the book and convey a bare minimum of information to those who do.
If the problem is interesting then why not write up a blurb about what the problem is and, most importantly, how it was solved? Giving us two strings and telling us that one can be turned into the other is fairly pointless; the interesting part are how and why, the first of which wasn't answered at all and the second of which was answered with "because Randall Munroe put it into a book".
Let's assume that some important but little-known authentication or encryption algorithm was broken. Would you prefer an article that talks about what the algorithm is used for, how the flaw was discovered and what the possible consequences are or a two-sentence story saying "the XYZ algorithm was broken. The key the scientists cracked was 106F82E87CFB2991"? Which of the two is more interesting?
The issue is that we were never given the problem (we can only guess that the presentation of the answer includes part of all of it) and, even more importantly, we were never told how the answer was found. In short, they left out all the interesting parts. The answer to a problem posted by the author of a nerd webcomic is no more exciting to nerds than any random string. Randall Munroe's proximity doesn't magically make things cool.
The cool bit would be the solution (ie. a documentation of the cognitive process that leads from the problem to the answer), which wasn't given. We weren't even told which algorithm the cyphertext was encrypted with - in fact, we can only tell that it's cyphertext at all because the second line talks about an "IV", which most likely refers to an initialization vector. Essentially someone just typed out two strings and declared that they turned one into the other. Which doesn't tell us anything.
Nerds cherish knowledge, not data. Getting told "here's something that might be part or everything of an interesting problem and this is the solution because I say so" conveys no knowledge at all. Why should nerds care?
The gripe is not that it's a story about a solved problem, the gripe is about the story being about a solved problem inside a dead-tree version of xkcd - and we can't even be certain we were told the actual problem so the informational content of this story boils down to: "Randall Munroe has apparently put some tricky puzzles into an xkcd book of his and someone solved a really hard one and got a set of coordinates. You'll have to trust us on this one, we don't have further data." As far as news go that's really weak.
There's no link to details about how the answer was found and we can only guess at what the problem was (apparently Randall gave some cyphertext and an initialization vector, leaving the reader to figure out which algorithm was used and how to decrypt the string). There's no actual article and the matter isn't urgent/all-important enough to warrant turning a set of posts incompehensible to those without the book into a news story.
Had someone written a nice blog post that explains the problem, how the solution was determined and what the answer means this would have been much more newsworthy. As it is now it's only of use to the subset of/. readers who own the xkcd books - and those who do and are interested in the puzzles are most likely already reading the xkcd forum, making this story mostly pointless.
In short: This story would be a lot more interesting if it was comprehensible without the book. As it is now it might as well be a stealth ad for the book. "Buy now and you too can have the faintest clue what kdawson is so excited about."
It's a sudden outbreak of democracy. The Lisbon Treaty moved a lot of power from the appointed Commission to the elected Parliament. Thus the sudden reversals on bank data sharing and ACTA. (Admittedly, much of the uproar over ACTA is also just because of the recently leaked papers.)
there are next to no users and the few users that are there seem to revel in running their machine off of 80 dollars worth of parts that they only upgrade after every other president.
The obvious solution would be to ensure that no president survives more than half a year in office.
I'd say that France is simply bad ad building stupid shit they don't need. The Eiffel Tower had great symbol status, which is what the World's Fair was all about. They built it well. Their current telecommunications network is useful for everyone. They're building it well (by what I can tell from the outside). The anti-German wall was useless by then-moder standards, the aircraft carrier was somewhat questionable and the DRM is again a bad idea from start to finish.
The moral: If you want to build shit you don't need, don't let the french handle it.
Have multiply redundant servers attached to very large pipes in various geographic locations so that people can connect to their nearest server. Something on the scale of Akamai but better distributed and with a better connection outside of the States.
Yeah, it's ridiculously expensive but come on now - is there anyone who didn't see this coming? "Our game won't run unless it can connect to an authentication server" combined with non-ridicuous auth server specs pretty much means "you can ruin our launch with the push of a single button". There are enough people with a point to make/a business case in Ubi's game failing/lots of boredom and lacking ethics in order to turn that into "we really want this launch to fail harder than the Challenger's last one".
These comments point out that the market for broadband services cannot ever resemble a textbook "perfectly competitive" market with multitudes of suppliers.
Especially funny if you're from Germany. I could choose between half a dozen DSL providers with a number of resellers and four mobile providers, each of which have spawned various sub-brands, all of which are competing against each other and their mother companies. And, in theory, cable. But hey, that might mean paying money for TV channels, which is just weird. Competition over here is pretty fierce.
Granted, my area is too rural for comprehensive 3G cover (with only one network offering HSDPA in the area) and it's unlikely any DSL provider is going to give me decent speed due to the distance to the nearest DSLAM. But I can easily switch if I find that one of them has the better package and due to competition remaining fierce they tend to come up with new things from time to time. Integrated telephone and mobile flatrates are already common (and data flatrates are the default); some providers are now bundling video-on-demand offerings.
Oh, forgot to add this: 6 Mbit/s is not the advertised speed. The advertised speed is 3 Mbit/s; the ISP is quite open about this. They just don't have any plans that slow anymore, which is why we pay for six.
In Germany you expect at least five seconds of downtime per day. Why? Because Germany is about 95% DSL with a mandatory disconnect after 24 hours. It also means that your actual connection speed depends on your distance to the DSLAM, which can lead to funny situations like us paying for 6 Mbit/s (the slowest plan) and being just twenty meters too far away, only getting 3 Mbit/s.
Of course they later reversed their stance; the Escape Velocity Nova demo plays just like the normal game except that you can't use mods, you can't buy certain ships/weapons and you get stopped halfway through each storyline. These restrictions are constant.
In other terms, game demos will now be just as big as the full game? I'm certanly not going to download 10 gigs just to see if a game is good.
Otherwise, the demos still omit large parts of the game, which means that the car still dumps you at a certain point in time but in addition to that it keeps getting slower all the time.
They'll just turn the WoW low-level quests into an RTS. So what if that means the RTS is just a few random battles that don't mean anything for the entire war? The gamers loved it in WoW so they'll love it in WC4, right?
drattmannh0nee...
dr attmann h0nee...
Dr. Attmann honey...
Okay, who is doctor Attmann and who at Valve is in love with him or her? Using Google, I found various people with a last name of Attmann and a doctor's degree, most of them at German universities. I think this is a clue that Portal 2 will be playing at a German university.
Actually, no. As TFA (but not TFS) points out, only apps that use a certain private API were pulled. Apple didn't change anything, they just chose this particular point to enforce the already-established rule of developers not using private APIs. Why now? Maybe they only noticed it now. I don't know. But they were entirely within their rights to pull those apps.
One could ask why the API isn't public. It also isn't on desktop OS X. Perhaps it works in a way that allows the user to have the radio violate the 802.11 spec, which is a very good reason not to let users mess with it. Perhaps it's not frozen and can change at any moment. Perhaps it's simply not very good.
It's not a case of "Apple is being evil" but rather "Apple has noticed that people were using APIs not deemed fit for public use". The appropriate course of action is not to vow never to buy an Apple product again but to contact Apple and ask for the Apple80211 framework to be made public (or a suitable public wrapper framework to be provided).
No, next they'll release "Call of Ditto: Modern Warfare 2 2". Yes, with two twos. They'll just re-release MW2 with different textures until people notice. Then they'll start re-releasing MW1.
One of Blizzard's great strengths is its almost-stellar reputation. Most people love Blizzard for being one of the most gamer-friendly companies in the industry. Their merger with Activision (currently striving for the coveted title of most hated distributor) made people wary - their reputations don't match each other at all.
It remains to be seen whether Blizzard can keep living up to their name.
If Call of Duty and Guitar Hero go down the drain, then you are left essentially with the Blizzard titles keeping things going.
So? 2013 is going to be exciting with Warcraft 4, Warcraft 4: Revenge of the Orcs, Warcraft 4: Revenge of the Orcs 2 and Warcraft iPhone Trivia. And 2015 we will finally get Sarah Kerrigan's Super Zerg Soccer 2 Turbo Aiur Championship Edition.
This quarter? Remember, possible future earnings are absolutely inconsequential. Short-term profit is the only profit. A strategy that sacrifices short-term gains for long-term gains is not perceived as a good strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding? The i7 is a high-end Intel processor. Sports cars sell for less.
I think you just found... *takes of glasses* ...a lead.
YEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAH!
No, I'm arguing that stories in the format of "the answer to question 3 on page 179 of book X" are pointless: They don't mean anything to anyone who doesn't own the book and convey a bare minimum of information to those who do.
If the problem is interesting then why not write up a blurb about what the problem is and, most importantly, how it was solved? Giving us two strings and telling us that one can be turned into the other is fairly pointless; the interesting part are how and why, the first of which wasn't answered at all and the second of which was answered with "because Randall Munroe put it into a book".
Let's assume that some important but little-known authentication or encryption algorithm was broken. Would you prefer an article that talks about what the algorithm is used for, how the flaw was discovered and what the possible consequences are or a two-sentence story saying "the XYZ algorithm was broken. The key the scientists cracked was 106F82E87CFB2991"? Which of the two is more interesting?
The issue is that we were never given the problem (we can only guess that the presentation of the answer includes part of all of it) and, even more importantly, we were never told how the answer was found. In short, they left out all the interesting parts. The answer to a problem posted by the author of a nerd webcomic is no more exciting to nerds than any random string. Randall Munroe's proximity doesn't magically make things cool.
The cool bit would be the solution (ie. a documentation of the cognitive process that leads from the problem to the answer), which wasn't given. We weren't even told which algorithm the cyphertext was encrypted with - in fact, we can only tell that it's cyphertext at all because the second line talks about an "IV", which most likely refers to an initialization vector. Essentially someone just typed out two strings and declared that they turned one into the other. Which doesn't tell us anything.
Nerds cherish knowledge, not data. Getting told "here's something that might be part or everything of an interesting problem and this is the solution because I say so" conveys no knowledge at all. Why should nerds care?
The gripe is not that it's a story about a solved problem, the gripe is about the story being about a solved problem inside a dead-tree version of xkcd - and we can't even be certain we were told the actual problem so the informational content of this story boils down to: "Randall Munroe has apparently put some tricky puzzles into an xkcd book of his and someone solved a really hard one and got a set of coordinates. You'll have to trust us on this one, we don't have further data." As far as news go that's really weak.
/. readers who own the xkcd books - and those who do and are interested in the puzzles are most likely already reading the xkcd forum, making this story mostly pointless.
There's no link to details about how the answer was found and we can only guess at what the problem was (apparently Randall gave some cyphertext and an initialization vector, leaving the reader to figure out which algorithm was used and how to decrypt the string). There's no actual article and the matter isn't urgent/all-important enough to warrant turning a set of posts incompehensible to those without the book into a news story.
Had someone written a nice blog post that explains the problem, how the solution was determined and what the answer means this would have been much more newsworthy. As it is now it's only of use to the subset of
In short: This story would be a lot more interesting if it was comprehensible without the book. As it is now it might as well be a stealth ad for the book. "Buy now and you too can have the faintest clue what kdawson is so excited about."
It's a sudden outbreak of democracy. The Lisbon Treaty moved a lot of power from the appointed Commission to the elected Parliament. Thus the sudden reversals on bank data sharing and ACTA. (Admittedly, much of the uproar over ACTA is also just because of the recently leaked papers.)
The obvious solution would be to ensure that no president survives more than half a year in office.
I'd say that France is simply bad ad building stupid shit they don't need. The Eiffel Tower had great symbol status, which is what the World's Fair was all about. They built it well. Their current telecommunications network is useful for everyone. They're building it well (by what I can tell from the outside). The anti-German wall was useless by then-moder standards, the aircraft carrier was somewhat questionable and the DRM is again a bad idea from start to finish.
The moral: If you want to build shit you don't need, don't let the french handle it.
Don't! It's a trap! Using that code will boot you straight out of Slashdot as we all know that people with even a single life won't come here!
Have multiply redundant servers attached to very large pipes in various geographic locations so that people can connect to their nearest server. Something on the scale of Akamai but better distributed and with a better connection outside of the States.
Yeah, it's ridiculously expensive but come on now - is there anyone who didn't see this coming? "Our game won't run unless it can connect to an authentication server" combined with non-ridicuous auth server specs pretty much means "you can ruin our launch with the push of a single button". There are enough people with a point to make/a business case in Ubi's game failing/lots of boredom and lacking ethics in order to turn that into "we really want this launch to fail harder than the Challenger's last one".
Especially funny if you're from Germany. I could choose between half a dozen DSL providers with a number of resellers and four mobile providers, each of which have spawned various sub-brands, all of which are competing against each other and their mother companies. And, in theory, cable. But hey, that might mean paying money for TV channels, which is just weird. Competition over here is pretty fierce.
Granted, my area is too rural for comprehensive 3G cover (with only one network offering HSDPA in the area) and it's unlikely any DSL provider is going to give me decent speed due to the distance to the nearest DSLAM. But I can easily switch if I find that one of them has the better package and due to competition remaining fierce they tend to come up with new things from time to time. Integrated telephone and mobile flatrates are already common (and data flatrates are the default); some providers are now bundling video-on-demand offerings.
Oh, forgot to add this: 6 Mbit/s is not the advertised speed. The advertised speed is 3 Mbit/s; the ISP is quite open about this. They just don't have any plans that slow anymore, which is why we pay for six.
In Germany you expect at least five seconds of downtime per day. Why? Because Germany is about 95% DSL with a mandatory disconnect after 24 hours. It also means that your actual connection speed depends on your distance to the DSLAM, which can lead to funny situations like us paying for 6 Mbit/s (the slowest plan) and being just twenty meters too far away, only getting 3 Mbit/s.
Care to share the URL?
Huh, never noticed the guy. Then again, I didn't take 30 days to get far enough into the Vell-os storyline to make a purchase of the game neccessary.
Of course they later reversed their stance; the Escape Velocity Nova demo plays just like the normal game except that you can't use mods, you can't buy certain ships/weapons and you get stopped halfway through each storyline. These restrictions are constant.
In other terms, game demos will now be just as big as the full game? I'm certanly not going to download 10 gigs just to see if a game is good.
Otherwise, the demos still omit large parts of the game, which means that the car still dumps you at a certain point in time but in addition to that it keeps getting slower all the time.
They'll just turn the WoW low-level quests into an RTS. So what if that means the RTS is just a few random battles that don't mean anything for the entire war? The gamers loved it in WoW so they'll love it in WC4, right?
drattmannh0nee...
dr attmann h0nee...
Dr. Attmann honey...
Okay, who is doctor Attmann and who at Valve is in love with him or her? Using Google, I found various people with a last name of Attmann and a doctor's degree, most of them at German universities. I think this is a clue that Portal 2 will be playing at a German university.
Man, I'm good at this ARG stuff.
If watching a sufficiently long and boring movie, yes.
Actually, no. As TFA (but not TFS) points out, only apps that use a certain private API were pulled. Apple didn't change anything, they just chose this particular point to enforce the already-established rule of developers not using private APIs. Why now? Maybe they only noticed it now. I don't know. But they were entirely within their rights to pull those apps.
One could ask why the API isn't public. It also isn't on desktop OS X. Perhaps it works in a way that allows the user to have the radio violate the 802.11 spec, which is a very good reason not to let users mess with it. Perhaps it's not frozen and can change at any moment. Perhaps it's simply not very good.
It's not a case of "Apple is being evil" but rather "Apple has noticed that people were using APIs not deemed fit for public use". The appropriate course of action is not to vow never to buy an Apple product again but to contact Apple and ask for the Apple80211 framework to be made public (or a suitable public wrapper framework to be provided).
No, next they'll release "Call of Ditto: Modern Warfare 2 2". Yes, with two twos. They'll just re-release MW2 with different textures until people notice. Then they'll start re-releasing MW1.
One of Blizzard's great strengths is its almost-stellar reputation. Most people love Blizzard for being one of the most gamer-friendly companies in the industry. Their merger with Activision (currently striving for the coveted title of most hated distributor) made people wary - their reputations don't match each other at all.
It remains to be seen whether Blizzard can keep living up to their name.
So? 2013 is going to be exciting with Warcraft 4, Warcraft 4: Revenge of the Orcs, Warcraft 4: Revenge of the Orcs 2 and Warcraft iPhone Trivia. And 2015 we will finally get Sarah Kerrigan's Super Zerg Soccer 2 Turbo Aiur Championship Edition.
This quarter? Remember, possible future earnings are absolutely inconsequential. Short-term profit is the only profit. A strategy that sacrifices short-term gains for long-term gains is not perceived as a good strategy.