They write aimbots, not player bots. You cant just run a bot, wlak away, and be level 50 like you could with Glider.
Face it, the level of strategy in an MMO is fairly low. The dynamics of a typical MMO are all about grinding and leveling - two very repetitive tasks. Playing against humans is always going to be more challenging and allow for a varied experience. MMO gameplay is all about being stuck on the rail and being guided ham-handedly through the grind. The skinner box can't offer too much variety or it wouldn't work.
In Battlefield I am not doing the same stuff over and over again. I am fighting against live players. They are always doing something different and I'm always reacting to the dynamic environment we players create.
In an MMO I'm killing 50 womprats for exp and some quest prize. Its almost 100% deterministic. I could write an app that plays WoW for me and does a great job,, please feel free to google "glider." I couldn't write an app that can play Battlefield for me. With live players there are too many variables, too many strategies, etc. In MMOs I just cast one of my only assault spells and drink a healing potion when need be. In BF I need to think about what the objective is, where the enemy is, if I should perform a defensive role or offensive role, if I need to take out armor, if my squadleader has sent an order, if I can get armor, if I can get a heli, how many tickets we have left, where to plant mines, where snipers might be hiding, whether i'll need a tracer for armor, etc.
Please don't make the very distinctive MMO grind a symptom of all games. Its not. The MMO grind is a thing unto itself. Its a shame that to get remotely challenged on an MMO you need to play P2P exclusively or get into a difficult dungeon or instance. There's a reason why these games appeal to a certain obsessive/OCD-type personality. It rewards non-thinking, easy work, and provides a built in social aspect.
Well, these limitations are imposed by the simple nature of mobile phone OS's. You could say the same of any firmware-based software. Its simple and gets right to the point. There is not enough excess memory, processing power, or diplay to do anything more.
On a dual core OSX machine, the sky is the limit. Users will demand features, bloaty crap, eyecandy, etc and developers will deliver to be competitive. The market is dictated by the wants of the lowest common denominator users. Yes, there will be fart apps for OSX, but they will probably show animated assess delivering farts instead of just making the sound. There is no revolution here. In fact there is a regression here as now we have a monopoly store as opposed to all sorts of vendors fighting it out using all sorts of sales channels. Apple, Inc now dictates prices, margins, selections, censorship, etc.
1. The UAC - unfortunately users can't be bothered to run as a non-admin and just use runas, so UAC is the next best thing. Running as non-admin is easier than ever.
2. 64-bit support with easy to find 64-bit drivers. If you want MS to sign your drivers you need to provide 64-bit.
3. Protected mode - not as in memory but as in a native sandboxing technology that IE and and Adobe X use. These apps interact with the OS via a broker process. This is also why so many exploit target the add-ons (Flash, pre-X Adobe, Java) and not the browser itself.
4. Bitlocker
5. Large disk support.
6. SSD TRIM support. I have 3 SSD drives and they would be a PITA without TRIM in 7.
7. Better security architecture. A lot of things dont run as non-admin in XP so you needed to run them as admin or system to make them work, which greatly increased your attack surface.
8. Better Windows update agent. I love the option to ether use my WSUS or go to MS to get updates . As well as a decent GUI that shows me that status of the updates, last update, etc.
9. Windows Media Center done right.
10. Powershell support native.
11. A decent taskbar, finally.
12. Performance increase. I've run 7 on 256 megs of RAM on an old P4 and it flies on modern hardware.
13. Youre going to upgrade anyway from XP eventually, might as well get something good.
My ISP, Comcast does do this. I have a 250GB limit per month, which I prefer over them killing my torrents at their whim or giving me fake unlimited access. If I need more than 250 I can pay for business class service. That's 100% reasonable.
I'm also with t-mobile which is "unlimited." In other words they throttle me to dial-up speeds for the rest of the month after I had a couple of gigabytes of transfers. Clear "unlimited" does this too. No one is really sure at that point they decide to do this, as its dynamic, so you can't even plan ahead.
I'd much rather have a reasonable limit that is disclosed upfront than fake unlimited. In fact, I'd support legislation that forced them to read limits and throttling policies in all ads and print details in all web/print ads. The lack of transparency in the cellular world is the real problem, not limits per se.
>I agree the plugging in the phone is annoying, as is typing in the password, but there is something very important that this gets you later... security
Entering a password for the store doesnt get you security (someone can still steal my phone, read my data, etc). It just minimizes billing headaches for Apple and makes absolutely no sense with free purchases.
>I'd personally not want to have to enter in that password in, but I understand the the theory behind the UI
From a UI perspective its terrible. Especially watching these iphone users screw up caps, numbers, etc.
>Plugging in the phone means you have a backup of your phone available. Sure many people probably don't do that later, but if you have a smartphone, you really need to be backing it up
My android backs up my contacts wirelessly and without intervetion. That is true for gmail contacts or Activesync contacts. No need to plug it in. What is this? 1995?
>and it's great you finally have fruit ninja, but there are no plans to bring Infinity Blade or Chaos Rings to the Android.
There are android-only apps too. Instead of hashing it out lets just say that you suffer from confirmation bias.
Again, the breathless "BIG DIFFERENCES" between the platforms are marketing more than anything else. They're practically identical devices.
Actually, she didnt choose it. I chose it for her. She's stuck on AT&T and doesnt qualify for anymore upgrades. A family member was selling a used iphone and I snatched it up for her. She would have been fine with the Eris or whatever Android phone AT&T offers.
JI6 GPS fix received OTA a couple weeks after I bought it. I know Canada Bell got Froyo. I'm assuming US is next.
Carriers have hurt android, definitional, but if they want to compete with iphone/Win7 which are both carrier agnostic then they'll need to up their game. Sprint/HTC seems to be very quick with the updates. EVO got Froyo a few months back.
I'm not sure how much I agree with this, although its fair to say this has become conventional wisdom.
I've seen non-techies use Android-based phones with ease and not play around with any sort of tinkering. The UI is generally easy to tolerate, not much different than iOS, and the market is dead simple to use. There are millions up millions of Android users. These people aren't exactly Kernel hackers.
I've also seen techies with jailbroken iphones modify every little thing.
The conventional wisdom here is failing. These devices, for the end user, are almost identical. There's a low learning curve with both, but once people figure out how to use the market, use a virtual keyboard, etc they're golden. Heck, I might even argue that the Android devices are easier to use as they are boot up and play, while the iOS phones require an iTunes install, credit card information, connecting a USB cable to the computer, and the constant putting in of your complex password when buying free applications via the App store. Some end users find this challenging.
I recently setup an iphone for my gf and was pretty annoyed at all the hoops I had to jump through just to get started. My own Vibrant took a handful of seconds to create a gmail account and put in the username/password once. Not to mention my phone gets OTA updates and iphone still needs itunes and the USB cable to do this. A large part of the "it just works" myth is Apple marketing. Spend some time at the genius bar or get a job supporting Macs to find that "it just works" is more than a bit exaggerated and has more to do with the lack of malware writers targeting Apple.
Err, those are the same thing. If I get a patent on an idea, which is what software patents are, then I can sue anyone infringing. Copying and infringing are the same thing.
The problem is that we are using 17th century solutions (patents) for modern problems. Its laughable that we even take these things seriously. Sadly, its 100% legal to patent "one click shopping" and other concepts. Software patents are too vague by their nature. Patents are old fashioned and make no sense in a modern economy. Perhaps someday our leaders will understand this.
The philosophies of the politics of the US falls under two umbrellas:
Republican: Big business and big religion are your masters. Democrat: Big business (slightly less so than GOP), federal government regulations, and enlightenment/secular principles are your masters.
A modern economy needs to be regulated to be successful. Either its a potentially democratic process done by the government or guys like Rupert Murdoch just make the call, fight it out with their competitors, and pass the cost onto you (tiered internet pricing).
It was Republican Richard Shelby bringing the pork back home. You know a member of the party of *snicker* fiscal responsbility:
The language that keeps Constellation going was inserted into the 2010 budget last year by [corrupt] U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who sought to protect the program and Ares jobs at Marshall Space Flight Center in his home state.
His office confirmed that the language was still in effect but did not respond to e-mails seeking details.
You have no idea how government works. Funding is handled by bipartisan committees. The minority party has a lot of sway on funding, especially the GOP because the Dems have so many consrevative members that they often need to reach across the aisle to get anything done.
The problem is that your corporatist press isn't mentioning names and uses the term "lawmakers" to cover the overly business friendly GOP. Funny how that works. I had to do a lot of digging to get this:
According to NASA, the agency has been spending an average of $95 million a month on Ares I. At that rate, it will spend about $475 million from Oct. 1 to March 4 — the period covered by the current budget extension.
The language that keeps Constellation going was inserted into the 2010 budget last year by [corrupt] U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who sought to protect the program and Ares jobs at Marshall Space Flight Center in his home state.
His office confirmed that the language was still in effect but did not respond to e-mails seeking details.
Activesync on Android certainly in encrypted using SSL. Youre complaining about local mail storage, which is a real concern but is far from saying "lack of encryption for Exchange."
Also, remote wiping is built into the Activesync protocol and has been since Exchange 2003 SP2 (October 2005). The issue with it is that certain phone/OS manufacturers decided not to support that part of the spec. Those third party apps aren't adding the feature to the protocol, they are adding what Google and others should have put into their implementation of the protocol.
Windows Mobile phone supported that feature years ago before iphone or Android existed. Your IT department could have standardized on that and had all these features. Don't like the status quo? Blame your phone manufacturer. The protocol isn't at fault.
Large organizations like governments get source and build binaries. China, the US, Germany, UK, etc all do. Every so often you'll see a breathless blogspam about "OMG CHINA HAS WINDOWS SOURCE!!"
Of course they do, they are a large paying customer.
I read enough of the tech press to know that these garbage articles pop up every so often. $GOVERNMENT is switching to linux!!! The followup usually is "after a pilot run which revealed some issues with linux and a deal with MS, we are now locked onto MS for the next 5 years." In other words its contract negotiation time in Russia.
Hows Red Flax linux going? Is every Chinese citizen using it? By the propaganda I've seen here and elsewhere it should be everywhere by now. Hows that Godsen/Dragon/Whatever chip doing too?
Lets also get rid of all those extraneous buttons up top and the title bar. I certainly dont need them. Put the forward and back buttons next to the URL box. Oh, lets get rid of the menu bar too, we'll just use an IE-style button to the right of the URL box. What a space saver!
Sercurity is still a huge issue. Flash runs with the credentials of the user! Lets sandbox it. Adobe Reader is a bloaty mess and full of security holes. Lets put in our own native sercure PDF reader.
Performance still isn't great. Maybe we should put each tab in its own process and let the OS schedule load properly. This will also be a defacto sandbox so that one tab cant interfere with other.
Awesome, now lets give it a new spiffy name. Its a shiny new browser, lets call its Chrome. Is that taken yet?
Who is your provider? On the residential level I've used 5 or 6 different providers and have never had issues opening ports up for rdp, ftp, ssh, etc. SMTP yes (which I generally agree with), but not the others. Is this a new fad or is it just one or two badly run ISPs?
I'm currently with Comcast, who according to slashdot is the most evil of ISPs, and have something like 15/3mbps with rdp, ssh, and ftps running 24/7.
I hate how cynical and ignorant mods mod people like you up.
First off, you are engaging in the fallacy of idealizing the past, a particular popular fallacy on slashdot. I find the more recent NASA accomplishments a lot more impressive than just lobbing meatbags onto the nearest satellite. Robotic rovers on mars, stardust mission, all manner of flybys and good space science, planetary probe hubble and webb in 2014, etc, Heck, we just had a god damn comet flyby last month.
You want expensive moon missions? Convince your fellow voters to trim 100+ billion off our bloated military budget and to put into NASA. NASA gets a paltry 17 billion annually. We spend almost that much of corn subsidies. Your defense budget is 700 billion.
Dont blame NASA because your democracy is broken and prefers to invest its money on war, defense, subsidies, and science last. Its amazing what NASA is doing with such small amounts of money.
Yes,but you don't need a key for it. You could program your keyboard to accept a double-click on shift to be the same as caps lock.
There's a larger conversation here about archaic keyboard conventions that's worth having. In fact, vendors are individually addressing them in a way that's just confusing for end users. I have a MS keyboard where the function buttons have been turned into shortcuts. I needed to press a Function lock to actually use f1, f2, f3, etc. I also just used some laptop, not sure if it was a lenovo or an HP, but it also had the same thing going on, except I couldnt just enable f1, f2, f3, etc, I have to hold down the function key to get those to work individually - which is the opposite of how laptop keyboards generally work.
Pause/break key? Scroll lock? There's a lot of room for improvement, but I don't think keyboards follow any standard.
Err, Chrome is eating into Firefox, not IE. The IE users are computer illiterates who think the blue buttons means "the internet."
Right now, Chrome is an impressive piece of software. Soon they'll ship a built-in PDF viewer (goodbye Adobe exploits) and have started sandboxing Flash. Its also fast and stable.
Firefox is the current IE6. Its bloaty, slow, and mismanaged (no h.264 for html5). Of course you may disagree with that, but even as a loyal Firefox user since the days of Phoenix I'm really tempted to just switch to Chrome.
Haha, the linux hater's blog is pretty funny. To be fair most of his complaints are pretty valid, he holds mainstream linux distros up to the same standard as Windows and applies the same "annoyances" mentality to it. Its good to see the shoe on the other foot for reference.
Did you check his Java? Java is the most exploited app right now. If he doesn't need it you should just uninstall it. If he needs it for a local app then disable the browser plugin and just make sure he keeps up with the updates. By default it sets to check monthly for updates. You should change that to weekly or daily.
Exactly. The "mark" fear is based on the idea that a lot of Romans of non-proper birth were locked out of markets and opportunity. It was John's way of saying "Hey, they'll do this to all of us! Down with the Emperor! Christ will come in our lifetime, shut down the Emperor and save us."
Didn't exactly come to pass, but like Nostradamous or whomever, the emotionally unbalanced and credulous hold up these writings as accurate and simply reinterpret everything to fit modern history. When I was a kid Revelation fit in "perfect" with the Iranian revolution and with the lineage of European royal families. Now we're projecting onto RFIDs and IT. In 2050 we'll be projecting onto jetpacks and the founding of Saudi-Israel. Humans are just dumb irrational animals. Religion is proof of this.
Except, you know, context. The whole book was little more than a thinly veiled attack on the Roman authorities. John was very much an anti-establishment character. He was especially critical of the worship of the Emperor as a deity. Not to mention John, like most early Christians, expected all this to happen in his lifetime.
>but the first time they try to inject that thing into my hand
The same "they" that make you carry a cellphone? The same "they" that make you use facebook? If anything you'll be clamoring for the chip our of peer pressure and convenience. It turns out you don't need this mysterious oppressor or 1st conspiracy theories. You just need consumerism and laziness to end up with a chip in your hand. One of the neat things of capitalism is that it gives you enough rope to hang yourself, the trick is not to hang yourself with it.
Dont be dramatic. How is this different than laptops shipping with built-in webcams, which seems to be every laptop on the market? A few years ago it was "ZOMG MS IS SENDING YOUR DATA TO THE NSA - WE FOUND A STRING NAMED NSA SOMEWHERE IN WINDOWS!!!" The conspiracy theories are cute, but I'll wait for hard evidence, thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
>People write bots for FPS games all the time.
They write aimbots, not player bots. You cant just run a bot, wlak away, and be level 50 like you could with Glider.
Face it, the level of strategy in an MMO is fairly low. The dynamics of a typical MMO are all about grinding and leveling - two very repetitive tasks. Playing against humans is always going to be more challenging and allow for a varied experience. MMO gameplay is all about being stuck on the rail and being guided ham-handedly through the grind. The skinner box can't offer too much variety or it wouldn't work.
In Battlefield I am not doing the same stuff over and over again. I am fighting against live players. They are always doing something different and I'm always reacting to the dynamic environment we players create.
In an MMO I'm killing 50 womprats for exp and some quest prize. Its almost 100% deterministic. I could write an app that plays WoW for me and does a great job,, please feel free to google "glider." I couldn't write an app that can play Battlefield for me. With live players there are too many variables, too many strategies, etc. In MMOs I just cast one of my only assault spells and drink a healing potion when need be. In BF I need to think about what the objective is, where the enemy is, if I should perform a defensive role or offensive role, if I need to take out armor, if my squadleader has sent an order, if I can get armor, if I can get a heli, how many tickets we have left, where to plant mines, where snipers might be hiding, whether i'll need a tracer for armor, etc.
Please don't make the very distinctive MMO grind a symptom of all games. Its not. The MMO grind is a thing unto itself. Its a shame that to get remotely challenged on an MMO you need to play P2P exclusively or get into a difficult dungeon or instance. There's a reason why these games appeal to a certain obsessive/OCD-type personality. It rewards non-thinking, easy work, and provides a built in social aspect.
Well, these limitations are imposed by the simple nature of mobile phone OS's. You could say the same of any firmware-based software. Its simple and gets right to the point. There is not enough excess memory, processing power, or diplay to do anything more.
On a dual core OSX machine, the sky is the limit. Users will demand features, bloaty crap, eyecandy, etc and developers will deliver to be competitive. The market is dictated by the wants of the lowest common denominator users. Yes, there will be fart apps for OSX, but they will probably show animated assess delivering farts instead of just making the sound. There is no revolution here. In fact there is a regression here as now we have a monopoly store as opposed to all sorts of vendors fighting it out using all sorts of sales channels. Apple, Inc now dictates prices, margins, selections, censorship, etc.
Let me count the ways:
1. The UAC - unfortunately users can't be bothered to run as a non-admin and just use runas, so UAC is the next best thing. Running as non-admin is easier than ever.
2. 64-bit support with easy to find 64-bit drivers. If you want MS to sign your drivers you need to provide 64-bit.
3. Protected mode - not as in memory but as in a native sandboxing technology that IE and and Adobe X use. These apps interact with the OS via a broker process. This is also why so many exploit target the add-ons (Flash, pre-X Adobe, Java) and not the browser itself.
4. Bitlocker
5. Large disk support.
6. SSD TRIM support. I have 3 SSD drives and they would be a PITA without TRIM in 7.
7. Better security architecture. A lot of things dont run as non-admin in XP so you needed to run them as admin or system to make them work, which greatly increased your attack surface.
8. Better Windows update agent. I love the option to ether use my WSUS or go to MS to get updates . As well as a decent GUI that shows me that status of the updates, last update, etc.
9. Windows Media Center done right.
10. Powershell support native.
11. A decent taskbar, finally.
12. Performance increase. I've run 7 on 256 megs of RAM on an old P4 and it flies on modern hardware.
13. Youre going to upgrade anyway from XP eventually, might as well get something good.
My ISP, Comcast does do this. I have a 250GB limit per month, which I prefer over them killing my torrents at their whim or giving me fake unlimited access. If I need more than 250 I can pay for business class service. That's 100% reasonable.
I'm also with t-mobile which is "unlimited." In other words they throttle me to dial-up speeds for the rest of the month after I had a couple of gigabytes of transfers. Clear "unlimited" does this too. No one is really sure at that point they decide to do this, as its dynamic, so you can't even plan ahead.
I'd much rather have a reasonable limit that is disclosed upfront than fake unlimited. In fact, I'd support legislation that forced them to read limits and throttling policies in all ads and print details in all web/print ads. The lack of transparency in the cellular world is the real problem, not limits per se.
>I agree the plugging in the phone is annoying, as is typing in the password, but there is something very important that this gets you later... security
Entering a password for the store doesnt get you security (someone can still steal my phone, read my data, etc). It just minimizes billing headaches for Apple and makes absolutely no sense with free purchases.
>I'd personally not want to have to enter in that password in, but I understand the the theory behind the UI
From a UI perspective its terrible. Especially watching these iphone users screw up caps, numbers, etc.
>Plugging in the phone means you have a backup of your phone available. Sure many people probably don't do that later, but if you have a smartphone, you really need to be backing it up
My android backs up my contacts wirelessly and without intervetion. That is true for gmail contacts or Activesync contacts. No need to plug it in. What is this? 1995?
>and it's great you finally have fruit ninja, but there are no plans to bring Infinity Blade or Chaos Rings to the Android.
There are android-only apps too. Instead of hashing it out lets just say that you suffer from confirmation bias.
Again, the breathless "BIG DIFFERENCES" between the platforms are marketing more than anything else. They're practically identical devices.
Actually, she didnt choose it. I chose it for her. She's stuck on AT&T and doesnt qualify for anymore upgrades. A family member was selling a used iphone and I snatched it up for her. She would have been fine with the Eris or whatever Android phone AT&T offers.
JI6 GPS fix received OTA a couple weeks after I bought it. I know Canada Bell got Froyo. I'm assuming US is next.
Carriers have hurt android, definitional, but if they want to compete with iphone/Win7 which are both carrier agnostic then they'll need to up their game. Sprint/HTC seems to be very quick with the updates. EVO got Froyo a few months back.
I'm not sure how much I agree with this, although its fair to say this has become conventional wisdom.
I've seen non-techies use Android-based phones with ease and not play around with any sort of tinkering. The UI is generally easy to tolerate, not much different than iOS, and the market is dead simple to use. There are millions up millions of Android users. These people aren't exactly Kernel hackers.
I've also seen techies with jailbroken iphones modify every little thing.
The conventional wisdom here is failing. These devices, for the end user, are almost identical. There's a low learning curve with both, but once people figure out how to use the market, use a virtual keyboard, etc they're golden. Heck, I might even argue that the Android devices are easier to use as they are boot up and play, while the iOS phones require an iTunes install, credit card information, connecting a USB cable to the computer, and the constant putting in of your complex password when buying free applications via the App store. Some end users find this challenging.
I recently setup an iphone for my gf and was pretty annoyed at all the hoops I had to jump through just to get started. My own Vibrant took a handful of seconds to create a gmail account and put in the username/password once. Not to mention my phone gets OTA updates and iphone still needs itunes and the USB cable to do this. A large part of the "it just works" myth is Apple marketing. Spend some time at the genius bar or get a job supporting Macs to find that "it just works" is more than a bit exaggerated and has more to do with the lack of malware writers targeting Apple.
Err, those are the same thing. If I get a patent on an idea, which is what software patents are, then I can sue anyone infringing. Copying and infringing are the same thing.
The problem is that we are using 17th century solutions (patents) for modern problems. Its laughable that we even take these things seriously. Sadly, its 100% legal to patent "one click shopping" and other concepts. Software patents are too vague by their nature. Patents are old fashioned and make no sense in a modern economy. Perhaps someday our leaders will understand this.
The philosophies of the politics of the US falls under two umbrellas:
Republican: Big business and big religion are your masters.
Democrat: Big business (slightly less so than GOP), federal government regulations, and enlightenment/secular principles are your masters.
A modern economy needs to be regulated to be successful. Either its a potentially democratic process done by the government or guys like Rupert Murdoch just make the call, fight it out with their competitors, and pass the cost onto you (tiered internet pricing).
It was Republican Richard Shelby bringing the pork back home. You know a member of the party of *snicker* fiscal responsbility:
The language that keeps Constellation going was inserted into the 2010 budget last year by [corrupt] U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who sought to protect the program and Ares jobs at Marshall Space Flight Center in his home state.
His office confirmed that the language was still in effect but did not respond to e-mails seeking details.
http://www.truthistreason.net/thanks-to-congress-inaction-500-million-goes-to-defunct-rocket-program-lockheed-martin
You have no idea how government works. Funding is handled by bipartisan committees. The minority party has a lot of sway on funding, especially the GOP because the Dems have so many consrevative members that they often need to reach across the aisle to get anything done.
The problem is that your corporatist press isn't mentioning names and uses the term "lawmakers" to cover the overly business friendly GOP. Funny how that works. I had to do a lot of digging to get this:
http://www.truthistreason.net/thanks-to-congress-inaction-500-million-goes-to-defunct-rocket-program-lockheed-martin
Activesync on Android certainly in encrypted using SSL. Youre complaining about local mail storage, which is a real concern but is far from saying "lack of encryption for Exchange."
Also, remote wiping is built into the Activesync protocol and has been since Exchange 2003 SP2 (October 2005). The issue with it is that certain phone/OS manufacturers decided not to support that part of the spec. Those third party apps aren't adding the feature to the protocol, they are adding what Google and others should have put into their implementation of the protocol.
Windows Mobile phone supported that feature years ago before iphone or Android existed. Your IT department could have standardized on that and had all these features. Don't like the status quo? Blame your phone manufacturer. The protocol isn't at fault.
Large organizations like governments get source and build binaries. China, the US, Germany, UK, etc all do. Every so often you'll see a breathless blogspam about "OMG CHINA HAS WINDOWS SOURCE!!"
Of course they do, they are a large paying customer.
I read enough of the tech press to know that these garbage articles pop up every so often. $GOVERNMENT is switching to linux!!! The followup usually is "after a pilot run which revealed some issues with linux and a deal with MS, we are now locked onto MS for the next 5 years." In other words its contract negotiation time in Russia.
Hows Red Flax linux going? Is every Chinese citizen using it? By the propaganda I've seen here and elsewhere it should be everywhere by now. Hows that Godsen/Dragon/Whatever chip doing too?
Lets also get rid of all those extraneous buttons up top and the title bar. I certainly dont need them. Put the forward and back buttons next to the URL box. Oh, lets get rid of the menu bar too, we'll just use an IE-style button to the right of the URL box. What a space saver!
Sercurity is still a huge issue. Flash runs with the credentials of the user! Lets sandbox it. Adobe Reader is a bloaty mess and full of security holes. Lets put in our own native sercure PDF reader.
Performance still isn't great. Maybe we should put each tab in its own process and let the OS schedule load properly. This will also be a defacto sandbox so that one tab cant interfere with other.
Awesome, now lets give it a new spiffy name. Its a shiny new browser, lets call its Chrome. Is that taken yet?
Who is your provider? On the residential level I've used 5 or 6 different providers and have never had issues opening ports up for rdp, ftp, ssh, etc. SMTP yes (which I generally agree with), but not the others. Is this a new fad or is it just one or two badly run ISPs?
I'm currently with Comcast, who according to slashdot is the most evil of ISPs, and have something like 15/3mbps with rdp, ssh, and ftps running 24/7.
I hate how cynical and ignorant mods mod people like you up.
First off, you are engaging in the fallacy of idealizing the past, a particular popular fallacy on slashdot. I find the more recent NASA accomplishments a lot more impressive than just lobbing meatbags onto the nearest satellite. Robotic rovers on mars, stardust mission, all manner of flybys and good space science, planetary probe hubble and webb in 2014, etc, Heck, we just had a god damn comet flyby last month.
You want expensive moon missions? Convince your fellow voters to trim 100+ billion off our bloated military budget and to put into NASA. NASA gets a paltry 17 billion annually. We spend almost that much of corn subsidies. Your defense budget is 700 billion.
Dont blame NASA because your democracy is broken and prefers to invest its money on war, defense, subsidies, and science last. Its amazing what NASA is doing with such small amounts of money.
Yes,but you don't need a key for it. You could program your keyboard to accept a double-click on shift to be the same as caps lock.
There's a larger conversation here about archaic keyboard conventions that's worth having. In fact, vendors are individually addressing them in a way that's just confusing for end users. I have a MS keyboard where the function buttons have been turned into shortcuts. I needed to press a Function lock to actually use f1, f2, f3, etc. I also just used some laptop, not sure if it was a lenovo or an HP, but it also had the same thing going on, except I couldnt just enable f1, f2, f3, etc, I have to hold down the function key to get those to work individually - which is the opposite of how laptop keyboards generally work.
Pause/break key? Scroll lock? There's a lot of room for improvement, but I don't think keyboards follow any standard.
Err, Chrome is eating into Firefox, not IE. The IE users are computer illiterates who think the blue buttons means "the internet."
Right now, Chrome is an impressive piece of software. Soon they'll ship a built-in PDF viewer (goodbye Adobe exploits) and have started sandboxing Flash. Its also fast and stable.
Firefox is the current IE6. Its bloaty, slow, and mismanaged (no h.264 for html5). Of course you may disagree with that, but even as a loyal Firefox user since the days of Phoenix I'm really tempted to just switch to Chrome.
Haha, the linux hater's blog is pretty funny. To be fair most of his complaints are pretty valid, he holds mainstream linux distros up to the same standard as Windows and applies the same "annoyances" mentality to it. Its good to see the shoe on the other foot for reference.
Did you check his Java? Java is the most exploited app right now. If he doesn't need it you should just uninstall it. If he needs it for a local app then disable the browser plugin and just make sure he keeps up with the updates. By default it sets to check monthly for updates. You should change that to weekly or daily.
Exactly. The "mark" fear is based on the idea that a lot of Romans of non-proper birth were locked out of markets and opportunity. It was John's way of saying "Hey, they'll do this to all of us! Down with the Emperor! Christ will come in our lifetime, shut down the Emperor and save us."
Didn't exactly come to pass, but like Nostradamous or whomever, the emotionally unbalanced and credulous hold up these writings as accurate and simply reinterpret everything to fit modern history. When I was a kid Revelation fit in "perfect" with the Iranian revolution and with the lineage of European royal families. Now we're projecting onto RFIDs and IT. In 2050 we'll be projecting onto jetpacks and the founding of Saudi-Israel. Humans are just dumb irrational animals. Religion is proof of this.
Except, you know, context. The whole book was little more than a thinly veiled attack on the Roman authorities. John was very much an anti-establishment character. He was especially critical of the worship of the Emperor as a deity. Not to mention John, like most early Christians, expected all this to happen in his lifetime.
>but the first time they try to inject that thing into my hand
The same "they" that make you carry a cellphone? The same "they" that make you use facebook? If anything you'll be clamoring for the chip our of peer pressure and convenience. It turns out you don't need this mysterious oppressor or 1st conspiracy theories. You just need consumerism and laziness to end up with a chip in your hand. One of the neat things of capitalism is that it gives you enough rope to hang yourself, the trick is not to hang yourself with it.
Dont be dramatic. How is this different than laptops shipping with built-in webcams, which seems to be every laptop on the market? A few years ago it was "ZOMG MS IS SENDING YOUR DATA TO THE NSA - WE FOUND A STRING NAMED NSA SOMEWHERE IN WINDOWS!!!" The conspiracy theories are cute, but I'll wait for hard evidence, thanks.