Microsoft simply decides to fold a DRM API of some sort into future versions of Windows
A general-purpose PC is harder to secure, but you may be surprised to discover that these capabilities are already built into the hardware and the OS in many modern PCs. Vista requires you to turn on your Trusted Platform Module to enable Bitlocker.
The main objection to it is that it places all the power in the hands of a few select holders of private encryption keys - and the user isn't one of them. In the console market, this is pretty much accepted, because the majority of folk just want a box that plays games. In the PC market, it permits holders of root keys unprecedented power, for example...
The ability to literally force users to upgrade software by turning off their old software (or subsets of its features).
The ability to restrict the opening of given documents, including your own.
All of these things already happen on Consoles ; the Wii refuses to open save-games for Twilight Princess (specifically crafted ones that enable an exploit), upgrading some parts of the OS disable it's ability to play MP3 in the photo viewer (in favour of AAC for some reason).
If it happened in PCs? Software manufacturers would love the ability to prevent you from porting your documents to other formats ; they'd have a customer for life. It has potential for good uses (so much so that there are Trusted Computing stacks even for Linux), but if it becomes ubiquitous, the potential for abuse is enormous.
Yes, that would be true for that particular sample, but the IQ of a population is defined in terms of the distribution of intelligence - and 100 is defined as the median intelligence. Since intelligence follows a normal distribution, median coincides with mean (average), and half the people have below average IQ.
Your sample represents a skewed distribution, but if we take your numbers to be the score an arbitrary intelligence test used to rate IQ, the median score is 123. So to have a 100 IQ, you'd have to score 123, placing the lower 9 in your group firmly under the wire.
Religious people are not honest with themselves ; the cognitive dissonance you need to be religious is a form of lying to yourself.
(what's that you say... God knows all, is all-powerful, and benevolent, but yet somehow these children are still starving - well, heck, it must just be a test for the faithful!)
It's reasonably unlikely - moving up to 4GB of RAM on Windows means getting a 64 bit operating system. They are available, but 64 bit installs are very much in the minority.
I still don't trust 64 bit versions of Windows to be compatible with everything, and 64 bit versions of Linux can be a PITA sometimes. I may well be unfairly biased.
The majority of shipped computers with installed operating systems are still using 32 bit versions of Windows, so I think it unlikely that anything outside of rarified markets like CAD/CAM and server iron will start insisting on 64 bit capabilities any time soon.
It's a shame, because you only need the graphics data and the samples. If you could replace them with an open tile set and sample bank, you'd be fine. People have been doing this for nethack for ages, so why not TTD...
As far as I know, it's been done, but you're right, a "halo" of bright, strobing, IR LEDs would obscure your face on CCD cameras without IR filters (and they don't usually put them on, because of the reduction in light collection).
The comments here would seem to suggest that it's not going to work for all cameras though.
It's the capacity of these people for cognitive dissonance.
My wife is an evangelical. She is easily just as educated as I am. We both hold medical degrees. I have had ample opportunity to debate religion with both her, and her friends (her set of friends contains a subset that is equally intelligent and professional), in both social circumstances, and on two Alpha courses.
They are not fanatics, they are moderate. But they all share a common trait ; when you debate with them, there comes a point where they will just refuse to concede. They have no logical argument ; they may think they do, but whatever sophistry they construct always boils down to the equivalent of thumbing their nose and saying "God said so", or "God did it".
This refusal appears to be internal as well as external. My peers at school rated me a good teacher. One friend personally thanked me for his exam grade because he couldn't understand our physics teacher. My wife is clearly not stupid, holding a medical degree and thus a fair understanding of the life sciences.
But she doesn't understand evolution. You cannot teach her the concept, no matter how hard you try. Regardless of how carefully and slowly you explain it to her, she apparently cannot absorb it well enough to be able to explain it back to you.
She's also a creationist. It's as if the establishment of certain ideas require the construction of a mental blindspot that protects you from the truth.
Now, do you really want someone who has such a blind spot governing your country? I'm prepared to guess that such self-delusion is an innate human capacity, not limited to the theists. But they alone have a excuse, one that is accepted and even lauded.
Great, so you have to buy a new car to get the charger... or an accessory to plug into the 12V cigar lighter socket.
You can also get 12V lighter socket chargers for USB, and wall outlet chargers with USB sockets on too these days.
I wish Apple had chosen a standard instead of their proprietary connector, but it obviously has more functions than just power and data. An mini-usb with a small extension for the extra lones that was physically compatible with a standard connector (for just data and power) might have been nice though.
I believe the USB port in Windows will only supply power when the device is identified, to save power.
Of course, if the phone has no power, this is a monstrous inconvenience. I've taken to carrying a wind-up LED torch with a charger socket ; that way, I can prolong talk time when the battery is low and I have no outlet, and when it's flat, I can give it enough juice for the computer to charge it.
I'm not sure whether Ubuntu will charge it with a flat battery either, I must try that. But it certainly seems to have a driver out of the box that will let it charge.
Of course, the reason you need legacy support for the applications is because it's so damn difficult to get the application to support an up to date platform.
When you have the source, of course, you can patch it and recompile it. Not that this is free ; but supporting legacy features has it's own cost, as noted. If the product is open source, it's also likely that someone else will have already contributed patches.
The reason you don't hear people harping on about backwards compatibility on *nix is because anything with an active userbase moves forward.
I used to work for a company that was eventually forced to buy (not license, buy) an entire product, source and all, at some large price, because the company who wrote it no longer supported it, and their reporting engine was entirely based on it, and it was full of non-standard quirks in a format that was supposed to be a standard. It was just too much of a risk to continue without any way of supporting it.
If it was an OSS component of course, they would have been in a different position.
Powershell uses the same ol' cmd.exe terminal engine, alas.
However, both plain cmd and powershell support tab completion, although it's behaviour is a little different to bash.
The other matter ; you can configure the size of the terminal box. You can't change it dynamically, but you can change the font and the size of both the window and the scroll buffer, and save those changes to a property. You can maximise the window to full screen with alt-enter, but that just scales the content without actually increasing the column count. It also supports a slightly slicker copy/paste than using the context menu with the "quickedit" mode.
Drop the properties dialog on a cmd or posh window and have a mess around.
The thing about climbing a steep learning curve is that very soon you are higher up than the man cycling around Holland.
I agree that the slope will put many off though.
I have a very nice MythTV installation ; at the time I did it, I had to use Gentoo with bleeding-edge kernels to support my hardware. These days I suspect the same configuration would be supported by a Mythbuntu disk, which is a world easier, but still beyond the average Joe.
I didn't use MythTV because of a lack of other offerings ; I used it because Free software offered me features that Big Media were not willing to let me have - the ability to retain recordings at my discretion, not theirs, the ability to transfer recordings to the device of my choice, edit, burn, etc.
I prefer to rely on my ability to resolve technical issues in a way that satisfies me, rather than a huge faceless corp who view support as a cost rather than an opportunity to learn, and having the source code allows me to do that.
My work project at the moment has 2 types of component ; ones I have the source for, and ones I don't. Both classes of component have had issues, but I was able to patch or customize the open-source ones to suit our purposes (and typically much cheaper than the support contract for the closed-source ones which would pay my wages for 4 months). That for me is a better product.
Hmm. I use both Powershell and bash, and Powershell is rather good ; easier to use than bash in many respects.
It does have it's downfalls ; because it's primary design is to pass objects and not bytestreams down the pipeline, getting the output formatted exactly how you want it can end up with you writing a little more code than you wanted, if you have strict format requirements.
While *nix does have shells that can use objects (because they are Python flavoured), it doesn't have anything quite like Powershell. IMHO the syntax is easier to grok than bash, and you don't have to learn at least one text-processing language (sed, grep, awk) to make it useful[1][2], because the data you want is most often accessible as a property.
I find *nix to be a far more flexible and powerful operating system than Windows, it beats it on plenty of criteria, but Powershell is not one of them.
[1] although regular expressions are useful to learn, as they are for most shells. [2].NET programmers in particular can leverage their existing knowledge of the.NET APIs
Thin foil should work as long as it's electrically insulated from the loop antenna in the document ; since this is embedded between a sheet of plastic and a cardboard cover, that's already done.
Complete coverage works for any frequency.
Heck, a conductive antistatic bag might be enough.
If you have a Windows developer base of any size, you should also consider Bazaar. Both Mercurial and git neglect their Windows support ; git just because of the way it's designed, Mercurial has some fairly serious Windows-specific bugs that are a year old at least. I couldn't use Mercurial for my project because of one of them - it just couldn't commit my tree on Windows. Bazaar, on the other hand, has a fairly active effort going on to squash every Windows specific bug it has, and is easier to pick up than git.
The only thing distinguishing the commercial VCS tools now is their integration with the likes of project management and issue tracking tools, and possibly the ease of getting a support contract (for those organisations that just have to have someone to blame).
None of them can compete with the next-gen DVCS systems in terms of performance ; Linus Torvalds notes that BitKeeper used to take about 10-15 seconds to merge an emailed patch to the Linux kernel, an "order or two" of magnitude faster than anything else available at the time. He thought it would be good to cut that down to 3 seconds ; when he had finished, he had git merging over 6 patches per second.
Why go through all the rigmarole of proving you are an open-source project (or squeezing $800 per seat out of accounting) when you can install git (or bzr, or hg) and
Slashdot Mirror
credit cards should have rolling pins
For a moment I pictured a credit card making pastry.
noexec doesn't prevent exploits of applications that read the data though. But yes, it makes it a lot harder.
Heh, you think a politician is going to use a technology that can prove that he sent a given communique?
(yes, I know you don't have to sign your documents)
Microsoft simply decides to fold a DRM API of some sort into future versions of Windows
A general-purpose PC is harder to secure, but you may be surprised to discover that these capabilities are already built into the hardware and the OS in many modern PCs. Vista requires you to turn on your Trusted Platform Module to enable Bitlocker.
Trusted Computing is the general moniker ; it's opponents, like the Free Software Foundation like to say "Treacherous Computing".
The main objection to it is that it places all the power in the hands of a few select holders of private encryption keys - and the user isn't one of them. In the console market, this is pretty much accepted, because the majority of folk just want a box that plays games. In the PC market, it permits holders of root keys unprecedented power, for example...
All of these things already happen on Consoles ; the Wii refuses to open save-games for Twilight Princess (specifically crafted ones that enable an exploit), upgrading some parts of the OS disable it's ability to play MP3 in the photo viewer (in favour of AAC for some reason).
If it happened in PCs? Software manufacturers would love the ability to prevent you from porting your documents to other formats ; they'd have a customer for life. It has potential for good uses (so much so that there are Trusted Computing stacks even for Linux), but if it becomes ubiquitous, the potential for abuse is enormous.
Yes, that would be true for that particular sample, but the IQ of a population is defined in terms of the distribution of intelligence - and 100 is defined as the median intelligence. Since intelligence follows a normal distribution, median coincides with mean (average), and half the people have below average IQ.
Your sample represents a skewed distribution, but if we take your numbers to be the score an arbitrary intelligence test used to rate IQ, the median score is 123. So to have a 100 IQ, you'd have to score 123, placing the lower 9 in your group firmly under the wire.
I'm sorry, we only deal with conversions into metric fucktonnes here.
Religious people are not honest with themselves ; the cognitive dissonance you need to be religious is a form of lying to yourself.
(what's that you say... God knows all, is all-powerful, and benevolent, but yet somehow these children are still starving - well, heck, it must just be a test for the faithful!)
It's reasonably unlikely - moving up to 4GB of RAM on Windows means getting a 64 bit operating system. They are available, but 64 bit installs are very much in the minority.
I still don't trust 64 bit versions of Windows to be compatible with everything, and 64 bit versions of Linux can be a PITA sometimes. I may well be unfairly biased.
The majority of shipped computers with installed operating systems are still using 32 bit versions of Windows, so I think it unlikely that anything outside of rarified markets like CAD/CAM and server iron will start insisting on 64 bit capabilities any time soon.
Alas, it would seem so.
It's a shame, because you only need the graphics data and the samples. If you could replace them with an open tile set and sample bank, you'd be fine. People have been doing this for nethack for ages, so why not TTD...
ECHELON? Isn't that where the government searches for words like bomb, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy?
It's also triggered by laundering black-bag fissionable toffee for Bugs Bunny.
As far as I know, it's been done, but you're right, a "halo" of bright, strobing, IR LEDs would obscure your face on CCD cameras without IR filters (and they don't usually put them on, because of the reduction in light collection).
The comments here would seem to suggest that it's not going to work for all cameras though.
It's the capacity of these people for cognitive dissonance.
My wife is an evangelical. She is easily just as educated as I am. We both hold medical degrees. I have had ample opportunity to debate religion with both her, and her friends (her set of friends contains a subset that is equally intelligent and professional), in both social circumstances, and on two Alpha courses.
They are not fanatics, they are moderate. But they all share a common trait ; when you debate with them, there comes a point where they will just refuse to concede. They have no logical argument ; they may think they do, but whatever sophistry they construct always boils down to the equivalent of thumbing their nose and saying "God said so", or "God did it".
This refusal appears to be internal as well as external. My peers at school rated me a good teacher. One friend personally thanked me for his exam grade because he couldn't understand our physics teacher. My wife is clearly not stupid, holding a medical degree and thus a fair understanding of the life sciences.
But she doesn't understand evolution. You cannot teach her the concept, no matter how hard you try. Regardless of how carefully and slowly you explain it to her, she apparently cannot absorb it well enough to be able to explain it back to you.
She's also a creationist. It's as if the establishment of certain ideas require the construction of a mental blindspot that protects you from the truth.
Now, do you really want someone who has such a blind spot governing your country? I'm prepared to guess that such self-delusion is an innate human capacity, not limited to the theists. But they alone have a excuse, one that is accepted and even lauded.
Great, so you have to buy a new car to get the charger... or an accessory to plug into the 12V cigar lighter socket.
You can also get 12V lighter socket chargers for USB, and wall outlet chargers with USB sockets on too these days.
I wish Apple had chosen a standard instead of their proprietary connector, but it obviously has more functions than just power and data. An mini-usb with a small extension for the extra lones that was physically compatible with a standard connector (for just data and power) might have been nice though.
I believe the USB port in Windows will only supply power when the device is identified, to save power.
Of course, if the phone has no power, this is a monstrous inconvenience. I've taken to carrying a wind-up LED torch with a charger socket ; that way, I can prolong talk time when the battery is low and I have no outlet, and when it's flat, I can give it enough juice for the computer to charge it.
I'm not sure whether Ubuntu will charge it with a flat battery either, I must try that. But it certainly seems to have a driver out of the box that will let it charge.
Of course, the reason you need legacy support for the applications is because it's so damn difficult to get the application to support an up to date platform.
When you have the source, of course, you can patch it and recompile it. Not that this is free ; but supporting legacy features has it's own cost, as noted. If the product is open source, it's also likely that someone else will have already contributed patches.
The reason you don't hear people harping on about backwards compatibility on *nix is because anything with an active userbase moves forward.
I used to work for a company that was eventually forced to buy (not license, buy) an entire product, source and all, at some large price, because the company who wrote it no longer supported it, and their reporting engine was entirely based on it, and it was full of non-standard quirks in a format that was supposed to be a standard. It was just too much of a risk to continue without any way of supporting it.
If it was an OSS component of course, they would have been in a different position.
IPv6 ... still a limit, who cares if it's 10 or 10,000 years in the future
2^128 addresses, or 2^52 addresses for every observable star in the known universe. Compared to 2^32 for IPv4.
IPv6 may well not be the last protocol on the web, but it won't be for lack of addresses.
Powershell uses the same ol' cmd.exe terminal engine, alas.
However, both plain cmd and powershell support tab completion, although it's behaviour is a little different to bash.
The other matter ; you can configure the size of the terminal box. You can't change it dynamically, but you can change the font and the size of both the window and the scroll buffer, and save those changes to a property. You can maximise the window to full screen with alt-enter, but that just scales the content without actually increasing the column count. It also supports a slightly slicker copy/paste than using the context menu with the "quickedit" mode.
Drop the properties dialog on a cmd or posh window and have a mess around.
The thing about climbing a steep learning curve is that very soon you are higher up than the man cycling around Holland.
I agree that the slope will put many off though.
I have a very nice MythTV installation ; at the time I did it, I had to use Gentoo with bleeding-edge kernels to support my hardware. These days I suspect the same configuration would be supported by a Mythbuntu disk, which is a world easier, but still beyond the average Joe.
I didn't use MythTV because of a lack of other offerings ; I used it because Free software offered me features that Big Media were not willing to let me have - the ability to retain recordings at my discretion, not theirs, the ability to transfer recordings to the device of my choice, edit, burn, etc.
I prefer to rely on my ability to resolve technical issues in a way that satisfies me, rather than a huge faceless corp who view support as a cost rather than an opportunity to learn, and having the source code allows me to do that.
My work project at the moment has 2 types of component ; ones I have the source for, and ones I don't. Both classes of component have had issues, but I was able to patch or customize the open-source ones to suit our purposes (and typically much cheaper than the support contract for the closed-source ones which would pay my wages for 4 months). That for me is a better product.
Hmm. I use both Powershell and bash, and Powershell is rather good ; easier to use than bash in many respects.
It does have it's downfalls ; because it's primary design is to pass objects and not bytestreams down the pipeline, getting the output formatted exactly how you want it can end up with you writing a little more code than you wanted, if you have strict format requirements.
While *nix does have shells that can use objects (because they are Python flavoured), it doesn't have anything quite like Powershell. IMHO the syntax is easier to grok than bash, and you don't have to learn at least one text-processing language (sed, grep, awk) to make it useful[1][2], because the data you want is most often accessible as a property.
I find *nix to be a far more flexible and powerful operating system than Windows, it beats it on plenty of criteria, but Powershell is not one of them.
[1] although regular expressions are useful to learn, as they are for most shells. .NET programmers in particular can leverage their existing knowledge of the .NET APIs
[2]
Thin foil should work as long as it's electrically insulated from the loop antenna in the document ; since this is embedded between a sheet of plastic and a cardboard cover, that's already done.
Complete coverage works for any frequency.
Heck, a conductive antistatic bag might be enough.
Sign all your communications with trusted keys...
In-tree file-based issue tracking isn't unique, BugsEverywhere does it too, and you can do it with at least one of the commercial offerings.
And of course, it intrinsically works with any VCS that can version the files, not just git.
What I really want to see is an in-tree tracker with a Mylyn bridge.
Thanks for the link to Ditz though, I'm reviewing these things at the moment for an internal project.
Bazaar will let you work as if it were Subversion, for example, with a central server, lightweight local checkouts (with no history).
It will also let the same group of people work offline. Or heavyweight checkouts that can be offline, but commit to the server by default.
See here for more about workflows from the simple to the involved.
If you have a Windows developer base of any size, you should also consider Bazaar. Both Mercurial and git neglect their Windows support ; git just because of the way it's designed, Mercurial has some fairly serious Windows-specific bugs that are a year old at least. I couldn't use Mercurial for my project because of one of them - it just couldn't commit my tree on Windows. Bazaar, on the other hand, has a fairly active effort going on to squash every Windows specific bug it has, and is easier to pick up than git.
The only thing distinguishing the commercial VCS tools now is their integration with the likes of project management and issue tracking tools, and possibly the ease of getting a support contract (for those organisations that just have to have someone to blame).
None of them can compete with the next-gen DVCS systems in terms of performance ; Linus Torvalds notes that BitKeeper used to take about 10-15 seconds to merge an emailed patch to the Linux kernel, an "order or two" of magnitude faster than anything else available at the time. He thought it would be good to cut that down to 3 seconds ; when he had finished, he had git merging over 6 patches per second.
Why go through all the rigmarole of proving you are an open-source project (or squeezing $800 per seat out of accounting) when you can install git (or bzr, or hg) and
git init
git add .
git commit
You're off.