He means they didn't run on Win2k ; I was content to run with Win2k for a long time. A game with the "Games for Windows" logo was what spurred me into buying Vista ; I got it home, tried to run it, and found it didn't work.
I nearly bought XP, but I thought "What the heck" and decided to get the latest.
I can't see any technical reason for it not to work as DirectX 9c is available for Win2k ; the main missing dependencies appear to be cryptographic calls in the kernel (and failure occurs during loading), which suggests that parts of the software have been encrypted with routines that occur only in WinXP and above, and deliberately, in order to move people off Win2k.
In the business world, the lack of Win2k support for their new Powershell technology probably serves a similar end.
"Games for Windows" is not the only place this occurs. EA Link only works on WinXP up, for similar reasons I'll bet.
Of course, if you bought a Linux game that needed a kernel upgrade... you could just upgrade your kernel.
In the UK, you can either get listings straight from the DVB-T signal, or free (for personal use) from an XML feed served by the Radio Times (a commercial arm of the BBC).
From the same article
The role of the CIA in sponsoring Gladio and the extent of its activities during the Cold War era, and its relationship to attacks perpetrated in Italy during the years of lead and other similar clandestine operations is the subject of ongoing debate and investigation. Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have had parliamentary inquiries into the matter. [emphasis mine]
If you're sponsoring something, you're pretty much running it ; he who has the gold, makes the rules.
I dream of something opposite ; some of the same features, eco-power, etc, but spread over a large area, eco-houses in rolling green hills, local network, community halls. The place gets currency by providing consulting services to outsiders, but for the basics of living is aiming to be self-sufficient.
I liked one take I saw on this in a sci-fi novel ; each car has a wireless network node, everyone shares tracks around, so when you're driving, your car stereo swaps tracks with other cars, taking into account your preferences, etc. Kinda like what MS tried with the Zune... but good.
The pharmacological effects of clomipramine and MDMA are similar ; both of them futz with your serotonin metabolism, although clomipramine also futzes with noradrenaline.
The major difference is that while clomipramine just inhibits the re-uptake of these neurotransmitters in the synapse, MDMA also induces heavy release of serotonin, enough that your serotonin reserves are rapidly emptied on a "normal" dose.
I wouldn't touch MDMA with a mile long barge pole ; serotonin is the "happy" hormone, taking a drug that empties out your supply seems like a recipe for a suicidal Sunday morning, not to mention the long-term effects (like your brain getting so used to the high serotonin levels that it needs the drug just to be mildly cheerful).
I managed to wreck one a few months ago by spilling a cup of tea into it I'm gobsmacked you managed to wreck it ; I've heard tales of people spilling soda in these things and running them through the dishwasher to fix it up afterwards. ps, does not constitute actual advice.
This is akin to using MS products... "Don't like 'em, don't use 'em".
Well, I don't like their business practices, or the fact that their engineering practice is more motivated by marketing and corporate strategy than by actual engineers, but I use their products anyway. Why? At work, I am expected to produce software that works in Windows. At home, I like to play games, which for the most part means booting a Windows partition.
I love Linux and the freeness of Linux. I could probably give up playing games and spend my free time coding, and have just as much fun. But I can't give up Windows at work, because my living depends upon it.
Google happens to be the best search engine, bar none. Regardless of my feelings on it's privacy policy (which I don't really mind too much), it's still the best. Ditto for webmail and distributed calendar.
To function in the real world, you have to be able to deal with ambiguity and grey areas. I'm not saying that idealism is a bad thing ; I'm just saying that we can't all be so dedicated to something that we squat on the MIT campus rather than making a more conventional living for ourselves within the Matr^H^H^H^H System.
For what it's worth, the majority of work I do on Windows involves OSS software.
Its also a huge risk. Swings and roundabouts. When you buy a commercial product, the huge risk is that you find it has a problem, and the developer won't fix it.
double the amount of code people now need to be familiar with. I don't think you need to read or understand all the code to use it. Like a commercial product, you'll need to be familiar with the API. Unlike a commercial product, if it doesn't behave as expected, you'll always have the source to refer to (one reason MS are making a big deal out of releasing their CLR sources for reference).
Well abstracted OO code in particular you don't need to understand all of.
if you are encountering a specific problem, its likely that someone else has, and already built a solution. That sounds like a poster quote for OSS:-P
cost to the company for you to roll your own Difficult to work out ; so is the cost of the delay caused by our software purchasing process. In every case, it's been longer than the trial period on commercial software. In one case, I was waiting 13 weeks (yes, more than 3 months) for a VB6 code analysis tool. As you can imagine, I'd probably done most of the work it would have saved me by the time the license came. I would have loved even a half-broken OSS equivalent but alas, there is nothing comparable to this product commercial or OSS. So I guess commercial won that one.
This is particular to my situation ; but I'm not certain that I'm on my own here.
additional testing Well, you don't have to do quality assurance on commercial products.. but maybe you should be? Surely you need to know that your libraries behave as you expect, regardless of their source. So as a minimum, you are testing that it behaves as expected for the purposes of your software.... which you are doing anyway, if you are testing your software, through the abstraction layer of... your own code.
bigger server Only if you are constantly updating that source ; remember, most of the work was already done.
I don't think any coder, no matter how skilled, can claim to "understand" a million code framework in a day or so True, but again, I don't think you need to. Write tests to assure that it has the behaviour you want, if it doesn't, get it to pass either by patching your code, or their code (an option you don't have with closed source), and forget about it. You don't understand the internals of the commercial product, but you still use it, and take the risk that the vendor won't fix it.
You're not limited to non-commercial support for OSS projects either. Ok, yes, it might cost more than getting a patch for your commercial product, which has bugfixing amortized across all customers.
I surprised you didn't bring up licensing. Which is a real reason to choose commercial, if you don't want to compromise your choices in terms of distribution.
Why should anyone in your company try to dig into someone else's code to fix it? If it's nearly good enough, they can push it the rest of the way, and possibly do so more cheaply than buying an equivalent commercial product. There may not even be a commercial equivalent.
My projects either include or use several components which are open-source, which did not quite meet with my needs, and which I have patched to suit my requirements (WiX, XStream, HTML Tidy, etc). In most cases, I've submitted my patches to the core project, although the licenses these projects are under (at most restrictive) do not require me to - only to distribute source to recipients of the binaries. I consider it payment, which is only fair because I didn't give them any money. In all cases, the the effort involved was far less than just the effort required to cut enough red tape to obtain approval to purchase a commercial product. In some cases, there wasn't a commercial equivalent.
It's less clear cut if your existing coders are not skilled enough to actually modify a given OSS codebase, but if you have skilled coders and mundane requirements, there is usually something out there in the Open which either suits, or can be modified to suit with relatively less effort.
Buy some webspace on a *nix provider, one that insists on SSH for management. Get approval. Tunnel all your traffic through a secure proxy outside the UK.
They create 90% of that traffic by buying the highest rate packages, which by far have the highest margins on them.
Overhead makes up a high percentage of the charge for the lower tiers ; so if you're paying four times the charge for the top tier, you're giving them a much higher profit margin. By necessity, those top 10% must be on the top tier, so they're more like 30% of their profit margin.
I've seen this ; separate product lines, "Data" CD-R and "Audio" CD-R. The audio ones are identical, but they cost more because they have the levy on them. Obviously, only people who don't understand that there is no difference buy the "Audio" ones.
Why not the reverse - place a ceiling on the earnings for each work that is the equivalent of a luxury lifestyle, with health insurance and dental cover, for the approximate period that it took to create the work. If it's the Sistine Chapel, that covers a lot. If it's a novel, you're looking at a few years worth at best. A song, perhaps a month - writing, rehearsal, recording, none of these take long. The previous investment in your skills is covered by the fact that you can create more than one work at once.
Once you reach the earnings cap, copyright for that work expires.
Too much to dream of though ; there is too much money tied up in believing otherwise.
Spammers that do adopt DKIM will be also be providing a GREAT way of automatically shitlisting any mail you get from them ; mark one as spam, and you can attest with cryptographic certainty that any mail properly signed with that key is from a known spammer. It also make it more computationally expensive to be a spammer, as they like to send huge batches of single mails rather than the dead giveaway of a mail with a BCC list yea long... although this will be offset by the large bot armies out there.
Conversely, as signatures become more popular, not having a signature will become a solid ++ score for any spamfilter. Spammers can't just use keys generated by their bots because they still have to be registered with DNS.
Create a fake person in your address book, on your phone, etc. Encode the password into their name, address and telephone number using a rule that's easy to remember. Or choose something else ; put it into a very boring looking TPS report, whatever. It's important you don't make a policy out of WHAT gets used, because then it's easier to crack. Let people choose what makes most sense to them.
Voicemail is a bad idea, because voicemail is notoriously easy to crack.
That's not smart. You could steal the card from the envelope it's delivered in, and instantly know the zip code. This is why cards and PIN numbers are mailed separately.
Because it's not the same ; the split-path selector thing does provide the same feature, but not the same way.
With the up button you always knew where to click to go up one path. Now you can go up to an arbitrary level, but always have to think about where to click, depending on the length of your path. The application is now making you think about using the application instead of what you are using it for. This is the cardinal sin of UI design.
I got myself an old Model-M for home use, and I did find myself missing the Windows key for common operations.
So I have a bunch of "hotcuts" ; shortcuts to VBScript chunks which perform these operations, like showing the "Run" dialogue and minimizing to the desktop. Put them in the start menu (in their own folder), bind alt-ctrl- hotkeys to them and it's ALMOST as seamless as using the equivalent win- combination.
The ever insightful Unabomber gets this one right;
The same is true of scientists generally. With possible rare exceptions, their motive is neither curiosity nor a desire to benefit humanity but the need to go through the power process: to have a goal (a scientific problem to solve), to make an effort (research) and to attain the goal (solution of the problem.) Science is a surrogate activity because scientists work mainly for the fulfilment they get out of the work itself. Scientists will do science because it's a job, and because they like it. People will manage scientists if they are paid to do so. As long as the costs are met, the research will get done. As others point out, much of the costs are already met by the taxpayer. In countries with socialised healthcare, the taxpayer is most certainly paying for all of it.
By far the majority of monies spent on a drug by a pharmaceutical company is on promoting it's use, by advertising in the medical and public press, and by directly schmoozing doctors (who are usually very happy to see a "Drug Rep", as they come bearing gifts, trinkets and a free lunch).
Development goals are presently set by accountants and marketeers ; small (but patentable) variations on existing molecules, drugs for vanity, etc. What will sell the most. In the hands of the state, the motivation become different ; development of what will benefit the state the most, which means the drugs that will most reduce healthcare costs and and improve worker productivity ; this goal set has a much higher correlation with the maximum public benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not all of them
http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/channels.dat
But I see a fair chunk of them here. (I don't have cable, and I don't care enough to enumerate them all).
He means they didn't run on Win2k ; I was content to run with Win2k for a long time. A game with the "Games for Windows" logo was what spurred me into buying Vista ; I got it home, tried to run it, and found it didn't work.
I nearly bought XP, but I thought "What the heck" and decided to get the latest.
I can't see any technical reason for it not to work as DirectX 9c is available for Win2k ; the main missing dependencies appear to be cryptographic calls in the kernel (and failure occurs during loading), which suggests that parts of the software have been encrypted with routines that occur only in WinXP and above, and deliberately, in order to move people off Win2k.
In the business world, the lack of Win2k support for their new Powershell technology probably serves a similar end.
"Games for Windows" is not the only place this occurs. EA Link only works on WinXP up, for similar reasons I'll bet.
Of course, if you bought a Linux game that needed a kernel upgrade... you could just upgrade your kernel.
In the UK, you can either get listings straight from the DVB-T signal, or free (for personal use) from an XML feed served by the Radio Times (a commercial arm of the BBC).
If you're sponsoring something, you're pretty much running it ; he who has the gold, makes the rules.
I dream of something opposite ; some of the same features, eco-power, etc, but spread over a large area, eco-houses in rolling green hills, local network, community halls. The place gets currency by providing consulting services to outsiders, but for the basics of living is aiming to be self-sufficient.
I liked one take I saw on this in a sci-fi novel ; each car has a wireless network node, everyone shares tracks around, so when you're driving, your car stereo swaps tracks with other cars, taking into account your preferences, etc. Kinda like what MS tried with the Zune... but good.
The pharmacological effects of clomipramine and MDMA are similar ; both of them futz with your serotonin metabolism, although clomipramine also futzes with noradrenaline.
The major difference is that while clomipramine just inhibits the re-uptake of these neurotransmitters in the synapse, MDMA also induces heavy release of serotonin, enough that your serotonin reserves are rapidly emptied on a "normal" dose.
I wouldn't touch MDMA with a mile long barge pole ; serotonin is the "happy" hormone, taking a drug that empties out your supply seems like a recipe for a suicidal Sunday morning, not to mention the long-term effects (like your brain getting so used to the high serotonin levels that it needs the drug just to be mildly cheerful).
This is akin to using MS products... "Don't like 'em, don't use 'em".
Well, I don't like their business practices, or the fact that their engineering practice is more motivated by marketing and corporate strategy than by actual engineers, but I use their products anyway. Why? At work, I am expected to produce software that works in Windows. At home, I like to play games, which for the most part means booting a Windows partition.
I love Linux and the freeness of Linux. I could probably give up playing games and spend my free time coding, and have just as much fun. But I can't give up Windows at work, because my living depends upon it.
Google happens to be the best search engine, bar none. Regardless of my feelings on it's privacy policy (which I don't really mind too much), it's still the best. Ditto for webmail and distributed calendar.
To function in the real world, you have to be able to deal with ambiguity and grey areas. I'm not saying that idealism is a bad thing ; I'm just saying that we can't all be so dedicated to something that we squat on the MIT campus rather than making a more conventional living for ourselves within the Matr^H^H^H^H System.
For what it's worth, the majority of work I do on Windows involves OSS software.
Well abstracted OO code in particular you don't need to understand all of. if you are encountering a specific problem, its likely that someone else has, and already built a solution. That sounds like a poster quote for OSS
This is particular to my situation ; but I'm not certain that I'm on my own here. additional testing Well, you don't have to do quality assurance on commercial products.. but maybe you should be? Surely you need to know that your libraries behave as you expect, regardless of their source. So as a minimum, you are testing that it behaves as expected for the purposes of your software.... which you are doing anyway, if you are testing your software, through the abstraction layer of... your own code. bigger server Only if you are constantly updating that source ; remember, most of the work was already done. I don't think any coder, no matter how skilled, can claim to "understand" a million code framework in a day or so True, but again, I don't think you need to. Write tests to assure that it has the behaviour you want, if it doesn't, get it to pass either by patching your code, or their code (an option you don't have with closed source), and forget about it. You don't understand the internals of the commercial product, but you still use it, and take the risk that the vendor won't fix it.
You're not limited to non-commercial support for OSS projects either. Ok, yes, it might cost more than getting a patch for your commercial product, which has bugfixing amortized across all customers.
I surprised you didn't bring up licensing. Which is a real reason to choose commercial, if you don't want to compromise your choices in terms of distribution.
My projects either include or use several components which are open-source, which did not quite meet with my needs, and which I have patched to suit my requirements (WiX, XStream, HTML Tidy, etc). In most cases, I've submitted my patches to the core project, although the licenses these projects are under (at most restrictive) do not require me to - only to distribute source to recipients of the binaries. I consider it payment, which is only fair because I didn't give them any money. In all cases, the the effort involved was far less than just the effort required to cut enough red tape to obtain approval to purchase a commercial product. In some cases, there wasn't a commercial equivalent.
It's less clear cut if your existing coders are not skilled enough to actually modify a given OSS codebase, but if you have skilled coders and mundane requirements, there is usually something out there in the Open which either suits, or can be modified to suit with relatively less effort.
No chance.
Buy some webspace on a *nix provider, one that insists on SSH for management. Get approval. Tunnel all your traffic through a secure proxy outside the UK.
They create 90% of that traffic by buying the highest rate packages, which by far have the highest margins on them.
Overhead makes up a high percentage of the charge for the lower tiers ; so if you're paying four times the charge for the top tier, you're giving them a much higher profit margin. By necessity, those top 10% must be on the top tier, so they're more like 30% of their profit margin.
No, he can hold his drink. But he probably gets his data copied by the KGB honeytrap he picked up at the local casino.
I've seen this ; separate product lines, "Data" CD-R and "Audio" CD-R. The audio ones are identical, but they cost more because they have the levy on them. Obviously, only people who don't understand that there is no difference buy the "Audio" ones.
Why not the reverse - place a ceiling on the earnings for each work that is the equivalent of a luxury lifestyle, with health insurance and dental cover, for the approximate period that it took to create the work. If it's the Sistine Chapel, that covers a lot. If it's a novel, you're looking at a few years worth at best. A song, perhaps a month - writing, rehearsal, recording, none of these take long. The previous investment in your skills is covered by the fact that you can create more than one work at once.
Once you reach the earnings cap, copyright for that work expires.
Too much to dream of though ; there is too much money tied up in believing otherwise.
He's not using a "unique font". He's using a tag.
Spammers that do adopt DKIM will be also be providing a GREAT way of automatically shitlisting any mail you get from them ; mark one as spam, and you can attest with cryptographic certainty that any mail properly signed with that key is from a known spammer. It also make it more computationally expensive to be a spammer, as they like to send huge batches of single mails rather than the dead giveaway of a mail with a BCC list yea long... although this will be offset by the large bot armies out there.
Conversely, as signatures become more popular, not having a signature will become a solid ++ score for any spamfilter. Spammers can't just use keys generated by their bots because they still have to be registered with DNS.
Create a fake person in your address book, on your phone, etc. Encode the password into their name, address and telephone number using a rule that's easy to remember. Or choose something else ; put it into a very boring looking TPS report, whatever. It's important you don't make a policy out of WHAT gets used, because then it's easier to crack. Let people choose what makes most sense to them.
Voicemail is a bad idea, because voicemail is notoriously easy to crack.
> How about Global Impact of Striking French Air Traffic Controller?
>
That's not smart. You could steal the card from the envelope it's delivered in, and instantly know the zip code. This is why cards and PIN numbers are mailed separately.
Because it's not the same ; the split-path selector thing does provide the same feature, but not the same way.
With the up button you always knew where to click to go up one path. Now you can go up to an arbitrary level, but always have to think about where to click, depending on the length of your path. The application is now making you think about using the application instead of what you are using it for. This is the cardinal sin of UI design.
I got myself an old Model-M for home use, and I did find myself missing the Windows key for common operations.
So I have a bunch of "hotcuts" ; shortcuts to VBScript chunks which perform these operations, like showing the "Run" dialogue and minimizing to the desktop. Put them in the start menu (in their own folder), bind alt-ctrl- hotkeys to them and it's ALMOST as seamless as using the equivalent win- combination.
By far the majority of monies spent on a drug by a pharmaceutical company is on promoting it's use, by advertising in the medical and public press, and by directly schmoozing doctors (who are usually very happy to see a "Drug Rep", as they come bearing gifts, trinkets and a free lunch).
Development goals are presently set by accountants and marketeers ; small (but patentable) variations on existing molecules, drugs for vanity, etc. What will sell the most. In the hands of the state, the motivation become different ; development of what will benefit the state the most, which means the drugs that will most reduce healthcare costs and and improve worker productivity ; this goal set has a much higher correlation with the maximum public benefit.