But even the bad ones are better than 'Gee, the Icon looks pretty. Virus writers are nortoriously bad artists so this program I downloaded from some unknown person that claims to be a secret beta of a Microsoft product should be fine to run'
Virus writers are also notorious for copying code fragments from other viruses; why assume they won't copy icons (or other decently designed graphics) from legitimate applications?
While I'm sure Stallman's a great guy & a tireless crusader for Free software, I don't really see him actually doing much computer science. In my book the primary reason for a CompSci department to hire a researcher is to have them do research
What do you think will have a more profound influence on the direction of computer science in decades to come? Open-source software and GPL? Or a few cool new algorithms that will likely be superceded in a few years?
You are aware that gag orders are a normal and accepted thing in the course of some legal matters, right? Oh, yeah, that doesn't fit in with your tinfoil whine-assing, so no of course not.
A gag order referring to matters of fact in a case is one thing; a gag order prohibiting one from quoting a duly-enacted (and publicly viewable) piece of legislation is something else entirely.
3000 people died at once. For no reason. Getting in an automobile, I assume some risk. I have no reason to assume the risk of having some religious nutjob crash a jetliner into my office, nor do I want to.
A few years earlier, some other religious nutjobs attempted to blow up the WTC. How many unsuccessful attempts does it take before working there has a non-zero probability of risk?
So if my cd/dvd/whatever breaks and it is my fault I should spend 20 bucks on a replacement instead of spending a little bit of time and 50 cents making a backup copy? It's a better idea to make the copy and use it in situations when the disk may be broken than it is to just buy a new one if anything happens.
It's like buying insurance; it depends on the numbers. If, on average, you damage less than one DVD out of 40, it's cheaper to buy the replacements on the rare instances when you need them, rather than wasting 50 cents to back up every single DVD you own. On the other hand, if you have a less safe environment (small children, sloppy co-workers, etc.) then backups may be more cost-effective.
Years ago, i ammassed a collection of many hundreds of video games on floppy media. I diligently backed every single one of them up. I think that I only had to rely on such backups once, or maybe twice. The cost to replace two games would have been an order of magnitude cheaper than the cost of the backups in media and storage space, not to mention the time spent in making them.
Since the article said only 10% of households even have a computer I doubt that's the case. Estimates say 50% of US households have a computer. Owning a computer certainly doesn't automatically conferr literacy, but with 5x as many (percentage wise) owning computers it would be safe to assume that the average American is more computer literate than the average Arab.
Not necessarily. In countries where technology is expensive, hard to get, or hard to support, it is likely that those who have it know how to use it. In contrast, technology in America is so cheap and available that many people own computers and yet don't know how to make their VCRs stop flashing 12:00.
Somehow, I'm not really thrilled at the thought of my Windows Media Player punching me in the face for 2d8+12 points of damage whenever I play an MP3 file for which I don't have a valid certificate.
Just get a lich or some master dwarves or something, I'm sure one of them will make a computer golem for you.
I assume that you've never worked in the HR department of a company that has had a disgruntled lich on the payroll.
Or even county jail! Lining up touching your hairy thing to the guy in front's butt, and other such indignities are just life as usual, at least in Los Angeles.
They're not fun, but I wouldn't call them atrocities.
Treating prisoners in this way is atrocious.
So, by definion, such treatment is an atrocity.
How this stacks up to other atrocities (such as the Holocaust) is just a matter of degree.
"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." - Joseph Stalin
IIRC Protection from Lightning is a 4th level Cleric spell!
And Raise Dead is a 5th level Cleric spell.
Why bother continuously protecting against something that might happen occasionally, when it's just easier to fix the results after the fact? (Now if only there were a Raise Charred Metal spell...)
Why do you not like PayPal? I've not seen any disparaging comments on them before. Can you elaborate a bit more on this?
While I have never personally used PayPal, I have friends who have related horror stories; there are many others at
http://www.paypalsucks.com.
I also have friends who have had success with PayPal, so it may work for you; just be careful how you use it. In particular, have a special bank account just for PayPal, never use it for anything else, and never keep excess funds in it. This way, if anything 'irregular' happens, your losses are limited. Also, as a buyer, you get additional consumer protection by using a credit card rather than a bank account.
Is Microsoft Software actually certified for safety critical systems? I thought it was not warranted for that use.
In fact, most Microsoft EULAs (and those of other software vendors) specifically mention that the products in question are not certified for life-critical applications.
If someting like this ever came to court, the virus writer's lawyers could legitimately claim that the fault was not that of his client. Rather, it be the computer owner's negligence for running unsafe software in a life-critical application in the first place.
Of course, in the U.S., the Patriot Act would likely override that.
The thing that smells funny about this figure however, is that if they required 1TB of storage, the OS installation would have to come on over 200 DVD's. "Please insert DVD #156 now" (sigh)
Mass-producing and distributing large number of DVDs is expensive. Given the way Microsoft has been shifting to online distribution of patches, etc., it's more likely to be:
Please download critical security update patch #156 now (150MB)
This also makes things more tedious to pirate;
A stack of 200 DVDss can be easily burned; a pile
of 1000000 files, some of which fit onto a single DVD, and some which don't, is a lot messier. Remember the days when games first came out on CDs, before burners were available?
Let's see now: 1TB of storage is the thing that stands out. I've been running a dual CPU machine with 4GB of RAM for a while now, but 1 TB of storage, what the hell for ?
I currently use a system with 1GB of RAM and 236MB of HD (36GB SCSI primary, 200GB IDE secondary); a x4 increase for the next generation doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
Also, Microsoft has been using Unicode for years (ever look at the guts of a Word document?). If the Longhorn file system uses Unicode internally, that will automatically double the size of all text text documents. (Unless, of course, they make.doc the native text format, which would make the increase x10).
Of course, I imagine that most of what fills up people's hard drives these days is downloaded music, videos, games, and applications, none of which are text. Then again, when applications have to conform to Longhorn's (undoubtedly more complicated) API set, and when music and videos start embedding tons of DRM baggage, they will naturally get to be a lot larger.
This is far and away the most powerful machine I've ever ordered, and it doesn't meet the Longhorn 'average'... Something smells...
Maybe Microsoft can't get machines like this today either, which might explain why Longhorn has been delayed a couple more years:)
The Scientology nuts are complaining that a search for "scientology" also results in anti-scientology sites. Should they be awarded damages too?
I don't think so.
True. However, if somebody paid Google to put an anti-Scientology site higher up on the list, this is no longer a matter of neutral search results, but a wilful use of a trademarked name. This isn't about searching, but about commercial profit out of someone else's trademark.
A friend of mine told me that Battlefield Earth was the worst movie ever made. I considered this statement to be biased and overly cynical; no movie could be that bad. Then one day, when he borrowed a copy of it and brought it over for several of us to watch, I discovered just how wrong I was.
Since the advent of computers & other high tech components in automobiles, people have long been predicting the same thing.
Honestly, how many 1970 automobiles do pass on your way to work?
It depends on where you live. The last time I was in the Los Angeles area, I saw quite a few cars that were in the 20-30 year old range. Of course, cars there aren't generally affected by rust.
This reminds me of a book I read about garbology (can't remember the title), where scientist were baffled about the low quantity of washers & dryers found in dumps. They discovered that broken appliances were exported to central and south America to be rebuilt, and that many of the appliances used there were decades old!
I was in Mexico City in 1991; the vast majority of vehicles (and all taxis) I saw on the road were Volkswagen beetles (a model not made in the US for decades), and a large number of them looked like they had been in use for a very long time.
When you don't thave lots of money to throw around on always buying new equipment, you develop the skill set necessary to make do with
older and obsolete models.
"The MPAA is evil for sending pirates to jail! Their attempts to go after copyright infringement is 'abusive' and just like the 'War on Drugs.' The RIAA is 'greedy' for legally pursuing people who are violating their copyright."
Two articles later...
"Here's another article about evil companies violating the copyright of the GPL. We must enforce the GPL and punish those who infringe its copyright. GPL violaters are evil, and the copyright of the GPL must be respected."
Not really. The MPAA and RIAA are saying
"You are stealing things we didn't write, but have the rights to distribute, and are ruining our justly-earned ridiculously huge bottom line", while the GPL people are saying
"You are stealing things that we let you use for free as long as you give us due credit, but you are too cheap to even do that".
Two vey different motives.
In Eternal Darkness, Sanity's Requiem, your character has a sanity meter. When your sanity gets low, certain in-game effects happen, such as hearing strange voices, having the camera angle tilt crazily, walking on the ceiling, or even hallucinating battles that don't really happen.
However, certain effects break out of the game. In one, for example, the screen goes black, it looks like the game system reboots, and displays a "controller error" message screen. The first few times things like that happened, I thought my game had malfunctioned, but later I correlated these to losses of in-game sanity. I think this was very effective in making sanity loss seem real, by making the player (as well as the character) think he's losing his mind.
In Duke Nukem 3D, on the first level there is a video arcade room. One of the machines is a Duke Nukem video game. If you activate it, Duke says "I don't have time to play with myself".
How do you know that the compiled code, assuming it is compiled correctly, wasn't altered in the transfer to the device?
Because I transfered it. Perhaps via serial cable or over a cable not on a public network.
True; however, how do you know that what you transferred is actually running on the device? Unless you actually compiled the code in the boot ROM that does the download, you can't be sure that the code isn't being altered as it is downloaded. Even so, unless you know every other chip and every trace on the device's motherboard, you can't be sure that there isn't something else going on that could subvert your intentions.
There have been countless games when I knew exactly what I wanted to do to solve a problem (and it was the correct solution), but the game engine was overly finicky; you had to use exactly the right word, or click the mouse on exactly the right pixel. I don't mind having to think to solve a puzzle, but attempting to read the mind of the programmer to figure out just how he expected something worded shouldn't have to be part of that.
Anyone who ever looks in a strategy guide prior to beating a video game is a total loser.
Well, it's even harder to win when you get stuck 10% of the way through with a puzzle you just can't beat.
The fun of the game is figuring out the puzzle and things.
Yes, that's part of the fun. But completing the game is alo part of the fun. Personally, I enjoy mental puzzles, but I really hate the ones where you have to thrawsh the controller with the dexterity of a 14-year-old, and if you make the slightest mistake, you die and have to start over. In that case, it's a less painful to have a walkthrough that gets you through the tedious parts you can't do by yourself, so you can enjoy the other parts that you can.
If someone just tells you how to do it, what's the point?
I agree that just using the walkthrough 100% and not thinking at all diminishes the gaming experience. But if I spend $50 on a game and get 10% of the way through (and am frustrated enough to pick up the game system and throw it through the TV screen), if I spend $15 more for a strategy guide that helps me through the rough parts and lets me complete 100% of the game, I've gotten a lot more bang for my buck (7.5 times as much, if you do the math).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes there is, when did Microsfot (or any other major software company) begin releasing beta software through P2P networks as a means for testing?
Shortly after their e-mail beta test where Bill Gates personally paid people $1 for every e-mail they sent. Didn't you get your checque?
But even the bad ones are better than 'Gee, the Icon looks pretty. Virus writers are nortoriously bad artists so this program I downloaded from some unknown person that claims to be a secret beta of a Microsoft product should be fine to run'
Virus writers are also notorious for copying code fragments from other viruses; why assume they won't copy icons (or other decently designed graphics) from legitimate applications?
While I'm sure Stallman's a great guy & a tireless crusader for Free software, I don't really see him actually doing much computer science. In my book the primary reason for a CompSci department to hire a researcher is to have them do research
What do you think will have a more profound influence on the direction of computer science in decades to come? Open-source software and GPL? Or a few cool new algorithms that will likely be superceded in a few years?
You are aware that gag orders are a normal and accepted thing in the course of some legal matters, right? Oh, yeah, that doesn't fit in with your tinfoil whine-assing, so no of course not.
A gag order referring to matters of fact in a case is one thing; a gag order prohibiting one from quoting a duly-enacted (and publicly viewable) piece of legislation is something else entirely.
3000 people died at once. For no reason. Getting in an automobile, I assume some risk. I have no reason to assume the risk of having some religious nutjob crash a jetliner into my office, nor do I want to.
A few years earlier, some other religious nutjobs attempted to blow up the WTC. How many unsuccessful attempts does it take before working there has a non-zero probability of risk?
Worldwide piracy is still a big problem though I doubt there's much of it in the Baltic.
If they had insufficient valid NT licenses, would be obliged to hoist the Jolly Roger?
So if my cd/dvd/whatever breaks and it is my fault I should spend 20 bucks on a replacement instead of spending a little bit of time and 50 cents making a backup copy? It's a better idea to make the copy and use it in situations when the disk may be broken than it is to just buy a new one if anything happens.
It's like buying insurance; it depends on the numbers. If, on average, you damage less than one DVD out of 40, it's cheaper to buy the replacements on the rare instances when you need them, rather than wasting 50 cents to back up every single DVD you own. On the other hand, if you have a less safe environment (small children, sloppy co-workers, etc.) then backups may be more cost-effective.
Years ago, i ammassed a collection of many hundreds of video games on floppy media. I diligently backed every single one of them up. I think that I only had to rely on such backups once, or maybe twice. The cost to replace two games would have been an order of magnitude cheaper than the cost of the backups in media and storage space, not to mention the time spent in making them.
Since the article said only 10% of households even have a computer I doubt that's the case. Estimates say 50% of US households have a computer. Owning a computer certainly doesn't automatically conferr literacy, but with 5x as many (percentage wise) owning computers it would be safe to assume that the average American is more computer literate than the average Arab.
Not necessarily. In countries where technology is expensive, hard to get, or hard to support, it is likely that those who have it know how to use it. In contrast, technology in America is so cheap and available that many people own computers and yet don't know how to make their VCRs stop flashing 12:00.
Haven't you ever heard of golems?
Somehow, I'm not really thrilled at the thought of my Windows Media Player punching me in the face for 2d8+12 points of damage whenever I play an MP3 file for which I don't have a valid certificate.
Just get a lich or some master dwarves or something, I'm sure one of them will make a computer golem for you.
I assume that you've never worked in the HR department of a company that has had a disgruntled lich on the payroll.
Or even county jail! Lining up touching your hairy thing to the guy in front's butt, and other such indignities are just life as usual, at least in Los Angeles.
They're not fun, but I wouldn't call them atrocities.
Treating prisoners in this way is atrocious. So, by definion, such treatment is an atrocity. How this stacks up to other atrocities (such as the Holocaust) is just a matter of degree.
"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." - Joseph Stalin
IIRC Protection from Lightning is a 4th level Cleric spell!
And Raise Dead is a 5th level Cleric spell. Why bother continuously protecting against something that might happen occasionally, when it's just easier to fix the results after the fact? (Now if only there were a Raise Charred Metal spell...)
Support the First Amendment: Read at -1.
The First Amendment gives people the right to say whatever they want (within reason); however, it does not obligate everyone else to listen to them.
Why do you not like PayPal? I've not seen any disparaging comments on them before. Can you elaborate a bit more on this?
While I have never personally used PayPal, I have friends who have related horror stories; there are many others at http://www.paypalsucks.com. I also have friends who have had success with PayPal, so it may work for you; just be careful how you use it. In particular, have a special bank account just for PayPal, never use it for anything else, and never keep excess funds in it. This way, if anything 'irregular' happens, your losses are limited. Also, as a buyer, you get additional consumer protection by using a credit card rather than a bank account.
Is Microsoft Software actually certified for safety critical systems? I thought it was not warranted for that use.
In fact, most Microsoft EULAs (and those of other software vendors) specifically mention that the products in question are not certified for life-critical applications.
If someting like this ever came to court, the virus writer's lawyers could legitimately claim that the fault was not that of his client. Rather, it be the computer owner's negligence for running unsafe software in a life-critical application in the first place.
Of course, in the U.S., the Patriot Act would likely override that.
The thing that smells funny about this figure however, is that if they required 1TB of storage, the OS installation would have to come on over 200 DVD's. "Please insert DVD #156 now" (sigh)
Mass-producing and distributing large number of DVDs is expensive. Given the way Microsoft has been shifting to online distribution of patches, etc., it's more likely to be:
Please download critical security update patch #156 now (150MB)
This also makes things more tedious to pirate; A stack of 200 DVDss can be easily burned; a pile of 1000000 files, some of which fit onto a single DVD, and some which don't, is a lot messier. Remember the days when games first came out on CDs, before burners were available?
Let's see now: 1TB of storage is the thing that stands out. I've been running a dual CPU machine with 4GB of RAM for a while now, but 1 TB of storage, what the hell for ?
.doc the native text format, which would make the increase x10).
:)
I currently use a system with 1GB of RAM and 236MB of HD (36GB SCSI primary, 200GB IDE secondary); a x4 increase for the next generation doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
Also, Microsoft has been using Unicode for years (ever look at the guts of a Word document?). If the Longhorn file system uses Unicode internally, that will automatically double the size of all text text documents. (Unless, of course, they make
Of course, I imagine that most of what fills up people's hard drives these days is downloaded music, videos, games, and applications, none of which are text. Then again, when applications have to conform to Longhorn's (undoubtedly more complicated) API set, and when music and videos start embedding tons of DRM baggage, they will naturally get to be a lot larger.
This is far and away the most powerful machine I've ever ordered, and it doesn't meet the Longhorn 'average'... Something smells...
Maybe Microsoft can't get machines like this today either, which might explain why Longhorn has been delayed a couple more years
The Scientology nuts are complaining that a search for "scientology" also results in anti-scientology sites. Should they be awarded damages too?
I don't think so.
True. However, if somebody paid Google to put an anti-Scientology site higher up on the list, this is no longer a matter of neutral search results, but a wilful use of a trademarked name. This isn't about searching, but about commercial profit out of someone else's trademark.
Re:This link says it all.
A friend of mine told me that Battlefield Earth was the worst movie ever made. I considered this statement to be biased and overly cynical; no movie could be that bad. Then one day, when he borrowed a copy of it and brought it over for several of us to watch, I discovered just how wrong I was.
Since the advent of computers & other high tech components in automobiles, people have long been predicting the same thing. Honestly, how many 1970 automobiles do pass on your way to work?
It depends on where you live. The last time I was in the Los Angeles area, I saw quite a few cars that were in the 20-30 year old range. Of course, cars there aren't generally affected by rust.
This reminds me of a book I read about garbology (can't remember the title), where scientist were baffled about the low quantity of washers & dryers found in dumps. They discovered that broken appliances were exported to central and south America to be rebuilt, and that many of the appliances used there were decades old!
I was in Mexico City in 1991; the vast majority of vehicles (and all taxis) I saw on the road were Volkswagen beetles (a model not made in the US for decades), and a large number of them looked like they had been in use for a very long time.
When you don't thave lots of money to throw around on always buying new equipment, you develop the skill set necessary to make do with older and obsolete models.
"The MPAA is evil for sending pirates to jail! Their attempts to go after copyright infringement is 'abusive' and just like the 'War on Drugs.' The RIAA is 'greedy' for legally pursuing people who are violating their copyright."
Two articles later...
"Here's another article about evil companies violating the copyright of the GPL. We must enforce the GPL and punish those who infringe its copyright. GPL violaters are evil, and the copyright of the GPL must be respected."
Not really. The MPAA and RIAA are saying "You are stealing things we didn't write, but have the rights to distribute, and are ruining our justly-earned ridiculously huge bottom line", while the GPL people are saying "You are stealing things that we let you use for free as long as you give us due credit, but you are too cheap to even do that". Two vey different motives.
In Eternal Darkness, Sanity's Requiem, your character has a sanity meter. When your sanity gets low, certain in-game effects happen, such as hearing strange voices, having the camera angle tilt crazily, walking on the ceiling, or even hallucinating battles that don't really happen.
However, certain effects break out of the game. In one, for example, the screen goes black, it looks like the game system reboots, and displays a "controller error" message screen. The first few times things like that happened, I thought my game had malfunctioned, but later I correlated these to losses of in-game sanity. I think this was very effective in making sanity loss seem real, by making the player (as well as the character) think he's losing his mind.
In Duke Nukem 3D, on the first level there is a video arcade room. One of the machines is a Duke Nukem video game. If you activate it, Duke says "I don't have time to play with myself".
How do you know that the compiled code, assuming it is compiled correctly, wasn't altered in the transfer to the device?
Because I transfered it. Perhaps via serial cable or over a cable not on a public network.
True; however, how do you know that what you transferred is actually running on the device? Unless you actually compiled the code in the boot ROM that does the download, you can't be sure that the code isn't being altered as it is downloaded. Even so, unless you know every other chip and every trace on the device's motherboard, you can't be sure that there isn't something else going on that could subvert your intentions.
There have been countless games when I knew exactly what I wanted to do to solve a problem (and it was the correct solution), but the game engine was overly finicky; you had to use exactly the right word, or click the mouse on exactly the right pixel. I don't mind having to think to solve a puzzle, but attempting to read the mind of the programmer to figure out just how he expected something worded shouldn't have to be part of that.
Strategy guides should all die.
My, how elegant and succcinct.
Anyone who ever looks in a strategy guide prior to beating a video game is a total loser.
Well, it's even harder to win when you get stuck 10% of the way through with a puzzle you just can't beat.
The fun of the game is figuring out the puzzle and things.
Yes, that's part of the fun. But completing the game is alo part of the fun. Personally, I enjoy mental puzzles, but I really hate the ones where you have to thrawsh the controller with the dexterity of a 14-year-old, and if you make the slightest mistake, you die and have to start over. In that case, it's a less painful to have a walkthrough that gets you through the tedious parts you can't do by yourself, so you can enjoy the other parts that you can.
If someone just tells you how to do it, what's the point?
I agree that just using the walkthrough 100% and not thinking at all diminishes the gaming experience. But if I spend $50 on a game and get 10% of the way through (and am frustrated enough to pick up the game system and throw it through the TV screen), if I spend $15 more for a strategy guide that helps me through the rough parts and lets me complete 100% of the game, I've gotten a lot more bang for my buck (7.5 times as much, if you do the math).