1) Netscape came pre-installed by some (most?) OEMs at that time. I don't have numbers on this but it was hard to find a computer that didn't have it.
By 1996, Microsoft was specifically targetting Netscape by both releasing a free web browser, Internet Explorer, but also engaging in specific OEM requirements that minimally required IE to remain on the desktop and possibly included either excluding Netscape's icon on the desktop or Netscape's install completely (it's unclear to what extent it was).
2) Netscape was out first; a lot of people were settled into using Netscape before there even really was an IE. Netscape started with the dominant market position.
While Netscape started in the lead, PC sales skyrocketed in the 90s. Put simply, if all the computers in '96 were sold with just Netscape and all the computers in '99 were sold with just IE and all the computers were still running in '99, then IE would have about a 66% market share in '99 inherently. The numbers in the previous link aren't quite like that, in part because computers take time to be sold, Netscape users apparently clung on for quite a while, and obviously not all computers had just one web browser installed (some percentage downloaded a browser or installed from a CD).
3) While Netscape for a while was superior, later versions of Netscape were terrible -- as in, not as good as the previous versions of Netscape. Eventually even people who hated IE of that era (including me) started using it just because they were so damn tired of how buggy Netscape had become.
While I don't doubt that had something to do with it, people only started switching to Firefox when it was clearly superior in some ways (extensions) to IE. Ie, to get people to d/l the browser or cause OEMs to fight MS to keep Netscape would have required for Netscape to be significantly better in some property. As much as Netscape 4.x could be called terrible, I don't think it would have been enough even if Netscape 4.x was merely as good as IE4.
I don't deny that Microsoft had a big and unfairly used advantage in having the dominant operating system, but in the grand scheme of things, that amounts to Microsoft trying to slip Netscape roofies while Netscape was busy firing a shotgun at itself as fast as it could.
I think you're overstating your case a bit. IE4 was hardly bug free. But, it was already there and good enough. Why bother fighting with Netscape at all unless it's clearly superior? Certainly, until Mozilla was open source and started caring about standards compliance there really wasn't any ideological reason to be pro-Netscape either. Really, if there were any shotgun blasts that were fired, it was from Microsoft failing to making IE secure enough from attack for such a long period, Firefox was able to gain some traction for those worried about (if nothing else) the homogenous security risk.
The fact that the Wii outsold them is a testament to the fact that gameplay does indeed matter.
The Wii is a testament to the fact that people would rather spend $200 on a remote and wave it around on the couch rather than buy a tennis racket and actually run after a tennis ball. But, then, millions of people with their $200+ TVs were already a testament to that.
PS - Yes, I'm being a bit overly snarky, but the fact that there are people who actually view the Wii as "a good workout" instead of "very light aerobics at best" (and Nintendo pushing the whole Wii Fit) doesn't exactly make me feel great that the Wii is number one even if I equally think the XBox 360 and PS3 overhyped the relevance of graphics. Where's the fourth console which actually focuses on long-term story development and fun without a few flicks of the wrist for some cheap thrills being the main driver. Well, at least the Wii has Virtual Console to play older games and WiiWare to play some interesting newer games.
All I'm saying is that there isn't a 1st amendment issue when you prohibit a service provider from telling their customer that he's under surveillance. Interfering with an ongoing criminal investigation is obstruction of justice. That's been illegal since the Common Law (i.e: it predates the United States of America) and has never been ruled to be unconstitutional.
It is a 1st amendment issue when you can't tell your family and friends, though, even when it's merely that you were a served a NSL without telling for whom it covered or for what was requested (like, say, if Earthlink were to report how many NSLs they receive a year). Quite simply, Common Law might allow abridging freedom of speech and to the point that a NSL tells you of an investigation and could lead one to knowing obstruct justice there could be charges, but all direct stipulations of the NSL law to gag speech are an act of Congress and unconstitutional against the 1st amendment.
In short, you're focusing too much on the results of Common Law that people are willing to accept and not focusing enough on why people actually dislike NSLs when it comes to free speech. If it was all an issue of Common Law and obstruction of justice, why would the NSL law even try to specify specific things to gag since they'd already be illegal? Clearly, it was a power grab to censor speech even if it wouldn't last.
so what about people who did the job and did not go to big 4 year school? Why should they get passed over for a JOB?
Um..because they did not go to a big 4 year school and someone else did? It's like asking why the person with the shifty eyes, the funny smell, or the lack of professional references keeps being passed up over other people. Hiring involves a selection process, not simply picking a random person who claims he/she can do the job reliably for the long term. If you're hiring and you want a person that doesn't smells odd or you do want to have a person with a college degree because you believe they'll relate better with all the current college graduate staff, you'll make a choice of them over others.
Put more simply. Life isn't fair. Hiring and firing doubly so.
Sure farm subsidies and defense spending goes to corporations but food stamps have nothing to do with corporate fascism.
If American farms are subsidized by the government, resulting in lower priced goods, then their food is cheaper than the food of other countries. This subsidization causes a downward pressure on crops pushing American farms to ever further increase yield (helped by companies like Monsanto/ADP). Over time, the actual investment on any single farm is so great that no individual is capable of supporting the yearly upfront costs (lower margins require higher upfront inventory to maintain the same income) or maintain the diversity to avoid collapse level losses because of either low return or a bad yield on crops raised. This leads inherently to collective, multi-region ownership of farms (aka coops or corporations). With this stage set, the discussion leads to food stamps.
Individual people get food stamps not corporations and they can use them wherever food stamps are accepted.
Food stamps inherently lead to overconsumption of food, especially of American produced food. Food stamps, the school lunch program, and exports are all designed as "release valves" to maintain the demand level of American produced food. Consider the negative effects of people suddenly unable to pay the rent deciding to buy less processed (and hence generally cheaper) food or soda; processed food, btw, tends to cost more because it includes various additives like HFCS and soda is basically HFCS water. Unemployment insurance is designed to have the same effect, to maintain the economy during job loss or recession to mitigate the harm on prices of a sudden, potentially massive, loss of demand.
The rest of this anti-capitalist/free market rant doesn't show any more knowledge or reasoning either.
None of what I said was anti-capitalist/free market, unless you believe government interference is the epitome of the free market and capitalism (or that limited-liability corporations are a free market construct). Even then, I made it clear near the end that even if all these things (which, btw, were done for social and economy stability reasons) do have anti-free market effects, they shouldn't necessarily change, especially not just for change sake. If there is a desire to feed the poor and keep farming a large industry in the US for stability reasons, then megacorps are a natural consequence. The issue isn't megacorps but those megacorps that would strive to maintain power (either through PR manipulation, lobbying, or outright force) and do harm in those strivings. As it stands, I don't think as a whole we're being harmed by most megacorps. Still, the manipulation and lobbying efforts make me worry on what may come which means we should maintain significant, collective supervision of their activities and make it clear that if they do become harmful we will change their leadership or even dissolve their charter, if necessary.
The issue is less "information should be free" and more "this just signed some people's death warrants" with some of the posted information. Civilians whom, probably under the assurance of anonymity and safety, gave the US information. Now, someone leaked their names, Wikileaks posted it, and those same civilians are now in the cross hairs.
True. But, I wonder, if Wikileaks were to have posted intel on the Taliban and some of their informant names had been leaked, how gun ho would you or the Obama administration be about not using that information for their own advantage (ie, issuing "death warants") and admonishing Wikileaks.
Of course, we'll arm chair philosophize about the ethics, reasoning, logic, etc, about this whole thing, because men won't come in the night to kill us and our families as a result of some jackass claiming we told someone something.
I hate to break it to you, but the US Army doesn't shoot candy from their guns. And the US's predator drones aren't air striking in candy either. If anyone should be reasonably killed in war, it'd be armed troops, informants, and spies. If, on the other hand, you want to upset with the Taliban for killing real innocent civilians, that's another thing.
Oh, and as a small aside on that, civilians killed were up in 2009 from 2008 mostly due to great anti-governmental element attacks. Of 2412 civilians killed, ~68% were by anti-governmental elements, ~25% were from US-lead forces, and it was unclear who caused the deaths of the last ~8%. But, yeah, let's focus on a couple dozen informants because that'll effect the war effort. Or, you know, we could just leave*.
*Yea, yea, if we leave it might very probable degenerate into a civil war that'll result in the death of even more innocent civilians than if we stayed. Clearly there's no simple good answer if one cares. But, focusing on the lives of a few informants seems rather dickish still.
As far back as the Franklin Roosevelt administration, in 1933, when it looked for a minute like the US government might actually start putting people ahead of corporate interests, a group of men, owners of some of our largest industries, including the grandfather of George W. Bush plotted to over throw and replace him with a pro-corporate Fascist regime.
A historical irony, given those actions by FDR are a large basis for the pro-corporate fascism of today's government. Of course, demand-side corporate subsidies actually force some level of competition, but megacorps trying to corner the market (look at agribusiness and food stamps or defense contractors and defense spending) still have an amazingly strong, if not strict fascist, grip on government spending. Of course, that's the delicious irony of "pro-business" Republicans who demand cuts on spending. No, they just want to cut taxes because megacorps and their owners, though consolidation, end up hurting worst from progressive taxation and taxation on corporate shares.
Of course, "pro-business" Republicans focus heavily on small businesses and how higher taxes might kill them or hurt job creation. Of course, the fact that most small businesses failing has nothing to do with taxation (figuring out how to survive on the slim margins the free market would imply exist is very hard and the dead weight loss of taxes are inherently factored into the cost/price and really only aid non-local business (but, then, tariff is a dirty word)) or that small businesses generally will only hire as much workers as they need (and those that would be limited would ones experiencing significant growth...for which they could obtain loans if they have such great and obvious growth potential just as they almost certainly have major short-term loans already for things like inventory or payroll). But, then, it's easier to point at government as punching bag than to do the actual math to show who is having the worst effect on a business (Wal-Mart, for example) and to separately consider what, if anything, should be done about those factors (possibly nothing, since picking favorites just to pick favorites is the root of the problem but there is a reasonable basis to act if the distortion effect of taxes or a few businesses are hampering the actual action of the economy).
I think you're missing the big picture. The big picture is, flu vaccines take a long time to make. Yes, media fear mongers hyped up the worst case scenario, but the mass production was precisely because H1N1 was pandemic; ie, it wasn't as important if it had a high kill ratio as that it spread a lot and hence a lot of vaccines could counter the spread. As a result, a very large production of the vaccine were produced. The fact that "spotter planes told us it had broken up and become a light rain shower" is precisely why about half the vaccines weren't used. If you're looking for the media fear mongers to officially apologize, well good luck with that.
Meanwhile, the lethality of most influenza tends to be less from the flu being strong per se and more to do with people (elderly and children) having an immune system unable to cope. So, presumably the mass vaccination probably did save a good many elderly and child lives. And the pandemic status was accurate. The only thing really left is for the CDC and the WHO to officially admonish the various media fear mongers and apologize that they didn't do such earlier. I'm not really sure what you expecting though, unless you believe it's the CDC's and the WHO's job to have a PR arm to educate people that they shouldn't blindly believe everything the media might spit out, especially when it's the same jackasses spewing yet another thing to fear this week when last weeks fear didn't pan out as nearly as lethal as they made it out to be.
While I certainly am not against the course material for a University education being available, I think you bring up an interesting point. There's a reason why it's two to seven years income that's spent on a University education: because devoting yourself to learning simply is such a time consuming task, you really don't have the free time to work much, if at all. Yes, you can cut out the degree, the tuition, and the cost of course material, but you're still left with the actual two to five years of work. If you dabble in it, that time period can easily extend into decades.
In short, while I certainly agree that the material should be available, I don't think one should delude oneself into believing that simply reading a few texts is what it means to get a University education and that such is sufficient to really know a field. A University education is, after all, intended to push you to the zen of groking one's field, not merely understanding it. While one can certainly manage such without spending time in a classroom (or even without University texts), most people aren't willing to devote the time involved. For those who are, of course, any simple and cheaps step to cut the costs and hence effective years to learn is a very good.
With all due respect, the US President doesn't run the US economy. At best, he and Congress have the power to effect the economy. To that end, the major ways that the US Government can effect the economy is either positive growth (low federal interest on loans, lower taxes, and/or more spending) or negative growth (high federal interest on loans, higher taxes, and/or lower spending) with some ambiguity if there's a worry of long-term solvency. To that end, the stimulus bill would, if anything, be a positive growth action. Yes, it can lead to long-term solvency concerns which leads to..
Obama took a structural $450 billion a year deficit under Bush (which was hardly anything to be proud about) and has turned it into a structural $1.4 trillion annual deficit.
Two points. One, while the structural annual deficit might have been those figures, the actual debt changes for Bush's years were closer to ~620 billion a year (the federal debt increased from ~$5.7 billion to ~$10.7 billion from Jan 2001 to Jan 2009). Two, this difference is a major problem precisely because it was the sort of emergency spending (on Iraq and Afghanistan) that should be accounted for in an annual budget instead of hidden to make a very large problem seem less big.
This is simply unrecoverable without severe austerity. It ends in ruination.
I hate to break it to you, but we were already there. Economy recessions are an inevitable thing requiring large government spending (unemployment insurance costs doubling, minimally, if unemployment doubles) with decreasing revenue (obviously, less workers equals less taxes). Reasonably, one should save up for "a rainy day", not spend beyond one's means for..well..decades. Simply put, our federal budget has for ages been fixed on the idea that the GDP will grow by ~2%/year, so it's okay to incur 2% more national debt because the ratio allows equal effectiveness in paying off the debt each year through tax increases.
But, as you note, increasing taxes dramatically and decreasing spending could lead to ruination. The real truth, of course, is we could engage in such large tax increases (a lot of other countries have higher taxes and haven't been ruined for it). It's just political suicide, the people in general don't want it, and it's likely to not be done until absolutely necessary. That's where the real risk lies.
At the end of Obama's term, we will have doubled the national debt at the same time that Social Security and Medicare goes into the red. In my opinion, this is what you get when you nominate a bunch of socialist and marxist retreads to your cabinet.
Sorry, but they're not socialist or marxist. They're almost entirely Clinton retreaders (just as Bush had heavy Bush Sr retreading).
They really have no clue on how to run an economy.
Again, they only influence the economy.
Turbo Tax Timmy couldn't even balance his own taxes correctly, but now he's running the Treasury Department trying to fix the entire economy (Turbo Tax Timmy is a good example of where academic achievement doesn't necessarily confer real world success and achievement).
That's the fundamental issue. Everyone seems to have heavy debt and simply cutting spending by people (ie, cutting their unemployment insurance) risks having a negative ripple effect in the economy. The long-term goal, of course, is to fix the system (federal interest loans should never have been so high, spending so great, or taxes so low). But, that's a shift that taxes years if not decades for the economy to absorb the change instead of freaking out when billions or trillions of money flows shift or disappear.
Obama's mismanagement of the economy is almost enough for me to really believe he's an adherent of the Cl
Which is why I stuck achievement in there. You are right, it's not about performance on an IQ test...presumably a lot of the basement dwellers on Slashdot would do quite well on that account, while accomplishing very little productive in their lives, at least at present.
And the problem with achievement is that achievement isn't necessarily productive or wholly worthwhile. Look at Mao, for example. On the one hand, he did radically propel China forward into being a strongly developing country. On the other hand, his clear lack of experience and overconfidence in the ability to micromanage such a large country resulted in massive famine and strife.
Bush, like him or hate him, does have a body of accomplishment that is better than the vast majority of people out there. He didn't get elected President because his daddy was President. He was actually an effective and popular governor of Texas. And he got to be governor of Texas by defeating Ann Richards. His daddy didn't do that for him either.
No, what did that for him was a collection of individuals who have done the same thing for countless other individuals (including Bush's father). Bush was a face and a personality and while he certainly shaped the campaigns that gained him Governorship and Presidentship--and he certainly exercised significant power when elected--, he was far from "the decider" or in a position where most people weren't sheltered even if he made grossly large mistakes in procedure. I'm not saying he didn't accomplish something extraordinary, but I'd almost argue that getting a PhD is a greater achievement because it's less based upon a popularity contest and more on actual ability. Certainly, that's not the basis for Bush being elected.
There is certainly a lot of truth that a lot of doors were opened up for GWB due to who his father was, and if you take the same guy, and plop him into a lower middle class pedigree, the outcome would have been far different. Them's the breaks. We don't like in a perfect meritocracy. Those don't actually exist.
Rather true. Nor do I believe that the President's job is to necessarily have achieved a lot otherwise. It's, in many ways, to listen to the will of the people, listen to the counsel of his Cabinet, and to have enough humility and humanity to not think himself wiser or more important than millions or billions of people which his decisions (or those of others he chooses to follow) will effect. My problem, then, is Bush seemed both overly arrogant in convictions that seemed less of his own design and more of those around him with a willingness to forfeit the life and freedom of many under some banner of protecting the US. To that end, he achieved a lot in gaining power for the Presidency to carry out those actions, but I don't think on balance that was a good achievement.
And as far as the job he did as President...I think Obama is finding out just how hard that job is. Because Bush fucked up things less in 8 years than Obama did his first year in.
I'm curious of what you speak in this regard. I would definitely say that Obama has certainly been in the news more and did more in the first year than Bush did (well, prior to 9/11). Beyond that, I'm not sure where you've actually pragmatically seen what any of Bush or Obama has done to you. And ideologically, Bush authorized or was otherwise reasonably culpable for authorizing a number of horrible things (warrantless wiretapping, kidnapping, torture, and indefinite imprisonment); Obama isn't much better, continuing about half the mentioned practices. In any case, I'd love to hear an elaboration.
An idiot savant is still an idiot. If anything, they're often the most frightening. They're often easy to manipulate into doing horrible things, people blindly trust them for their intelligence, and they lack the normal emotional reaction to things for people to comprehend when they should stop trusting in them.
But, yes, let's pretend it's all a matter of how well one does on an IQ test.
Do you seriously think most people buy R4s for homebrew? That's like saying most people use torrents to get Linux ISOs.
So? Without the R4, what do you think people currently pirating will do? Well, they'll likely switch from using a real DS to using an emulated DS on a computer. So, all the court ruling has done is moved where the infringement happens. People are already pirating (possibly through torrents) DS games, so that hasn't changed either. The real question is how the R4 can be illegal but emulators in general are legal.
Simply put, piracy happens because it happens. The R4 is not the originator of this nor will banning it be the end. Copyright is written even knowing this, requiring that copyright holder sues those that infringe their copyright. This idea that they should be granted a blanket ban on imports is absurd on its face. And in all probability, it's very unlikely that it'll actually help Nintendo (much like shutting down Napster didn't really help).
PS - On a funny side note, a lot of sites seem to be calling them "R4 Emulator Card[s]". The R4 is simply an adapter, no different than if one were to design a device to plug a HD into a XBox to play games.
Something like: The financial markets are like a (needed) utility to which the owners decided to attach a casino for fun and a little profit on the side. Eventually, the casino outgrew the utility and when the casino went bust, we users of the utility were forced to bail it out because we need the utility.
The problem, I think, is the analogy is both true and incomplete. Well before banks were attached to casinos, they were already in a situation with questionable underpinnings. The problem goes like this:
You take a bank that's multinational (or at least, very big national). By being spread out across one or more nations, it has a risk pool closer to the average of the nation(s). When it comes time to give a home loan in Fooland, though, the situation is local. If Fooland is simply a bad place to give home loans (ie, a significantly high foreclosure rate), local banks will tend to be much stricter about who they accept and work harder to verify that the applicant is actually viable because they understand the situation and a few foreclosures could bankrupt them potentially.
Meanwhile, a multinational bank is much more lax because it see its as more financial secure (having much more capital and in raw numbers able to support many more foreclosures). The problem is, while this holds generally true, clustered foreclosures inherently drive down the price of homes. Ie, each Fooland with 10% of homes foreclosured results in a flood of new homes. However, people are inherently unlikely to move to Fooland even if home prices drop; people tend to move because of better jobs, and strict local banks and a now much more strict multinational are doing anything but spur job growth for the new cheap homes. Besides, if there were plenty of good local jobs, it's unlikely that there'd be that 10% foreclosures given the investment homes are seen as.
In short, the problems run a lot deeper than some casino-ish action. Local banks can't magically spur economic growth by being more generous with business loans as easy money alone simply spurs inflation (ie, the appearance of but not actual growth). And simply feeding the home purchase demand isn't a solution (it can lead to recessions and even deflation). Government involvement might not be the answer either except in areas where there's a known need for development for long-term stability or security (defense, energy, food, etc). Certainly, though, some level of regulation is warranted given the unintended consequences of conglomeration.
Personally, I'm waiting for the day that IPv6 becomes common place*. By then, I can readily imagine someone like Google data mining the trash of the nation (imagine targeting ads when you actually know what people have bought and might buy again instead of merely what they might buy). Hell, I'm sort of surprised Google isn't doing it already given how much DSL/cable/fiber users already have nearly, if not entirely, static IPs. And just imagine the sort of money Google could make from governments, private investigators, etc.
One person cutting down a tree for firewood is fine. A thousand men can lead to deforestation. A machine that can effect the word of a million men can can cause an ecological nightmare. The same holds true with pollution. The same holds true with oil and global warming. Something evil can come out of something as innocuous as collecting garbage. Even though we probably shouldn't punish Google today, I don't think we should wait until there is reason to punish a company or person to change the law. I don't really know where the line of privacy should begin and end. However, I do know that charging all individuals with the task of having the foresight to do the right thing when in comes to privacy when most are not aware of where the pragmatically privacy lines are isn't the answer. Hell, very few of the most technical among us follow the "don't post it on the internet if it's supposed to remain private" in its strictest sense; or, are you one of those few people who keeps all your private data on non-internet-connected computers (any computer connected to the internet is part of the internet hence the information is effectively posted to those with the desire to find it so long as that computer has the capability to leak that information)?
Tavis gave MS a timeline and they said can't commit right this instant but we will get back to you by friday (pretty resonable considering it was a patch tuesday for them).
Resonable, sure. But the point is, if Tavis offered MS a lack of disclosure for a guaranteed timeline for a fix and MS's response is anything but an "I accept", Tavis has no responsibility to keep the offer standing anymore than MS is obligated to keep the price on a copy of Windows 7 on Friday the as Tuesday just because on Wednesday you said you would "get back to them on friday".
Tavis then publishes on wednesday like a total douchebag. There is no way you can twist this that makes Tavis look like anything but a douche.
In the same way all contractual transactions tend to make people look like douchebags because in the end they try to take very real aspects of reality and abstract them into simple language; the fact that any sort of non-agreement on terms can result in an offer being dropped or significantly changed because one party chooses it is a fact of negotiation both sides have to understand before any sort of contractual engagement.
The only possible way he could have looked less of a prick is if he waited till saturday and had no further response he could have published it, even then though it goes against what he claims is responsible disclosure.
Yea, I'm going to have to go with "It's not Tavis Ormandy's job or responsibility to live up to a timetable MS creates for when to negotiate when Tavis Ormandy is the one trying to generously inform MS about a vulnerability before, quite rightly and properly, disclosing such information to the general public."
MS isn't a person. Whatever claims of social responsibility one can extend from offering help to a person resulting in an obligation to offer more effort than originally intended doesn't extend to companies. The people or entity most hurt by full disclosure in this discussion is MS because, in the end, it makes publicly visible the vulnerability in a Microsoft product and risks them future sales. Yes, this may pragmatically result in the short term in more people being hurt. In the end, the fault likes in Microsoft producing the buggy code and those who would exploit that code, not the disclosure of the existence of that buggy code (aka don't shoot the messenger).
Microsoft is not alone in this, btw. Google, Adobe, Apple, etc are just as responsible for the buggy code they create and/or include from other sources but fail to sufficient test/verify. This holds true for any person or organization that releases software, hardware, or whatever. The funny aspect of it is, the best defense that Microsoft can argue is that everyone has bugs, but again pragmatically the bugs in Microsoft code has a disproportion effect on people so even if it were true that Microsoft code was on average as buggy as other code, there's still as much reason to avoid Microsoft software; in the pragmatic end, the objective isn't to avoid Microsoft code completely but for all players to have a percentage of the market based in part on the effect of security vulnerabilities. Hence, the publicity of such vulnerabilities instead of being able to bury each vulnerability is in the long term pragmatic interest of people.
This, open information leading towards perfect information, is at the very core of the optimizing effect of the free market as it relates to the marketplace of software and ideas.
One of the first major introductions of mainstream achievements happened with the Xbox 360.
Well, yes and no. Achievements have been around for ages in one form or another, especially in things like RPGs in the form of side quests. The more mainstream aspect of it is how they're done in a more visible fashion in tons of games that probably shouldn't have them (because adding a date on a checklist or some pointless fluff graphics doesn't really much to the game) now do, which I'm sure is great for people who are obsessive about completely games 100% and those who just generally like a game and play it a lot who probably suffer very little for having such useless additions (presuming that ridiculous standards aren't used to block them (MMZ3) or development time is wasted on them instead of focusing enough on the main game). Overall, the whole achievements thing just sounds like a useless gimmick, much like DLC and any sort of unlockables.
Yes, at some level, I'm just as guilty as anyone to wallow in the glee of achievement I feel and the feeling of reward, but to actually create a whole architectural design about it is the sort of pandering that makes me feel sick and disgusted (think Pokemon and the base design to manipulate people to buy more products by being always willing and able to make more monsters) and want to outright avoid such things.
No, they created a disgruntled former employee who can be blamed for any money missing from the company; and without any solid evidence, it's possible nothing legal will happen. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The flaw that isn't going to be fixed "in the near future" is the "if a shortcut's icon is shown in Windows Explorer, then automatic execution of malicious code may occur" (perhap's this is some sort of buffer overflow in the icon parameter reader?). The best workaround? Disable the display of icons for shortcuts. Attack vectors? WebDAV, USB sticks, and LAN shares mostly. To that end, I'd imagine Microsoft is directly at risk given they likely have multiple rather huge LAN and it's already been demonstrated that at least some hackers are specifically targeting organizations (RealTek, for one). How much do you think Microsoft's source code is worth?
Gaming is like dancing [with your thumbs]. A large part of the exhilaration is managing to get the end of a game without screwing up terribly.
Seriously, we can read that kind of things only on Slashdot.
I know I'm "weird", but I think for most people, part of the exhilaration of dancing is because we hope some screwing will end the game.
Funny, but I always thought that the screwing will end the game was a given and the dancing was just some pre-screwing entertainment. In the end, the dancing merely was a good bit of fun exercise that showed a commitment to form, a good bit of dexterity, and an enjoyment of refining technique. Feel free to extrapolate such comments to thumb/finger dancing with pre-screwing entertainment and refining technique...
Gaming is like dancing [with your thumbs]. A lot of the mechanics are shared between games. A large part of the exhilaration is managing to get the end of a game without screwing up terribly. It's more nerdy (and possibly annoying) to some because the dance partner is a computer (more accurately, it's the game developers through a computer). It leads to the same sort of frustration that Garry Kasparov expressed about Deep Blue because many are more inclined to see the challenge presented as intended to remove the fun of the game. While I wouldn't go as far as to say that such a point never holds true (ie, there is such a thing as a game that's unreasonably hard), the challenge of a game forces gamers to improve which extends the life-long enjoyment of gaming. In the end, it's this attribute that keeps people interested in the long-term.
"We are merely sprites that dance at the beck and call of our button pressing overlord."
Re:Every windows application
on
Wine 1.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
With all due respect, Crossover sucks when it comes to usability. Managing Windows/Linux shortcuts seems to be a joke, at best. The documentation on cxmenu is, to put it nicely, utterly confusing. cxsetup really sucks when it comes to doing all sorts of the regular things you'd expect to be able to do--as much as I like bottles, most the time one is left fiddling on the command-line to actually setup bottles in some sensible fashion because crossover seems heavily designed with the mentality that having separate bottles as a default is some sort of unusual thing.
Then there's the cxinstallwizard, which is geared to Crossover supported programs. If you use one of those apps, then great, Crossover might be for you. If you're like me, and you run all sorts of unsupported programs which means you're left to your own devices, for the most part (yes, technically you can use the cxinstallwizard, but it's generally faster and easier to run an installer from the command-line).
I'm not trying to be all down about Crossover, really. It's just that I'd say Crossover is geared more towards people who want to pay to be guaranteed a fixed set of programs will work. Usability as a general point is rather lacking, primarily in how well Crossover features interact (have fun fiddling around with the whole menus thing so your bottles don't get intermingled in bad ways) and how rather blah things are even when they do work compared to a general expectation of how well they should work (random long pauses in the UI when opening dialogs because seemingly near everything relies upon spawning separate crossover win32 apps to gather data).
Really, a bit better documentation and a generic Crossover terminal for executing Crosover apps in different bottles would probably be more usable.:/
I will readily admit I don't fully understand SCADA or DCS or PLC and how they're implemented in the real world, but I still don't quite understand your answer. I fully understand why in general there would be a want and a need for Windows servers in such a situation, but I don't really grasp the extent of that need. If an assembly line has 20 steps to make a product, does that mean you need 21 Windows servers (one for each step and a controller)?
It sounded like, and again I could be wrong, the GGGP was speaking of having dozens of Windows or other OS systems that need to be regularly monitored and updated. If this is standard practice and from your comment I gather a necessity of the modern age, then I do find that rather disturbing. Having said that, I still am not sure I understand why Windows was chosen. It would seem that it might have a lot to do with OCP, but it seems amazing that with all the possible security concerns (and risk to millions of dollars of equipment or human life) that even if an OS was required, there wouldn't be extensive glue used to communicate with the necessary Windows server and an OS that needed updated a lot less regularly (like TRON or perhaps OpenBSD) that would be used lower down in the production chain.
Overall, I can see how your point stands, as it sounds like the system as a whole has become reliant much more on software than hardware for production and certainly some OS of some sort might be likely running on most of the equipment. Considering the statements about the vulnerability of OSs, I rather shiver to think about relying so heavily on code that is likely only proven in a very narrow field.
PS - If I completely misunderstood you and you thought I was trying to banish all Windows systems from the production line, then I'm sorry, I wasn't. I can understand why high enough level administration on a relative few servers which can be properly supported by an IT staff could be a reasonable expectation. I find it difficult imagining updating and checking dozens or hundreds of Windows systems attached rather directly to large machines, where even a small glitch in the change of output of a program as a result of a security patch could do very bad things; but, then, I guess that's true no matter the level...it just seems a more manageable thing to control at a single point where one can heavily test under a varied limited range of input/output.
At the time it began, the Iraq war had widespread favor across the political spectrum, with most of the Senate Democrats voting in favor of it, including the oh-so-very-far-right Hilary Clinton.
As been stated many times before, the US politically is pretty right leaning. This includes Hillary Clinton who, along with Joe Lieberman, was pushing for enforcing ESRB ratings as law (in response to the Hot Coffee mod). In comparison, a more liberal place like France seems more unwilling to rate anything R-rated (look at some popular 12 and over titles).
Belief in WMD was similarly pervasive, since the intelligence community was saying they were there, and no evidence had come out yet to suggest this analysis was incorrect.
Two things. One, the intelligence community was saying that nuclear WMDs would take 5 to 10 years to develop, minimal even if Saddam had gotten uranium (look at Iran's difficulties in refining large quantities of uranium; consider that to go from natural Uranium (0.7% U-235) to nuclear fuel (3% U-235) requires a lot of work and a hell of a lot more work to get to nuclear weapon grade (97% U-235)). Two, the evidence was incredibly flimsy that Saddam had made or had components for chemical weapons (the last time Saddam had chemical weapons, the US and Europe sold him a good bit of the base components). Three, Hans Blix, one of the United Nations' top two weapons experts (and an inspector) said the evidence was shaky, at best. According to Scott Ritter who was UN weapons inspector during most of the 90s, even though only perhaps 90-95% of all factories/weapons/etc, Iraq wasn't a significant threat with what remained. As much as it was consistently clear to Blix and others that Saddam wanted WMDs and repeatedly tried to test the UN to see if he could wiggle in a way to import components and construct WMDs, it was also clear that Saddam kept backing down because he realized that the reprisal for actually pushing the UN that far wouldn't actually work.
In short, the very people who'd actually been in Iraq for years on the ground and who had personally dealt with the oversight of such things--ie, the people one probably should really be listening to if one cared about the facts and the truth--were specifically stating before the Iraq War that the war was not justified based on WMDs. Meanwhile, the CIA was well on its way towards overthrowing Saddam; and incidentally, the CIA is precisely where all this questionable intelligence was coming from.
Btw, because I was actually listening to Hans Blix before the Iraq War, I was against it before it started. I was also quite aware, with the progressive drum beating as the war start date approached that the people in charge had little interest in actually reviewing the facts since they'd settled on a train of thought and a course of action (consider the Bush years and Global Warming and how long it took for even the smallest acknowledgment that "the evidence is still unclear" was some rather clear bullshit). As for the Senate Democrats who are moderate or even left, most acted like pitiful, fearful politicians. It was better to vote for a war blindly than to look "weak" on terrorism (remember the whole push for the Iraq-Al Quaeda connnection; that's why). Btw, perhaps that's the reason so many people voted for Obama, since he never voted for the war and that made him, once the war was unpopular, look steadfast and strong (and politically lucky, since he wasn't in the Senate until 2005); but, I digress.
In double short, the only people who believed in the WMDs were (a) those in power (which I'd argue were rather far righ
They failed to correctly patch windows, they would just as likely fail to correctly patch linux or any other OS too.
Why do you presume an embedded system would even have an OS?
The question isn't "why were you using windows", vulnerabilities exist in all OS's. The question is "Why the fuck were they not patching known vulnerable systems that are mission critical?"
The company was shut down for a whole day, costing $20,000 per minute in lost revenue.
That probably had something to do with it. Yes, I'm sure you could have a second (or third) redundant machine on the assembly line so you could reboot each machine in serial as they're patched and verified to work--a procedure that'd have to be carried out on the order of monthly (and some times randomly on top of that) which seems unreasonably excessive for such a niche application. Or, you could use an embedded system that doesn't have an OS. Or you could use an OS that's small enough that no exploitable vulnerabilities exist because even if a vulnerability exist, you can do enough test cases (and hardware parity/checksum/crc) to verify that software always reacts properly under all possible valid inputs and always fails safe with all possible invalid input, provided the input size is forced to be limited enough.
Patch for sasser worm was available well before the worm, secondly "why the fuck if they had a reason to not patch vulnerabilities were they leaving their mission critical devices exposed?".
How about "why the fuck would you use a general purpose OS with millions of lines of code to do a task that ten thousand lines of audited code could do instead"? My guess? Management thought it was cheaper and some IT people thought firewalls were magic that would remove all patching concerns.
What you describe is a massive failure on the part of the IT staff.
No doubt. In management too. At best, they're responsible for hiring IT staff stupid enough to choose to rely upon Windows and a firewall. At worst, they're the ones who forced such a solution on IT staff and selected IT staff who believed it'd work.
Slashdot Mirror
By 1996, Microsoft was specifically targetting Netscape by both releasing a free web browser, Internet Explorer, but also engaging in specific OEM requirements that minimally required IE to remain on the desktop and possibly included either excluding Netscape's icon on the desktop or Netscape's install completely (it's unclear to what extent it was).
While Netscape started in the lead, PC sales skyrocketed in the 90s. Put simply, if all the computers in '96 were sold with just Netscape and all the computers in '99 were sold with just IE and all the computers were still running in '99, then IE would have about a 66% market share in '99 inherently. The numbers in the previous link aren't quite like that, in part because computers take time to be sold, Netscape users apparently clung on for quite a while, and obviously not all computers had just one web browser installed (some percentage downloaded a browser or installed from a CD).
While I don't doubt that had something to do with it, people only started switching to Firefox when it was clearly superior in some ways (extensions) to IE. Ie, to get people to d/l the browser or cause OEMs to fight MS to keep Netscape would have required for Netscape to be significantly better in some property. As much as Netscape 4.x could be called terrible, I don't think it would have been enough even if Netscape 4.x was merely as good as IE4.
I think you're overstating your case a bit. IE4 was hardly bug free. But, it was already there and good enough. Why bother fighting with Netscape at all unless it's clearly superior? Certainly, until Mozilla was open source and started caring about standards compliance there really wasn't any ideological reason to be pro-Netscape either. Really, if there were any shotgun blasts that were fired, it was from Microsoft failing to making IE secure enough from attack for such a long period, Firefox was able to gain some traction for those worried about (if nothing else) the homogenous security risk.
The Wii is a testament to the fact that people would rather spend $200 on a remote and wave it around on the couch rather than buy a tennis racket and actually run after a tennis ball. But, then, millions of people with their $200+ TVs were already a testament to that.
PS - Yes, I'm being a bit overly snarky, but the fact that there are people who actually view the Wii as "a good workout" instead of "very light aerobics at best" (and Nintendo pushing the whole Wii Fit) doesn't exactly make me feel great that the Wii is number one even if I equally think the XBox 360 and PS3 overhyped the relevance of graphics. Where's the fourth console which actually focuses on long-term story development and fun without a few flicks of the wrist for some cheap thrills being the main driver. Well, at least the Wii has Virtual Console to play older games and WiiWare to play some interesting newer games.
It is a 1st amendment issue when you can't tell your family and friends, though, even when it's merely that you were a served a NSL without telling for whom it covered or for what was requested (like, say, if Earthlink were to report how many NSLs they receive a year). Quite simply, Common Law might allow abridging freedom of speech and to the point that a NSL tells you of an investigation and could lead one to knowing obstruct justice there could be charges, but all direct stipulations of the NSL law to gag speech are an act of Congress and unconstitutional against the 1st amendment.
In short, you're focusing too much on the results of Common Law that people are willing to accept and not focusing enough on why people actually dislike NSLs when it comes to free speech. If it was all an issue of Common Law and obstruction of justice, why would the NSL law even try to specify specific things to gag since they'd already be illegal? Clearly, it was a power grab to censor speech even if it wouldn't last.
Um..because they did not go to a big 4 year school and someone else did? It's like asking why the person with the shifty eyes, the funny smell, or the lack of professional references keeps being passed up over other people. Hiring involves a selection process, not simply picking a random person who claims he/she can do the job reliably for the long term. If you're hiring and you want a person that doesn't smells odd or you do want to have a person with a college degree because you believe they'll relate better with all the current college graduate staff, you'll make a choice of them over others.
Put more simply. Life isn't fair. Hiring and firing doubly so.
If American farms are subsidized by the government, resulting in lower priced goods, then their food is cheaper than the food of other countries. This subsidization causes a downward pressure on crops pushing American farms to ever further increase yield (helped by companies like Monsanto/ADP). Over time, the actual investment on any single farm is so great that no individual is capable of supporting the yearly upfront costs (lower margins require higher upfront inventory to maintain the same income) or maintain the diversity to avoid collapse level losses because of either low return or a bad yield on crops raised. This leads inherently to collective, multi-region ownership of farms (aka coops or corporations). With this stage set, the discussion leads to food stamps.
Food stamps inherently lead to overconsumption of food, especially of American produced food. Food stamps, the school lunch program, and exports are all designed as "release valves" to maintain the demand level of American produced food. Consider the negative effects of people suddenly unable to pay the rent deciding to buy less processed (and hence generally cheaper) food or soda; processed food, btw, tends to cost more because it includes various additives like HFCS and soda is basically HFCS water. Unemployment insurance is designed to have the same effect, to maintain the economy during job loss or recession to mitigate the harm on prices of a sudden, potentially massive, loss of demand.
None of what I said was anti-capitalist/free market, unless you believe government interference is the epitome of the free market and capitalism (or that limited-liability corporations are a free market construct). Even then, I made it clear near the end that even if all these things (which, btw, were done for social and economy stability reasons) do have anti-free market effects, they shouldn't necessarily change, especially not just for change sake. If there is a desire to feed the poor and keep farming a large industry in the US for stability reasons, then megacorps are a natural consequence. The issue isn't megacorps but those megacorps that would strive to maintain power (either through PR manipulation, lobbying, or outright force) and do harm in those strivings. As it stands, I don't think as a whole we're being harmed by most megacorps. Still, the manipulation and lobbying efforts make me worry on what may come which means we should maintain significant, collective supervision of their activities and make it clear that if they do become harmful we will change their leadership or even dissolve their charter, if necessary.
True. But, I wonder, if Wikileaks were to have posted intel on the Taliban and some of their informant names had been leaked, how gun ho would you or the Obama administration be about not using that information for their own advantage (ie, issuing "death warants") and admonishing Wikileaks.
I hate to break it to you, but the US Army doesn't shoot candy from their guns. And the US's predator drones aren't air striking in candy either. If anyone should be reasonably killed in war, it'd be armed troops, informants, and spies. If, on the other hand, you want to upset with the Taliban for killing real innocent civilians, that's another thing.
Oh, and as a small aside on that, civilians killed were up in 2009 from 2008 mostly due to great anti-governmental element attacks. Of 2412 civilians killed, ~68% were by anti-governmental elements, ~25% were from US-lead forces, and it was unclear who caused the deaths of the last ~8%. But, yeah, let's focus on a couple dozen informants because that'll effect the war effort. Or, you know, we could just leave*.
*Yea, yea, if we leave it might very probable degenerate into a civil war that'll result in the death of even more innocent civilians than if we stayed. Clearly there's no simple good answer if one cares. But, focusing on the lives of a few informants seems rather dickish still.
A historical irony, given those actions by FDR are a large basis for the pro-corporate fascism of today's government. Of course, demand-side corporate subsidies actually force some level of competition, but megacorps trying to corner the market (look at agribusiness and food stamps or defense contractors and defense spending) still have an amazingly strong, if not strict fascist, grip on government spending. Of course, that's the delicious irony of "pro-business" Republicans who demand cuts on spending. No, they just want to cut taxes because megacorps and their owners, though consolidation, end up hurting worst from progressive taxation and taxation on corporate shares.
Of course, "pro-business" Republicans focus heavily on small businesses and how higher taxes might kill them or hurt job creation. Of course, the fact that most small businesses failing has nothing to do with taxation (figuring out how to survive on the slim margins the free market would imply exist is very hard and the dead weight loss of taxes are inherently factored into the cost/price and really only aid non-local business (but, then, tariff is a dirty word)) or that small businesses generally will only hire as much workers as they need (and those that would be limited would ones experiencing significant growth...for which they could obtain loans if they have such great and obvious growth potential just as they almost certainly have major short-term loans already for things like inventory or payroll). But, then, it's easier to point at government as punching bag than to do the actual math to show who is having the worst effect on a business (Wal-Mart, for example) and to separately consider what, if anything, should be done about those factors (possibly nothing, since picking favorites just to pick favorites is the root of the problem but there is a reasonable basis to act if the distortion effect of taxes or a few businesses are hampering the actual action of the economy).
I think you're missing the big picture. The big picture is, flu vaccines take a long time to make. Yes, media fear mongers hyped up the worst case scenario, but the mass production was precisely because H1N1 was pandemic; ie, it wasn't as important if it had a high kill ratio as that it spread a lot and hence a lot of vaccines could counter the spread. As a result, a very large production of the vaccine were produced. The fact that "spotter planes told us it had broken up and become a light rain shower" is precisely why about half the vaccines weren't used. If you're looking for the media fear mongers to officially apologize, well good luck with that.
Meanwhile, the lethality of most influenza tends to be less from the flu being strong per se and more to do with people (elderly and children) having an immune system unable to cope. So, presumably the mass vaccination probably did save a good many elderly and child lives. And the pandemic status was accurate. The only thing really left is for the CDC and the WHO to officially admonish the various media fear mongers and apologize that they didn't do such earlier. I'm not really sure what you expecting though, unless you believe it's the CDC's and the WHO's job to have a PR arm to educate people that they shouldn't blindly believe everything the media might spit out, especially when it's the same jackasses spewing yet another thing to fear this week when last weeks fear didn't pan out as nearly as lethal as they made it out to be.
While I certainly am not against the course material for a University education being available, I think you bring up an interesting point. There's a reason why it's two to seven years income that's spent on a University education: because devoting yourself to learning simply is such a time consuming task, you really don't have the free time to work much, if at all. Yes, you can cut out the degree, the tuition, and the cost of course material, but you're still left with the actual two to five years of work. If you dabble in it, that time period can easily extend into decades.
In short, while I certainly agree that the material should be available, I don't think one should delude oneself into believing that simply reading a few texts is what it means to get a University education and that such is sufficient to really know a field. A University education is, after all, intended to push you to the zen of groking one's field, not merely understanding it. While one can certainly manage such without spending time in a classroom (or even without University texts), most people aren't willing to devote the time involved. For those who are, of course, any simple and cheaps step to cut the costs and hence effective years to learn is a very good.
With all due respect, the US President doesn't run the US economy. At best, he and Congress have the power to effect the economy. To that end, the major ways that the US Government can effect the economy is either positive growth (low federal interest on loans, lower taxes, and/or more spending) or negative growth (high federal interest on loans, higher taxes, and/or lower spending) with some ambiguity if there's a worry of long-term solvency. To that end, the stimulus bill would, if anything, be a positive growth action. Yes, it can lead to long-term solvency concerns which leads to..
Two points. One, while the structural annual deficit might have been those figures, the actual debt changes for Bush's years were closer to ~620 billion a year (the federal debt increased from ~$5.7 billion to ~$10.7 billion from Jan 2001 to Jan 2009). Two, this difference is a major problem precisely because it was the sort of emergency spending (on Iraq and Afghanistan) that should be accounted for in an annual budget instead of hidden to make a very large problem seem less big.
I hate to break it to you, but we were already there. Economy recessions are an inevitable thing requiring large government spending (unemployment insurance costs doubling, minimally, if unemployment doubles) with decreasing revenue (obviously, less workers equals less taxes). Reasonably, one should save up for "a rainy day", not spend beyond one's means for..well..decades. Simply put, our federal budget has for ages been fixed on the idea that the GDP will grow by ~2%/year, so it's okay to incur 2% more national debt because the ratio allows equal effectiveness in paying off the debt each year through tax increases.
But, as you note, increasing taxes dramatically and decreasing spending could lead to ruination. The real truth, of course, is we could engage in such large tax increases (a lot of other countries have higher taxes and haven't been ruined for it). It's just political suicide, the people in general don't want it, and it's likely to not be done until absolutely necessary. That's where the real risk lies.
Sorry, but they're not socialist or marxist. They're almost entirely Clinton retreaders (just as Bush had heavy Bush Sr retreading).
Again, they only influence the economy.
That's the fundamental issue. Everyone seems to have heavy debt and simply cutting spending by people (ie, cutting their unemployment insurance) risks having a negative ripple effect in the economy. The long-term goal, of course, is to fix the system (federal interest loans should never have been so high, spending so great, or taxes so low). But, that's a shift that taxes years if not decades for the economy to absorb the change instead of freaking out when billions or trillions of money flows shift or disappear.
And the problem with achievement is that achievement isn't necessarily productive or wholly worthwhile. Look at Mao, for example. On the one hand, he did radically propel China forward into being a strongly developing country. On the other hand, his clear lack of experience and overconfidence in the ability to micromanage such a large country resulted in massive famine and strife.
No, what did that for him was a collection of individuals who have done the same thing for countless other individuals (including Bush's father). Bush was a face and a personality and while he certainly shaped the campaigns that gained him Governorship and Presidentship--and he certainly exercised significant power when elected--, he was far from "the decider" or in a position where most people weren't sheltered even if he made grossly large mistakes in procedure. I'm not saying he didn't accomplish something extraordinary, but I'd almost argue that getting a PhD is a greater achievement because it's less based upon a popularity contest and more on actual ability. Certainly, that's not the basis for Bush being elected.
Rather true. Nor do I believe that the President's job is to necessarily have achieved a lot otherwise. It's, in many ways, to listen to the will of the people, listen to the counsel of his Cabinet, and to have enough humility and humanity to not think himself wiser or more important than millions or billions of people which his decisions (or those of others he chooses to follow) will effect. My problem, then, is Bush seemed both overly arrogant in convictions that seemed less of his own design and more of those around him with a willingness to forfeit the life and freedom of many under some banner of protecting the US. To that end, he achieved a lot in gaining power for the Presidency to carry out those actions, but I don't think on balance that was a good achievement.
I'm curious of what you speak in this regard. I would definitely say that Obama has certainly been in the news more and did more in the first year than Bush did (well, prior to 9/11). Beyond that, I'm not sure where you've actually pragmatically seen what any of Bush or Obama has done to you. And ideologically, Bush authorized or was otherwise reasonably culpable for authorizing a number of horrible things (warrantless wiretapping, kidnapping, torture, and indefinite imprisonment); Obama isn't much better, continuing about half the mentioned practices. In any case, I'd love to hear an elaboration.
An idiot savant is still an idiot. If anything, they're often the most frightening. They're often easy to manipulate into doing horrible things, people blindly trust them for their intelligence, and they lack the normal emotional reaction to things for people to comprehend when they should stop trusting in them.
But, yes, let's pretend it's all a matter of how well one does on an IQ test.
So? Without the R4, what do you think people currently pirating will do? Well, they'll likely switch from using a real DS to using an emulated DS on a computer. So, all the court ruling has done is moved where the infringement happens. People are already pirating (possibly through torrents) DS games, so that hasn't changed either. The real question is how the R4 can be illegal but emulators in general are legal.
Simply put, piracy happens because it happens. The R4 is not the originator of this nor will banning it be the end. Copyright is written even knowing this, requiring that copyright holder sues those that infringe their copyright. This idea that they should be granted a blanket ban on imports is absurd on its face. And in all probability, it's very unlikely that it'll actually help Nintendo (much like shutting down Napster didn't really help).
PS - On a funny side note, a lot of sites seem to be calling them "R4 Emulator Card[s]". The R4 is simply an adapter, no different than if one were to design a device to plug a HD into a XBox to play games.
The problem, I think, is the analogy is both true and incomplete. Well before banks were attached to casinos, they were already in a situation with questionable underpinnings. The problem goes like this:
You take a bank that's multinational (or at least, very big national). By being spread out across one or more nations, it has a risk pool closer to the average of the nation(s). When it comes time to give a home loan in Fooland, though, the situation is local. If Fooland is simply a bad place to give home loans (ie, a significantly high foreclosure rate), local banks will tend to be much stricter about who they accept and work harder to verify that the applicant is actually viable because they understand the situation and a few foreclosures could bankrupt them potentially.
Meanwhile, a multinational bank is much more lax because it see its as more financial secure (having much more capital and in raw numbers able to support many more foreclosures). The problem is, while this holds generally true, clustered foreclosures inherently drive down the price of homes. Ie, each Fooland with 10% of homes foreclosured results in a flood of new homes. However, people are inherently unlikely to move to Fooland even if home prices drop; people tend to move because of better jobs, and strict local banks and a now much more strict multinational are doing anything but spur job growth for the new cheap homes. Besides, if there were plenty of good local jobs, it's unlikely that there'd be that 10% foreclosures given the investment homes are seen as.
In short, the problems run a lot deeper than some casino-ish action. Local banks can't magically spur economic growth by being more generous with business loans as easy money alone simply spurs inflation (ie, the appearance of but not actual growth). And simply feeding the home purchase demand isn't a solution (it can lead to recessions and even deflation). Government involvement might not be the answer either except in areas where there's a known need for development for long-term stability or security (defense, energy, food, etc). Certainly, though, some level of regulation is warranted given the unintended consequences of conglomeration.
Personally, I'm waiting for the day that IPv6 becomes common place*. By then, I can readily imagine someone like Google data mining the trash of the nation (imagine targeting ads when you actually know what people have bought and might buy again instead of merely what they might buy). Hell, I'm sort of surprised Google isn't doing it already given how much DSL/cable/fiber users already have nearly, if not entirely, static IPs. And just imagine the sort of money Google could make from governments, private investigators, etc.
One person cutting down a tree for firewood is fine. A thousand men can lead to deforestation. A machine that can effect the word of a million men can can cause an ecological nightmare. The same holds true with pollution. The same holds true with oil and global warming. Something evil can come out of something as innocuous as collecting garbage. Even though we probably shouldn't punish Google today, I don't think we should wait until there is reason to punish a company or person to change the law. I don't really know where the line of privacy should begin and end. However, I do know that charging all individuals with the task of having the foresight to do the right thing when in comes to privacy when most are not aware of where the pragmatically privacy lines are isn't the answer. Hell, very few of the most technical among us follow the "don't post it on the internet if it's supposed to remain private" in its strictest sense; or, are you one of those few people who keeps all your private data on non-internet-connected computers (any computer connected to the internet is part of the internet hence the information is effectively posted to those with the desire to find it so long as that computer has the capability to leak that information)?
*Yea, yea, who knows when that'll be...
Resonable, sure. But the point is, if Tavis offered MS a lack of disclosure for a guaranteed timeline for a fix and MS's response is anything but an "I accept", Tavis has no responsibility to keep the offer standing anymore than MS is obligated to keep the price on a copy of Windows 7 on Friday the as Tuesday just because on Wednesday you said you would "get back to them on friday".
In the same way all contractual transactions tend to make people look like douchebags because in the end they try to take very real aspects of reality and abstract them into simple language; the fact that any sort of non-agreement on terms can result in an offer being dropped or significantly changed because one party chooses it is a fact of negotiation both sides have to understand before any sort of contractual engagement.
Yea, I'm going to have to go with "It's not Tavis Ormandy's job or responsibility to live up to a timetable MS creates for when to negotiate when Tavis Ormandy is the one trying to generously inform MS about a vulnerability before, quite rightly and properly, disclosing such information to the general public."
MS isn't a person. Whatever claims of social responsibility one can extend from offering help to a person resulting in an obligation to offer more effort than originally intended doesn't extend to companies. The people or entity most hurt by full disclosure in this discussion is MS because, in the end, it makes publicly visible the vulnerability in a Microsoft product and risks them future sales. Yes, this may pragmatically result in the short term in more people being hurt. In the end, the fault likes in Microsoft producing the buggy code and those who would exploit that code, not the disclosure of the existence of that buggy code (aka don't shoot the messenger).
Microsoft is not alone in this, btw. Google, Adobe, Apple, etc are just as responsible for the buggy code they create and/or include from other sources but fail to sufficient test/verify. This holds true for any person or organization that releases software, hardware, or whatever. The funny aspect of it is, the best defense that Microsoft can argue is that everyone has bugs, but again pragmatically the bugs in Microsoft code has a disproportion effect on people so even if it were true that Microsoft code was on average as buggy as other code, there's still as much reason to avoid Microsoft software; in the pragmatic end, the objective isn't to avoid Microsoft code completely but for all players to have a percentage of the market based in part on the effect of security vulnerabilities. Hence, the publicity of such vulnerabilities instead of being able to bury each vulnerability is in the long term pragmatic interest of people.
This, open information leading towards perfect information, is at the very core of the optimizing effect of the free market as it relates to the marketplace of software and ideas.
Well, yes and no. Achievements have been around for ages in one form or another, especially in things like RPGs in the form of side quests. The more mainstream aspect of it is how they're done in a more visible fashion in tons of games that probably shouldn't have them (because adding a date on a checklist or some pointless fluff graphics doesn't really much to the game) now do, which I'm sure is great for people who are obsessive about completely games 100% and those who just generally like a game and play it a lot who probably suffer very little for having such useless additions (presuming that ridiculous standards aren't used to block them (MMZ3) or development time is wasted on them instead of focusing enough on the main game). Overall, the whole achievements thing just sounds like a useless gimmick, much like DLC and any sort of unlockables.
Yes, at some level, I'm just as guilty as anyone to wallow in the glee of achievement I feel and the feeling of reward, but to actually create a whole architectural design about it is the sort of pandering that makes me feel sick and disgusted (think Pokemon and the base design to manipulate people to buy more products by being always willing and able to make more monsters) and want to outright avoid such things.
No, they created a disgruntled former employee who can be blamed for any money missing from the company; and without any solid evidence, it's possible nothing legal will happen. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The flaw that isn't going to be fixed "in the near future" is the "if a shortcut's icon is shown in Windows Explorer, then automatic execution of malicious code may occur" (perhap's this is some sort of buffer overflow in the icon parameter reader?). The best workaround? Disable the display of icons for shortcuts. Attack vectors? WebDAV, USB sticks, and LAN shares mostly. To that end, I'd imagine Microsoft is directly at risk given they likely have multiple rather huge LAN and it's already been demonstrated that at least some hackers are specifically targeting organizations (RealTek, for one). How much do you think Microsoft's source code is worth?
Funny, but I always thought that the screwing will end the game was a given and the dancing was just some pre-screwing entertainment. In the end, the dancing merely was a good bit of fun exercise that showed a commitment to form, a good bit of dexterity, and an enjoyment of refining technique. Feel free to extrapolate such comments to thumb/finger dancing with pre-screwing entertainment and refining technique...
Gaming is like dancing [with your thumbs]. A lot of the mechanics are shared between games. A large part of the exhilaration is managing to get the end of a game without screwing up terribly. It's more nerdy (and possibly annoying) to some because the dance partner is a computer (more accurately, it's the game developers through a computer). It leads to the same sort of frustration that Garry Kasparov expressed about Deep Blue because many are more inclined to see the challenge presented as intended to remove the fun of the game. While I wouldn't go as far as to say that such a point never holds true (ie, there is such a thing as a game that's unreasonably hard), the challenge of a game forces gamers to improve which extends the life-long enjoyment of gaming. In the end, it's this attribute that keeps people interested in the long-term.
"We are merely sprites that dance at the beck and call of our button pressing overlord."
With all due respect, Crossover sucks when it comes to usability. Managing Windows/Linux shortcuts seems to be a joke, at best. The documentation on cxmenu is, to put it nicely, utterly confusing. cxsetup really sucks when it comes to doing all sorts of the regular things you'd expect to be able to do--as much as I like bottles, most the time one is left fiddling on the command-line to actually setup bottles in some sensible fashion because crossover seems heavily designed with the mentality that having separate bottles as a default is some sort of unusual thing.
Then there's the cxinstallwizard, which is geared to Crossover supported programs. If you use one of those apps, then great, Crossover might be for you. If you're like me, and you run all sorts of unsupported programs which means you're left to your own devices, for the most part (yes, technically you can use the cxinstallwizard, but it's generally faster and easier to run an installer from the command-line).
I'm not trying to be all down about Crossover, really. It's just that I'd say Crossover is geared more towards people who want to pay to be guaranteed a fixed set of programs will work. Usability as a general point is rather lacking, primarily in how well Crossover features interact (have fun fiddling around with the whole menus thing so your bottles don't get intermingled in bad ways) and how rather blah things are even when they do work compared to a general expectation of how well they should work (random long pauses in the UI when opening dialogs because seemingly near everything relies upon spawning separate crossover win32 apps to gather data).
Really, a bit better documentation and a generic Crossover terminal for executing Crosover apps in different bottles would probably be more usable. :/
I will readily admit I don't fully understand SCADA or DCS or PLC and how they're implemented in the real world, but I still don't quite understand your answer. I fully understand why in general there would be a want and a need for Windows servers in such a situation, but I don't really grasp the extent of that need. If an assembly line has 20 steps to make a product, does that mean you need 21 Windows servers (one for each step and a controller)?
It sounded like, and again I could be wrong, the GGGP was speaking of having dozens of Windows or other OS systems that need to be regularly monitored and updated. If this is standard practice and from your comment I gather a necessity of the modern age, then I do find that rather disturbing. Having said that, I still am not sure I understand why Windows was chosen. It would seem that it might have a lot to do with OCP, but it seems amazing that with all the possible security concerns (and risk to millions of dollars of equipment or human life) that even if an OS was required, there wouldn't be extensive glue used to communicate with the necessary Windows server and an OS that needed updated a lot less regularly (like TRON or perhaps OpenBSD) that would be used lower down in the production chain.
Overall, I can see how your point stands, as it sounds like the system as a whole has become reliant much more on software than hardware for production and certainly some OS of some sort might be likely running on most of the equipment. Considering the statements about the vulnerability of OSs, I rather shiver to think about relying so heavily on code that is likely only proven in a very narrow field.
PS - If I completely misunderstood you and you thought I was trying to banish all Windows systems from the production line, then I'm sorry, I wasn't. I can understand why high enough level administration on a relative few servers which can be properly supported by an IT staff could be a reasonable expectation. I find it difficult imagining updating and checking dozens or hundreds of Windows systems attached rather directly to large machines, where even a small glitch in the change of output of a program as a result of a security patch could do very bad things; but, then, I guess that's true no matter the level...it just seems a more manageable thing to control at a single point where one can heavily test under a varied limited range of input/output.
As been stated many times before, the US politically is pretty right leaning. This includes Hillary Clinton who, along with Joe Lieberman, was pushing for enforcing ESRB ratings as law (in response to the Hot Coffee mod). In comparison, a more liberal place like France seems more unwilling to rate anything R-rated (look at some popular 12 and over titles).
Two things. One, the intelligence community was saying that nuclear WMDs would take 5 to 10 years to develop, minimal even if Saddam had gotten uranium (look at Iran's difficulties in refining large quantities of uranium; consider that to go from natural Uranium (0.7% U-235) to nuclear fuel (3% U-235) requires a lot of work and a hell of a lot more work to get to nuclear weapon grade (97% U-235)). Two, the evidence was incredibly flimsy that Saddam had made or had components for chemical weapons (the last time Saddam had chemical weapons, the US and Europe sold him a good bit of the base components). Three, Hans Blix, one of the United Nations' top two weapons experts (and an inspector) said the evidence was shaky, at best. According to Scott Ritter who was UN weapons inspector during most of the 90s, even though only perhaps 90-95% of all factories/weapons/etc, Iraq wasn't a significant threat with what remained. As much as it was consistently clear to Blix and others that Saddam wanted WMDs and repeatedly tried to test the UN to see if he could wiggle in a way to import components and construct WMDs, it was also clear that Saddam kept backing down because he realized that the reprisal for actually pushing the UN that far wouldn't actually work.
In short, the very people who'd actually been in Iraq for years on the ground and who had personally dealt with the oversight of such things--ie, the people one probably should really be listening to if one cared about the facts and the truth--were specifically stating before the Iraq War that the war was not justified based on WMDs. Meanwhile, the CIA was well on its way towards overthrowing Saddam; and incidentally, the CIA is precisely where all this questionable intelligence was coming from.
Btw, because I was actually listening to Hans Blix before the Iraq War, I was against it before it started. I was also quite aware, with the progressive drum beating as the war start date approached that the people in charge had little interest in actually reviewing the facts since they'd settled on a train of thought and a course of action (consider the Bush years and Global Warming and how long it took for even the smallest acknowledgment that "the evidence is still unclear" was some rather clear bullshit). As for the Senate Democrats who are moderate or even left, most acted like pitiful, fearful politicians. It was better to vote for a war blindly than to look "weak" on terrorism (remember the whole push for the Iraq-Al Quaeda connnection; that's why). Btw, perhaps that's the reason so many people voted for Obama, since he never voted for the war and that made him, once the war was unpopular, look steadfast and strong (and politically lucky, since he wasn't in the Senate until 2005); but, I digress.
In double short, the only people who believed in the WMDs were (a) those in power (which I'd argue were rather far righ
Why do you presume an embedded system would even have an OS?
That probably had something to do with it. Yes, I'm sure you could have a second (or third) redundant machine on the assembly line so you could reboot each machine in serial as they're patched and verified to work--a procedure that'd have to be carried out on the order of monthly (and some times randomly on top of that) which seems unreasonably excessive for such a niche application. Or, you could use an embedded system that doesn't have an OS. Or you could use an OS that's small enough that no exploitable vulnerabilities exist because even if a vulnerability exist, you can do enough test cases (and hardware parity/checksum/crc) to verify that software always reacts properly under all possible valid inputs and always fails safe with all possible invalid input, provided the input size is forced to be limited enough.
How about "why the fuck would you use a general purpose OS with millions of lines of code to do a task that ten thousand lines of audited code could do instead"? My guess? Management thought it was cheaper and some IT people thought firewalls were magic that would remove all patching concerns.
No doubt. In management too. At best, they're responsible for hiring IT staff stupid enough to choose to rely upon Windows and a firewall. At worst, they're the ones who forced such a solution on IT staff and selected IT staff who believed it'd work.