Normally I'd agree with the point you almost managed to make, which is that development costs necessarily include dead-ends and mistakes... but in this case they're including the development cost of things like smelly controllers, which should have been an obviously* stupid idea to all involved.
*Oh, the fragrance of faux-blood/gunpowder/explosions. Just what I wanted in my living room.
"over $100 million worth of research went into the design they ended up using"
Well, that's not quite true. Perhaps $100M went into designing and testing all the different prototypes they ultimately discarded, and the one they used... but the one that they finally decided upon only cost a fraction of that.
It's sweet and all that you think paraphrasing xkcd shows that you have some kind of deeper insight, but you're clearly missing the point. A kernel mode exploit can do all the things that a user mode exploit can do, as well as install nasty malware like keyloggers, or worse... which in turn (likely) allows everything that physical access to the machine would have granted anyway.
So who cares? Me, and everyone even remotely versed in security.
While I agree that judging without prejudice is usually the best approach, I think in this case the liberal use of the second-person personal-pronoun (ie, "you") would have been a giveaway about who the intended target audience actually is... unless you think they are going to all this trouble to convince internal-only Microsoft employees not to use Chrome?
People like you are what's wrong with organized religion and one of the primary reasons of why I am atheist. The people that run the Vatican and those in the past that have stood up and protected that power structure at all costs are fallible mortals. Shut up and deal with it or I'll throw you in with Scientology.
I dunno about you, but I'm an atheist because there simply aren't any gods... but an anti-theist because of the way faith and religion makes people behave. Small difference, perhaps, but I wouldn't want people to believe that my objective interpretation of reality is merely a response to the way those pricks behave.
So this, don't get it. What happens after you've used up your quota of virgins? Do they magically get restored, or do you then have to spend eternity with a pack of thoroughly "used" women...?
'cause, assuming a standard rate, 72 virgins would only take a couple of months to get through, and I'm told eternity is much longer than that...
This is just a side effect of the "real" anti-virus/security businesses having no interest in reducing/mitigating the "virus" threat. It makes too much money for them.
Said with all the arrogance and presumption of someone who knows exactly nothing of what they speak. Speaking as someone who spent over a decade as an anti-virus researcher and anti-virus engine developer, the truth is that it is infeasible for AV companies to keep up with the flood of (generated) malware that engulfs modern PCs... and, believe me, it's not for lack of trying. Have you ever seen how aggressively they complete over the VB100%* award?
* That award, like most AV testing is a sham (testing against a very small yet widely known sample of existing malware), but the point still holds: they really do want to catch the malware, if for no other reason than that the company that has the best detection rates can make the most sales.
When the number of items is small; when insertions and deletions are common and/or time-critical; when ordering is important...
Any of the above could alone be good enough reasons to use a linked list vs. a hash table, and obviously more than one criterion would make a stronger argument. But this is a very one dimensional discussion; in any of those cases, perhaps an array or an ordered tree would prove more appropriate... each case must be matched to a particular data structure on its own merits.
But Google doesn't try to get it completely right the first time. They release and iterate... and it is that philosophy which is (one of) the foundations of their speed.
IIRC, they were just trying to save themselves from getting annihilated by these preposterous fees... and now we're giving them a hard time because they didn't save every other tiny internet radio station all at once?
Seems to me that we won the battle, but not the war (yet). So let's celebrate that instead of flagellating those fighting on our side, yeah?
Sure, but they saw fit not to share it with us plebs... and most likely still would not have. These guys are the reason why modern, publicly available crypto exists.
Yeah, right. And how do you get that music onto the iPod? Oh yeah, you need to install iTunes (which is terrible software, btw)... and what is iTunes except a foot in the door for the whole Apple(tm) lifestyle?
Yeah, I can see how that is totally different to getting locked into Microsoft products.
Oh, and who do you think preserved most of the pre-Dark Ages knowledge for us in the first place? Who copied and preserved the Greek philosophical texts? That's right, the Church. Monks in monasteries. The Church has played a very important role in education.
Oh please. The church has played a very important role in the education of things they believe in. How many of those documents that were studiously preserved were considered heretical? Or even just pagan? Most likely zero. And what happened to such deeply offensive documents? Discarded, destroyed, with a vengeance, perhaps?
Why this dichotomy of perservation principles? Because they weren't interested in history, or even in education itself - they were interested in power. Power via access to knowledge. It's a common theme today; knowledge is power - and the church back then knew it too.
They weren't interested in preserving. They were interested in controlling.
I did not imply that the advent of the Dark Ages was the church's fault. What I was trying to be explicit about was the responsibility the church bears for the part it played in impeding progress towards the Enlightenment.
As others posters have pointed out, my assertion that the translation of the Bible into vernacular heralded the Renaissance is incorrect. However, I stand by the point that the church certainly did not go to pains to educate the people - perferring itself to be the sole source of "wisdom" - and as such it cannot be disputed that their powerlust worked to maintain the status quo of the dark ages.
The Church, if anything, managed to save some of the knowledge that would otherwise would have been lost.
Sure, if by "save" you mean "appropriate for exclusive use".
Yes, the fall of the Roman Empire immediately preceded the Dark Ages. However, problem of the Dark Ages was not so much that there was no central empire to act as a beacon of light, but more that education and knowledge was available only to the clergy (and the wealthy, via the clergy). It is very telling that the Renaissance only began with the translation of the Bible into a common tongue, instead of being exclusively in Latin - that only priests could read.
though in all actuality it probably wasn't that bad... No, it's OK, it really was that bad.
It's one thing to have things teleporting into a room when you first arrive there (a la Doom 1), but it is entirely another thing to have some monster waiting in some tiny, undetectable compartment, ignoring you until you've walked past it exactly 7 times. The irrationality of such rubbish spoiled the immersion, and thus the game...
In case your wondering, the point is, if it makes them happy, they who are you to stop them? To paraphrase Richard Dawkin's central argument in "The God Delusion": all religion is necessarily evil because it fosters a culture in which a faith-based life is an acceptable lifestyle, which in turn leaves a society with no means of resaonably extirpating the extremists, who are truly dangerous. In other words, if moderate faith is acceptable, it is implicit that extreme faith must also be acceptable.
With that in mind, I personally have no sympathy for the "but it makes them happy" argument. There is much more at stake here than the happiness of a bunch of hoi polloi... especially when that (delusional) happiness can be more than replaced with (rational) wonder at the mystery and beauty of the natural world.
Slashdot Mirror
Normally I'd agree with the point you almost managed to make, which is that development costs necessarily include dead-ends and mistakes... but in this case they're including the development cost of things like smelly controllers, which should have been an obviously* stupid idea to all involved.
*Oh, the fragrance of faux-blood/gunpowder/explosions. Just what I wanted in my living room.
"over $100 million worth of research went into the design they ended up using"
Well, that's not quite true. Perhaps $100M went into designing and testing all the different prototypes they ultimately discarded, and the one they used... but the one that they finally decided upon only cost a fraction of that.
It's sweet and all that you think paraphrasing xkcd shows that you have some kind of deeper insight, but you're clearly missing the point. A kernel mode exploit can do all the things that a user mode exploit can do, as well as install nasty malware like keyloggers, or worse... which in turn (likely) allows everything that physical access to the machine would have granted anyway.
So who cares? Me, and everyone even remotely versed in security.
While I agree that judging without prejudice is usually the best approach, I think in this case the liberal use of the second-person personal-pronoun (ie, "you") would have been a giveaway about who the intended target audience actually is... unless you think they are going to all this trouble to convince internal-only Microsoft employees not to use Chrome?
Designed to be "internal-only", my ass. Designed to be "leaked" is more like it...
According to this, yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel
People like you are what's wrong with organized religion and one of the primary reasons of why I am atheist. The people that run the Vatican and those in the past that have stood up and protected that power structure at all costs are fallible mortals. Shut up and deal with it or I'll throw you in with Scientology.
I dunno about you, but I'm an atheist because there simply aren't any gods... but an anti-theist because of the way faith and religion makes people behave. Small difference, perhaps, but I wouldn't want people to believe that my objective interpretation of reality is merely a response to the way those pricks behave.
Hah! Try again....
So this, don't get it. What happens after you've used up your quota of virgins? Do they magically get restored, or do you then have to spend eternity with a pack of thoroughly "used" women...? 'cause, assuming a standard rate, 72 virgins would only take a couple of months to get through, and I'm told eternity is much longer than that...
This is just a side effect of the "real" anti-virus/security businesses having no interest in reducing/mitigating the "virus" threat. It makes too much money for them.
Said with all the arrogance and presumption of someone who knows exactly nothing of what they speak. Speaking as someone who spent over a decade as an anti-virus researcher and anti-virus engine developer, the truth is that it is infeasible for AV companies to keep up with the flood of (generated) malware that engulfs modern PCs... and, believe me, it's not for lack of trying. Have you ever seen how aggressively they complete over the VB100%* award?
* That award, like most AV testing is a sham (testing against a very small yet widely known sample of existing malware), but the point still holds: they really do want to catch the malware, if for no other reason than that the company that has the best detection rates can make the most sales.
When the number of items is small; when insertions and deletions are common and/or time-critical; when ordering is important...
Any of the above could alone be good enough reasons to use a linked list vs. a hash table, and obviously more than one criterion would make a stronger argument. But this is a very one dimensional discussion; in any of those cases, perhaps an array or an ordered tree would prove more appropriate... each case must be matched to a particular data structure on its own merits.
But Google doesn't try to get it completely right the first time. They release and iterate... and it is that philosophy which is (one of) the foundations of their speed.
Why are we all so busy blaming Pandora for this?
IIRC, they were just trying to save themselves from getting annihilated by these preposterous fees... and now we're giving them a hard time because they didn't save every other tiny internet radio station all at once?
Seems to me that we won the battle, but not the war (yet). So let's celebrate that instead of flagellating those fighting on our side, yeah?
Same shit different name.
Well, that's not exactly true. In the name of profit, one would annoy and imprison us; the other would happily destroy the world.
Oh, yeah, skydrive...
but isn't that a bit like Office Live
but isn't that a bit like Live Mesh
Can anyone say "Confused Product Strategy" three time backwards?
Sure, but they saw fit not to share it with us plebs... and most likely still would not have. These guys are the reason why modern, publicly available crypto exists.
The iPod just plays music
Yeah, right. And how do you get that music onto the iPod? Oh yeah, you need to install iTunes (which is terrible software, btw)... and what is iTunes except a foot in the door for the whole Apple(tm) lifestyle?
Yeah, I can see how that is totally different to getting locked into Microsoft products.
Waaah! Waaah! I live on the dark side of the moon, and I deserve cheap solar power too, dammit!
Oh, and who do you think preserved most of the pre-Dark Ages knowledge for us in the first place? Who copied and preserved the Greek philosophical texts? That's right, the Church. Monks in monasteries. The Church has played a very important role in education.
Oh please. The church has played a very important role in the education of things they believe in. How many of those documents that were studiously preserved were considered heretical? Or even just pagan? Most likely zero. And what happened to such deeply offensive documents? Discarded, destroyed, with a vengeance, perhaps?
Why this dichotomy of perservation principles? Because they weren't interested in history, or even in education itself - they were interested in power. Power via access to knowledge. It's a common theme today; knowledge is power - and the church back then knew it too.
They weren't interested in preserving. They were interested in controlling.
I did not imply that the advent of the Dark Ages was the church's fault. What I was trying to be explicit about was the responsibility the church bears for the part it played in impeding progress towards the Enlightenment.
As others posters have pointed out, my assertion that the translation of the Bible into vernacular heralded the Renaissance is incorrect. However, I stand by the point that the church certainly did not go to pains to educate the people - perferring itself to be the sole source of "wisdom" - and as such it cannot be disputed that their powerlust worked to maintain the status quo of the dark ages.
The Church, if anything, managed to save some of the knowledge that would otherwise would have been lost.
Sure, if by "save" you mean "appropriate for exclusive use".
Yes, the fall of the Roman Empire immediately preceded the Dark Ages. However, problem of the Dark Ages was not so much that there was no central empire to act as a beacon of light, but more that education and knowledge was available only to the clergy (and the wealthy, via the clergy). It is very telling that the Renaissance only began with the translation of the Bible into a common tongue, instead of being exclusively in Latin - that only priests could read.
Ah, the good old Gillette 3000... (aussie irreverancy at it's best)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gStI9ysPrhs
It's one thing to have things teleporting into a room when you first arrive there (a la Doom 1), but it is entirely another thing to have some monster waiting in some tiny, undetectable compartment, ignoring you until you've walked past it exactly 7 times. The irrationality of such rubbish spoiled the immersion, and thus the game...
Where are my mod points when I need them!? Thanks for the great Blackadder quote... :)
With that in mind, I personally have no sympathy for the "but it makes them happy" argument. There is much more at stake here than the happiness of a bunch of hoi polloi... especially when that (delusional) happiness can be more than replaced with (rational) wonder at the mystery and beauty of the natural world.