If you don't want to play The Great Time Sink....why would you be giving Blizzard your money in the first place? They have their rules, and this guy broke them. You don't want to play by their rules, don't play their game.
Speaking for myself, I don't give Blizzard money.:-) But speaking more generally, someone may continue to play the game despite a dislike of time sinks because they feel that, for whatever reasons, overall it's still worth playing. Just because you don't like one aspect of something doesn't necessarily mean you don't like it overall does it?
Similarly, it's not as simple as "You don't want to play by their rules, don't play their game" either. Do you read every rule of every game you ever consider playing and consider every possible interpretation of them before you do anything? Somehow, I suspect not.
It's not a matter of WINE, he was fucking botting! He took his programmable keyboard and built macros for fighting mobs and then left it unattendend.
As I understand it, he didn't actually leave it unattended. On the contrary, he couldn't leave it unattended, he still had to be sitting there pressing the programmed keys. He just wasn't paying attention while he was doing that. You can argue not paying attention is equivalent to leaving it unattended, but a simple macro on a programmable keyboard that you can't leave unattended does not make a bot, let along a fucking one.
Anyway, the real culprit here is the game design. If Blizzard want their players to worship at the altar of the great Time Sink, then they can expect them to use things like this to make it less mind-numbingly tedious.
I'm sure there are some people who only got the game for the character creator, but I think there's probably more who, having created a character, are going to want to play it as well.
And at least $100 on the purchase price? Was your copy gold-plated or something?
The rabbit tripping out is perhaps the best animal-related tripped-out video sequence since the 'My Lovely Horse' video in an episode of Father Ted. But it's not as good as that was.
And other than that, it's a really sucky competition. I hate tiebreakers.
The conflict was trite and simplistic. The writers didn't even address the issue of whether she was telling the truth about being sentenced to execution in the first place. Unless I missed it, although the extent to which the main characters go into dialogue to spell out the plot, multiple times, makes me think that unlikely. Having said that, my perception was probably coloured by the dire state of some of the acting. And the direction. And the background music.
And yes, I realise that Dr Who is often tongue-in-cheek. That's fine - good actually - so long as everything else is there. In my opinion it wasn't.
I do realise opinions differ, but the writing of the last series was not top notch. Too many plot holes and unresolved/totally ignored issues, too many cheap devices to establish and further the plot. In my opinion.
Yes. A plot that revolves around an alien, disguised as an overweight farting human with a zip in their head, planning to blow up Earth and surf to their own planet. That's a sure sign of quality writing if ever I saw one.
I spent a while looking at various photo galleries a while ago and couldn't find a single one I was happy with.
The main problem is that I'd like to have one photo in multiple albums. I know that was on the requested features for Gallery - anyone know if it made it into this release? (I can't check with the website not responding).
I'd also like one that doesn't arbitrarily use the terms 'album', 'collection', 'category', etc., in strange and bizarre ways. They're the same bloody thing! (in that they're all ultimately a collection of photos by some theme).
One that lets me use keywords for dynamic tagging and displaying of photos would be nice. Especially if it will let me just select keywords already used rather than typing them every time (that always goes horribly wrong since you typically end up referring to one thing in different ways, especially if there's more than one person uploading pictures).
I suspect I might end up writing my own, but if anyone can save me the trouble by pointing me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it.:-)
Actually, I take that back. It's an accurate representation of the article. Which was bad.
The example implies that the only application of 'penetrate and patch' is for idiots to check a design that's so obviously flawed you could simply correct it by thinking about it. And it assumes that if that flaw emerged, the developer would be
sufficiently dumb to just fix the flaw as related to the specific test data and not anything else related, like, say, the underlying design.
Which is indeed seemingly what the article says. It basically summarises to 'If you do this in a really stupid way, then this must be a dumb thing to do. Stop being dumb.' There's logic for you.
The author of the article actually uses the example of testing for Apache bugs on a system without Apache as justification for the 'penetrate and patch' approach being dumb. You've got to be kidding me. What about on a system with Apache? Would that be dumb?
I mean, I do agree that the 'penetrate and patch' approach is pretty futile if the design is put together and maintained by an idiot. But I'd say it's rendered redundant by the idiocy rather than being intrinsically redundant in itself.
At the other extreme, as the grandparent poster was saying, it's also redundant if you have a perfect design without any bugs and holes. Great. Let's just do that then.
Or, if we want to visit Mister Reality for a moment, we're going to in most cases have a design somewhere inbetween. Security will generally have been considered. But it most likely won't be a perfect design because we're just not capable of it (sidenote: how come users are so dumb they're just not worth educating, but software engineers are capable of perfection? I mean, to paraphrase the article, if educating software engineers was going to work, it would have worked by now...)
Anyway, given the probable failure to reach perfection in design (and the uncertaintly of knowing it even if you did), it might be a good idea, maybe, to actually test the live implementation, and maybe fix any flaws? Or if you wanted to give it a jazzy name, you could call it... penetrate and patch?
Or we could all just aim for perfect designs, assume we succeeded, and bask in the warm glow of our godlike egos. That's not a dumb idea at all.
Improved quality is only really relevant if it's a significant improvement. If both Skype and Google Talk are 'good enough' then Google being somewhat better isn't really that big an advantage.
And in my experience, the person at the other end using a bad and/or improperly configured microphone is usually the larger factor in audio problems.
Anyway, this project looks interesting to me because of the video conferencing element. As far as I know, Skype only supports it on Windows through a plug-in - http://www.video4im.com/ (although that works quite well) - and Google Talk not at all. I was looking for windows/linux video conferencing solutions a couple of weeks ago for work, and haven't found an adequate solution yet (netmeeting/Gnomemeeting falls over on being hell to get to work through some routers/firewalls). I'll be keeping an eye on this one.
a company who during the rigourous interview process phoned the agency that forwarded my application on several occassions to say how blown away they were with the quality of my application
Er... what? Why would they do that? Were they just sitting there thinking, "Man I'm bored... oh, I know, I'll phone that agency and praise that Hanff bloke. Again. He's so great!"
I can see how they might phone once but several times?
I agree that it shouldn't, but I think more evidence is needed to determine whether it actually does or not. For example, if I put *ducks* at the end of this otherwise totally humourless post, does anyone find it funny?
I was less than impressed with that essay. It read like the kind of drivel I might write, but don't, because I worry that it would come across as drivel written by a pompous egomaniac. But I doubt anyone's reading this article's comments by now, so, that said:
Smartness is pretty irrelevant. I mean, it's a fuzzy relative blob of a term to start with, particularly in the context of people doing stupid things, but beyond that it's not really a key factor.
I assume the thinking is that stupid people defend bad ideas 'because they're stupid'. That is, they don't understand that it's a bad idea to start off with. So you don't need to think about why stupid people defend bad ideas, it's obvious right?
But there aren't smart people who understand everything and are always right. They don't exist. There are people who don't understand anything, but they're not generally to be found defending it, so they're not really significant to the original question.
So one of the reasons people - both smart and stupid - might be seen to defend bad ideas is because they genuinely don't believe it's a bad idea. Of course, that links in with the definition of a 'bad idea' which is another fuzzy relative blob. But one blob at a time. This also leads us on to what happens when we reach the point where they really should understand it actually is a bad idea (allowing for the fuzzy blob factor course).
And the ultimate reason, I think, is that people (both smart and stupid) want to be right, and smart - or at least, want people to think they are.
This all stems from the (bad) idea that being right is good and being wrong is bad. Being smart is good and being stupid is bad. And if you're right, you are smart, and if you're wrong, you are stupid. And therefore if you admit you were wrong, you're admitting you were stupid. And you don't want people to think you're stupid.
We also usually learn that you don't always actually have to be right to get the credit for it. You can be wrong, but if you convince people you're right, it counts! Conversely, you can be right, but if people think you're wrong, it doesn't count. It's more important that people think you're right than to actually be right.
If we weren't so bothered about being thought of as smart, not stupid, perhaps this wouldn't be such a problem. And when you get down to it, there's really not that much difference. The people we think of as smart frequently do pretty dumb things, and the people we think of as stupid can surprise us.
Must be inspiration taken from that other renowed villain, the Sheriff of Nottingham. I can see the scene:
Bin Laden: We will cut their hearts out, with spoons! Lackey: Why spoons? Why not box cutters? Bin Laden: Because they're dull you twit, it'll hurt more!
Well, this Gnome 3 would eventually become the core product wouldn't it? And presumably bugfixes, appropriate new features, etc., would feed back into Gnome 2 while the two continued in parallel.
Sort of like having kernel versions 2.4 and 2.6. (although no doubt someone will leap out with some technical reason why that's totally different, but it looks the same in principle to me):-)
It sure is, I believe it's derived from the Scottish term get, usually used to refer to an illegitimate child. 'Git' itself is used more broadly though, in much the same way as 'bastard' is.
Well, the question's not whether it should be illegal, it's whether it actually is illegal. Sadly, they're not the same thing. I offer the existance of lawyers as evidence.
The RIAA and a debt collection agency aren't a 'law enforcement authority' or 'system administrators at other Internet service providers or other network or computing facilities'.
Slashdot Mirror
Similarly, it's not as simple as "You don't want to play by their rules, don't play their game" either. Do you read every rule of every game you ever consider playing and consider every possible interpretation of them before you do anything? Somehow, I suspect not.
As I understand it, he didn't actually leave it unattended. On the contrary, he couldn't leave it unattended, he still had to be sitting there pressing the programmed keys. He just wasn't paying attention while he was doing that. You can argue not paying attention is equivalent to leaving it unattended, but a simple macro on a programmable keyboard that you can't leave unattended does not make a bot, let along a fucking one.
Anyway, the real culprit here is the game design. If Blizzard want their players to worship at the altar of the great Time Sink, then they can expect them to use things like this to make it less mind-numbingly tedious.
I'm sure there are some people who only got the game for the character creator, but I think there's probably more who, having created a character, are going to want to play it as well.
And at least $100 on the purchase price? Was your copy gold-plated or something?
They're in South America. :-)
I had the same problem, but then it hit me!
"Xbox 360 is the best thing since... Duke Nukem Forever."
Slashdot fail english? That's unpossible!
The rabbit tripping out is perhaps the best animal-related tripped-out video sequence since the 'My Lovely Horse' video in an episode of Father Ted. But it's not as good as that was.
And other than that, it's a really sucky competition. I hate tiebreakers.
Hey! I'll have you know it's Saturday night here!
Oh wait. That's worse. Much worse.
Of course I watched it. I always RTFA too. ;-)
The conflict was trite and simplistic. The writers didn't even address the issue of whether she was telling the truth about being sentenced to execution in the first place. Unless I missed it, although the extent to which the main characters go into dialogue to spell out the plot, multiple times, makes me think that unlikely. Having said that, my perception was probably coloured by the dire state of some of the acting. And the direction. And the background music.
And yes, I realise that Dr Who is often tongue-in-cheek. That's fine - good actually - so long as everything else is there. In my opinion it wasn't.
I do realise opinions differ, but the writing of the last series was not top notch. Too many plot holes and unresolved/totally ignored issues, too many cheap devices to establish and further the plot. In my opinion.
Thanks for the information. I'll definitely check out the linked items feature. Well, when the site starts working again I will. :-)
I spent a while looking at various photo galleries a while ago and couldn't find a single one I was happy with.
:-)
The main problem is that I'd like to have one photo in multiple albums. I know that was on the requested features for Gallery - anyone know if it made it into this release? (I can't check with the website not responding).
I'd also like one that doesn't arbitrarily use the terms 'album', 'collection', 'category', etc., in strange and bizarre ways. They're the same bloody thing! (in that they're all ultimately a collection of photos by some theme).
One that lets me use keywords for dynamic tagging and displaying of photos would be nice. Especially if it will let me just select keywords already used rather than typing them every time (that always goes horribly wrong since you typically end up referring to one thing in different ways, especially if there's more than one person uploading pictures).
I suspect I might end up writing my own, but if anyone can save me the trouble by pointing me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it.
Your example is bad and you should feel bad.
Actually, I take that back. It's an accurate representation of the article. Which was bad.
The example implies that the only application of 'penetrate and patch' is for idiots to check a design that's so obviously flawed you could simply correct it by thinking about it. And it assumes that if that flaw emerged, the developer would be sufficiently dumb to just fix the flaw as related to the specific test data and not anything else related, like, say, the underlying design.
Which is indeed seemingly what the article says. It basically summarises to 'If you do this in a really stupid way, then this must be a dumb thing to do. Stop being dumb.' There's logic for you. The author of the article actually uses the example of testing for Apache bugs on a system without Apache as justification for the 'penetrate and patch' approach being dumb. You've got to be kidding me. What about on a system with Apache? Would that be dumb?
I mean, I do agree that the 'penetrate and patch' approach is pretty futile if the design is put together and maintained by an idiot. But I'd say it's rendered redundant by the idiocy rather than being intrinsically redundant in itself.
At the other extreme, as the grandparent poster was saying, it's also redundant if you have a perfect design without any bugs and holes. Great. Let's just do that then.
Or, if we want to visit Mister Reality for a moment, we're going to in most cases have a design somewhere inbetween. Security will generally have been considered. But it most likely won't be a perfect design because we're just not capable of it (sidenote: how come users are so dumb they're just not worth educating, but software engineers are capable of perfection? I mean, to paraphrase the article, if educating software engineers was going to work, it would have worked by now...)
Anyway, given the probable failure to reach perfection in design (and the uncertaintly of knowing it even if you did), it might be a good idea, maybe, to actually test the live implementation, and maybe fix any flaws? Or if you wanted to give it a jazzy name, you could call it... penetrate and patch?
Or we could all just aim for perfect designs, assume we succeeded, and bask in the warm glow of our godlike egos. That's not a dumb idea at all.
Improved quality is only really relevant if it's a significant improvement. If both Skype and Google Talk are 'good enough' then Google being somewhat better isn't really that big an advantage.
And in my experience, the person at the other end using a bad and/or improperly configured microphone is usually the larger factor in audio problems.
Anyway, this project looks interesting to me because of the video conferencing element. As far as I know, Skype only supports it on Windows through a plug-in - http://www.video4im.com/ (although that works quite well) - and Google Talk not at all. I was looking for windows/linux video conferencing solutions a couple of weeks ago for work, and haven't found an adequate solution yet (netmeeting/Gnomemeeting falls over on being hell to get to work through some routers/firewalls). I'll be keeping an eye on this one.
I can see how they might phone once but several times?
I agree that it shouldn't, but I think more evidence is needed to determine whether it actually does or not. For example, if I put *ducks* at the end of this otherwise totally humourless post, does anyone find it funny?
*ducks*
I was less than impressed with that essay. It read like the kind of drivel I might write, but don't, because I worry that it would come across as drivel written by a pompous egomaniac. But I doubt anyone's reading this article's comments by now, so, that said:
:-)
Smartness is pretty irrelevant. I mean, it's a fuzzy relative blob of a term to start with, particularly in the context of people doing stupid things, but beyond that it's not really a key factor.
I assume the thinking is that stupid people defend bad ideas 'because they're stupid'. That is, they don't understand that it's a bad idea to start off with. So you don't need to think about why stupid people defend bad ideas, it's obvious right?
But there aren't smart people who understand everything and are always right. They don't exist. There are people who don't understand anything, but they're not generally to be found defending it, so they're not really significant to the original question.
So one of the reasons people - both smart and stupid - might be seen to defend bad ideas is because they genuinely don't believe it's a bad idea. Of course, that links in with the definition of a 'bad idea' which is another fuzzy relative blob. But one blob at a time. This also leads us on to what happens when we reach the point where they really should understand it actually is a bad idea (allowing for the fuzzy blob factor course).
And the ultimate reason, I think, is that people (both smart and stupid) want to be right, and smart - or at least, want people to think they are.
This all stems from the (bad) idea that being right is good and being wrong is bad. Being smart is good and being stupid is bad. And if you're right, you are smart, and if you're wrong, you are stupid. And therefore if you admit you were wrong, you're admitting you were stupid. And you don't want people to think you're stupid.
We also usually learn that you don't always actually have to be right to get the credit for it. You can be wrong, but if you convince people you're right, it counts! Conversely, you can be right, but if people think you're wrong, it doesn't count. It's more important that people think you're right than to actually be right.
If we weren't so bothered about being thought of as smart, not stupid, perhaps this wouldn't be such a problem. And when you get down to it, there's really not that much difference. The people we think of as smart frequently do pretty dumb things, and the people we think of as stupid can surprise us.
Hey, my lunch is ready.
So, in conclusion, I blame society.
Must be inspiration taken from that other renowed villain, the Sheriff of Nottingham. I can see the scene:
Bin Laden: We will cut their hearts out, with spoons!
Lackey: Why spoons? Why not box cutters?
Bin Laden: Because they're dull you twit, it'll hurt more!
Well, this Gnome 3 would eventually become the core product wouldn't it? And presumably bugfixes, appropriate new features, etc., would feed back into Gnome 2 while the two continued in parallel.
:-)
Sort of like having kernel versions 2.4 and 2.6. (although no doubt someone will leap out with some technical reason why that's totally different, but it looks the same in principle to me)
It sure is, I believe it's derived from the Scottish term get, usually used to refer to an illegitimate child. 'Git' itself is used more broadly though, in much the same way as 'bastard' is.
Well, the question's not whether it should be illegal, it's whether it actually is illegal. Sadly, they're not the same thing. I offer the existance of lawyers as evidence.
The RIAA and a debt collection agency aren't a 'law enforcement authority' or 'system administrators at other Internet service providers or other network or computing facilities'.
Because illegal methods aren't justified by being used to combat illegality. The ends do not justify the means.
The question is whether an ISP releasing personal details in this context is illegal, but the answer to that isn't obvious.
You're right of course. Well, in that case, I must offer my most enthusiastic contrafibularities.
'grok' is a perfectly good word (albeit a fictional martian one by origin). But it's in several dictionaries and has it's own wikipedia entry.