Agreed, but it's been the same for the past few generations of gaming devices (handhelds and otherwise) due in part to Nintendo's philosophy.
Seems you've got everyone saying 'Ok, let's go out and make the very best games we possibly can' while Nintendo's line seems to be 'Let's go out and make the most _innovative_ games we can' They might tank horribly from time to time and there's more than a few examples already in Nintendo's past history, but they land some wonderful gems from time to time.
"Games that focus on opportunity game play. Games that are really fun to play right away. You get them immediately, they're cool, you play them for 15 minutes and you've got a very satisfying experience."
Another example of the above, this seems to have been lifted straight from one of Nintendo's press releases. This was what they were aiming for with the early cube titles such as Pikmin and Luigi's Mansion. The rationale being that people have less and less time nowadays and so they'll want titles that they can pick up for short amounts of time and still get some fun out of them. As opposed to the 50-hour epic RPG.
Bottom line, there will be room for both the PSP and the DS, they'll just have different appeal and the companies behind them will be pushing different philosophies.
I think you nailed it. I read an essay a couple of years ago comparing our urban existence with life in the jungle, focusing especially on aggressive and criminal behaviour.
I don't have the numbers but the essay concluded that it's not what you have on you that makes you a better target, it's how aware you are of your surroundings. Think of predators hunting a species further down the food chain. If they have to choose from a pool of available targets they will always go after the ones who present the least chance of reaction. Likewise people who are out to mug you usually notice a whole bunch of minutiae about yourself that you normally wouldn't even think about. Are you walking with your shoulders sagged, are your eyes downcast or wandering without really focusing, are your hands tucked in your pockets or are they and your arms actively working to balance your body, are you walking briskly or irregularly? So on so forth...
Of course someone who's looking at you as a potential target doesn't analyse all this, it's mostly just instinctive or subconscious information processing. Sometimes we get so caught up on the bigger picture we forget about the small details that do have a significant impact.
Maybe the user's fault because the problem is known to exist, but not FC's fault.
You're operating under the assumption that the end user subscribes to mailing lists, checks the forums and keeps track of hundreds of open bugs. It's quite simply an illusion.
Step out of the mindset of the hobbyist/power user/sysadmin for a moment. Fedora is made to be simple to install and simple to use, it's no slackware or gentoo, it's aimed at the common user or maybe even at someone who's just getting started with Linux.
Then you're suggesting the manufacturer of my car would be responsible if car slams into it?
Don't use extreme examples such as that one, they rarely correspond to the reality of the situation. I'm advocating some care and responsibility in releasing software, nothing more. I've used linux for years now and never had a single problem of this nature, so it obviously pains me to see a distro make a blunder as big as this.
And again... Linux isn't Microsoft, so trying to justify a bug by saying that there's something else out there that has even more bugs isn't really a good policy. Focus on your own problems and let other people worry about theirs.
Fedora isn't putting together an operating system to replace windows any more than it's aiming to replace BSD, and if it assumes every single person out there will not dual boot... well then that's just being downright naive.
In a perfect world we'd do without windows and dual booting altogether, but this isn't the case so we'll just have to deal with reality for the time being, any user-friendly distro such as fedora claims to be HAS to deal with the fact that people will sometimes run it alongside windows.
As for your second point of it being GRUB's fault... Linux distributions exist for one reason, and that's to pick and choose from an endless number of projects and patches, turning them into clean packages and making sure everything fits together nicely and runs stable. So yes, the problem lies with GRUB, but it's Fedora's job to make a _whole system_ work.
Before installing Fedora everything's fine, after installing it people lose the ability to boot into windows. It's as simple as this really. How can you expect linux to take over the desktop with the kind of attitude you just displayed?
Yes, MS is partly to blame, but joe user won't give a rat's ass about the finer points of booting operating systems, he'll just (quite rightly) blame fedora and be done with it.
Furthermore this is a bug that's been around for a few months, even before the release of Core 2 so there's really no excuse for this sort of thing. If you're designing an OS to run alongside others it's your responsibility to make sure it doesn't break anything, even if the others are broken somehow.
Please don't tell me 'Oh, but MS doesn't do this!', that's really no excuse is it?
This has got to be the most screwed up article I've read in a long time... I mean, where to begin?
Are people so desperate when it comes to computer security these days they're willing to commit suicide like this? His problem in the first place was with his ISP, so why not switch to a different one instead of applying his brand of twisted logic?
Seems like a pyrrhic victory if you ask me. He may be safe from lawsuits from his ISP, which he should have stopped using in the first place, but all the while his systems are open to whoever wants to use them for launching attacks, running little spam operations, you name it... It's not being smart, it's just being irresponsible and let the rest of us suffer the consequences.
Gotta love the 21th Century
on
Nano Body Building
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Great, another thing to make us even more lazy and careless.
Exercise and good diets? Nah mate, just pop in one of those new pills and you're sorted.
No, no, no! Linksys is owned by Cisco and surely their products are the shining example of good support and superb engineering, surely they........ ohhh *glances over at the linksys router in the next room* I think I see where you're getting at:D
Complexity is often your enemy when designing secure systems. It might be tempting to implement lots of features and bells and whistles and cherries on top, but if you're serious about security you'll want to keep it as simple as possible.
Of course since when is anyone who's serious about protecting their data is going to use winzip? One tool for each job please, this is for compressing and archiving data, not to protect it. Anything else they try to build on top of it is only giving a false sense of security to people.
I can see how "AES Encryption" must have had the marketing guys wetting their pants though.
Well yes, I think you're stretching it just a wee bit by saying that cell phone usage is an essential liberty;)
Imho the real danger lies when someone takes small steps that eventually DO lead to a loss of liberty. If you can't make a big jump, then do a lot of small ones that you can rationalize individually.
A >> B >> C >> D
A to B is perfectly logical, likewise B to C and C to D, but if you step back and look at A and then D you're probably not going to like what you see.
This reminds me of the buzz that surrounded MS's source code theft/leak. There are a couple of different things being discussed here.
First there are the security implications. Having the source out there for all to see isn't the endgame for the internet people, with MS people thought it was a big issue because their code is, well... crappy. I don't think this is true with Cisco, and unless there are some very obvious and very damaging security holes the internet will live to see another day, so all you doomsayers out there screaming that the world is coming to an end... settle down.
It does highlight once again the shortcomings of a security through obscurity model, but let's not go down that road again.
The second thing, which is where the story really lies, is how this could have happened. It's Cisco after all, how could their network be compromised? Probably someone there really dropped the ball. Any specifics on how this happened?
Now this happened at a company I used to provide tech support for, and it just goes to show you how your average person doesn't care the slightest bit about security:
I needed to do something in someone's account and didn't know their password. I also didn't want to reset it in the server because then I'd have them calling me saying the computer didn't work or whatever. So I thought of asking the guy working across the cubicle from where I was, not really expecting a reply:
"Say, you wouldn't happen to know this guy's password would you?" "Well no... but wait a second.. *shouting across to another cubicle and whoever was willing to listen* HEY, DOES ANYONE KNOW DAN'S PASSWORD?!" "*reply from somewhere* YEAH SURE, IT'S '34567'"
I wanted to bang my head against the desk and strangle the bastards. One *could* enforce a password policy, but that would just make people keep their passwords in a yellow sticky note on the computer screen. One *could* try and educate people it's not a very good idea to share passwords among themselves, but that would just make them go behind your back. One *could* try to explain why they just spent $5000 in server software so that everyone could have clearly defined privileges, but they'd just ignore you and head for the water machine.
My point being, of course it's easier to social-engineer your way somewhere because quite frankly people just don't want to go to any great efforts to protect their network/office/whatever.
Your average office worker's idea of a disaster is when someone spills the coffee before anyone has had any in the morning.
More privacy can only be a good thing and I'm not about to launch into a rant about freedom vs. safety, but let's just look at some of the more ugly tactics people can use to subvert a P2P system.
So anyone looking into stopping sharing of illegal material can't launch lawsuits anymore because they don't know the identities of the users. Fine, but they (or anyone malicious enough) can still flood the network with garbage and create so much noise that it will drive people away.
So how about a P2P moderation system similar to the/. one? Has anyone implemented anything like this? I don't know if it could be used alongside any privacy measures the designers implemented, but with enough work and balancing couldn't this be feasible? Imagine browsing limewire at a high threshold/. style and weeding out all those porn movies in disguise, incomplete files and mp3's with artifacts in them. There could be different ratings based on the node and the individual files and while the system could be abused I'm sure enough thought going behind it could make it fairly balanced and useful.
A: Yes, they're also mass spammers, but there's a distinction I make. The typical mass spammer is someone who is paid money for having his systems churn out spam 24/7, often trying to sell legitimate (if somewhat dubious) products.
A 419 scam is actually a crime of persuasion, so while they might start out as just spammers they usually escalate to targeting specific individuals, and this is no gray area as in spam, it's a crime, period.
B: I was actually trying to make a joke. But really, clueless and senile? Have you actually taken a look at the content of some 419 e-mails? That stuff is sometimes so far fetched it enters the realm of common sense.
Being lured in by an url that looks like a legitimate bank and handing over your details, that's being clueless. But being scammed into handing over thousands of dollars to help some nigerian astronaut stranded in space?...
Well I think what's really at stake here are two completely different set of teaching paradigms that we see today. On one hand we have the one where some entity (school, institution, whatever) feeds you knowledge carefully passed through their self-approved filters at the time of their choosing and at the rate they want... Basically the control is in their hands, all you have to do is to follow the rules, show up and absorb all that they throw at you. Now this works, and as it's been shown so far we've been able to educate a fairly big chunk of the population this way. BUT is it really the best way?
Fact is, people just don't work that way. Look at how kinds explore the world, it's on their terms, at their own rate and they actively fight any attempt to restrict that freedom. Which brings me to the second paradigm. Let them learn the way they feel more comfortable. I may be a bit naive, but I believe that if you instead put some control back in the hands on the pupil you eventually won't have to force feed him information, and teachers might become more facilitators than indoctrinators.
As the old adage goes, everyone can find out what you're doing online, they just don't have any meaningful (or easy) way of linking that information to your identity.
What's happening here is that now Amazon can do just that. They already have all the details they'll ever need about you, such as name, address and credit card number(s), they just added a way to correlate all your book searches to that identity, and now apparently all your browsing history too. Is this really that valuable to the common person? Do WE need to know every book we've ever browsed or every page we've ever visited? Marketing types will no doubt love this, but seriously, how will all this information ever work for you more than to whoever is hosting it?
Sure they're dead, if you happen to have a 24/7 broadband connection to serve your hunger for information, but sadly this isn't the case for many people out there.
There are other reasons for seeking out a library, such as a little peace and quiet in which to do some research, online or not. Oddly enough you sometimes also can't get this at home.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems you've got everyone saying 'Ok, let's go out and make the very best games we possibly can' while Nintendo's line seems to be 'Let's go out and make the most _innovative_ games we can' They might tank horribly from time to time and there's more than a few examples already in Nintendo's past history, but they land some wonderful gems from time to time. Another example of the above, this seems to have been lifted straight from one of Nintendo's press releases. This was what they were aiming for with the early cube titles such as Pikmin and Luigi's Mansion. The rationale being that people have less and less time nowadays and so they'll want titles that they can pick up for short amounts of time and still get some fun out of them. As opposed to the 50-hour epic RPG.
Bottom line, there will be room for both the PSP and the DS, they'll just have different appeal and the companies behind them will be pushing different philosophies.
I think you nailed it. I read an essay a couple of years ago comparing our urban existence with life in the jungle, focusing especially on aggressive and criminal behaviour.
I don't have the numbers but the essay concluded that it's not what you have on you that makes you a better target, it's how aware you are of your surroundings. Think of predators hunting a species further down the food chain. If they have to choose from a pool of available targets they will always go after the ones who present the least chance of reaction. Likewise people who are out to mug you usually notice a whole bunch of minutiae about yourself that you normally wouldn't even think about. Are you walking with your shoulders sagged, are your eyes downcast or wandering without really focusing, are your hands tucked in your pockets or are they and your arms actively working to balance your body, are you walking briskly or irregularly? So on so forth...
Of course someone who's looking at you as a potential target doesn't analyse all this, it's mostly just instinctive or subconscious information processing. Sometimes we get so caught up on the bigger picture we forget about the small details that do have a significant impact.
Maybe the user's fault because the problem is known to exist, but not FC's fault.
You're operating under the assumption that the end user subscribes to mailing lists, checks the forums and keeps track of hundreds of open bugs. It's quite simply an illusion.
Step out of the mindset of the hobbyist/power user/sysadmin for a moment. Fedora is made to be simple to install and simple to use, it's no slackware or gentoo, it's aimed at the common user or maybe even at someone who's just getting started with Linux.
Then you're suggesting the manufacturer of my car would be responsible if car slams into it?
Don't use extreme examples such as that one, they rarely correspond to the reality of the situation. I'm advocating some care and responsibility in releasing software, nothing more. I've used linux for years now and never had a single problem of this nature, so it obviously pains me to see a distro make a blunder as big as this.
And again... Linux isn't Microsoft, so trying to justify a bug by saying that there's something else out there that has even more bugs isn't really a good policy. Focus on your own problems and let other people worry about theirs.
Fedora isn't putting together an operating system to replace windows any more than it's aiming to replace BSD, and if it assumes every single person out there will not dual boot... well then that's just being downright naive.
In a perfect world we'd do without windows and dual booting altogether, but this isn't the case so we'll just have to deal with reality for the time being, any user-friendly distro such as fedora claims to be HAS to deal with the fact that people will sometimes run it alongside windows.
As for your second point of it being GRUB's fault... Linux distributions exist for one reason, and that's to pick and choose from an endless number of projects and patches, turning them into clean packages and making sure everything fits together nicely and runs stable. So yes, the problem lies with GRUB, but it's Fedora's job to make a _whole system_ work.
Before installing Fedora everything's fine, after installing it people lose the ability to boot into windows. It's as simple as this really. How can you expect linux to take over the desktop with the kind of attitude you just displayed?
Yes, MS is partly to blame, but joe user won't give a rat's ass about the finer points of booting operating systems, he'll just (quite rightly) blame fedora and be done with it.
Furthermore this is a bug that's been around for a few months, even before the release of Core 2 so there's really no excuse for this sort of thing. If you're designing an OS to run alongside others it's your responsibility to make sure it doesn't break anything, even if the others are broken somehow.
Please don't tell me 'Oh, but MS doesn't do this!', that's really no excuse is it?
This has got to be the most screwed up article I've read in a long time... I mean, where to begin?
Are people so desperate when it comes to computer security these days they're willing to commit suicide like this? His problem in the first place was with his ISP, so why not switch to a different one instead of applying his brand of twisted logic?
Seems like a pyrrhic victory if you ask me. He may be safe from lawsuits from his ISP, which he should have stopped using in the first place, but all the while his systems are open to whoever wants to use them for launching attacks, running little spam operations, you name it... It's not being smart, it's just being irresponsible and let the rest of us suffer the consequences.
Great, another thing to make us even more lazy and careless.
Exercise and good diets? Nah mate, just pop in one of those new pills and you're sorted.
No, no, no! Linksys is owned by Cisco and surely their products are the shining example of good support and superb engineering, surely they........ ohhh *glances over at the linksys router in the next room* I think I see where you're getting at :D
Complexity is often your enemy when designing secure systems. It might be tempting to implement lots of features and bells and whistles and cherries on top, but if you're serious about security you'll want to keep it as simple as possible.
Of course since when is anyone who's serious about protecting their data is going to use winzip? One tool for each job please, this is for compressing and archiving data, not to protect it. Anything else they try to build on top of it is only giving a false sense of security to people.
I can see how "AES Encryption" must have had the marketing guys wetting their pants though.
Stick with what you're good at.
Well yes, I think you're stretching it just a wee bit by saying that cell phone usage is an essential liberty ;)
Imho the real danger lies when someone takes small steps that eventually DO lead to a loss of liberty. If you can't make a big jump, then do a lot of small ones that you can rationalize individually.
A >> B >> C >> D
A to B is perfectly logical, likewise B to C and C to D, but if you step back and look at A and then D you're probably not going to like what you see.
This reminds me of the buzz that surrounded MS's source code theft/leak. There are a couple of different things being discussed here.
First there are the security implications. Having the source out there for all to see isn't the endgame for the internet people, with MS people thought it was a big issue because their code is, well... crappy. I don't think this is true with Cisco, and unless there are some very obvious and very damaging security holes the internet will live to see another day, so all you doomsayers out there screaming that the world is coming to an end... settle down.
It does highlight once again the shortcomings of a security through obscurity model, but let's not go down that road again.
The second thing, which is where the story really lies, is how this could have happened. It's Cisco after all, how could their network be compromised? Probably someone there really dropped the ball. Any specifics on how this happened?
Now this happened at a company I used to provide tech support for, and it just goes to show you how your average person doesn't care the slightest bit about security:
I needed to do something in someone's account and didn't know their password. I also didn't want to reset it in the server because then I'd have them calling me saying the computer didn't work or whatever. So I thought of asking the guy working across the cubicle from where I was, not really expecting a reply:
"Say, you wouldn't happen to know this guy's password would you?"
"Well no... but wait a second.. *shouting across to another cubicle and whoever was willing to listen* HEY, DOES ANYONE KNOW DAN'S PASSWORD?!"
"*reply from somewhere* YEAH SURE, IT'S '34567'"
I wanted to bang my head against the desk and strangle the bastards. One *could* enforce a password policy, but that would just make people keep their passwords in a yellow sticky note on the computer screen. One *could* try and educate people it's not a very good idea to share passwords among themselves, but that would just make them go behind your back. One *could* try to explain why they just spent $5000 in server software so that everyone could have clearly defined privileges, but they'd just ignore you and head for the water machine.
My point being, of course it's easier to social-engineer your way somewhere because quite frankly people just don't want to go to any great efforts to protect their network/office/whatever.
Your average office worker's idea of a disaster is when someone spills the coffee before anyone has had any in the morning.
More privacy can only be a good thing and I'm not about to launch into a rant about freedom vs. safety, but let's just look at some of the more ugly tactics people can use to subvert a P2P system.
/. one? Has anyone implemented anything like this? I don't know if it could be used alongside any privacy measures the designers implemented, but with enough work and balancing couldn't this be feasible? Imagine browsing limewire at a high threshold /. style and weeding out all those porn movies in disguise, incomplete files and mp3's with artifacts in them. There could be different ratings based on the node and the individual files and while the system could be abused I'm sure enough thought going behind it could make it fairly balanced and useful.
So anyone looking into stopping sharing of illegal material can't launch lawsuits anymore because they don't know the identities of the users. Fine, but they (or anyone malicious enough) can still flood the network with garbage and create so much noise that it will drive people away.
So how about a P2P moderation system similar to the
Just a though, slightly off-topic.
A: Yes, they're also mass spammers, but there's a distinction I make. The typical mass spammer is someone who is paid money for having his systems churn out spam 24/7, often trying to sell legitimate (if somewhat dubious) products.
A 419 scam is actually a crime of persuasion, so while they might start out as just spammers they usually escalate to targeting specific individuals, and this is no gray area as in spam, it's a crime, period.
B: I was actually trying to make a joke. But really, clueless and senile? Have you actually taken a look at the content of some 419 e-mails? That stuff is sometimes so far fetched it enters the realm of common sense.
Being lured in by an url that looks like a legitimate bank and handing over your details, that's being clueless. But being scammed into handing over thousands of dollars to help some nigerian astronaut stranded in space?...
Well as much as I hate 419 scammers I still can't bring myself to think of them as scum quite on the same level as mass spammers.
Think of them as the internet's version of the lion, culling the weak and gullible thereby keeping the species healthy.
Well that's just great! You spend the whole damn year learning elvish and then some annoying kid comes along with a $400 yo-yo and steals the show.
Well I think what's really at stake here are two completely different set of teaching paradigms that we see today. On one hand we have the one where some entity (school, institution, whatever) feeds you knowledge carefully passed through their self-approved filters at the time of their choosing and at the rate they want... Basically the control is in their hands, all you have to do is to follow the rules, show up and absorb all that they throw at you. Now this works, and as it's been shown so far we've been able to educate a fairly big chunk of the population this way. BUT is it really the best way?
Fact is, people just don't work that way. Look at how kinds explore the world, it's on their terms, at their own rate and they actively fight any attempt to restrict that freedom. Which brings me to the second paradigm. Let them learn the way they feel more comfortable. I may be a bit naive, but I believe that if you instead put some control back in the hands on the pupil you eventually won't have to force feed him information, and teachers might become more facilitators than indoctrinators.
As the old adage goes, everyone can find out what you're doing online, they just don't have any meaningful (or easy) way of linking that information to your identity.
What's happening here is that now Amazon can do just that. They already have all the details they'll ever need about you, such as name, address and credit card number(s), they just added a way to correlate all your book searches to that identity, and now apparently all your browsing history too. Is this really that valuable to the common person? Do WE need to know every book we've ever browsed or every page we've ever visited? Marketing types will no doubt love this, but seriously, how will all this information ever work for you more than to whoever is hosting it?
Sure they're dead, if you happen to have a 24/7 broadband connection to serve your hunger for information, but sadly this isn't the case for many people out there.
There are other reasons for seeking out a library, such as a little peace and quiet in which to do some research, online or not. Oddly enough you sometimes also can't get this at home.