I seriously don't trust those Gnome devs though- they seem dead set on making some product for a computer noob in 2028, or something. I get it is the dominant desktop now with even Linus on it, but burned once twice shy. I'll stick with XFCE on Fedora, and once in a blue moon run a thing from a command line that would have been a widget in Gnome. It is fine.
Sure, and we're all on board with that. The problem is that each and every piece of new technology is going to be saddled with this unless we solve it legislatively.
There's NO reason for a company to collect data, period. If I buy a VR headset, it's to play VR games or watch VR porn or design something in VR. Not to send my "usage data" upstream for some computer to fap to. Fuck that. I'm not installing spyware, I'm not running a spy OS, and I definitely don't need a spybot hardware piece. It's useless bullshit.
Every version of WoW except the latest one is abandoned. Certainly vanilla, BC, LK, Cata, and MoP are abandoned. The current version is nothing like any of those.
> The point is exactly that those 800k were not playing on Blizzard servers.
First, that's wrong. Many of them have accounts with Blizzard. Hell, if you care enough to run vanilla raids, you likely have more than one account. Even those with inactive accounts would likely activate them whenever Blizzard launches a new expansion.
Second, many of them are claiming they will unsub from WoW based on this, or not buy future expansions if they are not currently subscribed.
Third, most of these players, even the few that aren't playing Blizzard WoW, are hardcore fans- the experience you get on all these private servers is one that Blizzard REFUSES to acknowledge among its playerbase- progression servers (servers that go through a set of patches) and static servers (servers that act like a certain period of time in WoW's history). If you leveled a character you loved and then Blizzard changed it totally, you might still want to play that character, and a private server is the only way to do this. This entire side market exists because of Blizzard's choices in the first place!
Fourth, there's PLENTY more of these servers- this was just the generally most popular one in genre (wowlike vanilla). There's a whole bunch of subdivisions of WoW private servers, and many of them are totally legal. This one just had the misfortune to be located in France.
So there's no way they accomplished anything but pissing off their vanillaheads. It takes a lot of gall to fuck your character, guild, and game up on live, then reach across the ocean to delete the one you remade over there to play the game you want to play. Frankly, I suspect they might have had a more legit reason that they aren't sharing- they aren't even trying to hunt down all the private servers in France, after all, much less all the ones that operate legally in jurisdictions that they can't attack. But who knows. Their action, on the surface, appears totally irrational- though you have to pay attention to the private server scene to see it as anything but some DMCA garbage.
The Linux desktop is perfectly fine. Linus's attitude is perfect. Linus (and most devs) make tools for themselves. Then they end up with users, and the users are excited about adding some features, and those sometimes get added.
The issue- though it isn't really one- is that when it comes to GUIs, this method seems to take a long time to converge. Probably because users are fundamentally confused about GUIs, and there's a whole bunch of layers involved too, but I don't really know for sure why.
I think GNOME was on its way to being a standard Linux desktop, and by choosing this really bizarre ideological something, they shattered the community. I happily use XFCE now, but it is clear that there's a lot of hunger for certain types of desktops- to the point that packaging a good desktop is pretty much worth a distro to most people, instead of every GUI being expected on every desktop. At some point, something will be able to unite that group enough- one of the desktops will be "good enough" for most people, most especially including technical power users- and then you'll see that become more standard.
The splintering of these users has let everyone have what they want, but the cost is that any problem you have is experienced by a much smaller pool of people than if everyone was on the same thing. This makes the problem live a lot longer than otherwise, etc.
So Linux doesn't just have a good desktop solution, it has several- and obviously it takes longer to polish a bunch of solutions than it takes to polish a single one.
No, it won't. I hear this occasionally, and I'm not really sure where this silly meme got started. AAA gaming has been reasonably saturated for a few years- there's a ton of releases yearly of these high budget games- but they still are turning profits. If the industry gets to the point where they aren't profitable, the number will fall- but there's no reason to suspect it will freefall. AAA gaming will still be around, but you might not see quite as many per year. That's definitely no death knell.
The idea that the gaming community will suddenly throw its hands up and say "clash of clans is the only game I ever want to play again" is zero. There will always be a AAA market, even if those who overextended to be players in there get burnt.
Look for "pavucontrol". This has a tab for outputs and stuff. You can set default outs and ins, you can see the current applications and which thing they are using, and you can change it dynamically. It's basically a better version of the Volume Control in Windows.....and for some reason, I have to add it manually. I'm using a Fedora XFCE spin, and it didn't come with this, for some unknown reason. Maybe its allied with some other faction, or something- I don't have time to query the philosophical alignments of each binary. Anyway, pavucontrol is what you want.
Right, but unlike the other stuff, this one is pretty challenging. One reasonable guess might be to use the USB keyboard if and only if there's no other USB keyboard on the device, and prompt for if you meant to attach a keyboard if there's one present. This could also be done if there's either a keyboard OR a mouse. But if both are absent, and you plug in a keyboard or an attack drive that is secretly a keyboard, how on earth could you tell?
The fact that keyboards and mice are USB is the core issue- that was always a bad idea. There should have been a NON universal plug for user input devices, an evolution of PS/2 type connectors or something. It's unreasonable to expect that most users will understand that the USB drive can also be literally anything, up to and including the user.
Seriously, run through how this could be accomplished- everything sucks or doesn't work. You could put a string of numbers on the screen and ask that the new keyboard type that string in, and that will be awful over many situations (tty situation, prompt comes up on a monitor space that isn't really real, etc). You could ask for a corresponding button press on the computer itself, but that's not part of any standard, and rest assured many people would push the "add keyboard' button when they didn't want to. You could have a USB port that is able to be a mouse or keyboard, and have only two of those, and anything else doesn't work or makes a prompt, but now you are breaking the whole USB standard.
It's a very serious issue, and the only real solution would be a different shaped port that means "this is a user input device, you can trust it as much as you trust the user", versus one that means "this is an auxiliary device, it contains storage or input / output, but not user text or mouse input, as those are reserved".
And it gets stupider- since all USB can be I/O, the fact that it shows up as a keyboard instead of a joystick is because most things aren't configured to use the joystick as a means of accepting user input. Being a mouse is also a pretty solid attack pattern, though not as simple as a keyboard.
I mean, yes, but that's a definition of "natural order" that really just means "whatever the limits of physics are".
Thus far, our actions work on a pretty damned small scale. A maniac in a story who wants to "destroy the universe" usually does so with some power that has no real world equivalent- magic, a dark god, etc. More realistic stories that still feature cartoon villains who want to "destroy the Earth" usually do so with something that could, in theory, be a risk- nuclear technology being heavily abused, a self replicating agent (gray goo, virus, bacteria, fungus), or something that could realistically exist.
This is because our experiences show that stuff that happens on the human scale mostly stays on the human scale, and we are worried it can hit the planetary scale accidentally. We can wipe out all the bugs and mice in our house (and we want to!), but probably not the world (and we don't want to!). But we have NO reasons to believe that this observation, which has been true until this point, is actually real in the general case. The truth is, we don't know how easy it would be to "destroy the universe", and we don't understand a hell of a lot of low level physics that could point in that direction. Our best reasoning for it not being easy is that it hasn't happened yet, but this would be a much more potent observation if we could observe hundreds of hyper-advanced civilizations, all standing tribute to it being difficult to accidentally (or on purpose) blow up everything.
Anyway, just because we are at no risk of that RIGHT NOW doesn't mean that we should continue making that assumption going forward. Existential risk from our own actions will not always be benign.
> A die would work just as well, and would handle up to 6 checkpoints.
Screw that, just hand out a set of polyhedral dice. You can trivially generate 1 or 2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-6, 1-8, 1-10, 1-12, 1-20, or 1-100, and that's without getting cute with rerolls or bases that aren't 10.
Many of the things that are labelled a "toy" really are. Others are until someone drops millions on R&D to make it useful.
"PC is a toy"
The PC in 1981 *was* a toy. With 16 kilobytes of memory, no concept of directories, and a ludicrous buy-in required, it was a niche machine. Lotus 1-2-3 was two years away. Obviously it was a toy with a great deal of potential, but it took a lot of time to get there.
“C programming language is a toy”
When I google this, it takes me to the article and no place else. If this quote is real, it wasn't a very popular opinion. By 1982, C had been used for Unix for a decade or something- how a popular and standard OS and its myriad of tools was dismissed as "toy-like" isn't obvious to me, and I'd be surprised to find out that this claim got much purchase. Assuming it exists. I mean, it must, right? Someone had to be clueless.
"Mouse is a toy", "GUI is a toy"
GUIs were a toy in the early 80s, and so were mice. With a mouse driver chewing up your precious RAM and an utter lack of support, it took a long time before a mouse was considered something that you could assume your users would own. Windows could be run entirely from the keyboard for this reason. Despite being so good at its thing, it took a long damned time before it had real use.
"Email on a pager is a toy"
And it was. We don't all have email enabled pagers, we have touchscreens that didn't exist back then with high res displays that didn't exist back then running on batteries that didn't exist back then with a huge wad of software that cost a ton of time and money to create. Smartphones aren't email pagers that got bigger, smartphones are PCs that shrunk.
Many of the others, I don't think anyone believed. I don't know anyone who dismissed VOIP, the Macintosh, Flash storage, Youtube, or touch screens. Facebook is STILL a toy, it just has large buy-in and a bunch of money. Hell, people keep creating things that will be "the next facebook", and those are mostly toys too- if one catches on and turns facebook into myspace, that won't really change that. Cloud has never been a toy, but its certainly been oversold, and most of the critiques mock that point- the upsides of clouds are hyped, the downsides ignored.
The list has some good points on it, but mostly it deals with technologies that took years to decades, and tons of research and development, to leave their "toy" status behind. If you call something gimmicky and then it catches on twenty years later after all the underlying tech has changed, that doesn't make you wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
In Windows 10 it shows ads. Installing Windows 10 strips away your old ad-free version of Solitaire, too.
If you don't want to see ads, they offer a yearly subscription that lets you play Solitaire without ads.
If you cleverly kept your old executables, they won't work, but you can find a workaround here:
http://www.howtogeek.com/22512...
Even as a solitaire box, Windows 10 falls short. Linux, of course, still offers that game and many more!
> Vi is definatly a religion :-P
No, vi is a text editor with religious functions available from command mode, emacs is a religion that can also edit text.
Which is pretty offtopic. The question is about sincerely held beliefs, not whether a set of people with beliefs hold true to their teachings.
By this definition, Mormonism is a cult. While you may agree with that assertion, it is assuredly a controversial one.
Only if you believe that "0 is a quantity" is an oxymoron.
The mind arises from the brain. The brain is part of the body.
I seriously don't trust those Gnome devs though- they seem dead set on making some product for a computer noob in 2028, or something. I get it is the dominant desktop now with even Linus on it, but burned once twice shy. I'll stick with XFCE on Fedora, and once in a blue moon run a thing from a command line that would have been a widget in Gnome. It is fine.
I will only worship them if they have cool blue sex robots and spaceships that look totally wizard.
> Or you could just...not buy one?
Sure, and we're all on board with that. The problem is that each and every piece of new technology is going to be saddled with this unless we solve it legislatively.
What reasons would those be?
There's NO reason for a company to collect data, period. If I buy a VR headset, it's to play VR games or watch VR porn or design something in VR. Not to send my "usage data" upstream for some computer to fap to. Fuck that. I'm not installing spyware, I'm not running a spy OS, and I definitely don't need a spybot hardware piece. It's useless bullshit.
> WoW is not abandoned though.
Every version of WoW except the latest one is abandoned. Certainly vanilla, BC, LK, Cata, and MoP are abandoned. The current version is nothing like any of those.
> The point is exactly that those 800k were not playing on Blizzard servers.
First, that's wrong. Many of them have accounts with Blizzard. Hell, if you care enough to run vanilla raids, you likely have more than one account. Even those with inactive accounts would likely activate them whenever Blizzard launches a new expansion.
Second, many of them are claiming they will unsub from WoW based on this, or not buy future expansions if they are not currently subscribed.
Third, most of these players, even the few that aren't playing Blizzard WoW, are hardcore fans- the experience you get on all these private servers is one that Blizzard REFUSES to acknowledge among its playerbase- progression servers (servers that go through a set of patches) and static servers (servers that act like a certain period of time in WoW's history). If you leveled a character you loved and then Blizzard changed it totally, you might still want to play that character, and a private server is the only way to do this. This entire side market exists because of Blizzard's choices in the first place!
Fourth, there's PLENTY more of these servers- this was just the generally most popular one in genre (wowlike vanilla). There's a whole bunch of subdivisions of WoW private servers, and many of them are totally legal. This one just had the misfortune to be located in France.
So there's no way they accomplished anything but pissing off their vanillaheads. It takes a lot of gall to fuck your character, guild, and game up on live, then reach across the ocean to delete the one you remade over there to play the game you want to play. Frankly, I suspect they might have had a more legit reason that they aren't sharing- they aren't even trying to hunt down all the private servers in France, after all, much less all the ones that operate legally in jurisdictions that they can't attack. But who knows. Their action, on the surface, appears totally irrational- though you have to pay attention to the private server scene to see it as anything but some DMCA garbage.
The Linux desktop is perfectly fine. Linus's attitude is perfect. Linus (and most devs) make tools for themselves. Then they end up with users, and the users are excited about adding some features, and those sometimes get added.
The issue- though it isn't really one- is that when it comes to GUIs, this method seems to take a long time to converge. Probably because users are fundamentally confused about GUIs, and there's a whole bunch of layers involved too, but I don't really know for sure why.
I think GNOME was on its way to being a standard Linux desktop, and by choosing this really bizarre ideological something, they shattered the community. I happily use XFCE now, but it is clear that there's a lot of hunger for certain types of desktops- to the point that packaging a good desktop is pretty much worth a distro to most people, instead of every GUI being expected on every desktop. At some point, something will be able to unite that group enough- one of the desktops will be "good enough" for most people, most especially including technical power users- and then you'll see that become more standard.
The splintering of these users has let everyone have what they want, but the cost is that any problem you have is experienced by a much smaller pool of people than if everyone was on the same thing. This makes the problem live a lot longer than otherwise, etc.
So Linux doesn't just have a good desktop solution, it has several- and obviously it takes longer to polish a bunch of solutions than it takes to polish a single one.
> AAA gaming might just go away.
No, it won't. I hear this occasionally, and I'm not really sure where this silly meme got started. AAA gaming has been reasonably saturated for a few years- there's a ton of releases yearly of these high budget games- but they still are turning profits. If the industry gets to the point where they aren't profitable, the number will fall- but there's no reason to suspect it will freefall. AAA gaming will still be around, but you might not see quite as many per year. That's definitely no death knell.
The idea that the gaming community will suddenly throw its hands up and say "clash of clans is the only game I ever want to play again" is zero. There will always be a AAA market, even if those who overextended to be players in there get burnt.
Look for "pavucontrol". This has a tab for outputs and stuff. You can set default outs and ins, you can see the current applications and which thing they are using, and you can change it dynamically. It's basically a better version of the Volume Control in Windows. ....and for some reason, I have to add it manually. I'm using a Fedora XFCE spin, and it didn't come with this, for some unknown reason. Maybe its allied with some other faction, or something- I don't have time to query the philosophical alignments of each binary. Anyway, pavucontrol is what you want.
How do you distinguish betwixt an attack keyboard versus the user plugging in a real keyboard?
The problem is that you just plugged in a keyboard, and it will execute command keys and type stuff in to make itself able to run remote code.
Right, but unlike the other stuff, this one is pretty challenging. One reasonable guess might be to use the USB keyboard if and only if there's no other USB keyboard on the device, and prompt for if you meant to attach a keyboard if there's one present. This could also be done if there's either a keyboard OR a mouse. But if both are absent, and you plug in a keyboard or an attack drive that is secretly a keyboard, how on earth could you tell?
The fact that keyboards and mice are USB is the core issue- that was always a bad idea. There should have been a NON universal plug for user input devices, an evolution of PS/2 type connectors or something. It's unreasonable to expect that most users will understand that the USB drive can also be literally anything, up to and including the user.
Seriously, run through how this could be accomplished- everything sucks or doesn't work. You could put a string of numbers on the screen and ask that the new keyboard type that string in, and that will be awful over many situations (tty situation, prompt comes up on a monitor space that isn't really real, etc). You could ask for a corresponding button press on the computer itself, but that's not part of any standard, and rest assured many people would push the "add keyboard' button when they didn't want to. You could have a USB port that is able to be a mouse or keyboard, and have only two of those, and anything else doesn't work or makes a prompt, but now you are breaking the whole USB standard.
It's a very serious issue, and the only real solution would be a different shaped port that means "this is a user input device, you can trust it as much as you trust the user", versus one that means "this is an auxiliary device, it contains storage or input / output, but not user text or mouse input, as those are reserved".
And it gets stupider- since all USB can be I/O, the fact that it shows up as a keyboard instead of a joystick is because most things aren't configured to use the joystick as a means of accepting user input. Being a mouse is also a pretty solid attack pattern, though not as simple as a keyboard.
> OpenBSD cost me everything with its lackluster security.
Even your slashdot login! The humanity!
I mean, yes, but that's a definition of "natural order" that really just means "whatever the limits of physics are".
Thus far, our actions work on a pretty damned small scale. A maniac in a story who wants to "destroy the universe" usually does so with some power that has no real world equivalent- magic, a dark god, etc. More realistic stories that still feature cartoon villains who want to "destroy the Earth" usually do so with something that could, in theory, be a risk- nuclear technology being heavily abused, a self replicating agent (gray goo, virus, bacteria, fungus), or something that could realistically exist.
This is because our experiences show that stuff that happens on the human scale mostly stays on the human scale, and we are worried it can hit the planetary scale accidentally. We can wipe out all the bugs and mice in our house (and we want to!), but probably not the world (and we don't want to!). But we have NO reasons to believe that this observation, which has been true until this point, is actually real in the general case. The truth is, we don't know how easy it would be to "destroy the universe", and we don't understand a hell of a lot of low level physics that could point in that direction. Our best reasoning for it not being easy is that it hasn't happened yet, but this would be a much more potent observation if we could observe hundreds of hyper-advanced civilizations, all standing tribute to it being difficult to accidentally (or on purpose) blow up everything.
Anyway, just because we are at no risk of that RIGHT NOW doesn't mean that we should continue making that assumption going forward. Existential risk from our own actions will not always be benign.
Begun the clone war has.
> A die would work just as well, and would handle up to 6 checkpoints.
Screw that, just hand out a set of polyhedral dice. You can trivially generate 1 or 2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-6, 1-8, 1-10, 1-12, 1-20, or 1-100, and that's without getting cute with rerolls or bases that aren't 10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not that you should need a link- this is slashdot, you know D&D.
You two best race to the patent office!
> What, how to press the "flip coin" button?
Several million to design a physical UI so you really feel like you are flipping the coin?
Many of the things that are labelled a "toy" really are. Others are until someone drops millions on R&D to make it useful.
"PC is a toy"
The PC in 1981 *was* a toy. With 16 kilobytes of memory, no concept of directories, and a ludicrous buy-in required, it was a niche machine. Lotus 1-2-3 was two years away. Obviously it was a toy with a great deal of potential, but it took a lot of time to get there.
“C programming language is a toy”
When I google this, it takes me to the article and no place else. If this quote is real, it wasn't a very popular opinion. By 1982, C had been used for Unix for a decade or something- how a popular and standard OS and its myriad of tools was dismissed as "toy-like" isn't obvious to me, and I'd be surprised to find out that this claim got much purchase. Assuming it exists. I mean, it must, right? Someone had to be clueless.
"Mouse is a toy", "GUI is a toy"
GUIs were a toy in the early 80s, and so were mice. With a mouse driver chewing up your precious RAM and an utter lack of support, it took a long time before a mouse was considered something that you could assume your users would own. Windows could be run entirely from the keyboard for this reason. Despite being so good at its thing, it took a long damned time before it had real use.
"Email on a pager is a toy"
And it was. We don't all have email enabled pagers, we have touchscreens that didn't exist back then with high res displays that didn't exist back then running on batteries that didn't exist back then with a huge wad of software that cost a ton of time and money to create. Smartphones aren't email pagers that got bigger, smartphones are PCs that shrunk.
Many of the others, I don't think anyone believed. I don't know anyone who dismissed VOIP, the Macintosh, Flash storage, Youtube, or touch screens. Facebook is STILL a toy, it just has large buy-in and a bunch of money. Hell, people keep creating things that will be "the next facebook", and those are mostly toys too- if one catches on and turns facebook into myspace, that won't really change that. Cloud has never been a toy, but its certainly been oversold, and most of the critiques mock that point- the upsides of clouds are hyped, the downsides ignored.
The list has some good points on it, but mostly it deals with technologies that took years to decades, and tons of research and development, to leave their "toy" status behind. If you call something gimmicky and then it catches on twenty years later after all the underlying tech has changed, that doesn't make you wrong.