Re:What about conventional fission reactors?
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Return to the Moon
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· Score: 1
Unless its found there (on The Moon), it is really expensive to ship it there. So sending millions of tons of coal and oxygen (remember you need to *burn* it) to The Moon is not economically reasonable. There is also the problem that a coal fire power plant on The Moon have to function differently than one on Earth .
So you are quite right: Going with technology of today a fission pebble bed reactor makes a lot of sense. The only way to get better and safer reactors is to build and learn from designs. Being on The Moon, any problems will be magnified so safety and super reliability will be required. Once again, this technology is useful for future inhabitants of The Moon but these advances in nuclear power will have benifits for the rest on Earth with safer, more fault tolerant power plants.
This would be akin to having the anology of cars without modern safety features. "Personally, I have NEVER had a serious injury while driving any car because I take simple preventative measures like buying seat belts, safety glass, and air bags." The question one should be asking is why does the user have to buy "seat belts, safety glass, and air bags" for their computer in the first place?? Shouldn't these things be standard features? Turning around responsiblity to the user is allowing MS off the hook. Users are using Windows as designed and getting sometimes serious malfunctions. It would be one thing if people were abusing their machines and breaking them. It is something else to be normally surfing the internet, reading email, or doing any other nominal activity and hitting a serious problem that leaves their system bare to the hackers. This is squarely Microsoft's problem not the users!!
I'm tired of this kind of applogetic excusing for Microsoft. As much as people want to blame the users, its still all in MS's lap since many of the problems stem from software doing things that it should never be allowed to do in the first place. AV software, hardware and software firewalls, malware scanners...its all a hack to stop users from breaking their machines doing normal operations because MS won't or can't engineer a system that disallows it.
Years of experience on other systems have shown that computers are complex machines with complex interactions all of which are prone to error and worst exploit if not carefully designed. On the other hand Microsoft sold most of the world on the promise that Windows is as easy to use as a VCR and requires just as much maintaince and look at where we are. We have to throw more and more money and time into work arounds while MS takes longer and longer to fix up things. Why aren't more people asking why does Windows work this way?
The tracking isn't bad but it is when "they" are being devious about such activity. If a user understands that iTunes or WMP reports usage, and I mean more than the "blindly clicking 'Ok', shrink wrap stuff" then it is fine and may even have some use and value. If someone iTunes/WMP notices a pattern and starts offering better selections to that user then everyone is happy. If on the other hand the application starts snooping around for music squirrled away on the machine to tell someone what songs you have and have not purchased through that mechanism, that can be used to incriminate someone.
Trust is the key where full disclosure is the mechanism. The clearer these guys are on what their applications are doing the better off we all are.
Setup on a fresh Windows install is not that easy. The correlary to this is that Linux isn't that hard to install now either.
The last 3 machines that Linux went on worked "out of the box" (pop the disk into the drive and follow the on screen instructions). I could have cut down the number of screens I saw and "Next" buttons to hit if I was doing this dozens of times by using other mechanisms. The last time I helped my parents through a reinstall was a nightmare mostly because they thought they had all of the drivers when in actuallity they didn't. It really isn't there fault due to the fact that every vendor has their own driver set that is scattered in a giant stack of CDs I know is sitting on a self next to the machine. They know the disk is in there somewhere if only they can find it... Hey wait, isn't this what technology is supposed to solve?
I haven't tried it yet, but I have this sneaking suspicion my parents can figure out the latest installs for Fedora and SuSE. When it comes to reinstalling Windows XP I just tell them to call support. It isn't that they can't figure out how to install XP but finding all of the components and doing it in a safe manner is a chore.
The problem MS has with their patching strategy is that problems are not one size fits all. There are things in various parts of Windows and other MS products that are low priority to update and will not be happy if I have to push out something out of cycle. On the other hand, there are very serious critical flaws that are very high priority that I would like to have immediately and would push out to every machine I could find immediately.
All problems are not the same quality or severity so why is MS trying to treat them as such?
Wikipedia is exactly as advertised: Wikipedia is a multilingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser.
Because it is based upon free-content, anyone can "correct it". Because it based upon free-content, multiple view points will come into conflict. Because its on the Internet, it has a high degree of annonymity which is great sometimes (it levels the playing field, anyone can contribute) but not so great when you actually want to verify (how does one actually check if someone is an expert as opposed to a jerk). How do you even identify "good articles"? How do you identify people screwing them up? All of this takes people and capital. Time and money donated. And once again because it isn't some utopian ideal some want to raze it. Whatever....
It would be one thing if you don't want to contribute to Wikipedia because you simply don't want too but to claim it is broken is highly erronious. It is functioning exactly as discrbied with warts and all.
...and the best arguement why many "old school" ideas should be left at home. DQ8 is simply not challenging because they embraced many old school concepts instead of washing their hands of it or improving upon them.
DQ8 combat engine is simplistic. I mean dirt simple to the point you can predict with "in your head math" whether you can win the fight or should flee before damage is even exchanged. This leaves a system where the only way one can challenge the player is by trying to use "Surprise! Your Dead!" rare super attacks or the equally rare chance that given 4 targets, the size of your party, they will all chose to hit just one. Neither of these senarios features much intelgence nor does it dictate any strategy or stance player should take (beyond "overwhelming forces"). In any event, you are left with no strategy to play with. No tactics to leverage. No action to minimize risks or maximize bonuses. Simply put: there are no real decisions in DQ8. You either determin in the first round if you can win or leave.
DQ8 tries to promote mindless "grinding". This sort of aimless wandering around hoping for random encounters is an artifact any level based system which DQ8 is strongly tied into. Nominally, grinding happens when a player "lucks out" or out flanks the game to arrive a place the game didn't content on seeing at this particular time or level. The problem with DQ8 and their guerilla style strategy is that by the time you disembark a city, travel to the dungeon entrance, work your way to the bottom of a dungeon, spending resources and energy along the way to do so, it is too late to show the player "Oops, you should have been a higher level!" Grinding should be tuned and supressed as much as possible. Tasked based quest systems give much more satisfaction than vague "see you when you get there" systems DQ8 uses.
Randomly wandering around, randonly bumping into creatures that may randomly kill you off just isn't fun. I seriously question they were fun back in the "old school" days too (I don't ever seem to remember thinking "oh joy! another random encounter" in any console RPG). We now have the knowledge and technology to actually instill some more complex logic and real challenges into games instead of relying on random acts of "fickle fate" to try to trip up players. If I wanted to play a game that featued such randomness, I would rather play poker.
DQ8 is a great looking game. The plot is sometimes amusing even if it is cheesey RPG fare. The music is a bit repetive but otherwise is awesome. I even like the touch that the SFX are old school. It is the wet dream of a designer who lived 20+ years ago who thought this is how these games should look like. The problem is we are play this game now instead of then and are left wonder "Why is this fun?"
I do agree that it isn't the "attempt to generate human cloning" isn't at issue here (there is an issue but that is another/. post for another day). The issue is simply this: To find a readily available source of material, did he asked his subordinates to provide the material? How much of this is "asked" vs "ordered" vs "threat" vs "we do this or fail" we may never find out. Considering if you are a research assistent working on your Ph.D under him and he approached you for tissue. If you say "yes" then the research goes on, your doctorate based upon helping write up the research, and a glowing letter of recommendation. If you turn him down, not only is there a risk the project could be a wash (weak research to write a paper on) but he may flunk you/not write a letter of recommendation/etc. By crossing the line and asking to experiment on his subordinates, he has put his subordinates in a seriously comprised position and possibly tainted the observed results which we may now find out to be fabricated.
The complaint is about a leader using their power to abuse their subordinates which is highly unethical in *any field*.
It sounds to me like Napster is bemoaning the fact it isn't sitting where iTunes happens to be (read: on top). It seems to me that the market has spoken: They favor "buy it" or "subscription" based music systems. On the other hand the music industry continues to bemoan the fact too that they are overpricing their product. There is a giantic market for the $0.99 song market and yet they want to continue to produce that costs $1.29? Why is it this the consumer's fault? Maybe it is because consumers really don't think that very few songs are worth $1.29??
It seems to me that the companies who aren't in control of the market are bemoaning they don't have control of the market and can't dictate terms to Apple. They of course can continue to run their businesses in whatever manner they chose to but don't be surprised if they have to fold because they continue to ignore what consumers flock to buy.
The PS2 Emotion Engine has the same design philosophy: choosing to do small memory/cache in favor for very wide bandwidth. It makes for some interesting programming juggling and kung-fu since the data comes straight from memory dumped to the graphics so nothing is cached. The results speak for themselves since the PS2 is the oldest and the most dated performance the fact that the performance is extremely dynamic and probably *still not maxed*. People are still pulling tricks that no one could predict the PS2 to do. I suspect we wouldn't have games on the PS2 like GT4 or the beautiful Shadow of the Collosius if it had been made with more cache yet small bandwidth.
I like this move. Code signing of Active X controls will be more effective, since all code will have to signed before execution. Plus I.E. 7 has capability to create Whitelist of certain trusted signers, and reject everything else. See Do you Code Sign ??? for more details.
Digital signatures are only a security feature in that the publisher can guarentee that their data has not been modified in transmittion to you. It does not indicate the quality of the data. It was never meant to seperate software from malware. It is purely a traceablity mechanism whether it comes from Respectable Software.Net or Dubious Malware LLC.
Also forcing the user to build whitelists will be yet another "force the user configure their security" mechanism that we've seen fail many times over. Either an action is secure or it isn't. It should never be determined by commitee.
...for users to figure out. Its all "Internet" as far as they can figure out: Very few can define let alone know what a "Local Intranet" is or rarely have a reason to browse there (most home users have 1 maybe 2 machines which don't usually host web pages + hardware with Web Control interfaces). Both "Trusted Sites" and "Restricted Sites" are backwards concepts because you don't know if a "new site" is trustworthy or not till you get there which at that point maybe too late.
Very few home users can understand what these groupings mean let alone use them in a defensive manner that isn't intrusive. To make matters worse, its all optional (except for the "Internet" zone which is "all sites that don't fall into the other categories).
Since a user can easily be mislead or goof up the configuration it should be abandoned. You either can perform a function while browsing or you can't. Trying to place web sites into buckets its a chore the user doesn't like nor do they understand where dubious people will end up tricking them anyway.
Home computer security tools are a mess. Settings are not only obtuse they are optional. Unless you do a lot of homework to understand what some settings do users will often ignore warnings and settings just to get their computer to stop pestering them.
Why are these things optional? Very few use the exploits found all over XP in constructive way so why ask "Do you want to do this?" Why are warnings obscure and scary? A user doesn't like a little yellow flashing shield in their window. They will like it even less when the user clicks on it and are bombarded with techno-babble. Both of these things conspire to make users chose the wrong things. Especially when hackers provide a seemingly pleasant alternative.
These things don't have to be engineered this way and yet we continue to march down this road in XP.
Slashdot just wanted to post this 'story' because they wanted to be able to laugh at MS and pretend the evil giant was on its knees because all Xbox 360s are defective. MS has it coming once in a while and deserves to be bashed but in this instance it's the MS-haters who sound like drooling fanboys.
On the contrary, MS wanted to hype up the XBox 360 release. They are pumping money and time into getting people to closely look the XBox 360. Their intention was to get people to consider buying one of these things but what they got was some critism. They are drawing attention to any problems themselves.
So congrats to Microsoft...it worked. People are closely looking at the XBox 360 and noticing less than desirable things in real world usage. It seems like more of a hardware problem than a software one so it is going to be interesting how they approach any fix.
If you believe reading is the easy bit then look at Html. As "specified" as W3 has made Html no two browsers render many pieces of data the same way.
As I said before, it is interesting they are specifying how to write out proper Office Xml but it is somewhat meaningless for everyone but Office to understand how to read it properly. We can understand the heck out of how to write files and still end up with a lot of tinkering on how to read it in where two implementations interpt the format differently.
They are fully and openly specifying how to write all of the Office formats. While this is good, it does nothing for the other important half which is reading. They clearly don't want all applications to perfectly files generated by some software. This tatic seems to guarentees that at least one product will "clean" as well as special Office formats: Office itself.
I suppose people can take the information on how to write a valid "clean" Office format to make better format translators but we are still hosed for various random files that will be generated and only readible in sanctioned applications.
Its democratic dream offers no defence against viruses, spammers, criminals, hucksters or deranged individuals. Rummaging about in Usenet is like slumming through the tenderloin district during the plague years -- your chances of catching a computer virus or a handful of invitations to unspeakable sexual acts is much greater than finding what you were looking for in the first place.
Not like the web supported internet at all right? Web pages offer defenses against virus, spammers, criminals, cheats, liars and swindlers! All web pages offer clear and concise information! You can never catch a virus from the web! And the web is chalk full of explicit stuff?
Err...wait, what are they complaining about again that they want to get rid of Web..er..I mean Usenet? It seems to me both are different implementations that exhibit the same problems. If one wants to complain that offering Usenet is an expensive service they can no longer offer at cost that is one thing. It is something silly to suggest that Usenet has to be sacked because it offers the same problems the Internet in general features.
This kind of goes to both products (Office 12 and Open Office) but why can't they support all sorts of different configurations? Open Office should strive to be the best office productivity suite it can by while offering any number of UI configurations. Open Office shouldn't strive to copy MS products. Instead they should strive to be more agile and flexible than MS.
Decent remote administration tools? Nice infrastructure for deployment? Like what? SUS/WSUS? This still requires users sitting at their machines to do something which invariably will lead to woe because a few will do the wrong things. Nudging users to do system maintance is not a very good plan to do system maintaince.
I'm trying to not sound antagonistic but the tools to do enterprise wide Windows administration I have priced out are not cheap at all. Also many seem to ignore the cost of "the givens" like "corporate editions" of your favorite AV software. It all adds up to compared to the tools available for free or out of the box in many unix systems.
In any event, the "study" is somewhat misleading. I can bet that the setup for a Linux machine in a serving capcity is longer and trickier than a Win2k3 machine. But once it is done, this is shocking for some, it is done. The maintaince profile and impact is lower for Linux than Win2k3 by quite abit.
One of the classic problems with file systems is "where do I put stuff?" In an even more ironic twist is that the desktop represents some part of the file system which doesn't correlate directly to the file system (the desktop is the first thing you see and yet is not "the first file system"). Ultimately one of the more frustrating support issues is finding lost stuff. People may claim "it is the user's fault for not having better organizational skills" but wait...isn't the computer there to assist with this in the first place?
A simple use case is "I want to save 'file type a'". A simple question relatating to this is "where should this be?" for which any number of people will have any number of answers. And the OS isn't going to help because its answer is "anywhere you have permission". One user will place it in a directory "My FileTypeAs". Another will place it on the desktop (where ever that ends up being). Another will bury it 4 deep in a structure they only understand. So on and so forth. It creates a situation where there are unwritten (and unenforcable) rules on what to place where. If the rules change, then all of the old data runs the risk of being misplaced or lost while it is refiled.
Enter the idea of 'type managers'. This is a view on files of a given type that is customized to everything in for that data type. It knows how to "view" the data type. It knows how to store that data type. It knows how to search on that data type. Currently in the "explorer style" file manager, you have one frame that is trying to interpt all the possible types of files on the file system trying to deal with any number of metadata types which it might not be able process. In the type manager system, if you want to find images one would use the Image Manager and search much like Google/GMail. No more searching the entire file system in a haphazard manner or other mnemonics to try organize in order to leave a trail of bread crumbs back to the files. MP3s don't exist in the world of the Image Manager so it never has to deal with them. If you used the Image Manager to save the file then you know it is in the system and it will be located.
Most of us already use one popular type manager: your favorite Email program. To read or write email you aren't bothered with most storage details (imagine if you were forced to "save to the send box"). In fact any time you pull it out of the Email program to the file system or something else (like a printer), you create more work for yourself. Your email program is more than able to track and handle Email than any "explorer" can. It knows about Junk Mail, friends, threads, and all of the other Email centric paterns that an "explorer" just couldn't handle. And specifically GMail gets it right by avoiding the "folder file system" idea.
The best system would be to have both a "file manager" and many numbers of "type managers". The best UI systems allow for power users to play with toys without crippling novice users. Power Users would rather use the file manager and track things themselves but the cost of this shouldn't be that novice users end up losing things and being frustrated.
It could be bad timing (who has time to play other stuff with Soul Calibur 3 and a stack of other games?) or a lack of really interesting release titles (ie. the killer app like Ridge Racer was) but something is amiss. I feel that MS, in their zeal to get the thing out before "anyone" else could get theirs out they are missing some magic in their games. Maybe if they had held off for 6 more months and really got some special stuff that shows the features of the XBox 360 over just the XBox there might be something interesting going on.
An interesting thing to note is that the XBox came in just as MMOGs are starting hit their stride. The XBox 360 will be the first system introduced with this effect stronly in play. This should be a good litmus on how MMOGs effect "buy once, play once" games and their systems. I'm not suggesting doom or gloom for either but it will be something to note.
ps. I have a sneaking suspicion that XBox 360 is heading for the same road of ruin in East Asia. Has anyone out there heard anything about how they are handling release events?? Or is MS going to again ignore the second largest market and arguably source of stellar console talent?
Using a NAT as a security feature is based on the "security through obscurity" idea. The fact it isn't trivial to know what is on the otherside of the NAT component can lead people to think they are secure which leads to woe. A hidden network doesn't make that network secure.
A Network Admin should always use NAT for what it is designed to do: compact network address management. It is however *not* a security feature of the network. You need to use network security practices and devices to pull that off. Anyone claiming they want to stick to IPv4 for "NAT security" is some what misguided in what its purpose and place in the network.
Is there anything in IPv6 that says you can't do network address translation? I don't believe so but I'm not sure since like most it hasn't been deployed so it isn't an issue. NAT is a good idea simply because it helps manage network traffic and topology, reguardless of your address space.
So I guess they are right: RedHat won't support a patch from out of the blue (say a patch I made for my ultra-custom setup) without testing (which might cost RH consult billable time).
But that isn't a big deal because MS doesn't either. It isn't like MS will support driver modification from ATI let alone anything I could come up with either so what is the advantage of MS's way?
Bubbles happen when people oversell something. The key thing everyone needs to realize is that Open Source isn't a 'magic bullet' or a 'plentacia'. Work, time, and money, in short capital, needs to be spent to use Open Source right along with every other closed source solution. I believe in the long run for various problems Open Source is easily better investment. There are other problems where Open Source will have a hard time showing return on investment. In either event, one should never oversell the technology.
So here is the queston: Is any other vendor out there creating a Dot Com bubble? Or could they have created the previous Dot Com bubble?? Yes I'm thinking about Microsoft: Did MS oversell its technology in the 90s which allowed people to believe they could build anything cheaply, securely, etc?
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Unless its found there (on The Moon), it is really expensive to ship it there. So sending millions of tons of coal and oxygen (remember you need to *burn* it) to The Moon is not economically reasonable. There is also the problem that a coal fire power plant on The Moon have to function differently than one on Earth .
So you are quite right: Going with technology of today a fission pebble bed reactor makes a lot of sense. The only way to get better and safer reactors is to build and learn from designs. Being on The Moon, any problems will be magnified so safety and super reliability will be required. Once again, this technology is useful for future inhabitants of The Moon but these advances in nuclear power will have benifits for the rest on Earth with safer, more fault tolerant power plants.
This would be akin to having the anology of cars without modern safety features. "Personally, I have NEVER had a serious injury while driving any car because I take simple preventative measures like buying seat belts, safety glass, and air bags." The question one should be asking is why does the user have to buy "seat belts, safety glass, and air bags" for their computer in the first place?? Shouldn't these things be standard features? Turning around responsiblity to the user is allowing MS off the hook. Users are using Windows as designed and getting sometimes serious malfunctions. It would be one thing if people were abusing their machines and breaking them. It is something else to be normally surfing the internet, reading email, or doing any other nominal activity and hitting a serious problem that leaves their system bare to the hackers. This is squarely Microsoft's problem not the users!!
I'm tired of this kind of applogetic excusing for Microsoft. As much as people want to blame the users, its still all in MS's lap since many of the problems stem from software doing things that it should never be allowed to do in the first place. AV software, hardware and software firewalls, malware scanners...its all a hack to stop users from breaking their machines doing normal operations because MS won't or can't engineer a system that disallows it.
Years of experience on other systems have shown that computers are complex machines with complex interactions all of which are prone to error and worst exploit if not carefully designed. On the other hand Microsoft sold most of the world on the promise that Windows is as easy to use as a VCR and requires just as much maintaince and look at where we are. We have to throw more and more money and time into work arounds while MS takes longer and longer to fix up things. Why aren't more people asking why does Windows work this way?
The tracking isn't bad but it is when "they" are being devious about such activity. If a user understands that iTunes or WMP reports usage, and I mean more than the "blindly clicking 'Ok', shrink wrap stuff" then it is fine and may even have some use and value. If someone iTunes/WMP notices a pattern and starts offering better selections to that user then everyone is happy. If on the other hand the application starts snooping around for music squirrled away on the machine to tell someone what songs you have and have not purchased through that mechanism, that can be used to incriminate someone.
Trust is the key where full disclosure is the mechanism. The clearer these guys are on what their applications are doing the better off we all are.
Setup on a fresh Windows install is not that easy. The correlary to this is that Linux isn't that hard to install now either.
The last 3 machines that Linux went on worked "out of the box" (pop the disk into the drive and follow the on screen instructions). I could have cut down the number of screens I saw and "Next" buttons to hit if I was doing this dozens of times by using other mechanisms. The last time I helped my parents through a reinstall was a nightmare mostly because they thought they had all of the drivers when in actuallity they didn't. It really isn't there fault due to the fact that every vendor has their own driver set that is scattered in a giant stack of CDs I know is sitting on a self next to the machine. They know the disk is in there somewhere if only they can find it... Hey wait, isn't this what technology is supposed to solve?
I haven't tried it yet, but I have this sneaking suspicion my parents can figure out the latest installs for Fedora and SuSE. When it comes to reinstalling Windows XP I just tell them to call support. It isn't that they can't figure out how to install XP but finding all of the components and doing it in a safe manner is a chore.
It could be worse yet: "XBox 360: Jump in the seaman ship"
The problem MS has with their patching strategy is that problems are not one size fits all. There are things in various parts of Windows and other MS products that are low priority to update and will not be happy if I have to push out something out of cycle. On the other hand, there are very serious critical flaws that are very high priority that I would like to have immediately and would push out to every machine I could find immediately.
All problems are not the same quality or severity so why is MS trying to treat them as such?
Wikipedia is exactly as advertised: Wikipedia is a multilingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser.
Because it is based upon free-content, anyone can "correct it". Because it based upon free-content, multiple view points will come into conflict. Because its on the Internet, it has a high degree of annonymity which is great sometimes (it levels the playing field, anyone can contribute) but not so great when you actually want to verify (how does one actually check if someone is an expert as opposed to a jerk). How do you even identify "good articles"? How do you identify people screwing them up? All of this takes people and capital. Time and money donated. And once again because it isn't some utopian ideal some want to raze it. Whatever....
It would be one thing if you don't want to contribute to Wikipedia because you simply don't want too but to claim it is broken is highly erronious. It is functioning exactly as discrbied with warts and all.
...and the best arguement why many "old school" ideas should be left at home. DQ8 is simply not challenging because they embraced many old school concepts instead of washing their hands of it or improving upon them.
DQ8 combat engine is simplistic. I mean dirt simple to the point you can predict with "in your head math" whether you can win the fight or should flee before damage is even exchanged. This leaves a system where the only way one can challenge the player is by trying to use "Surprise! Your Dead!" rare super attacks or the equally rare chance that given 4 targets, the size of your party, they will all chose to hit just one. Neither of these senarios features much intelgence nor does it dictate any strategy or stance player should take (beyond "overwhelming forces"). In any event, you are left with no strategy to play with. No tactics to leverage. No action to minimize risks or maximize bonuses. Simply put: there are no real decisions in DQ8. You either determin in the first round if you can win or leave.
DQ8 tries to promote mindless "grinding". This sort of aimless wandering around hoping for random encounters is an artifact any level based system which DQ8 is strongly tied into. Nominally, grinding happens when a player "lucks out" or out flanks the game to arrive a place the game didn't content on seeing at this particular time or level. The problem with DQ8 and their guerilla style strategy is that by the time you disembark a city, travel to the dungeon entrance, work your way to the bottom of a dungeon, spending resources and energy along the way to do so, it is too late to show the player "Oops, you should have been a higher level!" Grinding should be tuned and supressed as much as possible. Tasked based quest systems give much more satisfaction than vague "see you when you get there" systems DQ8 uses.
Randomly wandering around, randonly bumping into creatures that may randomly kill you off just isn't fun. I seriously question they were fun back in the "old school" days too (I don't ever seem to remember thinking "oh joy! another random encounter" in any console RPG). We now have the knowledge and technology to actually instill some more complex logic and real challenges into games instead of relying on random acts of "fickle fate" to try to trip up players. If I wanted to play a game that featued such randomness, I would rather play poker.
DQ8 is a great looking game. The plot is sometimes amusing even if it is cheesey RPG fare. The music is a bit repetive but otherwise is awesome. I even like the touch that the SFX are old school. It is the wet dream of a designer who lived 20+ years ago who thought this is how these games should look like. The problem is we are play this game now instead of then and are left wonder "Why is this fun?"
I do agree that it isn't the "attempt to generate human cloning" isn't at issue here (there is an issue but that is another /. post for another day). The issue is simply this: To find a readily available source of material, did he asked his subordinates to provide the material? How much of this is "asked" vs "ordered" vs "threat" vs "we do this or fail" we may never find out. Considering if you are a research assistent working on your Ph.D under him and he approached you for tissue. If you say "yes" then the research goes on, your doctorate based upon helping write up the research, and a glowing letter of recommendation. If you turn him down, not only is there a risk the project could be a wash (weak research to write a paper on) but he may flunk you/not write a letter of recommendation/etc. By crossing the line and asking to experiment on his subordinates, he has put his subordinates in a seriously comprised position and possibly tainted the observed results which we may now find out to be fabricated.
The complaint is about a leader using their power to abuse their subordinates which is highly unethical in *any field*.
It sounds to me like Napster is bemoaning the fact it isn't sitting where iTunes happens to be (read: on top). It seems to me that the market has spoken: They favor "buy it" or "subscription" based music systems. On the other hand the music industry continues to bemoan the fact too that they are overpricing their product. There is a giantic market for the $0.99 song market and yet they want to continue to produce that costs $1.29? Why is it this the consumer's fault? Maybe it is because consumers really don't think that very few songs are worth $1.29??
It seems to me that the companies who aren't in control of the market are bemoaning they don't have control of the market and can't dictate terms to Apple. They of course can continue to run their businesses in whatever manner they chose to but don't be surprised if they have to fold because they continue to ignore what consumers flock to buy.
The PS2 Emotion Engine has the same design philosophy: choosing to do small memory/cache in favor for very wide bandwidth. It makes for some interesting programming juggling and kung-fu since the data comes straight from memory dumped to the graphics so nothing is cached. The results speak for themselves since the PS2 is the oldest and the most dated performance the fact that the performance is extremely dynamic and probably *still not maxed*. People are still pulling tricks that no one could predict the PS2 to do. I suspect we wouldn't have games on the PS2 like GT4 or the beautiful Shadow of the Collosius if it had been made with more cache yet small bandwidth.
Digital signatures are only a security feature in that the publisher can guarentee that their data has not been modified in transmittion to you. It does not indicate the quality of the data. It was never meant to seperate software from malware. It is purely a traceablity mechanism whether it comes from Respectable Software.Net or Dubious Malware LLC.
Also forcing the user to build whitelists will be yet another "force the user configure their security" mechanism that we've seen fail many times over. Either an action is secure or it isn't. It should never be determined by commitee.
...for users to figure out. Its all "Internet" as far as they can figure out: Very few can define let alone know what a "Local Intranet" is or rarely have a reason to browse there (most home users have 1 maybe 2 machines which don't usually host web pages + hardware with Web Control interfaces). Both "Trusted Sites" and "Restricted Sites" are backwards concepts because you don't know if a "new site" is trustworthy or not till you get there which at that point maybe too late.
Very few home users can understand what these groupings mean let alone use them in a defensive manner that isn't intrusive. To make matters worse, its all optional (except for the "Internet" zone which is "all sites that don't fall into the other categories).
Since a user can easily be mislead or goof up the configuration it should be abandoned. You either can perform a function while browsing or you can't. Trying to place web sites into buckets its a chore the user doesn't like nor do they understand where dubious people will end up tricking them anyway.
Home computer security tools are a mess. Settings are not only obtuse they are optional. Unless you do a lot of homework to understand what some settings do users will often ignore warnings and settings just to get their computer to stop pestering them.
Why are these things optional? Very few use the exploits found all over XP in constructive way so why ask "Do you want to do this?" Why are warnings obscure and scary? A user doesn't like a little yellow flashing shield in their window. They will like it even less when the user clicks on it and are bombarded with techno-babble. Both of these things conspire to make users chose the wrong things. Especially when hackers provide a seemingly pleasant alternative.
These things don't have to be engineered this way and yet we continue to march down this road in XP.
On the contrary, MS wanted to hype up the XBox 360 release. They are pumping money and time into getting people to closely look the XBox 360. Their intention was to get people to consider buying one of these things but what they got was some critism. They are drawing attention to any problems themselves.
So congrats to Microsoft...it worked. People are closely looking at the XBox 360 and noticing less than desirable things in real world usage. It seems like more of a hardware problem than a software one so it is going to be interesting how they approach any fix.
If you believe reading is the easy bit then look at Html. As "specified" as W3 has made Html no two browsers render many pieces of data the same way.
As I said before, it is interesting they are specifying how to write out proper Office Xml but it is somewhat meaningless for everyone but Office to understand how to read it properly. We can understand the heck out of how to write files and still end up with a lot of tinkering on how to read it in where two implementations interpt the format differently.
They are fully and openly specifying how to write all of the Office formats. While this is good, it does nothing for the other important half which is reading. They clearly don't want all applications to perfectly files generated by some software. This tatic seems to guarentees that at least one product will "clean" as well as special Office formats: Office itself.
I suppose people can take the information on how to write a valid "clean" Office format to make better format translators but we are still hosed for various random files that will be generated and only readible in sanctioned applications.
Not like the web supported internet at all right? Web pages offer defenses against virus, spammers, criminals, cheats, liars and swindlers! All web pages offer clear and concise information! You can never catch a virus from the web! And the web is chalk full of explicit stuff?
Err...wait, what are they complaining about again that they want to get rid of Web..er..I mean Usenet? It seems to me both are different implementations that exhibit the same problems. If one wants to complain that offering Usenet is an expensive service they can no longer offer at cost that is one thing. It is something silly to suggest that Usenet has to be sacked because it offers the same problems the Internet in general features.
Or maybe they should try a fourth option:
4) All of the above
This kind of goes to both products (Office 12 and Open Office) but why can't they support all sorts of different configurations? Open Office should strive to be the best office productivity suite it can by while offering any number of UI configurations. Open Office shouldn't strive to copy MS products. Instead they should strive to be more agile and flexible than MS.
Decent remote administration tools? Nice infrastructure for deployment? Like what? SUS/WSUS? This still requires users sitting at their machines to do something which invariably will lead to woe because a few will do the wrong things. Nudging users to do system maintance is not a very good plan to do system maintaince.
I'm trying to not sound antagonistic but the tools to do enterprise wide Windows administration I have priced out are not cheap at all. Also many seem to ignore the cost of "the givens" like "corporate editions" of your favorite AV software. It all adds up to compared to the tools available for free or out of the box in many unix systems.
In any event, the "study" is somewhat misleading. I can bet that the setup for a Linux machine in a serving capcity is longer and trickier than a Win2k3 machine. But once it is done, this is shocking for some, it is done. The maintaince profile and impact is lower for Linux than Win2k3 by quite abit.
One of the classic problems with file systems is "where do I put stuff?" In an even more ironic twist is that the desktop represents some part of the file system which doesn't correlate directly to the file system (the desktop is the first thing you see and yet is not "the first file system"). Ultimately one of the more frustrating support issues is finding lost stuff. People may claim "it is the user's fault for not having better organizational skills" but wait...isn't the computer there to assist with this in the first place?
A simple use case is "I want to save 'file type a'". A simple question relatating to this is "where should this be?" for which any number of people will have any number of answers. And the OS isn't going to help because its answer is "anywhere you have permission". One user will place it in a directory "My FileTypeAs". Another will place it on the desktop (where ever that ends up being). Another will bury it 4 deep in a structure they only understand. So on and so forth. It creates a situation where there are unwritten (and unenforcable) rules on what to place where. If the rules change, then all of the old data runs the risk of being misplaced or lost while it is refiled.
Enter the idea of 'type managers'. This is a view on files of a given type that is customized to everything in for that data type. It knows how to "view" the data type. It knows how to store that data type. It knows how to search on that data type. Currently in the "explorer style" file manager, you have one frame that is trying to interpt all the possible types of files on the file system trying to deal with any number of metadata types which it might not be able process. In the type manager system, if you want to find images one would use the Image Manager and search much like Google/GMail. No more searching the entire file system in a haphazard manner or other mnemonics to try organize in order to leave a trail of bread crumbs back to the files. MP3s don't exist in the world of the Image Manager so it never has to deal with them. If you used the Image Manager to save the file then you know it is in the system and it will be located.
Most of us already use one popular type manager: your favorite Email program. To read or write email you aren't bothered with most storage details (imagine if you were forced to "save to the send box"). In fact any time you pull it out of the Email program to the file system or something else (like a printer), you create more work for yourself. Your email program is more than able to track and handle Email than any "explorer" can. It knows about Junk Mail, friends, threads, and all of the other Email centric paterns that an "explorer" just couldn't handle. And specifically GMail gets it right by avoiding the "folder file system" idea.
The best system would be to have both a "file manager" and many numbers of "type managers". The best UI systems allow for power users to play with toys without crippling novice users. Power Users would rather use the file manager and track things themselves but the cost of this shouldn't be that novice users end up losing things and being frustrated.
XBox 360? What is that?
It could be bad timing (who has time to play other stuff with Soul Calibur 3 and a stack of other games?) or a lack of really interesting release titles (ie. the killer app like Ridge Racer was) but something is amiss. I feel that MS, in their zeal to get the thing out before "anyone" else could get theirs out they are missing some magic in their games. Maybe if they had held off for 6 more months and really got some special stuff that shows the features of the XBox 360 over just the XBox there might be something interesting going on.
An interesting thing to note is that the XBox came in just as MMOGs are starting hit their stride. The XBox 360 will be the first system introduced with this effect stronly in play. This should be a good litmus on how MMOGs effect "buy once, play once" games and their systems. I'm not suggesting doom or gloom for either but it will be something to note.
ps. I have a sneaking suspicion that XBox 360 is heading for the same road of ruin in East Asia. Has anyone out there heard anything about how they are handling release events?? Or is MS going to again ignore the second largest market and arguably source of stellar console talent?
Using a NAT as a security feature is based on the "security through obscurity" idea. The fact it isn't trivial to know what is on the otherside of the NAT component can lead people to think they are secure which leads to woe. A hidden network doesn't make that network secure.
A Network Admin should always use NAT for what it is designed to do: compact network address management. It is however *not* a security feature of the network. You need to use network security practices and devices to pull that off. Anyone claiming they want to stick to IPv4 for "NAT security" is some what misguided in what its purpose and place in the network.
Is there anything in IPv6 that says you can't do network address translation? I don't believe so but I'm not sure since like most it hasn't been deployed so it isn't an issue. NAT is a good idea simply because it helps manage network traffic and topology, reguardless of your address space.
So I guess they are right: RedHat won't support a patch from out of the blue (say a patch I made for my ultra-custom setup) without testing (which might cost RH consult billable time).
But that isn't a big deal because MS doesn't either. It isn't like MS will support driver modification from ATI let alone anything I could come up with either so what is the advantage of MS's way?
Bubbles happen when people oversell something. The key thing everyone needs to realize is that Open Source isn't a 'magic bullet' or a 'plentacia'. Work, time, and money, in short capital, needs to be spent to use Open Source right along with every other closed source solution. I believe in the long run for various problems Open Source is easily better investment. There are other problems where Open Source will have a hard time showing return on investment. In either event, one should never oversell the technology.
So here is the queston: Is any other vendor out there creating a Dot Com bubble? Or could they have created the previous Dot Com bubble?? Yes I'm thinking about Microsoft: Did MS oversell its technology in the 90s which allowed people to believe they could build anything cheaply, securely, etc?