Video games don't even have to obey the laws of physics, much less national and local laws. It's nice if they can at least obey the laws of Cartoon Physics consistently, for whatever version of that they choose to implement.
Is there a Japanese-localized version of Grand Theft Auto?
A large percentage of video games involve killing people, which is generally illegal, often using weapons which would be illegal in the countries the games are sold in (if the laws of physics allowed your BFG-9000 and Death Ray to exist.) Also, a number of countries have laws affecting who can get married, and this game certainly isn't implementing lots of checks on whether you've been married before or are a citizen or whatever.
They went out of their way to write code to disallow same-sex marriage; if they hadn't checked for it, it should have worked fine. It's a different case than not including polygamy, where you have to take a whole bunch of data structures that have two entries and expand them to larger numbers (but not larger than four, if you're in a Muslim country.)
_xeno_ commented below that the real reason it's there is that the marriage feature leads to children, and that was breaking on the code for identifying the parents of the child (what, Heather has two mommies?) Ok, so this was a cheap-ass fix, but it wouldn't have been that much work to do a better fix; if nothing else, don't allow same-sex couples to have kids, instead of not allowing them to get married. Still unrealistic, but less so.
Apparently "Dead" means "still close to half the phones being sold", aka "doesn't want to go in the cart!" Sure, they aren't gettin' better, but they're not dead yet.
"Feature Phone" is a standard industry term - it means phones that do more than basic calling, and often have installable applications, but aren't based on the iPhone/Android touchscreen designs that have taken over the market and usually don't run general-purpose operating systems (except maybe Symbian.) Most of them either don't have web browsing, or have some crippled-HTML-substitute like WAP. They're usually smaller (remember when being the smallest phone you could get meant it was the fanciest and most expensive?), often have clamshell designs, sometimes keyboards, and actually fit in your pocket.
You can read RFIDs, so you can copy them. They're just bits. The problem is that the typical individual doesn't have the knowledge or want to spend the money for the equipment to copy an RFID. (Though given what car dealers seem to charge to duplicate RFID+mechanical keys, it's tempting to spend the cash on an RFID reader and burner instead.)
What I want, though, is a key that's waterproof. If I'm going to do something that'll get me soaking wet, like surfing or boating, I don't want to have to carry around some electronic keying system that can't cope with salt water, like the remote control for my current car. (If I'd gotten the highest-priced trim package with the car, it would have come with a pushbutton combination door lock, which would have been nice, but would only have come with the bigger engine, not the gas-efficient one.)
It's less true now than 10 years ago, but it used to be you need some old-timers around because they were the only ones who knew Smalltalk, which was the fast way to prototype and build the GUI system, while the C++/Java/Whatever programmers were building the database backend. The GUI might later get rewritten in something else, but it was designed in Smalltalk (or Insert-favorite-LISP-dialect-here.)
My wife used to work for a company with a French president and an Italian engineering VP, and while very few people came in with hangovers, it was company policy that when the World Cup was happening, don't expect any of the European-background employees to be awake during California hours because they were up watching the games live.
What surprises me about it is that they're still having the party even though they've got 300 employees. My experience watching startups in Silicon Valley over the last few decades is that the typical pattern is that somewhere between 100 and 200 employees, the company hires a professional HR department instead of doing it informally, and the first thing the HR department does is shut down the beer party.
The purpose of the beer party isn't drinking beer. It's getting everybody to hang around and socialize and have unfocused discussions about what they're doing. It's especially valuable after the company reaches the first dozen or two people, because cross-organizational discussions tend to slow down by that point, and you desperately need them.
And if you're the old-timer joining the group? You really want to be at that beer party, because you'll have heard all those discussions a dozen times before at your previous companies, and you've got a lot to add. (On the other hand, you don't actually need to go to Burning Man with them, and going skiing depends on whether you're the skiing type; at one of my wife's previous startups, the 50-somethings were more likely to be skiers than the kids.)
Most traffic light controllers used to be relatively immune to hacking; if they weren't the dumb relay versions, they had at most a 4-bit microcontroller. Some of the newer systems can do a lot more, coordinating timing and the like, but with the older ones, the most you could do was emulate the emergency vehicle "make the lights green in my direction" feature.
But signs? Yeah, they've got potential. I've never been tempted to change them significantly, but some days I've really wanted to shorten 3-panel messages down to 1 or 2, so that you could figure out what they're trying to say while driving by at whatever speed the highway is doing.
In the US, "rubbing alcohol" usually refers to isopropyl alcohol, not ethanol, and it's medical-use purity. And you can absorb alcohol through your skin, so you wouldn't want toxic impurities in it.
That's different from "denatured alcohol", which is usually some combination of ethanol and things that are bad for you, and it's the version that's not food-grade, it's paint-thinner-grade solvent.
The strongest distilled ethanol-water combinations are about 96% ethanol, which has a lower boiling point than pure ethanol; if you want to get it any drier than that, you need to add some kind of other organic solvent such as benzene, so that you can boil off the alcohol-water-benzene mixture at an even lower temperature, leaving the ethanol and less or no water. But you're not normally going to do that for food-grade alcohols, because you don't want any remaining benzene, and because 96% is too strong to be actually drinkable anyway; maybe you'd want a stronger alcohol if you wanted to dissolve some flavoring that's less soluble with the remaining water content, but 96% is usually strong enough to do the job pretty well.
I've occasionally heated up liquor to pour over a dessert before flaming it. Brought it to near-boiling in the microwave, and carrying it over to the table where we were going to serve it was... entertaining. It goes right through your sinuses into your bloodstream, faster than drinking it, but I'd much rather drink it.
This powdered alcohol does keep telling you not to snort it; says it'll get you drunk but be unpleasant, and certainly with the flavored versions I'd expect that to be true. (Even with the unflavored ones, seems like a nose-ful of carbohydrates isn't really what you want.)
SSL has two parts that take a lot of time - key exchange using public-key technology, which just depends on the number of connections, and data encryption, which takes time proportional to the amount of data encrypted. Until the last few years, the key exchange time dominated, because public-key operations are slow and most use of SSL was for encrypting passwords, credit card numbers, or other very small chunks of data. It was pulling teeth to get a lot of sites to use SSL at all (though the whole Certificate Authority system is a lot to blame for that), and it was pulling teeth to get a lot of sites to encrypt more than just your login and credit card data (such as the whole page that asks for your login.)
Do you think speed doesn't matter any more, now that lots of sites are running with the CPU relatively idle? How many SSL connections do you use where the server has bothered to turn on PFS, the Perfect Forward Secrecy stuff that does a one-time Diffie-Hellman exchange? (Appallingly few.) How many sites do you connect to that are using 2048-bit public-key or longer? (Some, but hardly most.) It's still about performance.
You're the first person I've heard of who's gotten something positive out of Scientology (your existence:-). Hope you and your family can recover from the rest of it.
Back when I had a Psion 3A organizer, it was a great tool for taking notes on, though eventually the hardware died.
After that I used a series of Palm Pilot versions, which weren't as good - graffiti was slower than typing, and the text file editor could only handle notes up to 4KB, so I had to start new ones roughly monthly (though at least they did sync with Outlook pretty well.)
For the last decade or so I've been doing most of my work on Windows, so I just keep a Notepad text file open on my laptop all the time, and update the filename quarterly to keep an archive (though I haven't actually truncated the old part of the file in a few years, since Win7's Notepad can handle decently large files.) I back it up to various other media, and I suppose I could also back it up to my phone.
So is there any way to cache Ubuntu upgrades, which would let my large collection of virtual and physical lab machines all fetch them from the LAN instead of the each one having to drag them across its WAN? Might as well fetch the official copy just once, and have everything else update at gigabit speeds.
So if you're still around, and not just drive-by trolling, what do you recommend other than Ubuntu or Mint? (I'm not counting Mint because there's already a thread about that.)
JEOS (Just Enough Operating System) used to be a sub-version of Ubuntu, with a minimal server edition; anything else you wanted was an apt-get install away. But there hasn't been a real JEOS version since about 8.04 or so, and with virtual machines these days I have a need for a lot of small-disk-footprint VMs. Is there something that's relatively similar, with basic networking and maybe a LAMP stack?
It would be nice to have a basic X windows environment, but I don't need big piles of Gnome or KDE, and I definitely don't need OpenOffice or lots of the other fun tools. Thanks!
In this case I know it's some kind of privacy software, but typically "FooBatz Release 5.4c is out!!!" is some gaming application or whatever. A half-sentence or more in the Slashdot summary would help, and so would a FAQ that starts with a section of "What is FooBatz?" rather than with "Why won't Ver 5.4b build on Slackware?"
Am I trusting my tax data to online services? Fat chance. Too many people have my data already.
More precisely, my wife runs TurboTax, I run errands and fetch papers and caffeine. Back in the 80s, we went to H&R Block because of the complexity of moving expenses from my first post-college job, and my wife said "that looks easy", took the H&R Block tax prep course and did a year of working there, then a couple years at another tax/accounting company, then started her own tax business, using TurboTax and a laptop. It was a bit difficult to keep everything working, because TurboTax assumed you had a desktop PC with a real disk drive instead of floppies, but after a couple years of using RAMdoubler and disk compression, she was able to upgrade to a laptop that resembled what TurboTax needed. Eventually she went back to doing computer businesses and was able to get rid of most of her tax clients (and eventually all of them), but she's been doing the taxes in the years since then.
I think we're finally using the personal version of TurboTax by now; we used the tax-preparer version for many years because there were things the personal one just couldn't do or didn't do well (including importing previous years' data from the tax-preparer version, which kept us on that for a couple years after we would have switched.)
No, you actually have to fix the code to add bounds checking, or download a new version of OpenSSL (which probably gets you other fixes as well, unless you were already running the latest version.)
Recompiling OpenSSL with the proper flag isn't enough to do the job - there are people who've done that and had problems keeping OpenSSL stable on their platforms, and more importantly, that still doesn't stop the Heartbleed attack from causing trouble. You need to get the code not to try to fetch memory beyond the appropriate object's array bounds, though OpenSSL should also default to using malloc()/free() instead of rolling its own badly.
Back in the 90s and early 2000s I was consulting, so whether I wore a tie or not depended on the customer. The sales guy I worked with brought me along to one Japanese company in the late 90s, so I guessed conservative and wore a tie. They asked me not to do it again; they'd convinced their management that nobody in Silicon Valley wears ties, and didn't want anybody to mess that up:-)
I did wear a tie to a New Year's party recently, and I wore one to a trade show a year or so ago just because I hadn't had any excuse to wear a tie in ages.
Slashdot Mirror
Video games don't even have to obey the laws of physics, much less national and local laws. It's nice if they can at least obey the laws of Cartoon Physics consistently, for whatever version of that they choose to implement.
Is there a Japanese-localized version of Grand Theft Auto?
A large percentage of video games involve killing people, which is generally illegal, often using weapons which would be illegal in the countries the games are sold in (if the laws of physics allowed your BFG-9000 and Death Ray to exist.) Also, a number of countries have laws affecting who can get married, and this game certainly isn't implementing lots of checks on whether you've been married before or are a citizen or whatever.
They went out of their way to write code to disallow same-sex marriage; if they hadn't checked for it, it should have worked fine. It's a different case than not including polygamy, where you have to take a whole bunch of data structures that have two entries and expand them to larger numbers (but not larger than four, if you're in a Muslim country.)
_xeno_ commented below that the real reason it's there is that the marriage feature leads to children, and that was breaking on the code for identifying the parents of the child (what, Heather has two mommies?) Ok, so this was a cheap-ass fix, but it wouldn't have been that much work to do a better fix; if nothing else, don't allow same-sex couples to have kids, instead of not allowing them to get married. Still unrealistic, but less so.
If they hadn't done that, then it wouldn't have affected people who only wanted to do opposite-sex marriages.
Apparently "Dead" means "still close to half the phones being sold", aka "doesn't want to go in the cart!" Sure, they aren't gettin' better, but they're not dead yet.
"Feature Phone" is a standard industry term - it means phones that do more than basic calling, and often have installable applications, but aren't based on the iPhone/Android touchscreen designs that have taken over the market and usually don't run general-purpose operating systems (except maybe Symbian.) Most of them either don't have web browsing, or have some crippled-HTML-substitute like WAP. They're usually smaller (remember when being the smallest phone you could get meant it was the fanciest and most expensive?), often have clamshell designs, sometimes keyboards, and actually fit in your pocket.
You can read RFIDs, so you can copy them. They're just bits. The problem is that the typical individual doesn't have the knowledge or want to spend the money for the equipment to copy an RFID. (Though given what car dealers seem to charge to duplicate RFID+mechanical keys, it's tempting to spend the cash on an RFID reader and burner instead.)
What I want, though, is a key that's waterproof. If I'm going to do something that'll get me soaking wet, like surfing or boating, I don't want to have to carry around some electronic keying system that can't cope with salt water, like the remote control for my current car. (If I'd gotten the highest-priced trim package with the car, it would have come with a pushbutton combination door lock, which would have been nice, but would only have come with the bigger engine, not the gas-efficient one.)
It's less true now than 10 years ago, but it used to be you need some old-timers around because they were the only ones who knew Smalltalk, which was the fast way to prototype and build the GUI system, while the C++/Java/Whatever programmers were building the database backend. The GUI might later get rewritten in something else, but it was designed in Smalltalk (or Insert-favorite-LISP-dialect-here.)
My wife used to work for a company with a French president and an Italian engineering VP, and while very few people came in with hangovers, it was company policy that when the World Cup was happening, don't expect any of the European-background employees to be awake during California hours because they were up watching the games live.
What surprises me about it is that they're still having the party even though they've got 300 employees. My experience watching startups in Silicon Valley over the last few decades is that the typical pattern is that somewhere between 100 and 200 employees, the company hires a professional HR department instead of doing it informally, and the first thing the HR department does is shut down the beer party.
The purpose of the beer party isn't drinking beer. It's getting everybody to hang around and socialize and have unfocused discussions about what they're doing. It's especially valuable after the company reaches the first dozen or two people, because cross-organizational discussions tend to slow down by that point, and you desperately need them.
And if you're the old-timer joining the group? You really want to be at that beer party, because you'll have heard all those discussions a dozen times before at your previous companies, and you've got a lot to add. (On the other hand, you don't actually need to go to Burning Man with them, and going skiing depends on whether you're the skiing type; at one of my wife's previous startups, the 50-somethings were more likely to be skiers than the kids.)
Most traffic light controllers used to be relatively immune to hacking; if they weren't the dumb relay versions, they had at most a 4-bit microcontroller. Some of the newer systems can do a lot more, coordinating timing and the like, but with the older ones, the most you could do was emulate the emergency vehicle "make the lights green in my direction" feature.
But signs? Yeah, they've got potential. I've never been tempted to change them significantly, but some days I've really wanted to shorten 3-panel messages down to 1 or 2, so that you could figure out what they're trying to say while driving by at whatever speed the highway is doing.
In the US, "rubbing alcohol" usually refers to isopropyl alcohol, not ethanol, and it's medical-use purity. And you can absorb alcohol through your skin, so you wouldn't want toxic impurities in it.
That's different from "denatured alcohol", which is usually some combination of ethanol and things that are bad for you, and it's the version that's not food-grade, it's paint-thinner-grade solvent.
The strongest distilled ethanol-water combinations are about 96% ethanol, which has a lower boiling point than pure ethanol; if you want to get it any drier than that, you need to add some kind of other organic solvent such as benzene, so that you can boil off the alcohol-water-benzene mixture at an even lower temperature, leaving the ethanol and less or no water. But you're not normally going to do that for food-grade alcohols, because you don't want any remaining benzene, and because 96% is too strong to be actually drinkable anyway; maybe you'd want a stronger alcohol if you wanted to dissolve some flavoring that's less soluble with the remaining water content, but 96% is usually strong enough to do the job pretty well.
I've occasionally heated up liquor to pour over a dessert before flaming it. Brought it to near-boiling in the microwave, and carrying it over to the table where we were going to serve it was ... entertaining. It goes right through your sinuses into your bloodstream, faster than drinking it, but I'd much rather drink it.
This powdered alcohol does keep telling you not to snort it; says it'll get you drunk but be unpleasant, and certainly with the flavored versions I'd expect that to be true. (Even with the unflavored ones, seems like a nose-ful of carbohydrates isn't really what you want.)
SSL has two parts that take a lot of time - key exchange using public-key technology, which just depends on the number of connections, and data encryption, which takes time proportional to the amount of data encrypted. Until the last few years, the key exchange time dominated, because public-key operations are slow and most use of SSL was for encrypting passwords, credit card numbers, or other very small chunks of data. It was pulling teeth to get a lot of sites to use SSL at all (though the whole Certificate Authority system is a lot to blame for that), and it was pulling teeth to get a lot of sites to encrypt more than just your login and credit card data (such as the whole page that asks for your login.)
Do you think speed doesn't matter any more, now that lots of sites are running with the CPU relatively idle? How many SSL connections do you use where the server has bothered to turn on PFS, the Perfect Forward Secrecy stuff that does a one-time Diffie-Hellman exchange? (Appallingly few.) How many sites do you connect to that are using 2048-bit public-key or longer? (Some, but hardly most.) It's still about performance.
We'll see if they can get the original OpenSSL project leaders to accept their changes, or whether they'll end up with their own fork of the project.
And while OpenSSL isn't an OpenBSD project (unlike OpenSSH), it's a tool that OpenBSD uses.
You're the first person I've heard of who's gotten something positive out of Scientology (your existence :-). Hope you and your family can recover from the rest of it.
Back when I had a Psion 3A organizer, it was a great tool for taking notes on, though eventually the hardware died.
After that I used a series of Palm Pilot versions, which weren't as good - graffiti was slower than typing, and the text file editor could only handle notes up to 4KB, so I had to start new ones roughly monthly (though at least they did sync with Outlook pretty well.)
For the last decade or so I've been doing most of my work on Windows, so I just keep a Notepad text file open on my laptop all the time, and update the filename quarterly to keep an archive (though I haven't actually truncated the old part of the file in a few years, since Win7's Notepad can handle decently large files.) I back it up to various other media, and I suppose I could also back it up to my phone.
So is there any way to cache Ubuntu upgrades, which would let my large collection of virtual and physical lab machines all fetch them from the LAN instead of the each one having to drag them across its WAN? Might as well fetch the official copy just once, and have everything else update at gigabit speeds.
So if you're still around, and not just drive-by trolling, what do you recommend other than Ubuntu or Mint? (I'm not counting Mint because there's already a thread about that.)
All of the above.
I assume Tahr had to go retest everything with OpenSSL updated to avoid the Heartbleed bug?
JEOS (Just Enough Operating System) used to be a sub-version of Ubuntu, with a minimal server edition; anything else you wanted was an apt-get install away. But there hasn't been a real JEOS version since about 8.04 or so, and with virtual machines these days I have a need for a lot of small-disk-footprint VMs. Is there something that's relatively similar, with basic networking and maybe a LAMP stack?
It would be nice to have a basic X windows environment, but I don't need big piles of Gnome or KDE, and I definitely don't need OpenOffice or lots of the other fun tools. Thanks!
Ubuntu's Debian-based - how much work will it take to migrate this to Ubuntu?
In this case I know it's some kind of privacy software, but typically "FooBatz Release 5.4c is out!!!" is some gaming application or whatever. A half-sentence or more in the Slashdot summary would help, and so would a FAQ that starts with a section of "What is FooBatz?" rather than with "Why won't Ver 5.4b build on Slackware?"
Am I trusting my tax data to online services? Fat chance. Too many people have my data already.
More precisely, my wife runs TurboTax, I run errands and fetch papers and caffeine.
Back in the 80s, we went to H&R Block because of the complexity of moving expenses from my first post-college job, and my wife said "that looks easy", took the H&R Block tax prep course and did a year of working there, then a couple years at another tax/accounting company, then started her own tax business, using TurboTax and a laptop. It was a bit difficult to keep everything working, because TurboTax assumed you had a desktop PC with a real disk drive instead of floppies, but after a couple years of using RAMdoubler and disk compression, she was able to upgrade to a laptop that resembled what TurboTax needed. Eventually she went back to doing computer businesses and was able to get rid of most of her tax clients (and eventually all of them), but she's been doing the taxes in the years since then.
I think we're finally using the personal version of TurboTax by now; we used the tax-preparer version for many years because there were things the personal one just couldn't do or didn't do well (including importing previous years' data from the tax-preparer version, which kept us on that for a couple years after we would have switched.)
No, you actually have to fix the code to add bounds checking, or download a new version of OpenSSL (which probably gets you other fixes as well, unless you were already running the latest version.)
Recompiling OpenSSL with the proper flag isn't enough to do the job - there are people who've done that and had problems keeping OpenSSL stable on their platforms, and more importantly, that still doesn't stop the Heartbleed attack from causing trouble. You need to get the code not to try to fetch memory beyond the appropriate object's array bounds, though OpenSSL should also default to using malloc()/free() instead of rolling its own badly.
Back in the 90s and early 2000s I was consulting, so whether I wore a tie or not depended on the customer. The sales guy I worked with brought me along to one Japanese company in the late 90s, so I guessed conservative and wore a tie. They asked me not to do it again; they'd convinced their management that nobody in Silicon Valley wears ties, and didn't want anybody to mess that up :-)
I did wear a tie to a New Year's party recently, and I wore one to a trade show a year or so ago just because I hadn't had any excuse to wear a tie in ages.
Yes, Dr. Who wears ties any more. (Or at least, David Tennant and Matt Smith did; haven't seen the latest Doctor yet. Bow ties are cool, right?)