People don't buy upgrade versions of software for the experience of upgrading. Upgrade versions exist as monetary incentives. You're getting a break on the price of the new software for paying for the previous version.
It is certainly a pain in the ass to have to install the old version of your software just to install the upgrade version. This has not been the way it's worked in the past with MS operating systems. To argue that this change is not a pain in the ass is just being a pain in the ass. Stop that.
Person B has *something*, or can obtain/create *something*.
Person A pays Person B money in exchange for *something*.
It doesn't matter what that something is. Desirable is desirable. Opening up the database so that anybody could have anything at any time would eliminate all desire and the entire market.
I think you're missing the point that the thread starter essentially made: what is valuable in this situation is time. Given a long enough timeline, you can obtain every item in the game. But we don't have unlimited time, do we? If you want to experience what it's like to possess Item X in the game, then you either have to spend the time to get it, or pay somebody else to get it. Just because *it* doesn't exist in the physical sense, and just because going to get *it* doesn't involve anything but playing a game doesn't invalidate the transaction.
Where things get iffy is when people think that the things they "own" in the game are actually things that they own. Far from it. Once the game is gone, so are all of their wanna-be possessions. They have paid only for the experience of playing, and that is all.
There are plenty of examples in "real life" in which you pay only for an experience.
What I find disturbing about the purchase of virtual items is that it completely removes the "game" from the experience. Paying somebody else to play the boring parts of the game for you is very much like cheating, especially when the gameplay itself is designed to be essentially boring. That is, a person who builds a character to level 60 isn't going to be more powerful in the game than player than a person who buys a character at level 60. Thus we uncover the weakness in all MMORPGs - the payoffs require no skill, they only require time. So you can hop into the Level 60 character you just purchased and take him for a spin and believe that everybody is oh so impressed, and you'll never have to prove yourself worthy. Your strategy and abilities will never be tested in a way that will reveal you as a poser, because very little strategy and skill are required to be considered "good." This style of "gameplay" lends itself directly to cheating, and I really wonder about both the cheaters and non-cheaters alike. These kinds of games are more like watching TV than being challenged - and who the hell wouldn't pay good money to skip the news and go right to the sitcom?
There are plenty of animals that are *surprisingly* intelligent, but only surprising to our ego.
The opposable thumb and the human brain did not come about in the same creature by chance. We developed as a whole by necessity (although some people have a hard time understanding this, and think that each piece must have been individually crafted). It would not make sense that a creature would exist with the same language/abstraction capabilities as a human, but with no means of communication or creation. I doubt that there is a race of intelligent creatures on some distant planet that we would be able to communicate with, but they unfortunately suffer from a lack of hands and thus can't build radios. While it's true that there are a lot of evolutionary variables to consider that would make an alien much different from a human, we're all exposed to the same natural laws. And really, what we're looking for here is some sign of "human compatible" creature - something that we can communicate with to some significant degree - and since we can't go look for intelligent or any type of life on distant planets, scanning for signals is our only option.
The real issue here is that just having a big brain and some hands does not necessitate the building of a television or radio. Perhaps we built televisions and radios because of the way we developed in our environment, and there are other means of communication that would be obvious had we developed in a different environment. It's almost kind of funny to think about the infinite number of ways that aliens could be different from us, but still think, "I wonder how many channels they get?"
The other real issue, and an even bigger one, is that this really seems to demonstrate our naive view of time. Thirty light years? A month to scan a system? It took us millions of years to finally come about, and during that time were mass extinctions, ice ages, etc - and eventually there *will* be more of these. Even if an alien race within 30 light years had used radio transmission for ten thousand years before dying out or advancing, the odds of us picking up on that tiny little window are tiny.
I certainly want to search for the existence of alien life, but am only in favor of projects like this because they stimulate creativity and even feelings of hope. Pointing a dish at the sky and hoping to hear that we're not alone is entirely human.
Maybe if the grip actually becomes unexpectedly slippery, otherwise it would be up to me to determine how tightly I need to grip the paddle. This is not difficult, as we have all held things in our moving hands.
A safety strap is another story. I should not be expected to discern the tensile strength of the strap and then determine the maximum amount of force the strap would have to endure based on how hard I can whip the paddle. Engineering a safety strap a little bit on the safe side is probably a good idea.
If ping pong paddles had safety straps, I would assume that the designers of the paddles foresaw that people will sometimes accidentally lose their grip and thus the paddle. After all, what else would the safety strap be for?
If I was playing ping pong with a paddle that had a safety strap, and for some bizzare reason lost my grip on the paddle, which then went flying across the table and directly into my opponents eye, then I might be a little upset to look down and see the safety strap still attached to my wrist. Yes, I would blame the manufacturer for providing me with a safety strap that did not function.
- If the paddle had no safety strap to begin with, I wouldn't even think of blaming the paddle or its manufacturer.
- If the strap was instead labeled, "handy hands-free carrying strap", then I wouldn't expect it to prevent the paddle from flying out of my hand during play, and again wouldn't think of blaming the paddle or manufacturer.
- But if the strap is indeed *intended* to provide *safety*, no matter how dumb the protection may seem, then it should provide the intended safety. If it does not, then it is faulty, and the manufacturer is to blame.
If Nintendo didn't expect the strap on the Wiimote to protect the user and/or device from being thrown accidentally, then why did they include it in the design? The intent is obvious. People are flailing their limbs all over the place getting all excited the way people do - the Wiimote is bound to go flying eventually. The designers thought of this, and placed a convenient little strap onto the controller. Very thoughtful, nice touch. But if that strap doesn't hold up under normal use and some five year old kid accidentally sends the thing flying and knocks grandpa's cigar over onto grandma's oxygen tank causing the entire house and family to go up smoke, then yeah, Nintendo is *partially* to blame.
Hell, I wish Nintendo had put a safety strap (a working one, anyhow) on the original Nintendo controller. I probably threw mine in frustration more than all these crazy Wii kids combined.
Again, I will say that it looks like this lawsuit is silly and that these people are not using the controllers as they were intended to be used. My argument is simply that a device should provide its intended function and if it does not, then the manufacturer is liable to the consumer and potentially liable for damages that result from using the device.
If you add a safety feature to prevent a hazard, even if 9 out of 10 slashdotters think that the hazard is ridiculous, and the safety feature fails, exposing the user to the hazard that the safety feature was supposed to protect against, then you assume some amount of liability unless the user was using the device in an unsuitable manner.
Wow, that was my best sentence ever! Four commas, three lines, damn.
If you don't add a safety feature to prevent against a potential hazard, and the hazard itself is "obvious", like releasing a bowling ball on the backswing, then in no way could you be considered liable for an accident of this nature.
To conclude my essay: if you include a feature and the feature doesn't work, it's your fault when the user finds out that the feature doesn't work.
That said, it looks so far like this lawsuit is pretty silly and that the users were abusing the controllers.
Right, but if alphanumeric and stronger passwords weren't so common, then they could more regularly assume alpha and be right more often. Increasing the required character set is always a good thing, even though it doesn't solve the problem of users choosing weak passwords. An enforced strong password policy along with some training on how to create passwords that are easy to remember is a good approach. Untrained users always cringe when they have to come up with a new password that can't contain parts of the old password, must be 8 characters or more, and have maybe three types of characters... but once they get used to the idea that they can put it all together in a way that doesn't make it too hard to come up with a new password and remember it, they usually lighten up.
A big threat, IMO, is users giving their passwords out. Not only is this dangerous for the duration of the current password, but it can also reveal the technique the user is using to create passwords. This happens a lot in the corporate environment... one employee tells a partner in their department their password before they go off on vacation so that the partner can access something they'll need, and nobody bothered to tell IT that this other person was in need of more access (temporarily or permanently). I make it a point to tell people, repeatedly, to never tell their password to anyone, not even me or executive management, for any reason. And boy do they ever want to tell me, especially when I have to make them stick around and log in multiple times while I work on their machine because Windows is a pain in the ass and runas is a half-assed workaround.
I'm not sure I agree with you. In consumer land, yes, purchasing software is often a one-time thing as you may decide never to purchase an upgraded version. Often times this is no big deal, you switch from Graphics Program A to Graphics Program B, woopee.
However, in the corporate world it's a bit different. The box on a shelf model of purchasing software doesn't apply so much. We purchase software and then pay for it yearly under expensive maintenance contracts. After years of using a software package, it becomes extremely difficult to even think about switching to another program and migrating data, re-implementing customizations, training, etc.
Even simpler software is moving to this model. Take Microsoft Office, which is no longer upgradeable by open license customers. In order to receive upgrade benefits, we have to purchase Software Assurance, which puts us in an interesting bind: right now we use Microsoft Office, but will we switch in the next three years? Maybe we will, but if we don't, then we will eventually wind up purchasing new licenses at full price. Thus if moving to a new office suite isn't a huge priority in the organization, it makes more sense to just pay the SA with the assumption that you'll still want MS Office and want to "save" some money. Customer lock-in. (I also wouldn't necessarily consider office suites to be simple these days either; when you've got tens of thousands of documents of all sorts, all created by Software X, it becomes harder and harder to justify switching)
So these companies supplying software to businesses already have a continuous revenue stream.
What I see holding back this software as a service thing in the present and near future is:
1) Yes there are potential cost savings after what could be a massive expenditure in moving to the new service. But do we really care enough to disrupt the current system? Is the reduction in IT overhead that significant? Over what timeline? Do we trust that technology won't change significantly during that timeline and not at all jive with our expectations? And just how portable do we need to be?
2) Do the applications work as well as local applications? Is the user experience equal or better? I've never seen this to be the case, but I can't predict the future. What happens when I *don't* want to upgrade the software features?
3) Customizing software is a common thing; yes, even in the non-opensource world. What happens when I want to add a feature, or a customized report (with or without the reporting tool provided by the software)? What happens when I want to link this application's data to that application? Am I provided these mechanisms?
4) We've all done the leased server and collocation thing. How'd that work out compared to admining your local servers? Nobody likes that out of control feeling.
4.1) We know what our in-house servers are doing. We can see them. We know what's on them. We know our internal network topology. We can maintain that, and would have to regardless. We get alarmed when something is wrong. We are confident that we can fix it without screwing anything up. We are completely responsible for all data and applications, and can choose exactly how they should work in the organization.
So IMO much of this depends on the quality of the software service, and how similar it is to a local deployment. If it isn't some web-based thing, or some Java-based thing, and the users and IT staff can both have the same power over the software as they previously had, then yay. I suppose if the applications just shot down the pipe to your machine when you wanted them, then it could work great... but why add the pipe into the mix of crap that can go wrong? Is it really that difficult to deploy and update software? I don't personally think so.
The views expressed in the article seem to have a very narrow scope. Some of them are valid for retail/online business, definitely. What about businesses that have absolutely nothing in co
This is an unfortunate design. It's interesting to note that the article claims that Novell will implement Open XML as a plugin in their version of OpenOffice.org. If this is true, and what you say is true, then they must also be implementing some kind of plugin architecture? Or perhaps the article is confusing "patch" with "plugin" - I don't see a source for the article.
This deal has a lot more to it than just adding support for MS Office file formats. It must have more to do with branding. I don't understand these things very well, admittedly. Why would Novell fork OO.org just to add support for Open XML which they'll then contribute back to OO.org? If OO.org accepted the code, then essentially both Novel and OO.org would have the same product.... except that one would say Novell on the splash screen I suppose.
At any rate, I would be surprised to learn that OO.org isn't going to support Open XML in the near future all on its own. They've already had semi-workable support for other MS Office formats, and it seems like this one would be easy to implement by comparison. And I don't think that MS Office and OO.org will ever be compatible enough except in the case of standard word processor/presentation formating and simple spreadsheets. Sure it's nice to have whatever compatibility is available, but until they are closer to being matched up feature for feature, it doesn't get me all excited in terms of business use. I think a lot of people think that all office productivity applications should pretty much do the same thing, but nobody will every agree on which things they should all do; thus if you're going to support the use of multiple suites, you're going to have to dumb the feature set down to only those supported by all suites.
The term "hacker" has for a very long time been used to describe those individuals who break into computer systems. Your computer gets "hacked," your software is "cracked." When Hollywood makes a movie about kids who break into computer systems, they are called "hackers." When you read in the paper about people going to jail for breaking into computers, they are referred to "hackers." This is the terminology that average people understand.
Aside from all that, "cracker" has been a derogatory term "white guy" for longer than computer crackers have been around. If I saw a headline that read "Cracker Arrested" I'd picture some fat guy with no shirt yelling obscenities at the cops.
I think that hackers have to let go of the label. Besides, if Jurassic Park has taught us anything, it's that "I'm a hacker" sounds really, really dumb....unless you really do break into computer systems, in which case it's a bit more on the cool side.
Personally, I just tell people that I'm a computer nerd. Being proud of being good with computers doesn't impress the masses too much, so it helps to diffuse the inevitable smirk by just admitting right off that you're a nerd and you damn well know it.
"On the other hand, I'm pretty much a windows expert. I can do pretty much anything with a windows machine EXCEPT keep it running for more than a month."
That's interesting, because in all my years of administering Windows servers, I haven't had this experience. Unless of course we count downtime due to updates, which is a valid thing to consider but I don't think that's what you're talking about. But downtime due to Windows crashes? I'm sure in some cases this is a problem (Windows web server? I'd never run one), but I've never experienced it to any significant degree.
"How about hackability? I don't think I've ever seen a rooted Linux machine (but as I said, I don't get a ton of exposure to Linux workstations, maybe I don't know?)--yet I find it rare when dealing with a PC over 6 months old to not have a rootkit or some such garbage installed."
You've never seen a rooted Linux machine? Hm. Again my experience differs in that I've seen several rooted Linux machines and very few "rooted" Windows machines. There is a difference between a rootkit and a virus, perhaps that's the trouble here.
"Also: a "Good" windows admin will schedule reboots daily or weekly. I've never heard of a "Good" linux admin doing that. Doesn't that alone say a lot about general stability?"
I disagree. This depends completely on the actual environment. I know when I can reboot with minimal affect, and I schedule my updates for those times. Other than that, the machines don't have to be restarted "just because." That's silly.
Finally, you seem to be jumping around between servers and workstations in your discussion. There is a difference between the two.
Anyhow, I agree that overall Linux with a standard load of services does have considerably better uptime, especially considering that restarting for updates is rare. Also, when services puke on Linux it's generally possible to kill them off and restart them, where occasionally a service on Windows will run away and refuse to die, essentially taking the whole system with it. The only thing that's burned me in Linux a few times are the short support lifecycles of some distributions, which I now avoid. And of course dependency hell can get annoying when trying to version upgrade a service on an older install.
Dangit, that was MY solution to terrorists. I had it all drawn up.
See the core of my invention was this little robotic hornet that could fly around through public areas analyzing people and picking out possible terrorists. Specifically, it could detect skin color, smell terrorist stink (e.g. body odor and gun powder), and analyze facial expressions for signs of Jihad-level grouchiness. The robotic hornet would transmit its data back to an underground cave control center where heroes could monitor its activity - it would draw nice red boxes around the faces of the people being analyzed, have 50X zoom capability, show what the hornet is thinking with text scrolling up very rapidly in the corner of the screen, display GPS info, and all that sort of stuff. When the hornet determined within 95% certainty that a person was a terrorist, the little red box on the heroes' display would turn into a cross-hair and blink over the suspect's face, zoom in rapidly, and the heroes would be given an option like: "OK / Ignore / Cancel / Don't Ask This Again".
If the heroes in the control center gave the OK, then the hornet would zip itself at the back of the suspect's neck, and then use some bionic gloves to bore itself into the subject. Once inside, it would interface itself with the subject's spinal cord, thereby taking complete control over the suspect. At this point, by snooping for Jihad-related traffic in the subject's nervous system, it will be known quickly whether the suspect is indeed a terrorist.
If the suspect is a terrorist, then the robotic hornet with bionic gloves essentially acts like a remote control transmitter/receiver, allowing the heroes in the underground control center to take complete control over the terrorist. (the underground control center will need some kind of antenna that sticks up above ground of course) Using a custom built super computer with brain analysis software, perhaps called Microsoft Jihadinator 2007, the heroes can actually view the terrorists thoughts, memories, and dreams, as if watching television. With this capability, the heroes can easily determine the location of the terrorist cell. Using a joystick, a hero can then (essentially) drive the terrorist back to the cell headquarters. The hero will have a microphone, and whatever he says into the microphone, the terrorist will say. This will help get past "what's the secret word" type checkpoints.
Once the terrorist is inside the cell headquarters, the hero has a number of options. Firstly, if the terrorist is already wired up with dynamite, then the hero can instruct the terrorist to self destruct. If the terrorist is not wired with dynamite, then the hero does have limited capability to grab one of the AK47s on the bomb-making table and start shooting other terrorists. However, complete control of this extreme is not possible until technology can catch up. Don't expect the terrorist to kill more than eight or nine fellow terrorists before being taken down if this option is exercised. Finally, the robotic hornet shall be equipped with a small explosive charge - preferably a small dirty bomb in a tiny suitcase. The hero can walk the remote controlled terrorist over to the bomb making table where all of the terrorists are making bombs and posing for photographs, and detonate the tiny dirty bomb. Given the proximity to bomb making materials at this point, the resulting explosion should destroy a large portion of the cell.
While an invention of this nature could eventually fall into the wrong hands, I believe that it would solve the terrorist problem once and for all. The hardest part about fighting terrorists is actually killing them. They're very resilient.
I cloned the grandparent's post, which should have benefited myself, the grandparent, and the reader. Yet for some reason, my post was modded down. I guess people trust the JonnyCalcutta username more than the slackmaster2000 username. If slashdot didn't enforce these crippling username policies, then I could have posted as JonnyCalcutta and we both would have flourished with positive mod points. Or something like that.
"Sounds good. Maybe the rest of the world should use that as an example. Instead of one rich company you get 51 companies making a living. No-one becomes big enough to abuse the advantage. Surely that is the free market."
Sounds good. Maybe the rest of the world should use that as an example. Instead of one rich company you get 51 companies making a living. No-one becomes big enough to abuse the advantage. Surely that is the free market.
BlackBoxVoting is essentially "Bev Harris", and it's an organization concerned about the implications of electronic voting.
No point in getting into the goods and bads of electronic voting, because all we have here is somebody not associated with ES&S posting a copy of the ES&S software. Another slashdotter has posted at least three times in this discussion that this is all legit because he called and spoke with Bev Harris -- but Bev Harris is *not* from ES&S. Her validation does not make the software legal to obtain.
"Harris started surfing the Web. On Jan. 23, 2003, she hit the mother lode. On an unprotected Web site, she found 40,000 files of Diebold Election Systems' source code--the guts of software to run touch-screen voting machines.... After a little soul searching, Harris downloaded the Diebold software files. It took 44 hours, and they filled seven CDs. By July 2003, after months of informal review and discussion among her friends and allies, Harris decided to allow Scoop, an "unfiltered" news Web site in New Zealand (www.scoop.co.nz/mason), to make the files available to anyone who wanted them. It wasn't a decision she made lightly."
Given her past actions (and without getting into the ethical or moral value of her crusade) I highly doubt that she has the legal right to distribute the software that she's making available today.
He said that the kid was on a machine at a university in Sweden, which doesn't necessarily mean that the kid was *in* Sweden; later he says that the kid had to download warez files at 28.8K, implying that he was connecting to the machine he was "on" from a remote location.
You could be correct, of course, but I didn't interpret it the same as you.
The experts are implying that image spam is a new trick, and in a large part responsible for the increase in spam lately. However, it seems to me that image spam is a very old trick that spam filters are trained for. My spam filters block all messages that only contain images, for instance. I suppose that a mixture of text and images is what is effective, but from the filter's point of view, it doesn't matter much that the image is there. The spammers have already been using tactics like this, with or without images, for a long time. And in my little corner of the universe, image spam hasn't been getting through any better than spam without images.
Anyhow, I'm seeing a massive increase in spam since late September. While our filter is effective, the sheer volume has meant that many more junk messages are getting through. I think that what a lot of people fail to realize is that while the problem of spam can be dealt with effectively for personal email, especially if you take advantage of an online service like gmail, it's a totally different ballgame in the corporate world where spam is a tricky and costly problem. Work email addresses get published (thus harvested) for a number of legitimate reasons, and once mailbox is on the radar it seems like the rest of them start getting sucked in. Some employees can effectively ignore their junk boxes, but others simply can't -- it can be costly to miss an email. This reduces spam filtering for these employees to a simple ranking system: "here are messages that are probably legit and you should look at right away, and here are a whole shitload of messages that are probably junk but there might be an important one in there somewhere."
My organization is relatively small, and we don't benefit from hundreds or thousands of users training the filter. Thus when there's a large increase in spam that's getting through, it can take the filter a while to learn to block them effectively. During this time it's not uncommon for the occasional legitimate message to be sent to the spam filter by a user who doesn't notice it tucked into the 75 new messages in his mailbox, and this makes matters even worse. Finally, it's really hard to get users to send their junk mail to the filters, even when you've got it setup as a simple drag & drop procedure that's just as easy as deleting. If you can only convince a percentage of your people that training the filters actually works and is important, and you only have say 50-100 employees, then you may not have near the support required to really make Bayesian filtering work to its potential effectiveness.
Anyhow, over here we've seen a huge increase in spam, with some email-heavy users who used to get 10 in their inbox per day now getting 30 to 50 or more, and with potentially hundreds going to junk boxes. (this has decreased, I think things have settled down during the past week) We run a variety of filtering measures including header checks, DNS blacklists, and Bayesian analysis but just enough spam is able to get through on a daily basis to make things difficult. Back to my original topic: virtually none of the spam getting into user inboxes has been image spam, and only a small percentage of blocked spam is image spam.
Stats from last thirty days here: Messages Processed: 91588, Spam: 72881, 80%. A large portion of our legitimate messages are internal, which are not "filtered", but still counted by the system. A large number of spam messages are getting through, so I would conservatively bump that percentage up to 83-85%.
What an absurd problem. I'm going to have to put more effort into reducing its affect.
Wha? You can do the same thing, cheaper, by scrapping together a PC.
There is a real difference between server hardware and workstation hardware. If you don't require real server equipment, then I can't think of any positive reason to choose a console over a PC that would outweigh all of the drawbacks.
MSI has a nice laptop kit. I know a guy who builds custom laptops for gaming, and they're very nice. I've always built my own PCs, and suspect that if I need a laptop in the future I'll build it myself.
First of all, you don't have to vote on every issue on the ballot. I frequently leave items blank if I don't understand the issue well enough. I failed to vote on half of the ballot issues this round, and didn't vote on any local judicial positions. Either I had no opinion in a matter of this sort, or I realized that its real implications were simply over my head, currently.
When it comes to electing representatives, it's simple. There is no way that you're going to find a representative that will vote exactly the way you'd like on every single issue. What you have to do boil everything down to your core values -- what you think are most important to the country and people. I would suspect that one party will more closely match these values than the other, and there you go.
When we elect representatives we're not voting on issues themselves. Well sure, in a way we are, but election-time issues are always blown way out of proportion and are just a small sampling of what's really going to be happening. Besides, the one or two issues we hear about at any given time are not going to make or break the country, even if the candidates would like you to believe so. The real point here is that your ability to make a difference extends well beyond voting day. That so many people are apathetic or ignorant of this is probably one of the major problems of our society. People need to be pestering their representatives all the time, not just during the election. You should be able to find one party who will be more likely to consider your opinions regarding core values more so than the other, or at least make policy that is more similar to your opinions than the other party would. There's your vote. Now be sure to make some phone calls or write a few letters to whichever jackass wins the election when important issues come up in the future.
When the current administration and congress came to power, I noticed a major swing not only in policy and legislation, but also in the general image of our country itself. Without explaining which side of the fence I'm on, this change was drastic enough to prove to me that it does indeed matter who's running the show. The direction of the country in terms of the core values that I believe are more important than all others did change; it didn't do a complete 180, but the change was in my mind significant. Now that I can see this more clearly, I was eager to vote. I don't have complete confidence in those I voted for in all matters. I know that they are going to do many things that I don't agree with. However, they'll at least be more likely to steer the ship somewhat on the course that I think we should be on.
Maybe think of it this way: there's a guy at the office or in your family with views that you find absurd. He's going to vote one way, and this is your chance to cancel him out.:)
And remember, you're not electing leaders, you're electing representatives. I think we've all forgotten this to a certain degree.
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People don't buy upgrade versions of software for the experience of upgrading. Upgrade versions exist as monetary incentives. You're getting a break on the price of the new software for paying for the previous version.
It is certainly a pain in the ass to have to install the old version of your software just to install the upgrade version. This has not been the way it's worked in the past with MS operating systems. To argue that this change is not a pain in the ass is just being a pain in the ass. Stop that.
Person A wants *something*.
Person B has *something*, or can obtain/create *something*.
Person A pays Person B money in exchange for *something*.
It doesn't matter what that something is. Desirable is desirable. Opening up the database so that anybody could have anything at any time would eliminate all desire and the entire market.
I think you're missing the point that the thread starter essentially made: what is valuable in this situation is time. Given a long enough timeline, you can obtain every item in the game. But we don't have unlimited time, do we? If you want to experience what it's like to possess Item X in the game, then you either have to spend the time to get it, or pay somebody else to get it. Just because *it* doesn't exist in the physical sense, and just because going to get *it* doesn't involve anything but playing a game doesn't invalidate the transaction.
Where things get iffy is when people think that the things they "own" in the game are actually things that they own. Far from it. Once the game is gone, so are all of their wanna-be possessions. They have paid only for the experience of playing, and that is all.
There are plenty of examples in "real life" in which you pay only for an experience.
What I find disturbing about the purchase of virtual items is that it completely removes the "game" from the experience. Paying somebody else to play the boring parts of the game for you is very much like cheating, especially when the gameplay itself is designed to be essentially boring. That is, a person who builds a character to level 60 isn't going to be more powerful in the game than player than a person who buys a character at level 60. Thus we uncover the weakness in all MMORPGs - the payoffs require no skill, they only require time. So you can hop into the Level 60 character you just purchased and take him for a spin and believe that everybody is oh so impressed, and you'll never have to prove yourself worthy. Your strategy and abilities will never be tested in a way that will reveal you as a poser, because very little strategy and skill are required to be considered "good." This style of "gameplay" lends itself directly to cheating, and I really wonder about both the cheaters and non-cheaters alike. These kinds of games are more like watching TV than being challenged - and who the hell wouldn't pay good money to skip the news and go right to the sitcom?
Well, for one thing, he'd still be waiting for all his Gentoo packages to compile if he'd used a 500Mhz PC. :)
There are plenty of animals that are *surprisingly* intelligent, but only surprising to our ego.
The opposable thumb and the human brain did not come about in the same creature by chance. We developed as a whole by necessity (although some people have a hard time understanding this, and think that each piece must have been individually crafted). It would not make sense that a creature would exist with the same language/abstraction capabilities as a human, but with no means of communication or creation. I doubt that there is a race of intelligent creatures on some distant planet that we would be able to communicate with, but they unfortunately suffer from a lack of hands and thus can't build radios. While it's true that there are a lot of evolutionary variables to consider that would make an alien much different from a human, we're all exposed to the same natural laws. And really, what we're looking for here is some sign of "human compatible" creature - something that we can communicate with to some significant degree - and since we can't go look for intelligent or any type of life on distant planets, scanning for signals is our only option.
The real issue here is that just having a big brain and some hands does not necessitate the building of a television or radio. Perhaps we built televisions and radios because of the way we developed in our environment, and there are other means of communication that would be obvious had we developed in a different environment. It's almost kind of funny to think about the infinite number of ways that aliens could be different from us, but still think, "I wonder how many channels they get?"
The other real issue, and an even bigger one, is that this really seems to demonstrate our naive view of time. Thirty light years? A month to scan a system? It took us millions of years to finally come about, and during that time were mass extinctions, ice ages, etc - and eventually there *will* be more of these. Even if an alien race within 30 light years had used radio transmission for ten thousand years before dying out or advancing, the odds of us picking up on that tiny little window are tiny.
I certainly want to search for the existence of alien life, but am only in favor of projects like this because they stimulate creativity and even feelings of hope. Pointing a dish at the sky and hoping to hear that we're not alone is entirely human.
Maybe if the grip actually becomes unexpectedly slippery, otherwise it would be up to me to determine how tightly I need to grip the paddle. This is not difficult, as we have all held things in our moving hands.
A safety strap is another story. I should not be expected to discern the tensile strength of the strap and then determine the maximum amount of force the strap would have to endure based on how hard I can whip the paddle. Engineering a safety strap a little bit on the safe side is probably a good idea.
This discussion rawks.
Does drinking more reduce my chances of dying from drinking and driving by 18%? Practice makes perfect!
If ping pong paddles had safety straps, I would assume that the designers of the paddles foresaw that people will sometimes accidentally lose their grip and thus the paddle. After all, what else would the safety strap be for?
If I was playing ping pong with a paddle that had a safety strap, and for some bizzare reason lost my grip on the paddle, which then went flying across the table and directly into my opponents eye, then I might be a little upset to look down and see the safety strap still attached to my wrist. Yes, I would blame the manufacturer for providing me with a safety strap that did not function.
- If the paddle had no safety strap to begin with, I wouldn't even think of blaming the paddle or its manufacturer.
- If the strap was instead labeled, "handy hands-free carrying strap", then I wouldn't expect it to prevent the paddle from flying out of my hand during play, and again wouldn't think of blaming the paddle or manufacturer.
- But if the strap is indeed *intended* to provide *safety*, no matter how dumb the protection may seem, then it should provide the intended safety. If it does not, then it is faulty, and the manufacturer is to blame.
If Nintendo didn't expect the strap on the Wiimote to protect the user and/or device from being thrown accidentally, then why did they include it in the design? The intent is obvious. People are flailing their limbs all over the place getting all excited the way people do - the Wiimote is bound to go flying eventually. The designers thought of this, and placed a convenient little strap onto the controller. Very thoughtful, nice touch. But if that strap doesn't hold up under normal use and some five year old kid accidentally sends the thing flying and knocks grandpa's cigar over onto grandma's oxygen tank causing the entire house and family to go up smoke, then yeah, Nintendo is *partially* to blame.
Hell, I wish Nintendo had put a safety strap (a working one, anyhow) on the original Nintendo controller. I probably threw mine in frustration more than all these crazy Wii kids combined.
Again, I will say that it looks like this lawsuit is silly and that these people are not using the controllers as they were intended to be used. My argument is simply that a device should provide its intended function and if it does not, then the manufacturer is liable to the consumer and potentially liable for damages that result from using the device.
If you add a safety feature to prevent a hazard, even if 9 out of 10 slashdotters think that the hazard is ridiculous, and the safety feature fails, exposing the user to the hazard that the safety feature was supposed to protect against, then you assume some amount of liability unless the user was using the device in an unsuitable manner.
Wow, that was my best sentence ever! Four commas, three lines, damn.
If you don't add a safety feature to prevent against a potential hazard, and the hazard itself is "obvious", like releasing a bowling ball on the backswing, then in no way could you be considered liable for an accident of this nature.
To conclude my essay: if you include a feature and the feature doesn't work, it's your fault when the user finds out that the feature doesn't work.
That said, it looks so far like this lawsuit is pretty silly and that the users were abusing the controllers.
Right, but if alphanumeric and stronger passwords weren't so common, then they could more regularly assume alpha and be right more often. Increasing the required character set is always a good thing, even though it doesn't solve the problem of users choosing weak passwords. An enforced strong password policy along with some training on how to create passwords that are easy to remember is a good approach. Untrained users always cringe when they have to come up with a new password that can't contain parts of the old password, must be 8 characters or more, and have maybe three types of characters... but once they get used to the idea that they can put it all together in a way that doesn't make it too hard to come up with a new password and remember it, they usually lighten up.
A big threat, IMO, is users giving their passwords out. Not only is this dangerous for the duration of the current password, but it can also reveal the technique the user is using to create passwords. This happens a lot in the corporate environment... one employee tells a partner in their department their password before they go off on vacation so that the partner can access something they'll need, and nobody bothered to tell IT that this other person was in need of more access (temporarily or permanently). I make it a point to tell people, repeatedly, to never tell their password to anyone, not even me or executive management, for any reason. And boy do they ever want to tell me, especially when I have to make them stick around and log in multiple times while I work on their machine because Windows is a pain in the ass and runas is a half-assed workaround.
But only if everybody uses their own scheme. Otherwise, this only increases the size of a the dictionary.
I'm not sure I agree with you. In consumer land, yes, purchasing software is often a one-time thing as you may decide never to purchase an upgraded version. Often times this is no big deal, you switch from Graphics Program A to Graphics Program B, woopee.
However, in the corporate world it's a bit different. The box on a shelf model of purchasing software doesn't apply so much. We purchase software and then pay for it yearly under expensive maintenance contracts. After years of using a software package, it becomes extremely difficult to even think about switching to another program and migrating data, re-implementing customizations, training, etc.
Even simpler software is moving to this model. Take Microsoft Office, which is no longer upgradeable by open license customers. In order to receive upgrade benefits, we have to purchase Software Assurance, which puts us in an interesting bind: right now we use Microsoft Office, but will we switch in the next three years? Maybe we will, but if we don't, then we will eventually wind up purchasing new licenses at full price. Thus if moving to a new office suite isn't a huge priority in the organization, it makes more sense to just pay the SA with the assumption that you'll still want MS Office and want to "save" some money. Customer lock-in. (I also wouldn't necessarily consider office suites to be simple these days either; when you've got tens of thousands of documents of all sorts, all created by Software X, it becomes harder and harder to justify switching)
So these companies supplying software to businesses already have a continuous revenue stream.
What I see holding back this software as a service thing in the present and near future is:
1) Yes there are potential cost savings after what could be a massive expenditure in moving to the new service. But do we really care enough to disrupt the current system? Is the reduction in IT overhead that significant? Over what timeline? Do we trust that technology won't change significantly during that timeline and not at all jive with our expectations? And just how portable do we need to be?
2) Do the applications work as well as local applications? Is the user experience equal or better? I've never seen this to be the case, but I can't predict the future. What happens when I *don't* want to upgrade the software features?
3) Customizing software is a common thing; yes, even in the non-opensource world. What happens when I want to add a feature, or a customized report (with or without the reporting tool provided by the software)? What happens when I want to link this application's data to that application? Am I provided these mechanisms?
4) We've all done the leased server and collocation thing. How'd that work out compared to admining your local servers? Nobody likes that out of control feeling.
4.1) We know what our in-house servers are doing. We can see them. We know what's on them. We know our internal network topology. We can maintain that, and would have to regardless. We get alarmed when something is wrong. We are confident that we can fix it without screwing anything up. We are completely responsible for all data and applications, and can choose exactly how they should work in the organization.
So IMO much of this depends on the quality of the software service, and how similar it is to a local deployment. If it isn't some web-based thing, or some Java-based thing, and the users and IT staff can both have the same power over the software as they previously had, then yay. I suppose if the applications just shot down the pipe to your machine when you wanted them, then it could work great... but why add the pipe into the mix of crap that can go wrong? Is it really that difficult to deploy and update software? I don't personally think so.
The views expressed in the article seem to have a very narrow scope. Some of them are valid for retail/online business, definitely. What about businesses that have absolutely nothing in co
Pirates say "yarrr", Charlie Brown says "argh." :)
This is an unfortunate design. It's interesting to note that the article claims that Novell will implement Open XML as a plugin in their version of OpenOffice.org. If this is true, and what you say is true, then they must also be implementing some kind of plugin architecture? Or perhaps the article is confusing "patch" with "plugin" - I don't see a source for the article.
This deal has a lot more to it than just adding support for MS Office file formats. It must have more to do with branding. I don't understand these things very well, admittedly. Why would Novell fork OO.org just to add support for Open XML which they'll then contribute back to OO.org? If OO.org accepted the code, then essentially both Novel and OO.org would have the same product.... except that one would say Novell on the splash screen I suppose.
At any rate, I would be surprised to learn that OO.org isn't going to support Open XML in the near future all on its own. They've already had semi-workable support for other MS Office formats, and it seems like this one would be easy to implement by comparison. And I don't think that MS Office and OO.org will ever be compatible enough except in the case of standard word processor/presentation formating and simple spreadsheets. Sure it's nice to have whatever compatibility is available, but until they are closer to being matched up feature for feature, it doesn't get me all excited in terms of business use. I think a lot of people think that all office productivity applications should pretty much do the same thing, but nobody will every agree on which things they should all do; thus if you're going to support the use of multiple suites, you're going to have to dumb the feature set down to only those supported by all suites.
This will never change in the media.
The term "hacker" has for a very long time been used to describe those individuals who break into computer systems. Your computer gets "hacked," your software is "cracked." When Hollywood makes a movie about kids who break into computer systems, they are called "hackers." When you read in the paper about people going to jail for breaking into computers, they are referred to "hackers." This is the terminology that average people understand.
Aside from all that, "cracker" has been a derogatory term "white guy" for longer than computer crackers have been around. If I saw a headline that read "Cracker Arrested" I'd picture some fat guy with no shirt yelling obscenities at the cops.
I think that hackers have to let go of the label. Besides, if Jurassic Park has taught us anything, it's that "I'm a hacker" sounds really, really dumb....unless you really do break into computer systems, in which case it's a bit more on the cool side.
Personally, I just tell people that I'm a computer nerd. Being proud of being good with computers doesn't impress the masses too much, so it helps to diffuse the inevitable smirk by just admitting right off that you're a nerd and you damn well know it.
"On the other hand, I'm pretty much a windows expert. I can do pretty much anything with a windows machine EXCEPT keep it running for more than a month."
That's interesting, because in all my years of administering Windows servers, I haven't had this experience. Unless of course we count downtime due to updates, which is a valid thing to consider but I don't think that's what you're talking about. But downtime due to Windows crashes? I'm sure in some cases this is a problem (Windows web server? I'd never run one), but I've never experienced it to any significant degree.
"How about hackability? I don't think I've ever seen a rooted Linux machine (but as I said, I don't get a ton of exposure to Linux workstations, maybe I don't know?)--yet I find it rare when dealing with a PC over 6 months old to not have a rootkit or some such garbage installed."
You've never seen a rooted Linux machine? Hm. Again my experience differs in that I've seen several rooted Linux machines and very few "rooted" Windows machines. There is a difference between a rootkit and a virus, perhaps that's the trouble here.
"Also: a "Good" windows admin will schedule reboots daily or weekly. I've never heard of a "Good" linux admin doing that. Doesn't that alone say a lot about general stability?"
I disagree. This depends completely on the actual environment. I know when I can reboot with minimal affect, and I schedule my updates for those times. Other than that, the machines don't have to be restarted "just because." That's silly.
Finally, you seem to be jumping around between servers and workstations in your discussion. There is a difference between the two.
Anyhow, I agree that overall Linux with a standard load of services does have considerably better uptime, especially considering that restarting for updates is rare. Also, when services puke on Linux it's generally possible to kill them off and restart them, where occasionally a service on Windows will run away and refuse to die, essentially taking the whole system with it. The only thing that's burned me in Linux a few times are the short support lifecycles of some distributions, which I now avoid. And of course dependency hell can get annoying when trying to version upgrade a service on an older install.
Dangit, that was MY solution to terrorists. I had it all drawn up.
See the core of my invention was this little robotic hornet that could fly around through public areas analyzing people and picking out possible terrorists. Specifically, it could detect skin color, smell terrorist stink (e.g. body odor and gun powder), and analyze facial expressions for signs of Jihad-level grouchiness. The robotic hornet would transmit its data back to an underground cave control center where heroes could monitor its activity - it would draw nice red boxes around the faces of the people being analyzed, have 50X zoom capability, show what the hornet is thinking with text scrolling up very rapidly in the corner of the screen, display GPS info, and all that sort of stuff. When the hornet determined within 95% certainty that a person was a terrorist, the little red box on the heroes' display would turn into a cross-hair and blink over the suspect's face, zoom in rapidly, and the heroes would be given an option like: "OK / Ignore / Cancel / Don't Ask This Again".
If the heroes in the control center gave the OK, then the hornet would zip itself at the back of the suspect's neck, and then use some bionic gloves to bore itself into the subject. Once inside, it would interface itself with the subject's spinal cord, thereby taking complete control over the suspect. At this point, by snooping for Jihad-related traffic in the subject's nervous system, it will be known quickly whether the suspect is indeed a terrorist.
If the suspect is a terrorist, then the robotic hornet with bionic gloves essentially acts like a remote control transmitter/receiver, allowing the heroes in the underground control center to take complete control over the terrorist. (the underground control center will need some kind of antenna that sticks up above ground of course) Using a custom built super computer with brain analysis software, perhaps called Microsoft Jihadinator 2007, the heroes can actually view the terrorists thoughts, memories, and dreams, as if watching television. With this capability, the heroes can easily determine the location of the terrorist cell. Using a joystick, a hero can then (essentially) drive the terrorist back to the cell headquarters. The hero will have a microphone, and whatever he says into the microphone, the terrorist will say. This will help get past "what's the secret word" type checkpoints.
Once the terrorist is inside the cell headquarters, the hero has a number of options. Firstly, if the terrorist is already wired up with dynamite, then the hero can instruct the terrorist to self destruct. If the terrorist is not wired with dynamite, then the hero does have limited capability to grab one of the AK47s on the bomb-making table and start shooting other terrorists. However, complete control of this extreme is not possible until technology can catch up. Don't expect the terrorist to kill more than eight or nine fellow terrorists before being taken down if this option is exercised. Finally, the robotic hornet shall be equipped with a small explosive charge - preferably a small dirty bomb in a tiny suitcase. The hero can walk the remote controlled terrorist over to the bomb making table where all of the terrorists are making bombs and posing for photographs, and detonate the tiny dirty bomb. Given the proximity to bomb making materials at this point, the resulting explosion should destroy a large portion of the cell.
While an invention of this nature could eventually fall into the wrong hands, I believe that it would solve the terrorist problem once and for all. The hardest part about fighting terrorists is actually killing them. They're very resilient.
As another poster mentioned, it is possible, just a bit of a pain.
r _pm_ez_gpo
Or, here's an easy way: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.p
Interesting!
I cloned the grandparent's post, which should have benefited myself, the grandparent, and the reader. Yet for some reason, my post was modded down. I guess people trust the JonnyCalcutta username more than the slackmaster2000 username. If slashdot didn't enforce these crippling username policies, then I could have posted as JonnyCalcutta and we both would have flourished with positive mod points. Or something like that.
"Sounds good. Maybe the rest of the world should use that as an example. Instead of one rich company you get 51 companies making a living. No-one becomes big enough to abuse the advantage. Surely that is the free market."
Sounds good. Maybe the rest of the world should use that as an example. Instead of one rich company you get 51 companies making a living. No-one becomes big enough to abuse the advantage. Surely that is the free market.
BlackBoxVoting is essentially "Bev Harris", and it's an organization concerned about the implications of electronic voting.
s _blackbox.php
... After a little soul searching, Harris downloaded the Diebold software files. It took 44 hours, and they filled seven CDs. By July 2003, after months of informal review and discussion among her friends and allies, Harris decided to allow Scoop, an "unfiltered" news Web site in New Zealand (www.scoop.co.nz/mason), to make the files available to anyone who wanted them. It wasn't a decision she made lightly."
No point in getting into the goods and bads of electronic voting, because all we have here is somebody not associated with ES&S posting a copy of the ES&S software. Another slashdotter has posted at least three times in this discussion that this is all legit because he called and spoke with Bev Harris -- but Bev Harris is *not* from ES&S. Her validation does not make the software legal to obtain.
I found a very interesting little news article from two years ago: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0410/040310_new
"Harris started surfing the Web. On Jan. 23, 2003, she hit the mother lode. On an unprotected Web site, she found 40,000 files of Diebold Election Systems' source code--the guts of software to run touch-screen voting machines.
Given her past actions (and without getting into the ethical or moral value of her crusade) I highly doubt that she has the legal right to distribute the software that she's making available today.
He said that the kid was on a machine at a university in Sweden, which doesn't necessarily mean that the kid was *in* Sweden; later he says that the kid had to download warez files at 28.8K, implying that he was connecting to the machine he was "on" from a remote location.
You could be correct, of course, but I didn't interpret it the same as you.
The experts are implying that image spam is a new trick, and in a large part responsible for the increase in spam lately. However, it seems to me that image spam is a very old trick that spam filters are trained for. My spam filters block all messages that only contain images, for instance. I suppose that a mixture of text and images is what is effective, but from the filter's point of view, it doesn't matter much that the image is there. The spammers have already been using tactics like this, with or without images, for a long time. And in my little corner of the universe, image spam hasn't been getting through any better than spam without images.
Anyhow, I'm seeing a massive increase in spam since late September. While our filter is effective, the sheer volume has meant that many more junk messages are getting through. I think that what a lot of people fail to realize is that while the problem of spam can be dealt with effectively for personal email, especially if you take advantage of an online service like gmail, it's a totally different ballgame in the corporate world where spam is a tricky and costly problem. Work email addresses get published (thus harvested) for a number of legitimate reasons, and once mailbox is on the radar it seems like the rest of them start getting sucked in. Some employees can effectively ignore their junk boxes, but others simply can't -- it can be costly to miss an email. This reduces spam filtering for these employees to a simple ranking system: "here are messages that are probably legit and you should look at right away, and here are a whole shitload of messages that are probably junk but there might be an important one in there somewhere."
My organization is relatively small, and we don't benefit from hundreds or thousands of users training the filter. Thus when there's a large increase in spam that's getting through, it can take the filter a while to learn to block them effectively. During this time it's not uncommon for the occasional legitimate message to be sent to the spam filter by a user who doesn't notice it tucked into the 75 new messages in his mailbox, and this makes matters even worse. Finally, it's really hard to get users to send their junk mail to the filters, even when you've got it setup as a simple drag & drop procedure that's just as easy as deleting. If you can only convince a percentage of your people that training the filters actually works and is important, and you only have say 50-100 employees, then you may not have near the support required to really make Bayesian filtering work to its potential effectiveness.
Anyhow, over here we've seen a huge increase in spam, with some email-heavy users who used to get 10 in their inbox per day now getting 30 to 50 or more, and with potentially hundreds going to junk boxes. (this has decreased, I think things have settled down during the past week) We run a variety of filtering measures including header checks, DNS blacklists, and Bayesian analysis but just enough spam is able to get through on a daily basis to make things difficult. Back to my original topic: virtually none of the spam getting into user inboxes has been image spam, and only a small percentage of blocked spam is image spam.
Stats from last thirty days here: Messages Processed: 91588, Spam: 72881, 80%. A large portion of our legitimate messages are internal, which are not "filtered", but still counted by the system. A large number of spam messages are getting through, so I would conservatively bump that percentage up to 83-85%.
What an absurd problem. I'm going to have to put more effort into reducing its affect.
Wha? You can do the same thing, cheaper, by scrapping together a PC.
There is a real difference between server hardware and workstation hardware. If you don't require real server equipment, then I can't think of any positive reason to choose a console over a PC that would outweigh all of the drawbacks.
MSI has a nice laptop kit. I know a guy who builds custom laptops for gaming, and they're very nice. I've always built my own PCs, and suspect that if I need a laptop in the future I'll build it myself.
First of all, you don't have to vote on every issue on the ballot. I frequently leave items blank if I don't understand the issue well enough. I failed to vote on half of the ballot issues this round, and didn't vote on any local judicial positions. Either I had no opinion in a matter of this sort, or I realized that its real implications were simply over my head, currently.
:)
When it comes to electing representatives, it's simple. There is no way that you're going to find a representative that will vote exactly the way you'd like on every single issue. What you have to do boil everything down to your core values -- what you think are most important to the country and people. I would suspect that one party will more closely match these values than the other, and there you go.
When we elect representatives we're not voting on issues themselves. Well sure, in a way we are, but election-time issues are always blown way out of proportion and are just a small sampling of what's really going to be happening. Besides, the one or two issues we hear about at any given time are not going to make or break the country, even if the candidates would like you to believe so. The real point here is that your ability to make a difference extends well beyond voting day. That so many people are apathetic or ignorant of this is probably one of the major problems of our society. People need to be pestering their representatives all the time, not just during the election. You should be able to find one party who will be more likely to consider your opinions regarding core values more so than the other, or at least make policy that is more similar to your opinions than the other party would. There's your vote. Now be sure to make some phone calls or write a few letters to whichever jackass wins the election when important issues come up in the future.
When the current administration and congress came to power, I noticed a major swing not only in policy and legislation, but also in the general image of our country itself. Without explaining which side of the fence I'm on, this change was drastic enough to prove to me that it does indeed matter who's running the show. The direction of the country in terms of the core values that I believe are more important than all others did change; it didn't do a complete 180, but the change was in my mind significant. Now that I can see this more clearly, I was eager to vote. I don't have complete confidence in those I voted for in all matters. I know that they are going to do many things that I don't agree with. However, they'll at least be more likely to steer the ship somewhat on the course that I think we should be on.
Maybe think of it this way: there's a guy at the office or in your family with views that you find absurd. He's going to vote one way, and this is your chance to cancel him out.
And remember, you're not electing leaders, you're electing representatives. I think we've all forgotten this to a certain degree.