I don't think that MS is under much immediate threat from Linux or OSX.
Remember that the entire windos ecology is based on lock-in. That means any other OS doesn't need 50% or even 30% market share to be a threat. Enough share to make everyone aware there are others in the market is enough. MS Office isn't the market leader because it's the best, it's the market leader because you have to use it because everyone else does, too. So the Office monopoly is in immediate danger as soon as some other office suit builds enough market share that "send your stuff in.doc because the other guy sure can handle that" doesn't work anymore, and you have to think about document formats.
Same with windos itself. It might take only 15% or 20% until the monopoly breaks. For example, once corporations offer and support, say windos or OS X, as a choice, lots and lots of people will switch to OS X. Right now, the stupid idea to standardize on the system instead of on the protocols, keeps whole corporations hostate to the windos monopoly. You don't need 50% market share to change that.
I'm not so sure. I think maybe it should be ok for people to be subjected to all kinds of ridiculous crap, as long as a simple "opt-out" button is right there that can make it all go away permanently. It'd be funny to see how many people never click on that.
Like most things, it would be funny for all of five seconds.
Again, remember spam. Even if spammers would honour their own opt-out links, we all agree that wouldn't solve the problem, do we? Even if you could reliably opt-out, you would have to opt-out fifty or so times. Per day. Every day.
By my standards, every piece of advertisement or sales pitch that is not opt-in is sleazy and intrusive. And yes, that does include roadside billboards.
If you RTFA it is something you can disable (at least according to the D-Link rep, I don't actually own one of these)
That doesn't make it ok.
Crap like this has to be opt-in. 20 years of spam should've told us that opt-out does not work. Well, at least not for the customer. It works great for the spammers.
What are we becoming? Now every sleazy behaviour is ok as long as you can opt-out? That hasn't worked for spam for the past 20 years, has everyone suddenly got a learning disorder?
The default behaviour of absolutely everything that's not a requested feature has to be opt-in.
Opt-out is not good enough. I thought we'd learnt that by now.
The non securespot version has been there since the firmware was released.
"without SecureSpot" certainly doesn't sound like "without spam". It much more sounds like that version is lacking a security feature, don't you think?
Either way, it asks you if you want to try it twice, and then leaves you alone.
So? It shouldn't even "ask" once. Remember that "ask" in this case means intercepting and manipulating traffic. I'm not familiar with applicable US law, but in the UK and Germany, where I know the law a little, this "feature" runs afoul of criminal laws.
Besides, what kind of attitude is that? It's ok to feel up your wife if I stop after being told twice not to?
So your message is "it's just a small pile of shit, swallow it already?"
No, sir!
It's still abuse if it's a small abuse. There's no such thing as "a little pregnant" or "a little dead". Abuse is abuse is abuse.
Why is this abuse? Because you will be very hard pressed to find a single customer who bought the product, expecting such a feature or, had you asked him, approving it.
If I give you a contract to paint my living room, that does not include the permission to record a porn movie while you're at it. And if I buy a router to handle my traffic, I don't give it permission to reroute me to advertisement.
However, much of the stuff that's used not in the office but in the field is pretty old, because reliability counts for more than speed or features. That's not just computers. The standard-issue guns are from when?
If you actually RTFA, you see that they aren't bonkers. Quite to the contrary. See this quote, for example:
"[M]ost threats should be made irrelevant by eliminating vulnerabilities beforehand by either moving them 'out of band' (i.e., making them technically or physically inaccessible to the adversary), or 'designing them out' completely," the request for proposals adds.
Yeah, absolutely. Remember that this is the military we're talking about. These are the guys who are the "customers" of stuff like the NSA's formally verifiable code project. These are the guys who still use 10 year old computers because those are hardened and tested to military standards. If they upgrade to 5 year old computers, the gain in speed will offset pretty much any performance penalty that security methods that don't fly in the commercial world because of said performance penalties, could cause.
These are also the guys who do a ton of things badly.
What do you think where new ideas on saving the world or building a better one will come from? TV studios? Politicians? Hollywood?
Research like this is the foundation of all progress. Note: Not this one specifically, I said "like" this. A lot of the things that you probably wouldn't live very well without started out as ideas with no visible use.
I don't get it. What's it about killing kids being so massively more objectionable then killing adults? Wasn't the crap about innoncent youth abandoned a century or so ago?
No, seriously. Kill a kid or kill an adult. Where, really, is the difference? I'll grant that there is probably some kind of ancient protection instinct hard-wired inside our skulls, which simply isn't appropriate anymore. It makes sense when the threats you might encounter would kill or main a kid, but could be taken care of by an adult. Assault rifles and grenades don't fall into that category.
I'm tired of the whole "think of the chiiiildren" meme. Can we please kill it? As I see it, killing a kid is actually less of a problem. A kid is faster to replace than an adult (say, 10 years instead of 30).
But I guess you can't even discuss that argument seriously without being shouted down.
I am ready with a big HDTV with Comcast, a Mac mini, and and an Xbox 360. I also have two laptops (one good for websites and one for streaming video), an old-school Blackberry, a 'regular' cell phone, a Nokia N810, a Squeezebox, and finally Sirius Satellite Radio. Which websites should I watch for live county results?
And why, exactly, do you want all this information overload?
You ask a question, but you omit the most important piece of information: Goal or purpose.
The election results and any interesting details will be plastered all over the media. It'll be hard to miss anything important. So why go to any effort at all to increase information input? What are you processing the info for?
Not that I don't agree the election result is important. It absolutely is. But "more information" does not equal better information.
My beef is on a different matter. I'm fairly sure a ban from the game for behaviour that goes against the TOS of that game would stand up in court. At least in theory, if all the wordings are correct, etc.
But in this case, you have a cross-items punishment, and at least where I live that's a no-go. You can't take my car because I didn't pay my rent. You can take my flat if I didn't pay my rent, or you can take my car if I didn't pay my lease on that - but you can not punish me on A for something I did to B.
In this case, EA says they will take away my access to a game, or online game content, for behaviour in a different game, or even in no game but on the online forum.
I'm pretty sure most lawyers will see that as vigilante justice and strike it down hard and fast. EA will argue that that's just how it is for technical reasons (unified ID) and if the plaintiff is any good he'll fire back with an expert witness that tells the court there's no technical reason whatsoever that forces EA to use a unified ID system, they just decided to do it for convenience. They could even have a unified system customer-side but keep track of individual items on the backend so individual locks are possible if they so desire.
IANAL but I do have legal training. I doubt very much that the "damages" argument would fly. I can not even begin to imagine how that could work, legally speaking.
My guess is they're betting on nobody going to court over this.
You need to go find a girlfriend and spend time with her.
As a matter of fact, playing online games is what we do for spending time with each other when we're not together (she lives in another city, not much longer though).
According to some study I forgot the source link to, that is, in fact, a fairly common setup. Quite a few couples play online games together.
Well, the thing is that you can generate collisions. I don't get all the math behind it (crypto is just a hobby, not my full-time job) but many academic cryptographers consider MD5 (and SHA1, btw) broken, and have done so for at least two years.
Now, that doesn't mean there's an implementation. It could still require something like 50 times the entire computing power of the globe. That's why I put "academic" explicitly in there. But as I said: I don't get all the math so I can't make a guess at what the ressources and requirements are. For most practical purposes it's probably still safe at least for the moment. But collisions are more than just fun anomalies at this point.
Real store or online shop is a non-trivial question.
Some things I prefer buying online, some in a real store. Stuff that you need to touch and feel, for example. Some clothes are of that kind, as well as sports articles and the like. Stuff that's mostly digital anyways (software) or of a well-known form (books) is something I prefer to buy online due to the convenience.
Building a "virtual store" in 3D that looks exactly like a real store strikes me as the most dumb thing you could possibly do. It combines all the limitations of the computer environment (limited FOV, lower resolution, etc.) with the total absence of any of the advantages it could offer.
I want a virtual store that knows its limitations and strengths. I don't want to wander down virtual aisles of stuff that all looks identical at the available resolution until you "move" closer (and wait for the high-res textures to load). What I want is a store where I can enter a search term and get a 3D representation of the search results. The ability to click an object and say "pile up similar stuff left and right so I can compare". An interactive 3D object so I can test it out, look how the controls work. One button click away are colour or texture changes. That is the kind of advantages a "virtual store" could offer.
Please fuck off with virtual salespeople and impulse buy traps at the checkout. If your virtual store has a 3D representation of a checkout counter, it sucks. Double sucky points if it has AI customers to properly represent the queues at the checkout.
It's not a "world" until it advances a lot more. One of the reason that "virtual meetings" don't hold a candle to real meetings it that you have a what? 30 field of vision? That is if your screen is fairly large.
See, in the real world you have 180 FOV, full positional full-duplex audio, unlimited resolution, and a much, much more intuitive user interface.
Virtual worlds need to become a lot more immersive before they will take off. As long as a simple conversation isn't as simple as in the real world, there will be some early adopters and hype, but that's it.
Me, I want touch. You don't even begin to realize how much touch and force feedback matters until you're in a "virtual world" where you have neither.
Isn't it the US where convicted felons can't vote?
So you can't vote, but you can be elected? Now that's a nice standard. "Nah, we can't have criminals affect the course of our society. We prefer being ruled by them."
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that MS is under much immediate threat from Linux or OSX.
Remember that the entire windos ecology is based on lock-in. That means any other OS doesn't need 50% or even 30% market share to be a threat. Enough share to make everyone aware there are others in the market is enough. MS Office isn't the market leader because it's the best, it's the market leader because you have to use it because everyone else does, too. So the Office monopoly is in immediate danger as soon as some other office suit builds enough market share that "send your stuff in .doc because the other guy sure can handle that" doesn't work anymore, and you have to think about document formats.
Same with windos itself. It might take only 15% or 20% until the monopoly breaks. For example, once corporations offer and support, say windos or OS X, as a choice, lots and lots of people will switch to OS X. Right now, the stupid idea to standardize on the system instead of on the protocols, keeps whole corporations hostate to the windos monopoly. You don't need 50% market share to change that.
I'm not so sure. I think maybe it should be ok for people to be subjected to all kinds of ridiculous crap, as long as a simple "opt-out" button is right there that can make it all go away permanently. It'd be funny to see how many people never click on that.
Like most things, it would be funny for all of five seconds.
Again, remember spam. Even if spammers would honour their own opt-out links, we all agree that wouldn't solve the problem, do we? Even if you could reliably opt-out, you would have to opt-out fifty or so times. Per day. Every day.
By my standards, every piece of advertisement or sales pitch that is not opt-in is sleazy and intrusive. And yes, that does include roadside billboards.
If you RTFA it is something you can disable (at least according to the D-Link rep, I don't actually own one of these)
That doesn't make it ok.
Crap like this has to be opt-in. 20 years of spam should've told us that opt-out does not work. Well, at least not for the customer. It works great for the spammers.
If you RTFA, you'll see that you CAN disable it.
What are we becoming? Now every sleazy behaviour is ok as long as you can opt-out? That hasn't worked for spam for the past 20 years, has everyone suddenly got a learning disorder?
The default behaviour of absolutely everything that's not a requested feature has to be opt-in.
Opt-out is not good enough. I thought we'd learnt that by now.
The non securespot version has been there since the firmware was released.
"without SecureSpot" certainly doesn't sound like "without spam". It much more sounds like that version is lacking a security feature, don't you think?
Either way, it asks you if you want to try it twice, and then leaves you alone.
So? It shouldn't even "ask" once. Remember that "ask" in this case means intercepting and manipulating traffic. I'm not familiar with applicable US law, but in the UK and Germany, where I know the law a little, this "feature" runs afoul of criminal laws.
Besides, what kind of attitude is that? It's ok to feel up your wife if I stop after being told twice not to?
So your message is "it's just a small pile of shit, swallow it already?"
No, sir!
It's still abuse if it's a small abuse. There's no such thing as "a little pregnant" or "a little dead". Abuse is abuse is abuse.
Why is this abuse? Because you will be very hard pressed to find a single customer who bought the product, expecting such a feature or, had you asked him, approving it.
If I give you a contract to paint my living room, that does not include the permission to record a porn movie while you're at it. And if I buy a router to handle my traffic, I don't give it permission to reroute me to advertisement.
I didn't say they use only 10 year old machines.
However, much of the stuff that's used not in the office but in the field is pretty old, because reliability counts for more than speed or features. That's not just computers. The standard-issue guns are from when?
If you actually RTFA, you see that they aren't bonkers. Quite to the contrary. See this quote, for example:
"[M]ost threats should be made irrelevant by eliminating vulnerabilities beforehand by either moving them 'out of band' (i.e., making them technically or physically inaccessible to the adversary), or 'designing them out' completely," the request for proposals adds.
Yeah, absolutely. Remember that this is the military we're talking about. These are the guys who are the "customers" of stuff like the NSA's formally verifiable code project. These are the guys who still use 10 year old computers because those are hardened and tested to military standards. If they upgrade to 5 year old computers, the gain in speed will offset pretty much any performance penalty that security methods that don't fly in the commercial world because of said performance penalties, could cause.
These are also the guys who do a ton of things badly.
So it'll be interesting to watch.
Man up and just say you want to steal the game.
The proper term is "make an unauthorized copy".
And yes, the difference is important. Stealing the game means going to a shop and lifting the box without paying.
Yes, this is important.
What do you think where new ideas on saving the world or building a better one will come from? TV studios? Politicians? Hollywood?
Research like this is the foundation of all progress. Note: Not this one specifically, I said "like" this. A lot of the things that you probably wouldn't live very well without started out as ideas with no visible use.
That used to be true about both CD and DVD burners. You know, in the past. A couple years from now, we'll add BluRay to that list.
I don't get it. What's it about killing kids being so massively more objectionable then killing adults? Wasn't the crap about innoncent youth abandoned a century or so ago?
No, seriously. Kill a kid or kill an adult. Where, really, is the difference? I'll grant that there is probably some kind of ancient protection instinct hard-wired inside our skulls, which simply isn't appropriate anymore. It makes sense when the threats you might encounter would kill or main a kid, but could be taken care of by an adult. Assault rifles and grenades don't fall into that category.
I'm tired of the whole "think of the chiiiildren" meme. Can we please kill it? As I see it, killing a kid is actually less of a problem. A kid is faster to replace than an adult (say, 10 years instead of 30).
But I guess you can't even discuss that argument seriously without being shouted down.
I am ready with a big HDTV with Comcast, a Mac mini, and and an Xbox 360. I also have two laptops (one good for websites and one for streaming video), an old-school Blackberry, a 'regular' cell phone, a Nokia N810, a Squeezebox, and finally Sirius Satellite Radio. Which websites should I watch for live county results?
And why, exactly, do you want all this information overload?
You ask a question, but you omit the most important piece of information: Goal or purpose.
The election results and any interesting details will be plastered all over the media. It'll be hard to miss anything important. So why go to any effort at all to increase information input? What are you processing the info for?
Not that I don't agree the election result is important. It absolutely is. But "more information" does not equal better information.
My beef is on a different matter. I'm fairly sure a ban from the game for behaviour that goes against the TOS of that game would stand up in court. At least in theory, if all the wordings are correct, etc.
But in this case, you have a cross-items punishment, and at least where I live that's a no-go. You can't take my car because I didn't pay my rent. You can take my flat if I didn't pay my rent, or you can take my car if I didn't pay my lease on that - but you can not punish me on A for something I did to B.
In this case, EA says they will take away my access to a game, or online game content, for behaviour in a different game, or even in no game but on the online forum.
I'm pretty sure most lawyers will see that as vigilante justice and strike it down hard and fast. EA will argue that that's just how it is for technical reasons (unified ID) and if the plaintiff is any good he'll fire back with an expert witness that tells the court there's no technical reason whatsoever that forces EA to use a unified ID system, they just decided to do it for convenience. They could even have a unified system customer-side but keep track of individual items on the backend so individual locks are possible if they so desire.
IANAL but I do have legal training. I doubt very much that the "damages" argument would fly. I can not even begin to imagine how that could work, legally speaking.
My guess is they're betting on nobody going to court over this.
So, they take away something I paid for - will they refund? Probably not. I wonder how that would play out in a court of law.
We're going to stick to PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.
Damn. Everything that sucked about Oblivion was a compromise they had to make due to the console versions.
Please make a real PC version this time, not something that feels like a cheap console port.
You need to go find a girlfriend and spend time with her.
As a matter of fact, playing online games is what we do for spending time with each other when we're not together (she lives in another city, not much longer though).
According to some study I forgot the source link to, that is, in fact, a fairly common setup. Quite a few couples play online games together.
if you're sold a lifetime subscription and the company shut down the servers, get your money back.
Depends on whether they specified your or their lifetime in the small print. :-)
Well, the thing is that you can generate collisions. I don't get all the math behind it (crypto is just a hobby, not my full-time job) but many academic cryptographers consider MD5 (and SHA1, btw) broken, and have done so for at least two years.
Now, that doesn't mean there's an implementation. It could still require something like 50 times the entire computing power of the globe. That's why I put "academic" explicitly in there. But as I said: I don't get all the math so I can't make a guess at what the ressources and requirements are. For most practical purposes it's probably still safe at least for the moment. But collisions are more than just fun anomalies at this point.
Real store or online shop is a non-trivial question.
Some things I prefer buying online, some in a real store. Stuff that you need to touch and feel, for example. Some clothes are of that kind, as well as sports articles and the like. Stuff that's mostly digital anyways (software) or of a well-known form (books) is something I prefer to buy online due to the convenience.
Building a "virtual store" in 3D that looks exactly like a real store strikes me as the most dumb thing you could possibly do. It combines all the limitations of the computer environment (limited FOV, lower resolution, etc.) with the total absence of any of the advantages it could offer.
I want a virtual store that knows its limitations and strengths. I don't want to wander down virtual aisles of stuff that all looks identical at the available resolution until you "move" closer (and wait for the high-res textures to load).
What I want is a store where I can enter a search term and get a 3D representation of the search results. The ability to click an object and say "pile up similar stuff left and right so I can compare". An interactive 3D object so I can test it out, look how the controls work. One button click away are colour or texture changes. That is the kind of advantages a "virtual store" could offer.
Please fuck off with virtual salespeople and impulse buy traps at the checkout. If your virtual store has a 3D representation of a checkout counter, it sucks. Double sucky points if it has AI customers to properly represent the queues at the checkout.
It's not a "world" until it advances a lot more. One of the reason that "virtual meetings" don't hold a candle to real meetings it that you have a what? 30 field of vision? That is if your screen is fairly large.
See, in the real world you have 180 FOV, full positional full-duplex audio, unlimited resolution, and a much, much more intuitive user interface.
Virtual worlds need to become a lot more immersive before they will take off. As long as a simple conversation isn't as simple as in the real world, there will be some early adopters and hype, but that's it.
Me, I want touch. You don't even begin to realize how much touch and force feedback matters until you're in a "virtual world" where you have neither.
Isn't it the US where convicted felons can't vote?
So you can't vote, but you can be elected? Now that's a nice standard. "Nah, we can't have criminals affect the course of our society. We prefer being ruled by them."
Actually, I laugh at people who wage wars over programming languages. ;-)
PHP is good for what it was designed for. If you disagree, just don't use it. Fine with me. :-)
This line from the IRC discussion says it all:
[16:24:51] bjori: switch to US layout ;)