Games - like all other social activities - can do a lot of good things for people. Now I don't talk about single-player doom, just like solitaire isn't so much use. But online games? Check.
Two data points: One, a recent study on MMORPGs (sorry, lost the link) revealed that quite a lot of couples play together. I do that myself and it helps keeping a long-distance relationship happy.
Two, I run an online game myself (see.sig) - and among the praise I got was a father who played the game together with his children whom he didn't see for years after the divorce and the part plays a good part in helping them bond together again.
Multiplayer games are social activities and should be seen in that light, with all the good and bad that brings.
Metadata (at least of the kind we're speaking about here) being useful only to one user, which in the windos world means one account on one machine (or network) means there's a simple solution:
Associate metadata with file in filesystem in such a way that it follows the file around. In other words: Put it in the inode or whatever the windos equivalent is. That way, metadata stay associated, no matter where you move the file to.
But when you send the file out by mail, FTP or whatever, only the file contents are copied, and the metadata stays put, never leaving your system. For convenience, add a way to send the metadata along, but only if user explicitly says he wants it done.
Gee, if anybody needs to be lectured about not storing metadata it's inline, it's the designers of Unix. Special files, directories with special names, using "From" as a message separate in mail files.
Unix stores what little metadata it natively supports in the inode, not in the file data blocks.
Special files have nothing to do with metadata, but with the Unix philosophy of "everything is a file", which works great and allows you to reduce the number of necessary system calls considerably.
I know no directories with special names. There are many names "by convention", but if I want I can have my ~tom in/var/weirdstuff/homedirs/tom instead of/home/tom and neither/dev nor/etc,/proc,/sys are special because of their name. The name is by convention and does not carry metadata.
Help me out here, but what's so difficult about not storing metadata in-line ?
After 10 years of M$ Word disclosing secret information, you'd have guessed that "a removal tool" as mentioned in the article is obvious to anyone with half a brain as not good enough.
Storing the meta-data in a seperate file, or how about with the other metadata (i.e. with the inode) isn't so hard, is it? And it is quite obviously the right thing. There's even a big, red hint right there in your face: It's called meta-data. Might want to treat it different from the actual data, you know?
Of course markets are capable of making such "complex decisions" - it happens all the time.
No, you are confusing logic types here. Participants within the market make complex decisions. But the market itself is quite stupid. That is it's greatest advantage but also a major shortcoming.
You are claiming that boycotts don't work?
Re-read my original comment. Boycotts leverage communication channels and decision processes outside the market proper.
ALL advertising is part of "the market";
No, it isn't. In fact, advertisement does not even exist in free market theory, because one of its assumptions is complete and truthful information available to all participants.
What I despise is force being brought into the market
Apparently you despise only one specific form of force, namely that used by the government. The force brought to market by quasi-monopolists ("do as we say or we'll bancrupt you") doesn't appear to bother you.
Never in a thousand years. Europe has over 700 mio. people. Pulling out of that market would open the C*O who made that move to a world of pain, including immediate removal from the board and both civil and criminal cases by shareholders.
Linux crap that's unusable for anyone with an IQ under 130.
There's an extra 0 there in your number, but given that I assume you meant it is unusable for you by that, I guess that is excusable and we should be glad the sentence is halfway readable at all.;)
I can't believe the EU would be so fascist as to compel Microsoft to release this information...
Your definition of facism differs considerably from the one everyone else uses, you know?
and with a fine post-dated to Dec 15!!
That's usual practice. You are nice in giving the other guy a chance, but at the same time you tell him that the additional time is not to be understood as time he can just continue sleeping.
Microsoft should suspend all sales of Windows and Office until this is resolved.
Please!. Oh yes, please! Do you have any contacts within M$ you can influence so they'd do that? That would be a blast to watch. The EU antitrust commission is not the guys you want to snub at.
Hell they might be able to talk Apple into joining the boycott...
You are insane. Apple would jump at that opportunity, redirect its entire production to Europe and have a 90% market share within the year. They'd be crazy to "join the boycott". Totally, utterly, unbelievably crazy.
I'm not at all comfortable with that decision being handled by "extra market forces" - aka government. AKA, men with guns.
If the market wants MS to open up, the market should decide it.
You seriously need to get back to university. Market's don't make that kind of complex decisions. A market sets a price, that's all.
There's a theory that markets can enforce additional restrictions by "voting with your dollars", but it has been largely disproven in reality. The simple version is that markets are unable to communicate, much less enforce that kind of requests, because they only have a one-bit channel (buy or not buy) available. Thus it is impossible to effectively communicate anything that requires more than one bit of information.
Before you reply, consider that most of the additional communication channels you will offer are not part of the market, but outside it - just like government intervention, anti-trust laws and the other options you despise are.
We're losing the internet to the Bad Guys, the battle is half over already,
You're fairly young, I dare to guess.
See, things always swing back and forth. In the early days, the Internet was a free-for-all, where hackers and sysadmins ruled, and even large corporations had to ask nicely. Right now, the corporations are in control, money decides over technical merrit. It'll swing back and forth a few more times before it settles on some compromise. That's how society works - invent something, test out the limits in various directions, settle on something most people agree on.
Maybe it doesn't look like that, maybe it looks inescapable - I'm sure that's the way monarchy and feudal society appeared to the average peasant in, say, 1405. And still what was "inescapable" then is just history to us today.
J. Allard had a chat with Edge magazine about the launch lineup of the Xbox 360, and makes the claim that they have the best launch lineup ever associated with a console.
Hey, I don't blame him. It's not like he's biased, or anything. If Edge magazine were to ask me about, say, web-based multiplayer online games, I'll make it a point to mention that BattleMaster is certainly one of the best. And that has nothing to do with the fact that it was made by me or anything...
No, it ain't. Like a good board game, there are rules, in writing, to that game. We call those rules "laws". Bill's little company has broken several of them.
In other words: He's just a cheater.
If this were a MMORPG, he'd be the cheater who goes to the newbie area every now and then and gives away a few of the items he cheated himself into. But he's still a cheater.
but you have to be a ruthless dictator in order to run a multi-national. When in Rome. Show me one CEO who can exist in *that* world, without holding true to the values of the Sith.
Funny how fucked up the world is, isn't it? You have to be evil in order to be successful. It doesn't just make it easier, it's a requirement.
Unless you can honestly claim to give a larger percentage of your salary to charity than bill gates has,
That is a gross oversimplification.
Someone who barely makes it, and yet donates some might only be making a total donation of 5% of his income, but that 5% is from where he actually feels it missing.
Someone who's got so much money he can't possibly spend it all even if he did nothing else all day might not even feel 10%, 20% or even 50% at all. And it certainly is the larger sum.
But who of these two makes the larger personal sacrifice?
All of the HCI people I've known have been very smart, had PhDs -- and quite narrow-minded in their thinking about how humans and computers interact....
Weird, all the HCI people I know are fully aware that there is nothing more valuable in their field than high- and low-fidelity prototypes tested by real users.
EAL4+ is a fairly high level, and not easy to reach. This was serious work and money invested for M$.
However, do keep in mind that CC is much more about assurance than about security. In fact, most (and in many cases the most difficult to meet) requirements are in the development and documentation areas.
What EAL4+ does mean is that windos isn't a quickly hacked together bundle of hogwash (even though it looks like that at times), but was systematically developed, using version control software and systematic testing as well as being extensively documented. Usually, this goes together with a higher software quality, and high software quality usually means higher security.
M$ is quite successfully employing their "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy to words now. "Open" is merely the first victim. If this works, you can be guaranteed that nothing is safe.
You're probably right. I work for an ISP, but we only have half a million customers. Our parent company has 30 mio. or so. I know they have "terrabytes", but not how many. Could be 10, could be 100.
M$ is losing this battle and knows it. You can see that from the comment. Why? Because only he who knows he is at #2 says "hey, why not have two winners?".
OpenDocument and Open XML come from very different design points.
Absolutely! One was designed to be an open document format useful to both users and developers, and the other was designed to embrace&extend the idea and create a fake impression of being open while keeping the customer solidly tied to one product.
Your friend probably has more knowledge on HCI than all of the comments here combined. Trust her, don't trust/., because what is true for cryptography is also true for usability - it's easy to get it wrong and hard to get it right, and it takes an expert to spot the difference.
That's 100 GB of real storage as defined by any company worth their IT department, and maybe 50 GB of effective capacity for any with a food one.
These are EMC devices, not cheap USB harddrives. RAID-5, extra volumes, metadata, SCSI and Fiberchannel, NAS, SAN, etc. pp.
Sorry, different game. You probably also have more computing power in your notebook than the space shuttle has on-board. That doesn't mean anyone even half sane would entrust the space shuttle to your home machine.
RTFParent. I know how they define it, I read the specs. It isn't packets. They know that one e-mail can be many packets. They know that one VoIP call is many packets. They want sender, recipient and date, mostly. That's a very small fraction.
And SSL will not save you, unless you run your own mailserver and the other guy you're talking to also runs his own mailserver, because otherwise they'll just gather the data on his end.
They cannot force an american company down their European laws now, can they?
Of course they can, just the same way US laws are constantly shoved down the throat of european companies. The deal is essentially "we don't care where you are, you have assets here that we can sack, so play nice".
Quite honestly, most of the time it works the other way around. Sometimes I feel our european government are just trying to show they can also play.
Slashdot Mirror
Games - like all other social activities - can do a lot of good things for people. Now I don't talk about single-player doom, just like solitaire isn't so much use. But online games? Check.
.sig) - and among the praise I got was a father who played the game together with his children whom he didn't see for years after the divorce and the part plays a good part in helping them bond together again.
Two data points:
One, a recent study on MMORPGs (sorry, lost the link) revealed that quite a lot of couples play together. I do that myself and it helps keeping a long-distance relationship happy.
Two, I run an online game myself (see
Multiplayer games are social activities and should be seen in that light, with all the good and bad that brings.
Metadata (at least of the kind we're speaking about here) being useful only to one user, which in the windos world means one account on one machine (or network) means there's a simple solution:
Associate metadata with file in filesystem in such a way that it follows the file around. In other words: Put it in the inode or whatever the windos equivalent is. That way, metadata stay associated, no matter where you move the file to.
But when you send the file out by mail, FTP or whatever, only the file contents are copied, and the metadata stays put, never leaving your system. For convenience, add a way to send the metadata along, but only if user explicitly says he wants it done.
Gee, if anybody needs to be lectured about not storing metadata it's inline, it's the designers of Unix. Special files, directories with special names, using "From" as a message separate in mail files.
/var/weirdstuff/homedirs/tom instead of /home/tom and neither /dev nor /etc, /proc, /sys are special because of their name. The name is by convention and does not carry metadata.
Unix stores what little metadata it natively supports in the inode, not in the file data blocks.
Special files have nothing to do with metadata, but with the Unix philosophy of "everything is a file", which works great and allows you to reduce the number of necessary system calls considerably.
I know no directories with special names. There are many names "by convention", but if I want I can have my ~tom in
Yes, it is a beta product. Which means someone within M$ is wondering why it hasn't shipped, yet.
Help me out here, but what's so difficult about not storing metadata in-line ?
After 10 years of M$ Word disclosing secret information, you'd have guessed that "a removal tool" as mentioned in the article is obvious to anyone with half a brain as not good enough.
Storing the meta-data in a seperate file, or how about with the other metadata (i.e. with the inode) isn't so hard, is it? And it is quite obviously the right thing. There's even a big, red hint right there in your face: It's called meta-data. Might want to treat it different from the actual data, you know?
Of course markets are capable of making such "complex decisions" - it happens all the time.
No, you are confusing logic types here. Participants within the market make complex decisions. But the market itself is quite stupid. That is it's greatest advantage but also a major shortcoming.
You are claiming that boycotts don't work?
Re-read my original comment. Boycotts leverage communication channels and decision processes outside the market proper.
ALL advertising is part of "the market";
No, it isn't. In fact, advertisement does not even exist in free market theory, because one of its assumptions is complete and truthful information available to all participants.
What I despise is force being brought into the market
Apparently you despise only one specific form of force, namely that used by the government. The force brought to market by quasi-monopolists ("do as we say or we'll bancrupt you") doesn't appear to bother you.
If the fines are too big, Microsoft goes home
;)
Never in a thousand years.
Europe has over 700 mio. people. Pulling out of that market would open the C*O who made that move to a world of pain, including immediate removal from the board and both civil and criminal cases by shareholders.
Linux crap that's unusable for anyone with an IQ under 130.
There's an extra 0 there in your number, but given that I assume you meant it is unusable for you by that, I guess that is excusable and we should be glad the sentence is halfway readable at all.
I can't believe the EU would be so fascist as to compel Microsoft to release this information...
Your definition of facism differs considerably from the one everyone else uses, you know?
and with a fine post-dated to Dec 15!!
That's usual practice. You are nice in giving the other guy a chance, but at the same time you tell him that the additional time is not to be understood as time he can just continue sleeping.
Microsoft should suspend all sales of Windows and Office until this is resolved.
Please!. Oh yes, please! Do you have any contacts within M$ you can influence so they'd do that? That would be a blast to watch. The EU antitrust commission is not the guys you want to snub at.
Hell they might be able to talk Apple into joining the boycott...
You are insane. Apple would jump at that opportunity, redirect its entire production to Europe and have a 90% market share within the year.
They'd be crazy to "join the boycott". Totally, utterly, unbelievably crazy.
I'm not at all comfortable with that decision being handled by "extra market forces" - aka government. AKA, men with guns.
If the market wants MS to open up, the market should decide it.
You seriously need to get back to university. Market's don't make that kind of complex decisions. A market sets a price, that's all.
There's a theory that markets can enforce additional restrictions by "voting with your dollars", but it has been largely disproven in reality. The simple version is that markets are unable to communicate, much less enforce that kind of requests, because they only have a one-bit channel (buy or not buy) available. Thus it is impossible to effectively communicate anything that requires more than one bit of information.
Before you reply, consider that most of the additional communication channels you will offer are not part of the market, but outside it - just like government intervention, anti-trust laws and the other options you despise are.
We're losing the internet to the Bad Guys, the battle is half over already,
You're fairly young, I dare to guess.
See, things always swing back and forth. In the early days, the Internet was a free-for-all, where hackers and sysadmins ruled, and even large corporations had to ask nicely.
Right now, the corporations are in control, money decides over technical merrit.
It'll swing back and forth a few more times before it settles on some compromise. That's how society works - invent something, test out the limits in various directions, settle on something most people agree on.
Maybe it doesn't look like that, maybe it looks inescapable - I'm sure that's the way monarchy and feudal society appeared to the average peasant in, say, 1405. And still what was "inescapable" then is just history to us today.
J. Allard had a chat with Edge magazine about the launch lineup of the Xbox 360, and makes the claim that they have the best launch lineup ever associated with a console.
Hey, I don't blame him. It's not like he's biased, or anything. If Edge magazine were to ask me about, say, web-based multiplayer online games, I'll make it a point to mention that BattleMaster is certainly one of the best. And that has nothing to do with the fact that it was made by me or anything...
but that is how the market is supposed to work.
No, it ain't. Like a good board game, there are rules, in writing, to that game. We call those rules "laws". Bill's little company has broken several of them.
In other words: He's just a cheater.
If this were a MMORPG, he'd be the cheater who goes to the newbie area every now and then and gives away a few of the items he cheated himself into. But he's still a cheater.
but you have to be a ruthless dictator in order to run a multi-national. When in Rome. Show me one CEO who can exist in *that* world, without holding true to the values of the Sith.
Funny how fucked up the world is, isn't it? You have to be evil in order to be successful. It doesn't just make it easier, it's a requirement.
Unless you can honestly claim to give a larger percentage of your salary to charity than bill gates has,
That is a gross oversimplification.
Someone who barely makes it, and yet donates some might only be making a total donation of 5% of his income, but that 5% is from where he actually feels it missing.
Someone who's got so much money he can't possibly spend it all even if he did nothing else all day might not even feel 10%, 20% or even 50% at all. And it certainly is the larger sum.
But who of these two makes the larger personal sacrifice?
All of the HCI people I've known have been very smart, had PhDs -- and quite narrow-minded in their thinking about how humans and computers interact....
Weird, all the HCI people I know are fully aware that there is nothing more valuable in their field than high- and low-fidelity prototypes tested by real users.
For those not in-the-know on CC:
EAL4+ is a fairly high level, and not easy to reach. This was serious work and money invested for M$.
However, do keep in mind that CC is much more about assurance than about security. In fact, most (and in many cases the most difficult to meet) requirements are in the development and documentation areas.
What EAL4+ does mean is that windos isn't a quickly hacked together bundle of hogwash (even though it looks like that at times), but was systematically developed, using version control software and systematic testing as well as being extensively documented.
Usually, this goes together with a higher software quality, and high software quality usually means higher security.
See other comment.
M$ is quite successfully employing their "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy to words now. "Open" is merely the first victim. If this works, you can be guaranteed that nothing is safe.
You're probably right. I work for an ISP, but we only have half a million customers. Our parent company has 30 mio. or so. I know they have "terrabytes", but not how many. Could be 10, could be 100.
M$ is losing this battle and knows it. You can see that from the comment. Why? Because only he who knows he is at #2 says "hey, why not have two winners?".
OpenDocument and Open XML come from very different design points.
Absolutely! One was designed to be an open document format useful to both users and developers, and the other was designed to embrace&extend the idea and create a fake impression of being open while keeping the customer solidly tied to one product.
Your friend probably has more knowledge on HCI than all of the comments here combined. Trust her, don't trust /., because what is true for cryptography is also true for usability - it's easy to get it wrong and hard to get it right, and it takes an expert to spot the difference.
s/food/good/
:)
Damn, I'm tired.
You've got 500 GB at home.
That's 100 GB of real storage as defined by any company worth their IT department, and maybe 50 GB of effective capacity for any with a food one.
These are EMC devices, not cheap USB harddrives. RAID-5, extra volumes, metadata, SCSI and Fiberchannel, NAS, SAN, etc. pp.
Sorry, different game. You probably also have more computing power in your notebook than the space shuttle has on-board. That doesn't mean anyone even half sane would entrust the space shuttle to your home machine.
It depends on how they define that.
RTFParent. I know how they define it, I read the specs. It isn't packets. They know that one e-mail can be many packets. They know that one VoIP call is many packets. They want sender, recipient and date, mostly. That's a very small fraction.
And SSL will not save you, unless you run your own mailserver and the other guy you're talking to also runs his own mailserver, because otherwise they'll just gather the data on his end.
They cannot force an american company down their European laws now, can they?
Of course they can, just the same way US laws are constantly shoved down the throat of european companies. The deal is essentially "we don't care where you are, you have assets here that we can sack, so play nice".
Quite honestly, most of the time it works the other way around. Sometimes I feel our european government are just trying to show they can also play.