Actually for myself I'd much prefer that when I open a new tab that it cloned the current page I was on. Why? Because sometimes I want two seperate instances of the same page to use, granted it's not a frequent need, but when that need arises then it becomes quite a chore to open a new tab, copy the url from the previous tab, paste it into the new tab. Not to mention that there's no real downside I can see to such cloning. Even if you don't desire any of the content on that page, you're only a mouse click or one url away from leaving it behind.
1) Default deny instead of default allow.
Actually, default deny is just as stupid as default allow, as if you have default deny, people just get sick of being asked if they want to allow something, and end up clicking "yes" on every box they see.
Why on earth would you allow your users to select what is acceptable? I believe his proposition was stating that you as the systems admin should set what people can use, and block everything else, otherwise if users could specify what was allowed, then you're back to square one like you say.
2) Enumerating Badness
So you want to write a virus scanner that somehow can recognise viruses without being told which programs are viruses. Modern virus checkers already mostly do this. With spyware it's very hard for a computer to tell the difference between a program you wanted installing and one you didn't. How do you expect it to tell?
Simple, you have a fixed set of programs that are allowed to run, and you don't allow users to install additional programs. Anything not designated as allowed to run therefore gets stopped in its tracks before harm can be done.
3) Penetrate and Patch
So you are saying we should write code without bugs and holes? What a great idea that is? why did no-one think of saying that before?
Actually I think his point is that code is being written insecurely when it really could be written securely. Look at how things are now, the buffer overflow is a security flaw that has been known about for quite some time, and there are very easy ways to protect against it, yet buffer overflow exploits are still quite common. The point is we shouldn't be trying to understand the flaw and try to patch it, we should try and understand how the flaw ever came to existing, and fix that!
4) Hacking is cool
You think people should learn how to stop hacking and intrusion without learning how existing hacks work? Then you are stupid. Shush.
As I explained in an above post, his point is that time could be better spent learning about the root cause of the security exploits (things like buffer overflows) and how to prevent them, rather than spending the rest of your life trying to guard against the countless flaws that the various programs you'll run may have.
5) Educating Users
So you are saying that we have to do security without teaching users how to do it. That just isn't going to work unless you never let users install their own applications or plug-ins. Yes teaching users is hard, but it has to be a vital part.
His point here was that users shouldn't even be able to cause harm in the first place, and if they can, then no amount of education is likely to prevent them from inadvertantly harming others. That said though I do believe users should be educated, but I agree with his point as well.
6) Action is better than Inaction
So, after saying the state we are in is rubbish, you now say we shouldn't actually change anything. Eh? Or are you saying "don't try something new without testing it first"? Well thats more than a little obvious.
It should be obvious, but how many companies got burned because they switched to very insecure wireless networks early on?
All up the points he raises are interesting, if idealistic at times. Next time you should try reading better
I think you misunderstood his point with #4. My understanding of what he was saying was that time spent learning how to hack into a system with xyz could be better spent simply learning about good security practices (such as how to prevent a buffer overflow). Rather than spending the rest of your life learning about each new exploit, you simply focus on why those exploits are occuring, and fixing them at the source, rather than trying to simply keep patching.
It keeps open source from using the information protected by those NDA's. Why? Because if they implement code into their open source projects based on information they gain by agreeing to the NDA, then they cannot publish the source code (and thereby have it as open source) without essentially violating the NDA.
For most people they're far more likely to listen to believe their friend when they hear a movie is good than they will if they hear some random person they don't know claimed that Movie X was the best!
As for sample chapters and promo mp3's, I'm not sure if that was what the grandparent was referring to, it could well be that they infact downloaded various ebooks/mp3's illegaly, but their content encouraged him to go out and purchase legitimate versions.
It shouldn't be a hard idea to grasp, it's something I've done myself quite recently, where a friend gave me a pirated copy of Sin City which after viewing at home I chose to see it at theatre's despite the cost. Given what I knew of before I had been given that copy, it's entierly likely I wouldn't have seen it at theatre's at all, as what was shown on tv regarding it (reviews, movie clips) didn't give me a sufficient idea as to the content of the movie, and therefore I could not be sure if it would be worth seeing at theatre's.
As far as skill in MMORPG's goes, you should really give Guild Wars a look. The level cap is 20, and statistics are only a small portion of what determines if you win a battle or not.
Heh, your girlfriend sounds like my fiance. It's almost scary just how much fun she has mowing down people in cars, or beating old ladies to death with a baseball bat (yes, she actually targets old ladies specifically). I even mentioned the hot coffee mod to my fiance and told her about the contents of it (I've only seen a video of it as we don't yet have San-Andreas) and she just laughed and said she wanted to see it.
Actually they're only using 8-bit PNG files, which IE has supported for quite some time, unsurprisingly as they only use one bit for transparency much like good old.gif files. Full 24-bit PNG transparency support is still lacking in IE however, though you can use an ActiveX filter to force it in IE if you desire it.
You're missing the point. If Intel did what you said and made it so the compiler simply did not compile code for AMD based processors at all, people wouldn't be as concerned. Why? Because it would be quite obvious to anyone that tried to use it that the compiler didn't work for AMD CPU's, end of story. However, in this case what's happening is that when it comes to AMD CPU's, the compiler is still compiling, but it's also purposly making an effort to slow the AMD CPU, all without indicating that to be the case.
It's this misleading part that people are so angry about. Had Intel openly stated that their compiler would not work as efficiently with AMD CPU's, then Intel may have been ok.
It's not about prior art, it's about how novel this idea truly is. With something like the internet where information flows so freely, implementing a system to harness that information on a retail site to guess what else you could try to push your customer is pretty damned obvious. Prior art isn't the issue most people have with patents, it's that many damned obvious things get patented when in reality far fewer idea's should recieve a patent.
Given Microsofts security record that's a pretty valid concern; I'd be lying if I said I didn't share your uneasiness regarding it.
More troubling however is Microsofts constant need to integrate various things such as their browser and now RSS into their operating system as tightly as possible. Keeping everything nice and modular would be much better; but I guess Microsoft see's some value in this approach despite the inherent security risks and stability issues.
Why should they want it standards compliant? So long as it's IE compliant I would assume Microsoft would be happy. Infact I would suspect they would be happier that way than they would be if it did produce nice standards compliant code.
Tell me something. How many regular people (by which I mean the less computer savy among us) do you think are even aware of Windows N? Why would they after all, very few people wanted to see any success out of such a thing, and Microsoft is not included in that small party.
While your analogy isn't bad, it isn't entierly correct in this instance. Software Piracy in particular is also a rather undervalued advertising medium. After all, what better way for people to be aware of good software such as games than to actually play the games themselves? Not only that, but with the spread of these games, word of mouth from all the people who pirated it quickly gives further advertisement for the product which potentially leads people to buy it, and those who pirate it will sometimes buy it if the product is deemed good enough.
Now, granted there are certainly people who won't pay at all and will just take this free stuff for granted, but while I admittedly have partaken in piracy before, I always only do it with products that I either could not otherwise afford to obtain, or products that I may purchase in the future.
That said, piracy isn't right, but my point in this is that it's also not as wrong as some would have you believe; it's a very hazy issue when it comes to good and bad, which is one reason why people feel it's ok.
If IE7 does fix all the CSS issue's, then expect some rather unhappy users of longhorn when they go to the numerous sites that have worked around earlier versions of IE and all its flaws, and find that suddenly their websites look all funny.
I'm personally not going to hold my breath waiting for Microsoft to implement proper CSS support.
The parent doesn't have a clue what they're talking about. Saying that using tables for layout and HTML 4.01 is the only way to make web sites look good on all browsers is complete bull. Anyone who actually knows how to use CSS properly will see how simply it is to create a nice layout, and it's not all that hard to make it work on all browsers.
In truth IE7 may give Web Developers more work as opposed to less, depending of course on how strictly they abide to CSS standards. Given Microsofts track record, and the lovely base they've created out of their lazyness in adhering to standards, I would not be surprised if there were still some parts that don't strictly follow CSS rules.
Of course Microsoft by its own lazyness is also in an unfortunate position. If by some miracle IE7 is fully compliant with CSS standards, then I can bet there will be a number of websites which simply will not render correctly. The point they're at now they either break a bunch of sites with IE7 so they get fixed, or they just screw standards over again and keep things compatible. Either way, Microsoft isn't in a nice position.
Of course regardless of how IE7 turns out, there'll still be people working away on IE5.x, so no matter what, Web Developers like myself will have to do just as much work as usual.
Indeed, software patents are very broken, which is quite a shame too as they could work as intended (encourage innovation and provide protection for the small people) but they haven't been handled correctly at all.
Patent law as it stands does not apply well to software as software is a different beast from what patents were originally intended to protect, things like special toasters or car engines or some crap, I don't really know specific examples, but you get the idea.
The problem in this is that software is very very different to these things, in one very important way. Physical items take time to create to get the materials etc., no matter how simple, and there are obvious limitations on what you can do with it. Software on the other hand is quite different; while it still requires time, there are no physical materials needed to assemble it (not in the same sense as a toaster for instance), not only that but actual limitations on what you can do are few. Essentially your imagination is the limit, you can create a simple program to keep the time to a program which puts you in the seat of a god controlling your worshipers and performing miracles. Quite a difference.
Due to this freedom I think a big issue related to software patents is maturity. At present it's not so easy to gauge genuine novelty in software, because it's not as easy to be sure that if someone were presented with the same problem or need, that they wouldn't have come to the same solution. The sheer amount of freedom available combined with the still rather young age of the software industry means that no one, no matter how educated is truly qualified to determine the novelty of many of the items people try to patent.
While I'm sure there are exceptions to what I've stated above, and I have no doubt that some software patents have been granted which are quite deserving of a patent, but regardless, far too many patents are issued for rather trivial things which many would say are not the least bit novel. This is definitely a failing of the patent office, as the general attitude seems to be that 'a patent carries no weight until it has been tested in court, so what's the harm in granting them?' While that may be true, it's not nice at all for the small people when the big companies unviel their huge patent portfolio and their huge amounts of cash at the hands of their lawyers. Patents may not carry any weight, but one can definitely still beat another person down with them, that has been proven many a time before.
So where does the fault lie? In my opinion, primarily with the patent office for setting the bar so low and relying on the courts to do their job. How do we solve it? A nice solution in my mind would be to make the patent office responsible for the legal fee's of any person believed to be violating an untested patent, that is if the person wishes it. If the person was deemed to be violating then they would be required to pay the patent office back the cost of their legal fee's. This would very much encourage the bar to be set higher for novelty needed to recieve a patent, and also discourage the use of patents as a club to beat down others, as repeated lawsuits for trivial things would not be desirable by companies, as they'd be potentially hurting the very people who give them the power to do that. Of course this would never happen, but at the very least I hope in time that software patents find their lifespan lowered drastically, down to three years preferably, though I admittedly feel I may be going a bit too extreme in the length of time I feel should be given for a patent.
There's no reason this should be rated down, it's all quite true. I'm currently studying web-design, and half of what I have to learn is about how to get around the stupidity of various versions of IE. I only hope longhorn will properly support CSS, the last thing I need is to learn how to cope with another version of stupid IE psuedo-CSS rules.
Though you're largely correct saying that most games are GPU bound rather than CPU bound, I wouldn't expect that trend to continue too far into the future. With graphics getting steadily better developers will start to look towards other means of making their games appeal to the market, namely the flashy kinds of things that seems to sell most games these days. Namely what I'm referring to is physics and AI. Both of these area's could do a lot more with additional processing power, and once dual core CPU's become more common I have no doubt we'll be seeing games start to bump up the CPU requirements. Games like HL2 are already starting to head this way to an extent, but there's still a very long way to go.
What kind of performance one could expect from a drive like this? Would it be any different from a regular hard drive, just with a heck of a lot more space, or would there be some tangible difference? I suspect there wouldn't be, but nonetheless while this seems rather promising I don't want to find that it packs some pretty heavy penalties for the storage.
...the newer battery wasn't quite so 'new'. It would explain the seemingly quick loss of power (going from half full to empty in an hour). Makes one wonder if the parts used were taken from old stock.
And those thousands of employee's and possibly many more can seperate to join the numerous companies that will finally be able to enter the market, rather than being crushed by Microsoft and not even being able to.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually for myself I'd much prefer that when I open a new tab that it cloned the current page I was on. Why? Because sometimes I want two seperate instances of the same page to use, granted it's not a frequent need, but when that need arises then it becomes quite a chore to open a new tab, copy the url from the previous tab, paste it into the new tab. Not to mention that there's no real downside I can see to such cloning. Even if you don't desire any of the content on that page, you're only a mouse click or one url away from leaving it behind.
1) Default deny instead of default allow. Actually, default deny is just as stupid as default allow, as if you have default deny, people just get sick of being asked if they want to allow something, and end up clicking "yes" on every box they see.
Why on earth would you allow your users to select what is acceptable? I believe his proposition was stating that you as the systems admin should set what people can use, and block everything else, otherwise if users could specify what was allowed, then you're back to square one like you say.
2) Enumerating Badness So you want to write a virus scanner that somehow can recognise viruses without being told which programs are viruses. Modern virus checkers already mostly do this. With spyware it's very hard for a computer to tell the difference between a program you wanted installing and one you didn't. How do you expect it to tell?
Simple, you have a fixed set of programs that are allowed to run, and you don't allow users to install additional programs. Anything not designated as allowed to run therefore gets stopped in its tracks before harm can be done.
3) Penetrate and Patch So you are saying we should write code without bugs and holes? What a great idea that is? why did no-one think of saying that before?
Actually I think his point is that code is being written insecurely when it really could be written securely. Look at how things are now, the buffer overflow is a security flaw that has been known about for quite some time, and there are very easy ways to protect against it, yet buffer overflow exploits are still quite common. The point is we shouldn't be trying to understand the flaw and try to patch it, we should try and understand how the flaw ever came to existing, and fix that!
4) Hacking is cool You think people should learn how to stop hacking and intrusion without learning how existing hacks work? Then you are stupid. Shush.
As I explained in an above post, his point is that time could be better spent learning about the root cause of the security exploits (things like buffer overflows) and how to prevent them, rather than spending the rest of your life trying to guard against the countless flaws that the various programs you'll run may have.
5) Educating Users So you are saying that we have to do security without teaching users how to do it. That just isn't going to work unless you never let users install their own applications or plug-ins. Yes teaching users is hard, but it has to be a vital part.
His point here was that users shouldn't even be able to cause harm in the first place, and if they can, then no amount of education is likely to prevent them from inadvertantly harming others. That said though I do believe users should be educated, but I agree with his point as well.
6) Action is better than Inaction So, after saying the state we are in is rubbish, you now say we shouldn't actually change anything. Eh? Or are you saying "don't try something new without testing it first"? Well thats more than a little obvious.
It should be obvious, but how many companies got burned because they switched to very insecure wireless networks early on?
All up the points he raises are interesting, if idealistic at times. Next time you should try reading better
I think you misunderstood his point with #4. My understanding of what he was saying was that time spent learning how to hack into a system with xyz could be better spent simply learning about good security practices (such as how to prevent a buffer overflow). Rather than spending the rest of your life learning about each new exploit, you simply focus on why those exploits are occuring, and fixing them at the source, rather than trying to simply keep patching.
It keeps open source from using the information protected by those NDA's. Why? Because if they implement code into their open source projects based on information they gain by agreeing to the NDA, then they cannot publish the source code (and thereby have it as open source) without essentially violating the NDA.
For most people they're far more likely to listen to believe their friend when they hear a movie is good than they will if they hear some random person they don't know claimed that Movie X was the best!
As for sample chapters and promo mp3's, I'm not sure if that was what the grandparent was referring to, it could well be that they infact downloaded various ebooks/mp3's illegaly, but their content encouraged him to go out and purchase legitimate versions.
It shouldn't be a hard idea to grasp, it's something I've done myself quite recently, where a friend gave me a pirated copy of Sin City which after viewing at home I chose to see it at theatre's despite the cost. Given what I knew of before I had been given that copy, it's entierly likely I wouldn't have seen it at theatre's at all, as what was shown on tv regarding it (reviews, movie clips) didn't give me a sufficient idea as to the content of the movie, and therefore I could not be sure if it would be worth seeing at theatre's.
I'm guessing you've never used ICQ...
As far as skill in MMORPG's goes, you should really give Guild Wars a look. The level cap is 20, and statistics are only a small portion of what determines if you win a battle or not.
Heh, your girlfriend sounds like my fiance. It's almost scary just how much fun she has mowing down people in cars, or beating old ladies to death with a baseball bat (yes, she actually targets old ladies specifically). I even mentioned the hot coffee mod to my fiance and told her about the contents of it (I've only seen a video of it as we don't yet have San-Andreas) and she just laughed and said she wanted to see it.
Actually they're only using 8-bit PNG files, which IE has supported for quite some time, unsurprisingly as they only use one bit for transparency much like good old .gif files. Full 24-bit PNG transparency support is still lacking in IE however, though you can use an ActiveX filter to force it in IE if you desire it.
You're missing the point. If Intel did what you said and made it so the compiler simply did not compile code for AMD based processors at all, people wouldn't be as concerned. Why? Because it would be quite obvious to anyone that tried to use it that the compiler didn't work for AMD CPU's, end of story. However, in this case what's happening is that when it comes to AMD CPU's, the compiler is still compiling, but it's also purposly making an effort to slow the AMD CPU, all without indicating that to be the case.
It's this misleading part that people are so angry about. Had Intel openly stated that their compiler would not work as efficiently with AMD CPU's, then Intel may have been ok.
It's not about prior art, it's about how novel this idea truly is. With something like the internet where information flows so freely, implementing a system to harness that information on a retail site to guess what else you could try to push your customer is pretty damned obvious. Prior art isn't the issue most people have with patents, it's that many damned obvious things get patented when in reality far fewer idea's should recieve a patent.
Given Microsofts security record that's a pretty valid concern; I'd be lying if I said I didn't share your uneasiness regarding it.
More troubling however is Microsofts constant need to integrate various things such as their browser and now RSS into their operating system as tightly as possible. Keeping everything nice and modular would be much better; but I guess Microsoft see's some value in this approach despite the inherent security risks and stability issues.
Why should they want it standards compliant? So long as it's IE compliant I would assume Microsoft would be happy. Infact I would suspect they would be happier that way than they would be if it did produce nice standards compliant code.
Tell me something. How many regular people (by which I mean the less computer savy among us) do you think are even aware of Windows N? Why would they after all, very few people wanted to see any success out of such a thing, and Microsoft is not included in that small party.
While your analogy isn't bad, it isn't entierly correct in this instance. Software Piracy in particular is also a rather undervalued advertising medium. After all, what better way for people to be aware of good software such as games than to actually play the games themselves? Not only that, but with the spread of these games, word of mouth from all the people who pirated it quickly gives further advertisement for the product which potentially leads people to buy it, and those who pirate it will sometimes buy it if the product is deemed good enough.
Now, granted there are certainly people who won't pay at all and will just take this free stuff for granted, but while I admittedly have partaken in piracy before, I always only do it with products that I either could not otherwise afford to obtain, or products that I may purchase in the future.
That said, piracy isn't right, but my point in this is that it's also not as wrong as some would have you believe; it's a very hazy issue when it comes to good and bad, which is one reason why people feel it's ok.
If IE7 does fix all the CSS issue's, then expect some rather unhappy users of longhorn when they go to the numerous sites that have worked around earlier versions of IE and all its flaws, and find that suddenly their websites look all funny.
I'm personally not going to hold my breath waiting for Microsoft to implement proper CSS support.
The parent doesn't have a clue what they're talking about. Saying that using tables for layout and HTML 4.01 is the only way to make web sites look good on all browsers is complete bull. Anyone who actually knows how to use CSS properly will see how simply it is to create a nice layout, and it's not all that hard to make it work on all browsers.
In truth IE7 may give Web Developers more work as opposed to less, depending of course on how strictly they abide to CSS standards. Given Microsofts track record, and the lovely base they've created out of their lazyness in adhering to standards, I would not be surprised if there were still some parts that don't strictly follow CSS rules.
Of course Microsoft by its own lazyness is also in an unfortunate position. If by some miracle IE7 is fully compliant with CSS standards, then I can bet there will be a number of websites which simply will not render correctly. The point they're at now they either break a bunch of sites with IE7 so they get fixed, or they just screw standards over again and keep things compatible. Either way, Microsoft isn't in a nice position.
Of course regardless of how IE7 turns out, there'll still be people working away on IE5.x, so no matter what, Web Developers like myself will have to do just as much work as usual.
...or possibly about the guy swerving to avoid you and plowing into another car and killing a small family perhaps. Yeah, real foolish.
Indeed, software patents are very broken, which is quite a shame too as they could work as intended (encourage innovation and provide protection for the small people) but they haven't been handled correctly at all.
Patent law as it stands does not apply well to software as software is a different beast from what patents were originally intended to protect, things like special toasters or car engines or some crap, I don't really know specific examples, but you get the idea.
The problem in this is that software is very very different to these things, in one very important way. Physical items take time to create to get the materials etc., no matter how simple, and there are obvious limitations on what you can do with it. Software on the other hand is quite different; while it still requires time, there are no physical materials needed to assemble it (not in the same sense as a toaster for instance), not only that but actual limitations on what you can do are few. Essentially your imagination is the limit, you can create a simple program to keep the time to a program which puts you in the seat of a god controlling your worshipers and performing miracles. Quite a difference.
Due to this freedom I think a big issue related to software patents is maturity. At present it's not so easy to gauge genuine novelty in software, because it's not as easy to be sure that if someone were presented with the same problem or need, that they wouldn't have come to the same solution. The sheer amount of freedom available combined with the still rather young age of the software industry means that no one, no matter how educated is truly qualified to determine the novelty of many of the items people try to patent.
While I'm sure there are exceptions to what I've stated above, and I have no doubt that some software patents have been granted which are quite deserving of a patent, but regardless, far too many patents are issued for rather trivial things which many would say are not the least bit novel. This is definitely a failing of the patent office, as the general attitude seems to be that 'a patent carries no weight until it has been tested in court, so what's the harm in granting them?' While that may be true, it's not nice at all for the small people when the big companies unviel their huge patent portfolio and their huge amounts of cash at the hands of their lawyers. Patents may not carry any weight, but one can definitely still beat another person down with them, that has been proven many a time before.
So where does the fault lie? In my opinion, primarily with the patent office for setting the bar so low and relying on the courts to do their job. How do we solve it? A nice solution in my mind would be to make the patent office responsible for the legal fee's of any person believed to be violating an untested patent, that is if the person wishes it. If the person was deemed to be violating then they would be required to pay the patent office back the cost of their legal fee's. This would very much encourage the bar to be set higher for novelty needed to recieve a patent, and also discourage the use of patents as a club to beat down others, as repeated lawsuits for trivial things would not be desirable by companies, as they'd be potentially hurting the very people who give them the power to do that. Of course this would never happen, but at the very least I hope in time that software patents find their lifespan lowered drastically, down to three years preferably, though I admittedly feel I may be going a bit too extreme in the length of time I feel should be given for a patent.
There's no reason this should be rated down, it's all quite true. I'm currently studying web-design, and half of what I have to learn is about how to get around the stupidity of various versions of IE. I only hope longhorn will properly support CSS, the last thing I need is to learn how to cope with another version of stupid IE psuedo-CSS rules.
Though you're largely correct saying that most games are GPU bound rather than CPU bound, I wouldn't expect that trend to continue too far into the future. With graphics getting steadily better developers will start to look towards other means of making their games appeal to the market, namely the flashy kinds of things that seems to sell most games these days. Namely what I'm referring to is physics and AI. Both of these area's could do a lot more with additional processing power, and once dual core CPU's become more common I have no doubt we'll be seeing games start to bump up the CPU requirements. Games like HL2 are already starting to head this way to an extent, but there's still a very long way to go.
What kind of performance one could expect from a drive like this? Would it be any different from a regular hard drive, just with a heck of a lot more space, or would there be some tangible difference? I suspect there wouldn't be, but nonetheless while this seems rather promising I don't want to find that it packs some pretty heavy penalties for the storage.
...the newer battery wasn't quite so 'new'. It would explain the seemingly quick loss of power (going from half full to empty in an hour). Makes one wonder if the parts used were taken from old stock.
And those thousands of employee's and possibly many more can seperate to join the numerous companies that will finally be able to enter the market, rather than being crushed by Microsoft and not even being able to.