I agree, "global warming" has become no more than a public relations buz word.. For use when you want to garner public attention for any natural or unnatural change in an ecosystem. I'm sure nobody will make the argument that the blackened air created by cars, factories and other industrial complexes is helpful to the environment around us. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that global warming is responsible for everything negative that happens. It seems from this discussion, I am not the only one who feels this way. From what I learned in Geology, the river delta explanation seems plausible.
What everybody needs to understand is that Earth - as an environmental system - is always in a state of change. People don't like to hear that because people like to believe that they are in control of their surroundings. In reality, the environment and the ecosystems around us will move to adapt to any new stimuli introduced. This is what we (the public) lack an understanding of. If we continue to abuse the Earth by polluting the air as we are now, the ice caps might melt quite a bit. Okay, fine... but that is a short term, direct reaction. How will the world look in 100 years? 500 years?
No computer model is going to accurately predict that. Too many unknown variables in the equation. It might not be as bad as we are led to believe. Just something to keep in mind.... I personally support environmental reform, but not because of global warming threats.
when Yahoo does something like this, they are teh Evil!!!!11!!one! But when Google does it, it can only be for the common good, right? A malicious Hax0r gets put away??
No. You make it sound like all/.ers blindly believe anything Google does is correct. Google knows how to play this crowd, and there is nothing wrong with that. You're the real problem here because of how you trivialize the issues to make it seem like a popularity contest. Some people here might think that way, but most probably do not...
The difference between these two events is pretty basic. In Google's case:
a subpoena to Google from the police
This is a legal requirement that Google has no choice other than to comply with. (or to not log queries and degrade service severly). Now in Yahoo!'s case, from the article you linked:
Yahoo Holdings Ltd. in Hong Kong worked with mainland Chinese police to find Shi, according to court documents. So far, Yahoo has refused to offer details beyond this statement released Thursday: "Yahoo must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the [local] laws, regulations, and customs."
Can you see the differences? Do you see why Yahoo HK was evil, but Google was not? Hong Kong is a seperate government than mainland China. Yahoo in Hong Kong had no legal requirement to cooperate with mainland Chinese police (first evil deed). Then, Yahoo stated that they will comply with local "customs".
So, the bottom line is that subpoenas and customs are very different things. Google will release customer data in compliance with court orders. Yahoo will release customer data in compliance with local customs. Please don't pretend these are the same thing.
Neither Netcraft nor Kreskin need be sought out. Reality confirms it, PalmOS is dead.
I'm not sure what netcraft would say about a mobile device operating system, but whatever... Palm OS is not dead. It has a cult-like following of die hard PalmOS users, much like Apple has a cult-like following of OSX users. Would you say OSX is dead just because it commands ~5% of the market? No, because that is still a very large number.
I use a Windows mobile device now, and have used it every day of my like for the last 1+ years. I think my next smartphone will be Palm OS based. Why? Windows mobile is okay at first, but after time it becomes very annoying. The interface for many non-trivial tasks is not intuitive at all. I use to find myself getting angry at the OS, but not I just accept it for what it is. I think Windows mobile would have failed if it were released under any other name.
the developers did all the fucking work thats what. all machiest did was put up a webpage and drum up a little PR. nothing all that time consuming or expensive, and yet they are sent to profit 4 to 1 on the sales. it's the usual, the dev's do all the time and the slime balls in sales make all the money off their hard work.
You have a terrible bussiness sense and can't see the point. Let me spell it out for you: MacHeist is voluntary! The developers agreed to this offer and therefore get what they negotiated. If they wanted more, they should have demanded more. I think all the developers should be quite happy. They made a deal, and they're getting money. MacHeist is basically acting as a PR/sales firm and they did an amazing job.
I can't imagine sales were all that great before this...
That is possible, but then it might just be a result of *who* uses MySQL. There is a large base of inexperienced users who are just not trained/experienced at all. Most people that I have met in school or on the job who has developed a DB and spoken to me about it has relied in some way on foreign key constraints. On the other hand a few of my friends have done DB work and dont even know what FK's are... I think it basically comes down to experience, and MySQL tends to have more inexperienced devs using it (wholly due to its popularity and free-ness).
In your iTunes folder (My Music in windows, Music on Macs), there are at least two files. One is a itunes library binary file which is what iTunes uses while running. The other file is called something like "iTunes Library.xml". The latter file is a human-readable export that is created and updated automatically while iTunes is running, or when its closed... i cant recall.
I'm certain you can find a converter to whatever other player you need/want to use. I used that xml file and a half hour of Perl hackery to write a script that syncs itunes between computers (very useful since all my machines use the same music files from a file server).
Note the *one* sentence that was added by the slashdot mod stated this was 15 months out of date. Oct 2005 is 14 months ago. Next time, before you insult a large group of developers, get your facts straight.
Yeah, I agree. You have to remember that MacHeist coordinators handled the PR, advertising, coordination and web site of this thing. They did it really well, and the result is pretty spectacular. I even bought a software pack... I've had a Mac for years, and I knew about most of this software, but was never really interested. MacHeist convinced me to spend my money, the dev's did not. Seems like a win-win to me.
Use of the procedure described above is not limited to Skype and is known as "UDP hole punching".
This sentence, which occurs in the last paragraph of TFA, should be further noted. The technique described here has been around for as long as NAT routers have been around (a very long time). Its fairly common knowledge/practice in network security circles. In fact, this was taught in my network security course last year. I think it was on the final as well... except we had to defeat a NAT router using TCP packets which is a slightly more tricky task.
On a tangent: NAT routers are not really proper firewalls, though they have the side effect of keeping most attackers out. This is beacuse NAT was designed and implemented primarily for allowing multiple computers to utilize a single global address. They technically break the OSI stack by reaching past the link layer... and provide a bit less security than using vanilla iptables without modules. A more interesting exercise would be to describe the steps to defeat a firewall with stateful packet inspection.
Actually its "forking" either way. The term is slightly ambiguous. It can mean an official development branch OR an independant un-official development based on a copy of the official code. In this case they're definitely going to modify some part of the OO code.
In software engineering, a project fork or branch happens when a developer (or a group of them) takes code from a project and starts to develop independently of the rest. The term is also used more loosely to represent a similar branching of any work (for example, there are several forks of the English language Wikipedia).
So its not FUD, and its not incorrect. Additionally there is nothing wrong with Novell creating an ODF plugin... we already know they signed a deal with the devil, this is not quite as bad. It woudnt hurt for OO to take the open source plugin and make it availible to enhance compatibility with Office in the future. I don't know how OO plugin's work, but I imaging that they don't link against the OO libraries at all, so Novell would not be required to open/free the code at all.
It might feel wrong, but maybe we should just accept the free help...
If Google revealed the core techniques used by its index to filter out hacked pages, then it would be effectively making those techniques useless. Its the same reason Microsoft and Firefox have not told the world how its anti-phishing features work, even if you have a domain that appears erroneously as phished. Its also the same reason that only dozens Google employees REALLY know how AdSense works. We know it depends on the context of the page, but clearly there is more to it (this confirmed by an Google employee friend of mine who is under NDA; could noy say more).
Its security through obscurity, sure... A valid form of security when the goal is to prolong discovery of methods until new ones are in place.
That page is default start page for Firefox, not an ad. You have to already be using the browser to get there, unless you go out of your way to browse to the Firefox start page...
I agree with you, some slant is expected, and much worse things have been said. Strange that they left out of the other categories was how OSX stacks up... like:
Search: Mentioning spotlight being a year or so ahead of Vista search, with an upgrade due in a month
Flip: Expose being far far ahead (and more feature rich) than this "Flip" thing
Gadgets: wow... the timeline: Konfabulator invented them; Apple ripped Konfabulator; Google ripped Apple; Microsoft brings up the rear (Note that Google, Yahoo and Konfabulator released Windows version a while ago)
Firewall: OSX shipping with enterprise-grade industry standard iptables firewall for well over 5 years
Parental Controls: How Apple is releasing vista-like (hehe) parental controls at the same time as Vista's launch. Nice catch up.
User-based Security w/o defaulting to Admin user: OS X and Linux win by almost a decade
Anyway, I don't think it was all that bad of a review.
Chances are that 25 years after the Gates die, the foundation will decide that it doesnt want to die and start to fund raise from the rich and powerful moguls of the world. They've already taken a 40 (i think it was 40) billion dollar endowment from a stock billionaire. Who says other ridiculously wealthy people won't also donate unthinkable quantities of money in the future?
As the article says, this snippet has been around since the original Quake came about. Back then (a decade?) the hardware was so much slower than it is today that this approx function was absolutely needed to write the game. It's not new, nor mysterious. In fact I first encountered this code on a forum where somebody linked to the top10 most interesting code snippets (or something to that end)... I've even used it my own code here and there. The crazy hex number exploits IEEE floating point.
A not that is not mentioned here: you can repeat the IEEE magic number line again for a more accurate result:)
Well, yes. I'm sure all the crackers have gotten their grubby little mitts on the thing already, but the general populate hasn't. What good is being able to break into Vista already, when no one is using it yet. Once the use of the OS starts to grow after it is released, there will be an abundance of targets. Not so, right now.
Targets? Are you under the impression that the only reason to exploit a machine is to form a bot net? Additionally, have you considered that an exploit written/discovered during beta can, in most cases, be SAVED until release? It's not like the evil hackers are reporting their hacks to Microsoft for QA purposes.
The crackdown is a weight that must be counter-balanced. The U.S. is a great example of this because of how serious freedom of speech is treated by the community and courts (please don't reply with counter examples... there are always *some* counter examples of this but nothing like other countries). I guess that is why you cited the U.S.
Anyway the government is always trying to crackdown on everything it can exert authority over. The public, by way of the courts, decides how much they can restrict. Pretty much 'excersize your rights or lose them'. Without this constant battle, things would become unbalanced. Either we would end up with ultra-oppressive china-like government or -- on the other end of the spectrum -- pure anarchy.
Do you think warnings are a good deterant for something like cheating in WoW? Would you be hestant to cheat if you knew that getting caught would just result in a series of warnings? Blizzards tough, zero tolerance stance on cheating is the primary reason the game is still fairly pure. Sure some small number of people have and will always try to cheat, but the risks are huge... when you play for 1-2,000 hours a year (as many do), you DON'T risk a ban.
As for closing IM, VoIP and other programs: better safe than sorry. Though, its really unlikely that any third-party program that is NOT a wow cheat program will cause a problem. From what I understand, the game scans memory to see if unauthorized programs are reading/writing WoW's memory space. So just the mere fact that Blizzard has put such fear into you regarding cheating means that their system is working:-)
Re:So... it realy sucks, but its the best 360 game
on
Gears of War Review
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· Score: 2, Insightful
. I think he falls somewhere in the very very small category of people who won't be pleased no matter what you do.
I believe that is a required trait of a reviewer... mentioning what is good and picking on what is not.
Half a dozen Microsoft Engineers, marketeers and QA people held big technical talk at my university a few weeks ago. They did not hide the fact that Vista was designed for the future, not the past. First of all, nearly all of the new visual fluff will disable itself on hardware older than probably around 3 years old. If you get your old laptops and aging 5+ year old machines to run Vista, it will revert to the same old XP UI. I'm not sure about any non-fluff features... they probably disable depending on hardware as well.
So bottom line is that the Vista "experience" will vary from machine to machine. Old machines will feel just like XP. Recent machines will likely have a mix of low-resource XP features and new Vista stuff. Vista-ready machines and other very recent machines will be the only ones to get the whole "experience" (aka Aero Glass, etc).
This is what the told an auditorium of student. I also have a pre-release version that I don't care to install...
I am just wrapping up my BSCS and you should know that yes, it has changed. I had two classes in architecture. They were basic circuit design... more stress on making us understand how computers shove bits around and arithmetic than laying out actual boards. The other classes were split evenly between computation theory (algorithms, asymptotic efficiency, logic proofs, P=NP, etc) and software design/development (programming language design, object-oriented practices, OS-level coding/IPC/threading, etc).
I still a heavy dose of mathematics, but not as much as you probably had. We had to take nearly all of the calculus and stats classes up to but not including differential equations. This probably all varies from school to school.
Quite honestly, I hold Electrical or Computer Engineers with higher esteem than CS grads. Not that CS isn't vital to many companies; I just feel that the practical, physical designs associated with engineering are the more respectable components of computing.
Hahahaha. Hardware design is cool stuff... but who would use the computers without software to run on them?
Don't you mean an ad agency with the best search technology? Just be happy Google understands enough about what it wants to give you what you want for free.
Search: generates ad revenue by providing you with information GMail: free webmail with tons of space... so that you don't delete your old mail and Google can use it for language modeling corpus etc. Groups: again ad revenue coupled with providing information Docs and spreadsheets: probably another way to associate a language with your account for better overall service. etc, etc, etc.
Did you even read what you linked? That article plainly states that the book was selective, not false, in its research. Why shouldnt it be... it was not about environmental modeling, but about the *politics* of environmental modeling. I cite it because if you really stop and think about that points it makes, you might realize that you are not always correct. Just because some scientist (even the ones at that climate science site) coerce a computer to spit out some numbers does not make those numbers correct.
Step back and realize that all this modeling is done on data that has been gathered for about 100-200 years at best. 200 years?? What the hell is that in terms of the world? Its a blip, and you can't conclude things from that small a window of observation.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, "global warming" has become no more than a public relations buz word.. For use when you want to garner public attention for any natural or unnatural change in an ecosystem. I'm sure nobody will make the argument that the blackened air created by cars, factories and other industrial complexes is helpful to the environment around us. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that global warming is responsible for everything negative that happens. It seems from this discussion, I am not the only one who feels this way. From what I learned in Geology, the river delta explanation seems plausible.
What everybody needs to understand is that Earth - as an environmental system - is always in a state of change. People don't like to hear that because people like to believe that they are in control of their surroundings. In reality, the environment and the ecosystems around us will move to adapt to any new stimuli introduced. This is what we (the public) lack an understanding of. If we continue to abuse the Earth by polluting the air as we are now, the ice caps might melt quite a bit. Okay, fine... but that is a short term, direct reaction. How will the world look in 100 years? 500 years?
No computer model is going to accurately predict that. Too many unknown variables in the equation. It might not be as bad as we are led to believe. Just something to keep in mind.... I personally support environmental reform, but not because of global warming threats.
The difference between these two events is pretty basic. In Google's case:
This is a legal requirement that Google has no choice other than to comply with. (or to not log queries and degrade service severly). Now in Yahoo!'s case, from the article you linked:
Can you see the differences? Do you see why Yahoo HK was evil, but Google was not? Hong Kong is a seperate government than mainland China. Yahoo in Hong Kong had no legal requirement to cooperate with mainland Chinese police (first evil deed). Then, Yahoo stated that they will comply with local "customs".
So, the bottom line is that subpoenas and customs are very different things. Google will release customer data in compliance with court orders. Yahoo will release customer data in compliance with local customs. Please don't pretend these are the same thing.
I use a Windows mobile device now, and have used it every day of my like for the last 1+ years. I think my next smartphone will be Palm OS based. Why? Windows mobile is okay at first, but after time it becomes very annoying. The interface for many non-trivial tasks is not intuitive at all. I use to find myself getting angry at the OS, but not I just accept it for what it is. I think Windows mobile would have failed if it were released under any other name.
I can't imagine sales were all that great before this...
That is possible, but then it might just be a result of *who* uses MySQL. There is a large base of inexperienced users who are just not trained/experienced at all. Most people that I have met in school or on the job who has developed a DB and spoken to me about it has relied in some way on foreign key constraints. On the other hand a few of my friends have done DB work and dont even know what FK's are... I think it basically comes down to experience, and MySQL tends to have more inexperienced devs using it (wholly due to its popularity and free-ness).
In your iTunes folder (My Music in windows, Music on Macs), there are at least two files. One is a itunes library binary file which is what iTunes uses while running. The other file is called something like "iTunes Library.xml". The latter file is a human-readable export that is created and updated automatically while iTunes is running, or when its closed... i cant recall.
I'm certain you can find a converter to whatever other player you need/want to use. I used that xml file and a half hour of Perl hackery to write a script that syncs itunes between computers (very useful since all my machines use the same music files from a file server).
Note the *one* sentence that was added by the slashdot mod stated this was 15 months out of date. Oct 2005 is 14 months ago. Next time, before you insult a large group of developers, get your facts straight.
Yeah, I agree. You have to remember that MacHeist coordinators handled the PR, advertising, coordination and web site of this thing. They did it really well, and the result is pretty spectacular. I even bought a software pack... I've had a Mac for years, and I knew about most of this software, but was never really interested. MacHeist convinced me to spend my money, the dev's did not. Seems like a win-win to me.
This sentence, which occurs in the last paragraph of TFA, should be further noted. The technique described here has been around for as long as NAT routers have been around (a very long time). Its fairly common knowledge/practice in network security circles. In fact, this was taught in my network security course last year. I think it was on the final as well... except we had to defeat a NAT router using TCP packets which is a slightly more tricky task.
On a tangent:
NAT routers are not really proper firewalls, though they have the side effect of keeping most attackers out. This is beacuse NAT was designed and implemented primarily for allowing multiple computers to utilize a single global address. They technically break the OSI stack by reaching past the link layer... and provide a bit less security than using vanilla iptables without modules. A more interesting exercise would be to describe the steps to defeat a firewall with stateful packet inspection.
According to the great and powerful wikipedia:
So its not FUD, and its not incorrect. Additionally there is nothing wrong with Novell creating an ODF plugin... we already know they signed a deal with the devil, this is not quite as bad. It woudnt hurt for OO to take the open source plugin and make it availible to enhance compatibility with Office in the future. I don't know how OO plugin's work, but I imaging that they don't link against the OO libraries at all, so Novell would not be required to open/free the code at all.
It might feel wrong, but maybe we should just accept the free help...
If Google revealed the core techniques used by its index to filter out hacked pages, then it would be effectively making those techniques useless. Its the same reason Microsoft and Firefox have not told the world how its anti-phishing features work, even if you have a domain that appears erroneously as phished. Its also the same reason that only dozens Google employees REALLY know how AdSense works. We know it depends on the context of the page, but clearly there is more to it (this confirmed by an Google employee friend of mine who is under NDA; could noy say more).
Its security through obscurity, sure... A valid form of security when the goal is to prolong discovery of methods until new ones are in place.
That page is default start page for Firefox, not an ad. You have to already be using the browser to get there, unless you go out of your way to browse to the Firefox start page...
I agree with you, some slant is expected, and much worse things have been said. Strange that they left out of the other categories was how OSX stacks up... like:
Search: Mentioning spotlight being a year or so ahead of Vista search, with an upgrade due in a month
Flip: Expose being far far ahead (and more feature rich) than this "Flip" thing
Gadgets: wow... the timeline: Konfabulator invented them; Apple ripped Konfabulator; Google ripped Apple; Microsoft brings up the rear (Note that Google, Yahoo and Konfabulator released Windows version a while ago)
Firewall: OSX shipping with enterprise-grade industry standard iptables firewall for well over 5 years
Parental Controls: How Apple is releasing vista-like (hehe) parental controls at the same time as Vista's launch. Nice catch up.
User-based Security w/o defaulting to Admin user: OS X and Linux win by almost a decade
Anyway, I don't think it was all that bad of a review.
Chances are that 25 years after the Gates die, the foundation will decide that it doesnt want to die and start to fund raise from the rich and powerful moguls of the world. They've already taken a 40 (i think it was 40) billion dollar endowment from a stock billionaire. Who says other ridiculously wealthy people won't also donate unthinkable quantities of money in the future?
Watch out for that guy jogging 50 feet behind you with a laptop satchel on his shoulder and a high-gain antennae in his hand!
As the article says, this snippet has been around since the original Quake came about. Back then (a decade?) the hardware was so much slower than it is today that this approx function was absolutely needed to write the game. It's not new, nor mysterious. In fact I first encountered this code on a forum where somebody linked to the top10 most interesting code snippets (or something to that end)... I've even used it my own code here and there. The crazy hex number exploits IEEE floating point.
:)
A not that is not mentioned here: you can repeat the IEEE magic number line again for a more accurate result
Targets? Are you under the impression that the only reason to exploit a machine is to form a bot net? Additionally, have you considered that an exploit written/discovered during beta can, in most cases, be SAVED until release? It's not like the evil hackers are reporting their hacks to Microsoft for QA purposes.
*sigh*
The crackdown is a weight that must be counter-balanced. The U.S. is a great example of this because of how serious freedom of speech is treated by the community and courts (please don't reply with counter examples... there are always *some* counter examples of this but nothing like other countries). I guess that is why you cited the U.S.
Anyway the government is always trying to crackdown on everything it can exert authority over. The public, by way of the courts, decides how much they can restrict. Pretty much 'excersize your rights or lose them'. Without this constant battle, things would become unbalanced. Either we would end up with ultra-oppressive china-like government or -- on the other end of the spectrum -- pure anarchy.
Do you think warnings are a good deterant for something like cheating in WoW? Would you be hestant to cheat if you knew that getting caught would just result in a series of warnings? Blizzards tough, zero tolerance stance on cheating is the primary reason the game is still fairly pure. Sure some small number of people have and will always try to cheat, but the risks are huge... when you play for 1-2,000 hours a year (as many do), you DON'T risk a ban.
:-)
As for closing IM, VoIP and other programs: better safe than sorry. Though, its really unlikely that any third-party program that is NOT a wow cheat program will cause a problem. From what I understand, the game scans memory to see if unauthorized programs are reading/writing WoW's memory space. So just the mere fact that Blizzard has put such fear into you regarding cheating means that their system is working
I believe that is a required trait of a reviewer... mentioning what is good and picking on what is not.
Half a dozen Microsoft Engineers, marketeers and QA people held big technical talk at my university a few weeks ago. They did not hide the fact that Vista was designed for the future, not the past. First of all, nearly all of the new visual fluff will disable itself on hardware older than probably around 3 years old. If you get your old laptops and aging 5+ year old machines to run Vista, it will revert to the same old XP UI. I'm not sure about any non-fluff features... they probably disable depending on hardware as well.
So bottom line is that the Vista "experience" will vary from machine to machine. Old machines will feel just like XP. Recent machines will likely have a mix of low-resource XP features and new Vista stuff. Vista-ready machines and other very recent machines will be the only ones to get the whole "experience" (aka Aero Glass, etc).
This is what the told an auditorium of student. I also have a pre-release version that I don't care to install...
I am just wrapping up my BSCS and you should know that yes, it has changed. I had two classes in architecture. They were basic circuit design... more stress on making us understand how computers shove bits around and arithmetic than laying out actual boards. The other classes were split evenly between computation theory (algorithms, asymptotic efficiency, logic proofs, P=NP, etc) and software design/development (programming language design, object-oriented practices, OS-level coding/IPC/threading, etc).
I still a heavy dose of mathematics, but not as much as you probably had. We had to take nearly all of the calculus and stats classes up to but not including differential equations. This probably all varies from school to school.
Hahahaha. Hardware design is cool stuff... but who would use the computers without software to run on them?
Don't you mean an ad agency with the best search technology? Just be happy Google understands enough about what it wants to give you what you want for free.
Search: generates ad revenue by providing you with information
GMail: free webmail with tons of space... so that you don't delete your old mail and Google can use it for language modeling corpus etc.
Groups: again ad revenue coupled with providing information
Docs and spreadsheets: probably another way to associate a language with your account for better overall service.
etc, etc, etc.
There are better targets for criticism right now.
Did you even read what you linked? That article plainly states that the book was selective, not false, in its research. Why shouldnt it be... it was not about environmental modeling, but about the *politics* of environmental modeling. I cite it because if you really stop and think about that points it makes, you might realize that you are not always correct. Just because some scientist (even the ones at that climate science site) coerce a computer to spit out some numbers does not make those numbers correct.
Step back and realize that all this modeling is done on data that has been gathered for about 100-200 years at best. 200 years?? What the hell is that in terms of the world? Its a blip, and you can't conclude things from that small a window of observation.