One of the reasons why the US pays a lot more money than the Europeans do for defense is that the US is also paying for the European's defense: we shared a somewhat more equitable share of the load back during the Cold War when there was a functional German army which would have comprised much of the first line of defense against the Soviet armored spearhead, but after the Soviet Union collapse Europe decided to pare defense budgets down substantially and spend the savings on further increasing the size of the welfare state. Its currently so bad that Europe would be just structurally incapable of, e.g., removing a local tin-pot genocidal dictator (Milosevic, etc) without US assistance, to say nothing of actually mounting a significant campaign overseas. The Brits are probably in a better shape than the continent (marginally), and France can still push around impoverished African nations which have air forces which would fit on a municipal airport in Idaho and leave room to spare, but by and large Europe is incapable of providing for its own defense.
We're not talking about dumping hot water into the river.
Well, yes, you are. Unless they then take the water which has been warmed by absorbing heat in your dorm rooms and then give it to the freshmen to drink. And even then it still ends up in the river, except delayed about 6-18 hours and substantially warmer than when it started.
I'm thinking they mean programs which "can uniquely identify users of the program", rather than programs which "can be used to avoid paying for software". Consider what would happen if, say, Firefox "generate[d] serial numbers" on every install and these were passed on the outbound stream on a regular basis (say, in the HTTP request for websites, or via a "phone home" to Mozilla.org which relayed the last five URLs you visited and the unique ID) -- you could, without doing anything nasty *inside* the target's computer, greviously compromise their privacy just by building up a profile of their activities.
Obviously, on the scale of spyware nastiness, this doesn't rate much more than a medium. Heck, for some applications I just don't care if you know if my unique identity is using it or not (say, a freeware thing that kept my system clock on-time back in the days when my Dell's BIOS clock would drift on a daily basis -- doesn't matter to me at all that you can build up a profile of my clock-synching activities).
How Lucky You Are To Get Mail In English
on
Spam is Dead
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I keep three email boxes -- work (also has my old college address forwarding to it, for business/professional/family use only), gmail (general use, except I give all US-based or English-using websites this address), and yahoo Japan (general use, except I give all Japan-based websites this address). I get zero spam at work in my inbox because the address is non-published, and all of the spam comes to my university address where it gets munched by Spamassassin and spat out by Thunderbird. I've never gotten a single spam at gmail in a year of using it. Yahoo, despite everyone telling me "Their filtering is great, gets almost as much as Google", is *buried* in spam every time I open it, all very sickeningly spammy content in Japanese (can you imagine an email saying, in plain text, "Local girls want to meet you tonight to have SEX! Join our matching site, only $10 a month!" getting through your spam filter in this day and age? Thats what all my spam looks like -- they don't even bother trying to obfuscate.) I can only assume that this is because yahoo and Thunderbird's content analysis breaks down on Japanese... probably for lack of a decent segmenter for languages which aren't written with whitespace. Someday I've got to take a look at Thunderbird's filtering and see if I can't improve it a little bit. I work at a technology incubator in Japan and when they say, "Hey, patio11, got any ideas for what you would do if we gave you a lot of money?" I've got a pretty good idea:
1) Take Spamassassin
2) Make it work in Japanese
3) ???
4) Profit.
Linux fans should not criticize Windows for failing to find a mouse or a printer. Seriously, when was the last time this has happened to anyone with Windows? 1993? As compared to Linux, where when a given distribution correctly autoconfigures all the equipment on a non-custom mid-line Dell its a minor miracle worthy of sacrifice to Tux The Terrible, God of Unspeakable Configuration Issues.
I'm not a hardware guy, but it strikes me that this would be a nice thing to have in the various boxes that are sprouting up all over the place. I had a professor once that had some insane number of obsolete computers running Linux and some other OSS, performing all manner of Internet appliance type chores (firewall, intrusion detection, cycle server for student projects, what have you). Some of these seem like good candidates to yank out the hard drive from -- all the firewall needs is a Linux distribution and some configuration data to run, no need to put in a hard drive just so it can boot up and then come crashing down once in a while (the hard drive was essentially the only part he had to replace over the years, considering with 24/7 uptime it gets a bit of a workout and since the box had very, very little in terms of other components there were only a couple of places for it to fail).
Where's the RPG where you can have some casual sex? Blowing a dozen goons away goes without saying, but getting laid even once just doesn't happen in a normal game. Where it happens it is the goal or the entire selling point.
Arcanum. They've got one brothel, one quest which can be solved by prostituting yourself, and another quest which will result in your (perhaps unwilling) participation in a drunken orgy. None of the sex is on-camera, though. I have also heard that some of the romantic entanglements in Baldur's Gate II end up at, shall we say, on the spectrum of romantic entanglements.
That being said, its honestly something I would rather have less of in my game than more. Just give me a better, more moving story (when was the last time where two characters in an RPG actually fell in love as opposed to were depicted as being in love following the expected genre conventions?) or some non-puerile jokes instead.
It should be mentioned that there are no foozles to kill to earn money, unless someone programs a section of The Grid to have money-dispensing foozles. Its real money you're playing with, so if you decide to buy a shirt for $.50 it actually cost somebody, somewhere fifty cents.
The American government spent $950 million US (1.2 billion Aussie) and the American people chipped in another billion (and, incidentally, the navy was there flying search and rescue immediately and we had boots on the ground in three days, which is on the same timetable as our *domestic* disaster relief plan for federal assistance despite the necessity of crossing that tiny little obstacle known to locals as The Pacific Ocean). I'm not denigrating the Aussie contribution in the least -- America, Japan, Australia, and India all deserve massive props for getting the relief effort organized as quickly as they did and for fronting truly massive amounts of resources. But, in recognition that there *will* be a next time, would it kill you to not spit in the face of the country that lead the world in humanitarian contributions and singlehandedly accounted for a quarter of the total? I mean, its not like we're going to stop giving out money just because we get grief over it (we sent what we could to Iran after the earthquake and got the usual Great Satan line -- thanks guys, a pleasure as always!) but some gratitude just once in a blue moon would be nice and make the next massive aid effort an easier sell in Congress.
How can an Italian shoe maker compete with companies which appear to be Italian luxury show makers, but are just fake Asian brands with some minor finishing in Italy?
a) Using that whole fine hand crafted aesthetic to create a look which cannot be functionally duplicated by someone making 500 pieces a day with no specialized training or
b) going into an industry where the above is actually possible, because any industry where it isn't is doomed in Italy and everywhere else in the first world, just as it will be doomed in China 20 years from now.
It would also be a good publicity tool, and the military is perfectly capable of using those (and, I might add, comprised of much better people than the grandparent apparently believes). Look at the thousands of lives they saved with relief efforts in the wake of the South Asian tsunami, among any number of similar incidents. Much of the technology used for that operation was developed with military purposes in mind, too (ships capable of creating water onboard, worldwide logistics systems which are "fault tolerant" when the fault involves literally wiping entire cities off the map, helicopter airlift of supplies and medevac, the best first responder medical teams in the world, etc).
...(who was blind, mostly deaf, and was born without hands)...
I'm going to tack that on my wall: "Heim, blind, mostly deaf, and without hands, spent 19 years of his life doing research in mathematics so advanced we can barely even follow it. What's your excuse?"
Re:The right programming language helps hugely
on
When Bugs Aren't Allowed
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· Score: 3, Informative
I've participated in the ICFP before (one-man team on Java, program died in the first round, so there are my cards on the table), but one of the reasons the International Conference on Functional Programming Contest is consistently won by Functional Programmers is that it appeals heavily towards them both in terms of getting the word out to people and in terms of task selection. Type safety, fast compiled code, garbage collection -- all of these were all but irrelevant to the last two years' tasks. The main stumbling block both years had been writing parsers. FP is great for both tasks, thats why they teach you Scheme for your compiler design course in college and unless the language stokes your fire you'll never, ever use it again. This does not imply that its the tool for every possible job, and the various languages have features which make them better for a variety of tasks.
Yesterday, I had to do an analysis for someone on whether eliminating the electoral college would hurt states with a low turnout or not. The data is online in a nice plain text table, and the calculations are dirt-simple and take under a second in whatever language you want. Gawk all the way, got the project done in half an hour, if I had used C or Java I'd probably have spent triple the time for the same results. Several months ago I had to do image processing with a GUI wrapped around it -- C for the number crunching,.NET something or other for the GUI. A year ago I had to write a distributed application to do some crazy intense number crunching -- wrote the number crunching loop in C*, wrote the network code and interface in Java.
* Credit where credit is due: I borrowed 99.95% of it from GPLed code designed to do the same task on a single machine.
It actually takes longer to load the OS now than it did 20 years ago.
It takes longer to start your car than to start a horse, too, but I'm not swapping my Pinto for a pinto anytime soon. (Actually relevant to me, it takes a lot less time to start up, log in, and get working in 2006 than it did back when I started using computers about 12 years ago. I remember back in the Windows 3.1 era when about five minutes elapsed between flipping the power switch and getting the wordprocessor open. On my home system running XP thats about 20-30 seconds for bootup, five seconds for various applications loading (all that taskbar cruft, you know the drill), and 2 seconds for word. I understand MS spends a LOT of time "cheating" to get Word to appear to open faster and all I can say is bully for them.)
We've been able to confirm the following issue with FFIV for the GBA, released December 15th. The issue and resolution are described below. Our apologies to our customers for any trouble this may have caused.
Conditions for appearance of the issue:
If you satisfy the following four conditions the game will freeze and there is a very small chance of the saved data being cleared.
1) You have between 1 and 4 party members
2) You've just selected Item on the Menu screen.
3) Using the formation command (don't know what its called in the US version off the top of my head, you know, the one where you can swap people around), you move a party member to an empty space
4) You again select the Item command.
Resolution for the issue:
Don't satisfy the above four conditions. Alternatively, after using the formation command (as described in #3) either immediately save or view the monster bestiary before using the item screen, or exit out of the menu system before using the item screen. If you do any of these the problem will not happen to you.
We promise to be more careful in the future, sorry, if you have any questions, yadda yadda.
Oh, there is comic gold to be mined here. "Gay rights at Microsoft: not quite the full rainbow". Or maybe "Queer Eye for the MS guy: orange and blue are NOT a good color combination".
(This is also the guy who submitted an purchase request for some close parenthesis... got it signed also!)
If you were a Scheme shop this absolutely makes sense. I nearly failed my final compilers test because I got to the last problem and just ran out of them while writing the parser. If I had to use it professionally I'd want about 20k in inventory and a Parentheses Solutions Provider on speed-dial in case I ran out when doing something important.
Not only do you have to press the enter, you also have to select some options (like "I agree, I will not ruin my life playing this game") which are not the default options. And you can only type your input after the screen is fully loaded, which literally doubles the amount of attention you have to pay since the entire process gets bogged down with pointless 3D eyecandy during the load screen. I liked FFXI for a while but the login process was something decent shareware developers would have slit their wrists over ten years ago if they had let it into a program.
I used to play FFXI and the login process *was* needlessly complicated, especially after you got disconnected. For those of you who haven't played it, there is built-in communications/graphics lag between many of these eight steps, which means the time between you click FFXI on your desktop and the time you can actually move your character takes over a minute. Because the application is designed to perform identically on a PS2 and on a PC, you get some fun "features" like the I/O blocking during the loading phases, so for example while you're waiting 5 seconds for the "We care about you, please don't forget your social obligations to play this game" prompt to come up if you hit the two buttons you need to cancel it the game will ignore them until the prompt is fully loaded.
By comparison, in WoW the process is "Fire up WoW, type in password, click login, click enter game world" (possibly type in account name if you don't have the auto-remember setting checked). If you're playing a different character than you were last time, add one mouse click. If you're playing on a different server, add three. Total elapsed time for the typical case is about 15 seconds, most of it at the loading screen.
The price is slashed to $150 *if you sign up for a year of Internet service* (several hundred dollars, depending on the specifics, roughly half of which will accrue to the store as a finder's fee). Popular electronics get released with this gambit here all the time -- cell phones are the most obvious example (do you think I paid anything for my last two camera phones?) and NTT (Japan's answer to Ma Bell, hurting to expand customer base as of late) was giving out *free iPod minis* to get people to sign up for their fiberoptic service in my town. That surely isn't an indication of a lack of popularity of iPods, is it?
Incidentally, the text at the bottom of the price slashed sign reads "Offer limited to the first ten buyers", which suggests .
Slashdot Mirror
Normally I'm not a big ones for purient jokes but that's just perverse genius.
One of the reasons why the US pays a lot more money than the Europeans do for defense is that the US is also paying for the European's defense: we shared a somewhat more equitable share of the load back during the Cold War when there was a functional German army which would have comprised much of the first line of defense against the Soviet armored spearhead, but after the Soviet Union collapse Europe decided to pare defense budgets down substantially and spend the savings on further increasing the size of the welfare state. Its currently so bad that Europe would be just structurally incapable of, e.g., removing a local tin-pot genocidal dictator (Milosevic, etc) without US assistance, to say nothing of actually mounting a significant campaign overseas. The Brits are probably in a better shape than the continent (marginally), and France can still push around impoverished African nations which have air forces which would fit on a municipal airport in Idaho and leave room to spare, but by and large Europe is incapable of providing for its own defense.
Well, yes, you are. Unless they then take the water which has been warmed by absorbing heat in your dorm rooms and then give it to the freshmen to drink. And even then it still ends up in the river, except delayed about 6-18 hours and substantially warmer than when it started.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~hayes/mas863/urinecontro l.html
Obviously, on the scale of spyware nastiness, this doesn't rate much more than a medium. Heck, for some applications I just don't care if you know if my unique identity is using it or not (say, a freeware thing that kept my system clock on-time back in the days when my Dell's BIOS clock would drift on a daily basis -- doesn't matter to me at all that you can build up a profile of my clock-synching activities).
1) Take Spamassassin
2) Make it work in Japanese
3) ???
4) Profit.
Linux fans should not criticize Windows for failing to find a mouse or a printer. Seriously, when was the last time this has happened to anyone with Windows? 1993? As compared to Linux, where when a given distribution correctly autoconfigures all the equipment on a non-custom mid-line Dell its a minor miracle worthy of sacrifice to Tux The Terrible, God of Unspeakable Configuration Issues.
I'm not a hardware guy, but it strikes me that this would be a nice thing to have in the various boxes that are sprouting up all over the place. I had a professor once that had some insane number of obsolete computers running Linux and some other OSS, performing all manner of Internet appliance type chores (firewall, intrusion detection, cycle server for student projects, what have you). Some of these seem like good candidates to yank out the hard drive from -- all the firewall needs is a Linux distribution and some configuration data to run, no need to put in a hard drive just so it can boot up and then come crashing down once in a while (the hard drive was essentially the only part he had to replace over the years, considering with 24/7 uptime it gets a bit of a workout and since the box had very, very little in terms of other components there were only a couple of places for it to fail).
Arcanum. They've got one brothel, one quest which can be solved by prostituting yourself, and another quest which will result in your (perhaps unwilling) participation in a drunken orgy. None of the sex is on-camera, though. I have also heard that some of the romantic entanglements in Baldur's Gate II end up at, shall we say, on the spectrum of romantic entanglements.
That being said, its honestly something I would rather have less of in my game than more. Just give me a better, more moving story (when was the last time where two characters in an RPG actually fell in love as opposed to were depicted as being in love following the expected genre conventions?) or some non-puerile jokes instead.
What's your take?
Yep, sounds dead.
It should be mentioned that there are no foozles to kill to earn money, unless someone programs a section of The Grid to have money-dispensing foozles. Its real money you're playing with, so if you decide to buy a shirt for $.50 it actually cost somebody, somewhere fifty cents.
The American government spent $950 million US (1.2 billion Aussie) and the American people chipped in another billion (and, incidentally, the navy was there flying search and rescue immediately and we had boots on the ground in three days, which is on the same timetable as our *domestic* disaster relief plan for federal assistance despite the necessity of crossing that tiny little obstacle known to locals as The Pacific Ocean). I'm not denigrating the Aussie contribution in the least -- America, Japan, Australia, and India all deserve massive props for getting the relief effort organized as quickly as they did and for fronting truly massive amounts of resources. But, in recognition that there *will* be a next time, would it kill you to not spit in the face of the country that lead the world in humanitarian contributions and singlehandedly accounted for a quarter of the total? I mean, its not like we're going to stop giving out money just because we get grief over it (we sent what we could to Iran after the earthquake and got the usual Great Satan line -- thanks guys, a pleasure as always!) but some gratitude just once in a blue moon would be nice and make the next massive aid effort an easier sell in Congress.
Are you willing to take that risk?
a) Using that whole fine hand crafted aesthetic to create a look which cannot be functionally duplicated by someone making 500 pieces a day with no specialized training or
b) going into an industry where the above is actually possible, because any industry where it isn't is doomed in Italy and everywhere else in the first world, just as it will be doomed in China 20 years from now.
It would also be a good publicity tool, and the military is perfectly capable of using those (and, I might add, comprised of much better people than the grandparent apparently believes). Look at the thousands of lives they saved with relief efforts in the wake of the South Asian tsunami, among any number of similar incidents. Much of the technology used for that operation was developed with military purposes in mind, too (ships capable of creating water onboard, worldwide logistics systems which are "fault tolerant" when the fault involves literally wiping entire cities off the map, helicopter airlift of supplies and medevac, the best first responder medical teams in the world, etc).
They all start with the letter F?
I'm going to tack that on my wall: "Heim, blind, mostly deaf, and without hands, spent 19 years of his life doing research in mathematics so advanced we can barely even follow it. What's your excuse?"
Yesterday, I had to do an analysis for someone on whether eliminating the electoral college would hurt states with a low turnout or not. The data is online in a nice plain text table, and the calculations are dirt-simple and take under a second in whatever language you want. Gawk all the way, got the project done in half an hour, if I had used C or Java I'd probably have spent triple the time for the same results. Several months ago I had to do image processing with a GUI wrapped around it -- C for the number crunching, .NET something or other for the GUI. A year ago I had to write a distributed application to do some crazy intense number crunching -- wrote the number crunching loop in C*, wrote the network code and interface in Java.
* Credit where credit is due: I borrowed 99.95% of it from GPLed code designed to do the same task on a single machine.
It takes longer to start your car than to start a horse, too, but I'm not swapping my Pinto for a pinto anytime soon. (Actually relevant to me, it takes a lot less time to start up, log in, and get working in 2006 than it did back when I started using computers about 12 years ago. I remember back in the Windows 3.1 era when about five minutes elapsed between flipping the power switch and getting the wordprocessor open. On my home system running XP thats about 20-30 seconds for bootup, five seconds for various applications loading (all that taskbar cruft, you know the drill), and 2 seconds for word. I understand MS spends a LOT of time "cheating" to get Word to appear to open faster and all I can say is bully for them.)
Oh, there is comic gold to be mined here. "Gay rights at Microsoft: not quite the full rainbow". Or maybe "Queer Eye for the MS guy: orange and blue are NOT a good color combination".
If you were a Scheme shop this absolutely makes sense. I nearly failed my final compilers test because I got to the last problem and just ran out of them while writing the parser. If I had to use it professionally I'd want about 20k in inventory and a Parentheses Solutions Provider on speed-dial in case I ran out when doing something important.
Not only do you have to press the enter, you also have to select some options (like "I agree, I will not ruin my life playing this game") which are not the default options. And you can only type your input after the screen is fully loaded, which literally doubles the amount of attention you have to pay since the entire process gets bogged down with pointless 3D eyecandy during the load screen. I liked FFXI for a while but the login process was something decent shareware developers would have slit their wrists over ten years ago if they had let it into a program.
By comparison, in WoW the process is "Fire up WoW, type in password, click login, click enter game world" (possibly type in account name if you don't have the auto-remember setting checked). If you're playing a different character than you were last time, add one mouse click. If you're playing on a different server, add three. Total elapsed time for the typical case is about 15 seconds, most of it at the loading screen.
Incidentally, the text at the bottom of the price slashed sign reads "Offer limited to the first ten buyers", which suggests .