The article asks for an example of trek games that succeeded. The best, or at least, most enjoyable and replayable one I've found was written 20 years ago.
It was a PC game called 'Begin:Tactical Starship Combat'. It ran first in 80x20 text and later in EGA, but unlike most trek games of the time (which were variants of the old "You're in a 'sector' with 12 quadrants. Press P for phaser" theme from the PDP-11 days, this one put you in charge of a ship (or a fleet) with detailed systems, a need to excercise tactics (instead of just pounding on a 'Fire all' button), and clever (or at least difficult) AI.
You gave it commands using a quasi-english that you could shorten. "Pursue Krager at warp 6" could become "purs kr 6" for instance, as long as it was distinct enough.
Phasers, torpedos, warp engines that could overheat, especially when they had taken damage (limiting your performance or making you sacrifice repair times for temporary speed), power systems management, shield management, all sorts of details but you weren't FORCED to micromanage 'em.
Ship battles could be 1x1, or massive fleets. You can play hide & seek with a Romulan warbird, or escort a convoy and protect it against Orions.
I made a web page about it a couple years ago, and there's a Yahoo groups with a few hundred people that STILL play it today. Someone has even hacked together a multiplayer version with clever use of assembly and a debugger.
THIS is the kind of game that works with trek. It puts the player in the game as themselves, not as Kirk or Archer or Picard. The original Toy Story didn't have Barbie because Mattel was worried that Barbie on film wouldn't match the Barbie that kids have in their imagination. The same thing applies to Star Trek games. If the game doesn't let someone really feel like they're in control of things, or uses so many graphics that it gets into uncanny valley territory, then it'll disappoint at some level.
Keep it simple while keeping it flexible. Configurable complexity, less graphics, more monkey.
Here's a page I made about the game, with screenshots and downloads.
Last year, my webpage describing how I did something similar (but spectacularly cheaper with the commensurate drop in ability) using some off the shelf electronics and an R/C toy was featured here on Slashdot, my first slashdotting!
The EPA numbers haven't been representative/useful for ages. Every car owner so interested has had to determine their own average mileage, usually via their gas receipts or instant-economy displays on their dashboard.
The City/Highway system doesn't allow for the type of accurate planning that is needed, I'd rather see a Typical rating that is based off of some algorithm that averages city/highway driving on level ground and leaves the rest to the consumer. When I plot cross country flights, I have a known fuel burn-rate I can depend on. With my car, I have to drive until the gauge gets low.
For example, my 1999 Buick Regal has a Typical mileage of 22mpg. That's for my (now mostly) city driving with a touch of highway thrown in. If I spend a lot of time downtown, it might be 17mpg-ish. If I'm on a cross-country trip at a reasonable speed (eg, not 45mph) then I see 26-29mpg. These numbers are based off exact experience. While writing this, I googled to find my 'official mpg' and got this: http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/15081.shtm l
This site does exactly what I'm suggesting. The official city mileage is 18, the official highway is 27. That's great, but the ACTUAL mileage that I see is the same as what these folks figured off of average spread: 21mpg.
I don't care what my theoretical mileage is, I care what the practical/typical mileage is. For my car, it's 21-22mpg. Dropping the City/Highway trick in favor of something like this gives a more USEFUL number, even if it's at the expense of losing bragging points from a theoretical highway-only number.
A friend has it and says he really likes it, but noticed one thing. Fark apparently requires the user to scroll horizontally to see all of the content. A feature I'd like to see in modern browsers is an option to override absolute size specifications on websites to keep things scrolling in one dimension. On an embedded devices like a cell phone or game console (and maybe even a desktop browser, why not) I'd be willing to trade a slight departure from the 'artistic vision' of a web designer for enhanced usability.
I've built a few things I really liked: 1. Building an airplane (200+mph 4 seater version of a Burt Rutan design) 2. Flamethrowers (the response time of the Culver City police department to 40+ foot flame mushroom clouds is 5 minutes) 3. TankCams - I've explored the crawlspace under my house from the comfort of my living room via teleoperation. 4. A couple of neat costumes, this year I was written up on slashdot about my Aliens walking forklift costume. 5. An inertially coupled autopilot for R/C planes I built years ago as a cheap UAV so I could send a plane someplace, take pictures, then have it fly itself back, all without crashing.
There are lots of cool things to do out there, I'll be dead when I stop working on them. Instead of being a "remember that time back when I was held the football record at Polk High" thread, I hope this thread focusses not just on past accomplishments, but also mentions things people are still actively doing, otherwise it'll be terribly depressing.
Saying that the cell part comes from geographic "cells" is simply inaccurate. It refers to the frequency mapping used to allow bidirectional communication over radio through use of frequency "cells". I have charts of cell frequencies from the analog days that diagram this. Imagine a hex board, the kind you would find when playing an RPG in your parent's basement. Each hex cell has a frequency. The spread of the specific frequencies is such that each cell around it is theoretically just far enough away to avoid interference. When you'd make an analog call, you'd stake claim to one of the cells, and based on availability, the phone or tower would choose one of those surrounding cells and use that as the frequency for the other half of the phone call. In large crowds or traffic, the phones could lose the ability to get a signal because there were no frequency pairs available (because they were all in use).
So in short, cellular describes the radio frequency mapping, not the geographic spread of "cell" towers. Oh, and the claim that nobody talks on their phones anymore is bollox, as demonstrated by the various people who cut me off in traffic this morning while yammering away on their phones. I'm assuming that they weren't simply using them as ear heaters.
A number of items have come to our attention regarding the simulation procedures for the upcoming moon landing, and clarification is required on a number of points:
1. Rocket jumping or use of stun grenades for propulsion will not be feasible, please stop requesting these items from the mission planners. 2. As you will be physically on the moon, there will be no "l4gging". 3. Please do not accuse fellow trainees of "hax". It has become a growing morale issue. 4. "Pwnage" is not an approved item in the radio communication guide for NASA missions. Please stick with standardized phrasing for clarity. 5. When on the moon, the action of "strafing" sideways will not be practical in the EVAsuits, so please take this into consideration. Also, there have been a number of collisions and falls in the hallways from sim trainees attempting to employ this walking method. The base physician has speculated that the unnatural gait is causing people to literally "trip over themselves", so please stop. 6. Two of the inflatable habitats have lost pressurization during tests because of inadvertent puncturing. Subsequent interviews have revealed that trainees were looking for "wall hacks" and accidentally damaging the structure. This could cause a significant safety problem during the mission, so please use care.
Finally, the practice of attaching large "sig" images to all internal e-mails has become disruptive. The use of animated gifs with flashing text and, in some unfortunate cases, nudity, has become both a workplace harassment hazard as well as a visual distraction. Please use the standard signature generator to create a plain text sig with your contact information.
Of possible interest, there might be a couple of people that don't know that the phrase referenced above is an urban legend. Fisher developed the pen on their own without any tax payer money, NASA thought it was a neat idea and bought some. The russians.... also bought them. Nobody wants conductive graphite shavings floating behind circuit panels. Well, nobody except Jello Biafra and anyone else who delights in the death of astronauts/cosmonauts.
It's terribly off-topic, I know, but hopefully it's interesting enough to avoid burnination.
First, this is just a rumor, second, every rocket program since Goddard fastbaked the first potato during his first liquid fueled rocket experiments has had weight problems. Phase I is to set the basic requirements of thrust and payload, phase II is to make it work. Things start heavy and get lightened. At one point during the Apollo program, the program managers were offering bounties to people who could cut an ounce so that they could meet the performance requirements needed for the missions.
This is not news, this is sensationalism. The stick concept will probably work just fine. It grates on me because I've got real problems with the SRB as relates to the shuttle, but with an actual launch abort system that can pull the capsule away, I guess it's a good and cheap solution. It'll probably be quite a ride, too.
C'mon folks, this isn't rocket sci- well... let me rephrase. C'mon folks, this isn't a new problem, and it's not even unexpected. It's a standard part of rocket development, just like debugging compile problems is a usual part of large software development projects.
Flash-only sites are crap, and a blight on the internet, yes. But how often have problems been really SOLVED by adding new laws?
Let market forces work it out. These companies will lose business because of the accessibility problems, and probably also because of unfriendly interfaces. Money talks to business far better than lawmakers, and it's a language they can speak that doesn't require translators.
The ADA is one of those "nice intentions" laws that, for every wheel-chair ramp added to a school has 20+ abuses designed to generate cash flow.
What's missing from the summary is that almost immediately upon getting the list, the articles in question were dealt with and the offenders were blocked or warned.
Wikipedia is written by a large community, and people make mistakes. I have read about other reference tomes that have been caught plagiarizing (for example, some encyclopedias or atlas's will put in a fake piece of data or a fake street so that they can easily determine if they're being copied from), and the turnaround time for fixing it can be years depending on the publishing cycle.
This isn't a condemndation of Wikipedia, despite Mr. Brandt's best efforts, it's a confirmation of why WP works.
Of the people who got the reference, nobody was offended. I was curious about that myself, too, but it turned out that the folks most likely to flip out didn't really know their WWII history. Good times were had by all.
Heh, I used to make costumes for the kids. First year, my wife dressed my son as a fox, so I made him a big tank to be driven around in with german markings. In one step, he became Rommel. Next year, he gets a pilot jacket, so I built the mech-warrior battlemech costume (http://hallert.net/mech/mechcostume.htm) with him as the pilot. After that, wifey put the kabosh on my involvement with their costumes.
It's fashionable to bash Symantec and McAfee and make ridiculous comparisons between them and viruses, but they're just companies meeting a demand for specific software. They are no more leaching off of microsoft than car-washes 'leech' off the auto-industry.
The OS is changing, and the nature of threats are changing. These companies started by writing software to protect against disk-to-disk threats, then file infectors, then worms, and so on. Each has changed their business model as the needs of the market have changed, and I'd be hesitant to casually write them off just yet.
The market will decide things in the end. Either the companies change and continue to meet customer demand, or they won't, and they'll fade away. My money is on smart people staying fresh and changing based on their past history.
The alternative is to essentially say "Netcraft confirms that security software companies are dead!", with just as much legitamacy.
Why does this surprise anyone? Propriety software traditionally undergoes a formalized, designed testing process. It's not perfect, but it's an ordered approach to boundary testing, design level implementation of quality, and more. Open source software must rely on after-the-fact testing in the form of "this broke when I tried to do this".
In the end, it comes down to black box vs. white box testing. Commercial software has a strong QA engineering component. Open Source software relies primarily on a black box testing approach.
Open source has MANY benefits and MANY advantages over commercial software. This just doesn't happen to be one of them, but unlike the commercial software, the bug fix cycle on open sourced stuff can be a LOT quicker, so it evens out in the end.
I'd like to shamelessly repost something I wrote a few months ago on another thread about a cell phone w/ 8GB of storage. It was a response to the people who were saying "why the hell would I need that much space there?": The utility of having this much space on your phone isn't just storing MP3s, videos, and whatnot. The real potential is in what this means you can create.
I'd like to have my phone be a constant or voice activated recorder. I have my phone on me at all times, it has a microphone, why not have it provide me a 'cockpit voice recorder' of sorts for life? No more guessing exactly what my wife told me to do, or having to write down phone numbers.
Generation 1, your phone just records MP3s of life as it happens to you. If anything interesting happens during the day, you save the file on your computer.
Generation 2, it meta overlays GPS data and is automatically stored as part of your 'diary'. You store it in an encrypted location so it can't be used against you unless you choose to release it, and you have a perfect alibi showing what you said and where you were.
Generation 3, combine voice processing to index everything spoken around you into a searchable form, recognize phone numbers, voices, etc, and create a full digital assistant. At some point around here, it can also store a digital video feed from any cameras you or your personal equipment might have that's synchronized with everything.
Generation 4, it hunts down Sarah Conner.
Everytime someone puts a bunch of storage into something, someone else says "what's the use?" And human nature being what it is, some other asshole decides to invent something cool to use that storage/capabillity for just so they can give the finger to the first person.
Maybe.... but to play devil's advocate, people who quit their jobs to start website based businesses 10 years ago were also encouraged to "get serious about life" and go do something real. Some of those guys ended up making millions because they got in on the ground floor. There's no guarentee of success in any business, but there ARE opportunities and they aren't always obvious.
As silly as it seems right now, the succesful Second Life clothier might be the metaverse-based tycoon of the future.... or homeless. We just don't know yet, so it's probably prudent to avoid all encompassing "you won't have marketable skills" statements.
I can see the advertising synergy already. Situation, wearable computers are going to become more popular, right? Also, it stands to reason that as CPU speeds go up, some performance happy overclockers will end up with some pretty hot equipment.
Once you add propane to the mix, "Taste the heat, not the meat" takes a whole new meaning when you have people getting burns from their laptops, I like it.
The article makes a number of critical errors that impact its credibility.
The article expounds on the dangers of Javascript, but fails to mention ActiveX. I suspect the author had heard about "scripting" being a security hole and assumed incorrectly that the other person was talking about Javascript. JS is inconsequential compared to ActiveX when it comes to actual risk.
Additionally, when it claims that AV software essentially supersedes any firewall in terms of protection, it fails to consider the security nightmares in Windows. Specifically, through the trust relationships, you can modify registry settings and execute code on computers without your viral code ever touching the disk on the machine by doing it remotely from another computer. Because memory scanning is essentially ineffective, modern AV programs cannot effectively protect against this, which is why most security companies suggest combining AV with a Firewall. Plus, there are regular buffer overflow exploits that have the same effect: Code running without touching the disk. Where do they come from? Over the wire. Code Red and Nimda are good examples of attacks that were stopped by even the most basic firewalls. Safe browsing had no effect whatsoever on whether a user was infected.
Finally, the article fails to take into consideration the thought that goes into the automatic rule creation most firewalls come with now. Developers understand that users demand convenience and security, and work to find a good match of both. To this effect, most modern desktop firewalls will use signature based rules (so that a malicious program has to do more than just be named after a trusted program) to create a basic rule that allows that program outbound access. The ports are not being just "left open" willy nilly, they are connected to known programs and watched. Some firewall programs even watch for threadjacking malware that would inject itself directly into trusted programs, that gives even more protection.
The author of the article should reevaluate his or her knowledge of internet security. It is likely that the increasing ease of use has been interpreted as a drop in protection, but this is not the case. A secure system is one that uses a heterogeneous mix of disk and network protection.
Slashdot Mirror
The article asks for an example of trek games that succeeded. The best, or at least, most enjoyable and replayable one I've found was written 20 years ago.
It was a PC game called 'Begin:Tactical Starship Combat'. It ran first in 80x20 text and later in EGA, but unlike most trek games of the time (which were variants of the old "You're in a 'sector' with 12 quadrants. Press P for phaser" theme from the PDP-11 days, this one put you in charge of a ship (or a fleet) with detailed systems, a need to excercise tactics (instead of just pounding on a 'Fire all' button), and clever (or at least difficult) AI.
You gave it commands using a quasi-english that you could shorten. "Pursue Krager at warp 6" could become "purs kr 6" for instance, as long as it was distinct enough.
Phasers, torpedos, warp engines that could overheat, especially when they had taken damage (limiting your performance or making you sacrifice repair times for temporary speed), power systems management, shield management, all sorts of details but you weren't FORCED to micromanage 'em.
Ship battles could be 1x1, or massive fleets. You can play hide & seek with a Romulan warbird, or escort a convoy and protect it against Orions.
I made a web page about it a couple years ago, and there's a Yahoo groups with a few hundred people that STILL play it today. Someone has even hacked together a multiplayer version with clever use of assembly and a debugger.
THIS is the kind of game that works with trek. It puts the player in the game as themselves, not as Kirk or Archer or Picard. The original Toy Story didn't have Barbie because Mattel was worried that Barbie on film wouldn't match the Barbie that kids have in their imagination. The same thing applies to Star Trek games. If the game doesn't let someone really feel like they're in control of things, or uses so many graphics that it gets into uncanny valley territory, then it'll disappoint at some level.
Keep it simple while keeping it flexible. Configurable complexity, less graphics, more monkey.
Here's a page I made about the game, with screenshots and downloads.
http://hallert.net/misc/begin/begin.html
Last year, my webpage describing how I did something similar (but spectacularly cheaper with the commensurate drop in ability) using some off the shelf electronics and an R/C toy was featured here on Slashdot, my first slashdotting!
http://hallert.net/misc/tankcam/tankcam.html
There are other crawlspaces out there, get under your houses and make your own robots do your bidding!
The EPA numbers haven't been representative/useful for ages. Every car owner so interested has had to determine their own average mileage, usually via their gas receipts or instant-economy displays on their dashboard.
m l
The City/Highway system doesn't allow for the type of accurate planning that is needed, I'd rather see a Typical rating that is based off of some algorithm that averages city/highway driving on level ground and leaves the rest to the consumer. When I plot cross country flights, I have a known fuel burn-rate I can depend on. With my car, I have to drive until the gauge gets low.
For example, my 1999 Buick Regal has a Typical mileage of 22mpg. That's for my (now mostly) city driving with a touch of highway thrown in. If I spend a lot of time downtown, it might be 17mpg-ish. If I'm on a cross-country trip at a reasonable speed (eg, not 45mph) then I see 26-29mpg. These numbers are based off exact experience. While writing this, I googled to find my 'official mpg' and got this: http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/15081.sht
This site does exactly what I'm suggesting. The official city mileage is 18, the official highway is 27. That's great, but the ACTUAL mileage that I see is the same as what these folks figured off of average spread: 21mpg.
I don't care what my theoretical mileage is, I care what the practical/typical mileage is. For my car, it's 21-22mpg. Dropping the City/Highway trick in favor of something like this gives a more USEFUL number, even if it's at the expense of losing bragging points from a theoretical highway-only number.
And in the end, what's more important?
A friend has it and says he really likes it, but noticed one thing. Fark apparently requires the user to scroll horizontally to see all of the content. A feature I'd like to see in modern browsers is an option to override absolute size specifications on websites to keep things scrolling in one dimension. On an embedded devices like a cell phone or game console (and maybe even a desktop browser, why not) I'd be willing to trade a slight departure from the 'artistic vision' of a web designer for enhanced usability.
I've built a few things I really liked:
1. Building an airplane (200+mph 4 seater version of a Burt Rutan design)
2. Flamethrowers (the response time of the Culver City police department to 40+ foot flame mushroom clouds is 5 minutes)
3. TankCams - I've explored the crawlspace under my house from the comfort of my living room via teleoperation.
4. A couple of neat costumes, this year I was written up on slashdot about my Aliens walking forklift costume.
5. An inertially coupled autopilot for R/C planes I built years ago as a cheap UAV so I could send a plane someplace, take pictures, then have it fly itself back, all without crashing.
There are lots of cool things to do out there, I'll be dead when I stop working on them. Instead of being a "remember that time back when I was held the football record at Polk High" thread, I hope this thread focusses not just on past accomplishments, but also mentions things people are still actively doing, otherwise it'll be terribly depressing.
I'm also building an airplane, a Cozy Mk IV (a 4 seater version of Burt Rutan's LongEZ).
Airplanes are very fulfilling projects, well suited for this crowd.
Saying that the cell part comes from geographic "cells" is simply inaccurate. It refers to the frequency mapping used to allow bidirectional communication over radio through use of frequency "cells". I have charts of cell frequencies from the analog days that diagram this. Imagine a hex board, the kind you would find when playing an RPG in your parent's basement. Each hex cell has a frequency. The spread of the specific frequencies is such that each cell around it is theoretically just far enough away to avoid interference. When you'd make an analog call, you'd stake claim to one of the cells, and based on availability, the phone or tower would choose one of those surrounding cells and use that as the frequency for the other half of the phone call. In large crowds or traffic, the phones could lose the ability to get a signal because there were no frequency pairs available (because they were all in use).
So in short, cellular describes the radio frequency mapping, not the geographic spread of "cell" towers. Oh, and the claim that nobody talks on their phones anymore is bollox, as demonstrated by the various people who cut me off in traffic this morning while yammering away on their phones. I'm assuming that they weren't simply using them as ear heaters.
Memorandum
To: Sim training participants
From: SIMCOM
A number of items have come to our attention regarding the simulation procedures for the upcoming moon landing, and clarification is required on a number of points:
1. Rocket jumping or use of stun grenades for propulsion will not be feasible, please stop requesting these items from the mission planners.
2. As you will be physically on the moon, there will be no "l4gging".
3. Please do not accuse fellow trainees of "hax". It has become a growing morale issue.
4. "Pwnage" is not an approved item in the radio communication guide for NASA missions. Please stick with standardized phrasing for clarity.
5. When on the moon, the action of "strafing" sideways will not be practical in the EVAsuits, so please take this into consideration. Also, there have been a number of collisions and falls in the hallways from sim trainees attempting to employ this walking method. The base physician has speculated that the unnatural gait is causing people to literally "trip over themselves", so please stop.
6. Two of the inflatable habitats have lost pressurization during tests because of inadvertent puncturing. Subsequent interviews have revealed that trainees were looking for "wall hacks" and accidentally damaging the structure. This could cause a significant safety problem during the mission, so please use care.
Finally, the practice of attaching large "sig" images to all internal e-mails has become disruptive. The use of animated gifs with flashing text and, in some unfortunate cases, nudity, has become both a workplace harassment hazard as well as a visual distraction. Please use the standard signature generator to create a plain text sig with your contact information.
Regards,
SIMCOM
Office of simulation
Of possible interest, there might be a couple of people that don't know that the phrase referenced above is an urban legend. Fisher developed the pen on their own without any tax payer money, NASA thought it was a neat idea and bought some. The russians.... also bought them. Nobody wants conductive graphite shavings floating behind circuit panels. Well, nobody except Jello Biafra and anyone else who delights in the death of astronauts/cosmonauts.
It's terribly off-topic, I know, but hopefully it's interesting enough to avoid burnination.
First, this is just a rumor, second, every rocket program since Goddard fastbaked the first potato during his first liquid fueled rocket experiments has had weight problems. Phase I is to set the basic requirements of thrust and payload, phase II is to make it work. Things start heavy and get lightened. At one point during the Apollo program, the program managers were offering bounties to people who could cut an ounce so that they could meet the performance requirements needed for the missions.
This is not news, this is sensationalism. The stick concept will probably work just fine. It grates on me because I've got real problems with the SRB as relates to the shuttle, but with an actual launch abort system that can pull the capsule away, I guess it's a good and cheap solution. It'll probably be quite a ride, too.
C'mon folks, this isn't rocket sci- well... let me rephrase. C'mon folks, this isn't a new problem, and it's not even unexpected. It's a standard part of rocket development, just like debugging compile problems is a usual part of large software development projects.
I dub thee the "Y++ bug", sir software defect.
Flash-only sites are crap, and a blight on the internet, yes. But how often have problems been really SOLVED by adding new laws?
Let market forces work it out. These companies will lose business because of the accessibility problems, and probably also because of unfriendly interfaces. Money talks to business far better than lawmakers, and it's a language they can speak that doesn't require translators.
The ADA is one of those "nice intentions" laws that, for every wheel-chair ramp added to a school has 20+ abuses designed to generate cash flow.
What's missing from the summary is that almost immediately upon getting the list, the articles in question were dealt with and the offenders were blocked or warned.
Wikipedia is written by a large community, and people make mistakes. I have read about other reference tomes that have been caught plagiarizing (for example, some encyclopedias or atlas's will put in a fake piece of data or a fake street so that they can easily determine if they're being copied from), and the turnaround time for fixing it can be years depending on the publishing cycle.
This isn't a condemndation of Wikipedia, despite Mr. Brandt's best efforts, it's a confirmation of why WP works.
That's my wife, what are you saying?
Of the people who got the reference, nobody was offended. I was curious about that myself, too, but it turned out that the folks most likely to flip out didn't really know their WWII history. Good times were had by all.
That's kinda awkward, because I did actually build the one from the Matrix last year, I'd be fighting myself.
http://hallert.net/apucostume/apucostume.htm
Now if only I were as cool as the Star Wars kid....
Heh, I used to make costumes for the kids. First year, my wife dressed my son as a fox, so I made him a big tank to be driven around in with german markings. In one step, he became Rommel. Next year, he gets a pilot jacket, so I built the mech-warrior battlemech costume (http://hallert.net/mech/mechcostume.htm) with him as the pilot. After that, wifey put the kabosh on my involvement with their costumes.
It's fashionable to bash Symantec and McAfee and make ridiculous comparisons between them and viruses, but they're just companies meeting a demand for specific software. They are no more leaching off of microsoft than car-washes 'leech' off the auto-industry.
The OS is changing, and the nature of threats are changing. These companies started by writing software to protect against disk-to-disk threats, then file infectors, then worms, and so on. Each has changed their business model as the needs of the market have changed, and I'd be hesitant to casually write them off just yet.
The market will decide things in the end. Either the companies change and continue to meet customer demand, or they won't, and they'll fade away. My money is on smart people staying fresh and changing based on their past history.
The alternative is to essentially say "Netcraft confirms that security software companies are dead!", with just as much legitamacy.
Traditionally, haven't merit badges been tied to specific, measurable actions? Knots? Prove it by tying 'em. Fire? Prove it by burnination.
A merit badge for _not pirating_ is like not-tea in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Why does this surprise anyone? Propriety software traditionally undergoes a formalized, designed testing process. It's not perfect, but it's an ordered approach to boundary testing, design level implementation of quality, and more. Open source software must rely on after-the-fact testing in the form of "this broke when I tried to do this".
In the end, it comes down to black box vs. white box testing. Commercial software has a strong QA engineering component. Open Source software relies primarily on a black box testing approach.
Open source has MANY benefits and MANY advantages over commercial software. This just doesn't happen to be one of them, but unlike the commercial software, the bug fix cycle on open sourced stuff can be a LOT quicker, so it evens out in the end.
I'd like to shamelessly repost something I wrote a few months ago on another thread about a cell phone w/ 8GB of storage. It was a response to the people who were saying "why the hell would I need that much space there?":
The utility of having this much space on your phone isn't just storing MP3s, videos, and whatnot. The real potential is in what this means you can create.
I'd like to have my phone be a constant or voice activated recorder. I have my phone on me at all times, it has a microphone, why not have it provide me a 'cockpit voice recorder' of sorts for life? No more guessing exactly what my wife told me to do, or having to write down phone numbers.
Generation 1, your phone just records MP3s of life as it happens to you. If anything interesting happens during the day, you save the file on your computer.
Generation 2, it meta overlays GPS data and is automatically stored as part of your 'diary'. You store it in an encrypted location so it can't be used against you unless you choose to release it, and you have a perfect alibi showing what you said and where you were.
Generation 3, combine voice processing to index everything spoken around you into a searchable form, recognize phone numbers, voices, etc, and create a full digital assistant. At some point around here, it can also store a digital video feed from any cameras you or your personal equipment might have that's synchronized with everything.
Generation 4, it hunts down Sarah Conner.
Everytime someone puts a bunch of storage into something, someone else says "what's the use?" And human nature being what it is, some other asshole decides to invent something cool to use that storage/capabillity for just so they can give the finger to the first person.
Maybe.... but to play devil's advocate, people who quit their jobs to start website based businesses 10 years ago were also encouraged to "get serious about life" and go do something real. Some of those guys ended up making millions because they got in on the ground floor. There's no guarentee of success in any business, but there ARE opportunities and they aren't always obvious.
As silly as it seems right now, the succesful Second Life clothier might be the metaverse-based tycoon of the future.... or homeless. We just don't know yet, so it's probably prudent to avoid all encompassing "you won't have marketable skills" statements.
Just a thought.
I can see the advertising synergy already. Situation, wearable computers are going to become more popular, right? Also, it stands to reason that as CPU speeds go up, some performance happy overclockers will end up with some pretty hot equipment.
Once you add propane to the mix, "Taste the heat, not the meat" takes a whole new meaning when you have people getting burns from their laptops, I like it.
The article makes a number of critical errors that impact its credibility.
The article expounds on the dangers of Javascript, but fails to mention ActiveX. I suspect the author had heard about "scripting" being a security hole and assumed incorrectly that the other person was talking about Javascript. JS is inconsequential compared to ActiveX when it comes to actual risk.
Additionally, when it claims that AV software essentially supersedes any firewall in terms of protection, it fails to consider the security nightmares in Windows. Specifically, through the trust relationships, you can modify registry settings and execute code on computers without your viral code ever touching the disk on the machine by doing it remotely from another computer. Because memory scanning is essentially ineffective, modern AV programs cannot effectively protect against this, which is why most security companies suggest combining AV with a Firewall. Plus, there are regular buffer overflow exploits that have the same effect: Code running without touching the disk. Where do they come from? Over the wire. Code Red and Nimda are good examples of attacks that were stopped by even the most basic firewalls. Safe browsing had no effect whatsoever on whether a user was infected.
Finally, the article fails to take into consideration the thought that goes into the automatic rule creation most firewalls come with now. Developers understand that users demand convenience and security, and work to find a good match of both. To this effect, most modern desktop firewalls will use signature based rules (so that a malicious program has to do more than just be named after a trusted program) to create a basic rule that allows that program outbound access. The ports are not being just "left open" willy nilly, they are connected to known programs and watched. Some firewall programs even watch for threadjacking malware that would inject itself directly into trusted programs, that gives even more protection.
The author of the article should reevaluate his or her knowledge of internet security. It is likely that the increasing ease of use has been interpreted as a drop in protection, but this is not the case. A secure system is one that uses a heterogeneous mix of disk and network protection.